Pen Pals

Both layouts done with Club Scrap Literary Kit. A couple of stamped images of a pen and I was done! Well - I did do a bit of Xacto cutting: the designs from the white page (lower layout) cut and pasted onto the brown page (upper layout).

My mother taught me to ignore chain letters. And of course, I applied the same rule to e-mails and now forward neither letters nor e-mails. Especially if they are threatening or promise miracles. However one time I broke this rule of mine. When I was about eight or nine I received a friendship chain letter. What this letter wanted to do was help you make Pen pals. So I forwarded it to ten people, added my name to the bottom of the list of ten addresses, removed the top address, and then wrote to the person whose address I had eliminated from the list. I am sure many of you have had a chain letter sometime in your life and actually carried on the chain :-) so you know the procedure!

And that is how I made a wonderful friend ~ Debi in Australia. She was my age, had a younger sister called Jenni, a dog called Ben and a cat whose name I now do not remember. She was born and lived in the UK for a while, then moved to Australia. We wrote with great frequency for quite a few years. I really treasured every letter that I received. And she sent a lot of photos, which was so wonderful! She was my first real pen pal but I do not remember her family name anymore. All I have left are these photographs and memories of being so excited every time a letter came! Our correspondence died out when we reached our teens.

Just as I had written to Debi, Minoo from Amritsar, India wrote to me. I wrote back and thus started a friendship that lasted for almost a decade. She was a few years my senior. She wrote beautifully, describing her life, so very different from mine, her city which I had never visited, and many other subjects which we found a common interest in. Her letters were sensible, educative and she is probably the best correspondent I have had.

What I never understood is why our friendship ended. One day she wrote to me saying she was getting married ~ an arranged marriage, most common in India. I was very happy for her, sent her my congratulations and was convinced that she would keep writing to me even after she was married. But it was not to be so. After the wedding I never heard from her again. I wrote to her family asking for the new address, then I wrote to her new home, all to no avail. She never wrote back. I was very saddened by this loss. I still miss her friendship.

And now for some dance lessons:
ETA: The guy below is a motivational speaker and uses dance to motivate (Thanks Debi!). He appeared on the Today show. Well, he is very very good at dancing!!

If you have not seen this video, please do not freak out! It is funny in a 'give you the heebeejeebies' kind of way. This is no kid, but a midget. It is a scene from an Indian movie ~ a Tamil movie, a language I do not speak. So I too have no idea what they are saying.

ETA: A very kind soul has translated the conversation for me :-) Right in the end, the little fellow asks the reclining fellow for a bidi (Indian hand rolled stinky cigarette). The recliner says 'Hey, you are a kid, you cannot smoke'. The little one replies 'I am older than you. Now give me the bidi or I'll leather your backside'. Or something to that effect ...

Well, now I know!! Yay!