After Joe and I returned home from our Boy Scout Camp experience and delivered the children to their mother in Chicago Heights, IL, I discovered I was expecting. It wasn't particularly welcome news. We had only been married seven or eight months and were already having some pretty critical "issues". Separately...secretly...I think we both wondered if bringing a child into the mix was a wise idea, but for different reasons. Joe, however, was the only one who said out loud that he wanted me to have an abortion. He already had two children by his first marriage. I had none but always wanted to be a mother...and we WERE married, for Pete's sake. I had already sacrificed some significant things to be with him. I wasn't willing to sacrifice our child, too. We had some serious, tearful discussions over a period of a week or two. It was abundantly clear to me that if I did as he wished, I would never feel the same about him again, and our marriage was doomed. I didn't threaten that--just felt it in my heart. Finally, he acquiesced by saying something like, "I don't want to lose our marriage over this, so I think we should just move forward with the pregnancy and make the best of it." That's what I wanted to hear!
I made an appointment with an OB/GYN group of three young doctors. The baby's due date was established for April 23, 1979. In those days, pregnancy wasn't covered by insurance unless it had complications that required surgery. (Not sure if insurance companies now cover pregnancy. They should!) We were given a bill of just over $600 which had to be paid in full before the due date. We managed it, since we were both teaching...but I worried about what we would be cutting out of our non-existent budget to get it paid. Also in those days, ultrasound technology was very new. Doctors only ordered ultrasounds for high risk pregnancies--which would include mothers over age 35. I was only 31 with no complications, so we weren't blessed with knowing the gender of our baby. The doctor who saw me the most during my monthly appointments guessed "female" due to the heartbeat of the baby. (Apparently females have a faster heart rate.) The doc said he was about 80% accurate. We'd have to wait and see!
My pregnancy was remarkably devoid of nasty things. For example, I had NO morning sickness. I wasn't turned off by tastes or smells. I didn't crave anything. Wonderful! I did gain weight fairly quickly, though, prompting Joe to ask the doctor if that should be happening. The doctor's response was, "Generally speaking, the more weight the mother gains, the healthier the baby." I actually outgrew my first round of maternity clothes and had to buy more in a larger size. That should have clued me in that I was putting on FAT, not just baby weight, but I was inexperienced in those things and didn't have a clue!
That winter turned out to be almost tragic. Joe's father, in Greencastle, IN, had to have a prostate surgical procedure. At the very same time, my mother was in the hospital in Streator, IL, getting cancerous polyps removed from her bladder. We couldn't be in either place by way of support because Joe had abdominal pain. When I took him to the ER, they decided that he needed to have an appendectomy. In those days, an appendectomy required a 6-inch incision. (Not the laparoscopic thing that they do now.) I taught school by day; went to the hospital to be with Joe after school; and called both Joe's family and my own at night to check up on everyone. I was five months pregnant at the time but barely showing. Each night, I would call Joe in the hospital to talk. This episode caused him to become softer and grateful for my dedication to him when he was down. It was new territory for us. One evening, he was feeling better. He hadn't had anything to eat by mouth for a few days while they waited for his guts to make noises. He told me to bring fried chicken when I came to see him the next day. I thought he was joking. Imagine my surprise when he was actually angry with me for not bringing the chicken! Thankfully, that evening, the doctor decided that Joe could have a "low residue" meal which included steak. I was saved!
In a week's time, I brought Joe home. He rested comfortably for a couple of days, then he started to run a fever and his incision began to hurt more than it should have...and turned colors. Instead of getting better each day, he got worse. Back to the doctor who re-admitted him to the hospital due to an infection at the incision site. Each day, they ran tubes into his incision to irrigate the area to flush out infection. Fluids went in and nasty stuff came out. I guess he cursed a nurse, at one point. I'm glad I wasn't there for that! I was upset with his doctor, however. When I inquired what would cause an infection, he took it as criticism and informed me, in no uncertain terms, that surgery in a bowel area was risky, at best. I wasn't implying malpractice. I was just curious. Whatever!
Joe was in the hospital for ten days the second time. His roommate, Carl, was a fellow who was undergoing chemotherapy for bone cancer. Joe commented that the poor guy was up vomiting on a regular basis. One evening when I visited Joe, Carl's priest was visiting Carl. His comment to me, quietly as he was leaving, was that Carl wouldn't be with us all that much longer. In the two-week duration of hospital stays, my condition had gone from barely-showing to obvious. The hospital provided Carl with a bagged snack every day, consisting of a sandwich and something else. He could tell that I was running myself ragged and he had no stomach for the bagged snack. He offered it to me, saying "I haven't touched it. I promise." When I quizzed him about why touching it would matter, he said, "You'd be surprised at how many people think cancer is contagious." I ached for him. I graciously accepted his offering and ate every crumb!
While all of this was happening, we were entering the Christmas season. I needed to get a Christmas tree and get it home without my husband. I managed. (I was so proud of myself!) Then the blizzard of 1979 hit. Neither Joe nor I were in any condition to shovel snow. I don't know how we managed, but we did. The tree got put up and we got dug out.
As soon as Joe felt better, we had to get cracking on a nursery for the baby. The house we were renting had only two bedrooms upstairs. Ours was one. The other was to be part guest room and part nursery. There was a tiny space under the stairs on the bottom floor to put another kid in... (Eric was elected.) We decided to paint the stairway and the guest room. There was my just-recovering-from-surgery husband on a scaffold, painting the stairwell...while I rolled paint on the walls of the bedroom. Both of us were shocked when the paint that we had just applied started peeling off in big sheets! Whaaaat?? Since we had bought the paint from Sherwin Williams, we went to them for advice. They sent a representative to the house. It was finally determined that the paint already on the walls was calcimine paint that is water based with chalk. We very quickly determined that the cheapest way to go was just to roll water on the walls and strip what peeled. It wasn't fun.
My parents had a tradition to buy a grandchild's crib. We settled on a dark wood Jenny Lind crib for the baby. We put that up in the nursery/guest room sometime during the winter. But we had lots of time before due date, so we weren't too concerned. It was agreed that my mother would come to help when the baby was born. I definitely would need her!
Later in the pregnancy, I couldn't breathe well. The baby was somehow positioned in my rib cage that I needed a pillow at my back to throw my stance to make it easier to breathe without pain. Joe took me to a nice Italian restaurant for my birthday in early March. I was hungry, but I couldn't eat everything. There were too many things taking up space in my belly!!
One weekend in late March, my stepchildren and my in-laws came to visit. That was a first! I'm not totally sure where we put everyone. I think Eric slept in the under-stair room. The grandparents were probably put in the guest room, and Stephanie was probably slated for the couch. I simply don't remember. I do remember that Stephanie (age 8 by this time) and I were engaged in some craft project. We had a good time. That night, we all gathered in the TV room to watch Larry Bird take the Indiana State University Sycamores to a victory in the state semi-finals. Joe was an ISU alumn. The house was electric with victory! I, however, was very tired. My belly just ached down low...like carrying the baby weight was too much. I fell asleep on the couch even with my company there. Around 10:30, everyone decided to go to bed. That's when the fun began.
There was one bathroom in the house. Joe was on the pot, but I suddenly felt like I had wet my pants. I commanded the throne, just to determine what was going on. My water broke! And as I sat on the toilet, I became aware that there were other signs that labor had started. I instantly started having contractions...and the contractions were about 2 1/2 minutes apart. This should not be happening! Joe and I had taken LaMaze classes. We knew that first babies should take forever to be born. Contractions would start at MANY minutes apart and gradually get closer...but mine were close already. Joe, who had been drinking beer all evening with the basketball game, decided to take a shower and make a pot of coffee. I decided I would just go to bed and get "a good night's sleep". We were timing contractions which were getting closer by the minute. Joe thought we should go to the hospital. I thought we were being foolish. Our baby wasn't due for a month yet. Nothing was going the way I had been told to expect!
Finally, I told Joe to call the doctor. He did, then handed me the phone. I told Dr. Goldstone (on call) that my water had broken, and I had contractions that were 2 1/2 minutes apart. His indignant response was, "What are you calling ME for?" I asked, "What should I do?" He said, "Go to the hospital!" Duh....
We woke Joe's folks to tell them we were leaving for the hospital and ask that they watch over Eric and Stephanie while we were gone. Helen, God bless her, asked if there was anything she could do to help. I said, "Yes! You go! I'm not ready for this!" She laughed about that for years.
The date was March 24th...and it was snowing. The hospital was 45 minutes away. It was gettin close to midnight as we drove through the dark, but I was hanging on by my fingernails. Contractions were very strong and very close together. I was pre-registered at the hospital, thanks to our LaMaze class, but I still had to sign some papers because it appeared that my baby would be premature. I was taken up to a hospital room while Joe was detained elsewhere. When the nurse in charge checked me, it was determined that I was ready to deliver! I heard the nurse say, "When Mr. McNary gets here, get him suited up." The nurse offhandedly said to me, when I complained about not being ready, "It's always the ones who aren't ready who go the fastest!"
I was taken to delivery and told to push when I felt the urge. I never felt the urge! With each contraction, I was told to push, and in between contractions, they poked and prodded me. It hurt! At one point, I sucked up instead of bore down. The nurse yelled at me. "Get in control, young lady!" The joke was on her. I was in complete control! I pushed and pushed and pushed, and nothing happened. Finally, the doctor decided to use forcepts to deliver my child. (Just another painful deal.) I heard him say, "Well, here's a hand." Apparently, my child had her head tilted the wrong way for an easy delivery, and one of her hands was in the birth canal.
Although Joe and I had never talked about it, I wasn't averse to having pain meds to relieve delivery pain. Unfortunately, I was too far into labor when I got to the hospital to be offered pain-relieving drugs. Unwittingly, I gave birth without anesthesia. I felt every contraction and every stitch. Suddenly, we had a girl baby! I was totally elated that I had survived childbirth!
Our baby arrived a month ahead of time, yet she weighed 6 pounds, 11 ounces. A keeper! When I went to the recovery room, my legs wouldn't stop shaking. No one told me to expect that.. Then Joe and I had the task of naming our child. Since she was a month early, we hadn't settled on names yet, but the nurse was bugging us for a name. We quickly decided on Megan Elizabeth. Megan Elizabeth McNary seemed so fitting. (Had she been a boy, I'm not sure we could have agreed on a name so readily.)
When I was finally taken to a room, I was so elated that I couldn't sleep! I sent Joe home. He got there in the early hours of the morning, in time to make a pot of cofffee and be there when everyone woke up. Stephanie asked where I was. Joe told her that I was in the hospital and had delivered her sister. She apparently didn't believe him and searched all over the house looking for me!
In the meantime, the hospital nurse delivered my child to me. As she held Megan, she said, "This is a pretty baby. I have seen a lot of babies in this hospital, so I know a pretty baby when I see one...and this is a pretty baby!" I agreed! Megan Elizabeth McNary, born at Ingalls Memorial Hospital in Harvey, IL, on March 25, 1979, became the love of my life. That love has only been usurped by the birth of my grandchildren.
Joe and I did not survive as a couple, but my memories of my daughter's birth will never leave me. Her 33rd birthday approaches. I love you, Megan!
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
March 25, 1979
My daughter was conceived in a Boy Scout camp! (I know, too much information!) My then-husband Joe and I were area directors at the camp for the summer...and, well, there was no TV so we had to find ways to entertain ourselves...
Actually, no. That was the joke that we told people. Megan WAS conceived while we were there, but not because we were bored. The whole summer camp experience was pretty miserable. Let me back up...
Joe and I were married in December of 1977. We were both educators, living in a rented Craftman house in a little town called Monee, IL., and were looking for summer jobs after school was out. I happened to see an ad somewhere that the Rainbow Council, BSA, was looking for people (teachers) to work at their camp near Morris, IL, so we applied. They REALLY wanted Joe as Program Director because he was a former Boy Scout and a former school principal. They decided I could be the camp Nurse, if I would take a first aide course, but then changed their minds and made me the Ecology Director. We had to attend National Camp School for the BSA--a week-long camping experience--in order to qualify. Unfortunately, the only Camp School that was close enough for us to get to was in eastern Ohio, and the only offering that was available to us before our camp actually started was when school was still in session. Joe decided that we should just go and take the days as sick days from school. Like no one would notice that we were both gone at the same time for five days????
At first, the national scout executives told the local scout executive that had hired us that NCS had no facilities for women and that I couldn't attend. Supposedly, he told them that they'd have to "get over it" because they would be unable to keep me out. (These were Women's Lib times.) When we got to camp, I had to laugh. Facilities? Surely they jested! We were issued a bottomless canvas tent, and two cots. The only restroom was an outhouse. I shared the tent with my husband and made sure the outhouse door was locked when I used it. No biggie!
My presence in camp did cramp the guys' style some. On the first night there, we were divided into patrols (or platoons, or something) and each group was to come up with a name. One group was told that they had to clean up their act because a lady was present. Why? Their chant was, "Eat a beaver; save a bush"! Still, by the time the week was over, I had been accepted. Thus, I became the first woman in America to attend National Camp School for the BSA!
When we hit home after that, we were asked to explain our joint absence from school. The school district wasn't too fond of our excuse, so we were both docked a week's pay. Ouch! We were scraping by as it was! Stupid us!
One of us--not sure if it was Joe or me--decided to invite Joe's two children (Stephanie and Eric) to join us for the duration of the summer camp experience. Stephanie was 6 and Eric was 8. I was a brand new stepmother with virtually NO experience in mothering! The kids' mother agreed to let them come. She also had a summer job, so the children's being with us was going to help her out. We compiled a huge list of things we wanted the children to have. Their mom objected to all of the "requirements". (Years later, I understood the added expense to her budget. Joe didn't.) We were issued a three-bedroom cabin in the woods. The kids' bedrooms had bunkbeds. Ours didn't. In any case, we prepared for what we thought would be the experience of a lifetime for us and the kids.
Just before school ended and camp started, Joe left our Irish setter in the car on a hot May day "for just a little bit" while he had lunch with co-workers...and she died. He raced her to a vet but she could not be revived. Then he had to come and tell me at the end of my day at school. I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that I scared myself with the strength of my shock and grief. The worst part for me was that the last thing I had said to Joe that morning was "It's going to be hot today. Don't leave Ann in the car." I was sick. Couldn't eat; could hardly breathe. It was awful. And it was in this mood that we started our camp experience.
We had to wear uniforms. Dark green Explorer shirts, khaki shorts, knee-high green socks with red tabs. My hair--always short and always curly--suffered in the humidity, but I still wore nail polish. The troops that drove in to be greeted by me, not expecting to see a woman, were shocked, thinking the BSA had employed a gay! Tell you what: I would gladly have worn ANYTHING but that uniform. I looked awful in it!
Our schedule was that we had 24 hours off each week. One day! It soon became obvious that I was going to have to spend my one day off in town doing laundry in a laudromat. Stephanie wet the bed virtually every night. I had her bed linens to wash, plus at least two outfits per day when she didn't make it to the bathroom in time. Eric stashed his dirty clothes under his bunk or in a trunk, along with spilled cans of Sprite--all mildewed. His laundry for the week would consist of two pairs of underwear and a sock or two. All I could find!
Poor Stephanie had never been away from home before, and we weren't offering much by way of entertainment or supervision. Eric didn't care. He was on a lark in the woods, but Steph suffered. I tried talking to her about things, to no avail. EVERY night was a struggle to get her to go to bed because of the bugs she either saw in her room or imagined. I lost patience. Joe didn't do much. We were all too tired every night to want to fight with children to go to bed! It wasn't much fun...for any of us. I think Grandma and Grandpa McNary came to visit one weekend...and maybe took the children home to visit their mother, before bringing them back. It was a couple of days of respite. Whew!
At the beginning of camp, Joe and I volunteered to be divers for the Lost Bather's drill. We were snorkelers and strong swimmers, so it seemed like the (bragging) thing to do. Kids at the waterfront were assigned buddies. When they entered the water, they put their "buddy tags" on a board. When they left the area, they were supposed to remove their tags. Invariably, someone would forget to remove his tag, launching an alarm to put divers in the water to look for a "lost bather". The first time this happened, I ran to the waterfront, stripping my clothes as I went...entered the water out of breath...and as I was diving in formation, realized that I was looking for a body...and what would I do if I actually found one? The "lost bather" was found, high and dry, at his campsite. He got chewed out for not following protocol, but I realized that this was probably not for me. The next time the alarm sounded, I was conveniently far enough away that I didn't respond!
Scouts were endlessly bringing me injured or abandoned baby animals. Most of the time, the animals were injured or abandoned BECAUSE of the Scouts. I did what I could, with not much experience. One such critter was a fledgling robin who seemed to have broken legs. I fed it cooked egg yolk with a pair of tweezers, at the advice of a veterinarian. It soon healed. That bird thought I was its mother! It followed me everywhere. Would perch on my shoulder. Flew at the screen of the cabin to be let in if we happened to leave it outside. Everyone was agog! One day, I came home to the cabin to find the bird wet near a shallow pan of water...and dead. Eric and the ranger's son had been playing there, but no one had ANY CLUE how the bird could have died. It broke my heart.
Another critter was a 13-lined ground squirrel that had been hit by a car. It looked dead but was still breathing. No blood. I got an eye dropper and put some sugar water in it, put it up to the little guy's mouth, and he started sucking on it! Over a week or two, he recovered. He had one leg that was probably permanently injured, but I eventually turned him loose in the woods. I always hoped I made a difference...
Then there were the five baby cottontails. Bunnies are highly susceptable to stress, so I had to be careful. I kept them in an aquarium tank, feeding them with an eye dropper. At night, I put the aquarium in the ecology shelter. It was just like a picnic shelter in a park. One night, we had a terrible thunderstorm with lots of lightning and very loud thunder...and the next day, every one of the bunnies was dead. There were no marks on them. I could only assume that they died of fear in the storm.
As I attended to the critters, Joe accused me of caring more for the animals than his children. I resented the accusation. I was doing more for his children than he was...but it didn't matter. I accused him of not caring about our dog...that he had always resented my attachment to her. He said he KNEW that would come up...and so it went. In the first summer of our married year, we weren't very happy with each other!
There were scout people not happy with me, too. Several scouts submitted garbage to me as requirements for ecology badges. They not only didn't fit the requirements, they didn't even fit the spirit of the requirements. I refused to pass them. Their Scoutmasters were angry. I got the feeling that there was an assumption that if a scout attended camp, he would be passed on things. Pretty poor message to send to boys--or girls!
The camp employees also consisted of "Comissioners " who inspected troop campsites for a daily award. Joe put all of us on an inspection rotation--including me. I had never done anything like this before. I was totally impressed by things that the troops did in their campsites. The Comissioners, however, complained about my high praise and resented that someone beside them should be given the inspection job. Understand that the mean age of camp employees was probably 19/20, if you took me and Joe out of the equation. We were both in our early 30s. There was one other dude in his 30s. I did what I had to do...and tried to defend myself...but it wasn't easy.
The other dude in his 30s was assigned with me to clean/inspect the mess hall once. He said something to me, like, "I found a roach." I said, "Oh...I know! We have them all over our cabin!" At that point, he put his arm around my shoulder and said quietly, "Peg...not THAT kind of roach." I felt so stupid!!!!
It was in this atmosphere that Megan McNary was created. We returned home from the dead dog and unhappy kid situation, only to discover that I was pregnant. Wish I had a happier story! Leading up to my baby's 33rd birthday on March 25th... My next post will be about that night!
Actually, no. That was the joke that we told people. Megan WAS conceived while we were there, but not because we were bored. The whole summer camp experience was pretty miserable. Let me back up...
Joe and I were married in December of 1977. We were both educators, living in a rented Craftman house in a little town called Monee, IL., and were looking for summer jobs after school was out. I happened to see an ad somewhere that the Rainbow Council, BSA, was looking for people (teachers) to work at their camp near Morris, IL, so we applied. They REALLY wanted Joe as Program Director because he was a former Boy Scout and a former school principal. They decided I could be the camp Nurse, if I would take a first aide course, but then changed their minds and made me the Ecology Director. We had to attend National Camp School for the BSA--a week-long camping experience--in order to qualify. Unfortunately, the only Camp School that was close enough for us to get to was in eastern Ohio, and the only offering that was available to us before our camp actually started was when school was still in session. Joe decided that we should just go and take the days as sick days from school. Like no one would notice that we were both gone at the same time for five days????
At first, the national scout executives told the local scout executive that had hired us that NCS had no facilities for women and that I couldn't attend. Supposedly, he told them that they'd have to "get over it" because they would be unable to keep me out. (These were Women's Lib times.) When we got to camp, I had to laugh. Facilities? Surely they jested! We were issued a bottomless canvas tent, and two cots. The only restroom was an outhouse. I shared the tent with my husband and made sure the outhouse door was locked when I used it. No biggie!
My presence in camp did cramp the guys' style some. On the first night there, we were divided into patrols (or platoons, or something) and each group was to come up with a name. One group was told that they had to clean up their act because a lady was present. Why? Their chant was, "Eat a beaver; save a bush"! Still, by the time the week was over, I had been accepted. Thus, I became the first woman in America to attend National Camp School for the BSA!
When we hit home after that, we were asked to explain our joint absence from school. The school district wasn't too fond of our excuse, so we were both docked a week's pay. Ouch! We were scraping by as it was! Stupid us!
One of us--not sure if it was Joe or me--decided to invite Joe's two children (Stephanie and Eric) to join us for the duration of the summer camp experience. Stephanie was 6 and Eric was 8. I was a brand new stepmother with virtually NO experience in mothering! The kids' mother agreed to let them come. She also had a summer job, so the children's being with us was going to help her out. We compiled a huge list of things we wanted the children to have. Their mom objected to all of the "requirements". (Years later, I understood the added expense to her budget. Joe didn't.) We were issued a three-bedroom cabin in the woods. The kids' bedrooms had bunkbeds. Ours didn't. In any case, we prepared for what we thought would be the experience of a lifetime for us and the kids.
Just before school ended and camp started, Joe left our Irish setter in the car on a hot May day "for just a little bit" while he had lunch with co-workers...and she died. He raced her to a vet but she could not be revived. Then he had to come and tell me at the end of my day at school. I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that I scared myself with the strength of my shock and grief. The worst part for me was that the last thing I had said to Joe that morning was "It's going to be hot today. Don't leave Ann in the car." I was sick. Couldn't eat; could hardly breathe. It was awful. And it was in this mood that we started our camp experience.
We had to wear uniforms. Dark green Explorer shirts, khaki shorts, knee-high green socks with red tabs. My hair--always short and always curly--suffered in the humidity, but I still wore nail polish. The troops that drove in to be greeted by me, not expecting to see a woman, were shocked, thinking the BSA had employed a gay! Tell you what: I would gladly have worn ANYTHING but that uniform. I looked awful in it!
Our schedule was that we had 24 hours off each week. One day! It soon became obvious that I was going to have to spend my one day off in town doing laundry in a laudromat. Stephanie wet the bed virtually every night. I had her bed linens to wash, plus at least two outfits per day when she didn't make it to the bathroom in time. Eric stashed his dirty clothes under his bunk or in a trunk, along with spilled cans of Sprite--all mildewed. His laundry for the week would consist of two pairs of underwear and a sock or two. All I could find!
Poor Stephanie had never been away from home before, and we weren't offering much by way of entertainment or supervision. Eric didn't care. He was on a lark in the woods, but Steph suffered. I tried talking to her about things, to no avail. EVERY night was a struggle to get her to go to bed because of the bugs she either saw in her room or imagined. I lost patience. Joe didn't do much. We were all too tired every night to want to fight with children to go to bed! It wasn't much fun...for any of us. I think Grandma and Grandpa McNary came to visit one weekend...and maybe took the children home to visit their mother, before bringing them back. It was a couple of days of respite. Whew!
At the beginning of camp, Joe and I volunteered to be divers for the Lost Bather's drill. We were snorkelers and strong swimmers, so it seemed like the (bragging) thing to do. Kids at the waterfront were assigned buddies. When they entered the water, they put their "buddy tags" on a board. When they left the area, they were supposed to remove their tags. Invariably, someone would forget to remove his tag, launching an alarm to put divers in the water to look for a "lost bather". The first time this happened, I ran to the waterfront, stripping my clothes as I went...entered the water out of breath...and as I was diving in formation, realized that I was looking for a body...and what would I do if I actually found one? The "lost bather" was found, high and dry, at his campsite. He got chewed out for not following protocol, but I realized that this was probably not for me. The next time the alarm sounded, I was conveniently far enough away that I didn't respond!
Scouts were endlessly bringing me injured or abandoned baby animals. Most of the time, the animals were injured or abandoned BECAUSE of the Scouts. I did what I could, with not much experience. One such critter was a fledgling robin who seemed to have broken legs. I fed it cooked egg yolk with a pair of tweezers, at the advice of a veterinarian. It soon healed. That bird thought I was its mother! It followed me everywhere. Would perch on my shoulder. Flew at the screen of the cabin to be let in if we happened to leave it outside. Everyone was agog! One day, I came home to the cabin to find the bird wet near a shallow pan of water...and dead. Eric and the ranger's son had been playing there, but no one had ANY CLUE how the bird could have died. It broke my heart.
Another critter was a 13-lined ground squirrel that had been hit by a car. It looked dead but was still breathing. No blood. I got an eye dropper and put some sugar water in it, put it up to the little guy's mouth, and he started sucking on it! Over a week or two, he recovered. He had one leg that was probably permanently injured, but I eventually turned him loose in the woods. I always hoped I made a difference...
Then there were the five baby cottontails. Bunnies are highly susceptable to stress, so I had to be careful. I kept them in an aquarium tank, feeding them with an eye dropper. At night, I put the aquarium in the ecology shelter. It was just like a picnic shelter in a park. One night, we had a terrible thunderstorm with lots of lightning and very loud thunder...and the next day, every one of the bunnies was dead. There were no marks on them. I could only assume that they died of fear in the storm.
As I attended to the critters, Joe accused me of caring more for the animals than his children. I resented the accusation. I was doing more for his children than he was...but it didn't matter. I accused him of not caring about our dog...that he had always resented my attachment to her. He said he KNEW that would come up...and so it went. In the first summer of our married year, we weren't very happy with each other!
There were scout people not happy with me, too. Several scouts submitted garbage to me as requirements for ecology badges. They not only didn't fit the requirements, they didn't even fit the spirit of the requirements. I refused to pass them. Their Scoutmasters were angry. I got the feeling that there was an assumption that if a scout attended camp, he would be passed on things. Pretty poor message to send to boys--or girls!
The camp employees also consisted of "Comissioners " who inspected troop campsites for a daily award. Joe put all of us on an inspection rotation--including me. I had never done anything like this before. I was totally impressed by things that the troops did in their campsites. The Comissioners, however, complained about my high praise and resented that someone beside them should be given the inspection job. Understand that the mean age of camp employees was probably 19/20, if you took me and Joe out of the equation. We were both in our early 30s. There was one other dude in his 30s. I did what I had to do...and tried to defend myself...but it wasn't easy.
The other dude in his 30s was assigned with me to clean/inspect the mess hall once. He said something to me, like, "I found a roach." I said, "Oh...I know! We have them all over our cabin!" At that point, he put his arm around my shoulder and said quietly, "Peg...not THAT kind of roach." I felt so stupid!!!!
It was in this atmosphere that Megan McNary was created. We returned home from the dead dog and unhappy kid situation, only to discover that I was pregnant. Wish I had a happier story! Leading up to my baby's 33rd birthday on March 25th... My next post will be about that night!
Sunday, March 18, 2012
The Ants Crawl In; The Ants Crawl Out...
I think that song goes, "The worms crawl in; the worms crawl out", but I have taken poetic license to suit my purposes. So sue me!
With the warm so-called winter that we've had, I feared an abundant season for bugs--and now, I'm sure of it. Most years, I will get some big black ants in the house for a week or two along about late April or early June. It's not a serious infestation. Just annoying. Well, my friends, I'm afraid they have already found their way in--and it's only mid-March! I have probably killed 10 of them in the house today, most of them in the garage room. One of the little buggers was crawling on the inside of my thigh. I swatted it and thought it went flying, but then I felt something sticking me. It was the ant! In his dying efforts, he chomped down on my leg. I had to PULL him off! (He's dead now, poor thing.) Also, somewhere near the back door on the patio, there has been a hatch of little flying ants. It seems that a find a swarm of them at least once a year around here. Time to find my can of Raid!
Okay...except for the bugs, I'm not complaining about the weather. Really. I'm not. In fact, the wonderfully warm and sunny days we have had have done wonders for my energy and mood. Flowering trees are in bloom. Spring flowers are in bloom. Trees are budding. Lawns need to be mowed. People are out walking their dogs and their kids, running for exercise, and generally soaking up the early springtime weather. To quote McDonald's, "I'm lovin' it!"
Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day. I'm not Catholic, but I am part Irish. Catholic, Irish, or not, everyone seems to get into the spirit of the day, and I'm no different. If I have company, I will usually fix a corned beef and cabbage dinner (something I won't do if I'm just here by myself). Thus, I invited my co-grandparents/friends Judy and Phil, and their son Dan who lives with them, to share the occasion with me, and they graciously accepted. I was able to make the table look festive, and the feast turned out well, if I do say so myself. Judy had had a very busy day, so I think it was a relief for her not to have to cook or clean up. After a glorious weather day, it felt great to share my table with such good folks. On a side note, my granddaughter Robin loves corned beef and cabbage. In her younger years, she called it corned "beeth"...so that's what it will always be for me!
I am the Godmother of one of my Catholic friend's sons. When he was baptized, back when my own daughter was very young, I was expected to attend--which I did. My friend told me that if the priest asked me if I were Catholic, I was supposed to say "yes". "Diane, you want me to lie to a priest???" Her response was, "Never mind, since you have the very Irish name Margaret McNary, he won't even ask." And he didn't!
Another related story: my favorite uncle met his second wife at a Post-Cana meeting--a singles group for widowed Catholics--even though Uncle Bud wasn't Catholic. A couple of years after his wife died when their children were in their early teens, one of his friends coaxed him to the Post-Cana meeting where he met Rita Henry, the Secretary to the President of Catholic University in Washington, DC. They fell in love. Rita was from Massachusetts, Catholic, and of Irish descent, and had an outrageous Massachusetts accent. (If you ever listened to President John F. Kennedy, you know what I'm talking about.) When Rita announced to her sister that she was going to marry George Armstrong, the sister replied, "Armstrong doesn't sound Irish. It doesn't even sound Catholic!" Still, they married and had a very loving relationship until the day he died many years ago. It was all good.
After Sunday School today, I went to the Akira Japanese Steakhouse here in Plainfield for a "social" with my SS class. It was entertaining. The cooks prepare the meal in front of you with all of their fancy spatula/knife shenanigans. Our cook spun some eggs on the grill, then picked them up with a spatula, still spinning. One egg, he tossed in the air and caught in his breast pocket...where it broke. He was embarrassed. It totally wasn't in the script! The food was good and quite reasonable. In fact, the whole menu was reasonable, and the companionship was great. Unfortunately, I ate it ALL and suffered for it the entire rest of the afternoon. Couple this huge meal with yesterday's huge meal, and I think you'll probably understand why I'm not losing weight!!
Back up a bit. My SS class has been studying the disciples of Jesus. Last week and this, the focus was on Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. One of the discussion questions afterward had to do with "Is prayer just our way of controlling God by trying to make him think the way that we do?" I ended up sharing a personal story with the class about when my grandmother was sick and dying. I wanted her to live, just for me, even though she was deathly ill and could be revived with no future. As I was telling the story, the tears came out of nowhere. It startled me! My grandmother died in 1975--many, many years ago--but the circumstances still affect me to this day. I am happy that I can be emotional in church and with my SS friends. God bless her...one of the members of the class also wept with me. I wasn't out of control, but I did so understand that some of what we experience is beyond human understanding.
My daughter and her husband spent the weekend on a cemetery adventure in my hometown in Central IL, taking pictures in an effort to resurrect my deceased brother's website about the place. It was a huge undertaking, considering that it would also include some emotional visits to the family's former farm. I'm not sure that poor Denis knew what hit him or understands the passion that Megan has for genealogy, but there is probably a hope that someday they can travel to Estonia to see where he was born and mostly raised. That's a whole half-hemisphere away! Denis gets the Oscar for patience and caring! They went home to a needy cat. Poor Toffee!
I will most likely leave for northern Illinois at the end of the week for a visit. It will be my daughter's 33rd birthday and my grandchildren's spring break. I would LOVE to have then here, but I guess that is not to be. I hope this fantastic weather continues. It's hard to think that it won't!
God bless.
With the warm so-called winter that we've had, I feared an abundant season for bugs--and now, I'm sure of it. Most years, I will get some big black ants in the house for a week or two along about late April or early June. It's not a serious infestation. Just annoying. Well, my friends, I'm afraid they have already found their way in--and it's only mid-March! I have probably killed 10 of them in the house today, most of them in the garage room. One of the little buggers was crawling on the inside of my thigh. I swatted it and thought it went flying, but then I felt something sticking me. It was the ant! In his dying efforts, he chomped down on my leg. I had to PULL him off! (He's dead now, poor thing.) Also, somewhere near the back door on the patio, there has been a hatch of little flying ants. It seems that a find a swarm of them at least once a year around here. Time to find my can of Raid!
Okay...except for the bugs, I'm not complaining about the weather. Really. I'm not. In fact, the wonderfully warm and sunny days we have had have done wonders for my energy and mood. Flowering trees are in bloom. Spring flowers are in bloom. Trees are budding. Lawns need to be mowed. People are out walking their dogs and their kids, running for exercise, and generally soaking up the early springtime weather. To quote McDonald's, "I'm lovin' it!"
Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day. I'm not Catholic, but I am part Irish. Catholic, Irish, or not, everyone seems to get into the spirit of the day, and I'm no different. If I have company, I will usually fix a corned beef and cabbage dinner (something I won't do if I'm just here by myself). Thus, I invited my co-grandparents/friends Judy and Phil, and their son Dan who lives with them, to share the occasion with me, and they graciously accepted. I was able to make the table look festive, and the feast turned out well, if I do say so myself. Judy had had a very busy day, so I think it was a relief for her not to have to cook or clean up. After a glorious weather day, it felt great to share my table with such good folks. On a side note, my granddaughter Robin loves corned beef and cabbage. In her younger years, she called it corned "beeth"...so that's what it will always be for me!
I am the Godmother of one of my Catholic friend's sons. When he was baptized, back when my own daughter was very young, I was expected to attend--which I did. My friend told me that if the priest asked me if I were Catholic, I was supposed to say "yes". "Diane, you want me to lie to a priest???" Her response was, "Never mind, since you have the very Irish name Margaret McNary, he won't even ask." And he didn't!
Another related story: my favorite uncle met his second wife at a Post-Cana meeting--a singles group for widowed Catholics--even though Uncle Bud wasn't Catholic. A couple of years after his wife died when their children were in their early teens, one of his friends coaxed him to the Post-Cana meeting where he met Rita Henry, the Secretary to the President of Catholic University in Washington, DC. They fell in love. Rita was from Massachusetts, Catholic, and of Irish descent, and had an outrageous Massachusetts accent. (If you ever listened to President John F. Kennedy, you know what I'm talking about.) When Rita announced to her sister that she was going to marry George Armstrong, the sister replied, "Armstrong doesn't sound Irish. It doesn't even sound Catholic!" Still, they married and had a very loving relationship until the day he died many years ago. It was all good.
After Sunday School today, I went to the Akira Japanese Steakhouse here in Plainfield for a "social" with my SS class. It was entertaining. The cooks prepare the meal in front of you with all of their fancy spatula/knife shenanigans. Our cook spun some eggs on the grill, then picked them up with a spatula, still spinning. One egg, he tossed in the air and caught in his breast pocket...where it broke. He was embarrassed. It totally wasn't in the script! The food was good and quite reasonable. In fact, the whole menu was reasonable, and the companionship was great. Unfortunately, I ate it ALL and suffered for it the entire rest of the afternoon. Couple this huge meal with yesterday's huge meal, and I think you'll probably understand why I'm not losing weight!!
Back up a bit. My SS class has been studying the disciples of Jesus. Last week and this, the focus was on Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. One of the discussion questions afterward had to do with "Is prayer just our way of controlling God by trying to make him think the way that we do?" I ended up sharing a personal story with the class about when my grandmother was sick and dying. I wanted her to live, just for me, even though she was deathly ill and could be revived with no future. As I was telling the story, the tears came out of nowhere. It startled me! My grandmother died in 1975--many, many years ago--but the circumstances still affect me to this day. I am happy that I can be emotional in church and with my SS friends. God bless her...one of the members of the class also wept with me. I wasn't out of control, but I did so understand that some of what we experience is beyond human understanding.
My daughter and her husband spent the weekend on a cemetery adventure in my hometown in Central IL, taking pictures in an effort to resurrect my deceased brother's website about the place. It was a huge undertaking, considering that it would also include some emotional visits to the family's former farm. I'm not sure that poor Denis knew what hit him or understands the passion that Megan has for genealogy, but there is probably a hope that someday they can travel to Estonia to see where he was born and mostly raised. That's a whole half-hemisphere away! Denis gets the Oscar for patience and caring! They went home to a needy cat. Poor Toffee!
I will most likely leave for northern Illinois at the end of the week for a visit. It will be my daughter's 33rd birthday and my grandchildren's spring break. I would LOVE to have then here, but I guess that is not to be. I hope this fantastic weather continues. It's hard to think that it won't!
God bless.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Memories of Moon Point
(I am writing this at the request of my daughter who is resurrecting a website that her uncle poured his heart into before it [his heart] simply stopped beating.)
Moon Point is a cemetery in the country just south of Streator, Illinois, where I was born. Like many cemeteries, it is tucked away in a wooded area near a creek--land that is unusable as tillable crop land, although crop fields are nearby. It is the final resting place of many of my family members, and as such, it isn't just a cemetery but a place of reverence; a place that we selected to put the mortal remains of those we loved in life. As the Forever Home of my family, I love that old cemetery. My parents, grandparents, two siblings, two uncles and an aunt are buried there, with more to come. Moon Point Cemetery is a place of complete quiet. Sometimes, one can see deer. More often, one can see/feel mosquitoes!
Before I was born, a toddler sister of mine died in a horribly tragic home accident. It changed the family forever. Barbara Lynn Covill was the first of our immediate family to be buried at Moon Point, and because she was there, it became a special place. (I'm not sure how different my life would have been had Barbara never lived and died, but I do know that, because of her, when I came along a year or two later, I was just loved. That's a whole other blog topic!) As a family, we went to visit her grave at least once a year. (We also always went in the spring because there was wild asparagus growing along the fencelines, and my parents were "gatherers" of asparagus!) As a result of Barbara's death, my grandfather bought up a bunch of cemetery plots for the family--enough that we could all be buried there, if we wanted. I can remember that my grandmother took my other sister and I there for a picnic...because it was peaceful and shady. A picnic in a graveyard. Did we find it scary? Not at all.
Once upon a time, one could exit from Moon Point Cemetery by taking the access road east to Illinois route 23, or taking the road west through the country that eventually led to a place called Reading, and a little farther down the road, our farm. The road to the west was pretty rough and went over a one-lane rickety iron bridge over Moon Creek, then onward. At one point--I think in the 1960s or '70s--the bridge either washed out or was condemned. It was demolished and never replaced. That meant, then, that there was only one way in and out of the cemetery--and a railroad track with no gates or warnings, crossed that road. If a train happened to stop over the road, anyone visiting the cemetery was trapped until the train moved again. (This happened to my brother in the days before cell phones. He was stuck there for three hours!)
When I was a kid, the entrance to the cemetery had two red brick pillars on either side of the road, one with a plaque that said "Moon Point", and a big iron gate across the road between them. In order to gain access to the cemetery, someone had to get out of the car and open the gate to let the vehicle through. The gate had been vandalized so many times that it was finally removed. Then the brick pillars fell into disrepair, leaving them just a pile of broken bricks. Sad, really.
Moon Point Cemetery is quite isolated, and because of this, it was/is a favorite gathering place for kids looking for a spot to do whatever it is that teens do when unsupervised and unseen. Barbara's grave marker had been the base for launching fireworks, and some of the spots inside the letters on her stone were broken out. (The scorch marks from the fireworks are still there, after all these years.)
When I was a teen, myself, in the 1960s, we were visiting my grandparents at their farm when a call came in that the cemetery had some major vandalism damage. My grandfather was on the cemetery board at the time. He was a roly-poly, mild-mannered, devout Christian man, normally, but he became absolutely livid when we viewed the damage. Some very heavy grave markers were knocked over. Many of the older ones were broken off. Whoever was responsible for the damage had worked really hard at doing what they did. I had never seen my grandfather angry before, but I remember so vividly his saying that they needed to post a sign on the cemetery property: "No trespassing. Violaters will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law AND A DOUBLE-BARRELED SHOTGUN." His grandfather was buried there, and his beloved grandchild. Damage to many of the stones was irreparable. No one was ever found culpable. I understood his anger.
The most recent family "burial" at Moon Point was my brother. On the very last day of 2005, he was shopping in a Chicago suburb when he simply collapsed, dead. His long-time roommate didn't call with the news. I found out through an email from the River Forest, IL, police. Doug had distanced himself from my sister and me--hard feelings over the sale of the family farm--but we were left to make his final arrangements. On a perfectly horrible snowy/rainy, windy day in mid-January of 2006, we scattered the ashes of Floyd Douglas Covill among the tombstones of the people he loved and the cemetery whose website he had worked so hard to establish. Now, these many years later, we are trying to get permission to place a military marker on the place that would have been his grave. Also now, his niece Megan is reviving his website. It was his passion and his legacy. I am so very grateful that it won't be lost!
My family's plots are the first ones inside the cemetery on the road in. There are urban legends about hauntings at Moon Point--something about a hatchet lady. So stupid! Still, many pictures on websites about the Moon Point haunting legends show my family's gravestones. If that's what it takes to keep memories alive, I'm all for it!
Moon Point is a cemetery in the country just south of Streator, Illinois, where I was born. Like many cemeteries, it is tucked away in a wooded area near a creek--land that is unusable as tillable crop land, although crop fields are nearby. It is the final resting place of many of my family members, and as such, it isn't just a cemetery but a place of reverence; a place that we selected to put the mortal remains of those we loved in life. As the Forever Home of my family, I love that old cemetery. My parents, grandparents, two siblings, two uncles and an aunt are buried there, with more to come. Moon Point Cemetery is a place of complete quiet. Sometimes, one can see deer. More often, one can see/feel mosquitoes!
Before I was born, a toddler sister of mine died in a horribly tragic home accident. It changed the family forever. Barbara Lynn Covill was the first of our immediate family to be buried at Moon Point, and because she was there, it became a special place. (I'm not sure how different my life would have been had Barbara never lived and died, but I do know that, because of her, when I came along a year or two later, I was just loved. That's a whole other blog topic!) As a family, we went to visit her grave at least once a year. (We also always went in the spring because there was wild asparagus growing along the fencelines, and my parents were "gatherers" of asparagus!) As a result of Barbara's death, my grandfather bought up a bunch of cemetery plots for the family--enough that we could all be buried there, if we wanted. I can remember that my grandmother took my other sister and I there for a picnic...because it was peaceful and shady. A picnic in a graveyard. Did we find it scary? Not at all.
Once upon a time, one could exit from Moon Point Cemetery by taking the access road east to Illinois route 23, or taking the road west through the country that eventually led to a place called Reading, and a little farther down the road, our farm. The road to the west was pretty rough and went over a one-lane rickety iron bridge over Moon Creek, then onward. At one point--I think in the 1960s or '70s--the bridge either washed out or was condemned. It was demolished and never replaced. That meant, then, that there was only one way in and out of the cemetery--and a railroad track with no gates or warnings, crossed that road. If a train happened to stop over the road, anyone visiting the cemetery was trapped until the train moved again. (This happened to my brother in the days before cell phones. He was stuck there for three hours!)
When I was a kid, the entrance to the cemetery had two red brick pillars on either side of the road, one with a plaque that said "Moon Point", and a big iron gate across the road between them. In order to gain access to the cemetery, someone had to get out of the car and open the gate to let the vehicle through. The gate had been vandalized so many times that it was finally removed. Then the brick pillars fell into disrepair, leaving them just a pile of broken bricks. Sad, really.
Moon Point Cemetery is quite isolated, and because of this, it was/is a favorite gathering place for kids looking for a spot to do whatever it is that teens do when unsupervised and unseen. Barbara's grave marker had been the base for launching fireworks, and some of the spots inside the letters on her stone were broken out. (The scorch marks from the fireworks are still there, after all these years.)
When I was a teen, myself, in the 1960s, we were visiting my grandparents at their farm when a call came in that the cemetery had some major vandalism damage. My grandfather was on the cemetery board at the time. He was a roly-poly, mild-mannered, devout Christian man, normally, but he became absolutely livid when we viewed the damage. Some very heavy grave markers were knocked over. Many of the older ones were broken off. Whoever was responsible for the damage had worked really hard at doing what they did. I had never seen my grandfather angry before, but I remember so vividly his saying that they needed to post a sign on the cemetery property: "No trespassing. Violaters will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law AND A DOUBLE-BARRELED SHOTGUN." His grandfather was buried there, and his beloved grandchild. Damage to many of the stones was irreparable. No one was ever found culpable. I understood his anger.
The most recent family "burial" at Moon Point was my brother. On the very last day of 2005, he was shopping in a Chicago suburb when he simply collapsed, dead. His long-time roommate didn't call with the news. I found out through an email from the River Forest, IL, police. Doug had distanced himself from my sister and me--hard feelings over the sale of the family farm--but we were left to make his final arrangements. On a perfectly horrible snowy/rainy, windy day in mid-January of 2006, we scattered the ashes of Floyd Douglas Covill among the tombstones of the people he loved and the cemetery whose website he had worked so hard to establish. Now, these many years later, we are trying to get permission to place a military marker on the place that would have been his grave. Also now, his niece Megan is reviving his website. It was his passion and his legacy. I am so very grateful that it won't be lost!
My family's plots are the first ones inside the cemetery on the road in. There are urban legends about hauntings at Moon Point--something about a hatchet lady. So stupid! Still, many pictures on websites about the Moon Point haunting legends show my family's gravestones. If that's what it takes to keep memories alive, I'm all for it!
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Oops!
In my last blog post about cell phones, I probably should have talked a bit more about my lack of interaction with them.
Back when my daughter and then-son-in-law moved to Muncie, IN, I bought Meg a Tracfone for Christmas. It was almost an afterthought...and it was cheap. That phone turned into a great tool to coordinate their move with everyone involved. (Patting myself on the back.) I, however, didn't have a cell phone. I'm an amateur radio operator! Why do I need a cell phone??? Well...I just did...and I think Meg provided me with my first cell phone--a clone of the one I had given her.
It wasn't too long thereafter that Megan upgraded to a better Tracfone...and then yet another variety. I inherited her cast-off. That was several years ago. I still don't know how to work it properly...and unlike most of the modern generation, I never have it on unless I am mobile on a trip or away and expecting a call. I don't have a clue how to send a text message!
Megan doesn't even have a house phone. That concerns me some. A time or two, we have left one of the grandchildren alone at the house without thinking that there is no way for them to contact anyone in an emergency. Of course, cell phones require energy management. They don't do anyone any good if the battery is dead. That's why I still have a "land line" at my house!
On another topic, I am totally grateful for the wonderfully warm and sunny days we have had this week. What a difference they have made in my attitude and energy levels! I actually did some housework today and took care of a couple of business items! Of course, there is so much more to do... I love hearing the birds in the morning, and even though we have lost daylight in the mornings due to the DST time change, life just feels better than it did. Go figure!
March is rapidly progressing. Slow down, springtime...slow down!
Back when my daughter and then-son-in-law moved to Muncie, IN, I bought Meg a Tracfone for Christmas. It was almost an afterthought...and it was cheap. That phone turned into a great tool to coordinate their move with everyone involved. (Patting myself on the back.) I, however, didn't have a cell phone. I'm an amateur radio operator! Why do I need a cell phone??? Well...I just did...and I think Meg provided me with my first cell phone--a clone of the one I had given her.
It wasn't too long thereafter that Megan upgraded to a better Tracfone...and then yet another variety. I inherited her cast-off. That was several years ago. I still don't know how to work it properly...and unlike most of the modern generation, I never have it on unless I am mobile on a trip or away and expecting a call. I don't have a clue how to send a text message!
Megan doesn't even have a house phone. That concerns me some. A time or two, we have left one of the grandchildren alone at the house without thinking that there is no way for them to contact anyone in an emergency. Of course, cell phones require energy management. They don't do anyone any good if the battery is dead. That's why I still have a "land line" at my house!
On another topic, I am totally grateful for the wonderfully warm and sunny days we have had this week. What a difference they have made in my attitude and energy levels! I actually did some housework today and took care of a couple of business items! Of course, there is so much more to do... I love hearing the birds in the morning, and even though we have lost daylight in the mornings due to the DST time change, life just feels better than it did. Go figure!
March is rapidly progressing. Slow down, springtime...slow down!
Saturday, March 10, 2012
The Telephone
I happened upon the movie Meet Me in St. Louis on Turner Classic Movies yesterday, starring Judy Garland. Hadn't seen it in years, so I decided to watch. The movie is set in the Victorian 1800s, a romantic comedy musical about a family of mostly girls, trying to make their way in what was then modern society. In one scene, one of the daughter is expecting a long distance phone call from a suitor, whom she suspects is going to propose marriage. The whole family plans their evening around that phone call. Wow! Did that bring back a flood of memories about the telephone and how much it has changed just in my lifetime! Let's see if I can remember all of them...
*First of all, there was ONE telephone company with "Bell" in the name: Illinois Bell Telephone, where I lived. If you didn't like their service, you were out of luck. And the telephone in your house belonged to the company. You just rented it by the month (automatically in your bill).
*There were wooden hand-crank telephones that were hung on the wall in some of the houses that I visited as a kid, but these were mostly before my time. In my experience, all phones were black plastic, with cords that attached the receiver to the base unit--either on a table or hung on a wall. Most houses had just one phone, and when you talked on it, you were stuck close to the base unit because of the cord. If it was in a public area of the house, everyone could hear your end of the conversation!
*Phones either had no dial (operator driven) or a rotary dial with fingerholes and numbers under each hole so you could dial the 7-digit number. Where we lived in the early 50s (Danville, IL), you only had to pick up the receiver and wait for the operator to answer. You then told her the last 4 digits of the number you were trying to reach because the other three numbers indicated a local call and were all the same. Any other prefix indicated a long distance call.
*Friends of our family who lived in a rural area near my grandparents had the phone number "5-5-ring 5"...which meant that they were on a party line, shared with other families. If an incoming call was for them, the phone would ring five times. Other rings meant the call was for someone else. I always found that confusing.
*My grandparents also had a party line but their phone only rang if the call was for them. If you wanted to make a call, you had to pick up the receiver and listen to see if the phone was in use before you could dial. It was not at all unusual for others to listen in to your conversation, unannounced! In later years, all phones were put on private lines. No more eavesdropping!
*If you called someone who was using their phone, you got a busy signal--a series of beeps. There was no Call Waiting, no Caller ID, no Call Forwarding, and no Voice Mail. When your phone rang, you didn't know who it was, and if you were on the phone, they couldn't reach you. If someone in the family was expecting an important call, the rest of us were told to stay off the phone until it came through. Period!
*When we moved to the Chicago area in 1958, the phone number prefixes consisted of words. Ours was EUCLID, abbreviated as EU. Our number was EU3-3101. In numbers, that translated to 383-3101. Later, Illinois Bell dropped the word prefixes in favor of just the numbers. I only mention this because it seemed so strange to me to have a phone number that started with a word!
*Long distance phone calls were a big deal and had to go through an operator. First, you dialed "0". When the operator answered, you would say, "Operator, I'd like to make a long distance phone call to (say) Rice Lake, Wisconsin. The number is..." There were three types of LD calls: collect, which meant the person you were calling had to pay the bill; station-to-station, which meant that you paid the bill and were willing to talk to whomever answered; and person-to-person, which meant that you paid the bill but only if one particular person was available. The operator would say, "You have a collect call from Peggy. Do you wish to accept the charges?" If I wanted to call my folks from college, I had to call collect. We couldn't make LD calls on the dorm phones. If we were traveling, we would plan to call person-to-person and have the operator ask for a pre-planned code name--someone who didn't live there. That way, the person we were calling got the signal that we had arrived safely, and no one had to pay for the call!
*Long Distance calls in those days were expensive. There was a fee for the first three minutes--the amount depending on the location and distance (and sometimes the time of day!)--then a rate for every minute thereafter. We kids weren't allowed to make LD phone calls without parental permission, and even then, we had to have a pretty good reason for wanting to! Then the family Phone Police would be ordering us off the phone when the allotted time was up. Ever try to express your undying love and affection for a long distance teenage boyfriend in three minutes? Especially when the phone was in a public place in the house? Impossible!
*LD calls were sufficiently rare and expensive that, when someone in the family called on a holiday, for instance, we called everyone to the phone to say a few words. Those calls were a family event! If you happened to have an extension phone, other family members could listen in. It was quite unusual to call Grandpa or Grandma McNary and not have both on the phone at once!
*In the 60s, Slimline Princess phones were invented. These were a bit more expensive to rent, but they came in colors. Wow! Later ones didn't have dials but pushbuttons. Double wow! Also, extension phones became more common. They were still attached to the same line, but you weren't stuck in the middle of the living room to talk. You could talk on an extension in a more private setting.
*Somewhere along the line, phone service was de-centralized. "Ma Bell" had competition. Phone companies cropped up all over the place. Then came Call Waiting, and Caller ID, and all of those other amenities that make phone use so convenient. Then came the Internet. Personal computer became the norm and modems were connected through the phone line. If you got a call, it knocked you offline unless you disabled incoming calls until you were done "surfing the Net". That brought a rise in requests for second phone lines that could be dedicated as a "data line" only. And that, in turn, started the competition for phone and computer "bundled" rates. Now, I have unlimited long distance phone privileges. I can call anywhere in the country for no added fees. Unheard of!
*Cell phone technology came about as a result of amateur radio technology. In the beginning, only rich people had "mobile" phones, and they were the size of bricks! Now, they are smaller, wireless, and EVERYONE has them. They really aren't phones at all, but little radios that can do just about anything but brush your teeth for you. With them, you can take still photos, make videos, place phone calls, surf the Internet, read bar codes, locate where you are with a GPS installed--you name it. You aren't tethered to a cord. And, if you are a teenager, your entire social life depends on them!
I'm probably forgetting something. When I think of how much the telephone has changed just in the last 65 years, I really feel like an old fogey!
*First of all, there was ONE telephone company with "Bell" in the name: Illinois Bell Telephone, where I lived. If you didn't like their service, you were out of luck. And the telephone in your house belonged to the company. You just rented it by the month (automatically in your bill).
*There were wooden hand-crank telephones that were hung on the wall in some of the houses that I visited as a kid, but these were mostly before my time. In my experience, all phones were black plastic, with cords that attached the receiver to the base unit--either on a table or hung on a wall. Most houses had just one phone, and when you talked on it, you were stuck close to the base unit because of the cord. If it was in a public area of the house, everyone could hear your end of the conversation!
*Phones either had no dial (operator driven) or a rotary dial with fingerholes and numbers under each hole so you could dial the 7-digit number. Where we lived in the early 50s (Danville, IL), you only had to pick up the receiver and wait for the operator to answer. You then told her the last 4 digits of the number you were trying to reach because the other three numbers indicated a local call and were all the same. Any other prefix indicated a long distance call.
*Friends of our family who lived in a rural area near my grandparents had the phone number "5-5-ring 5"...which meant that they were on a party line, shared with other families. If an incoming call was for them, the phone would ring five times. Other rings meant the call was for someone else. I always found that confusing.
*My grandparents also had a party line but their phone only rang if the call was for them. If you wanted to make a call, you had to pick up the receiver and listen to see if the phone was in use before you could dial. It was not at all unusual for others to listen in to your conversation, unannounced! In later years, all phones were put on private lines. No more eavesdropping!
*If you called someone who was using their phone, you got a busy signal--a series of beeps. There was no Call Waiting, no Caller ID, no Call Forwarding, and no Voice Mail. When your phone rang, you didn't know who it was, and if you were on the phone, they couldn't reach you. If someone in the family was expecting an important call, the rest of us were told to stay off the phone until it came through. Period!
*When we moved to the Chicago area in 1958, the phone number prefixes consisted of words. Ours was EUCLID, abbreviated as EU. Our number was EU3-3101. In numbers, that translated to 383-3101. Later, Illinois Bell dropped the word prefixes in favor of just the numbers. I only mention this because it seemed so strange to me to have a phone number that started with a word!
*Long distance phone calls were a big deal and had to go through an operator. First, you dialed "0". When the operator answered, you would say, "Operator, I'd like to make a long distance phone call to (say) Rice Lake, Wisconsin. The number is..." There were three types of LD calls: collect, which meant the person you were calling had to pay the bill; station-to-station, which meant that you paid the bill and were willing to talk to whomever answered; and person-to-person, which meant that you paid the bill but only if one particular person was available. The operator would say, "You have a collect call from Peggy. Do you wish to accept the charges?" If I wanted to call my folks from college, I had to call collect. We couldn't make LD calls on the dorm phones. If we were traveling, we would plan to call person-to-person and have the operator ask for a pre-planned code name--someone who didn't live there. That way, the person we were calling got the signal that we had arrived safely, and no one had to pay for the call!
*Long Distance calls in those days were expensive. There was a fee for the first three minutes--the amount depending on the location and distance (and sometimes the time of day!)--then a rate for every minute thereafter. We kids weren't allowed to make LD phone calls without parental permission, and even then, we had to have a pretty good reason for wanting to! Then the family Phone Police would be ordering us off the phone when the allotted time was up. Ever try to express your undying love and affection for a long distance teenage boyfriend in three minutes? Especially when the phone was in a public place in the house? Impossible!
*LD calls were sufficiently rare and expensive that, when someone in the family called on a holiday, for instance, we called everyone to the phone to say a few words. Those calls were a family event! If you happened to have an extension phone, other family members could listen in. It was quite unusual to call Grandpa or Grandma McNary and not have both on the phone at once!
*In the 60s, Slimline Princess phones were invented. These were a bit more expensive to rent, but they came in colors. Wow! Later ones didn't have dials but pushbuttons. Double wow! Also, extension phones became more common. They were still attached to the same line, but you weren't stuck in the middle of the living room to talk. You could talk on an extension in a more private setting.
*Somewhere along the line, phone service was de-centralized. "Ma Bell" had competition. Phone companies cropped up all over the place. Then came Call Waiting, and Caller ID, and all of those other amenities that make phone use so convenient. Then came the Internet. Personal computer became the norm and modems were connected through the phone line. If you got a call, it knocked you offline unless you disabled incoming calls until you were done "surfing the Net". That brought a rise in requests for second phone lines that could be dedicated as a "data line" only. And that, in turn, started the competition for phone and computer "bundled" rates. Now, I have unlimited long distance phone privileges. I can call anywhere in the country for no added fees. Unheard of!
*Cell phone technology came about as a result of amateur radio technology. In the beginning, only rich people had "mobile" phones, and they were the size of bricks! Now, they are smaller, wireless, and EVERYONE has them. They really aren't phones at all, but little radios that can do just about anything but brush your teeth for you. With them, you can take still photos, make videos, place phone calls, surf the Internet, read bar codes, locate where you are with a GPS installed--you name it. You aren't tethered to a cord. And, if you are a teenager, your entire social life depends on them!
I'm probably forgetting something. When I think of how much the telephone has changed just in the last 65 years, I really feel like an old fogey!
Friday, March 9, 2012
Fairness Gene?
The road to my local grocery store is closed for a few weeks, causing me to have to take a detour--which takes me right past "Roland's Golden Memories Retirement Club". There ain't no "club" about it, folks. It's a home. Be it assisted living, nursing, or whatever, it's a place where old people go to live because they can't live on their own anymore. And it makes me angry. Whoever named the place has done a horrible disservice to the aging!
Retirement club? C'mon people! Who are you trying to kid? A club is a place where people choose to go to have a good time with other people of the same interests. It's not a place to live just to be where employees are paid to take care of you because you can't do it anymore. And this particular place is also not just a "club" for retirees. It's a euphemism for invalids and old age, and living out your last days/weeks/months/years. (Pick one.) We no longer refer to places as "old folks' homes" or "nursing homes" because they have negative connotations, but calling a place a "retirment club" just smacks of condescension, and I hate it. "There, there, Grandma. We don't want you to feel bad about where we are sending you, so we'll just call it a retirement club." Ooookay.
What offends me more, however, is the "Golden Memories" part. The implication is that people who live to a ripe old age have only memories left. They are no longer productive members of society, so let's talk about their lives as if living in the past--the memories of what they no longer can do or have. GOLDEN memories...the good old days. What an insult! If I get to the point at which all I have to live for are my golden memories, just shoot me. If I can't contribute something to my community or my family, there is no longer any need for me to stay alive. I admit that I write much in this blog about my past experiences, mostly as a history for my daughter and grandchildren, but not as if that's all I have left. I try not to be a complainer, but honestly, MANY of my memories are FAR from golden. Many of them hurt like hell and can cause me to weep years and years later.
Perhaps Roland's is trying to imply that their institution hopes to supply golden memories for old folks in their waning years. Maybe I'm just being too sensitive. I always have had an overgrown fairness gene. I have no qualms about the need for such places--just what they are called. I'm not resisting growing old, myself....just resenting it. Society already shows a zillion times over that we "seniors" no longer count. I just hate seeing it on a sign outside a building that houses old people! I think we should start calling the hereafter "God's Heavenly Retirement Club". (BYOB!)
Retirement club? C'mon people! Who are you trying to kid? A club is a place where people choose to go to have a good time with other people of the same interests. It's not a place to live just to be where employees are paid to take care of you because you can't do it anymore. And this particular place is also not just a "club" for retirees. It's a euphemism for invalids and old age, and living out your last days/weeks/months/years. (Pick one.) We no longer refer to places as "old folks' homes" or "nursing homes" because they have negative connotations, but calling a place a "retirment club" just smacks of condescension, and I hate it. "There, there, Grandma. We don't want you to feel bad about where we are sending you, so we'll just call it a retirement club." Ooookay.
What offends me more, however, is the "Golden Memories" part. The implication is that people who live to a ripe old age have only memories left. They are no longer productive members of society, so let's talk about their lives as if living in the past--the memories of what they no longer can do or have. GOLDEN memories...the good old days. What an insult! If I get to the point at which all I have to live for are my golden memories, just shoot me. If I can't contribute something to my community or my family, there is no longer any need for me to stay alive. I admit that I write much in this blog about my past experiences, mostly as a history for my daughter and grandchildren, but not as if that's all I have left. I try not to be a complainer, but honestly, MANY of my memories are FAR from golden. Many of them hurt like hell and can cause me to weep years and years later.
Perhaps Roland's is trying to imply that their institution hopes to supply golden memories for old folks in their waning years. Maybe I'm just being too sensitive. I always have had an overgrown fairness gene. I have no qualms about the need for such places--just what they are called. I'm not resisting growing old, myself....just resenting it. Society already shows a zillion times over that we "seniors" no longer count. I just hate seeing it on a sign outside a building that houses old people! I think we should start calling the hereafter "God's Heavenly Retirement Club". (BYOB!)
Thursday, March 8, 2012
My Peyton Manning Story
If you have followed the news at all, you now know that Peyton Manning, the quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts, has been cut loose to find his fortune elsewhere. It's been a sad, sad time for Indianapolis. Most of us feel that Mr. Manning IS the Colts here--QB for 14 years, taking the Colts to the Super Bowl twice, once for a win.
Most fans adore Peyton Manning. Number 18 jerseys don fans everywhere--now doomed to Goodwill. We don't know where Peyton will land or who will replace him, but he has made an impact on Indy. There is a children's wing in a hospital named after and supported by him.
Still Peyton Manning is a very private person. In his whole time in Indy, we have known nothing about his personal life. Last year--or maybe the year before?--he and wife had a child. It was announced, but no one knew she was even pregnant. How's that for privacy??
It is public knowledge that Peyton Manning is/was from New Orleans. When Hurricane Katrina happened, I was running net control for SATERN (the Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network) on the radio for the event. There were two TV news channels in my house in two days, just to advertise what was going on. New Orleans was under water. People were in attics and on roofs, looking for rescue. It was awful...
In the midst of it, a fellow representing the Colts called me...a man named Kelly...who was inquiring if we could find out via our radio network if Mr. Manning's property in New Orleans was safe. He made it clear that he wasn't calling because Peyton had asked...was just hoping that we could shed some light on the situation to ease his concerns. I could have put that out on the radio network but decided to sit on it for awhile.
I'm so glad I did! People were dying. People were in desperate situations. There was no electricity, no air conditioning...no food or water. People were suffering. If I had put it on the network to check on a football star's property, it would have made both of us seem insensitive. I called Mr. Kelly back awhile later to explain to him that the situation was too intense for us to act on his request. He understood and agreed.
It was a tough call. I could have made myself seem famous for making a request for a famous person! I could have asked for people to check on Peyton Manning's property as a favor to him...but HE wasn't the one requesting it and I had the presence of mind to understand that some things aren't worthy of our attention. Bottom line is that I would probably have received criticism for the request and made Mr. Manning look like a selfish person.
In the end, it turned out that Manning's property in New Orleans was high and dry. I know I made the right decision for Mr. Manning and myself. Our integrity remained intact.
That's my brush with Peyton Manning...and he doesn't even know it!
Most fans adore Peyton Manning. Number 18 jerseys don fans everywhere--now doomed to Goodwill. We don't know where Peyton will land or who will replace him, but he has made an impact on Indy. There is a children's wing in a hospital named after and supported by him.
Still Peyton Manning is a very private person. In his whole time in Indy, we have known nothing about his personal life. Last year--or maybe the year before?--he and wife had a child. It was announced, but no one knew she was even pregnant. How's that for privacy??
It is public knowledge that Peyton Manning is/was from New Orleans. When Hurricane Katrina happened, I was running net control for SATERN (the Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network) on the radio for the event. There were two TV news channels in my house in two days, just to advertise what was going on. New Orleans was under water. People were in attics and on roofs, looking for rescue. It was awful...
In the midst of it, a fellow representing the Colts called me...a man named Kelly...who was inquiring if we could find out via our radio network if Mr. Manning's property in New Orleans was safe. He made it clear that he wasn't calling because Peyton had asked...was just hoping that we could shed some light on the situation to ease his concerns. I could have put that out on the radio network but decided to sit on it for awhile.
I'm so glad I did! People were dying. People were in desperate situations. There was no electricity, no air conditioning...no food or water. People were suffering. If I had put it on the network to check on a football star's property, it would have made both of us seem insensitive. I called Mr. Kelly back awhile later to explain to him that the situation was too intense for us to act on his request. He understood and agreed.
It was a tough call. I could have made myself seem famous for making a request for a famous person! I could have asked for people to check on Peyton Manning's property as a favor to him...but HE wasn't the one requesting it and I had the presence of mind to understand that some things aren't worthy of our attention. Bottom line is that I would probably have received criticism for the request and made Mr. Manning look like a selfish person.
In the end, it turned out that Manning's property in New Orleans was high and dry. I know I made the right decision for Mr. Manning and myself. Our integrity remained intact.
That's my brush with Peyton Manning...and he doesn't even know it!
Monday, March 5, 2012
My Soapbox
I have a problem with Republican politics. When George W. Bush became president, the first thing he did was screw with American public education, instituting No Child Left Behind, which was and is totally out of step with reality.
What's worse is that I live in a Republican state. I am inundated daily with the conservative agendas that are so far from what I feel and believe that it gets ugly.
What are my issues? Mostly, I am female!
*Abortion. I don't like the notion of late-stage abortion as a measure of birth control, but I do think that a woman should have a choice. If men can't keep things in their pants, and women are drawn into that, why must it be the woman who is stuck with a life-changing situation, when men can move on to create other unwanted children? Sorry...I just think the choice should be there.
*Welfare. Not everyone in need of services is bleeding the system. My child and her family were, several times (unbeknownst to me) having to take advantage of WIC, food stamps, food banks, and other ways to keep the babies fed. Poverty in this country is overwhelmingly juvenile and female. Who does it hurt to cut back on welfare??
*Education. I was a teacher for 40 years in American public schools. Over the last 15 years of my teaching career, we were told how we weren't making the grade, in spite of working our fannies off trying to help kids not only learn but also just to get through their lives. Now, states are offering vouchers to send tax monies with children who want to go to private schools. What's wrong with that? It takes aways funds from public schools and puts it in the hands of schools that can pick and choose what students they will accept and not accept. Schools whose students can't make the appropriate test scores are threatened with being "taken over" by the state. These same schools have already lost so much revenue due to the economy that they can't even provide enough copy paper to provide worksheets and other valuable learning materials. It's a set-up for failure. Actually, I WANT to see the state take over these schools and see what they can do!!
*Gay marriage. The debate is still out about whether homosexuality is a choice or a genetic inheritance. Who cares? Yes, it is strange by most standards, but gays are not asking for anything more than a legally recognized partnership, which can already be documented in law. I mean, my siblings and I were partners in farm ownership. Why can that same institution be granted to people of the same sex who want to be together forever? What is the divorce rate for gay marriages? Can it be any worse than the 50% hetero rate? The statistics are still out on that one, too. I take the same stance with that as I do with the notion that there can be no other life in the universe. Huh? How do we know??
*Separation of church and state. The Republicans think they have a claim to defend the Christian nature of our country's founding. If they actually did their research, they would understand that our founding fathers weren't necessarily Christian, and the pilgrims were a mixed bag of people looking for new situations. (Not the Puritans...the pilgrims.) I have my faith. I want others to have theirs. But I do NOT want religion in my government, and I do NOT want government in my religion! When the line blurs, we all have issues.
*Women's rights. The Republicans let the likes of Rush Limbaugh represent their conservative stance. I have listened to Rush's radio program way longer than I like, only to try to understand what the conservative view is on things. He repulses me! Last week, ol' Rush stepped directly into a pile of manure that came from his own mouth. A young woman was testifying before a congressional committee about insurance covering contraception prescriptions--a committee that had no females on it, and had decided that her testimony could not be televised. In his daily radio show, he called her a "slut" and a "prostitute" because (he conjectures) that she wanted to have so much sex that she wanted insurance to cover her contraception. Huh?? I was infuriated! Rush created such a firestorm that he was forced to make a sort-of apology because he was losing sponsors for his show, but the apology was one of those, "I'm sorry, BUT..." things. Don Imus lost his radio slot for calling a group of African American female athletes a bunch of "nappie-headed ho's", but Rush is being kept on and defended by his media carrier for his "right to express his opinion" about the issue at hand. Clearly, it isn't okay for a non-political idiot to make racial slurs, but it IS okay for a political idiot to sling epithets at women? Sorry. It doesn't fly with me. In fact, it make my blood pressure go up!!
I witnessed a TV ad the other day promoting a penis vacuum pump...with the tag that it is "covered by Medicare and most insurance policies". Huh? This has nothing to do with contraception or procreation, but for sexual desire. Apparently it's okay for insurance to cover this but not female contraception?? I'm aghast....
One of my dearest friends has become a conservative/political gun nut whose information about politics comes directly from the NRA. He is vociferously posting anti-democratic stuff...even touting the "birther" crap. I have tolerated it, considering his state of mind as his. I'm done with that, now. I intend to continue the fight by posting some stuff in my own conscience's defense.
I went to church yesterday. The pastor spoke briefly about the poor people in southern Indiana who have suffered with the tornado devastation, saying "They are not being punished for anything." Then I went to Sunday School, and one of our older members who gets on topics and won't shut up started in on how we have tornadoes because we have cut Got out of our society. Oh...you have to understand how much strength it took to keep my mouth shut!! I started to, saying, "Now, now, Kenny..." but his wife shut him down before it got worse. We all know Kenny's thoughts. Everyone knows not to get him started...but it upsets me. In fact, when politics came up in class during our study of the disciples, I blurted out "As long as the Republicans allow themselves to be represented by Rush Limbaugh, I will never vote for them. I am very, very angry about that!" Things were pretty quiet after that.
I'm sorry if your fortune has been at risk because of the economy, but Barack Obama didn't start that. George W. Bush started the big company bailouts. I don't have a fortune. I don't even make enough money in retirement to pay much in taxes. I don't follow the stock market. No need! I don't know what the answer is. Like the big majority of people in this country, I rely on what I have to keep me going. It isn't pretty, folks...but I'm not complaining. I'm just tired of those who do! Until you have lived at the bottom of the heap for awhile, you have no room to criticize what goes on!
I wish I were a multi-millionaire. I wouldn't buy for me. There is nothing I really need...but so many need so much. I would get such pleasure out of helping a little!
What's worse is that I live in a Republican state. I am inundated daily with the conservative agendas that are so far from what I feel and believe that it gets ugly.
What are my issues? Mostly, I am female!
*Abortion. I don't like the notion of late-stage abortion as a measure of birth control, but I do think that a woman should have a choice. If men can't keep things in their pants, and women are drawn into that, why must it be the woman who is stuck with a life-changing situation, when men can move on to create other unwanted children? Sorry...I just think the choice should be there.
*Welfare. Not everyone in need of services is bleeding the system. My child and her family were, several times (unbeknownst to me) having to take advantage of WIC, food stamps, food banks, and other ways to keep the babies fed. Poverty in this country is overwhelmingly juvenile and female. Who does it hurt to cut back on welfare??
*Education. I was a teacher for 40 years in American public schools. Over the last 15 years of my teaching career, we were told how we weren't making the grade, in spite of working our fannies off trying to help kids not only learn but also just to get through their lives. Now, states are offering vouchers to send tax monies with children who want to go to private schools. What's wrong with that? It takes aways funds from public schools and puts it in the hands of schools that can pick and choose what students they will accept and not accept. Schools whose students can't make the appropriate test scores are threatened with being "taken over" by the state. These same schools have already lost so much revenue due to the economy that they can't even provide enough copy paper to provide worksheets and other valuable learning materials. It's a set-up for failure. Actually, I WANT to see the state take over these schools and see what they can do!!
*Gay marriage. The debate is still out about whether homosexuality is a choice or a genetic inheritance. Who cares? Yes, it is strange by most standards, but gays are not asking for anything more than a legally recognized partnership, which can already be documented in law. I mean, my siblings and I were partners in farm ownership. Why can that same institution be granted to people of the same sex who want to be together forever? What is the divorce rate for gay marriages? Can it be any worse than the 50% hetero rate? The statistics are still out on that one, too. I take the same stance with that as I do with the notion that there can be no other life in the universe. Huh? How do we know??
*Separation of church and state. The Republicans think they have a claim to defend the Christian nature of our country's founding. If they actually did their research, they would understand that our founding fathers weren't necessarily Christian, and the pilgrims were a mixed bag of people looking for new situations. (Not the Puritans...the pilgrims.) I have my faith. I want others to have theirs. But I do NOT want religion in my government, and I do NOT want government in my religion! When the line blurs, we all have issues.
*Women's rights. The Republicans let the likes of Rush Limbaugh represent their conservative stance. I have listened to Rush's radio program way longer than I like, only to try to understand what the conservative view is on things. He repulses me! Last week, ol' Rush stepped directly into a pile of manure that came from his own mouth. A young woman was testifying before a congressional committee about insurance covering contraception prescriptions--a committee that had no females on it, and had decided that her testimony could not be televised. In his daily radio show, he called her a "slut" and a "prostitute" because (he conjectures) that she wanted to have so much sex that she wanted insurance to cover her contraception. Huh?? I was infuriated! Rush created such a firestorm that he was forced to make a sort-of apology because he was losing sponsors for his show, but the apology was one of those, "I'm sorry, BUT..." things. Don Imus lost his radio slot for calling a group of African American female athletes a bunch of "nappie-headed ho's", but Rush is being kept on and defended by his media carrier for his "right to express his opinion" about the issue at hand. Clearly, it isn't okay for a non-political idiot to make racial slurs, but it IS okay for a political idiot to sling epithets at women? Sorry. It doesn't fly with me. In fact, it make my blood pressure go up!!
I witnessed a TV ad the other day promoting a penis vacuum pump...with the tag that it is "covered by Medicare and most insurance policies". Huh? This has nothing to do with contraception or procreation, but for sexual desire. Apparently it's okay for insurance to cover this but not female contraception?? I'm aghast....
One of my dearest friends has become a conservative/political gun nut whose information about politics comes directly from the NRA. He is vociferously posting anti-democratic stuff...even touting the "birther" crap. I have tolerated it, considering his state of mind as his. I'm done with that, now. I intend to continue the fight by posting some stuff in my own conscience's defense.
I went to church yesterday. The pastor spoke briefly about the poor people in southern Indiana who have suffered with the tornado devastation, saying "They are not being punished for anything." Then I went to Sunday School, and one of our older members who gets on topics and won't shut up started in on how we have tornadoes because we have cut Got out of our society. Oh...you have to understand how much strength it took to keep my mouth shut!! I started to, saying, "Now, now, Kenny..." but his wife shut him down before it got worse. We all know Kenny's thoughts. Everyone knows not to get him started...but it upsets me. In fact, when politics came up in class during our study of the disciples, I blurted out "As long as the Republicans allow themselves to be represented by Rush Limbaugh, I will never vote for them. I am very, very angry about that!" Things were pretty quiet after that.
I'm sorry if your fortune has been at risk because of the economy, but Barack Obama didn't start that. George W. Bush started the big company bailouts. I don't have a fortune. I don't even make enough money in retirement to pay much in taxes. I don't follow the stock market. No need! I don't know what the answer is. Like the big majority of people in this country, I rely on what I have to keep me going. It isn't pretty, folks...but I'm not complaining. I'm just tired of those who do! Until you have lived at the bottom of the heap for awhile, you have no room to criticize what goes on!
I wish I were a multi-millionaire. I wouldn't buy for me. There is nothing I really need...but so many need so much. I would get such pleasure out of helping a little!
Friday, March 2, 2012
So Not Fair!
Watching TV coverage of tornado devastation in southern Indiana. Indiana Task Force One is on the way. There are fatalities...at least four. Here in Plainfield, we just had two rounds of storms with big hail, and it's not over yet. I figure the second round was another attempt to dent my car since the first round didn't do it...
The news about my former stepson's surgery today is not good. He will be sent home without any procedures, now having to choose between chemo/radiation or no treatment at all. My heart just aches for them all... He is so young. This is not fair.
My neighbor to the north came over on Tuesday to tell me that her father had been killed in an automobile accident on Saturday. That poor family! She and her children have had a rough row to hoe over the last few years. Now this. Her mother spends a lot of time at their house, babysitting the grandchildren while Mommy works. Now, Grandma is a grieving widow. Did I say "not fair" already??
At the risk of sounding cavalier about things, I will announce that today is my 65th birthday. Talk about unfair!! How did this happen? Only yesterday, I was raising a child. Now, I am becoming a child! (No, I'm not in diapers--yet.)
It is snowing heavily in northern Illinois where my daughter lives. They get snow. We get hail and tornadoes. But there are robins in my yard and sandhill cranes migrating northward overhead. That part isn't unfair. I'll take it!
The news about my former stepson's surgery today is not good. He will be sent home without any procedures, now having to choose between chemo/radiation or no treatment at all. My heart just aches for them all... He is so young. This is not fair.
My neighbor to the north came over on Tuesday to tell me that her father had been killed in an automobile accident on Saturday. That poor family! She and her children have had a rough row to hoe over the last few years. Now this. Her mother spends a lot of time at their house, babysitting the grandchildren while Mommy works. Now, Grandma is a grieving widow. Did I say "not fair" already??
At the risk of sounding cavalier about things, I will announce that today is my 65th birthday. Talk about unfair!! How did this happen? Only yesterday, I was raising a child. Now, I am becoming a child! (No, I'm not in diapers--yet.)
It is snowing heavily in northern Illinois where my daughter lives. They get snow. We get hail and tornadoes. But there are robins in my yard and sandhill cranes migrating northward overhead. That part isn't unfair. I'll take it!
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