Word: minding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...beautiful roses in his garden," wrote the great rosarian Samuel Reynolds Hole in 1869, "must have beautiful roses in his heart." To wait as long as three years for trilliums to bloom requires considerable fortitude; to rise early and weed builds discipline; to construct a garden in one's mind in the dead of winter fosters purity of thought. "Sometimes what you do is for others," muses Designer Oscar de la Renta, who has transformed a Connecticut horse farm into a hilltop garden of crab-apple trees and white roses, with rows of fruit trees and swaths of delphiniums...
...Kempf, a housewife in Atlanta, "and am trying to re-create my childhood." Her father had a vegetable garden, and her mother grew irises. "Here I am, with a two- and a three-year-old, back at my origins." Many of her friends, she finds, are of the same mind. "They are tired of being self-absorbed. They want some roots, and they're realigning their values...
After dropping out of high school at 17, Randi joined a traveling carnival. On tour, he wore a turban and a beard, was billed as Prince Ibis, did a mind- reading act and supervised a "ten-in-one," carny talk for ten attractions under one tent. Among the features, Randi recalls, were Kong Lee, the electric boy, and the 10-ft. indigo snake ("It was only six feet, but who counts...
...gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said -- could it not? -- of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially...
...world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table...