Scraptastic #2

When I posted the first Scraptastic pics a couple of weeks ago, I said that I had some ideas in mind about where to go. This is where I wanted to start. I keep looking at these, and I am not sure if I like them or not. I think I want to keep playing with this idea. The pieces below are 19" x 19". I am going to cut a larger background this weekend and put multiple flowers. What do YOU think about where this is going?

Trust me, these are reasonably square. The distortion comes from the angle of the camera.

In order to take these pictures, I had to move a certain someone whose nickname is "Baby Boy." When I got through taking the pictures, I put the cover back on the work and set him back on the cover. He wanted to cuddle.....

I said, "Okay...."

 Then, of course, I had to send a picture to Hubby Dearest for his entertainment.

Last evening, I finished reading Anne Tyler's "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" (1982). I spent about four days in this book, and I don't know whether I liked it. I am quite fond of her novels, but there was a character in the book who reminded me so strongly of someone in my life that it colored the way I read the book. The character, Cody, had such a warped understanding of his life and held such intense, unreasonable grudges that every time he came back on stage, my skin crawled. I kept wanting to shake him and say, "Please take about three steps back. Try to understand where everyone else is coming from." Of course, the tragic, fatal flaw in such characters is that they are incapable of doing so, and that flaw blinds them to the goodness around them, and it changes the way that other people in their lives relate to them. When people are trying very hard to not upset someone who flies off the handle at seemingly random times about even the most casual of remarks, it drains the energy of everyone around them.

On the list of the most influential books of my life is Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine." In the introduction to the paperback version of the book, he talks about "going around back and coming up and looking at the world through someone else's eyes and saying, 'Oh! So THAT'S how you see it!'" That sentence is probably the single most important sentence I ever read. It has governed every relationship I've had, and every time I've messed up a relationship, it's because I lost sight of the truth of that sentence. I think that's why a character like Cody in Tyler's "Dinner" affects me so much - because he never encounters that idea, and great suffering results from that absence.

So, what books or sentences have affected YOU?