#963 the art of the initial, plus a cool old photo or two

Today I had to write my initials about a million-jillion times on a million-jillion pieces of paper, or so it seemed. It was the second day of our month-end closing process, and part of my job is to initial most of the bills that have to be paid. We bought a lot of stuff last month.

As I was sitting there writing ST over and over and over, my mind wandered a little and I started thinking about my grandfather, my mother's father. Why would writing my initials a million-jillion times remind me of my Avi? I'll tell you.

When I was younger, we would go over for the Christmas holidays sometimes. Since we would be gone for a few weeks, I usually had to bring schoolwork with me so I wasn't horribly behind the rest of the class when I got back. I remember one time I was sitting at the big dining room table at the apartment on Roca i Batlle, doing some schoolwork and my grandfather was sitting there reading the paper as he often did.

He asked me to show him how I made my initials. I carefully scrawled an SW on the page.

"No no no no no," he said. "You must not let the pen leave the paper when you write your initials. It must be one flowing letter." He took my pencil and proceed to write his initials, RP, on the paper. It was cool. I don't remember exactly how it looked, but I remember liking it a lot.

I practiced and practiced. It's remember thinking that it was hard to make an S and a W into one flowing letter. I did it for a long time, though. Now the ST is very easy to flow and I write it very often.

Kind of a strange thing to remember, right? But it was fun to go back for a minute.

Here's a photo of me and Avi when I was 7 years old.

I don't remember that couch being very comfortable, but I loved that room. The painting on the wall above our heads? Love it. It's my grandmother, my mother and her sister. It was beautiful. Man! I really, really loved my Avi,

Here's a super-cool photo I found of him. Don't ask how I ended up with it. Cool stuff like this is way more up Lizzie's alley, so I just got lucky:

Right?! That's Avi in a ring with a bull. He's fighting a freakin' bull! Very Hemingway-esque. :) The photo was taken in July 1967.

That's all I've got for tonight. See you tomorrow!