Change of Fortune

"Don't forget---the stockholder of yesterday is the stowaway* of today." ---Groucho Marx in Monkey Business

*Stowaway, as in someone who sneaks aboard a ship without paying fare. (The first part of the movie, the Marx Brothers' characters were stowaways.)

Thoughts on Time

(on entering a new year)
From everlasting to everlasting
You are God.
For a thousand years in Your eyes
Are as a day just passed
Or as a watch served in the night.
The days which we are given--
In them is seventy years;
Or if there is strength,
Eighty years.
Teach us our days thus to reckon
So that we may obtain a heart of wisdom.---Moses, from Psalm 90
(translated by C. Marie Byars)

Psalm 130

Man, his days are like grass;
As a flower of the field, he thus flourishes:
The wind blows over it and it is not,
And its own place remembers it no more.
But from everlasting to everlasting
Yahweh's love is with those who revere Him
---David; Psalm 130:15

Successful Failure

"Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure." ---George Eliot [pseudonym for author Mary Ann Evans], Middlemarch (1871-2)

Un-Hidden Talents

    "Be true to yourselves; cherish whatever talent you possess, and in using it faithfully for the good of others you will most assuredly find happiness for yourself, and make of life no failure, but a beautiful success." ---Louisa May Alcott; "Happy Women" in The New York Ledger (1868)

Los Ranchos de Deneiros

Here's a fact of southwestern living: if a village or suburb has the name "Farm", "Ranch" or "Rancho" in it, the place, in fact, has no farms or ranches. And real estate there will be mucho expensive. And if a place has "Santa Fe" in the name you will have to have a LOT of "Holy Faith" and a whole lot more pesos to live there! ---Marie Byars

If at First You Don't Succeed

"Flops are part of life's menu, and I've never been a girl to miss out on any of the courses." ---Rosalind Russell (actress) in the New York Herald Tribune (1957)