I am a fan of ampersands (&), those flamboyant little symbols that fill in for the word “and”.

Shunning secretarial classes in high school, I was not formally introduced to the ampersand until I started doing graphic design. I was smitten. Even the word is fun to say.

Ampersands have been around since Roman times; however, the name is more recent. After perusing numerous web sites, the following history is the clearest. Be a bit patient, the explanation is convoluted.

 The name “ampersand” certainly sounds as if it should mean something terribly exotic, coined in the misty yesteryear of typography, but its roots are actually quite humble, and we have the long-suffering schoolchild to thank for the word.  It comes from the practice once common in schools of reciting all 26 letters of the alphabet plus the “&” sign, pronounced “and,” which was considered part of the alphabet, at least for learning purposes.

Any letter that could also be used as a word in itself (“A,” “I,” “&” and, at one point, “O”) was preceded in the recitation by the Latin phrase “per se” (“by itself”) to draw the students’ attention to that fact.  Thus the end of this daily ritual would go: “X, Y, Z and per se and.”  This last phrase was routinely slurred to “ampersand” by children rightly bored to tears, and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.  Courtesy of The Word Detective May 2003

When choosing a typeface, I always check out the ampersand first. That symbol is often a wee showcase for font designer’s creativity.

A small gallery of ampersands with a decidedly romantic bent follows. Happy Valentines Day!

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The other day it sounded as if the Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe was roaring through the house. Wind gusts were up to 45 mph, and the cats were all hiding in the rafters. I wanted to join them.

I have friends who find wind invigorating and exciting. I, however, view a windy day with unease. Aren’t those big wind gusts just a practice run for sinking an ore boat in Lake Superior or blowing away some poor little Wisconsin town? And it’s historical fact that many pioneer women who lived in sod houses out in the plains went mad from the constant howling of the wind.

Wind was a foe even when we lived in the city. Our yard was graced with a magnificent, mature willow tree. We all treasured it. But, don’t believe all that gentle wind in the willows nonsense. After every storm, we could be found in our yard raking up willow tree debris for hours.

The phenomenal power of wind was fully revealed to us when we moved into our current country home. We are on a seventy foot bluff with open fields around us. When a nor’easter gets whipping, the noise in our upstairs bedroom is deafening. The whole house, including the bed, literally shakes and groans.

I think the wolf got miscast in The Three Little Pigs. The wind should have been the character that said, “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.”

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Sousa doesn’t talk. It’s odd to live with a creature that drifts silently through the house like an ebony ghost.

We know that the girl possesses a voice. In two years she has emitted four small “meows.” 

Sousa is a beautiful black tortoiseshell cat who started life as a stray. She was run over by a car and left for dead at the side of a road. When a nearby farm family went to bury her, she stirred. Our local no-kill shelter took her in, paid the vet bills and tried to find her a “forever” home.

Every weekend she was tucked into a cat carrier and taken to a “mobile.” In other words, she was driven to a Wal-Mart parking lot with other foster cats in need of permanent homes.

Sousa apparently figured out that hiding silently in the back of her cat carrier was the fastest ticket home to her foster mom. For a year and a half, people passed her over for more vocal, charismatic cats.

But then she had a mobile showing at our house. We both knew this brave girl was right for us. After all, the other Tooley cats can talk up a storm. Neko even says the best cat swear words I’ve ever heard when I refuse to open the treat cupboard.

Silence is fine with us.

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“There is no such thing as an Idaho potato. But there are potato varieties that are grown in Idaho.”

The Interstate Baking Company recently filed for bankruptcy. In other words, Twinkies have tanked.

Who would have ever thought Americans could forsake their Twinkie habit? A lunchbox staple for generations, Twinkies have fallen from grace. What happened?

The answer appears to be that the world has finally caught up with my mother. Years before the term “health” food was invented, my mother was packing nutritious lunches for me every day. The format never varied: a cheese or peanut butter sandwich on 100% whole wheat bread, an apple and homemade cookies.

In my entire life I’ve probably eaten a grand total of three Twinkies. When you grow up with real food (called “slow” food now) you are hooked for life.

But now moms who grew up on Twinkies are doing a radical thing. They are reading food labels. Significant numbers of them are deciding not to feed their kids a chemical lunch.

I worked for a natural foods bakery for five years and remember an experiment done by one of the office people. An unopened package of Twinkies was placed on top of a file cabinet for two years. The Twinkies didn’t mold, rot, shrink, smell, dry out or decompose. We could only conclude that Twinkies are shot full of embalming fluid.

A few centuries from now some archeologist will probably dig up an intact package of Twinkies and ponder the culture that produced “food” with archival qualities.

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