hello, mister nameless

I'm too curious. It gets me into trouble. It drives me crazy.

      For example, this morning, I went to the A.W.Perry Homestead Museum in Carrollton, Texas.

The place is an old house with a barn on some land. It wasn't open, so I wandered about taking pictures of the outsides of the buildings.

Then I wandered around the fields looking for bugs and such. I guess I haven't changed much since I was four. Even then, I was always hunting; bugs, lost coins, buried treasure.

     So anyhow, I came upon The Most Amazing Bug in the World. He was such a good fella.

I mean, I was all but jamming my camera lens into his eyeball, and he just sighed and stayed put. Good boy. He and I are buddies. I got to wondering what he is called, specifically, in the bug world. Obviously, he appears to be some sort of dragonfly. But what is his official name? I need to get a book and look it up.

     This wondering got me pondering language. I learned several years ago that one cannot conjure up a thought unless one first has a word for the concept in question. That is why it is so critical to talk to your baby; to give little kids rich vocabularies so as to enable them to think bigger thoughts. I was interested to learn this, as I had talked to my babies non-stop from day one, but that was just because I thought it was fun, and because I was so insanely in love with the little pumpkins that I wanted to interact with them every second, never mind if they could not yet talk back.

     The material I read on this whole words-before-thoughts subject said, for example, that some cultures have no word for alone, therefore that whole concept does not exist for them. They are always among others as a way of being. Fascinating. They have no word for alone, so they can't think it. But here I was bonding with this bug, though I do not know its name. Perhaps the rule of name-before-idea only relates to concepts, not material objects, or perhaps the general term bug was good enough for me to place the thing within my mental framework.

On a different note, since the hot weather has struck, I've been working on some delish healthy popsicle recipes. Tomorrow, I will let you know the best two. They're fast, easy & refreshing!