Thursday blues

There is some concern about continuing to publish pictures of Kate on this blog. Cindy is worried about it. She is the mother, of course. So we will have to be more discrete in this. Today is the day when we find out whether Kate is on the final ten of Homecoming Court. Cross your fingers and toes, people. I will get back to this later.

It is a dreary day and the sky is crying again. I hope Saturday is pretty in Clinton.

This morning several appointments have cancelled. There are rumours that several closings are going to take place today and tomorrow. Now one of them is going to probably be on Monday, although they said they wanted to close on Friday afternoon. The other one is supposed to close on Friday morning; however, I haven't heard anything from them. I really need to cross my fingers and toes for those two.

I would love to get some closings closed in the next few weeks. I keep hearing from lenders and borrowers and they are all in earnest, and sound hopeful, but nothing happens. Meanwhile, I get calls from potential clients who then cancel at the last minute or balk at the fees they are quoted.

Tomorrow will be here before we know it and Cindy and I will be winging up to the upcountry in South Carolina. South Carolina has a broad diversity of terrain and georgraphic features. They have the Low Country along the coast. They have the Piedmont around the capital. They have the Upcountry in the north and west. They also have some of the most unusual names for cities and towns (I say that, knowing that Devil's Elbow and Monkey's Eyebrow are both in Kentucky). Everything seems to have a story or a derivation. I don't know why South Carolina has to break down the whole state into these romantic regions. Romantic, I suppose, to someone.

South Carolina is actually kind of strange to me. I say that knowing that South Carolina is basically the mother or big sister of Georgia, being the immediate predecessor to the last original English colony, and the place from which Oglethorpe left to set out and build Savannah. Since the Carolinas weren't set up as a debtor's colony, they have a little bit on us poor Georgians. Charleston is better than Savannah. But St. Simons is better than Hilton Head. And Atlanta soars over Columbia. All the intermediate cities like Greenville, Spartanburg, Macon, Columbus, Gainesville are a wash as far as I am concerned, although I think we have more than they do. We have better sports teams. They have better pastimes. We have better roads. And we are bigger. Of course, if you combined the two Carolinas into their original composition as "Carolina", they would probably be bigger and better than most states. Of course, if you did that, you would have to give us back Alabama and Mississippi. Boy, what a pile of rednecks that would be.

That is my attempt to compare and contrast the two states. Do with it as you will.

By the by, the antique expression for the day, as given by my calendar, is "shoe the gosling". This is an expression which apparently means to do something that is not worthwhile, or as they put it,"a profitless task." Interestingly, the phrase "not worthwhile" and "profitless task" clearly mean the same thing. You can see their lineage in the words "not worth-while" and "profit-less". Profit and worth being similar in meaning.

Anyway, getting back to the expression, apparently this goes back to a fair which was established in 1284 and held in Nottingham, England. The fair was established by King Edward I for all of the farmers and stockmen to bring their geese to the fair, I suppose to exhibit or sell. Farmers came from far distances to show off their geese. They would gather their geese, clip their wings to prevent them from flying away, and walk them to Nottingham. I can only imagine what that looked like, particularly when they all arrived in Nottingham. Come to think of it, imagine what it sounded like. A little like downtown London at 5:00 p.m., around Piccadilly.

At any rate, the farmers travelled far distances to bring their geese to the fair. Often, they would coat the feet of the geese with tar and sand to make a little "footee" for the protection of the feet of the geese. I suppose that this expression came from the value of these shoes to the geese. Maybe the fair did nothing for the owners of the geese. Or maybe the shoes didn't help the geese. Who knows? Anyway, this expression came out of the fair and shows, I suppose, the value of trying to put a shoe on a goose.

Which doesn't explain why there used to be Red Goose shoes. Which leads me to ask why Buster Brown and his dog, Tige, would sell shoes either. And who was PF and how or why did his shoes fly? I do remember the Red Goose and the little boy and his dog, trying to get my mom to buy us shoes. My mother, who was in the shoestore to buy us shoes in the first place, didn't need a goose or a little boy and his dog to help her in picking out shoes. What was the point?

It was probably hard enough just getting two little boys to sit still long enough to try on shoes in the first place.

By the way, as you all must know by now, my mother is the reigning queen of shoes (since Imelda Marcos is no longer with us). She has come along way since she used to remove her shoes after school so she could walk home barefoot in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Now she needs many closets in her house just to house her shoes. Thankfully, all of her children have left the roost and given my mother more closets to house her shoes.

Then there is the fact that my great-grandfather's brothers had a chain of shoestores in Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana and Florida.

Did you know that I was a child model in a fashion show in Indianapolis? Did you know I was paid in a pair of shoes? My first dress loafers.

So you see, shoes have been very important in my family. That is why I always take mine off as soon as I get home in the afternoon.

Nevertheless, did the shoe company use a goose to sell shoes because they couldn't get the shoes on the goose? I could have told them there would be no profit in trying to shoe a goose? And I didn't need an entry on a calendar to tell me that.

Ok, Ok, that's enough.

One more thing: why are they called loafers? I think I will look that one up.