Ineffable

 

Everything important happens again and again and if you don't believe that, you are not looking hard enough at the right things.

You may not recognize it for what it is.

You may not appreciate it for the way it happens.

Because it is not personal, except it is if you see it.

Life begins again and again. Reanimated, repeated, resourced.

Grains of sand yielding becoming more and more of what they already are.

Cells dividing.

Seeds exploding.

Evolution furthering what already is.

It is the glory of life on a grand scale.

Not Suzy, or Billy, but the spark of creation replicating itself for all eternity in everything that is.

That's the glory of  being part of Creation.

Gratitude

Gratitude is like a light beam. The farther it gets from the source the larger it feels until it spills out over my entire life.

Today is the day after Christmas, so I guess it could feel like a let down, but for me it just got brighter.

I found places for some of my favorite gifts, took pictures of them there and sent texts to the people who got them for me. For me this is playing. I love looking for just the right place for just the right thing. Designing and redesigning my life is one of my great joys.

And -- my son called to tell me how perfect my gifts were for him. I really shouldn't get credit for that. I simply listen when he talks so that I am aware of what is important to him and I know what he does so that makes it easy to find gifts he can use. Then I have the fun of shopping for just the right clothing, soft on the inside as well as the outside and warm with  appropriate construction. It's like a treasure hunt that I have the fun of doing and then get glowing appreciation for. Both gifts for me!

Same for my daughter and sister who loved that I seemed to find gifts they adored. 

I don't buy gifts for everyone for every occasion, but occasionally I find the exact right gift for someone and then I get so excited. It is not a miracle, nor is it work. It is only the result of paying attention to what they say and do.

I think that is one of the reasons I love being with people one on one. It is possible to have a deeper, closer relationship that way. If someone is important to me I really want to know who they are and what they like. Now. Not ten years ago. Now.

I am grateful for the people in my life that I love!

Joy

I am celebrating this Christmas like it is the last one ever! Who knows. At my age that is always a possibility and besides it is just a nice way to live.

Searching for just the right presents for each person, even some I don't usually buy gifts for, gave me twice as much joy this year. 

Making a Christmas pie, baking Christmas cookies and even making a special meal for just me to eat has filled the house with good smells. My nose is the fastest way I know to fall into a wonderful memory.

I do not feel sad at all, which feels a little funny given the circumstances this year.

I simply feel blessed to have such wonderful people in my life, to know that next year we will have a new president, and that the covid vaccines are out there.

Ten months of unspeakable darkness and horror has taught me to find joy in the smallest things and for that I am grateful.

I am more than grateful.

I find myself joyful!

Gifts of the heart

One good thing about Christmas 2020, for me at least, is that people are trying to be sure no one feels left out, or alone this holiday season.

In the past it seemed as though there was a goal - that two or three hours spent eating Christmas dinner and opening presents on Christmas Day in frantic cheer.

This year that will not happen for many folk, but there is a sort of continual excitement leading up to what would have been that time.

People calling, people writing, people taking time to make sure that no one is forgotten. Dropping by or mailing presents, sending cards, calling every day. these scattered minutes are so dear to someone with loved ones.

I would rather have a daily dose of love, a call from my son, or bestest, than all the presents in Santa's sleigh.

The gift

 

Christmas opens my heart so wide it is painful.

It is as though I can feel a thousand times more than normal and everything touches me deeply.

I look at the truly good people in this world, the ones who not only give, but think and do loving things all the time. People who don't just act nice, but ARE nice and they break my heart. I want to wrap them up and keep them safe forever.

I wonder what my son will be when he is old and frail and dependent on others. Will they be kind to him? Will they treat him gently and love him for real, not just as part of some job they do?

He gives and gives and gives. 

I have never known anyone with less who gives so much, all the time. Stopping to help a woman on the road and giving her one of his bungee cords to keep her load on her car. Spending time listening to people who need to be heard. Caring for his family day and night even when he is worn out or not feeling well. Caring for animals as though they were people. There isn't a mean bone in his body. No passive aggressive actions, no doing for appearances sake only. He is the real thing.

But not all people value that. The world is more inclined to care for the rich man, the showy man, the man who whines and complains.

I just want my son to meet people like him when he is old and fragile. He has earned that. If I could pick a Christmas gift, that would be it.

Traditions

 

As a child our Christmas tradition was simple. A week before Christmas we bought a big tree and my dad wired it to the woodwork on either side of the corner it stood in. Later we decorated it with old family heirloom ornaments and a gazillion single strands of tinsel. 

It was important to me that we establish traditions for our children, so around the second week in December we would drive out to a tree farm where my husband cut down the tree we all chose and we drove it home. Then we would string popcorn and cranberries and add them right after he put the lights on. Later we ate my iced Christmas cookies, drank hot chocolate and decorated that tree.

Soon, though, the children were involved in other things. Christmas concerts at school. The church's nativity scene play and the Community Theater's Christmas program. These took a lot of time, especially the last one. I worked on costumes, my husband played Santa in the suit I made, our oldest son usually had a solo or two and performed, or danced in whatever the program was that year. Our other two children were actors, elves, and extras. Rehearsals were long and late and there was no time to go look for a tree on the farm.

We bought an artificial tree and it lasted right up to the end of our marriage, Towards the end I left off the bottom two tiers and stuck it through the hole in our umbrella patio table, so the cats would not tip it over. With a big Christmas skirt, it was perfect!

Now I live alone. The boys are one on each coast and even though my daughter is nearby, there is the quarantine from COVID 19 to deal with. Still, traditions are important. 

I put up my small fake tree with the realistic pine cones and hung the macaroni angel, my grandson's singing ornament with his face on it, the ornaments friends and family have made recently and topped it with both a star and the ornament we put on Community Player's Christmas tree every year.

Wrapping presents to put underneath it is still one of my favorite things to do. The traditions have morphed a bit, but they are still recognizable in the joy I feel each year digging deep to find them.

That is the secret to traditions, I think. They have to grow with the times to stay alive.

In the moment

I saw someone's emotional response out in public the other day and I felt sad. It was a made for TV moment, right off the screen. It was what I hear and see so many people do anymore.

Simply mimic what they think is the proper, or cool, response according to made for consumer's propaganda.

A "Whoot." An inauthentic exclamation. An overstatement that cheapens the moment. A way of commercializing real feelings and responses.

All the hand raising, whooping, hollering, and craziness for public consumption is camouflage for the real thing.

An honest smile, watery eyes, heartfelt joy and simple silent awe often get lost in this sort of buffoonery and it makes me sad, because the people losing it are not even aware that they have been desensitized.

Life is not all about the glitter and show. The truest gifts touch so deeply that there aren't any really appropriate responses. There is only un-evinced gratitude and awe and maybe a smile, or hug.

And that is okay.

Loving

 

All my life I have loved and been loved, but it wasn't until High school that I realized people could leave my life. 

I was four when we moved away from Champaign and I remember my mother saying that I said, "Well I have friends now. When are we going to move?" I wondered what she meant at the time. I barely knew Julie and Paul, the kids across the street, but I think what she really meant was that she didn't like moving.

My mother was born and raised in one house, in one town, and had one true love all her life. She died before he did, so she never really lost anyone.

We moved quite a bit after I was four, but my family was always there. As long as they were with me, I was home. I thought that the whole world was as stable as that until the first guy I really dated, broke up with me. It hurt. I had never had someone walk out of my life before.

Eventually I grew up, got married and had three children. In the movies that was happily ever after. In real life it was miscarriages, foster care and adoption before giving birth. It turned out my husband was seldom faithful, but I thought my children were forever.

And that turned out to be true.

Those children are mine forever. I will never stop loving them. They are not mine to keep, not objects to be owned, but they are human beings that are such a part of me that my love could go around the world a million times and still be as strong, or stronger than it ever was.

Nothing will ever change that.

My Thots

 

I wrote my first thot nearly 22 years ago. At the time it was written to get a response from someone else who wrote a thought every day and suddenly missed a few.

In the beginning they were unique and thought provoking.

Later on they would be a bit more ecstatic.

And for a long while they often had something really worth saying.

That being said, they seem to have evolved into a form of therapy for me during the past couple of years. 

After reading a few of my older ones, I am disappointed by where the newer ones have gone.

Is that important, or is it just another 2020 moment designed to destroy everything?

I honestly don't know, but it is something I am seriously thinking about.

Puzzle

 

If  hearts holds the love of a family close, what happens when parts of that love pull away?

Is it like cookie dough at Christmas?

Are there people shaped holes left behind?

One for Dan and one for Sue and one for Terry Lou?

Can they be reinserted, slipped back in like living jigsaw puzzles that click together with a satisfying snap, or are they like uncaulked seams in a working shower? Messy. Leaky. Awkward.

I think most mothers would take them either way.

Your child is your child no matter what.

Cursed?

If it's not one thing, it's my mother!

I write this as a mother. 

As the mother!

My son has had a very rough year. Lost his old job, has become an independent contractor facing winter, has a money pit of a house and all sorts of other things.

Today his dog bit the delivery man who reached over the fence with a package. It is a rescue dog he has been working with since they got her and it wasn't a bad bite, but still . . . the dog bit the man.

I feel bad because the delivery man was delivering a package from me.

My son is the epitome of patience, peace and goodwill. He says not to worry.

I am a guilt ridden mother who generally really doesn't worry about too many things. Like why is he late getting home, etc., but this?

I'm starting to worry that whatever comes next might be the last straw. That one straw that is keeping the money pit upright,  amid all its leaks and creaks, ancient pipes and cursed plumbing.

I am imagining opening the bathroom door to find my son stewed in a hot bath of plaster chips and a hundred years of dust, only to hear evil laughing echoing through the halls behind me.

Of course that won't happen.

I don't live there.

But his wife and son do.

With the dog.

A little Christmas adventure

Sometimes window shopping online pays off. 

Today I found something that spoke to me of a friend and the price was astounding. Etsy, Ebay, Amazon, and others were asking as much as seventeen times what the man on Marketplace was!

And what really made the day was the journey.

I found it, confirmed it, and drove two towns over to pick it up! 

I haven't been anywhere, or done anything since last March so this was a real adventure.

I went to the bank to get some money, drove over there and went to the wrong house, but I didn't panic. I just called him on the phone. He answered and I walked next door.

Tomorrow I'm going to the post office. 

I'm mailing a big box of books to my son, a box of sketches to Bestest and this to someone I am hoping will be very surprised.

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

Euphemisms

 

Most people know about euphemisms. They are words we use to make ugliness sound better, more acceptable, less repugnant.

Women of my generation took this idea to lengths I'd never realized until I read a book by Roxane Gay called Hunger. That book is very appropriate for this time. A time when women are allowed to talk about the unspeakable. A time when the unimaginable may be voiced without shame, although it still feels shameful and difficult to talk about.

The first time I had sex I did not expect it. I did not want it. I said, "No." many times. I pushed him away firmly but gently, so I wouldn't hurt his feelings. It didn't stop him. 

Afterwards he said we made love and I wanted him to feel for me the way I had felt for him, so I thought maybe he was right, but I felt awful.

Every morning after that he would come up to my bedroom at his mother's home and do it again. I would push him away and whisper, "No," so his mother wouldn't hear and when he didn't stop I would threaten to tell her. I even threatened to call out for her help, but I didn't want to embarrass him, or her, or shame myself, so of course I did not. Sometimes I barely slept trying to figure out how I might escape him in the morning.

I hated making love with him, but he wouldn't stop. 

I couldn't tell anyone. I didn't want them to know and I didn't want them to think bad things about me, or him, so I finally began telling myself I was a modern girl. I made love just because. He went into the army and we agreed to date other people when he wasn't home. He said men couldn't be expected to be celibate. 

I didn't understand why the boys I dated didn't try to make love to me. I wondered if it was because they could tell I had already done it and was a slut? I felt trapped by what I had done with him.

Eventually he came home from the army and we got married like people do who have already made love. On our honeymoon he gave me all kinds of slutty outfits and wanted me to wear them when he did it to me. It made me feel used and unloved, but I didn't want to make him sad.

We were married nearly thirty years during which I had lots of bad feelings about his truthfulness and faithfulness and doubts about his love for me, which turned out to be well founded. I made lots of excuses for him. I blamed myself for not being loving enough, good enough, kind enough. When my doctor told me I had chlamydia I couldn't figure out how I got it. 

Now I wonder how I could have been so deluded for so long, but it felt right at the time. At least it felt as right as anything else in our relationship did. 

Now I prefer solitary living.

Corrections

Water finds its own level and so do people.

Eventually.

Some of them just don't live long enough for this to happen in a way we find socially acceptable. 

But if they did.

They would.

Change does not happen over night,

Or in a month,

Or often in a year.

If it took forty years to create something,

You might expect it to take ten years to recreate it.

If you want to get it right.

Socially compromised

 

It's not what you say that matters.

It is what you do!

Saying you aren't afraid of COVID-19, or that wearing a mask is a sign that you are afraid, is the reasoning of child. I'm not ascared of you!

We don't allow children to choose whether or not they get immunizations, or stay away from friends who have the measles, because they are not mentally mature enough to make those decisions.

284,000 people have died from this virus and people are worried that their freedom is threatened by wearing a little cotton face mask. 

Has anyone mentioned how dying affects your freedom?

Has anyone thought about how they'd feel if you came up and strangled their grandmother? Giving her this virus is tantamount to that. 

COVID is a weapon that people not wearing masks carry with them everywhere. They are a danger to society. Ignorance does not dissolve that blame.

Let people register for the right not to wear a face mask. They will then be on a an easily identified list. People who refuse to wear a face mask and social distance can then be refused medical care  That care should be reserved for those who cared enough to at least try not to spread it. When it comes down to the last ICU bed, why give it to someone who actively made others sick? Or didn't care if they did?

There are consequences for actions and they should fall first on the shoulders of those who asked for them.

Two sides of the coin

 

There are people in this world who are good. Extraordinarily good, kind, caring people. They are not perfect, but they do things for the right reasons.

I don't know why they are this way. I used to think it was nurture, but I am beginning to believe it is nature, because they come from the same families that less kind people do.

These people think about what they are doing. They don't just react and if it feels good to them, continue. A lot of people do that. They mistake feeling good for helping others, when they are not really doing that at all. They believe that if it feels right, it must be right.

Unfortunately, many things that might feel good, or right, in the moment, are only enabling. Their long term results can be tragic. Passed down from generation to generation like sacred cows, they create untold misery for children grandchildren, great grandchildren. All in the name of goodness (nee: feeling good.)

The flip side of these people are the extraordinary ones. Their lives are not necessarily any easier, but the gifts they give, freely and without strings, have a lasting influence. The quiet, good natured, common sense and intelligent responses they pass on are the stuff of everything good in the world.

We are not in this world to create drama. Histrionic, pitiful, poor me, passive aggressive, manipulative, enabling people often think they are very good and they may mean well, but it doesn't change how damaging they are.

Our role models walk softly and respond carefully.

A series of unfortunate events

This starts out with no good deed goes unpunished and moves on from there.

My son called me, like he often does, and we talked one our headsets while he drove around running errands. 

I took him with me, via the headset, as I took my daughter a bunch of Christmas decorations I no longer used.

Then, still talking to my son, I decided to treat myself to donuts and pulled into my favorite store. I took the keys out of the ignition, then remembered I needed to put my mask on before getting out of the car. Leaning over, I popped the ear bud off of on of the wires on my headset!

I love this headset. It makes my isolation so much nicer because I can talk to people for hours if I want to while still doing chores, so I hurried to try and find the ear bud on the dark car floor. The contrast between the sunny day and dim floor board made it impossible to see, so I gave up, grabbed my purse and went in to buy donuts.

Proud that I could keep the headset on while doing this, I bought two donuts, chitchatted with the salesperson who liked my elephant shirt and went back out to my car.

That is when I realized my keys were not in my purse. Panicking I started pulling everything out and putting it on the hood of my little Honda Fit. Then I saw the keys! Inside the car on the passenger seat.

Another customer came over to see if I was okay and the woman in the store came out, but I said I would call my daughter and she would bring me the keys. I called and told her where I thought my spare was at home and settled in to wait.

I knew it would be at least thirty minutes for her to get to my house and back to me, so I looked around for a place to sit. During this time when you cannot sit in stores or restaurants, I thought I was out of luck, but then I saw a concrete bench across the street by an ice cream store

Thank goodness I had my son to talk to and thank goodness it was 46 degrees out, because I hadn't worn a coat today. I waited for nearly half an hour and walked back to my car, but my daughter never came.

She had had trouble finding my jewelry box where I kept the spare key and then, in her hurry to get it to me, got lost and passed the donut shop. When I called her we had to figure out where she was and she had to come all the way across town back to me.

But I got the key. The automatic button to unlock the car wouldn't work, but the key unlocked the door. I drove home, found the earbud on the floor and got back into my house.

Two budding cold sores and several trips to the bathroom later, I fell asleep under my weighted blanket and slept for two hours! 

All's well that ends well.

Right?

Christmas miracle

There are people in my life that I cannot share anything with because just talking to them opens a door to all their anguish and hurt. They do not see that their own decisions cause nearly all of their problems. Instead they turn it around and tell me they cannot live like I do. By that they mean self-centered and selfish.

They believe that having any boundaries is selfish. Having any rules mean. Having any personal preferences petty. They prefer to be pecked to death by their children, job, friends, and life in general. In fact, that seems to be the only constant in their life -  they must suffer to be happy.

I don't believe I am self-centered or selfish. I just have limits and I believe people who are independent are ultimately happier than those who are enabled and tied to someone else's generosity.

On the flip side are the people in my life who find peace or joy in most days of their lives. My son, who lost his job in February loves the new life he's made for himself as an independent contractor. He likes the work, the people he works with, the whole shebang. The only problem is not making enough money for anything extra. Today he found out his ancient furnace is dead and gone. That means it will take thousands of dollars to replace it, or they are going to have a very cold winter.

An amazing couple, who has always told them, "If you if ever need anything, please let us know." heard they were in trouble and gave them a check for the whole thing! It is the closest thing to a Christmas miracle I have ever personally experienced.

I believe that good things can happen without all the chest beating and weeping some people feel is necessary in life. You may need to rethink, or re-plan, or get lucky, but as long as you don't give up and keep on doing honestly kind and good things, life is doable.

In fact it can be awesome.

Seasoning

 

In the beginning she tilled the ground, broke up the clods of earth and let air and light into the soil. The next day she scattered seeds. Some in rows, others in mounds, and tucked them all in under a warm blanket of soil.

They began to grow, knowing not from where they came, so their curious little minds began creating stories.

The peas, winding their way up trellises believed that the light called to them and in their hearts they heard it saying, "Higher, if you love me rise higher."

The beans grew straight and narrow, knowing it was the only way.

Pumpkins spread, lazy and careless, wanting only to loll about on the soft earth and enjoy their being.

The oregano, basal and garlic scented something beautiful in the air.

But the peppers were hot and alert and spread among all the others, asking questions, creating needs. The peppers were not content to be. They needed to know from whence they came. They wanted to know where they would go and so the stories began.

Soon the beans and peas were kneeling and begging forgiveness for not being enough. 

The pumpkins burst forth into bloom, hoping it was enough.

The seasonings quivered in the light.

And the peppers went right on heating things up.

Until one day she came out.

Picked them all,

And ate them.

Eye

The eyes have it!

No matter how old someone gets to be, their eyes peek out through the wrinkles and furrows with the intensity of their being.

Always look people in the eye.

I am me

 

I never lived alone until my divorce in 1998. Then, for the first time I had my own condominium and a job that I relied upon for paying part of my bills.

In the beginning I was lonely and afraid. I thought I needed to look for the old stability, a husband or steady boy friend and yet, I felt ridiculous calling a grown man a boy friend.

I had good friends and they helped me make the transition from part of a couple, a mother, a daughter, a child of my father, to me. A woman.

It took time. The first ten years were wildly fluctuating periods of time where I did many of those things women today do in their early twenties. It ended when I moved to North Carolina for a few years to be near my youngest son. 

Another couple of fractures in the family brought me back to here, a city I have lived in for almost fifty years, but I was still flailing a bit, trying to find my own place, my own feelings, my own ways. Ones that reflected how I felt and how I wanted to live.

I've heard it takes two years for every year lived to let go of old ideas. I think that may be true. This past year, forced into quarantine because of the virus, I have had to live with myself consistently and it has changed me.

I hear my impatience with people being vocalized when it feels necessary. I do not feel constrained to please others, or make them like me so much. I am more comfortable than I can ever remember feeling since I was probably four years old. 

My nightmares have turned into dreams so sleeping is no longer scary. My preferences are not critiqued, or laughed at, so they can flow one to another. I am reading, eating, sleeping, living in ways that feel good to me.

Life is not perfect. Is it ever? 

But it is much more tolerable and comfortable than I can ever remember it being in the past.

Thinking

It seems to me that the average person doesn't really want to think. He, or she, wants their thoughts, their ethics, their entire world, spoon fed to them.

Churches pour out dogma, one dose at a time, carefully indoctrinating small children with love before pouring all sorts of other outlandish ideas down their throats later on. What started out as love often becomes slightly veiled intolerance and hate, confirmed and sealed under a safe authoritarian God.

Justice plays out much the same way, varying in actual existence depending on the mores of the day. Free love bad. Narrowly defined heterogeneous love good. Theft of hard goods like possessions and jewels bad. More creative white collar crime clever. Whatever lines the judgers pockets and lives acceptable.

For them.

Education is good for a certain class of people. Not so good for those who might call them to account. Teaching children facts rather than thinking corrals them into a more amenable class of underlings.

People ultimately often come around to vote the way their fathers voted. Go to churches their grandparents attended. Expect little Sally or Dick to hang out with the "right" sort of people, right color, right sex, right social mores and manners, desires, and dreams. Anything else is threatening.

Anyone gulping from the bottle of open minded thinking is likely to become drunk on dangerous ideas. Ideas that might change the safety of the norm. And anyone taught to think could figure out how to explain their thoughts to other people in ways that produce change.

Thinking creates hardship for those in charge. Better to teach facts. If you do that right, it won't really matter what facts you teach them, because they will never really use them for much more than mundane things like counting their possessions. Life becomes simple one-up-man-ship and souls are left floundering.

Freedom

I made a conscious choice to have all the things that were important to me for Thanksgiving dinner. In spite of the fact that I would be all alone and share it with no one. That ended up making me feel immensely grateful for my decision, my situation and my being.

After all, if I do not treat myself the way I would like to be treated, why would anyone else? How would they even really know what that was? I wasn't sure myself until I began to weigh how much I looked forward to the smell of some things cooking and the way they tasted against how much money and work it would be to produce them.

I think that may be the major difference in the quality of many lives. There are more choices than some people are willing to acknowledge and how we decide those choices define who we are and our reaction to life. 

I know people who seem to choose to suffer. They tell themselves they must perform jobs and live with people they do not like. Then they tell themselves they have no choice. They have to work, or they cannot ask someone to leave their home. 

I have left jobs that I found intolerable and in the end the new jobs I found myself in were infinitely better! I have sometimes been a little bit lonely, but I have been lonelier living with people who make me unhappy.

It takes a little, maybe sometimes even a lot, of courage, to do what I feel is right, but it generally pays off. And if it doesn't? I can make another decision to change that.

Believing that life is a journey and I am at the helm of my own ship, no matter how humble it may be sets me free. Free to be happy. Free to accept the results and free to change things again. It is the absolute basic foundation of a good life.

The Whitehouse has eyes

 

A place of historic beauty and tradition becomes the stage for unimaginable horror when a family of oddly bred miscreants take over.

Bland perfect faces topped by perfect hair and punctuated with cold searing eyes, the creatures dig up the rose gardens, break traditions and see no value in art, music or any other sort of refinement not present in a gaudy Florida golf club.

Children do not laugh, nor do pets galivant in its unhallowed halls.

This is the season of the malcontents. The end of an era when hundreds of thousands are out of work, dying, and fearful that they will be targeted by the petulant, revengeful creatures within .

It is a crime to be truthful, educated, or even logical.

Bedlam reigns.

But hope rises on the horizon.

Respite

 

I took a mini vacation today.

I mean really mini.

I got in my car, went to the bank to get money for my grandson's birthday, then drove around the far outside western part of our town.

In between I stopped and bought two donuts, but I haven't eaten them yet.

All in all it was about an hour and forty-five minutes total, but with sunshine and something that was not political on the radio, it was totally refreshing.

Great

Are we great enough yet?.

Have enough people died in the blue states?

Has enough money been kept back for the wealthy to be at ease?

Are the Proud Boys takin' good care of our super spreader's ego?

Four years of greatness like this could wipe out an entire nation.

But . . .

It is what it is.

The Embarassment

 

The playground is awash in dissension.

The cheaters think everybody cheats, that's how you win.

The losers think it's more about the fight than anything else.

The winners can't get on with it because no one knows where the grown-ups are.

Pitiful.

Misconceptions

I see posts on social media encouraging people to do simple things no one over the age of three should have to be reminded of. Pick up your trash, be nice, etc.

Manners, etiquette, civility, have become less common in today's world.

We have a reverse snobbery that implies there is no reason for any sort of refinement short of not shitting in the street.

I believe it started when people began worshipping money, not for what it can do, but for what they believe it brings with it.

Rich people don't have to open their own doors, pick up their own trash, be nice if they don't want to. But most wealthy people in the past with any sense of security and savoir faire, were perfectly fine doing these things.

Being crass, rude, entitled, does not make you rich. It does not even make you look rich. It simply makes you look crass, rude and entitled. No matter how much money you do, or don't, have.

Like all social fads it is based on a false construct that grows up around frustration. The world is not fair and bullies like to throw their weight around. 

Weight is what you throw when you have nothing else.

Dreams

 

The way is long and winding and what seems unimportant now may turn out to be most memorable later on.

When I was twelve I spent long afternoons with Eliza B. Condell, the woman next door. She was in her nineties and had lived alone since 1899 when her fiancé died. Many of her things ended up in the Illinois State Museum, but to a lonely little new girl on the block she was just a sweet old neighbor with a house full of exotic things.

I played with her music box, a large, glass topped piece with metal bells, played by metal and ceramic birds, bees and butterflies. I had tea parties with a tiny tea seat made out of civil war coins and dressed paper dolls from the early Ziegfeld Follies

She loved to read and I remember walking between our two houses late at night just to get a glimpse of her, wrapped in a huge shawl, reading in her rocking chair by the window.

I had no idea she was famous, but I loved the stories she told about her brother, a world traveler who brought her things from China and other faraway places.

I was hungry for companionship and she filled me up with dreams.

One country indivisible

Minus the constant nagging to divide us I believe we can become one country indivisible with liberty and justice for all. 

History shows us that real change is slow. One step forward, two back, but perseverance pays off in the long run.

As long as just a small majority of people still have honor, empathy, and a sense of justice, we will be okay.

People of color, women, the immigrants who began this country, all walk beside each other and it is possible for us all to flourish. Why would we deny that?

Now we will have the chance to be the people we want to be. Let's show each other this is a good thing.

One last comment

 

The basis of the United States of America has been corruption, incompetence, dishonesty, ignorance, and vulgarity for four long years. Crassness has been the American way. Divisiveness has replaced diplomacy. We took the idea of the Ugly American and elevated it in concrete and steel as our ideal.

Truth be told there is a large under current of ingrained racism, bigotry and hate that most people are smart enough to hide from their neighbors. These people will lie in polls, claiming to be for Biden, when they know they will vote for Trump. They understand what they are doing, but they cannot change. The idea that they might not be as rich, or smart, or kind, or well educated as people with different skin colors, or religions infuriates them. These are Nazis at heart and they live among us.

No matter how embarrassing it is to hear people talking about the President of the United States of America like he is a sensitive toddler who cannot deal with the truth of his loss, we must move on and it is more difficult knowing that there are at least seventy million Americans willing to live with all this just to soothe their debilitated egos.

Biden and Harris have their work cut out for them. 

It's like taking over a special education class mid term when the original teacher allowed the bullies to run the class for four years. There are generations of ingrained beliefs that, once allowed to surface, are difficult to alter. 

How do you teach kindness to people who believe it is only a mask to make their job easier? How do you teach tolerance and empathy to people who are totally blind to anything but surface decoration? How do you teach integrity to people who believe cheating is part of winning?

Entitlement is a disease that has been allowed to replace everything good in our country for way too long. Truly successful people are not measured in dollars and cents, but in honesty, empathy, and a determination to leave the world better than they found it.

Breathe!

 

A collective sigh of relief can be heard all across the United States and most of the world. 

We are about to have a president who is concerned about our country and not just himself. 

Civility will once more define us.  We will cease to be the laughing stock of the world.

Hope is now possible. Relief during this pandemic will be more important than the president's personal hoodlum friends, or his beautiful daughter, or whatever little tiffs fly in or out of his tortured mind.

We will, once more, have a real government with real policies, real goals, and realistic expectations.

There will be disagreements, but they will be dealt with in a sane matter, not by someone saying, "I can do whatever I want." Not by someone who tries to keep the world enraged and divided, but by someone who is sane.

We have taken our country back!

Hard

 

It is hard not to share in the fear and hate spread by Trump and his litter of greedy children.

They are like sophisticated zombies out to feed off the ignorance of their cult following. 

A true horror movie come to life in a country that once celebrated science and sanity.

The patriarch rages around, throwing his weight and power against everything I believe in and they stand behind him, pale, sloe eyed, enablers, waiting their turn to gobble up everything they can.

If we don't oust these people now more and more people will continue to crawl out of the depths to join them and soon we might truly be powerless.

The nightmares of people who know history will come true as a dystopian world begins to rise. Real abject poverty and lush wealth will hang in an unholy balance where the military replaces the police and kangaroo courts are simply tools of the very rich.

It is hard not to feel desperate and depressed even knowing this election will probably bring us some relief, at least for four more years.

Dangerous

 

I have been physically ill for a while now, but it has been worse this week.

All I can do is sleep.

I know it is a coping mechanism, but it's the best I've got right now.

Awake, I am so angry at the stupidity of Trump supporters and the people I know who are one of them.

I'm afraid that this is the end of some of these relationships for good.

How can I look at people who believe in a man who does so many evil (yes, evil, not just bad) things and not see his face reflected in their eyes and soul?

The very thought of these people upsets me. I have no desire to ever see them again under any circumstances.

It would be more convenient to say forgive and forget, but it would also be stupid on my part to forget. 

People who condone this type of behavior are not reliable relatives or friends.

They are dangerous.

Hope

The nightmare isn't over yet, but there is hope.

I could never have imagined the people in this country electing a Trump, but they did.

The fact that so many continue to vote for him now disturbs me.

Who are we? 

What kind of stunted understanding and dedication to vulgarity acts this way? This is a man most of us wouldn't have allowed in our homes in the past and certainly a man who had no use for us in his either, unless it was to clean it, or cook for him, (Or, if we are of a certain type, get laid by him.)

My view of the American people will never be the same.

But now there is hope. Hope for the average American just trying to do the right thing, work full time, support a family with medical care, and a hope that qualified people will be in charge of education, conservation, the justice system and the military.

We have been on the precipice of another Dark Age where superstition and the rich use and abuse the masses of poor ignorant souls dancing around honoring false idols and absolving their anger with guns.. 

Let education reign! Let health care include everyone! Let justice be based on truth. 

Hope once again raises a weary head above the horizon and reaches out to help, even those who do not understand.

A whole new world

Tomorrow is the election that decides the fate of the once glorious United States of America.

Can we rectify the mistakes of four years ago when the Republicans elected an eight year old bully who is willing to lie, cheat, steal, threaten and kill to stay in power?

Our complacency has cost the entire world.

Who knows how many people have paid with their lives due to the virus, our border antics, our poor policing, and the constant egging on of white supremacists by the man who calls himself president.

We have had our own military sent against us and done nothing when another country puts a bounty on the heads of our soldiers.

We have mocked the disabled, denigrated prisoners of war who fought for our country, and allowed a rapist to go free.

Our country is burning, flooding, closing down and over run with the dead and dying.

How much more does it take?

Temptation

 

She whispers quietly from her island amidst the chaos.

Long arms reaching out of the darkness, offering the ultimate hug, a breast to lean against in stormy seas.

A siren whose dark magic slips quietly in between the words and the reason.

Always calling, she is a jealous lover willing to let others weep with emptiness.

To silence her, turn a deaf ear and move away,

Love is the invisible shield.

Real Horror

Imagine running around the outside of the hospital over and over again, trying to raise enough money to pay for your four year old son's medical treatments!

Imagine trying to come up with strange and time consuming ways to raise enough money for anyone's medical care!

Real horror lies in finding out someone you love is sick.

There is a treatment, even a cure for the problem.

But that person will still die.

Because our health care system says you are only worth what you can pay.

If you do not have the money. You do not get the treatment.

People have to jump through insane hoops to try and get enough money to save lives.

They run races, sell tickets, promote charities!

To pay a system that other countries provide for free, or nominal fees.

The people in the U.S.A. believe there is a dollar amount on every individual's head and if he or she cannot come up with it?

They pay the ultimate price, sometimes suffering unbelievable amounts of unnecessary pain.

And then they die.

Loss

 

If there is one thing life has taught me, it is that everything is transitory.

Friends come and go. Family comes and goes. Good times come and go.

But nothing comes and goes with more frequency than possessions.

Being attached to any one thing is an iffy proposition.

Floods, fire, theft, moving, even just aging takes everything away eventually.

One person's treasure is another's junk, so there is no need to hoard things for the future generations.

Enjoy what you have while you have it and then allow it to move on into someone else's life.

Expectations

Growing up I was allowed to follow my heart. 

When I wanted to play the piano, or saxophone, violin, or oboe, nobody said you must become very good so that you can make a living at it someday.

The same was true of learning a foreign language and sewing, riding a bike, playing tennis and reading books. I was never encouraged to focus on just one thing because it would be financially profitable.

Once I was grown up and married I thought I had been short changed. Someone should have made me play recitals and continue on when I wanted to switch interests. Then perhaps I would have been a great pianist, or world class seamstress.

Or not.

As it was I was pretty happy with myself until my husband began pointing out all the people who could do things better than I could. He was good at making money and making people feel badly about themselves. I was only good at enjoying my life.

For a long while I felt terrible about that, but now I don't.

Not everyone will be Yo Yo Ma, but nobody will keep Yo Yo Ma from being himself. I think that is true about most of us. If we are exceptional at something, it will pan out. 

Being able to bounce back from sadness, loss, or abuse time after time speaks to a skill that makes life worth living. There is no big paycheck on your deathbed that validates giving up everything in order to successful, but there is a sense of satisfaction and well being that comes from doing what you love.

Open your eyes

 

What does it say about you if you need to openly carry a gun everywhere you go?

Are you the kind of person who is ready, willing and able to shoot another human being at the drop of a hat?

In a church?

In a polling place?

In a hospital?

At the grocery store?

At the lumber yard?

In your car?

What makes you think you . . . YOU . . . are likely to need to shoot someone? 

Look at all the people police kill and they are supposedly trained on when to use a gun. It obviously doesn't work. In a moment of fear or bad judgement someone dies. Why? Because the person in front of them scared them, or angered them and they over reacted.

There are bad people in the world, but there are a lot more people with bad judgement. A knife, a billy club, their fists, are bad enough. They do not need a gun. And their children do not need guns lying around when the open carry person forgets to take it to the bathroom with them, or falls asleep, or just gets so used to it, they cease to be careful.

Amy Coney Barrett

 

Congratulations!

You will forever go down in history as the woman nominated by the worst president of the United States of America, as proof he could do whatever he wanted no matter what.

You are expected to just be a tool used by the male judges and the political powers that put you in this position, assuming you will be easy to manipulate.

Your lack of experience and qualifications are the perfect counterpoint to highlight all the power Ruth Bader Ginsburg carefully cultivated as a truly well educated, well qualified woman who did not need to rely on men to tell her what to do.

It would be nice to discover you are more than everyone in the world expects you to be, but no one really expects that and in fact, the people who chose you are counting on you not being more than a place holder for men.

Let bedlam reign

I am already down in the doldrums after months of no socializing.

And I think my upstairs neighbor just took up the drums.

The neighbor behind me has a lonesome dog.

And the one on the left isn't right.

I think I am becoming socially unstable.

Any minute now I may burst out in my most opera momma voice and sing 

"Somewhere over the rainbow, silence reigns."

Who will accompany us and where will they accompany us to?

To die for

 

People keep speaking about Trump and his views as if there is something new. 

After four years, everyone should know by now that Trump sees himself as a super star, maybe even a super hero. He lives for the adoration of his screaming, chanting fans. At least the ones still living and proving their love, because they are willing to die for him.

Not his plans. Not his political beliefs. Simply. Him.

He is their actual idol, their golden calf and they are immersed in insane adulation.

They don't need a reason to vote for him and they are willing to do ANYTHING he even infers in order to curry favor with him, unaware that he would not even allow them to step through the front door of his home, or clubs.

You can't reach these people. They are willing to give up their pope, priest, pastor, KKK leader, mother, father and even their children to let Trump know they LOVE him. These are teeny boppers in adult bodies, with adult rights and guns out there to support their hero.

What made him a hero? Well he told them so! That's how they know!

Trump is the man to die for.

Things

 

I have noticed that conspicuous consumption is not always as easily recognizable as you might think.

It is one of those things that stands by, ready to fill in the holes left by disappointment.

When things do not turn out the way people expect they can grasp at straws. 

For some people it is all about bigger and better things. For others it is about more things. For some it is about any thing, but if it is about things it is generally not about the thing you think it is.

Collections do not, in and of themselves, make you happier. You can own a mansion full of Victorian furniture or a mid century masterpiece, but unless you are doing something with it, it will eventually fall short of making you happy. Simply owning it is not enough. You will need to keep adding to it again and again, feeding that emptiness that never fills up.

If your love is redecorating these houses, or refinishing this furniture with your own hands, you will have something that actually does fill you -- with pride in workmanship, creativity, the hours spent in loving action.

The same is true about clothing, or motorcycles, or anything else that you can buy. The more you buy, the less content you become in the long run, because you'll find you can't get "No satisfaction."

We come from a long line of hunters and gatherers, but they did these things to survive. We don't have to bury acorns to live through the winter anymore. Lining our nest with fur and feathers gathered all through the warm months is not necessary. 

Collecting is not enough.

Our minds and our bodies are not content to just survive. We want meaning to fill in those holes that show up when life gets easier.

Realistic

 

Why do we put more thought into buying a car, or a piece of furniture than we do when choosing what we hope will be our life long mate?

It may look romantic in movies, or sound romantic when people talk about marrying someone they met by chance, but in the long haul that adorable clumsiness, or insignificant habit is likely to become a grain of sand that will rub you raw.

And beware the sad story of former mistreatment. Someone who shares that too soon is likely to be someone who is used to, or even looking for, the comfort of feeling slighted and abused.  Eventually you too will become part of the story no matter what you do. 

It is easier to fall back on old habits than to forge new ones. There is a feeling of safety that comes from familiarity, even if that familiarity is painful.

A healthy, content relationship will be continually changing and require adaptation from both people in order to survive. 

Passive aggressive behavior is the road to failure. No one will read your mind correctly all the time. It takes courage to discuss things you both might not agree upon, but not talking about them will not make them go away, or be less significant.

It is better to work all this stuff out before you complicate relationships with children, houses, or years of faking it. 

Love is the grease that facilitates transitions

 

We see with our mind's eye.

When I look at Honda Odysseys I see hearses. Hearses were shaped like that when I was growing up.

Looking at chilly, wet, leaf strewn yards late in the day makes me feel at home and centered. I am reminded of evenings when my mother came home from work my senior year of high school and we were ready for dinner. Our family gathered and lamps shed their warm yellow light in cozy puddles around the living room, assuring us that all was right with the world.

Trains bring back memories of long summer nights in the fifties when my sister and I were tucked into our bunkbed and the world was safe and snug with my parents close by. We could hear the distant chug and plaintive wail of the trains across town and I imagined folks in them, their heads silhouetted against the lighted windows.

The smell of vegetable beef soup frames a picture of us sitting around the dining room table for lunch when I was three and my dad came home for lunch from the U of I.

And so it goes through out my life. I am always half here and half some place in the past where the warmth came from feeling safe and loved in a family that changed everything except their ways of being.

Automobiles were snug places that held the whole family safe on the roads at night. Homemade cheeseburgers eaten on plates we held in our laps while watching television were Sunday night rituals. And moving meant packing it all up and moving to a new house or even town, secure in the knowledge that nothing important would change. There would always be mom and dad and the four of us forever and ever.

Until there wasn't.

Fairy tales fail

 

I feel for young women who were fed the fairy tale that if they were kind, sweet, loving, forgiving, and beautiful, they would be happy. Those qualities are not bad in and of themselves, but they are designed to mostly make someone else, using you, happy.

The idea that the happiest people are those who are married with children is often a myth put out by the church and old women who were trapped early so gave up most of their expectations.

Children are the greatest gift in the world, but unless you can afford to feed them, take them to the doctor and dentist, and send them to a good school dressed reasonably well, they will make you feel awful. Guilt hurts.

Women, just like men, need to find something they love to do that brings in money. That usually involves some kind of training or education. In my generation women were often encouraged to pick an occupation that left them free to care for their husband, but he was encouraged to find something he was good at and loved.

Having a job you enjoy, a salary you can live on, a place to call home that you can afford and a life filled with challenging fun things you enjoy makes you more likely to be happy and happy people migrate towards other happy people..

They get together for mutual caring, mutual enjoyment. Neither one is a sugar daddy or momma. Both are relatively content and emotionally secure adults who like themselves enough to love someone else.

Then, if you want children, you might be ready.

Venting

 

In the annals of history,  our era may top all others in winning awards for ludicrousness.

We are buffoons.

Pretending the earth is flat, claiming that wearing a face mask impedes freedom, that vaccinations give kids autism and drinking Clorox won't kill you, are just a few of the weird nesses some people swear by.

I would love to see the edge of this flat earth, to walk hand in hand with believers right off that edge wherever it may be, but I wonder if wearing underwear might impede our freedom to pee on everything and mark our territory along the way?

Believing that saying something over and over again makes it true is an interesting idea. We should test that out, too. Everyone say, "I have five arms, I have five arms . . ." I'm sure there will be some good little gals who begin making five armed shirts and good ole boys who will wear them. No matter what.

People with little problems once bought big trucks. Now they carry big guns. One is as effective as the other, but the trucks are slightly less lethal.

I went to the 2020 fair. The creeps and the nuts were there! The orange baboon, that raving old goon, was inciting some riots there.

Baseball

 

I went to a Vintage baseball game today. It is played by 1858 rules, without gloves, using a big ball kind of like a softball. The umpire stands behind the home plate with a large staff, or stick and if you come in to score a run, you ring a bell!

The teams wear old fashioned uniforms, no cleats and try to be as authentic as possible. The ball can bounce and still be in play. Sometimes a person from another team switches over to keep the teams even.. Usually it is played by men ranging from about 18 to 70 and older, and today a little boy was allowed to help out playing outfield and even first base a time or two, since both teams are in our league.

I love how the men automatically made it fair for the child without ruining the game. It's the same thing they do for very old players, sometimes even having a substitute runner. 

And yet they play very seriously and ritually. The main man welcomes the teams and in the end each captain gives a thank you talk where the players respond by waving their hat in the air and crying out, "Huzzah!"  as he thanks the teams, the spectators, etc. 

If everyone in the world lived by these rules the world would be a much better place, with a place for everyone and everyone doing his best to play fairly, honorably, and hard.

Paring down

 

Today my daughter helped me take my wooden folding dining table and chairs to my granddaughter's. I also gave her my little electric woodstove. Then my daughter took one of my dollhouses and some furniture, so the apartment is paring down.

I am donating clothes that don't fit as well as things that have sat in closets for a year.

A month ago I would not have even been able to dig these things out, let alone help carry them all the way to the car and load them up, so I can tell I am improving even though it is very slow.

 What once seemed like treasures now often feel like a burden. 

Bacchanalian ecstasy

 

The tension of waiting for the next election is almost unbearable.

As a child I found certain cartoons immensely unsettling. They were the ones using real type people who did overblown things. People whose mouths got too big when they yelled, or who grew long and skinny when they responded.

I feel like this is the world I live in now.

Our president is certifiably crazy. His minions are power hungry super villains and proud of it. Our government is a mockery of justice where the bad kids can do whatever they want with no consequences. Bad deeds are rewarded. No jail sentence means anything if you tickle the president's fancy.

There is no law and order.

There are only the brutes with money enjoying their hour in the sun in bacchanalian ecstasy. Chuckling at other's misfortune, reveling in who can do the most heinous thing before the election is too close and they have to be accountable again.

I hope the majority of people are not as dumb as these people think and vote Trump, McConnel and Graham out of their bad ole boys club soon. 

It is time to pay the piper.

 

Noblesse oblige

 

I truly hope this is a dismal year for the Republican party. 

Their cavalier cruelty and snickering adherence to Trump's depravities need to be made an example of what not to do.

Mitch McConnel, Lindsay Graham, Donald Trump, men who believe they are above it all, above us all, because they have money and power, need a lesson in American realism.

Money always speaks. Since the beginning of this nation money has had more power than poverty, but there was once an idea that with money and power comes noblesse oblige, or the idea that you are honor bound to take care of those around you.

My grandfather didn't just pay his housekeeper while she was young enough and healthy enough to work. He eventually built her a house and took care of her until she died. The same was true of others who worked for him. If they were sick, he made sure they got to the doctor. If their kids had problems, he tried to help. He set up scholarship funds for young people he didn't even know.

He was not an infinitely wealthy man. By today's standards he probably wasn't even rich, but he grew up poor and he knew what it was like. And he had honor.

Unlike the Trumps who believe the world exists to please them, he felt he owed the people of this world a chance to make it. 

Today's world is a scary place. Every good deed by a politician seems to have an alternate and abhorrent reason behind it. Religion is simply a political ploy used to control those poor folks who believe in magic. Medical care is important because it keeps the scientific community working to develop ways only the rich can afford. 

We have devolved into the very things we said we were leaving behind when this country began.

Plague etiquette

 

Today the daughter I adopted forty four years ago turned forty eight!

She is moving to Arizona next summer, so this is the last birthday we may spend together.

I had not been to a restaurant since early last March and we hoped to eat outside at one tonight, but the weather was too windy and cold. They closed the outside.

I almost didn't go, but I'm glad I did. We ate in a fairly private corner inside and I haven't felt so human in months.

We wore masks when the waitress was taking our orders and serving us and were as safe as I knew how to be. I probably won't go out among people like this again for many months, but it was worth it tonight.

It was strange seeing the other guests in the distance. Mostly older folks, mostly wearing masks most of the time, but obviously feeling awkward and unsure of plague etiquette.

This is the first time in my life I have lived in an extended period of time under the duress of an invisible foe who could kill me and while it feels a bit anticlimactic, it also feels terrifying.

Worse than ghosts or bogeymen hiding in closets, this thing can hover in the air, slip down your trachea and boom, it's got you!

My first truly scary Halloween coming up.

Just an ordinary woman

 

I never planned to be the person I am. 

There was no plan at all. Somehow it just happened.

I went to college laughing at people who went to get their MRS, but then I sort of did that anyway.

I thought I was a good writer, a decent pianist, a passable musician in an orchestra and band. I can draw better than some. I am creative, but what did I do with it?

Over the years I volunteered at schools and churches, welcome clubs for the town and orchestrated all sorts of little scenarios that tickled people's fancy.

I sewed clothes for local theatres, made my children's clothing and did my fair share of baking. Tennis was my passion for a number of years and I was slightly better than average.

I even got my name in a few books thanks to the generosity of my best friend who allowed me to read them while he wrote.

Yet here I am. 

Just an ordinary woman living alone for nearly twenty years, drinking coffee in isolation in a one bedroom apartment.

And when I die when I'm dead and gone . . . the world will not even blink.

Coloratura

 I listened to the Virtual finals of the Camille Coloratura Awards tonight. 

I had forgotten how beautiful a voice can be.

I am certainly no judge of any sort of singing, especially this sort, but when I closed my eyes I had no doubt what pleased me and what made me cringe a little.

Some of the high notes sounded tinny to me and some had a bit of an edge I found unpleasant, but one person melted my heart and my ears.

The music was silky and smooth, it literally slid up and down the scales like some sort of heavenly light on a divine vocal chord. I could have listened to that one all night.

To my surprise, when I opened my eyes, it was a man!

I did not know men could be Coloratura sopranos, but there was no doubt this one was.

Among all the lovely voices, his was the one that stole the show for me.

Road kill cookies

Happy is an extreme.

I don't expect to be happy, although it is a good feeling.

Anymore I settle for content, or even just not enraged.

My country has turned into a horror movie where the bad guys keep winning.

Once we relied upon things like checks and balances, or rule of law.

Now it is simply rich men win. 

If our president was a CEO in a bank they would have trotted him off to the funny farm a while ago, but he is the head of our country and there are no laws for people like him. No one elects people like him except for the Republican Party who thought they could use him like they did GW.

Surprise, surprise, surprise! His mother didn't even instill enough manners in him to make him acceptable at a child's party, let alone the Grand Ole Party.

I am grateful when no one is issuing treasonous innuendos from the country's capital.

Happy is for sane times.

Right now we are living in a mad hatter world where the bad guys are spiking the tea and handing out road kill cookies.

In my world today

 

This year has made me skeptical of everything!

All those articles about how it was? The ones about how it was in the fifties, sixties and seventies are often grossly wrong. I know. I was there. A lot of it is really from times long before those years and neither as good, nor as bad as they claim.

Articles about how to organize are barely disguised sales ads for stores selling "stuff" to store your stuff.

Beauty ads all claim to have found an easier way to make your life better because you look better, but in fact beauty without health and energy, empathy and love is pretty irrelevant. Even if worked the way they say it does, which it usually does not.

In the words from Fiddler on the Roof, "If you're rich they think you really know." I see a true test of people's intelligence this year. We have a president who thinks he is god's gift to the world and a bunch of people who follow him like lemmings no matter how obnoxious his behavior, or unscientific his assumptions, or egotistical his pandering for popularity.

People want to send children back to the classrooms and yet they have no belief in science, history, or manners, so I don't know what is supposed to be taught. Propaganda, maybe?

Everyone has their own god and set of appropriate rituals ordained by that god, so it's thrice around some altar chanting magic words in an attempt to cajole that god into doing your will.

People are literally clamoring to die in order to invoke their right to freedom and prove they are strong.

The Think it and it shall be system is now the norm and we are no more than lab rats in our president's run up the ramp for power.

Helloooooooo

 

It is time that our goals as human beings catch up with evolution.

Once upon a time we needed more bodies to do the chores, plant the corn, knead the bread. Survival was a hit or miss thing that got down to basics.

Today most of us don't grow our own food, beat our rugs, or make our own medicine.

It no longer makes sense to have life goals that simply increase the number of people. If you just love children and can afford to care for them properly, go for it, but don't feel it is an obligation.

Men have grown up for ages knowing they can be firemen, stockbrokers, grocers, lawyers, whatever and still be husbands and fathers if they want. Women need that same direction and freedom.

How you do it is up to you, but you should be brought up believing it is your goal in life to find your own calling.

MMXX

 

The universe has a sense of humor unrivaled by anything man could ever come up with.

Just look at platypuses and 2020. 

A platypus is a cute little mammal that lays eggs and is venomous. It is sometimes called the duck billed platypus, as if there were some other kind swimming around down there in the primordial muck that let it slip through. 

The proverb, hindsight is 2020 refers to being able to see things more clearly when you look back on them. If that is true, the world is so much clearer as 2020 draws to a close that it is scary.

We now know what happens when you elect a third grade bully buffoon as president of the once most powerful country in the world. 

We now know that disregarding a major plague is not the way to go.

We now should realize that a flourishing economy in a dead world is rather pointless. (But I don't think that one has sunk in yet.)

I find it interesting that the idea of something being 2020 is good.

This is a year when parental supervision stands between children and a double x rated world on nearly every level.

Choose wisely

 

What draws people to the same kind of people, over and over again?

If experience shows that one of them is publicly desirable, but personally, at home, a bully or a cheat, why would anyone continue to seek that sort out?

After all, life is not just for show.

A nice house, an impressive partner, fame, or fortune will not necessarily make a happy life.

My father once told me that all other things being equal, money was good to have, but that didn't mean money could make up in things what personality took in peace or contentment.

Wisdom comes too late for some of us.

Or perhaps it just keeps us from continuing to make mistakes.

Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes . . .

 

There are people who find authoritarians comforting.

For a while.

Eventually, though, they discover that know-it-all people who have to have it all their way, are generally not consistent, because they aren't happy people.  What they thought would make them happy yesterday fails and they require new things from those around them today, which will fail too, given enough time.

It is the never ending story of trying to please the terminally unhappy.

Eventually leading to standing in line, waiting your turn to be thrown under the bus for doing your best to be a yes-man, or woman.

Tired

 

This has been an awful year in every single solitary way. Politically, our whole country has gone down the tubes. Our country's motto is every man for himself, do whatever you want to get what you want and use everyone to get where you are going.

Environmentally, it appears we are closer to the end than we realized.

Health wise, we have to deal with the coronavirus, but we are doing it without leadership, truth, or science. We are all expendable if it helps someone else get where they want to go.

My personal health has been on a roller coaster of ups and downs that make no sense and are exacerbated by a run in with an egotistical doctor with questionable education and judgement last month.

Add to that the life long job of dealing with a mentally disabled child independent enough to do as she pleases, but often in selfish and childishly greedy ways --  and I am exhausted.

I am tired of being the voice of reason. I am tired of being the mother. I am tired of trying to do the right thing and I am tired of being nice.

Dream a little dream

 

Dreams are defined differently depending on who is talking about them. 

As a member of a Jungian dream group for over ten years I am intimately involved with my own dreams to this day and lately they have taken a very dark turn.

Imagine finding myself back in my grandma's Big House where my bed is in the kitchen far away from everyone else's. I try to get in bed with my grandma or great aunt, but am made to go back to the kitchen where my bed is tucked into a corner. The place I had to sit, in real life, on a chair, when I misbehaved as a very young child. It was never a traumatic punishment. I would just watch all the people working in the kitchen, or coming and going outside the window. But in this dream I realize there is someone in bed behind me and when I reach back I can feel the large, brown, stiff, dead fingers of my father! I scream for help because there is a long dead body in my bed, but no one comes.

Then I dream that I go upstairs to Lizzy's room and it is covered in blood! I don't see the reason for it, but it is everywhere. I can smell the metallic scent of the blood and feel the thick viscosity of it as it congeals. The floor is made of rough concrete with dips and uneven places where the blood has pooled. I try to clean it all up before her parents see it because I know they will be upset. As I continue to mop it up I am careful not to destroy the delicate lace decorations it has splattered on. I finally get it all up and go in the bathroom only to find more blood when I hear her father coming up the steps. I know he will be devastated and I feel guilty, but I don't know why.

I cannot imagine where these dreams are coming from, but they are truly disturbing. Neither one is based on actual experiences in my life, but both occur in places from my past with people I actually knew and had good experiences with. 

Sometimes remembering dreams so vividly is more of a curse than a gift.

A vote for Trump

 

A vote for Trump is voting for four more years of Trump campaigning to keep Trump in office. 

It is a vote against democracy.

It is a vote against everything a human being should hold dear. Earth. Air. Health. Peace. Life.

People voting for Trump are people are people who do not believe in science, or truth, people who just like the idea that there is someone who can rub the noses of a world they don't like, in the dirt.

Trump's government is all about him. Whatever whim strikes him in the moment becomes the primary target for his need for revenge. If it isn't about him, it is bad. He thinks the world exists to promote and adore him and anything that gets in the way must be removed. Right now. At any expense.

And this will eventually include you.

very late night thoughts

 

I have a cousin who thinks he is one of the five princes of the universe. It is an obligation that takes up a lot of his time, especially when they are called to convene and discuss certain things.

When he told me all this, it was the first time we had been able to sit down and visit in probably twenty years. 

I didn't want to interrupt him.

Now I wish I had asked more questions.

Maybe I am one of the princesses they lost along the way!

Obituaries

A person dies being who they are. Nothing magically makes them better people just because they died.

If someone is lazy, dirty, selfish and neglectful while alive, it is wrong to write a glowing obituary making up things they did not do, could not do and didn't care to do.

Passing on lies about how they did all those things they talked about, but never really did, is discourteous to the people who knew who they actually were while alive.

Feeding on the attention their death brings you on social media is wrong. Going to their funeral and pretending you were close to them is wrong. Grandstanding for attention is not an honorable thing to do.

People live and people die and they have a right to be credited with the things they actually did -- good or bad. 

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

Making the list

History will remember those names associated with Trump just like they do Hitler and Himmler, Stalin and Khomeini. Even Vlad the Impaler does not pale next to them.

They will not be remembered as esteemed members of the United States, but as despicable white supremists who tried to take advantage of the country to make themselves wealthier. 

These are the people who used their power to elevate themselves at horrible costs to the American people.

These are the names of those who tried to usurp our entire government for their own profit.

Misleading an entire country until people died by the thousands. Needlessly.

Trying to hijack our post office and elections and even using our military against our own people.

Using every available tool to destroy our health, environment and anything else that did not make them personally wealthier.

They were willing to lie to us, cheat us, let us die, burn to death and drink bad water just to make a buck.

Ignoring science, utilizing racist views, denying what every educated person in the world understands, there was no step too low for these people to pursue in their own personal rise to victory at our expense.

Remember them.

Remember their families.

Memorialize them so that this never happens again.

Justice

 

The only problem with being real is that then the consequences become real.

I am really disillusioned with my country, it's politics, it's president and many of its voters who are part of my family.

I am frustrated that the world is run by rich players whose only focus is themselves and their money.

I am sick of all my ideals being destroyed by people who pretend to be honorable.

I am horrified that justice no longer exists in today's world in any meaningful way.

I am angry that most of the people in power nationally right now are crooks, liars, pedophiles and narcissists.

I wonder how the world got to this place.

I want the people who don't believe in science to suffer without the rest of us joining in.

I want the people who treat other people badly to suffer the same treatment.

But then that might be justice.

Right?

Please pass the peas

 

I guess a quarantine leaves people open to reminiscing. 

I look at pictures from 45 years ago, pictures of people I don't even know, and see things that make me homesick. The black and white china, tablecloths, good silverware, big tables full of friends and family. It was a way of living that seems mostly gone now that people eat on paper plates with plastic silverware in front of televisions.

I miss the style of living based around people entertaining people with conversation and not just setting up social networking pictures, or grandstanding for show. I have seen pictures of people laughing, eating, even sleeping again and again, but the words are always small, or replaced by emojis.

We seem to be forgetting that life is an experience, not a photo op. That those balanced forks, knives and spoons, are about sensual joy not just shoveling food into our mouths, that fine napkins and a few manners give us a sense of stability lost when the Kardashians set the pace for so called reality.

I've been to homes where people feel that putting serving platters and bowls on the table violates the restaurant atmosphere of one plate per person sparseness. It is more about how it looks, than how it feels or tastes. Free flowing conversations interrupted by please pass the peas has become a luxury no longer afforded the masses. 

Graciousness has been sacrificed to more mundane things, which I guess some people define as more real, but for me nuances are the spices that make life exquisite.

What is your habit like

 

I am fairly certain that style is often dictated by the people selling it and the people who feel compelled to buy it because it is new, or touted as in.

How else could they sell new refrigerators all the time, or new televisions? They have to convince people there is a reason.

The same is true for hair. If everyone quit dying their hair, or cutting it, what would happen to all the people who make hair dye and scissors and all the stylists who work on it?

There really isn't anything wrong with this as long as you realize it is not really necessary. It might be fun, but unless you want it, just skip it.

I have a couple of things I wore for thirty or more years because they were well made, thoughtfully cut and I loved them. People used to do this all the time. Expensive coats, dresses and suits might be taken in, or let out, but they weren't tossed.

I know people who change their cell phones like socks, but unless you need it to do something different I don't understand why. I am not a gamer, so I used my first apple phone for nearly six years. 

It's not that I'm frugal. I go through nice purses frequently. I just love the style, or color, or size, or something about them. The very best ones are packed carefully in my closet. The rest I give away. 

I'm just not into the other stuff right now. Most of us are not made of money, so we have to choose our habits carefully.

Life at seventy

I never imagined old age the way I experience it.

I saw the women in my grandmother's Guest Home sitting around all day. I saw the old farm women coming into town to work at seventy when their husbands died. I met the wealthy women having teas and coffees with my mother-in-law. I saw idealistic articles and stories about grandmas surrounded by smiling little ones as they baked cookies. And I saw couples traveling on buses in foreign lands.

Of course I am only seventy. Things could change rapidly with very little provocation, but my life is mostly solitary during this quarantine. Eating is my big pleasure, reward and bane. I spend a lot of time looking forward to what I eat next and trying to keep it so my blood sugar, blood pressure, kidneys and weight don't get out of whack. I walk for exercise, but my feet, ankles, and the rest of me seem to get a kick out of making this hard.

I read, write, clean my apartment, draw and talk on the phone.

Trips to the library, grocery store and window shopping are out now. 

I am grateful for what I have and can do, but I miss volunteering and going out with friends.

Mostly I feel like I am living in some dystopian reality.

You are who you vote for

Is anyone else bothered by all the ads saying, "So and so is almost winning, send us money so he can?"

Then there are the shaming ads that use my name and say, " Jane Doe, you are allowing John Smurf to win by ignoring our pleas for money."

And the claims that someone will match my donation by X number of times?

I understand that campaigns cost money, but the constant begging for every Tom, Dick, and Harriet, who could win if they just got more money from me, again, feels odd. I do donate when I can for people where I think it will make a difference. 

Are the people in our country so ignorant, jaded and uniformed that they will only vote responsibly if someone is in their face on television right up until election day?

Because I don't really believe we will change anyone's mind who is still going to vote for Trump at this point. These people do not respond to reason, or truth, or anything except a gleeful need to be whatever it is in their poor demented minds they are. They live in a dark fairy land where wishes are gold and evil is king. All the so called Christians who are against abortions and totally willing to watch people starve, suffer and die for lack of food, medical care and asylum, are living up to their sadomasochistic religion that gets off on Christ's suffering for them. 

I have never been more disillusioned with a country in my life.

This modern world

 

We like to believe that we live in a thoroughly modern world and we do have so many conveniences available that were not here years ago. Washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, toasters, memory foam mattresses, wash and wear clothing, cars that get amazing mileage, air conditioners, even robot vacuums. Doctors can vaccinate us against smallpox, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, treat us for high blood pressure, diabetes, even depression.

But for all this, we are hardly more than savages.

Beyond a certain point all doctors really know how to do is remove bad things with surgery or chemicals. People still believe the color of skin makes us better or worse human beings. We are greedy, preferring to hoard things and accumulate money rather than work for the common good. We judge each other on superfluous things believing that if you have expensive houses, cars, jewelry, clothing, it some how designates you as a better person. How many hours we work means more than what we did with those hours.

In the end, many of us are not much more than magpies flying around eating, procreating and collecting shiny objects for our nests. 

It may be modern, but there must be more. Somewhere there must be kindness, empathy, actual caring, not just passive aggressive posturing.

As long as people still starve for lack of food, die for lack of medical care, suffer for lack of justice, the world may be modern, but it is certainly not humane. Being a human is not necessarily laudable.

Long and winding road

 

Health care is a vital part of modern living. It is a shame that in our country it is not provided for everyone. My son's family cannot afford it. It would take 48% of their earnings to pay for insurance. I am retired and fortunately have decent insurance with Medicare.

That does not guarantee good health care, though. I had a good doctor through Advocate, but they sold us to Carle and the doctor I saw there was brutal. She sees you only at scheduled appointments that take several weeks to get. In between she has a nurse tell you to go to prompt care. Who wants a doctor who won't take care of you?

Today I am going to a relatively new clinic, all based locally, but also with it's own lab and even on-site counseling services. Whole care. I hope it pans out.

And it did! I feel vindicated and I am also back on my regular medication.

But I am totally exhausted after surviving the last few weeks.

Lend me your ear

 

It is amazing what a phone call can do.

I live alone and that has never been a problem before this pandemic. I had tons of friends and was out and about so much that my time alone was cherished.

Now I have basically been alone, really home alone, without coffees, or lunches, or movies with friends for going on six months. That is a long time. Book club on zoom just isn't the same. We gave it up. The same with coffee. There is just something about sitting at a table among living, breathing bodies that changes the atmosphere. But we are social distancing and I am vulnerable.

I am not bored. I have books to read, an infinite number of movies to watch with the internet, I have gone to an occasional outdoor picnic, or local ballgame with my daughter (maybe four or five total,) but sometimes I find myself just feeling trapped and old and lately, ill.

Bestest calls me every morning and that gets me out of bed. It's amazing how important that time has become.

My younger son calls me when he is driving somewhere or doing work that is just physical, or after his runs in the evening. Sometimes we talk for hours, even four or five hours. 

Even when it is just a few minutes, these phone calls leave me rejuvenated and feeling better. We may just talk about nothing, or we may discuss world affairs, but I think it is the human contact that makes them so miraculous.

I find it interesting, because I have always felt like a bit of a loner, but evidently I do need a certain amount of real human contact and I am so fortunate to have people to give it to me.

One bad apple can kill you

Forced to find a new doctor three times in two years because the first two left town, I had no idea what I had let myself into with the third. The first two were gems.

I asked her to refill my major blood pressure medicine prior to our first appointment because I had to wait so long to get into her. She only refilled it for half the dosage! I assumed it was probably a clerical error and there was enough that I could continue at the dose I had taken during the last seven years, but when I saw her, she implied that I had been taking it wrong for seven years.

The bottle was clear.50 mg. morning and night. 

She changed my statin and doubled up two of my minor meds.

She told me I needed to get all kinds of tests and exams, so I did the blood work right away that day. She acted like I was using a pain medication that my last doctor prescribed back in April as an addict. I had only taken four, the rest of the bottle is full, but she didn't ask, just put a cryptic note on my record.

 She prescribed an antibiotic for a sinus infection.

I picked up all the new medicine and discovered she forgot to order the statin, so I called and left a message. That's another thing. Every time I called for an appointment, or to talk to a nurse I only got a recording. Once the nurse called me back to reiterate, "The doctor said if you have any problems just go to prompt care." I told her my blood pressure was over 204 and she said, "Well maybe you should go to ER." It was clear, I was not to see her, or talk to her, no matter what, until scheduled appointment weeks away.

She never called me again and in desperation I did some work on the internet to discover that the pounding heart, nausea, cold sweats, chills, anxiety, shaking  were all symptoms of withdrawal from my heart medicine if it was cut in half abruptly. 

I called the front desk to leave a message that I wanted to switch to another doctor. They did call back to tell me I could only do that if my present doctor agreed!

Now, nearly two weeks later, I am doing a little better. My blood pressure which was in range before all this started is still very high, but not over 200 most of the time.

I have an appointment with a new doctor, in a new office, on Wednesday and I am so grateful. 

Gone

 

Who understands death?

How can so much power cease to be?

Where did it go?

How did it escape this body I know and love?

How can so much love and creativity be gone?

Did someone flick a switch, turn out the light?

I search everywhere for you.

In every waking moment, every thought, every dream.

But you really are gone.

They don't need excuses

 

If you are still rescuing your child, from him or herself, at forty, there might be a problem. 

You can give too much. You can give so much that there is no need for them to ever grow beyond the rebellious teens, assured that you will scoop them up, give them everything they've lost and set them back on the road to glory no matter what.

Because, in fact, you cannot give them everything they've lost. You cannot give them the twenty years of growth they lost being your constant cause.

Part of life is learning to take care of yourself and ideally we do that as children. Good parents realize that their main job is to give their child the skills to survive in today's world. Love is pretty much a given, but how that love manifests can make all the difference in the world.

Give them a home to live in, clothes to wear, food to eat, a car to drive, money to pay for whatever they want and ask them for nothing but to be good? This might work if you had already instilled a work ethic, or sense of duty in them, but by forty, if that isn't there,  you are not on track.

I'm not sure how you instill character in someone forty years old, but it isn't by giving them everything and just hoping they won't do anything "bad." They don't need excuses. They have plenty of those.

Seriously, it isn't going to be easy. You have to do what should have been done over a period of 18 years while they were growing up. Giving them what is good for them and requiring them to earn privileges like cars, gas money, new clothes, eating out, recreation. They need a job even if it is at MacDonalds, or bagging groceries. 

It won't be easy, but if you can't tough that out, you'll be living Groundhog day in hell for the rest of your life. 

Hope springs eternal

 

I have been told that I am a survivor.

If that means I am always grasping at straws,

That I always believe I might have misunderstood.

That I feel I am wrong so often 

That not having hope might be another mistake.

So that, in despair, I lean towards the bright side,

Then it is true.

I am a survivor

By default.

Exacerbation

 

I read that they believe the coronavirus is creating a whole new world of insomniacs. I can understand that, but I don't think it is just the virus.

It is the state of the country.

I don't wake up at 2 AM worrying about the virus. 

I wake up worrying about the man who would be dictator and the secret police.

I worry about little children crying themselves to sleep in strange places with strange people. Not knowing where Uncle Sam put their parents. (Or maybe, God forbid. Who he sold these children to.)

I worry about the people who can't afford medical care, or groceries because their company insulted the egomaniac running our country.

The virus is terrifying, but our political status is more terrifying. It exacerbates everything else going on.

Everything is a photo op for some people. Even death and desolation.

How much longer

 

One might think that I would know myself quite well after seventy years, but I am constantly surprised.

It wasn't until this year that I discovered the intensity of movies becomes almost too much for me almost exactly half way through. 

Growing up I knew programs were thirty, sixty, or ninety minutes long and they started on the half hour, or hour, so all I had to do was look at the clock to know how much longer I had to wait for the tension to end.

Now that all my viewing is done via the Internet, things can start and end at any old time, but when I cannot bear it anymore I can pause and look to see how much more time is left.

It is always within a few minutes of halfway through!

Not earth shattering news, but interesting to me that I am that consistent.