Holly

A few minutes ago my phone rang.

It was Holly, a young woman I have great admiration for. She and her husband are parents to two very lively young boys, and they are all super people.

Holly told me about Mrs. K, a teacher at the school she attended (the same school my family has attended for several generations). Mrs. K had been very important to Holly, and a few years ago Holly had the chance to sit down with Mrs. K and tell her what an inspiration she had been.

This week Mrs. K had a stroke, a big one and is not expected to live through the weekend. Her husband, the music teacher at the same school, died of Parkinson's a few years ago. She had been living with a son and his family up in Washington State.

But the real reason Holly called, she told me, was that she suddenly realized that she needed to call several people and tell them how important they had been in her life. She told me that I had been that inspiration to her and how much she appreciated our friendship.

I am not always as happy as I look. My life and my family are not always doing the best, or my friends either. I grieve for them and I grieve for me as well. Life is not an easy road. Holly can see all of that. And she is full of empathy.

Holly says she loves to see me smile, even when she knows it is an act, that inside she knows I am crying. She is very perceptive.

Thank you Holly.

The men that I apprenticed to years ago are long gone. I was very close to one of them and visited him often until he died, way too young. The other one I never did get to say good bye to, and now he is gone.

My list is full of people that I should have talked to and did not and now I cannot. They needed to know they were appreciated.

But right now I can tell Holly and Stef and David and Bill and Pastor John and David W what a inspiration they are to me. Arline and Lora and Dea and Lia my daughters and Jessica and Emily and Brianna and Amy my granddaughters. Sid and Cliff and Curtis my sons in law. I love each of you.

And I need to remind some others of how important they are to my life.

Again, thank you Holly.

I am sad

My sister is a one woman book publisher.

Every once in a while she gives me a book to read and give an evaluation. I am not an english major (she was), but I can tell if the story makes sense, whether it is too wordy and if everything goes the right direction.

Usually I can do that in an hour or two of reading and writing.

She is working on a book now on sexual abuse of children, and asked me to review the manuscript

The author, a clinical psychologist, has the perspective that there are books about girl victims but not much about their male counter parts, so this book is mainly about the boy victims.

First of all the numbers are staggering. I have lived a sheltered life. I just was aware that this kind of thing even happened -- so carefully is the secret hidden from view. Somewhere around a fifth of our girls have been molested in some ways, the experts say, and maybe half that many boys.

I raised 4 beautiful daughters and have an equal number of granddaughters. I would never allow a thought into my head about them sexually. Most people are equal in their devotion to their daughters and sons.

But there are those exceptions. Fathers, uncles, grandfathers, cousins, even mothers and aunts.

I am glad I was naive enough to not suspect that kind of thing, but now that my mind has been opened a bit, I grieve for all of those wonderful girls and women, boys and men who were so wounded by this evil.

The author, of course, says that all should seek a good counselor. And he is right I am sure. But with the numbers we are given, there are not enough good counselors to deal effectively with the problem, not enough money to buy the time of these good people, to help the walking wounded.

So I suggested that the book be made more useful for those who are not able, for one reason or another, to see that wonderful counselor / psychologist that he speaks of.

It is a huge challenge.

And as I read the stories, my heart breaks.

mr tuper's legacy

Our kitchen bulges.

We went shopping for the month a couple days ago, but that is not how it bulges.

If Tuper made it we have one of them. Well, ok, we don't have everything, no kitchen is that large.

So when Miriam goes on her walk in the morning with Leo, I do a bit of rearranging.

Our youngest daughter is a single mom living in a small house with her our granddaughter. When I go to her kitchen I open the door and there are 4 pans, each of the same manufacturer, graduated sizes, stacked neatly. Her dishes are adequate, but not over stocked.

I look in her kitchen hardware drawer and she has just what she needs and uses, with out any duplicates.

And I am envious.

So I have been working on slimming our inventory of kitchen stuff. I found a glass punch bowl with a liter of cute little cups to go with it. We have never had a party where that would be useful, and for sure we aren’t at this age. I'll sneak it away soon.

Old Henry* said it well: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.

hmm

*Henry David Thoreau

a dollar a day

In my last post I talked about a photo contest my grandson Alan was entering.

The interesting thing about the contest was the premise.

Can you feed yourself for a dollar a day? In many places in the world, that would be an unheard of luxury, but even those of us who are pretty careful would find it a huge challenge.

Still it is worth a bit of consideration, at least for us.

We live on a very modest, very fixed income. Almost everything we consider necessities (insurance, gas, food, property taxes) are going up pretty seriously.

The only way I can hope to keep up and survive is to cut costs, and that ain’t easy!

So far this year our grocery bill has been about $2 a day for each of us. Pretty tight, but it could be tighter if necessary, I am sure. As I think about though, that price includes paper products, cleaning supplies and a few other things that are not really food items.

We come from a long line of scratch cooks. Our kitchen and pantry is veritable small scale grocery store, with stocks of almost everything we eat. Still I like ice cream once in a while, and miriam makes wonderful chocolate chip cookies (still) that go through a fair amount of spendy chips (we buy them in bulk which is cheeper). 


If we really had to, and we may at some point, we could cut out a lot, but for now it is an interesting intellectual exercise.

Cut our grocery bill in half? Hmm.

better color

Thanks to Dea and photoshop this is closer to what it looked like.