Category: Personal Journey

Where did all those classmates go?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

There are holes in the listings posted in the website. Individuals, perhaps, who want no contact, though their location is known. Perhaps others who have been ostracized, after prison or scandal. Others just fallen through the cracks.

I see, too, others have been added. Girls who left to have secret babies. Boys who maybe got their GEDs or returned to the fold through marriage. I’m glad to see them included.

In the meantime, I prepare a message. The one that says my location can be known, even if I’m not attending this year’s reunion. Even now, it’s a long road from here to there, and back again.

~*~

How curious, coming across that note a few decades after I wrote it.

I’ve reconnected with a few via social media.

But many holes still remain. Frankly, I don’t know what I’d say to them if they did show up. We have gone in quite different directions, after all.

Individual life as a mosaic

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The thought hit me while scrolling through old posts on this blog.

Does anyone you know actually maintain a tightly focused life?

You know, someone who proclaims, ”These are my goals and I’m sticking to them”?

Or is it more a matter of steering between the many things that just pop up, like they do on the merry-go-round here at the Red Barn?

Or more like a pinball machine, for those of us of a certain age?

In the end you just have to patch together whatever you can from the pieces, even while trying to fit them to the other folks around you?

Back to the press and a personal debt

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The first printing press in Britain was established at Westminster in 1476 (during the reign of Edward IV, 1461-1483) by William Caxton. Modern movable type had been invented not that much earlier around 1450 by Johannes Guttenberg.

Caxton is considered a central figure in establishing Chancery English to the standard dialect used throughout England. In his haste to make translations for publication, he imported many French words into English.

Well, England did rule much of France during the century.

As a reader and writer, I’m indebted to both men and a host of those who followed.

Lately, I’ve been returning to the Baskerville typeface, which we used for our high school newspaper, though now its in honor of an earlier resident of our house. The face dates from the 1750s.

One classic I’ve long been fond of is Caslon, from the 1720s, by another English designer. It’s similar to Goudy, a 1915 American design based on historic Italian faces and one I’ve been using on my Thistle Finch publications. It really is elegant.

Sometimes the very appearance of a word in type or a well-designed page will make my heart sing.

Just so you know what happens when ink gets in your blood.