#SoCS Aug. 22/2020

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “brush.” Use it as a noun, a verb, or an idiom. Have fun!

I am listening to The Complete Novels of Mark Twain in Audibles. I had read his books long back and enjoyed them. Listening to them is a wonderful experience. The word brush brought to mind the scene from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The scene where he has to white wash the wall is very popular. His aunt tells him that he has to paint a wall as a punishment. Tom sits with his brush and paint thinking of ways to not paint. It was fun to read how he made many boys take the brush and paint the wall. They gave him their treasures in exchange for being allowed to paint. The wall got three coatings by the end of the day 😊. I wonder if Mark Twain thought that scene would still bring a smile after more than 150 years.

Our daughter has always loved to paint. And she has passed on her love to her son. The other day he showed us the bottle he was painting using acrylic paints. She sent a photo of him holding a brush and looking at the bottle and of course, we as grandparents thought it just too wonderful for words😊.

As I was writing that, my thoughts went to our brush with law in Sofia, Bulgaria. We were there in 2012. We had gone to see the beautiful Boyona church. We bought tickets for the tram to return to our hotel, at the other end of the city. We did not know that we had to punch the tickets in a punching machine kept to one side. An inspector climbed in, checking the tickets of all the passengers. She was very angry with us and thought we were cheating. We later learnt people buy these tickets in bulk and punch them as and when the commute. We kept saying in sign language that we had bought the tickets at the station but did not know that we had to punch them. The tall man sitting behind us started supporting us , another lady joined him. But the inspector was adamant that we should pay the fine. We were ready to do that. Then that man asked the lady to punch two tickets, he took our unpunched ones and gave it to her. He gave the punched tickets to the inspector. She said something, I do not know what, it was in their own language, and left us to ourselves. The man got down before we could thank him. But we were able to thank the lady.  Those people will always be a part of our lives. We thanked God that the inspector came when she did because if she had come towards the end of our journey we would have to pay a fine. For the rest of our stay we diligently punched the ticket when we went in a tram 😊. Sofia is a beautiful place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyana_Church

By Lakshmi Bhat

I am a person who believes there is not enough darkness in the world to extinguish the light of a small candle. We live in a small place in South India. I love reading, blogging, stitching, traveling, photography, listening to people and many other things which make life so very nice and interesting. Blogging is a fun experience, it has brought me into contact with people in different parts of the world and it is good to read about their everyday life. In spite of the differences there is a sameness which is fascinating. I have learnt and am learning something everyday. I have learnt to write haikus. I enjoy combining the thought and the number of syllables. I have always read books and I was happy to write short fiction. I had thought I would not be able to do so. Stream of Consciousness and photo challenges are fun too. Yes, there is so much in life that is sad and that hurts us. Many a time I wonder why life is so unfair to so many. We all have problems in life but the problems of many seems unbearable. This makes me feel so helpless. It is not possible to help everyone but we can do our bit, we can do something to help some in whatever way we can. Twice a week I used to go to a home for the mentally challenged . But I have not gone there since March 2020. I will start going there again but I do not know when. There have been many challenges in life and we have faced them with a positive approach. Our grandson and granddaughter have made life so much more richer.

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