Weekend Culture

Saturday night my husband and I attended a celebration for the 20th anniversary of the Blue Ridge Library.

The Hall Trio performed. These young people were amazing.




All of the players were quite good. I was taken with the young lady playing the harp. That is one instrument I have never attempted. She played it extremely well and I enjoyed watching her face. I could tell when she hit a particularly hard passage just perfect - her eyes lit up.

An article about this group is here (I didn't write it).

Sunday my husband and I went to a play at Hollins. Called Caroline, or Change, by Tony Kushner, this work spoke about race relations and poverty.



My husband fell asleep during the first act, which was not a reflection on the play but on him. He works all the time.

The actress playing the lead role was extremely good, as was the young man playing Noah. Noah was an 8-year-old who lost his mom; he adored Caroline. But then came the $20 problem....

During the second act, something caught my eye and I watched somewhat amazed as a very large paint flake wafted down from the ceiling. At first I thought it was a bat. It landed about four rows in front of me in a lady's hair.

I thought I was the only one who saw it until my husband leaned over and whispered, "They're really bringing down the house."

An Excellent Day

Thursday was a most excellent day.

The day was warm and the air clear. The recent rains had everything looking clean and pristine.

The tree blossoms were exquisite; they left my mouth hanging open in awe at the simple beauty of it all. The grass grew emerald green and the mountains had a tint of pink and green as the redbuds began to bloom and the oaks and elms begin to leaf out.

This wonderful day started out with a trip to the courthouse, where I did a little research (a favorite past time) and talked with friends who work there. Then I met briefly with my editor, who produced a box that someone had mailed to me.

A small present from a fan of my work, it was. I was pleasantly surprised.

I returned home for lunch, where my husband and I ate and had delightful conversation about the farm and the cattle.

Then I hopped back in the car. En route, I stopped in people's driveways and spoke with ladies I did not know as I asked if I could take pictures of their flowers and trees. They were enjoying the day, too, sitting back on their heels with their gloved hands dirty from weeding and planting.

Not a one turned me away.

I made my way to an interview, where the people I spoke with for my article were absolutely sweet and kind and wonderful to talk with.

The sky was a perfect backdrop for photos and I saw pictures everywhere I looked. It was as if my vision had cleared after being foggy for a long time.

Since this was the first day I'd been out and about for any length of time since I took ill in early March, I'm not so sure that analogy isn't spot on.

I returned home delightfully worn and happily tired by my excursion.

It really was an excellent day.

Play Ball!

Spring, of course, means baseball. While I personally am not a big fan of the game, the nephew (left, in the red) is shortstop for my high school alma mater.

Tuesday was the first home game Husband and I had been able to attend. The sun came and went. While it shone the air was warm, but when the clouds covered the sky the wind kicked up and it was crisp indeed. I ended up sitting in the car part of the time. Fortunately we had parked so I could see through the windshield, as I can't stand to have the wind in my ears.

The Cavaliers lost to Hidden Valley, but it was a joy to see my nephew play. He had surgery on his rib bone in January and I feared it would keep him from sports. But many hours of therapy later, he seems to be back in form.

He made at least five good plays from shortstop, including this catch. Although to be sure I am not sure what the result was.

Thursday Thirteen

1. This story on AOL states that America's favorite book is the Bible. The Reuters version of it is here.

2. Men like Lord of the Rings and women like Gone with the Wind, the story says.

3. It doesn't say if people actually read these books (including the Bible). All three of those books are not the easiest reading.

4. According to this old Washington Post article, only 45 percent of Americans read anything in 1999.

5. This up-to-date Reuters article says that one third of Americans read more than 10 books a year.

6. That means about 66 percent of Americans read less than 10 books a year.

7. This article says that women read more than men and they like mysteries, romances and religious books.

8. Here is a list of books banned somewhere by somebody in the United States. J. K. Rowling has four books on the list. Not everyone loves Harry Potter.

9. Wikipedia also has a banned book list, but it includes bannings in other countries as well as the U.S. It's a long list.

10. This website is a comprehensive look at censorship.

11. The ALA has a banned books week every year (but it is not this week). They have information about banned books at this site too.

12. I have read a number of the banned books listed on these websites. I also have enough sense to not read something that I find offensive. Personally I think if someone finds a book offensive they should just not read it, and if the person is a student (or a parent) then he or she should ask for a different book.

13. If so many people do not read, and if the top three books cited are books that can be difficult to read even for people who read a lot, then do you think these top three books - including the Bible - are really being read?


I am still not an official Thursday Thirteen participant, but you can learn more about it here. My other Thursday Thirteens are here. One day I will figure out how to play properly.

A Question of Race

Race relations are much in the news these days, thanks to the presidential run of Barack Obama.

I grew up and have spent most of my life in the confines of a generally white area. My county is about 94 percent white. Most of the more rural communities surrounding the city are about the same, or less. The city is about two-thirds white.

My interactions with people of color (or black people, I honestly don't know what to call anyone these days) were few. My family was like most in those times - racist and bigoted. You know the kind - black folks eat watermelon and fried chicken and have lots of babies so they can draw welfare. It's an unfortunate attitude that I fear continues to this day.

I started school in 1968. Virginia as late as 1964 was struggling with race relations in public schools. According to this Wikipedia article, many counties tried to get around the federal laws by creating private schools and academies. Segregation existed then. I think it still does, covertly.

As it is with many things, my thoughts and feelings about race have been formed from my own experiences, some of which I am going to share.

My learning career began with kindergarten at East Salem, for at that time this is where we lived. Salem had only a year before become a city.

I think I was in a summer school type of situation for kindergarten, but I am not certain. In any event, I rode a bus from elementary school to my grandmother's house every day.

One day the bus driver said she had to pick up kids at the vocational school across the street. Normally the bus was filled with white students under the age of 12 or so.

The students she picked up were black male teenagers. I do not know if these were the first black persons I had seen up close, but these fellows scared all of us.

They snarled and got down in our faces, hissed at us and left us petrified. They took our notebooks from our hands and tossed them in the aisle. They were loud and boisterous and went out of their way to make us scream. Young girls, myself included, sat frozen in terror, holding hands, tears streaming down our faces. I can still hear the bus driver yelling, "Ya'll sit down back there, stop scaring them kids," as she continued along the route.

Stop after stop, little boys and girls fled the bus in terror and ran sobbing into their mother's arms. I did the same; I remember fleeing as quickly as my little legs would carry me, running the half-block to my grandmother's front porch. I flung myself into her bosom and cried as I told her what had happened.

I remember my uncle, a teenager himself, cursing because these youth had terrorized me. Had he been there, he proclaimed, he'd have stopped it.

Doubtless the phone at the school rang a lot the next morning and the principal and other officials received angry visits from parents, although I do not recall what happened in my own family.

Nothing like that ever occurred again in the time I remained at that school. By the second grade I was in a rural county in a new school system, with different incidents about to take place in my education on race.

Over the years I have thought of this incident often. I have had nightmares about it. But generally I recall it as an incident involving young teenagers who were having fun at the expense of a bunch of little kids. I do not to see it as an incident of race, mind you, of black youth scaring white youth, even though the truth of it is they were black and the rest of us were white.

I see it as young teenagers taking advantage of a bunch of little kids. But I feel sure that in five-year-old wisdom, at that time I was as scared of these young men because they were black as I was because they were working hard to scare us.

Thankfully this episode, while creating a lasting impression, did not make me fearful of either black people or teenagers.

Next up: Part II (it's the entry below this one).

A Question of Race, Part 2

Part 1 is here.

Prejudice in the late 1960s and early 1970s manifested itself in many ways. I remember hearing bad jokes, sick stories, and caricatures that turned my stomach.

Somehow I rejected many of these attitudes, even though they were dominate. Many people I knew had no problem with attitudes about the "colored" folks. My grandmother up until she died last year made off-the-cuff remarks about her caretakers, as in, "she's a really nice colored girl, them folks do good at changing the sheets." She did not mean harm; it was way she was raised.

Attitudes are difficult to change.

In 1971 I was in the third grade at my rural elementary school.

One day I was asked if there were any black teachers at my school.

"No," I said, and returned to whatever I was doing, probably reading a book.

My third grade teacher was Mrs. Fairfax. She was a wonderful lady and I loved her with all the adoration a nine-year-old girl could muster for her teacher. She expected and received the best from me. I was her best student but she did not have favorites. She simply acknowledged that I made the top grades and moved on, but at the same time I still felt special.

She was unique that way.

She was also black. I had forgotten!

A similar event happened when I was 17. I had my driver's license and I wanted guitar lessons. I found a teacher a one of the city's music shops at one of the malls.
He was a wonderful teacher, very patient and very much ready to help me improve my performance and technique.

I took lessons from him for about a year. One day someone who had met him approached me and asked me why I had never mentioned the fact that my guitar teacher was a black man.

"It never occurred to me that it was a problem," I said.

I guess the moral of these musings is that upbringing and environment can be overcome. I like to think that I am open minded and maybe a little less prejudiced than some.

However, I am sure that I have prejudice and bigotries because I do not believe that people can be free of such things. I think everyone has them.

Prejudice and bigotries manifest themselves in many ways. I guarantee there are a number of white men (and women) watching the Democratic primaries in horror. It must be the stuff of their nightmares as they watch a woman and a black man duke it out for the presidential nomination.

I remember when Doug Wilder was nominated governor of Virginia. Several people I knew thought this would be the end of life as we knew it for this state. But that didn't happen. Wilder was a pretty good governor as governors go.

I feel sure that if Barack Obama ends up as president, life will continue on. If Hillary Clinton ends up as president, life will continue on. I suppose it will even continue on if John McCain ends up as president. How it continues on is another question entirely, but it is not a question that I think is answered by pointing at race and gender.

Maybe one day those traits won't matter. Maybe we'll all be able to be see only people, you and you and me and all of the rest, as just folks. Just human beings trying to get along.

**Editors note**

Upon reflection, I changed several of the above paragraphs of this entry to eliminate some things that I thought may embarrass someone else and to clarify a few points at the end. The meaning is still the same, I think.

**End Editors note**

What is This?

Can you guess what this is and what it was used for?

Hail Forsythia!

Books: The Peacock Emporium

The Peacock Emporium
By JoJo Moyes
Copyright 2004
435 pages

This book took me longer to read than most, partly because I've been sick and I tend not to read much when I'm ill, but also because this thing left me scratching my head a lot and I put it down and picked it back up several times.

If you suffer through the first 70 pages, you'll find the story. The initial pages have their place but the author would have been better served to have started the book at "Part Two" and added those other pages as flashbacks or something.

The book would have benefited highly from a good editor; there were enough typos or punctuation problems for me to comment on it. I am generally forgiving but if I am looking as much for misplaced or lacking commas as I am the content, there's a problem.

The author writes very long sentences that left me breathless, not to mention searching for the subject noun. Again, a little editing would have made this more readable.

That's what wrong with the book. What's right is the character of Suzanne, once you finally get to her. She's the meat of this big sandwich and a very complex young woman she is. She is unhappy and trying to find herself. Her journey is intriguing and I liked that part of the story when I wasn't being aggravated by the rest of the book.

This is from the book jacket:

Thirty-five years on, Suzanna Peacock finds refuge from her mother's shameful legacy in her shop, the Peacock Emporium. Within its magical walls she discovers not just friendship, and an escape from her troubled marriage, but the first real passion of her life.

If the book had stuck to that, I'd have given it at least 3.5 stars.

As it stands, though, I can just barely give it 2 stars.

The Internet and Society

A friend and I were having an email discussion about the Internet and how, unless you're very lucky, you end up having to deal with nameless and faceless souls who just want to cause harm.

The Internet has been likened to the wild west, a lawless place where people can say and do what they like. If they want to flame you, they do, if they want to call you names, they do, if they want to make you look ridiculous, they do.

Civility can be found but it doesn't seem mainstream. I feel fortunate to have run across some very nice people online, but I stay away from newsgroups and from discussion sites where the comments get unruly. I see commentaries at the ends of articles where people are just horrible with their language, insulting and vulgar. I don't need to see more to know what is out there.

Unfortunately, the media has found the Internet a good place to do their lazy work. Instead of standing on street corners to find out what people think, they check a newsgroup from the safety of their desk. Instead of digging through books for old data, they use whatever they dredge up online and that's all you get. It may be a time-saver but I don't know that it actually adds much to the conversation.

I do not deal well with confrontation, and when I get flamed, I just leave. It's not worth the angst and frankly the opinions of those kinds of mean people, who 90 percent of the time don't know what they're talking about anyway, aren't worth the time.

Anyway, I thought my friend had some interesting insight into this line of thinking about the Internet, and I wanted to share it. I've reworked it a little:

Abusing the Internet comes about when kids do their homework on line. Politicians and journalists skim everything from what is
already out there. There's nothing original about it.

It's really very sad and frustrating. It indicates a decaying society.

Our culture crested sometime in the1960s, with the civil rights movement and the various radical movements and the real consolidation of scientific understandings of our universe etc.

But we can't live like that. Not as a species. Most people are scared and crave simplistic, emotional, immediate surroundings. The
womb. The cave. So all this dead-weight is pulling back on us, is pulling us in. Religion is rising again, with people preferring the
certainties of dogma to the challenges of rational thought. Even scientists have decided, after 50 years of scanning the universe for signs of life (and we know now that radio waves, which we are scanning for, decay within a few light years actually) that in fact we are unique, that the universe is
engineered so that in just one place in all its immensity, life shall be possible, and we shall be its summit. Just one step to declaring God did it all, after all - the superstitious easy answer spreads.

And while people soak up new technology, it is for just one thing - to hive themselves off into warm, dark, noisy little cyber-caves where all they do is chant empty mantras together or engage in vicious hate-fests against one
another or whatever.

The creativity has gone. We aren't looking out any longer - we're just looking inwards, at ourselves, all the time. And pretty soon
there will be terrible food and energy crises and the whole infrastructure we depend
on will decay as well.

What do you think? Has society reached its pinnacle? Is the Internet a symptom of the downward spiral? Has the world gone mad?

Thursday Thirteen

1. My husband says he never dreams. I don't believe him, because he sometimes mutters in his sleep.

2. However, not once has he woke up and said, "I dreamed last night that...." Not in 24 years of sleeping together has he ever told me a dream. I think that is sad.

3. I dream every night. In color.

4. Tuesday night I dreamed the federal government hauled me off from the library. I thought it was because I was topless.

5. They took me to a room where my husband had also been "disappeared" to. At least we were together.

6. A man who looked a lot like the bearded Al Gore kept grilling us to tell the truth, but he never said about what.

7. Then he took my pillow and cut in half. Maggots fell out of the middle of it.

8. "You are part of the cult!" the man screamed.

9. As a child I had a persistent dream of a black-hooded man who chased me through the garden. I hid behind the scarecrow. He always found me.

10. My grandmother dreamed that Jesus came to her and took her wedding ring from her finger. "You won't be needing this anymore," he told her. My grandfather died three days later.

11. When I was very small, I would wake in the middle of the night with the certainty that a woman sat on the end of my bed. My mother always said I was dreaming when she came in after I screamed.

12. Those particular screams and dreams stopped when we moved to another house.

13. I have always been pretty sure that woman wasn't a dream. She was a ghost.


I am not an official Thursday Thirteen participant, but I understand you can learn more about it here. This is my 46th Thursday Thirteen, so I suppose I should someday figure out how to play properly.

Newspapers in a Death Grip

The latest edition of the New Yorker offers an intriguing article, "Out of Print" by Eric Alterman, about the end of newspapers.

The initial paragraphs are an interesting history of newspapers in the U.S. Being a Virginian, I always thought this state had the first newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, but apparently Massachusetts beat the us to it by about 34 years.

The article in The New Yorker gives the Huffington Post credit for taking information digital, although this has been occurring in varying stages for a long time.

The article points out that without traditional media, there would be nothing for websites like HuffPo and similar sites to sound off about. This is the most important point of the entire article.

The author states it thusly:

... Huffington fails to address the parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers. (emphasis mine)

According to this very long story, HuffPo has created a community; hence, the hits from unique users. That means popularity and advertising revenue.

Everybody has something to say, it seems, and everyone wants the opportunity to say it.

Never mind that for the most part the opinions rattled off are worthless. Occasionally there is a gem among the inane, but it's infrequent at best. Essentially everyone is talking at once and no one is listening.

I have a naive view of newspapers in that I believe in the Fourth Estate (interestingly, I could not find a good definition online for what this means).

To me the Fourth Estate means an organization that watches out for the Greater Good. It sides with no one and nothing except Truth. It doesn't decry torture on one hand and okay it on the other simply because the government says water boarding is legal, for example.

I believe newspapers should hold views of the common man. If newspapers are political, they should only be so in a push for equality and in defense of the common man. If the views of the common man are completely opposite, as it seems these days, then maybe it's time for newspapers to give up this charade of neutrality and become a blue paper or a red paper and move on.

Newspapers have gotten away from Truth, however one defines that. They are now only about advertising dollars. That comes first. The news is secondary, something to fill the pages.

I have watched with something akin to horror as publishers have made decisions that have ultimately ruined their product. They've cut news staff, changed layouts and focus, and generally created the situation that exists now. In essence, newspaper owners have destroyed their own reason for being.

I agree entirely with this statement:

The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.” That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month.

By cutting staff, publishers have mutilated the sense of community that HuffPo professes to have found and taken advantage of. How can a community feel that the newspaper is a part of it if there is no presence?

If reporters do not attend events, from pancake breakfasts to government meetings, the relevancy of the newspaper ends. The community at large does not know the journalists and reporters and has no connection. They have no sense of ownership and participation in the news and thus no feeling that their needs and desires are reflected in the pages.

It is the knowledge of communities, whether that community is as small as a neighborhood or as large as a state - or these United States - that is missing. It takes a village to write a newspaper, frankly. One or two people can't do it all.

They miss far too much.

I am of the opinion that the Internet is not killing newspapers. Newspapers survived television.

Their demise began in the 1980s. Was it a result of deregulation, with the news now in in the hands of a few - a few whose motive is profit, not Truth?

This is not a problem of revenue or advertising. It is a political decision to make newspapers irrelevant. This is because newspaper stories, unlike the soundbites of TV, actually have depth. TV says such and such happened - a good, well-researched newspaper story tells you why it happened. TV does not do that particularly well.

When I read a newspaper, it is because I want to know the whys of an event. Or why a person is who he or she is. Only a well-written story can give me that information in a concise, if sometimes lengthy, method of communication. It would take hours of news footage to tell the same story.

The people in power - whoever that may be - do not want the whys of a story to be known and well understood.

This is why stories about the countdown to the battle of Iraq, for example, seldom touched on the past (which could have indicted the nation for its role in aiding and abetting the sovereign nation we were conquering and which never questioned the government rhetoric). This was a political decision in the newsroom. It had little to do with advertising.

I believe print edition of newspapers have a place. If ultimately they do not, then an electronic version of a newspaper, one in which journalists are paid to report real news and features and to be a part of the community, is a necessity.

Whether that online newspaper becomes a place of news or a place of inane chatter is in part up to the public and very much in the hands of the publisher.

Without good, dedicated staff and support of a publisher who wants to put out a good product that is again the voice of the common man, newspapers will indeed fail.

And then all we'll have left are a million opinions, and not an ounce of Truth.

Farewell and Amen

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time updating my links. I finally was able to reach my widgets in my Blogger layout.
I knew that some of my links were bad, because I had visited a couple of blogs and found the owners had either made them private or deleted them.

It always makes me sad when a relationship in which I've invested some time ends. Blogs in particular create an intimate relationship between reader and writer. The person is not exactly a friend, but neither is he or she an unknown entity.

A couple of these blogs I had read for several years, and I will keenly feel their absence.

Why do people, words, books, etc. come into our lives? Does the universe (or God) say, "You can learn from this person." Or perhaps this person can learn from you? And when the learning is over, the person vanishes? Is that how it works?

I have been through what seems like a very large number of relationships. If I were to recount them one by one, you'd think me a very difficult person indeed if I couldn't keep all of these people in my life. But I suspect many people have the same tale.

Many of these folks were coworkers. Why is it that when someone changes jobs, the friendship ends? I used to work in the legal field and even if I stayed in the same career but went to a different office, the old coworkers soon stopped calling or responding to my calls. Sometimes it happened within a matter of days, not weeks. Once it even happened within the same firm, and just because I moved down the hall!

Suddenly that bond isn't there anymore. Nobody does anything wrong, but Time steps in and Change takes over. And just like that, relationships end.

I have some relationships that have lasted quite a long time. My husband has stuck with me for going on 25 years - 26 if you count the year we dated. He should get a medal!

I am in touch with few friends from school, I'm sad to say, but there are one or two whom I see infrequently. Some I even consider good friends, even if all we do is exchange Christmas cards. I consider myself fortunate to still do that.

A former coworker, L., has been my friend for 25 years. There are long periods of time where we don't see each other or speak much, but then, like magic, we're having lunch and it is as if we still worked in the same office.

My closest girlfriend, B., has been listening to me whine for almost 10 years now. Ours is definitely an adult relationship, based on the persons we are now, not who we were so long ago. I kind of like that lack of history.

I even have longevity in online relationships. I have corresponded with C.J. for close to 15 years now. We met on AOL and have stayed in touch all this time. She is like a distant younger sister. My other friend, I., has been a near-daily pen pal for seven years. And I've been on a list with the same bunch of women for going on nigh seven years, too. And there are others I've know and still hear from occasionally that I've been writing to since 1995.

I also have worked off and on with one of my editors for about 23 years, and nearly 10 with another.*

I think those are very long relationships indeed and I treasure them. I wish I could keep all my friends close by, and never have them walk out of my life.

But alas, they turn to "private" and all I can do is watch them go.

*Added later

Books: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

The Memory Keeper's Daughter
By Kim Edwards
Copyright 2005
401 pages

Lifetime will have a movie made from this book on April 12.

Dr. Henry in 1964 must deliver his own children, thanks to a snowstorm. One of the twins has Downs syndrome. He hands the imperfect child to his nurse and tells her to take it to an institutional home. He does not tell his wife the child lives.

The nurse chooses to keep the child and raise her herself. She moves away.

The book follows the lives of these two families. Dr. Henry's family is forever marred by his decision and his secret, which he takes to the grave with him.

The nurse's life is enriched beyond her wildest dreams.

In the end, the two families meet. The books ends with a great promise of hope.

This my book club's pick for March. Thanks to my bronchial ailment, I missed the meeting last Tuesday, much to my dismay. I am sure the discussion was great.

I enjoyed this work, although it was difficult and sad in places. Dr. Henry chose to play God and it turned out to be a mantle he could not wear. His decision had many consequences.

If I remember the movie is on, I will watch it, but I am not very good about keeping up with TV.

4 stars

For Writers

This website is pitting various writing blogs against one another in a basketball style seed. Check it out if only to find the links to some good blogs about writing and freelancing.

Swayze and my mom

My heart ached when I read the news a few weeks ago that actor Patrick Swayze of Dirty Dancing fame had pancreatic cancer.

This was not because I am an ardent fan (although I like that movie), but because pancreatic cancer is the disease that eight years ago killed my mother.

My mother loved Dirty Dancing. She loved to dance and she loved music – what better movie, eh? Once we were shopping together, and she asked me to go wait for her in a chair in the corner while she tried on clothes. “Nobody puts Baby in the corner!” I huffed, giving Swayze’s line. Mom burst out laughing, as did I.

Cancer in any form is not pretty, but pancreatic cancer is a particularly nasty bugger.

Each year about 30,000 Americans are given a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Most of these people will be dead within the year. Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in this country.

In Spring 1999, my mother returned from Paris. It was her first trip abroad. She was pale and wan and complaining of stomach problems. She had been in a foreign country. We thought it was the water.

When June came around, my mother attended a small party at my home. She complained of her stomach hurting still. I remember watching her standing by the table, her fist in her gut.

I asked her, of course, if she had been to the doctor. She had. Several times.

A few weeks later, Mom told me she still wasn’t feeling well. I insisted she go back to the doctor. She called me from his office and told me she was being admitted to the hospital that Friday.

She had jaundice.

The following Monday, doctors wheeled my mother off for exploratory surgery. Something was blocking her bile duct. My aunt, who is a nurse, waited with me.

Mom returned to the room, still unconscious. The doctor took us aside. “Pancreatic cancer,” he said.

That was it. No statistics, no hope, no offer of help.

My aunt knew right away that this was a death knell. She explained the diagnosis and statistics.

I was in shock.

My mother’s first words upon awakening were, “Is it cancer?” I burst into tears and fled from the room, leaving my aunt to tell her.

It was the hardest day of my life up to that time.

The choices open were radiation and chemotherapy and little hope. The most radical procedure was a surgery called a Whipple, which entailed removal of the pancreas and surrounding organs, including part of the stomach. My mother chose this operation and opted to have it performed at the University of Virginia.

The surgery prolonged her life. She actually lived just a little beyond a year of the diagnosis. But it was a difficult time, because the surgery left her weak. It also damaged her stomach and she ended up with tube feeding for the rest of her short life.

About this time of year in 2000, I slipped away from work to visit my mother, as I frequently did. Most days I walked in and the house was still as a tomb. She said television bothered her and the music she loved had become noise that she no longer cared to hear. But on this day I walked in to find the radio on. My mother was in the back part of the house. She didn’t know I was there.

“Now I’ve had the time of my life, and I’ve searched through every open door…,” she sang, her alto chiming in on this Dirty Dancing song.

I was grateful she was having a good day. And I was saddened because by this time I knew that the cancer had spread and chemo and radiation wasn’t working. She wasn’t going to be with us much longer.

She died in August at the age of 56. That was the last song I heard her sing.

Give generously when cancer foundations come calling. You just never know where – or who – this disease will strike next.

**This was originally printed on March 26, 2008, in The Fincastle Herald under my column/byline. It didn't have the links.**

Thursday Thirteen

Sleeping

1. Sleeping is something we take for granted if we do it and miss violently if we're not doing it.

2. I tend to start out sleeping on my back.

3. Then I turn over onto my side.



4. I prefer to sleep with a body pillow when I side-sleep. I toss a leg over the pillow.



5. Up until this week, I slept on a 7" wedge.



6. I started sleeping on this in 1998 after I experienced esophagus problems that warranted a look-see with a scope. The doctor told me to raise the head of my bed 4 inches. We did, and we both slide down and woke crumpled at the foot of the bed every morning.

7. I figure doctors never take their own advice. We lowered the bed to 2 inches and I started sleeping on a wedge.




8. I stopped sleeping on the wedge from about 2003 to 2005 because I was having back problems. Then in 2006 I developed vertigo and the only thing that helped was *not* laying down. So I went back to sleeping on the wedge.

9. About 5 months ago I hit my head on a shelf, and I developed neck problems.

10. I changed my pillows.



11. The little round pillow helped, but my neck problems continued.

12. I don't really care to visit my chiropractor again because I get mixed results from that care. The acupuncturist has helped my neck a lot, though.

13. Now I am trying to sleep without the wedge to see if (a) I stay on level ground and don't get dizzy and (b) it helps my neck and back.

**The dog is stuffed. I bought her in 2001 after my puppy of 17 years passed away because she looks like Ginger.**

Blogger Problems - Still

Does anyone have a clue as to why I can't access my widgets in layout? It is weird. It's Blogger, not my computer, because I can't access it from my laptop either.

When I go to layout, the scroll bar won't move. So I can't scroll down to reach my widgets to change them. Which means I can't add links.

A few days ago I was looking at my blog (the page you're seeing now) and I noticed these little tool-like things on the sidebar. I clicked on them and the widgets opened up for editing. I had access! Yay. So I quickly made a couple of changes that I'd been unable to make.

But now those little tool things aren't there anymore and I don't know why they came up in the first place. And I still can't access my widgets in layout!

Blogger is strange sometimes.

Happy Easter

The roses are full of leaves! Soon they will be blooming.



The heralds of Spring! Beautiful daffodils.




Favorite forsynthia! Golden blooms.




The redbird says, wetcho!

When the Lights Go Out

This morning around 10:15 a.m., I sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast and reading the paper.

I had already spent time on the computer, just playing. It was time to do housework and try to make up for all the time I'd been ill.

As I read, the words on the paper started disappearing. I realized I had a hole in my vision.

I have problems with flashers and floaters; I thought perhaps this was some new version of this problem.

The hole was egg-shaped and the edges of it were wavy. Things looked quite odd. I shut one eye and then the other.

The hole was there no matter what.

This was scary.

I went to the computer and typed in "hole in vision" and ... realized I couldn't see to read anything. Things started going black all around the hole.

By the time I picked up the phone and called my husband, I couldn't see the phone to dial. Most of my vision, except for the upper right corner of space, was gone.

This kind of dark is much different than nighttime. It was a darkness unlike anything I have ever experienced.

My husband contacted the doctor's office here in my county, and then he raced home and took me in.

By this time, it was 11:25 a.m., and my vision was clearing up. I could see. It was a relief, let me tell you.

The doctor told me I had an ocular migraine. I have migraines but they have diminished greatly in recent years. I haven't had a bad migraine in quite a while. I had some vision symptoms with previous migraines - spots before my eyes, light sensitivity, that kind of thing. But I'd never lost my sight.

Apparently they've morphed into this new thing, this ocular migraine. It may be tied in to this terrible chest cold I've had for two weeks, too. Perhaps my system is simply that much out of balance.

We returned home and I went to bed. A nap helped tremendously.

Going blind has always been a major fear of mine. I have a hard time imagining not being able to read or take photos or see my husband's wonderful loving face. Sight is something taken for granted.

I won't be taking it for granted for a long time, I suspect.