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.