A New Old Thought

New to me, old in general.

Nail clippers. They haven't changed much in my lifetime. Or at all?? I still remember my dad clipping my toenails in the office of our house in Geneva, each of us sitting in our own chair, with my leg draped over his knee, a trash can under my foot. He did a good job. I don't remember him ever cutting me. I can't say the same about my skill with my own kids. Poor things. The first time I ever trimmed our oldest child's fingernails, when he was about 10 days old or so, I made it through nine nails without a hitch, but the tenth drew blood. Arghhh! Of course if that happened with me and my dad, I wouldn't remember it anyway, I guess.

So the nail clippers we used back then, to my memory, looked exactly the same as the ones we use now. Perhaps because they were already perfect? How about some that don't cut skin, only hardended nails? Ah, but sometimes we want to cut dead skin off, or that stuff that sometimes points up at the side of the nail? Some people call those hangnails, but I think hangnails are a piece of the actual nail hanging off...terminology, whatever.

I commented to David (not a blog comment, a real live conversational comment) about the lack of advances in nail clipping technology (compared to, say, PDAs), and he quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson to me:

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

I don't think he knew it was Emerson, but I didn't even know it was a quotation from somebody. I mean, the way he said it, I knew it had to be, but I didn't remember ever hearing it before. So we discussed it a bit, and I finally got around to looking it up today.

What I love is being married to a man for over 11 years and keeping on hearing "new" things out of his mouth (even if it was originally said before 1882). From time to time, I ask him, "Tell me something I don't know about you." He always comes up with something. The next 60 or 70 years with him, God willing, are going to be so great.