Negativity blinds us from seeing angels.

When you have a negative attitude it is hard to see all the angels you meet in the world.

I thought about this after hearing two men in complaining in the locker room.  The older complained that his friends were less willing to give him rides.  I kept quiet, but I wondered if his friends were unwilling to listen to his negative comments.  When I related this to my wife, she suggested that fewer of his friends drove anymore.

The negativity made me think of the couplet

When you laugh, the whole world laughs with you.
When you cry, you cry alone.

The actual couplet is

“Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone:
…”

The poem is “Solitude” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox”.  You can find it at
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45937/solitude-56d225aad9924

Word play

I am taking a University for Seniors at UMD called “Words Just Want to Have Fun”.

The instructor passed out cards with a word or a phrase.  We were supposed to make a poem using that word.  Mine was “buffalo” and I thought of a haiku and a pair of rhymes.

Buffalo, the town,
Gets lots and lots of deep snow.
It’s the lake effect.

Where the buffalo roam
Is the subject of a poem.
But there are no buffalo on the range
And the bison are penned to cook on your range.

We were also supposed to work in pairs on a cryptogram.  It is from the Oct-Dec. SPELL/Binder.  No pair finished it in class.  I kept making copying errors, putting the letter of the clue in the grid rather than the letter in the clue.  I also had to look three clues, one online (author of “The Razor’s Edge”,  one in the dictionary that began with “syn”, and one in “Hamlet” about what the ghost had to say about Gertrude.

This last was misleading because the clue included “Hamlet’s ghost”, not the ghost in “Hamlet”.