Sack of potatoes tied in the middle (and coal-burning furnaces).

When I do something kind that I know is unknown or soon forgotten, I wonder what good things that action might yield a generation or two or three from now.

But it’s more fun to think back to a simple act a hundred years ago that was observed by a child, who repeated it later, and so on, until it became my turn.

Likewise, when I do something I’m ashamed of, what horrible consequences will that someday have?

c0

File under Things My Dad Used to Say:

“You look like a sack of potatoes tied in the middle.”

He was not being unkind, and I never understood it that way. He didn't have a mean bone in his body and I never heard a disparaging word cross his lips. Kind people can joke like that and not be misunderstood.

One of the reasons I am noting this is that a hundred years from now, no one will likely know what a sack of potatoes even looked like, just as I couldn't tell you what a coal chute looks like, but I heard Dad talk lots of times about shoveling coal in his boyhood home when coal was delivered through a basement window. I can picture it, but I never experienced it.

(Homes used to be heated with coal-burning furnaces. The house I grew up in had a gas furnace that had been converted from coal; it still had a huge iron grate that you could peer through, very much like an old-fashioned locomotive steam engine you might recall from the movies.)

[2014-03-04]

c0