These Are the Champions

 

As I watched Opi, sweet Obi, our cat, old and frail and growing thinner by the day, lick the light stream of water from the kitchen faucet—he likes his water fresh and flowing—I knew he would soon leave us and join Zoom Zoom, the cat who traveled to and from Hawaii with us. Zoom Zoom spent the better part of a year on my desk, getting off only to use the litter box—thank heavens for that. He even ate on the desk. (I had a long, wrap-around-the-corner one.) Those wild pigs that marauded in the night were more than he could handle. A mouse that big? No way.

Zoom Zoom and Opi--a desk can get really crowded.

In Eugene, Oregon, a group of five women, a like-minded group, who had similar spiritual understandings, studied ancient mysteries, went to lunch together, celebrated birthdays, and parties where we dressed up. Someone sang or recited a poem they had written.

Now there is only one—me.

Those women walked the earth; they lived their lives—some lost spouses, some divorced, one remarried—they raised their kids, and developed their place on the Spiritual platform of life. One taught us how to die; she knew it was time, she stopped eating and died.

Joy dropped from them like diamonds.

I will be forever grateful to have known them.

You’ve heard of the butterfly effect.  Ray Bradbury wrote of it in a short story. Arrogant time travelers went back to the dawn of life on this planet to see dinosaurs.  One person slipped from the wooden pathway that kept curious onlookers from disturbing the ecological system and accidentally crushed a butterfly. That small step altered history forever.

We don’t know how we affect the people around us—the air, the water, the plants, the animals, the planet.

What did John F Kennedy say?

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

See why there was such hope then? See why the young people rushed from their college studies to join the Peace Corps? See why we believed we could send a man to the moon?

We had excitement. We had hope.

 

Well, it’s been a wet week in Junction City. And I had been putting off painting the Tiny House because it was too hot to paint outside. You could call it Resistance, procrastination, or "I don’t want to do that," but I committed to doing it.  We debated about the color. I couldn’t find one I liked. Okay, we agreed on a color.  I bought the paint, brushes, roller, long handle, and the following day it rained. For three days it rained.

I negotiated with someone to paint it for me, for it has a high peak, and I’m not so steady on a ladder anymore. I’m not ready to join my friends on the other side.

It isn’t painted yet.

And then yesterday, old friends came in the form of BOOKS. Daughter Dear came into my office carrying a box, and asked, “Do you want a box of your old books?

“Sure,” I said, not knowing that they had been buried with my husband’s old research materials and shop supplies.

Wow! What a find!  There's that Orchid lei book my son-in-law gave me for Christmas in Hawaii. I had looked all over for that book, but not in the right place, obviously. There was the Kumulipo, A Hawaiian Creation Chant, translated and edited with commentary by Martha Warren Beckwith.  I excitedly found that book in a bookshop in Hawaii years before we moved there. I knew it existed and never thought I would have one. Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, one of the all-time great writers on writing, and Seabisquit by Laura Hittenbrand. What a writer! The first paragraph in the Preface of Seabisquit has my vote for being the best written:

“In 1938. Near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year’s number-one newsmaker was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn’t the Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn’t even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.”

“In the latter half of the Depression, Seabiscuit was nothing short of a cultural icon in America, enjoying adulation so intense and broad-based that it transcended sport. When he raced, his fans choked local roads, poured out of special cross-country “Seabiscuit Limited” trains, packed hotels, and cleaned out restaurants.”—Laura Hiittenbrand.

And you know I love horses.

Diamonds appear all around us while we feel hamstrung by a man who wants to rename New Mexico for heaven’s sake. He’s like a bird who steals other birds’ eggs or an old dog who pees on everything and says, “Mine, mine, mine.”

 

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man.”

We need a champion like Seabiscuit, who helped people out of the depression.

Any volunteers?

I love you guys. 💗Thank you for the honor of your attention.

 

P.S. Why are the cats champions? Because they brought us joy.

How About the Price of Those Eggs?

 

Or...

The good, the bad, and well, what I’m doing.

You know how we have had a long record of wrongs the President and his cohorts have done to harm this country and alienate our allies. Now you know he is changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America; how insulting is that?!

Well, that isn’t what I want to write about.

Notice that we don’t see much about the Epstein files anymore—he has done a good job turning our attention away from those.

I didn’t want to write about those either.

After committing absurdity after absurdity that would take pages to enumerate, and you guys know them already anyway, he is now setting the stage as he did before the last two Presidential elections, making us doubt the legitimacy of any election where he is not the winner. And look what he is doing with AI, portraying himself pumped up, then insulting his opponents. They are as fake as his qualifications for being the Chief of this country.

And the Republican Party is holding on by the skin of its teeth. Don’t you wonder why?

Ha ha. “Money makes the world go round.”

 

Sometimes we need to shut up and let a picture tell the story.

This is from Robert Reich’s Substack post:

$594 million in 2017 from his own endeavors.

$ 2.24 billion after he became president.

How do you like the price of those eggs?

Holy Schmoley!

A Reprieve:

Saturday: My daughter, grandson, and I visited a farm where she chose two baby goats to be Daughter Dear’s in the middle of September. 

I sat on a pile of pallets, and one little female goat climbed onto my lap and slept while Daughter Dear talked with the owner. She will be getting neutered males, gently neutered, using rubber bands. All the females were already reserved.

Neutered males are called wethers, and they are gentle and lovable; we know because we had two when we lived in the forest of Oregon. 

Here are two little females we bottle-fed in Hawaii:

All our goats kept the brush around the house cleared. All were free-range because we had the room. The goats we will get this time will need to be penned. Too bad, but necessary.

We hear goats love to eat blackberry vines, and blackberry vines are taking over the back portion of the property. Husband dear had cut them a few months ago, but the vines loved their hair cutting so much they broke out in song and grew new stalks.

I won’t use poison on them—and they know it.

Goats to the rescue. We have an extra wild area behind the outbuilding behind our backyard we call the Wayback, where I have my office and where I am writing to you right now.

My Saturday lap baby wasn’t for sale. The young man who ran the farm adopted her. She was the third of triplets to be born. Two larger, stronger males were born before her, and the mother said, “That’s enough,” and focused on the strong ones. Her adopted dad takes her into the house at night, and she sleeps on his lap.

I was recharged on the farm. I felt its peacefulness the moment I stepped out of the car.

Back to Writing:

For the last couple of weeks, I had been rewriting old stories, editing, and submitting some to agents with no responses, but I had a brilliant idea.

“You need to write a new book.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, write about things working instead of things not working.”

You know that people loved Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield—it sold a kazillion copies.

You know that people loved Robert Fulghum’s “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?” It was on the New York Times List for almost two Years.  

So, see, people do like uplifting stories. Yes, yes, I know, those were non-fiction. I am talking about fiction.

It doesn’t matter; it tells me people want to believe in good, to see the world as a safe place, to realize life has its struggles, yet to hold an idea such as W. Clement Stone had when he said, “I believe God is a reverse pessimist; He conspires to do me good.” With fiction, you need conflict, or you have no story—so say the writing gurus. Okay, we’ll see what transpires.  

Then, to give me cause for pause, this week I read a post by an author saying he gave up writing and it almost killed him. He had written a book; it was published and got good reviews, but it didn’t sell.

He was devastated.

He languished in misery. Stopped writing. Took up tennis, and became fanatical with it: lessons, practicing daily,

He didn’t miss writing.

And then it slammed in on him. He did miss it.

So, why am I writing when there are authors far better than me out there?

Because I want to.

So, I began, and for the first 24,000 words it flowed. It felt like the universe was throwing helpers at me.  Amazing people (fictitious) appeared on the road to somewhere.

 

Elevator pitch for “No Working Title:”

“Fifteen-year-old Josie is on the run—no folks, her 92-year-old grandmother has died, so with a GED, a driver’s learner’s permit, and being an emancipated teenager, she and her dog, Zeus, climb into Grandmother’s pickup and aim for parts unknown.”

 

P.S. Josie grows up.

Listen. What'a Ya Think?

 

“There’s something happening here / But what it is ain’t exactly clear...”

 “I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down”

These are the lyrics to this 1966 protest song by Buffalo Springfield, written by Stephen Stills. It describes the tension and paranoia of the Sunset Strip riots. It is titled For What’s It’s Worth, but identified as ‘There’s something happening here.”

“There’s battle lines being drawn / Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong...”

“We better stop, hey, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down.”

*I give praise to Leigh Horne’s brilliance as a writer on Substack. She posted the lyrics to that song. Thanks, Horne, you gave me hope that things are a changing.

Yesterday I started to write this blog—I was griping about apps. Apps here, apps there, everywhere an app app.  Even coffee kiosks want you to order using an app. I was complaining because I called a company by phone—hey, the number was listed on their ad, but they asked me if I had an app. I think I did because I use their phone service, but I had never used it and didn’t know my 15-word code. They offered to guide me through it. Sometimes we want guidance. I just wanted to ask a question.

I graciously excused myself, but didn’t feel gracious.

I think I’m becoming a Curmudgeon. I’m fried like half the country.

You know how events, like technology, come along and we are so excited with them, take cell phones. What a wonderful invention. And then we have to limit their use because young people become so addicted it takes over their life.

Once, when I was a teenager, my boyfriend and I took a drive into a forest in Oregon. We had taken a logging load. I had used my folks’ car, and I got it stuck. Try as we might, we couldn’t dislodge that vehicle. So, we walked home—half the night, all the while thinking that any strange sound, a snap or a crunch, was a cougar stalking us.

We made it to a pay phone and called my folks, who still had a phone attached to the wall by a cord. (Everybody did.) My dad drove out with us the following day and got the car out easily. It’s a good thing we remembered where we had left it.

My point?

Sometimes technology is really handy. Except we are left wondering if it will save us or swallow us.

One of my favorite quotes is by the poet William Cowper. “To find the medium takes some share of wit, so tis a mark fools seldom hit.”

We’re impatient, fed up, irritated, and probably intentionally driven crazy. Of course, I am speaking for myself, but it feels right for about half the country. And I see how some people hold so tenaciously to their beliefs that wild horses couldn’t drag it out of them. But then why would wild horses want to drag anything? They want to be free. Human or critter, no one wants to be a slave.

Another take from Horne is her comment on Angie Nixon, whom she didn’t know about, nor did I, until she won the Democratic Primary for the US Senate in Florida.

“Just wow,” said Horne after she listened to Nixon being interviewed. “This young working mother and public-spirited volunteer for social justice just blew me away.”  

“Nixon is a single working mother and is now a stepmother. She is down to earth, smart, informed, and above all unafraid to listen to and otherwise engage with the people she wants to represent in Congress. The fact that she’s black is another plus.” Horne, a certifiably white person, says, "Black people, of necessity and through no choice of their own, have always understood the nature of oppression and their oppressors. And it’s about time we fully recognized that they have a whole lot to teach us about not only how to resist them, but how to take care of themselves and each other on the long, long road to freedom and dignity.”

P.S. William Cowper wrote, among many other poems and songs, “Amazing Grace,” and “The Negro’s Complaint,” 1788.

Once Upon a Jacket

 

Do you Know Where Patagonia is?

I didn’t when I bought a Patagonia jacket about 25 years ago; I only knew it was from a an exceptional company who were into recycled materials like plastic jugs.

I still have the jacket, and I know where Patagonia is.

It’s a huge part of the Southernmost region of South America, filled with a portion of the Andes Mountains, glaciers, rainforests, lakes, fjords, and deserts.  

The jacket has traveled, not to Patagonia, (I wish) but from Oregon to Hawaii, to California, and back to Oregon. I wore it when I hiked the trails on Hendricks Hill in Eugene, Oregon, with Jewell, my soul-dog, and in the evenings when it got cold in Hawaii.  I wore it while horseback riding in Marcola, Oregon. And I was wearing it when I painted the fifth-wheel trailer we had lived in for two years while our log house was being built. One day that jacket received a smear of what looked like vanilla ice cream on the back. So did our Rottweiler Gabe’s tail.

Neither ever washed off.

Both he and I were on the floor of the fifth wheel. I was painting: a dangerous combination: one dog, one person, one gallon of paint, but hey, only a dog’s tail and a jacket got the brunt of it.

We were living in the fifth wheel while our log home was being constructed some 200 feet away. Living in the forest as we were those 10 years were the greatest, both the two years in the fifth wheel where I oversaw construction daily, and the years that followed living in the log home. I even cooked a Thanksgiving meal while living in that fifth wheel trailer. I learned that if you load an outside grill with briquets, wait for the fire to get blazing hot, put a foil-wrapped stuffed turkey on the rack, close the lid, and go inside to your abode for a night of slumber to rest before preparing for the dinner the next day, you will awaken to a perfectly cooked turkey.

Imagine a video on hyper speed. Logs jumping one on top of one another, a crane named Sweet Marie, gently setting a roof atop those stacked log walls. Sweet Marie, sent to us by our magnificent log home designer, lifting the three skylights into place.

If you ever build a log home, hire a mountain climber; they know how to use ropes and pulleys. That climber, our superb finish carpenter, managed, by himself, to place a 12- foot header log over an open space where a bank of windows would set beneath.  He put those in too.

The horses came after the house was completed, and the freshly painted interior of the fifth wheel went to an elderly couple, for fun times at the ocean about 80 miles away. And when young fillies and one elderly mare were released from their paddock to careen around the log structure we called home, the young ones would gallop up the drive, and one would do a Lipizzaner’s leap, kicking out her heels in mid-air, while flying off the retaining wall.

All this came to me because I read about the company Patagonia this morning. (Anything that takes me back to the forest.)

You know, in turbulent times we need a reprieve from the chaos. And remembering good times allows our poor little nervous systems to calm themselves. People who are into “vibes” say that our remembering puts us back in the same “vibe” where we were when the event occurred. It reminds us that life goes in cycles, and while it appears that the earth and its people are sad, this is one way we can find hope.

All this over a jacket that now has a broken zipper.

Suddenly that jacket has become an icon for me.

And Patagonia, the company, is one reason I have hope for the future.

Here is Yvon Chouinard’s letter from the Patagonia website. Written on September 14, 2022:

“If we have any hope of a thriving planet—much less a business—it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have.

“I never wanted to be a businessman. I started as a craftsman, making climbing gear for my friends and myself, then got into apparel. As we began to witness the extent of global warming and ecological destruction, and our own contribution to it, Patagonia committed to using our company to change the way business was done. If we could do the right thing while making enough to pay the bills, we could influence customers and other businesses, and maybe change the system along the way.

We started with our products, using materials that caused less harm to the environment. We gave away 1% of sales each year. We became a certified B Corp and a California benefit corporation, writing our values into our corporate charter so they would be preserved. More recently, in 201 we changed the company’s purpose to: We’re in business to save our home planet.

While we’re doing our best to address the environmental crisis, it’s not enough. We needed to find a way to put more money into fighting the crisis while keeping the company’s values intact.

One option was to sell Patagonia and donate all the money. But we couldn’t be sure a new owner would maintain our values or keep our team of people around the world employed.

Another path was to take the company public. What a disaster that would have been. Even public companies with good intentions are under too much pressure to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term vitality and responsibility.

“Truth be told, there were no good options available. So, we created our own.

Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.”

 

“Earth is now our only shareholder.”

 

                                                   https://www.patagonia.com/home/

Read Yvon’s letter   Wow, would some geologist tell me how those mountains were made?     A Chilean Gaucho--a skilled horseman, said to be noble, brave and generous--and unruly.

A Short Story

 

“Like frog we are asked to know when it is time to refresh, purify, and refill the coffers of the soul.”—Medicine cards, Jamie Sims & David Carson.

 

Hey, everybody, I'm glad to have you here. You are the best to hang in with me through thick and thin, messes and cleanups, mistakes, typos, and all. I try to be good, but miss sometimes.

Okay, this has been my last few days: I took my short story, novella I had called it, off Kindle. I don't know if anyone was reading it anyway. I have no way of knowing, although data might be in the bowels of Amazon for all I know.

Now that's a disgusting thought.

Anyway, I like the story, but it needed work, so I revamped it, went over it word by word, inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph, until I gave myself a headache, and decided to give the story away for free. (Hold a bird in an open hand, or frog in this case.)

You might have read something about this story in an earlier blog, but I’m back at it, and as a writer, you know a piece of writing is never perfect. (Once a writing teacher said, “All art is flawed, which gave me hope.)

While reading about the toy frog a child has in this story, I was motivated to buy a plush CoQui frog toy off eBay this week. I had bought one when we lived in Hawaii--can't find the same one. It was cute, and when you squeezed its belly, it said its own name, “Co-Key.”

One day, one of our dogs, then a puppy, got the frog, and “Goodbye, frog.”

(I will post a picture of my frog when it arrives.)

Another idea in this book I got from Hawaii was that someone had offered a green frog toy, prettier than the brown Coquis, with the instructions to carry that frog with you on your adventures, write your adventures in its accompanying book, and give it to another traveler who will add their stories. It’s a fun idea, but those things fall flat and grind to a halt, and you never hear of them again.

Here, if you wanted, you could pretend that you are carrying a frog and a journal, and write down something funny, inspirational, or profound. We would love to read one or more of your gems.  Keep going for the link.

 

“Frog sings the songs that bring the rain and make the road dirt more bearable.”

—Medicine Cards, Jamie Sims & David Carson.

(My inspiration for using the Frog’s Song in a couple of titles.

I will post a picture of my frog when it arrives.

You may have heard me talk about the CoQui frogs of Hawaii before (an accidental import from Puerto Rico)—they are only about the size of your thumbnail, eat bugs and insects, and say their own name “CoQui,” which is to call a mate.  In mass, they can be loud, causing some to call them noise pollution, but that was not my experience. I thought they were sweet, and from a distance, innocent me who didn’t know they existed, thought they were birds.

All this is leading up to my presentation. Ta Da! In my effort to be transformational, I am presenting this short story, 5,850 words.

 

When you are in Hawaii, and you find a sign alongside the Highway saying “Voted the best café by my mother,” with an arrow pointing to a road through the cane grass. Take it.

You will bump along a lava-encrusted road with grass slapping the sides of your vehicle until it opens to a sandy beach beside a café. Above the entrance of the café, on its thatched roof, is a sign that reads, The Frog’s Song Café’. Go in, have the best sandwich you have ever tasted, and accept their invitation to a campfire at the beach, where you will find…

Well, I’m not going to tell you; read the book.

 

Click for Page and to read the book

The Gatekeepers

 

Notice, I left the gate open.

I was rewriting old novels, editing. I don’t know if they’re real novels or practice ones, so far, they haven’t caught an agent's attention. Some say it’s harder to get an agent than it is to write the book in the first place, or even to get a publisher. But folks, if you are a writer, remember most of the books that make it have been rejected numerous times, even Harry Potter. Can you imagine those agents who rejected Harry Potter crying in their soup nightly because they missed it? Fifteen percent of a zillion bucks is what? Probably a billion.

About 20 years ago, when we lived in California, I took a workshop from a Screenplay agent in LA. At the time, my daughter and I were toying with a script. That agent, with her young daughter standing beside her the entire talk, said that agents invite a bunch of creative writing students to go through the slush pile. (Their stack of unsolicited manuscripts). First, they set them all in a room, throw in a pizza and packet of rejection slips, and lock the door.

That’s it.

I suspect it’s about the same with books. Maybe it has changed since publishers have more competition now that many authors are self-publishing their books and Indie publishers have best-sellers. I have the problem of thinking that few people want to spend the money on books with price tags publishers demand, but readers of Harry Potter must have forked out that money when the Harry Potter books were first released. And hey, who doesn’t want to believe in magic?

The success of JK Rowling and Harry Potter are not to be tampered with.

I don’t know why I began this blog as I did. I guess I am following my own advice to my grandson. Just begin writing, I told him, and see where it takes you.

He came up with a brilliant idea but doesn’t know how to implement it. He had compared what he calls “Culture,” meaning the youth of today, which includes artists, furies, Trans, and computer game creators, with religion. He says both wanted to give the people hope, and while religion says you can have it, you can find God, peace, salvation, all of those, he says Culture wants the same, but they believe it’s impossible.

That was so sad, a defeatist attitude, to want to express yourself only to believe you will never be successful at it.

That is the legacy we have given our young people.

He says he wants to give people HOPE.

That’s what I want too.

When I was editing those novels, and at home discussing theme, plot, the deciding moment, and the old saying that without conflict you have no story, I thought, I need to write a new book maybe it will hit the refresh button on my brain.

What if I, instead of following the convention that you must put your protagonist through hell, write a book where things work out? Yeah, yeah, I know, one must struggle first before events work out. But isn’t hope what we want? Don’t we want to believe that good is waiting for us—that life will get better?  And what about attitude and the belief that much is accomplished with a glad heart? Did we lose sight of those?

Is that boring? Think of the book Chicken Soup for the Soul. It stayed on the Best Seller List for 4 years.  What about Robert Fulghum's book, Everything I Know I Learned in Kindergarten which stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for two years. And I loved the recent book Theo of Golden, basically uplifting—not that people didn’t have troubles, or were sad, but it was enchanting. You think people don’t want good news?

Every time I open my computer, it spits something depressing at me.  I’m tired of the Government's rabble. I’m tired bitching, snipping, and arguing. I want something that shows the goodness in people.

Are You Guys’ Writers?

 Are you guys’ writers?

I know you are readers, for you are here. Thank you. I appreciate you immensely.

I am encouraging reading and writing. Don’t let either go away. Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books, you just have to get people not to read them.”

Don’t do that. Keep on reading. Keep on writing. Both are good for that beautiful brain of yours.

“In times of crisis,” I read this morning in the Epoch Times: “it’s easy for your mind to feel bombarded—notifications, headlines, endless scrolling. It feels like information overload, but science shows it’s worse: shallow, fragmented content actually changes your brain, training it for distraction.”

I know that extended, focused reading is good for the brain. A study published in Neuroscience News shows that consistent cognitive engagement such as reading can even delay cognitive decline by years.

“What you feed your brain defines how it performs. Shallow content trains distraction. Deep, quality reading trains focus and insight.”

We need to delve into something of substance once in a while, immerse ourselves. Perhaps I should write longer blogs. But people have little time, so they want to get through information quickly. I suggest you use your precious leisure time to read a book. Savor it. Devour it.  And after that, write out your feelings, frustrations, blessings. Your life has meaning; it deserves your attention.

I was so excited yesterday after completing Suzanne Redfearn's novel Where Butterflies Wander, especially after she explained in the author’s comments following the book how she came to write it and how it morphed along the way. It fell in step with a discussion I had with my grandson the night before on what a theme is, a plot, should you write the ending first, those sorts of things. As she was writing her novel, she found an article in a magazine about a man in a cabin, squatting on someone’s land, and used that idea in her book. It gave her story backbone she said. And it gave her an ending. I wanted to tell somebody, but it was met with crickets, and I realized, once again, that discovery gives its gift to the one who finds it. Plus, you must jump on an idea while it’s hot; otherwise, it flies away with the wild ducks.

 It seemed pertinent that the two books I completed in the morning, that is not normal for me, were by the same author, Suzanne Redfearn. In April I mentioned Walking the Camino, and now I am talking about Where the Butterflies Wander.

When my girls were starting school, and I was reading about alternative education, I came upon the book, Education and Ecstasy. The author asked if we had ever, in our 12,16 or 18 years of schooling, had a teacher who believed learning was ecstasy. That’s the way learning ought to be, but mine wasn’t during those early years.  (That book is on Amazon; by George B Leonard, I just looked it up. Yep, printed in the 60s. That sounds right.)

That book just popped into my mind. That’s the way the brain works, and the way I wrote my memoir, like a mountain stream that splashes against rocks, beavers dam it up, the water breaks free, logs fall into it, but I trust the river knows where it is going and will take us there with it. (To the Source.)

It may sound ludicrous to say I’m writing a memoir, I'm not illustrious. I’ve never been to Mars. I’m not a celebrity, had a near-death experience, or chewed off my arm stuck on a mountain. However, I trust Natalie Goldberg when she said everybody ought to write a memoir, and it doesn’t have to be your life story. It can be any moment. It can be for those moments that take your breath away.

I wanted to visit my little girl self again, the one who could jump rope and run, and fearlessly jump onto a horse’s bare back. I wanted to visit my father again, who left for the Second World War, but I didn’t see him again until 38 years later.

I wished my ancestors had been more expressive. That way I would know how my grandmother responded when her 16-year-old daughter informed her that she was pregnant.

They had their thoughts and the right to privacy, but then those thoughts and feelings died with them.

I’m up to 70,000 words.

  

I agree that these are tough times, so was the war. However, then we didn’t have a society built on fear. We didn’t have a would-be dictator. We believed that our President was pulling with us. We still believed in democracy.

Now, there are many Americans who ought to be ashamed of themselves.

 

A moment of Reprieve:

Let us be as gentle and loving as this Momma Goat protecting her baby at the Lane county Fair in Eugene, Oregon. 

 

 

"The Miracle of Deliverance."

I would volunteer to drive a car full of ballots from Oregon to Washington, D.C., and dump them in the Oval Office if that were possible, and I bet there is someone in every zip code of the United States who would do the same.  

Fill that office with the words of the citizens that we do not want a dictator to run our country. Period.

Think of it:  trucks, armored vehicles, and private cars making a run to Washington. There would be so many, highway patrol, Homeland Security, whoever has jurisdiction, wouldn’t know who carried ballots and who didn’t. Maybe Amazon Prime could do it.

This fantasy came to me the other night when I went to bed fearing we would not have a fair and honest mid-term election. I saw that the President is taking whatever steps he can to ensure that as many voters who would vote against him are stymied. Of course, there are other means at their disposal.

I thought of all the escaped slaves who saved other slaves. They didn’t wait for permission.

We No-King-Marchers have our little marches, and what happens? The more the light shines, the more the harbingers of evil have their hissy fits and clamp down on whatever freedoms they can get their hands on.

We, the people, take to the streets, some 9 million strong, to protest the happenings coming out of Washington, D.C. But he’s still there.

We try to obey the laws, to be courteous, to speak our piece, only to see it trampled. We are playing by two separate sets of rules.

Remember the WWII Dunkirk, France rescue? Oh, you don’t remember? Neither do I, but I read about it, in a novel, can you believe, how the Germans cut off and surrounded 338,000 soldiers, forcing the British, French, Dutch, and Allies into a narrow corridor of sea in Dunkirk. There they were, stuck, either to perish or to be captured.

The harbor was too shallow for the big ships to navigate it. Winston Churchill thought they could evacuate maybe 20,000 of the men.

The British civilians rallied.

People who owned pleasure crafts, dinghies, fishing boats, lifeboats, and yachts navigated the harbor back and forth to pick up soldiers who were standing in cold shoulder-high water waiting to be rescued. Those civilian pilots drove from May 27, 1940, to June 4, 1940, through the harbor of Dunkirk stopping only for petrol, until all 338,000 men were delivered to the big ships.

 

 

 

All 338,000 men were rescued in what was called “The Miracle of Deliverance.” or "The Little Boats." 

It was not a military victory, but it was a human one."

  

 

  

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”—Margaret Mead

A Fabulous Peck on the Cheek, Next Week a Kick in the Pants

Sunday, July 12, 2026

 This was when the house was arriving-

I got such a kick out of an event that happened this week, well, two of them. I’m of the sort who, when I see or taste something stupendous, I have to run out and tell someone. You know, when we taste something really superb, we offer a bite to our spouse or friend, and say, “Oh, this is so good, here, try this.” The same works, though, if we taste something awful, “Augh, this is terrible, here taste this.”

Okay, first off, this is about moving our tiny house:

One reason I thought this driver was so superb was that I used to drive a pickup truck pulling a horse trailer, and whenever I needed to back it up, I broke out in a sweat. So, when the moving fellow said he would back his truck into our gravel driveway that runs alongside our regular drive and back to where the tiny house is parked under an RV- high roof, I said, “No way you can back into there.”

He said he could do it, and he did. He had changed his mind about using the Mule—a remote-controlled small tractor, and decided to use the truck instead.

Amazing. With a truck a half a block long, the cab reaching into the branches of our Magnolia tree alongside the driveway, carrying the Mule in a space behind the cab, and pulling a trailer longer than our house, he made it back to within inches of the tiny house.

The creative-thinking driver, with his magic trailer and remote-control device, lowered the back of the trailer to the ground, much like the bucket on a Bobcat, except it was 12 feet wide. He scooched the trailer loading ramp under the 4 x 4’s that supported the house, lifted, scooted, lifted, scooted until suddenly wheels appeared from beneath the trailer like landing gear descending from beneath an airplane, and settled in under the house.  With his remote control, the operator moved the entire house sideways to within an inch of the fence on one side and an inch to a tree limb on the other. He even cut a limb with his chainsaw and kept adjusting the house to line it up perfectly with the narrow driveway.  

A tight fit--top roof be gone.

When the house was completely off the ground and onto that trailer, he got in the truck and drove it out.

We still have the tiny house.

It’s parked in our graveled driveway.

We can show it for sale there and have it moved again when we get a a buyer. That tiny house is no longer trapped under that RV high overhead. We had to remove its roof to make space to lift the house, because dragging it out was dangerous.  

Want to buy a tiny house?

 

Don’t put your mother-in-law in it, unless she is very agile, for the bed, a full, brand new mattress is on rollers and slides easily under the raised kitchen floor. That arrangement is enormously better than the cramped loft, the only thing that was in the bare-boards house when we bought it. (Daughter Dear thought a tiny house would be a contribution to inexpensive housing. And it was her art project.)

She got rid of that loft right away—too claustrophobic. Now the building is insulated, beautifully plastered, and has a large tiled shower and a complete bathroom.

One of the contractors told us we could rent it for about $800 a month. Rent it out on Airbnb it,or live in it. Daughter Dear doesn’t have time to work on it anymore, and rather than have a carpenter come in and finish it, she figured that the owners could have a discount to purchase it if they complete it. That way they can put their own stamp on it.)

All the component parts are included except for a kitchen counter, and some elbow grease —you choose the counter. Being a tile aficionado, my daughter tiled the entire wall, in light brick above the kitchen cabinets. The bamboo flooring is provided, half in the bathroom is complete. There is slate tile for the kitchen. The sink, refrigerator, stove, faucets, lights, room heater, hot water heater, and a new mattress are provided.  The wiring was professionally installed. Water can be provided from a faucet. Toilet and drains need to be plumbed beneath the house. With an extension cord, a garden hose, and a composting toilet, it could be self- sufficient, provided you could dispose of gray water. You know, like in that back 40.

Door tile detail. 

 And now, the second magnificent find this week: It’s a love story as told to me a long time ago by a member of my family.

 

One thing about being a writer is that you find pages you wrote years ago and forgot about them, so when you find them, it’s a surprise. I found this old story, tucked away in the garage. It was the inside pages to a Newsletter I wrote ages ago.

My family member who is no longer with us, said it was about her sister.

When the sister was 28 years old and had just left a romantic relationship, she decided she knew there was one thing she wanted. That was a child.

So, when an old boyfriend rolled into town, she took advantage of the situation, struck up another rendezvous, became pregnant, and was prepared to be a single mother.

The baby was born at 28 weeks of gestation, had problems for a time, but survived, grew, and was healthy.

Sister rented an apartment (Where? I don’t know, this sounds like New York). The apartment was on the third floor, a walk-up. The owners, a Jewish couple, lived on the first floor, the second was rented, and the sister had the third.

The owners agreed to care for the baby while sister worked, and they decided they had another task. That was finding a husband for sister.

When the second-floor tenant left, leaving the apartment available, the owners held out on renting it until they had the perfect tenant. That left the apartment vacant for quite some time. The sister thought it just didn’t rent.

But then it did. To a nice single man.

One day, after her sister picked up her baby from the owners on the first floor, she walked from the second to the third. The man saw her upstairs, fumbling with her keys as she tried to get into her apartment while holding the baby. She had just had her wisdom tooth extracted and was swollen up like a cantaloupe. On top of that, she had Bell’s Palsy, which causes one side of the face to droop. (Some people recover from this, some don’t.)

The man came up behind her and said, “You look awful. Let me hold the baby for you so you can get some rest.”

They fell in love and got married.

The Jewish couple paid for the wedding.