Soon I think maybe I will make a list of blog subjects, a list of assignments to keep me going. Off the top now, have you noticed that your computer puts words in your - not, not your mouth, - in your copy? I wrote keep without the k, and before I finished, smart-ass here thought I wanted to say eel. Wrong. I have a friend who wanted to write Pringles, the classy curved potato chip you can't stop eating, but the computer wrote pregnant. You can't get pregnant from eating Pringles. Even I know that. Then there's that classic typo, and this was in the days before know-it-all computers, the one by which the woman wanted pubic relations. Typos and errors often lead to discoveries you might not have made yourself. I think that's how I discovered hidden potent meanings in run of the mill end (sic) phrases. Hand-in-glove becomes handing love, for example, and is useful for a run-on line in poetry. I started collecting these double meanings (not double-entendres) and I have little scribbles here and there as I have stumbled on them. Oh, dear, the bits of paper one collects. Joan Didion compares this gathering of little bitts and thoughts and ideas to a ball of string. No single piece is worth much but you save it and wind it round - what? - a starter bead? (like the irritating bit in an oyster), in the hopes that it will develop into a pearl. Or maybe just a large ball of string. That's the chief hazard writers are prey to, the hazard of hoarding paper . We are incapable of throwing away a piece of paper with some writing on it, even a grocery list. That of course reminds me of two great grocery lists. I read that Florence Nightingale never threw anything away and social historians are delighted to study her grocery list. And the grocery list in "Canticle of Leibowitz" (a wonderful novel by Walter Miller), found near a destroyed bomb shelter, becomes the icon of an illuminated manuscript: dill pickles and pastrami immortalized! (You have to read the book.) What next?

Today is almost over, just a few hours before I have to write tomorrow's blog. So what's for today? Well, I'm trying to finish my Christmas messages and trying not to forget anyone, also deciding who's naughty and nice - that is, who falls off my list. Used to be no one did. I stuck like Velcro, loyal like the iconic burr on the sheep dog's back. And I got to thinking, as I do more and more often: why doesn't anyone feel that responsible to me? Why am I always the one to reach out, to keep in touch, to remember to call or send a note or whatever? Why? Once, when I moved (this was years ago before I started questioning), I was delayed before I could send out my contact information to "friends". I use the quotation marks on purpose. It took me a while to inform people because I had a couple of assignments that took precedent. And then I noticed that no one had made the effort to reach me. It was not that hard. There's always mail forwarding, and family, that might have given them a lead. So then I got stubborn. I did not send out new addresses and numbers and waited. Know what? I lost several friends that way, people from whom I have never heard since - and that was almost 30 years ago. I met one of them a couple of days ago, at a luncheon. You go that long out of touch, you lose the currency of communication , let alone friendship. It gives one pause. Tomorrow - so soon - I'll try to hit a brighter note.