No Towel, but Honor to the Flexible

Just heard that yesterday (by two minutes out here in the desert) was Towel Day in honor of Douglas Adams.

One day in 1979, standing in a barren kitchenette in an Oxford college, making my cup of tea and beans on toast (cheap protein much used by students, though I was post-grad, visiting, and 40 years old!), I turned on my old green Roberts radio. It happened to come on about five minutes in to the first episode of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (still best of all on radio, regardless of worse and better films). Having never heard of the show, I was suddenly thrust into a very strange world indeed. Couldn't turn it off. Listened every day. When I got home, my local NPR station started it on late Saturday afternoons. Fabulous motivation to finish sermons.

HG was a very philosophical book - by a man who also wrote Last Chance To See, a wonderful tour of important, dying ecological sites, by a man who cared about this earth in reality, not just fantasy.

Sorry I missed towel day, though I have no idea whether my morning (and early afternoon, gawd it did go on) mammogram could have sustained one more weirdness like me insisting on clutching a towel. See, I can't stand up at the moment, so standing for the mammo wasn't possible. The experienced gal who said, oh sure, I can do it with you seated when I booked the appointment was off for the holiday week-end. Sweet, frantic newby in her place. Seated?? What?? Yikes.

But she just got on with it, found a highish stool chair, and off we went. Halfway through, bless her flexible heart and soul, she said, "You know what, this seated business is a lot better." I allowed as how it sure was better for me, because I could hold position instead of falling over. She said, "Yes, but I meant it is better for me too. I like this!"

She made a hard time for both of us amazingly easy, comfortable, and OK. Because she was truly open and flexible, she not only made it work, she let herself learn. Wow. Was I impressed. Now, if I can only learn to do likewise ... at least sometimes.