Give attitude, get attention, right?

I like that saying, it explains many things.

I prefer, and I think you’d agree, that the attitude be positive spunk [aka signal] rather than negative junk [aka noise], BUT the result is the same: the attention is on you.

Not that giving attitude is anything new.

In fact back when the world was a more genteel place free from 24/7 news and social media, I’m sure people gave attitude— just in more subtle ways. They may have been irritated by events and other people, but seemingly they tolerated that irritation with more grace than today*.

Case in point is Miss Nettie Briggs. She is featured in the professional portrait seen at the top of this post. She is looking placid, mildly amused by what she is doing.

Or so it seems to me.

I found this photo mixed in among the boxes of family photos that I sorted last summer and wrote about in Confessions Of A Reluctant Family Historian: My Kingdom For A Shredder, my most popular post of 2024. [Go figure?]

I don’t know for sure who Miss Nettie Briggs was: my mother had written her name on the back of the photo so she knew who she was. But there’s no one left from any generation that’d be able to tell me Miss Nettie Briggs’s story.

However I have an inkling of who she might have been.

I remember my mother talking about a nurse who came to live with her family for a year, tasked with looking after my mother’s older sister who’d had abdominal surgery. Something that at the time was a dangerous procedure that required months of bedrest in order to heal.

Nettie lived with them and when not looking after her charge, who slept a lot, she read books to and played games with my mother and her younger sister.

Mom liked Miss Nettie Briggs, as I recall. Enough, I would guess, to keep a photo of Miss Nettie Briggs around in a ratty cardboard box full of dusty old family photos for me to find one day.

I adore Miss Nettie Briggs because I find her charming.

Thus it has come to be that Nettie’s photo is now framed and hanging on the wall in our study where I do my blogging, old-school style on a desktop computer.

Meaning that whenever I do anything related to blogging Nettie is looking over my shoulder, keeping my thoughts mostly civil, my sense of humor firmly intact, and my vibe jovial enough.

At least most days.

Questions of the Day

What’s your attitude today? Are you receiving the kind of attention you want?  

Do you have any old family photos of somebody who is a mystery to you? 

Do you have any old or new photos of people framed and hanging on your walls? Once upon a time that was frowned upon you know!