Marching Forward,
To the Ides and Beyond...

March 1st is Rhetta's birthday. Rhetta has been my friend since February 1984, when I moved to Clarkston, Washington after completing my master's degree and started working where she worked- Child Protective Services or CPS.

Rhetta showed me the ropes, and shared her insights about just about everything- she loves to share life. When I was pregnant for Kira she was going to be the person to watch Carrie when I went into labor, however Kira had other ideas. Even though I had stopped working a month before my due date in order to catch my breath, I was awakened on Good Friday by my water breaking- my first thought being "Oh shit". So much for a break, I think it was the second day of my "leave". Rhetta was in Spokane and Carrie's day care at the college was closed for the holiday (a private college). We scrambled and things turned out fine...

Rhetta has always been there for me. I have watched her over the years, learning so much about the meaning of friendship from her. Thank you Rhetta.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY- HAVE A GREAT ONE!

"Certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big."- William James

I tend to have more than one book that I am reading at any given time. I read in fits and starts, digesting bits as I go. Jay gave me Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac on Valentine's Day last year and now I have finally finished it.

Aldo was amazing, so far ahead of his time and so articulate in his concerns:

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."

"Robinson's injunction to Tristram may well be applied, at this juncture, to Homo sapiens as a species in geological time:

Whether you will or not
You are a King, Tristram, for you are one
Of the time-tested few that leave the world,
When they are gone, not the same place it was.
Mark what you leave."

Aldo was born in Iowa, educated at Yale. He was born in 1887 and died in 1948 while fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's farm. He was one of the original founders of the Wilderness Society.

Rainbow picture courtesy of my co-worker Mary Bradley. It was taken in Oso, WA by her daughter-in-law on 3/1/04.

"We must believe in free will. We have no other choice."- Isaac Bashevis Singer

More blast from the past stuff- O'Keefe painting links to January 2002 page reconstructed...

"We are torn between the craving to know and the despair of having known."- Dr. Carl Sagan

Okay, indulgence is nice- thank you.
The logo at left links to my last recovered page from AOL and YAHOO created many moons ago. There are four or five more out there... later. :)

"If Garp could have been granted one vast and naive wish, it would have been that he could make the world safe. For children and for grownups. The world struck Garp as unnecessarily perilous for both."- John Irving

Click on the picture above to link to a site with cartoons about the current Martha Stewart stuff...

"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."- Mark Twain

This morning NPR had a story about how some "right-winged" groups are trying to affect the Sierra Club's agenda by joining the group even though they do not agree with the group's goals. Apparently they are opposed to the Sierra Club's views on immigration and say that the group used to be against population growth so they should be against immigration. Hmmm... I do remember the 1970's, the "Zero Population Growth" movement. Don't remember it having anything to do with immigration. In fact I remember it being about limiting how many progeny you create- it was in favor of at least birth control, if not abortion. I wonder if the infiltrators are in favor of those things- not likely.

It seems to me a sad state of affairs when those whose message is not adequate to convert stoop to this... I was thinking that maybe I should join the NRA and run for office there, have an anti-gun platform and recruit "left-wingers" to join the group and vote for me.

The world is familiar with the tactics, the strong-arming when the veracity of the agrument is not sufficient in and of itself. These are the rigidities that lead to war. These are the beliefs, based so deeply in righteousness, that are willing to subvert their own stated principles in order to force their beliefs upon others. Sigh...

"For you- 'My county right or wrong' is like saying, 'My mother drunk or sober.'"- G. K. Chesterton

Enlarging the question of what would ___ do? And begging the question itself- ideas of moral superiority rarely increase the morality of actions of any group. We are all more alike than different...

Whew!! Another old page recovered and renewed... early to mid November 2001. Click on the painting...

"If I have learnt anything, it is that life forms no logical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?"- Margot Fonteyn

I worked at Ypsilanti State Hospital from 1975 until late 1981. A number of co-workers during that time had family or were themselves originally from south of Michigan- like maybe Kentucky, Tennessee or Virginia. Their language and expressions were colorful and I enjoyed listening to them very much.

A supervisor I worked with in the late '70s on the medical floor, loved her coffee. She loved it strong and had two sayings about how she liked her coffee: "Coffee isn't coffee unless it can float a quarter." and "Coffee isn't coffee unless it stands up and says 'Howdy!'".

I have repeated those sayings of her's many a time...

I also include this picture of an Ypsilanti landmark- the unusually designed water tower. I guess it was built in 1890 and is still in use, holding 250,000 gallons of water. The design was by William Coats. I always did like the shape...

A lot of folks originally from the south worked at Ypsi State Hospital because their families had moved to Ypsitlanti during WWII to work at the "bomber factory". Click on the bomber picture for more historical info...

"We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause."- William James

I met with a guy a while back who was considered a difficult client because he drank, got nasty and scarey, and would get kicked out of programs and then show up again demanding services. It was all true.

When I met with him he reported that he had been clean and sober a few months, and we discussed his history and his abuse of alcohol and of others. I told him he needed to keep his shit together, go to AA and follow the steps. Clients like this look at me as if they wonder what the hell I know. A couple of times I have followed up that look with: "My eighteen year old daughter has been clean and sober 9 months." It stops them cold. They know what that means. Sometimes they tell me they are sorry, as if my plight was of their own making. This man became earnest, telling me that he indeed wanted to maintain sobriety because he now had a grandson to think about.

I told him up straight and very simple: "That's good, because both you and your son are alcoholics. Your grandson will most likely have trouble with alcohol, maybe in his teens, and what will matter then is not that his dad and grandpa are alcoholics- what will matter is what he saw you do about it." We talked a bit more and then the gal who was going to be his paid caregiver came in. I told her that he needed help with several things but that the thing he needed the most help with was something no one paid her for- that he needed help staying clean and sober because he was a mean and nasty drunk. He shook his head in agreement and said it was true.

After I mailed his paperwork to him to sign he left me a voice mail saying that he appreciated the assessment and how I didn't just say bad things about him. He also said he wished I wasn't transferring his case, that "those things you said, it helped me". I transferred his case and haven't seen him since.

I haven't seen Kira since Christmas. Haven't talked to her in five and a half weeks. She does not return my messages. She started her sobriety 9/11/02. I hope and pray that it continues, but I have no control over that. Yet, still, it is hard to let go and trust in the process. It is hard, even one day at a time.

I have finished Richard Adams' book, The Plague Dogs, and I give you some excerpts to savor...

"Dreams, then, are bubbles, rising buoyant through the enveloping element of sleep; and for all we know, too numerous to be marked and remembered by the sleeper, who upon his awakening catches only one here or there, as a child in autumn may catch a falling leaf out of all the myriads twirling past him."

"Freedom- that consuming goal above doubt or criticism... I will come to you as the male spider to the female, as the explorer to the upper reaches of the great river upon which he knows he will die before ever he wins through to the estuary... For we are free- free to suffer every anguish of deliberation, of decisions which must be made upon suspect information and half-knowledge, every anguish of hindsight and regret, of failure, shame and responsibility for all we have brought upon ourselves and others: free to struggle, to starve, to demand from all one last, supreme effort to reach where we long to be and, once there, to concede that it is not, after all, the right place. For a great price obtained I this freedom, to wish to God I had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when I sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full. The tyrant wasn't such a bad old bugger, and even in his arbitrary rages never killed as many as died in yesterday's glorious battle for liberty. Will you return to him then? Ah no, sweet Freedom, I will slave for you... Then I will curse you and die... And, Freedom, was I free?"

"The world, he now perceived, was in fact a great, flat wheel with a myriad of spokes of water, trees and grass, for ever turning and turning beneath the sun and moon. At each spoke was an animal- all the animals and birds he had ever known... and many more which he did not recognize... At the centre, on the axle itself, stood a man, who ceaselessly lashed and lashed the creatures with a whip to make them drive the wheel round. Some shrieked aloud as they bled... And yet, as he himself could see, the man had misconceived his task, for in fact the wheel turned of itself and all he needed to do was to keep it balanced upon its delicate axle..."

It is a good book, harder to read than Watership Down because of both its subject (animal experimentaion) and its heavier heart...

"We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive."- Leopold, Aldo: Round River, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993.

Ah... yet another lost page captured and tethered back to my site.

My third page, late October and early November 2001: The Continuing Saga.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.- Antoine de Saint Exupery

Click on the pictures...

Why you need a 401k...

"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there."- Richard Feynman

Q: Did anything Morrie said lead to the storyline of "Five People"?

A: As a matter of fact, yes. Morrie often told a story about waves, and how when they hit the shore they ceased to exist - unless you realized that, in truth, they weren't really waves at all, they were part of the ocean. Morrie saw himself that way, as part of something connected to a bigger humanity. In the Five People, I sort of explore that idea, that we are all connected to each other in ways we don't even realize, and that perhaps, when your life is over, you may find out all the other "waves" in this big ocean that you affected without even knowing it.

Mary gave me the book "the five people you meet in heaven" to read. I liked it a lot.

Everything has meaning. Context is everything. What is the context of life?

Each person is in your life for a reason.

If we could untangle the mysteries of life and unravel the energies, which run through the world; if we could evaluate correctly the significance of passing events; if we could measure the struggles, dilemmas, and aspirations of mankind, we could find that nothing is born out of time. Everything comes at its appointed moment.- Joseph R. Sizoo

I met a man recently. He was nice, and articulate. He sat in his recliner, plastic tubing helping the oxygen get into his lungs. He explained to me how he had lived in California, that just a few years ago he and his wife were in the car, himself driving. All of the sudden she slumped over. "We were only five minutes from the hospital so I turned around and drove right there. They tried to revive her for a couple of hours, but they couldn't." He told me that, yes, those were pictures of her above him on the wall. The sienna colors of times past, the young, smooth skin. "Beautiful? Well, she was young then!" Yes, I guess we all were beautiful, then.

He told me how they had diagnosed him with cancer last week, that it was in multiple areas of his body and so when he met with his oncologist later this week he was expecting that little would be done by way of treatment- they already had said that he was not strong enough to tolerate radiation. "Yes, and at 86 I am old enough."

Old enough to die. Life had been good to him. Old enough to die. Simple enough.
Yes, Grasshopper.

Gentleness is not a quality exclusive to women.- Helen Reddy

And so the radio tells us each morning of the road bomb that has gone off, or the suicide bomber, or another permutation offering the same, and how many more have died- how many Americans, how many of whatever nationality, and how many children.

This game is one whose rules I have a hard time understanding. When is the game over? Do you win when you're dead? Do you win when the others have died at your hands? What do you win? Why are we playing this game? To decide who is right about God? When the game is over, will it be over- or will it start again? When will it be enough blood?

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it all. This is not a statement about Bush, Republicans, Capitalism, Jews, Palestinians, Jihad, veils for women, circumcision or the Pope. It is about war. Period.
How much blood is enough?

"You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist."- Indira Gandhi (1917 - 1984)