I am not an inventor.  I don’t have that particular circuit connected to any wires… in my brain.  I wish I did.

Inventors are an amazing lot, aren’t they?  Oh sure, there is the whole list of usual suspects.  The ones we know and love the best.  The Thomas Alva Edison’s, the Alexander Graham Bell’s.  Benjamin Franklin, Karl Benz, Eadweard Muybridge, Louis Pasteur, Eli Whitney, The Wright Boys, and on and on.

Now me…. I don’t have that punch card.  I am the person with the plastic spray can cap, which is duck taped to the end of a yardstick, and then carefully mounted with a tornado of bungee cords…. at the end of a broom handle.  And as I am struggling to balance my newly “devised” contraption while trying to get that “something” from above my reach (hence the new tool)…. someone saunters up behind me and says…”Polly. Why don’t you just step up on that milk crate right there?”

Oh Blast IT anyhow. Confounded innovation.   Foiled…… once AGAIN.

But… a lot of inventors in history have gone mostly unnoticed.   Think about all of our stuff…. around us… right now.   Somebody, at some point in time, thought of a better way.  And then devised it.

Some of it seems so very fundamental.  But someone thought of it first.   Oh, you say.  don’t reinvent the wheel.  And I  say to that … EXACTLY!

How about the first shelter?  The first big palm brush propped up against a stick to block the wind, or the rain?  Or… how about a sharpened stick for a spear?  Fire? Levers?   …… The iPad?

Okay, I jumped ahead just a bit. But you get the point.

So, to all of those brain-mavens out there… and the ones who have long passed.. I extend a heart-felt-and-whopping-big thank you.

Without you… I’d be sitting naked in the pitch dark.  Outdoors.  Eating bark.   Not typing this.

I love inventors.

 “I’m more interested in what I discover than what I invent”  – Paul Simon