Small Oasis (Wordless Wednesday) and What’s In That Name? (Words for Wednesday)

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Linking up with Wordless Wednesday and Sandee at Comedy Plus.     

https://messymimismeanderings.blogspot.com/2020/09/small-oasis-wordless-wednesday-and.html

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Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and has become a moveable feast of word or picture or music prompts to encourage us to write stories, poems, or whatever strikes our fancy.    

This month, the prompts are being provided by River at Drifting Through Life.    

This week's words/prompts are:

1. the two Colins

2. rambunctious

3. purple tie

4. apple pie

Let the creativity begin!

It had been a complete coincidence that The Two Colins had ended up both having that name.

Remember what Shakespeare said about names?  Well, there seemed to be plenty in this name, at least for this family.

They weren’t really that closely related as such a huge family goes.  The family had started with a couple who came over on an immigrant ship long ago and had five children after arriving here.  Each of those children had several, and so on through the years, and The Two Colins were third cousins once removed.

In other words, not so close that their parents lived that near each other and were raised together or anything.  In fact, until The Two Colins came along, those parts of the family only saw each other every year at the huge family gathering in the summers on the old farmstead that one of the direct descendants still worked.

It was really odd, not only that both sets of parents independently and without knowing about the other’s choice decided to name their expected boys Colin, but odd what followed those seemingly innocuous and independent decisions.

Colin One, as he came to be called, was born on June 1, and Colin Two, the day after.

They both had the family traits that only came out occasionally in each generation of the family, the startlingly clear ice blue eyes of the original founding mother, and the cleft chin of the founding father of the clan.

When you saw them right together, or up close, you could see the differences between them, but from far enough away, or when they were both covered in mud, it was hard to tell them apart.

Both were RAMBUNCTIOUS, but that was to be expected in boys (and many girls) of the family.  Both left handed, which the family joke said came from Great Uncle Joe, the bachelor who’d never married but who was laughingly said to curse family members with left-handed children if they married someone he didn’t like.  That was especially funny as Great Uncle Joe was fond of all four parents in this situation, but he took it for the good-natured ribbing it was meant to be.

They were always together at family reunions, these Two Colins, and any other time they could convince their parents to let them visit one another.  They got into and out of trouble together, once sending the whole clan scrambling to find them when they turned up missing at the reunion.  Mothers gathered to weep and pray, fathers were dividing the land into quadrants to search, when laughter was heard overhead.  They were both up in the huge old oak tree that graced the front of the old homestead, said to have been carefully preserved in the building of the original farmhouse as it was old then.  Both boys were highly delighted by their trick on everyone, until they realized they had to come down to very irate fathers with access to the woodshed.  (In this case, several grandmotherly pleas spared them the rod, and they thanked that grandmother by not pulling such a stunt again.)

The boys were both so fond of APPLE PIE that it was not uncommon, when they were teens with appetites, to eat a whole pie each after a large meal.  Yes, they stayed skinny, too, which made several not-so-lean members of the family very jealous indeed.

When it came time to go to college, both knew they wanted to be mechanical engineers, as they’d spent a lot of time on the old family homestead in the summers building things in the shop and working on the tractors and other farm machinery.  They each chose the same college, and thought of belonging to a fraternity.  Colin Two had applied, and since they both had the same name, Colin One did also, and got a stern letter from the head of the fraternity about filling out more than one application.

They laughed, and both showed up at Pledge Night each wearing a grey pinstripe suit and a big, loud PURPLE TIE.  They did not pledge, after all, and laughed about that night and the fun they had in college for years after.

They are still good friends as well as family members, parents themselves now and planning some shenanigans for this year’s family reunion like they always do.  Come on by, I’ll introduce you and you can see for yourself that sometimes there’s more in a name than people think.

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Today is:

Al-Yaom Al-Watany -- Saudi Arabia (National Day/Founding of the Kingdom)

Augustalia -- Roman Empire (birthday of Caesar Augustus, still the traditional New Year's Day in Constantinople and in the Eastern Orthodox Church)

Bunster Winding -- Fairy Calendar

Checkers Day/Dogs in Politics Day -- thanks to Mr. Nixon; and i'm tempted to further comment, but this one is too easy

Chuuk Liberation Day -- Micronesia

Citua -- Ancient Inca Empire (feast to the Moon, and to banish disease, in the month of Coyaraimi, date approximate)

El Grito de Lares -- Lares, Puerto Rico (anniversary of the first uprising against Spanish rule in 1868)

Innergize Day -- the day to take time for yourself! always on the day after the equinox, so either the 23rd or 24th, depending on where you live

International Restless Legs Syndrome Awareness Day -- on the birth anniversary of Professor Karl-Axel Ekborn, the neurologist who first described it

National Great American Pot Pie Day

National Women's Health and Fitness Day -- US, sponsored by Fitness Day     

Neptune Day -- planet discovered this day in 1846 by Johann Galle of Germany

St. Adamnan's Day (Patron of Donegal, Ireland; Raphoe, Ireland)

St. Padre Pio's Day

Thrue Bab -- Bhutan (Blessed Rainy Day)

Anniversaries Today:

The University of Alberta in Alberta, Canada, is founded, 1908

Birthdays Today:

Anthony Mackie, 1979

Ani DiFranco, 1970

Elizabeth Pena, 1961

Jason Alexander, 1959

Bruce Springsteen, 1949

Mary Kay Place, 1947

Paul Petersen, 1945

Julio Iglesias, 1943

Tom Lester, 1938

Ray Charles, 1930

John Coltrane, 1926

Mickey Rooney, 1920

Walter Pidgeon, 1897

Friedrich Paulus, 1890

Walter Lippman, 1889

Victoria Woodhull, 1838

William H. McGuffey, 1800

Kublai Khan, 1215

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, BC63

Euripides, BC480

Debuting/Premiering Today:

"Marcus Welby, M.D."(TV), 1969

"The Jetsons"(TV), 1962

"Threni: id est Lamentatines Jeremiae Prophetae"(Stravinsky dodecaphonic work), 1958

Today in History:

Concord of Worms, 1122

The first major battle of the Wars of the Roses, at Blore Heath in Staffordshire, 1459

First commencement exercises of Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass., 1642

Liechtenstein declares its independence from the German Empire, 1719

John Paul Jones' "Bon Homme Richard" defeats the HMS Serepis, 1779

Lewis and Clark arrive back in St. Louis from their explorations, 1806

The Knickerbockers Baseball Club, the first baseball team to play under the modern rules, is founded in New York, 1845

Neptune is discovered by French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier and British astronomer John Couch Adams, 1846

Nintendo Koppai, later known as Nintendo Company, Limited, is founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi; it produces and markets the playing card game Hanafuda, 1889

The Phantom of the Opera (original title: Le Fantome de l'Opera), a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux, was first published, 1909

The MS Princess of Tasmania, Australia’s first passenger roll-on/roll-off diesel ferry, makes her maiden voyage across Bass Strait, 1959

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos announces over television and radio the implementation of martial law, 1972

Juan Perón returns to power in Argentina, 1973

Saint Kitts and Nevis joins the United Nations, 1983

Qantas Flight 1 overruns the runway in Bangkok during a storm; some passengers only receive minor injuries, it is still the worst crash in Qantas's history, 1991

The first public version of the web browser Mozilla Firefox ("Phoenix 0.1") is released, 2002

Hurricane Jeanne strikes Haiti and leaves at least 1,070 dead, 2004

The identification of four genetically different types of breast cancer by researchers is announced, 2012

Japan's space agency becomes the first to place two robotic explorers on an asteroid, Ryugu, from its Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, 2018