sea salt

On Saturday, I had my fortune read.  I was part of a group celebrating a friend's upcoming wedding, and the bachelorette festivities included a reading at Regina Russell's Tea Room in Quincy.  I'll admit, this is not usually my thing.  As a child I was not allowed to own a Ouija board, I was afraid when girls at sleepovers wanted to play "light as a feather, stiff as a board," and I was told in Sunday school that people who read horoscopes were agents of sorcery and evil. However, I also made countless paper fortune tellers in school, with fortunes like, "You will get kissed this year" and "You will marry the class nerd ."  I had fun reading the daily horoscopes in the newspaper, which were featured on the page adjacent to the advice columns, which I also read daily.  I never thought these games and interest in the future were evil - it was fun to suppose what if...? So I agreed to a Tarot card reading.  It was fifteen minute...

I am currently reading Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King, an historical narrative about the building of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore (known as the Duomo) in Florence, Italy.  It tells the complicated, inventive, and seemingly impossible story of how Filippo Brunelleschi designed, engineered, and created one of the most significant architectural wonders of the world. Throughout construction of the dome, Brunelleschi was forced to invent new machinery for hoisting, placing, and transporting massive amounts of brick, sandstone, marble, and mortar.  It was the 15th century, and by today's standards, these inventions seem primitive (for an example, conduct a Google image search for "ox-hoist").  Most of Brunelleschi's inventions worked perfectly, and he continued to astound the people of Florence with his ingenuity.  However, one invention failed.  It functioned like a 15th-century duck boat, designed to transport marble across land, ...

This morning I made a very conscious decision not to help someone.  This is, I'm proud to say, fairly out of character for me, as I really try to keep an eye out for people who need a hand with the door, people with one too many bags in their arms, parents trying to maneuver their strollers on and off the train.  This kind of active helping and awareness has been modeled for me my entire life, and is now almost an instinctual reaction - someone needs help, so let it be me. This morning, I did not help.  I looked at him long and hard, lingered for a moment, and kept going. I didn't see him right away.  I exited the blue line train at Government Center, where I transfer to the green line.  There was a crowd of people backed up on one side of the staircase, and the clog seemed to be halfway up the stairs.  Slowly the people moved to the left and weaved between the people coming down the stairs to make their way up.  I followed them until I sa...