I finished the ‘Tyrannosaur Canyon’ novel tonight; it was a good read, and I know Bob would have enjoyed it too. I liked it because it involved my favorite dinosaur, T Rex – and Bob would have liked it for the man stuff woven throughout the plot.
Bob taught me math concepts, and I taught Bob to spell and read; he was passed in school because of his athletic abilities, but he was pretty illiterate: I realized this one morning when he left a note for me. Bob was dyslexic, and no one had bothered to take the time to help him. So, when he insisted I finish High School after we were married, and keep the checkbook balanced; I struck a deal with him when he got home from work, the day of “the note”: I would suffer the kitchen table math lessons, and he would learn to spell and read ;-)
And that is what we did for the first 6 months of our marriage.
We were always a team, pulling together.
Once Bob grasped the concept of reading and spelling fluency … he was off and running! And competing with me in speed reading :-D I like to read, and am a voracious reader: I was reading a novel in a day then, because once I started reading, I never put the book down – I read sitting, standing, walking, riding in the car, cooking, loading the washer and dryer, and sometimes in bed if the book really grabbed my attention. Bob got as hungry for reading as I was – his first jump in the water was the book ‘Papillon’ – and that was a read! But Bob never did anything half way; if he was going to do something, he was going all in ;-) He read that book without any struggle. I am a GOOD English and Literature teacher: LOL! And then it was on to Word Search books (which he switched back and forth between, while reading my KJV Bible front to back/back to front after coming home to recoup and heal following his second death in 1981); and later, he started playing computer Word Games (Book Worm, Flip Words). He uploaded the Alpha Betty app onto his Smart Phone. And, he even did a Word Search book and Flip Words during blood transfusions at OHSU, when there in December 2018:
We were always a team, pulling together.
Once Bob grasped the concept of reading and spelling fluency … he was off and running! And competing with me in speed reading :-D I like to read, and am a voracious reader: I was reading a novel in a day then, because once I started reading, I never put the book down – I read sitting, standing, walking, riding in the car, cooking, loading the washer and dryer, and sometimes in bed if the book really grabbed my attention. Bob got as hungry for reading as I was – his first jump in the water was the book ‘Papillon’ – and that was a read! But Bob never did anything half way; if he was going to do something, he was going all in ;-) He read that book without any struggle. I am a GOOD English and Literature teacher: LOL! And then it was on to Word Search books (which he switched back and forth between, while reading my KJV Bible front to back/back to front after coming home to recoup and heal following his second death in 1981); and later, he started playing computer Word Games (Book Worm, Flip Words). He uploaded the Alpha Betty app onto his Smart Phone. And, he even did a Word Search book and Flip Words during blood transfusions at OHSU, when there in December 2018:
Bob doing a Word Search book.
Bob doing Flip Words on the iPad.
But, our favorite pastime was reading all the 6 Jean M. Auel Earth’s Children novels; starting with ‘The Clan of the Cave Bear’, which kickstarted the series in 1980 … and I snapped the rest up at garage sales when I found them: we’d read them over and over again; the story line never got old. The 1985 third novel in the series, ‘The Mammoth Hunters’, really got to Bob – that one took him a while to finish because the storyline was so upsetting to him. And I cried the whole way through the book too: it was a very emotional storyline, and touched every nerve. We couldn’t wait to get our hands on the follow-up book to see where the story had gone. Ayla and Jondalar’s Cro-Magnon love story really captured our attention, and we found ourselves rooting for them in every book and anxiously awaiting the continuing storyline. We were sadly disappointed to learn that ‘The Land of Painted Caves’ would be the last book in the series … but at the point in time, Jean Auel was 75 years old, and ready to retire from writing.
The Clan of the Cave Bear – 1980 * The Valley of Horses – 1982 * The Mammoth Hunters – 1985 * The Plains of Passage – 1990 * The Shelters of Stone - 2002 * The Land of Painted Caves – 2011
Life, lived in real time; or fictional, like the novel plots mentioned in this post … and sung about by Gary, “ain’t always beautiful”.
But it can be interesting :-D
Life Ain’t Always beautiful:
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