Tuesday, December 30, 2025
Journaling, blogging, writing in general
You know I often write about ways to stay happy or at least, generally content in the world. Writing is one way I dispell the blues. You can't help experiencing anxiety and sorrow in this life, but you can mitigate or even lessen both the hold and the duration of such feelings and my go-to method is by writing. Yesterday, I blogged about the decline that aging has brought into my life. Today, reading my e-mail news feed, I came actross this line: Yahoo Health - Writing even one line in a journal about how you feel each day helps. I believe this and the line I would like to write today about how I feel is about helpers.
I feel grateful to the helpers who make my 80 year old life manageable, my sister and my neighbors. My sister works here one day every week or two to help with heavier household maintainance jobs, grocery shopping, laundry, etc. It isn't only her help but also her company. Many elderly people, like myself, live alone and even though I have pets I love, the interaction with other adults is essential to wellbeing. My neighbors check in on me and help with tasks like putting out my trash and recycle cans and also texting me in storms and even just daily when they think of me. This helps enormously.
If you are looking ror something to do, start a little journal and begin with the gratitudes - 5 things each day for which you are grateful. If you have a hard time finding them, then you know this is an important exercise for you! Also, consider texting an old friend or neighbor and just asking how they are.
New Year 2026 is coming - today my sister is coming, and tomorrow, my pension check is coming! i am grateful for my many blessings, including that all my siblings are alive and well, as is my daughter and all my siblings offspring and two of my cousins with whom I am in contact. I am grateful for the sunshine coming in the window and my general wellbeing even with the inevitable disabilities of age. I am grateful for writing and blogspot!
Getting ready for a Happy New Year! wrightj45@yahoo.com
Monday, December 29, 2025
A New Year A New Decade - for me Entering the 80's!
The Challenges of Aging
Spine Decline
My neighbor John has been walking my dog for me for about 6 months. He walks every day, two or three times a day, so it was no problem for him to pick up my dog for one of his walks. I had been walking her, first to the railroad and down to Northmont and around to my street, about a mile. Then my back began to decline and I lowered the walk to half a mile around a little local pond called Martin's Lake, a nice pavement and a pretty park view.
When John took over, I gratefully gave in to not walking. John is away with his wife and family for ten days and I am walking the dog again. Now, I get as far as where the two Food Trucks are parked, about two long blocks from my house and then back. By the time I reach the food trucks, parked at the corner at the end of the two long blocks, I have a pinching. biting pain in the right side of my lower back.
Of course, I have been to the orthopedic doctor about my spine. It began about 20 years ago with a severe pain in the space between my shoulders at the base of my neck. It was diagnosed as dessicated disc disease in C (cervical vertabrae) 3 through C 7 (just about all of them.) The Doctor warned me that it would spread down my spine over time. He was right and it has. Now it is in the lumbar region, and I know this because something dreadful happened to me over a year ago and I went to another ortopedic doctor and had xrays.
The first orthopedic doctor at Regional Orthophpedics, was my doctor from my 50's when I tore the meniscus in my left knee. I had gone to him for shots in my knee and he had prescribed Celebrex which I took until I discoverd it had nearly destroyed my kidneys. By then, I had a new medical service, Cooper Health and a new general practitioner and she referred me to a new Cooper Health orthopedic doctor.
The disaster that happened to me was that I turned in bed in the middle of the night, and became paralyzed in a lightning bolt of nerve pain. I couldn't move for 6 hours, until nearly daylight. I thought my hip had locked up somehow but the new orthopedic doctor said the xrays showed it was my lower back and I had suffered a back spasm. He prescribed some serious muscle relaxants in case it happened again but that was about all that could be done.
I have not slept in a bed since that night. I sleep in a recliner.
Vision
That is one impending doom. Another one is my vision. Also in my 50's my eyesight began to fail in a strange and subtle way - first with colors like brown and navy and black when I was putting on socks in the morning, then as time progressed, with reading. Eventually, over the next decade, I went to 3 different eye doctors. 2 opthalmologists, then a cornea specialist because I was diagnosed with Fuch's Dystrophy - an inherited degenerative cornea disease for which there is no cure short of cornea transplant which involves transplant drugs and other complications. It will progress at individual rates. So far, mine has been slow and painless. But, I can no longer read, or read street signs or highway signs, or the gps map on the dashboard, so driving has become limited. I will eventually be blind. I listen to audio books.
Cognitive decline
Another problem with my driving has been a noticeable cognitive decline in the area of mind mapping. I used to be able to visualize the route to familiar far off places like a restaurant and antique shop I liked in Burlington, a hiking trail in Bordentown, and even some closer places. Sometimes the mind map just goes blank and I cannot see in my mind the route I was once so familiar with - like one day going to the veterinarian! I took a wrong turn and was driving all over the place trying to find my way back. So far this is the only sign of cognitive decline that I have noticed. Mostly my mind is sharp and my memory is good.
Memory
My memory seems to be in the normal range, by which I mean that I have no more trouble remembering things than most people at any age - the name of a an actor or a writer, or a favorite book or movie may temporarily evade me. Eventually, it comes to me.
Thursday, December 25, 2025
Merry Christmas 2025
Good morning and Merry Christmas whoever stumbles on this small and obscure corner of the mystery called the internet.
So far, I have spoken with my sister on the phone as I will be going to her house at noon, and texted several old friends. My neighbor, John, walked my dog, as he does most mornings, and another neighbor sent me a picure from the local park where he was having a walk. He could smell someone frying bacon and eggs for breakfast. It all made me think of people throughout near history (the 20th century) and what they would be thinking or doing on Christmas morning. Women would've been making a list in their heads of all they still had to get done before the family came or they would be getting the family breakfast and getting the kids dressed to go and visit family. Throuhout my childhood, in Philadelphia in the 20th Century, that is what people did in our world on Christmas; they got dressed up and went to visit other family members, usually centered at a Grandother's house. In our case, we visited my mother's mother on 10th and Oregan Avenue in South Philadelphia. Sometimes we went to Ocean City to my father's mother and sometimes my father took us to pick her up and bring her to Philadelphia.
As Grandmothers got too old, my mother took over the role, especially when we moved to New Jersey and the old family network as we had known it was disassembled.
The old network was the Lyon's family, Grandmom Lavinia and Grandpop Joseph, their adult children, my mother, her brother Joe, and sisters Susan and Lavinia. Then the unit began to split and members moved, a kind of organic dispersion.
Whatever configuration the family unit was taking, the morning was the same. We kids, however many there were at any given time, would rush down to open our gifts under the tree! What a thrill - some new treasure. I was just thinking how I still have a doll saved from those long lost days. All my other Christmas treasures are long gone though I can remember a few, like my Paint by Number kits! I can even remember the picture that a I painted from one of the kits, a German Shepherd portrait.
The years in between youth and motherhood were like magazine pictures of Christmas. I had Christmas nightgowns, flannel with decorative prints, and I wrapped my purchases, bought with my Christmas Club money (a practice of the 60's whereby banking clients put a small amount of money into a Christmas account each payday) with extreme care. I can remember some of the gifts purchased with thoughtfulness such as the woxford shirts and matching sweaters that I bought for my brothers so that they could be dressed well over the holidays. In those days, I went back to the family home from my apartment for Christmas and watched my much younger brothers and sisters unwrap their gifts. My mother made a ham dotted with pineapple and cherries, potato salad, green beans, and we had fruit cake, except for one Christmas when my mother actually made a traditional Christmas plum pudding - flaming and all!
The days of my motherhood were so taxing it makes me sad to think of them. I was a beast of burden. So much stuff to carry all the time. I was alone in Philadelphia and had no car, and my family was in New Jersey and then in West Virginia. We only had one Christmas with my daughter's father and it was remarkable because it was one of the coldest Christmases in weather history and cars were freezing on the roads! We drove to his family's house in Chad's Ford, on Christmas Eve, which is when they celebrated Christmas and the whole way, with my newborn baby, I was afraid his (Karl's) old car would freeze up and my baby would be in danger from the cold. It didnt' and she is now in her 40's and in London, England for Christmas with her boyfriend.
Each year I tried really hard to get the gift Lavinia wanted for Christmas. We were pretty poor so she only really got two - one from me and one from Santa, and small stocking stuffers. Sometimes I made her gifts when she was really little,like one year a princess gown. There were always books, both for her and during my childhood.
One Christmas all she wanted was a Topsy Towers, which she must have seen on television because it was sold out everywhere. I had to beg a variety of friends to drive me in their cars to stores as far away as Philadelphia in my search for this toy, but it was sold out everywhere. In a sleet storm, I rode my bike to Capa's costume store on the White Horse Pike in Haddon Heights and bought her a red tutu and ballet shoes and tights instead. In the era of the cabbage patch doll craze, we got lucky because her Grandmother Jones made one for her. I could never have gone to the lengths people I knew had gone through for their daughters, such as camping out in the Mall parking lot to be first in line when a shipment was due.
Things got easier when my mother gave me her old car and I could take my paycheck before Christmas and go to a store, Penny's or Two Guys, or even further back, Korvetts, and in one swoop buy all the gifts I needed for my family in our trip to West Virginia and my daughter. I rmember many of her toys: Teddy Ruxpin, Chatty Cathy, all the Barbi's and their accommodations - recording studio, ice cream shop, hair salon, and then the American Girl Dolls and their accessories. all of which we still have in the attic. My father made a beautiful trunk for Kirsten, the first American Girl Doll. In her teens it was cothes and computers. Then she was gone.
Now, I am in my 80th Christmas. In a couple of hours, I will go to my sister's which is where I have spent the past Christmases of the 21st century, with my sister and her son, my Godson Archie, and Bryson, Sue's grandson.
Generally my brother, also old, 78, drives up from W.Va. but not this year. He didn't anticipate it with joy, but with anxiety - too much traffic, too many hours for his bad joints and back, and bad weather predicted on top of that.
I don't mourn for the past. It was so hard for so many years, the endless lists of things to do, the fear of driving long distances in bad weather with unreliable cars, the exhaustion of all these extra demands on top of a heavy enough work life - two jobs working 6 days a week. It is so easy now. Everything is done well in advance, less to buy and less to spend so less anxiety about money (though still plenty of that). It is a burden on my sister now, but she is young, twenty years younger than I am, and she has energy and accepts the burden with calm and generosity.
Just recently I was looking at a book that I have loved so much and given away and bought again about 3 or 4 times, OUR TOWN, the play by Thornton Wilder. The protagonist goes back from the grave, for one day, to look at the past, but it is too beautiful and magical and fragile and lived with too much obliviousness to be endured. The others in the graveyard warn her not to go back, but to acdept with peaceful resignation the eternity and peace of the afterlife. But she does go back for that one day and it is too much to bear. And that is how I feel now about remembering. It is too much to bear.
Thank heavens for writing - a place to put the thoughts and memories - to move them on like the books and clothes I no longer need and give away. The practice is to BE HERE NOW. This is the moment to be lived, and fortunately for me, it is one of beauty, peace, comfort and a kind of happiness.
Merry Christmas 2025!
wrightj45@yahoo.com
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Obsession, Love and Sex
Perhaps you, like me, fell in love when you were young, really, deeply, passionately and adoringly in love. The object of my affection was my teen boyfriend, Mike. I thought he was perfect. He was Bronte's Heathcliff Wuthering Heights, Dr. Zhivago, every brooding romantic male in the French movies played by Jean Paul Belmondo, and even the fireman in 1966 film Fahrenheit 451, Oskar Werner. But, as it turned out, he was mostly Heathcliff, with unregulated rage, petty temper tantrums, intemperate negative emotions the full range of the menu. His competent, take-charge side became domineering and belittling in order to keep me thinking I was incompetent and dependent. The worse his moods became, the worse his behavior, the more controlling he became because he feared I might leave him, and it is important to say, he loved me passionatey too and as much as he drove me away, he wanted to hold on to me.
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AS he was the classic male romantic lead of the period (including Terence Stamp in The Collector), I was the classic female romantic lead of our period, Julie Christie from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (an excellent film - a masterpiece). I was very pretty, very intelligent, well-read, a budding intellectual and artist. And I was enthralled, so I followed him like a loyal dog, until I jumped the fence and unloosed the leash.
But literature teaches us a lot, and not many write about that aspect of a literary education. The film from a novel by Truffaut, The Story of Adele H, taught me where obsessive love leads, to a beautiful and intelligent woman with her life ahead of her turned into a ragged beggar, roaming from military camp to military camp after a man who had discarded her.
Women, however, are not the only ones subject to the downfall in obsessive love. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, Cherie, by Collette, Nana by Emile Zola, are all novels of men brought to desperation, despair and ruin by obsessive love.
Contemplating these novels and films may seem irrelevent and yet today our headlines are filled with large print on the scandal of the world leaders caught with their pants down in a depraved network of exploitation of under-age girls run by Jeffrey Epstein.
Throughout my entrance ito the literary world, I have pondered the seemingly undeserved adoration of college professors and writers for Vladimir Nobokov's novel, Lolita. I have even read it more than once when some author has brought up some aspect with his admiration that I thought I might have missed.
To me it was not only NOT a great novel, but it wasn't beautiful or inspiring or enlightening either. it was the sordid tale of an old man obsessed with a teenaged girl. Did I miss something here? Some moral insight? Maybe.
The thing is, my object of adoration was a young man my own age who adored me, and he was beautiful, the same as I was, and we entered into our sexual experience together, discovering together and learning together, equals in every way.
These modern expose's of old men buying sexual service from economically deprived girls just barely emerging from childhood, are disgusting because of the inequality and the theft by these old men of the beauty of the experience of romantic love that belongs to young women by right. There is nothing mutual, only usage. And the way society has punished and shamed women who serve the sexual needs of men for money, intensifies the trauma and the destruction this exchange inflicts on these young girls.
Can you remember what a child you were at 15 or 16? I can. I was full of hope and a sense of adventure and the allure of the wide world and my own future. I was fortunate to find real love and experience the Romeo and Juliet of it, not the theft and impoverishment of it.
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
The Story of Adele H. (Francois Truffaut)
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Nana (Emile Zola)
Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser)
Cheri (Collette)
and a more subtle but also a view of imbalance in love - Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)
Happy Trails!
wrightj45@yahoo.com
Vintage Postcards
A friend of mine from our Woodbury Friends Meeting has collected family holiday postcards from the early 20th Century and they are beautiful!
Fortunately for me, she had some copied and made into gifts last Christmas. I sent one of my favorites to my daughter in New York this year; it is a small imagine af a girl skiing in the center of an embossed square, very delicate and elegant. I often send her postcards as wwell as pop up cards, a little tradition of ours.
I have written before about my Great-Uncle Yock, my father's uncle, who worked in the post office in Ocean City, New Jersey back in the 1950's and whenever postcards came through with postage but no address (a fairly common occurrence) he put our address in Philadelphia. We frequently had postcards from compete strangers having a good time at the seashore. It was funny.
That gave me a lifelong interest in postcards as well as in stamps and the US Mail in general. As a teacher, one of the art lessons I taught was designing a postage stamp during Black History Month and Women's History Month. As an enrichment mentor, I often took my students to the post office and helped them start stamp collections. I have given away my own stamp collections twice.
Back in the early 2000's I gave my most interesting postcards to my daughter to use to send thank you notes to donors to a couple of early film projects she was working on, the 78 Project, and later Love All Alices. I had stopped collecting postcards with about 2 shoebox size containers and begun using them and getting them back to their intended purpose.
My house had begun to feel like one of those little corners in a creek or river where the flotsum and jetsum deposits tree trunks and beach chairs and coolers and other items detached from their original purpose.
That feeling is also why I have been donating hundreds of books to the Free Books Project - to get these items out of my cove and back to their original purpose.
This past Sunday, my friend with the vintage family postcards brought them to share during our discussion hour from 10:00 to 11;00 before silent worship and again I was interested in postcards and I discoverd there is a postcard club not far from here.
Postcards: Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club (WC4)
www.facebook.com › Pages › Businesses › Nonprofit organization
Rating 5.0 (2)
THE NEXT MEETING of the Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club will be held on Monday, November 10, 2025, at the Union Fire Company, 1396 River Rd. (NJ29), ...
Local Postcard Clubs - Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club
www.wc4postcards.org › localpostcardclubs
Meeting day: Second Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.. For additional information: Joan Kay - 718-375-7353
I don't collect anymore or even really have anything left worth showing or sharing, but I may drop in one day to visit. Also, I am painting postcard sized paintings and I have discovered on the internet that there are artists doing that as well.
By the way, a side note is that the original printed postcards began in the late 1800's around 1880 or so and in Germany. Before that, of course, travelers with art skills made painted scenes to send home and I saw a splendid show of these tiny masterpieces once in New York, many years ago. I suppose the days of all paper mail for private consumption are on the wane and maybe almost gone. This year I dropped from my origina 100 cards per year down to 15 Last year it was 75 and the year before, 50. People don't send cards anymore and they can be disappointed if they receive one because it means they have to go and get cards and stamps and make a return mailing. Perhaps it is wasteful but it is also a little beauty and adventure, this piece of paper traveling from one house, state, or even country, to another to bring a greeting.
But now, here we are doing that electronically, can't collect these though, can we, and where's the history?
The American Museum in Deptford, a little local museum on Andaloro Way which used to be Andaloro Farm, has a collection of postcards as well as trains, fishing reels, fosils, and a myriad of other objects to amuse and delight and make you think about history in all its material forms.
Merry Christmas my Friends!
wrightj45@yahoo.com
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Quilts, Poverty, and Gees Bend - Part 1
For the second time, I am reading a book called The Quilts of Gee's Bend by Susan Goldman Rubin. A;though it is a book written for youth, it is a billiant and beautiful book for any age.
In a nutshell, After theCivil War the Pettway plantation owners left. They had enslaved 100 people whom they simply abandoned in the slave cabins. Of course, enslaved people had always had to spplement their sparse rations to survive, so the people of Gees Bend fished and farmed and stayed alive. Then another owner bought the plantation and turned their slave cabins into tenant farms which meant they did all the work and he took a portion of the profits. By then the slave cabins had become a small village. They had to live with a cycle of credit with the local store for seeds each year and paid off the debt with the money from the harvest.
The storekeeper died and according to the story, left no records of the debts so the widow sent a gang of white men who took everything the Gees Bend folks had, tools, pigs, chickens, stored sweet potatos, everything, and they were left to starve.
A local journalist got wind of the situation and wrote about it and sent the article to the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had begun the Works Project Administration by then. The WPA arranged to send flour and corn meal to save the people from starvation in the short term and then set them up with small farm loans to buy tools and animals for the long term.
The cabins were so quickly and poorly made that the wind came right up through the floors and the walls so the women had taken to sewing quilts from fabric scraps from worn out clothes, and feed sacks. They used the scraps of cotton that fell to the floor in the cottin gin for batting. These quilts were layered under the children, on top of the children and on the walls to keep out the chill. Every year in the summer, the women would hang out their quilts to air and it wa like an art show.
The quilts were discovered and sold in the New York market where celebrities and folk art enthusiasts gave them the attention and honor they deserved and the quilt makers began to see some profit from their work.
Sadly, a collector bought the quilts and turned them into expensive art works sold at high prices, cards, accessories, and even postal stamps, but the Quilters of Gees Bend had no royalties or a fair share of this bounty until someone came to their aid and they had a law suit.
I am leaving now, but I will write more when I return.
Saturday, December 13, 2025
Quilting - Follow up on previous blog post about the book published by GCHS
Common Threads Through Time, Quilts of the Gloucester County Historical Society
In my previous post, I mentioned buying this book for myself for Christmas and a copy for each of the following, my sister, my daughter, and my Cousin Patty all of whom have quilts made by my Grandmother Mabel Wright.
I was so excited to find, this morning, a quilting store and a place to take lessons and I am signed up for January 2026
Earlu Girl Quilt Company, 235 S. White Horse Pike, Audubon, NJ 856-617-6322. Hours: closed Monday, open, Tuesday 10:00-5:00, Wed. 10:00 -7:00, Thursday, Friday and Saturday 10:00 - 5:00, Sunday 12:00 - 4:00.
earlygirlquilts.com
My own quilting experience consists of having made 2 original art quilts by machine for my daughter. One was very large on tan corduroy with a border of 2 inch denim pockets inside each of which there was a toy. On each pocket there was the letter of the alphabet. In the center was a cloth representative of the Ben Franklin Bridge; in the water were boats with velcro that could be taken off and put back on, and planes in the sky, also with velcro. This large quilt was hanging above a two story bed made by my father for my daughter when we lived on 8th Street in Philadelphia in 1983. Up top was her bunk, down below a curtained play room and sorage area. She could awaken in her top bunk and play with the toys in the quilt pockets or the boats and planes. The next quilt that I made for her was a portrait of our house, a twin sized bed quilt that she could take with her when she had to go for the weekend with her father for visittion. It was in case she got homesick. Those poignant quilts made me even more appreciative of the history of quilts especially as described in the book Common Threads. Many of those quilts were about women leaving their homes for a mariage or moving away to a new community, even a new region, or country.
Fortunately the Early Girl Quilt Company is holding day classes and I am signed up for January! I am so excited to be starting something new and meaningful. I will also be meeting new women and making new friends.
PBS Passport has a couple of quilting documentaries on offer and I have watched most of what they have but I will be watching again for a refresher. Also, I went to the Gees Bend Quilt Show at the Philadelphia Art Museum when it was on exhibit in 2008. I may stil have the catalogue from the show, even the book that I believe came out about the Gees Bend Quilters. I think I have a book tucked away somewhere about the Noank Quilters too.
It is so exciting to be starting something new, learning something new, especially something with such deep and meaningful roots in my life.
Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com
Quilting - Common Threads Through Time, published by Gloucester Co. Historical Society, NJ (review and thoughts)
Several years ago, I was fortunate in visiting the Gloucester County Historica Scoiety for the Quilt show.
I have been to GCHS many times for many exhibitions, but this was especially interesting to me because my Grandmother, Mabel Young Wright, was a quilter. Every grandchild was given a quilt and my cousin Patty Gushue. inherited several more which she gave to her granddaughters. She also gave one to my daughter, Lavinia Jones Wright, when she married 6 or 7 years ago. I still have my childhood sunbonnet babies quilt somewhere in the atic in tattered remnants from frequet use and washing. My marriage quilt, the wedding ring patter (I think) is still in the cedar chest in the attic as well- also much used and washed.
Among the many things I love about quilts are that they were hand made from readily available materials (often in early days, from re-purposed fabric from worn out clothing) and making quilts allowed women in the past, who had so few opportunities to excercise artisitic creativity in between child rearing and the rigors of housekeeping, a chance to meditate, concentrate and make something beautiful. I love the thriftiness of the early quilts from worn out clothing. I have an afghan made from scraps of wool yard too small to use for knitting, that the same grandmother made.
When I saw that the GCHS had published a book about their quilt collection, I hurried over to buy 4 copies, one for myself, which I just read, and one for my daughter, my cousin Patty, and my sister (who still has her quilt).
Not only do quilts tell the history of a community of women, their marriages, their departures and arrivals in new homes, the generations of daughters and sons and their life events, they tell the story of the history of fabrics, such a big part of American history - think COTTON ald all that implies.
For several years I have been searching for a close by daytime quilting group and this morning after I finished my book, I found one - in Audubon and I am on my way there now to see if I can sign up for daytime classes! I will write more about the book and about the quilt shop when I return.
I am so lucky! wrightj45@yahoo.com
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
My review of = Mexico: 500 Years of History, Paul Gillingham
For a few nights, I have been listening to the audio book of Mexico: 500 Yers of History by Paul Gillingham. I have always felt that Americans are shamefully ignorant of the History and Culture of our near neighbors North and South.
I read a history of Canada about 25 years ago when I was on a visit to Toronto, Canada. with my daughter as chaperone with Audubon Marching Band. Also, I read more, including the long narrative poem by Longfellow - EVANGELINE about the expulsion of the Arcadians, when I visited Nova Scotia, twice, many years later. In fact, I had visited Mexico once as well, but I was 18 and didn't know anything about where I was going. Back in the 1960's, a trip to Mexico was a kind of rite of passage for the more bohemian/intellectual/adventurous young people.
Anyhow, it happens that I have been working with a young Friend at Woodbury Friends Meeting, First Day School. Over a couple of years on Sundays, We took a chronological approach to world history from Dinosaurs to the 1600's, the Age of Exploration, and reached the point in time, this Autumn, when explorers from Europe were landing in the Americas. Several Friends will be exploring the topic from Indigenous people to Colonists including Puritans and Quakers, and Mexico, Central America and South America. One Friend has Canadian relatives, one Friend is from Mexico.
Needless to say, in the boiling turmoil that is our current state of affairs in the United States with Trump's persecution of Immigrants, so many of whom are from South America, Central America and Mexico, I felt a burning need to know more about these places, so when I read the review of this book, I knew it was the one for me. I have bought a map of South America to use with my young Friend and to teach myself where countries are down there.
I am writing my observations from only half way through, because it is such a big book and covers so much. What I wanted to mention was that chapter 13 delves into the 'invisible lives' of women in the 1500's and 1600's, in Mexico, the period of the invasion of Mexico by Spain. The first several chapters of the book discuss the invasion and the people involved, but when we get to Chapter 13, we hear about some of the women for whom records miractulously existed.
In Chapter 14 we hear a lot about the mix of races: Of course the Indigenous peopls in their millions, most notqably Mayans and Aztecs and Mexicans, the Spanish, but also the Africans, Portugese, and Germans. The author and several reviewers make the point that Mexico has the most diverse population in the world. There is a lot of discussion in this chapter about racism and racial hierarchy.
If you read CASTE: The Origins of our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson, then this will be a fascinating expansion and contrast to that narrative. If you haven't read it, you should!
Well, that's it for me for now. I have Christmas cards to write, but I will come back later after a few more chapters and drop some ideas.
As always if you want to discuss this or anything else, you can reach me by e-mail (not by comments - that blog feature is so polluted by spammers that I can't bear to look at it though blogspot does its best to root out the trash)
wrightj45@yahoo.com
A review on-line said this:
"As elegantly written as it is powerful in scope, rich in character and anecdote, Mexico uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs"
Friday, December 5, 2025
My thoughts after reading - Taking Religion Seriously, Charles Murray
Why I went back to church:
When my daughter was a toddler, I decided I wanted her to have a religious education of some kind, but not the 'patriarchal' kind. To be clear, I wanted my daughter to have a basic education in EVERYTHING - literature, science, relgion, ART. I wanted her to be well rounded and I wanted her to have a chance to be successful in the world, whatever that might mean. I wanted to give her the tools as I could perceive them. She was in Girl Scouts, she played softball, she had theater classes, art classes from kindergarten on, swimming lessons, the works. So that was my first motivation, to give my daughter a bsic view of the Judeo/Christian belief system.
My mother had been my Sunday School teacher at Gloria Dei, Old Swedes Church on Front Street in Philadelphia and I not only had a basic education in religion but an introduction to Colonial history as well. Yhe church was one of the oldest in the country as well as in Philadelphia and it was founded by the earliest settlers, the Swedes. We had a Swedish boat model maybe the Kalmar Nickel? handing in the center of the small church. I liked church in those days, that church, with its small, intimate, quiet and orderly EVERYTHING: a brilliant an dhumane minister, Reverend Dr. Roak, the architecture, rituals, congregation. It suited me, a sensitive and frightened child in a fairly harsh environment.
Much later, I rebelled because I began to percieve the patriarchal structure of our society and the church and because we moved to New Jersey and had a drunken and ineffectual minister. I began to think ministers were a problem, at least that role and the power of it. In my teens I asked my mother to let me stop going to that church but I would explore some others and she agreed. The church was a bedrock for my mother and she served it in many ways, vestry, many many fund raising church suppers; my father even maide a stained glass window for the church, St John's Episcopal, two doors down from their last home in Maple Shade, on Linwood Avenue.
I tried all the local churches in Maple Shade, but like Goldilocks, each church was too something or other. When I looked for the right church for my daughter, I found the Quakers, perfect for Philadelphia dwellers; Pennsylvania is aa Quaker state. I had read up on Lutherans, Methodists, and what I liked about the Quakers was the 'no priests' system. When I met the buildings, I was even more enamored - I love old architecture and there was a lot about it that reminded me of Gloria Dei, Old Swedes Church, venerable, simple, elegant.
The people were wonderful at Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, kind, patient, accepting. And I liked going to Meeting on Sunday and listening to the witness of the congregants. But then, we moved to New Jersey in 1985 and for many reasons the transport back and forth on Sunday became impossible, so we stopped going. I needed at least one day a week off anyhow since I worked full time and all day on Saturday at the University of the Arts. As a single mother, I had housework, shopping, yard work - the works!
What I went back to the Friends Meeting seven years ago, this time in Woodbury, NJ it was to fix myself. I was suffering from resentment and anger over a family situation and I didn't want to feel that way anymore. I hoped Friends (Quakers) might be able to help. This time, I was going to religion to help myself be a better person and what I meant by better was more Christ-like, as in forgiving, loving, kind, understanding and generous, less selfish and less judgemental.
What I found was that attending Quaker Meeting gives you the opportunity every week to work on that. And I think that perhaps that is one of the best things religion has to offer, the opportunity each week to work on yourself, make yourself more Christ-like and perhaps that is how Christ is born again and again and again, in our hearts as we try to live up to his example. Isn't that what we mean when we say Christian?
Happy Trails whatever road you are on =
wrightj45@yahoo.com
(as always if you wish to talk to me use my e-mail because the comments section of the blog is polluted by spam)
Thursday, December 4, 2025
Religion - Nadia Bolz Weber, Pastor
I have read a couple of books and many blog posts from Pastor Nadia. This one I copied to share with you. I will also find the link so you can follow her if you wish to. This is an excerpt
"On Sept 2nd, Eric and I stood on a beach in St. Bees watching the grey movements of the Irish Sea before taking our first steps of a 200 mile walk that would carry us clear across Northern England to Robin Hood’s Bay on the North Sea. The tradition is to pick up a small stone from the first coast and carry it in your pocket until you place it on the second.
Before we left, friends had asked what they could pray for.
They only answer I could summon was, “acceptance”.
So that was the stone I carried in my pocket. That of a small, smooth prayer of acceptance. It was all I had that I thought might, maybe, perhaps slay the Goliath I was facing.
Because sixteen days before leaving for Wainwright’s Coast-to-Coast hike, I was diagnosed with invasive ductile carcinoma. Breast Cancer. A treatable, survivable form of Breast Cancer, but breast cancer nonetheless.
“C.a.n.c.e.r”
As a word, “cancer” could really use some synonyms.
How is it that we have but one word for such a wildly broad spectrum of implication? Cancer is the term for something as simple as a suspicious mole removed in your doctor’s office AND for Leukemia.
That one word, “cancer”, when spoken for the first time by your doctor is a gunshot. It’s footsteps behind you in a dark alley; a tornado siren, and your spouse saying “we need to talk”, all rolled into one.
Acceptance
When friends asked what they could pray for, I knew I did not need bravery. I did not even need strength, per se. I just needed acceptance. Why? Simply because I had cancer and wished I did not. For 2 weeks I walked with this simplest of prayers.
When it was raining and I wished it wasn’t – I’d ask God for acceptance.
When the trail was steeper than I wished, I’d do the same.
When my legs ached and I longed for a place to rest and unlike on the Camino there were no café’s at which to stop, I’d repeat it. Acceptance.
When I wished the day’s walk was over but we had two more kilometers to go and those two kilometers felt like five, I’d whisper, “acceptance”.
A prayer, a reminder, an aspiration.
Each time I noticed myself wishing things were different, that the weather, the trail, Eric, or I myself were different, I whispered my one-word prayer. I hoped this tiny stone could hit my denial square in the forehead, knock my fear on its ass, and flatten self-pity. Because cancer is a giant, and I am so small, so ill-equipped, so prone to oppositional behavior.
So in this way, over the course of two weeks trudging across England, I practiced acceptance
I mean, what other options did I have? Fight the wind? Resent the cold? Be more miserable than necessary? I’ve done that throughout my life, and I’m exhausted.
When we got home from the walk, I told my spiritual director Jane about my one-word prayer. On the day of my surgery she sent me this perfect text message.
“Mental health is a dedication to reality at all costs”.
-M. Scott Peck
Making peace with what is becomes a struggle when the “is” in question is not what we want; when what “is” changes us, humbles us, reduces us. When the “is” isn’t even clear yet, because you’re waiting on pathology reports.
My God, the whole thing feels uncanningly like grief.
To be in grief is to be emotionally left behind. The person IS gone, the job IS lost, the body IS changed but the world in which that’s true feels 1,000 miles away from you and you’re left in a ghost land of what was, crawling through a desert of molasses toward the country of what is. And it is a fucking process.
When we got home from the walk, I told my spiritual director Jane about my one-word prayer. On the day of my surgery she sent me this perfect text message.
“Mental health is a dedication to reality at all costs”.
-M. Scott Peck
My God, the whole thing feels uncanningly like grief.
To be in grief is to be emotionally left behind. The person IS gone, the job IS lost, the body IS changed but the world in which that’s true feels 1,000 miles away from you and you’re left in a ghost land of what was, crawling through a desert of molasses toward the country of what is. And it is a fucking process.
Nadia Bolz-Weber from The Corners
From:
thecorners@substack.com
Monday, December 1, 2025
Things to do when you can't do what you used to do.
This morning, December 1st, 2025, I was texting with a friend who was talking about having what she calls 'the blahs' and I know that feeling well. It was my genetic gift to be almost always inspired by the world. Sparks were always going off in my mind from things I read or saw, or heard in conversation. But pnce in awhile, especially now that I am old, I get the blah's and even worse, the melancholy cloud drops over me - both at the same time! Ugh!
My subtitle for some of these posts should be "getting old/being old" but the fact is that younger people get this problem too. In fact when I retired, a bunch of teachers my age and also retiring were worried about what they were going to do with themselves. They had no hobbies! Hobbies seemed to be always banging on my door like salespeople "Buy Me - Try Me - Volunteer Here!" So when I retired, I DROVE (one of my go-to stimulators) and I found such interesting places, I began to volunteer everywhere, from Port Norris and the Bayshore Discovery Project to the Alice Paul Foundation in Mount Laurel with several places in between: Camden County Historical Society in Camden, Gloucester County Historical Society in Woodbury, and Red Bank Battlefield in National Park. In each of those places I developed a keen and avid interest and collected dozens of books which I read - they were each a passion, literally! And I made friends.
So what happened when I got visual disability and couldn't read anymore, or drive far away, and when my joints and spine deteriorated to such a degree that I couldn't sit for hours at a computer, or do a four hour touring shift, or climb steps to tour a house? Well, I discovered the Free Books Project and gave away all my books! I founded a small Seniors Group that met monthly at my local Seniors' Hall and that lasted for 7 years. We did 'show and tell' based projects such as a one page scrap booking project with an old family photo that we framed.
One cold snowy January Sunday morning about 6/7 years ago, I dropped in at the Woodbury Friends Meeting and I liked it so much I joined and religion became my next big interest. I have just listened to a great audio book called "Taking Religion Seriously." I volunteered to teach first day school there and that opened up a bunch of interests too.
Throughout all of this, my new found freedom gave me the time to develop my lifelong painting and art passions and I have been showing paintings in group shows at The Station (Eiland Art Center) in Merchantville, NJ. I have two paintings up there right now and tomorrow I am meeting there for lunch with an artist friend. She and I met at the Haddon Fortnightly annual show in March and we both have works in the Merchantville show.
In 2024, I was in seven group shows and that kind of burned me out, not for painting but for the rigors of framing, wiring, applying, dropping off and picking up for shows. This year I only did two group shows at The Station, my favorite venue.
What I have been doing lately though, is small postcard sized paintings, often in water color. I have a little pocket sized Windsor Newton water color set, and you just need a cup of water and some good small brushes. They are quick studies and I have become quite good at them. I can do a little beauty in about 2 or 3 hours and a couple in a day. Over my birthday week, I did half a dozen and gave them away (framed inexpensively with dollar store frames) as thank you noes to each of the people who took me out to lunch for my birthday. They are so small that they aren't a burdensome gift for people and those people can also re-gift them if they like. When a friend's cat died recently, I did a little 8x10 portrait painting of her cat for her and it gave her such solace that I have been thinking about doing little paintings of pets next to give away. But first, some landscapes to offer the people in my Woodbury Friends congregation for Christmas - there are only 6 or 8 of us who attend regularly so I could do 6 or 8 small landscapes to give away.
I can't hike anymore, or kayak. And I can't drive far away anymore as my eyesight deteriorates, or read. But I can still paint, and I listen to audio books!, and I can still write this blog - a big benefit for me as I love to write (compose and structure my thoughts) and this is a perfect venue. Also another friend introduced me to Art Journaling and I have slowly been adopting that as well. I learn a lot from this blog and writing it often inspires me to a new idea. This blog just now gave me the idea of the postcard sized paintings for friends of their pets. By the way, one year I saw a magnificent Art gallery show of 19th century painted postcard-
size landscapes of famous travel destinations done to send to people back home from travellers abroad. It was before the time of printed postcards. They were beautiful and INSPIRING!
Well, I hope you, too, are finding things to do to replace the things you can no longer do. "The world is so full of such wondeful things, I am sure we should be happy as Queens and Kings!"
Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com
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