A very sad post - Booty is dead

The mystery - On Friday afternoon, I let Booty, old glack and gray tabby out as ws our routine. He went out each day, strolled around the yard and napped on the porch step or on the bench. That evening, I called and called at supper time and he didn't come home. I wasn't worried yet because he sometimes stayed out until Cat's party at 9:30. Every night when I let the dog out to do her bedtime potty in the back yard, I give the cats treats in the back room. They each have their spot and their little dish. None of them ever miss the Cat's Party! But that night, Booty didn't come home.

I am too blind now to go out at night and walk around. I called and called and sat on the porch but he didn't come home. That night, I had a bad and frightening heart episode - I'd accidentally drunk two large glasses of an iced tea that turned out to be caffeinated. The caffein caused a high blood pressure attack - horrible pounding and arrythmia and palpitations that felt like I might be having ahert attack. I was up all night. i was so worried about dying that I didn't think about Booty.

Next day, my heart had subsided to a dull ache. I hadn't slept at all, so I slept most of the day, going out once in every few hours to call Booty. I didn't think too much about it because I was concerned that my heart might not come back to normal after this attack.

Saturday night I was worried. That was too long for him to be gone. But there wasn't much I could do about it. I could hardly stand up, I was so weak from the worst heart episode since I was in the hospital years ago,

Sunday, I had to stay home from Woodbury friends Meeting because I still had some chest pain and I was very weak and my head didn't feel right, as though my brain had been deprived of oxygen. I worried that maybe my carotid arteries were occluded, or that I'd had a clot travel somewhere.

On Sunday, I picked up Susan and she did some shopping for me and she went door to door in the neighborhood asking neighbors to keep a look out for Booty and she checked all the backyards for his body. No luck.

What really worried me was that my new neighbors, Dina and Mark had seen Booty on Saturday morning before they left for vacation. I was afraid they had locked him in their shed by accident. In the night on Saturday, I thought I had heard distant meowing, but I thought it was probably Willy in the catio out back. He often went out there and he often meowed. He is my noisest cat. Booty had a very weak meow I think from the smoke inhalation in my sister's house fire.

Booty had actually been my sister Susan's cat. She and her then partner Mike and their son, Archie had a catastrophic house fire on March 15, 2016. Sue was at work. Mike fell asleep with a cigarette in an ashtray on his chest. The cigarette rolled off into the sofa and set it on fire. Mike and Archie got out alive, two pets died of smoke inhalation: a dog and a cat. One cat was rescued, Booty. Booty was probably a year old at the time, maybe two.

In the turmoil following the house fire, my sister and her partner broke up. She and Archie lived with me for three months until she rented a house where but no pets were allowed. So Booty stayed here. he had been here ever since, part of my feline family. So that made him about 11 or 12 years old.

Booty was a quiet and gentle cat and had a beautiful face. He was no angel. He had a big problem with territorial urinating and he had destroyed some furniture. I think he was at war with my other old male, Lucky. Who knows. Anyhow over time, all our problems ironed out. Booty claimed the kitchen table and the Deacon's bench, and I bought vinyl (Pleathure) furniture which he didn't seem inclined to pee on. He did however, pee in the other cat's food dishes sometimes.

I don't let my other cats out. Willy, Patsy, and Dolly, triplets whom I adopted from the vet's office 7 or 8 years ago, were bottle fed babies and they had never been outdoors. I bought a 12 foot by 10 feet chain link enclosure and had a cat door installed in a window in the back room so they had an outdoor place, but I kept them indoors because I believe the view of the veterinarians and adoptions centers: the outdoors is dangerous for cats and also they kill birds. An outdoor cat lives 2 to 5 years. An indoor cat lives 13 to 16 years. Booty being an indoor/outdoor cat has had one or two year shaved off his life span. I don't know how old he would have lived to be, Most of my cats were in their 18th year range when they died.

Midmorning today, my neighbor from across the street, Mark, who puts out my recycle and trash cans for me, told me the recycle guys found my dead cat in the recycle can. Mark took the now empty can with just Booty's body in it to the back yard. I had a box which he put in the yard near the can. Sue will come tomorrow to bury the cat.

I texted my nephew, Archie, to ask if he would come after work today to bury Booty for $100 but he hasn't answered. I had hoped he would so that Booty's body wouldn't have to be in the recycle another night, but he hasn't answered and I don't think he will. Mark didn't want to take it out of the can because he said other animals would prey on the corpse. It is probably true.

I will just have to cope with the emotional pain. There is no escape. It is a big pain the older I get because the more power death holds as I approach it myself and the more indescribably precious life becomes as O prepare to lose it. I loved Booty and I will miss him. He loved me too. His suffering is over and he wasn't well. He had begun to lose weight, an affliction my cat Honey had suffered in her old age - a thyroid disease common to old cats. they eat and eat but they get thinner and thinner and sicker until they die. Even with treatment, as I discovered with Honey who went to the vet and got medicine and blood tests, the disease just progressed until she died on the bedroom floor one night - a better death than the one poor Booty suffered.

I will never know what happened to him but my guess is a car struck him and someone who knows us saw his body and put it in the recycle can since it was out at the curb. Or maybe they didn't know it was my cat and just found the recycle can handy. Anyhow, at least he is home and I can bury him and he can have his eternal rest with the other cats and dogs in the back yard. And he will be one more reason why I will stay here until I die. Their bones and their ashes are out there in the yard with som eof my mother's ashes.

Happy Trails or Sad ones - On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine

wrightj45@yahoo.com

What saved me today - a little memory and a couple of gratitudes

Driving around Newton Creek Park, I remembered the day I was walking there, years ago, and I found two white mice scrambling around the storm drain. They were being circled by birds of prey and I knew it wouldn't be long befoe they would be lunch. Across the street I saw a pile of empty boxes on a porch and I went over and took one. I brought the mice home to my house of FIVE CATS wondering what I would do.

I put them temporarily in a plastic tub with some seeds (I had a lot of seeds from my vegetarian and health food diet, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, etc.) I punctured the tub for air circulation.

I thought I would go to a pet store and buy some kind of habitat but as it happened, at my volunteer job at Red Bank Battlefileld, the young woman who was director at the time, Megan Giordano, had a big and roomy habitat (two foot deep and 4 feet long, 2 feet wide) from mice she had during her college days. It had an island with a palm tree on top! I put a thin layer of sterilized pet straw on the room bottom, and my mice were both safe and happy! The cats pretty much ignored them, at least when I was around.

I really enjoyed watching them, their fast little hands washing their faces, their overjoyed excitement when I put a respbeerry on their island. They groomed one another.

At the time, I kept a different blog, or maybe it was this one, I can't remember, but anyhow, I posted photos of them and people commented on them. One friend wrote and asked how many of them it would take to make a hat, and I replied, a team of 12 because they were union tailors and did only the best quality work!

My little friends lived for two years. One day, on of them, in the midst of the joy of eating a raspberry, clutched its chest and fell over - heart attack The other came over and tried to rouse its friend, but it was hopeless. I buried mouse number one and mouse number two went on a lone survivor on the island. That one died soon after. I read that they don't have a long life spanm (about 2 years) and I don't know where they came from or how old they were when I found them. My guess is that they were released from a school lab or they were released from some house that fed mice to snake pets.

I am grateful that I rescued them and gave them the good life they enjoyed and the fun they provided to me and those who read about them. Whenever I turn the corner at that park, driving now, not walking as i am so old and disabled, I think of those two little fur people.

On Friday, this weekend, I feel I was in danger of a heart atttack myself. While out to lunch, I made the mistake of ordering raspberry ice tea, thinking it was an herbal tea - raspberry but it is not. It is black tea with a flavored sugar syrup. That night I had the most horrible heart pounding breathlessness, arrhythmia, palpittions - it felt like my chest would burst. I ate an 80mg baby aspirin and took one of my blood pressure pills and did yoga brathing to slow my heart for the pills to kick in. It took 8 hours and i had not 5 minutes of sleep. My heart is very susceptible to caffeine stimulants. Next day, I slept all day. On Sunday, my heart had returned to normal but my head felt clogged and foggy. I was afraid I had done some damage.

Fortunately, each day that passed, I got better. It is now Wednesday. I took the dog for a walk at Proprietor's Park and we drove around Knight's Park in Collingswood and then Newton Creek Park and I rememered the mice.

I am so grateful to be alive and well again on this beautiful, breezy and mild summer day. It is perfumed and made magical by the summers past and the whole intoxicating air of summer itself. There were waves on the Delawre River when we walked at Proprietor's Park. I met some nice people walking and picnicing there.

The heart episode left me depressed. It is so difficult being OLD - I can't hear and my new hering aids make my ears itch unbearably. I can't see. I walk like tin man without his oil can. I was full of despair at the thought of how much more decline I would be forced to endure. But then, I got outside! I got in the car, walked the dog and drove around the parks looking at beauty and the trees. Sometimes I worry about the upcoming likelihood that I will no longer be able to drive, but then I think I will just walk around the neighborhood and enjoy the miracles there - the new spring flowers in the lawns before they get cut in spring, the colored leaves that carpet the yards in fall, the first snowflakes, Christmas lights ans wreaths.

My newest old statement of intention is to walk outside EVERY DAY no matter what! Well, maybe not in a smoke emergency or 90 degree weather or iced sidewalks but every other day! Get out and about! Be in the world outside the house! That was what saved me and gave me even the small urge to write this blog!

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Remembering those old time summer yummies - Ambrosia

A friend was just at a party where one of the things they served was ambrosia and we were talking about how rare it is to see ambrosia anymore. We both agreed about how delicious it was and how much we enjoyed tt!

I was reminded of green vegetable jello mold! When I worked as a volunteer in the historical society world, at our annual lunches, those green jello vegetable molds always showed up and I LOVED them! There were the clear grren jello molds with the grated carrot stripps suspended in them and the molds with mayo mixed in and a more pudding quality to them - all absolutely delectable especially in the hot summer time.

They are not easy to make; I know because i have tried. Even jello is a challenge. Those foods reminded me of Murphy's Book Loft which used to be in Mullica Hill, NJ. It was a huge old barn behnd a victorian farm house and it housed thousands of second hand books in its two floors with nooks and crannies with chairs and foot stools so you could browse in comfort for as long as you liked. The smell of those old books ----- They also had a magazine room - a large area lined with walls of date labeled brown boxes contining magazines from the last 100 years. I liked to buy magazines from my birth year 1945, and also sometimes from the 60's because the advertising was so glorious - especially holiday issues. I have no idea where those magazines are now - maybe lost in the attic. But those magazines had the recipes for these lost food treasures.

The more I though about it the more I remembered. The advertisements had a beautiful brunette housewife in a dress and apron in her itchen of gleaming white appliances and the ingredients for making these splendid treats spread out on the table. To make ambrosia you needed Delmonte canned diced fruit. Delmonte was the sponsor of the ad. To make jello mold, of course, you needed jello and that was the sponsor. Then I remembered the Campbell soup recipes - the cream of mushroom which mixed with canned tuna made a delicious casserole, especially if topped with canned roasted onion strips or potato sticks.

Although I ate all of the above dishes, I can't say I ever made any. I really never became that aproned queen of the kitchen, I was, instead, a wage slave and my cooking amounted to putting things in the microwave from the frozen food section of the Supermarket. Was it healthier? I don't know - canned or frozen? Your guess is as good as mine.

As of now, my food choices are very simple and very spare. I eat Siggi's yoghurt with walnuts, bare naked cereal with almond milk, and cheese and pickles with Daves' multi seed bread. Also I have a lot of beverages like lots of pulp orange juice, low sodium V8 juice, apple cider and coconut water. Also I drink a 30 g protein drink (Premier Protein) every day, sometimes two.

I don't eat enough vegetables but I do get Chinese vegetarian delight sometimes on brown rice and their veg soup, and I often buy Pat's Select's creamy potato soup to which I add peas and corn. That's it. I guess I eat like an astronaut without the proper calculations for nutrition, but I am 80 years old and predominantly vegetarian since 1970, so I guess I am ok nutrition wise. I could do better but the truth is I don't care that much about food. I jsut want to be fed.

"This is what we wanted, isn't it? A fresh start in a new place?"

When I was leaving Maritsa's Cafe' in Maple Shade today, a man said something about the awful heat and I replied "Thank God for air conditioning." And he replied "Carrier is my big hero. Imagine living in the old West before air conditioning or even fans?" And I added, "before dentists or doctors, going to the barber shop for a wound treatment or bone setting." We both chuckled and said a little gratitude for modern times.

In another conversation with a friend, we were talking about favorites and I was thinking how many of my favorite books were connected to an event such as Pioneer Women which I read in airports when I was in my 30's and flying out west to meet up with my fiance' Rob Sweetgall on his around the perimeter of the USA ultramarathon venture (I blogged about him when I foud out he had died). I was in an air conditioned airport reading about women going mad from the sound of the wind howling on the prairie when they were isolated from all other human beings and their husbands were off on ling trips to acquire lumber or some other resource. It reminded me of a short story that I think was by Hart Crne about a man going crazy trying to fend off the wolves that were after his wife's dead body in the winter in their isolated cabin in the forest. The wolves could smell her corpse.

Having given birth, a terrifying and hideously painful experience, I always think about women in the years before anaesthesia or in places where there were no other women to help or midwives. Another great book The Midwife's Tale. My final comment to the lunch man was "Best to leave the passt in the past."

The comedian Kathleen Madigan has a funny bit about her roots in the "middle" - St. Louis, Missouri, where her pioneer family decided enough was enough and just stopped there. She fantasizes being stuck in a covered wagon with her adventure seeking husband and fantasizing where to shoot him and leave his body before she turns the horses aroound and goes back home. "I don't know" she'd say, "It was a tragic accident."

Something I never thought about that I learned from Pioneer Women was that most of those westward covered wagon women were educated and comfortable in small towns with family and churches and conveniences like stores and neighbors nearby, and midwives! Their husbands craved the "Free Land"(that wasn't free, only stolen from the Indigenous people - a concept they were incapable of holding) and the adventure of someplace new and the women were kind of dragged along in their husband's dream. Living in a soddy.

I have a doll from my early 50'6 childhood, an Effanbee doll given to me for Christmas one year by my beloved Godfather Neal Schmidt. She is a walker. Along the years, she lost her hair and her original clothes. At some point I bought her a wig. At another point after I read a new biography, Prairie Fire, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. I bought my doll a Little House on the Prairie Outfit and a bonnet to dress her up for Christmas that year.

little House on the Prairie has been reprised in tv series and I am watching it on Netflix (I think - could be amazon - I will correct this when I turn it on again). That's what reminded me of the biography and the set of books I read after I read the biography. I hadn't read the Little House on the Prairie books before but I had bought them for my daughter and I believe she did.

Doing what your husband wants when you don't want to reminded me of traveling in Europe, in North Africa; in Morocco, Mike met a young Moroccan man who wanted to show us the 'real' Morocco when we were in Casablanca. he took us to a coffee bar, off the beaten track, entirely composed of male patrons. Mike was glad to go on this adventure; I was horribly anxious, first that he would lead us somewhere we'd get lost and rob us, or that he would drug us at the cafe' and God knows what would happen to me. Neither of them considered my discomfort as the only white woman, 5 feet 8, blonde at the time with Western clothing in an all male establishment in a Muslim country. Fortunately, everyone was polite, perhaps stunned, and all was well. Still......

The book I read on my way to Europe to meet up with my drafted and deployed soldier husband was "Charles Darwin and The Voyage of the Beagle." While living in Germany, I read the only book I could get in English translation (it was 1969) Gunter Grqss's The Tin Drum. I didn't understand the political implications at all but I was captivated by it and the main character never understood anything that was happening to him either.

It is hard to list favorites because they are, of course, so tied up with time and place and experience. That was the theme of one of my daughter's favorite films, High Fidelity, John Cusack, main character is organizeing his record colletion by experience, specifically heartbreaking losses in romance. Food for thought - Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Premonitions and strange encounters

For the past couple of years, I have had such strong thoughts and memories of people from the past that I have searched for information on them via google. One was my cousin Susan Atmore. She was 3 years older than I and we grew up near one another in South Philadelphia. She lived on 10th Street and I lived on Warnock Street. She and her older sister, Lavinia, seemed so exciting to my childish girl mind, so sophisticated! Her sister, Lavinia was 6 years older than I was. I remember them in high school and the high school girl friends coming over, the make-up and the clothes and the boys they were dating. They seemed so sophisticated and I was thrilled and grateful to be a little drab mouse on the periphery of their colorful and grown-up world.

We had lost touch years ago, despite my best efforts with Christmas cards and so on. Susan and her sister moved a lot and eventually they didn't send their forwarding addresses and I lost touch. When I began to think of her and remember things so intenseley, I looked her up and found she had died and was buried in Gloria Dei, Old Swedes church Philadelphia, our family church in my childhood.

Eventually I tracked down her sister, also dead, in Texas. Same thing for a man I was once engaged to, and a couple of boyfriends. Even a couple of male friends from the 1980's cropped up in my memory and I searched them out to find they had died as well. That isn't too surprising since I am 80 and to my shock I often remember people and think, "Holy Cow, they are probably dead too as they were alder than I am!"

A male friend of mine from the early 1980's, Dave Brier, was kind enough to build a tree house for my daughter when she was about 4 in our back yard in the house I had just bought in Mt. Ephraim. He had also given me a forsythia he had removed from a yard where he did landscaping work. That forsythia that he saved and planted in my yard had 30 years of flourishing sunny life until about 2 or 3 years ago when it died.

DAve and I used to send one another Christmas cards and we seemed to run into one another on an almost annual basis. He frequented The Station Cafe', the train depot converted to coffee house and art gallery where I show work in the group exhibitions seeral times a year. We ran into one another in Knight's Park in Collingswood where I used to walk regularly with my dog and he bicycled regularly from his home in Haddon TWp.

Dave used to work as recreational director at the YMCA in Philadelphia and he worked a lot of races, so we knew one another from the Edward Payson Weston 6 Day Race that used to be held at Cooper River where I lived. My sister and I had worked a race with him at Byberry Institution in Pa. before it closed (he supplied timing equipment and banners and accessories to races).

I guess we lost touch, like so many other people, around the time of the Corona Epidemic. I still sent Christmas cards but he didn't send any back. I knew he had a housemate named Margaret. He invited me and a friend to his house once when he had received from an aunt a large reproduction of a painting of a famous race horse. Dave gambled on the horse races. His dining room table was literally covered by prescription medications and when I remarked on them he said they were Margaret's. I said, "Is Margaret your girlfriend?" And he said, "She thinks she is."

He was like that, kind of roguish and also cynical and leaned toward depression. He always used to say "I am an angry man. I have a lot of anger."

Still he had a boyish charm and a friendliness that was engaging. I had met a couple of his best friends too, Arnie, and Michael. There were a couple of other friends who called Dave on the phone regularly and Dave talked to them in a kind of therapeutic way according to DAve. He also had a son struggling with mental illness. Who at some point was in residence in a group home in Merchantville and dAve met his son, Chris, at the Station (in Merchantville) for coffee regularly.

Once when I had met Dave in the park, he told me he'd had a heart attack and had gotten by-pass surgery. He was doing pretty well though, as he had bicycled to the park. He was still smoking cigars though, and I mentioned that but he countered by saying he didn't smoke them so much as he chewed them.

I got to know a lot about DAve's life, his father, his brother, and his former wife, also his problems with alcoholism, which he had miraculously conquered and had been sober for decades. I admired that.

When he popped into my mind, I searched google for an obituary as he was 5 years older than I and had suffered heart attacks so I thought he might not have sent a Christmas card because he was dead. Nothing about him anywhere. I metioned this to my sister and she said, "Call his best friend, Michael." I hadn't thought of that so I looked up Michael Tearson.

Michael Tearson is a regionally famous dj, radio personality and also musician, singer, and performer. His e-mail was easy to locate and I wrote him. He responded very quickly and gave me Dave's phone number and said he would call Dave and tell him I was going to call so that he would answer the phone and not hang up on me. He warned me that Dave was declining and didn't answer the phone or go out places.

When I phoned DAve, he answered in the creaky voice of an old rocking chair. Despite that, we had a fairly cheery conversation of about 15 minutes or more. We talked about all the marathon runners we had known from the 6 Day RAce, most of whom were dead, and he told me he stayed indoors on the sofa now with his cats watching horse racing on rv. He had lost touch with Arnie after Arnie married, but Michael Tearson phoned him every day.

Dave said sadly, "No one visits me or calls me or even sends me a birthday card." I said, "I will send you a birthday card, when is your birthday?" And he answered, "I don't know, but I know I am 85." I chided him, "Come on Dave, you know when your birthday is!" And he answered "Novemer? maybe?"

It was heartbreaking to think of him curled up in his sofa cocoon all day wqatching tv and not getting out or seeing people. I told him that when the weather got better I would come over if he would make the effort to come outside and sit on lawn chairs for awhile. He said he didn't know if he could do that."

Afterwards, I fell into my habit of trying to fix things and I thought, maybe if he had a ramp down the front steps or the back steps to the yard, and a wheelchair, he could get out a little. He was pretty adamant that he didn't want to get out. So maybe I was barking up the wrong tree.

Meanwhile, Michael Tearson, his best and most loyal friend still phones him every day. And Michael Tearson still has a flourishing career dj'ing all the summer concerts for the Camden County Summer Concert series and he is about to be honored for his extraordinary career in the next two weeks at a local concert venue. I need to get the date and put it on my calendar.

I sent them both some of my postcards made from my paintings and I will periodically contact each of them. Michael has had his own life altering tragedy in the death of his wife, and his soul mate, from cancer, just a few years into their happy marriage. But he is not crushed into despair. He still participates in the carnival of life.

Happy trails - and don't get sucked into the sofa!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

A Glorious afternoon with Art Journalist Tamarie Bitgood

Today, Wednesday July 8, I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours with two delightful artists, Victoria Meade, a watercolorist and Tamarie Bitgood an immensely gifted Art Journalist. Tammy shared her portfolio of art works and the cards she had made from them. This is the second time I have had the pleasure of seeing Tammy's work; the first time was a year ago when we met at the Station, Eiland Arts in Merchantville, NJ. I had some work in the show and Tammy joined me there for lunch and to show me her Art Journal.

Tammy's work is hard for me to describe. It is abstract design work where she works from an impulse into a pattern. It is very precise and detailed, kind of Mandala-like in its hypnotic appeal.

I was so inspired by Tammy's work that I bought an Art Journal but my work turned out to be completely different from hers and very much like me - narrative, realistic, illustrtion-like. I tried her technique of free association, but I always veered into a story. We are what we are. Fish don't fly and birds don't swim. I do think there was a period, early in my art school experience where I was more drawn into a design format. I had a series of pages in an old sketch journal that were devoted to things in circles, like the Aztec Calendar, a half of an apple, the inside of a cataloupe, and so on. There was a time I was influenced by Celtic illuminated Manuscripts too. The knotted patterns fascinated me but I was not diligent enought to master even the simplest ones. Gave me a whole new respect for the monks in the scriptoria monasteries.

Victoria is a watercolorist who had work in the show up at SJAC last month, the members show. Like me, she is a member o SJAC (South Jersey Artists Collective) and last month was the members' show. This month is a whole new show, Foundlings, Chris Hillman. I will put a photo from the work here on a side panel.

What a gift I have been given to have a gallery and a group on the grounds of my Friends Meeting in Woodbury, 122 Broad Street. This allows me to view new art all the time and spend time with other artists! I am so lucky!

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Kelce and Swift wedding - an option and on celebrity privacy

July 6th, while listening to rolling thunder outside! It sounds like heavily overloaded carts are rolling over a cobblestone road in the sky right now. Not much rain coming down, just noise!. My dog is under the piano. I was reading the e-mail news since we have not lost electricity here in Camden County, NJ. Something that has long bothered me, since the days of Princess Diana is the entitlement the press and fans seem to have to the privacy of performers or famous people. Fans have a right to see their favorite performers on the stage, but leave them alone in their homes, please! Why do fans and papparazi think they have the right to hound celebrities constantly throughut their lives, as though somehow they are owned by the media?

Princess Diana of course was the worst case in this situation. She was thoroughly persecuted by the papparazi and I think they should have been treated in a criminal way for hounding her. It goes without saying that a good part of the blame is the avid, even predatory invasive interest of a segment of the public that creates the financially driven predation on the lives of the famous. If people didn't avidly buy spy style magazines, even magazines like People, and if newspapers and magazines focused on the REAL news for awhile instead of pandering to gossip hunger, we would all be more educated and better.

I remember when rags like the National Enquirer were scorned and mocked. Intelligent people looked down on that monstrosity of ignorance and depravity - endless stories about women being sucked up into alien shps and probed and impregnated. I only know this because that disgusting front page used to be at eye leven on the check out aisle of the supermarket where we were trapped until we paid and bagged. Thank heavens it is gone, however the culture of it has flourished and taken the place of real news about important happenings.

Ignorance has been pandered to rather than people's interests having been elevated by education and the media, so now the standard of public information has declined into gossip and sports and repeated superficialities.

I think there should be laws protecting the privacy of people famous or not. Invasion of privacy is what it is called and how it should be criminalized just like slander and defamation. I don't know how to address the avid gossip mongering desperation of those who have nothing better to think about. I did my best as a public school teacher to open young minds and help them sample the vast and nourishing world of ideas, but now I am old and all I can do is observe the way the world is turning. I can tell you that high school was an uphill battle too - when the minds of the post industrial low socio demo culture in which I taught was captivated adn enslaved by drugs, alcohol and sex.

The ignorant have won, for awhile anyway, and their leader is in charge of the rest of us, at lease for the time being. Bad times come and they also go - all I can do now is wait - and listen to the summer thunder.

Happy Trails to you until we meet again!

wrightj34@yahoo.com

4th of July - a Music Post - Oh Susanna

Since the political climate is as hot and oppressive as the actual temperature, I am avoiding the 4th this year. But this week I have been into music again. When I read my e-mail this morning, I came across ths interesting piece about Stephen Foster. i knew him best for Beautiful Dreamer, which, by the way, as soon as I saw his name I began to sing. But after I read on, I realized half the songs in my beginner ukelele book and my beginner piano book were Stephen Foster's such as Oh Susanna, and Old Folks at Home! So I copied the article and I am pasting it here for you:

Two-hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its 50th birthday. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And another enduring voice was born: the songwriter Stephen Foster.

The timing is fitting, for Foster is a quintessentially American figure. His name is not as famous as it once was—nor as famous as successors such as Cole Porter or Irving Berlin—but his influence on music remains huge. Songs like “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Old Folks at Home” remain familiar, even if many assume that they are traditional folk songs. Foster effectively invented the idea of a professional songwriter; founded the American songbook and pioneered the now-standard verse-chorus structure; and inspired the intellectual-property law of music. His untimely death set the template for the doomed, dissolute musician. Meanwhile, the racist elements of his music, and the racial dynamics of his era, continue to complicate his legacy. What could be more American than that?

Two-hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its 50th birthday. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And another enduring voice was born: the songwriter Stephen Foster.

The timing is fitting, for Foster is a quintessentially American figure. His name is not as famous as it once was—nor as famous as successors such as Cole Porter or Irving Berlin—but his influence on music remains huge. Songs like “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Old Folks at Home” remain familiar, even if many assume that they are traditional folk songs. Foster effectively invented the idea of a professional songwriter; founded the American songbook and pioneered the now-standard verse-chorus structure; and inspired the intellectual-property law of music. His untimely death set the template for the doomed, dissolute musician. Meanwhile, the racist elements of his music, and the racial dynamics of his era, continue to complicate his legacy. What could be more American than that?

Foster was born into a prominent family in Pittsburgh. He had neither the interest nor aptitude for business or much else, but he managed to find a niche writing songs, often either for minstrel bands or to be sold as sheet music. “All he had was his ability to create poetry and melody and put them together,” Deane L. Root, a professor emeritus of music at the University of Pittsburgh and a Foster scholar, told me. By doing that, he created the model for the professional songwriters who have followed—Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland team, Nashville’s Music Row, and modern-day hitmakers such as Max Martin.

The guitarist Bill Frisell has been recording Foster’s music since the early 1990s and even named a group “Beautiful Dreamers” after the Foster composition, but he first encountered the songs as a young child. “It’s just the perfect model for what a melody and the form of a song can be,” he told me. “There’s a million other composers, but just thinking of popular-song form, in a way this seems like ground zero for so much stuff that we have now.” Frisell has recorded “Hard Times” as both a rollicking swing tune and a wistful lament, which he said is a testament to the song’s craftsmanship. “The melody just gets so deep down in you. It’s like the trunk of a tree, or the roots of the tree, and then you can start climbing around up there.”

Musical skill, then as now, was not enough to guarantee financial stability. Early in his career, Foster had a major hit with “Oh! Susanna” in 1847. But despite writing dozens of songs, he struggled to earn a consistent living, making $10 to $15 a song—$400 to $500 today. “He didn’t have an agent, he didn’t have a lawyer who could work this for him. He didn’t have somebody who knew the business on his behalf, writing up contracts with publishers and theater owners and all the rest,” Root said. Foster died destitute in 1864, after falling and injuring himself in the bathroom of a hotel on the Bowery, becoming perhaps the first of many famous wastrels in American popular music. According to legend, Foster was drunk, though experts dispute this.

Foster’s songs became ubiquitous—people sometimes mistook them for folk songs even during his lifetime—and were performed everywhere from back porches to opera houses, in every genre imaginable. But the man himself became best known only after his death, thanks to a fierce reputation-building effort by his brother. In the 1890s, Root told me, Foster became the first American composer to have his work collected in a book. This raised his profile and made him a model for a new generation of songwriters, who copied his verse-chorus structure. When Berlin and others formed ASCAP, now the leading performance-rights organization, to handle royalties in 1914, they had Foster in mind as a cautionary tale.

Speaking about Foster without talking about race is impossible. Frisell told me he’d lain awake the night before we spoke, thinking about how difficult it was to discuss. The leading popular music of the era was minstrelsy, which, as the musician Melvin Gibbs writes in his new book, How Black Music Took Over the World, “presented the version of Blackness that white audiences were willing to accept.” White minstrel musicians would either commercialize Black culture (a pattern that persists in popular music) or else perform exaggerated stereotypes of it. Many of Foster’s songs were written for Christy’s Minstrels, a major minstrel troupe of the 1840s and 1850s that performed in blackface, and his lyrics traffic in slurs, pro-Confederate sentiments, and revisionism about the horrors of slavery, even though he’d witnessed it himself. (Foster’s personal politics are tough to pin down; he also wrote pro-Union songs, and he seems to have been most interested in getting a paycheck.)

“My Old Kentucky Home” is that commonwealth’s state song, and it’s a staple of the Kentucky Derby. The lyrics describe the sorrows of a family separated by slavery, and Frederick Douglass praised the song for awakening abolitionist sentiments. Yet the words also include a slur that was sanitized in 1986—jarringly late. Some of the many Looney Tunes segments that feature his music were later withdrawn from circulation because of their offensive material. But the great Black bass-baritone and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson also recorded “My Old Kentucky Home” in its unexpurgated form, forcing listeners to confront the original content and context.

The musician-scholar Rhiannon Giddens, a leading interpreter of 19th-century American songs, told me that discussing Foster’s context is difficult because minstrel entertainment is so little understood today. “I don’t know if he was any more racist than the average person” of his time, she said. “He was just trying to make a buck.” She finds Foster more interesting for what he represents than who he was as an individual.

For a May concert at Carnegie Hall, part of commemorations of the nation’s 250th anniversary, she closed a set with “Hard Times.” Giddens doesn’t perform Foster’s music much, looking to spotlight lesser-known work, but she decided it was the right piece for the moment. For me and for many others, it’s Foster’s finest work. The song is untainted by dialect, with a memorable tune and powerful lyrics, and I have found it a salve during recent hard times. Whatever the flaws of Foster and his music, Giddens said, “The man could write a tune.” When she and her backing group played “Hard Times,” it brought down the house, just as it has done for some 170 years now.

Related:

Stephen C. Foster and Negro minstrelsy (From 1867) Track of the year: “Hard Times Come Again No More” (From 2016)

Happy Trails to you until we meet again (written by Dale Evans - 1951) wrightj45@yahoo.com

Learn to Draw!

There are so many benefits to drawing that it could take a book to describe them all from health for your brain through this excercise to enhancing concenrtion, providing a fully engaging distraction to get your mind off other things. Also to appreciate life and the things you see, drawing is the way to improve perception. I have loved drawing since I was a samll child and indeed most small children enjoy drawing. Here is your chance to develop that new hobby, that new practice, that new entry into a world of beauty; that's why I wanted to put this e-mail notice in my blog which I had rceived minuters ago in my e-mail news feed. At present, I am gathering resources for my own next project - I am going to make two paintings for the next show at The Station, also in Merchanville. it is the re-purposed train station on Chestnut (the rails to trails railroad line). The theme is big bold flowers and I have photographed some hyacinths that caught my eye at Platt's Farm this morning. If you want additional inspiration or motivation get some coffee and a lunch or breakfast or a pastry at Eiland Arts (The Station0 and see what art may still be on display until the new show goes up.

Register for Summer Still Life

Register for Beauty of Summer

Drawing for Grown-Ups: How to Draw Fruit Summer Still Life

Thursday, July 9, 2026

2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. | Adults

Merchantville Public Library

Drawing for Grown-Ups: Celebrate the beauty of summer

Merchantville PUBLIC LIBRARY

130 South Centre Street

Merchantville Public Library

130 South Centre Street

Merchantville, NJ 08109

Contact Number (856) 665-3128

fundamentals like line, value, form, composition, negative space, and color. Students are not required to have attended previous Drawing for Grown Ups courses. In this class, students will learn how to draw using form, color, and composition under the guidance of Jen Tracy, professional illustrator.

The goal of this workshop is to give adults the confidence they need to embrace drawing more often in their personal life. Daily drawing practices improve cognitive skills like memory, emotional regulation, and hand eye coordination. This class will focus on the basics of drawing so grown-ups can gain pride in their artistic skill. Students will make a drawing of fruit using the still life provided.

My note if you have ever wanted to learn how to draw - here is your chance! The same class is being held at Haddon Twp Library in the evening.

wrightk45@yahoo.com

CD music and obsolete media

Yesterday I did a 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. media retreat. I didn't text, or go on my laptop to scroll the e-mail news, or write in my blog or watch a streaming video series. It was a remarkable experience. I am 80 years old and I am from the land of long ago. My little media retreat yesterday took me right back to the period when we people didn't fill every minute with social media, internet or cell phone stuff. I will call that the "Wide Open Spaces." Now, don't get me wrong, I am no Luddite and I am not off the internet forever - I was an early adopter: I had my first apple powerbook laptop in the 1980's and bought my daughter a MacIntosh Performa when she was about 8. I loved that world.

I think my main disenchantment began to gray the vista about early 2000's with facebook. When my e-mail was distributed to all my old high school classmates due to our 40th reunion 2003, I got assailed by a tsumani of ignorant right wing crap from my old palls living in the Florida Villages and the Southwest with their much younger second wives. They were becming Trumpers. I really didn't want to know and I didn't want my day poisoned with their facebook crap, also, I had a lot of ill will towareds the facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. There was no reason to think his soul had improved from the impulse that founded his brand.

My next big disillusionment came with the replacement of cassettes by cd's. I had read about this trend from a book on Planned Obsolescence Kathleen Fitzpatrick, although the concept dates to the 1930's. The sheer waste of time and materials was appalling to me, yet, I dove right in. When the cd wallets were popular, I put all my cd's into the wallets and created another pile of plastic trash with the former plastic boxes.

Yesterday I chilled out in the "media retreat" suggested by a Woodbury Friends acquaintance. I had one phone call from my sister to give her a ride from the bus to the farm after her work shift.

Instead of spending two hours reading my e-mail news feed and another two hours or so writing my blog, I played my dusty ukelele. Also I got down my old almost forgotten boombox and played a Joni Mitchell cd in celebration of the 50th anniversary of her album BLUE. i set aside a chore for this morning - to gather whatever cd's I still had lying around and see what was there and maybe play some.

This morning I gathered and dusted off about 10 cd wallets, Classic rock, Country and Western, Folk and Bluegrass, Contemporary (Madelyn Peyreux and Corinne Bailey Rae, BonIver and such) and I was struck anew by the waste of it all. Lately I had been wanting to hear various old favorites and I felt trapped in the new world where I don't know how to load up my phone with music so I can plug it into the dash of my car which has no cd player, and my regular radio station 88.5 has been playing a lot of really modern stuff to attract a younger crowd. And I don't mind listening to new rap and pop, but sometimes I feel alienated because I am not driven by youthful lustful longing or angry dissatisfaction and it doesnt' speak to me. I would like to hear my old friends Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Carol King, Etta James. But I can't because I don't know how to load my phone, more work. Speaking of which, my former cell phone, I hesitate to call it 'old' as it was four, stopped taking a charge. The apple people told me the batteries only last 2 to 4 years, so I had to get a new one before I get my hearing aids which connect to the phone.

I looked on amazaon to see if there was a small battery operated cd player I could buy to use in the car, something like the saucer shaped one I used to use in the car on long drives to West Virginia to listen to books, but they don't make them anymore. I found on the shelf with the old boombox, but it doesnt't seem willing to do its job. It reminded me of the scene in The Time Machine, when the adventurere finds the silver discs of the Eloys' civilization but no one knows how to make them talk. but the pretty Eloys wouldn't want to listen anyhow because they live only in the moment probably due to the trauma of realizing on some level that they are going into the meat machine of the Morlocks and it doesn't' matter what they know.

This music experiences rides in on the back of my having divested myself of my vast library of thousands of books collected over a lifetime of avid reading. Box after box after box was hauled to the Free Books Project to be re-distributed to the world at large in the free little libraries and book arks all over Camden. All I have left are a few dozen refugees that got left behind, and one third of my art book collection. In truth I don't really look at books much anymore. First of all, I am losing my vision due to old age and both a cornea disease and cataracts, but still, I don't take them down from the shelf and page them the way I used to. The landscape of my intellectual life has changed so vastly that it is unrecognizable. I used to subscribe to a dozen magazines from Mother Joones to Science Digest. I could drop a hundred bucks every couple of weeksan at Borders Book STore (now also gone) I read books to soothe my imprisoned soul during my working and parenting years. I vacationed in books and traveled in books and solved my emotional problems with books I understood the world through books. That communication is gone.

I moved on too. I paint now and I write this blog. I listen to an audio book at night since I can't see and I prepare myself for the end. But it makes me sad and disgruntled to think of the swindle and the waste engendered by this constantly shifting media storage - all those computer discs with my writinggs -eventually thrown away - all those little video cassettes of my family life thrown away because they were on a camera format that needed a caddy to play on a vcr capable tv screen which of course, no longer existed. Mountains of plastic and monumental amounts of time and effort just lost. Well, I have vented and now I need to re-direct. We all know that if you look back, you run the risk of turning into a pillar of salt. As my brother often said "It is what it is." As I often say "Things turn out for the best if you make the best of the way things turned out." Both of those statements are problematic in logic terms but I don't care. They are life philosophies that fit. By the way, speaking of e-mail news feeds, remember the newspaper? REmember the plethora of cartoons depicting dad at the kitchen table reading the morning paper? Now I am reminded of The Book Loft in Mullica Hill, my all time favorite second hand book stoe in a big two story barn on the main street of Mullica Hill. I loved that place adn I can still summon up the fragrance of the old dusty books. The periodicals room was a treasure trove of ordinary living captured in Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, House and Gardens and a hundred other magazine titles thate wnt back nearly a hundred years. Gone. I have no idea what they did with the magazines and the books.

If I have made you sad too, I apologize. It's time for lunch - a tomato sandwich with a New Jersey tomato, a gift from my sister from Platt's farm where she lives. We still have a few farms in the Garden State though our crops now are housing developments.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com

Follow up on Beckham

Watched Victoria Beckham documentary last night and what an anxiety roller coaster! Somehow I expected it to be more about her music career but the documentary was about the rise and fall and rise and fall of her fashion line. Honestly I can understand how fashion designers lose their patience with celebrities who decide they can step in and do what the established designers have done, without the benefit of experience, education, or respect for the craft. It would be the same as if someone who liked to eat decided they could walk into a restaurant kitchen and be a CHEF. Or a parent decided they could walk into a school and be an art teacher or a gym teacher because they liked crafts or sports. After all, aside from our gtalent and interest, we teachers ahve gone to college to study the craft and the art and we have worked to get certified, just like your dentist.

But - spoiler alert - it turned out that Victoria did have enough talent and worked hard enough and long enough to gain the experience (and the financing) she needed to save her business just as it began to come crashing over the railing and down the cliff face of debt.

Honestly, I felt so sorry for her when her big Paris show was scheduled to be held outdoors in September and there was a torrential rain storm. But really, I should have thought anyone would have known better than to schedule anything on that scale outdoors - the weather is infamously unpredictable!

Next day, I did some looking around and found that not only has Victoria Beckham's fashion house prospered, but she added a cosmetics and accessories line and the whole works is now comfortably profitable.

If you have any interest in the behind the scenes of fashion, or in the experience of a person re-making him or herself and starting a new career, there is a lot to be enjoyed in this documentary.

as far as fashion and I go - it is all about FUNCTION! It has been a couple of decades since I had any interest in my appearance beyond not being a spectacle. I wear a belt bag so I don't forget my purse somewhere, and my keys hook onto it so I don't lose them. My old old old feet will not stand for anything but the ugliest and most roomy foot wear. My hair is short so I can step out of the shower and don't need to blow dry and I am white haired as befits my 80 years. That's my fashion statement.

I do think, however, it is a good lesson in finding your passion in a new career when the other one has come to its end. Maybe that's the best lesson in this film.

Happy trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Beckham - because of the World Cup 2026

Really I have no interest at all in sports of any kind and antipathy towards a few - like American football which I find mindless aggression and destructive in the consquences to the players - CTE. But, the US is hosting the World Cup of Soccer and of all the sports, it seems to me one of the most athletic, diverse and least harmful to players or the earth. I say that about the earth because I never realized until I visited an abandoned golf course in Cape May which was returning back to nature, how much land is tortured and negatively transformed to make golf courses. I just didn't know.

Also, I don't comprehend the passion and obsession with getting a ball into a hole, or a net, or between two poles. I do understand the concept of sport as symbolic war, but that doesn't make me like it more. By the way, on that subject, anyone remember ROLLERBALL?

Back to Beckham, I had seen the documentary before, a few years back, and found it interesting so last night I decided to watch the four episodes again. This time the themes that stood out to me were: betrayal, exploitation, the pattern of women's trajectories being turned into comet trails behind a man's burning ball. This time I felt such empathy for David Beckham because his heart got broken in so many ways that were familiar to me, I felt him.

Betrayal - Two massive episodes of betrayal that David Beckham suffered, to me, were when Beckham had a slip of the leg and tripped up an Argentinian player who cunningly capitalized on Beckham's mistake and did a big fake fall which caused Beckham to be red carded out of the game. England lost in a deeply grudge filled match (because England had stolen the Faulkland Islands from Argentina) and the UK fams spent the next year spitton on Beckham's car, insulting him and his wife wherever they went, and spewing malice and hatred towards him, blaming him for the loss as though it were all on him to make the win or the loss, and anyhow - such deep passionate hatred towards a man who had been their hero? How they turned.

The second one was when he had an argument with his coach/team manager, Alex, whom he considered to be a father figure and whom he had revered and respected, and he used a profanity. Behind his back, Alex sold Beckham's contract out to another soccer team, Real Madrid, a good team, but not the team the Beckham had considered "family" - no one is your family but your actual family!

Victoria Beckham had been enjoying a huge star trip as a member of the Spice Girls rock and roll group. They had two giant successes of albums and made world tours to adoring fans. Now her romance with David Beckham didn't end the Spice Girls, the lead singer and song writer, Geri Holliwell ended the group for her own reasons. Plus two of the members had become pregnant (women's folly) More on their after life in a paragraph or two. But Posh Spice turned into a harried overburdened mother of four dragged from home to home, country to country, following her husband's suddenly erratic career. Myself, having been a mother of ONE without the blessing of family help, I can't imagine how hard it was for her to carry that burden: child care, constant packing and unpacking, all the arrangements of homes, schools, the emotional fallout from the children. No longer the admired star on the stage with thousands screaming her name and showering her with applause and financial success, she was now the mule burdened with the baggage and the ire of the dependents.

In the end, the thing I really empathized with was Beckham's physical decline. Already by 38, Beckham was feeling the disaster in his back, joints and muscles. He talked about rolling out of bed in the mornings stiff and in pain. Another sports movie I saw years ago Any Given Sunday about American Football, showed the players getting shots in their knees to quiet the pain so they could continue. We all know about the brain trauma and the many suicides from the pain and dementia they suffer. A recent UFC cage fighter declared public that he didn't care if he had to get brain damage in order to win the belt!

It all worked out okay because Beckham struggled through all his setbacks, disasters and heartbreaks and adapted to the new reality with grace and dignity - a good lesson for our fallen hero, Joe Biden, who didn't know when to quit.

The Spice Girls, too, moved on with new careers as solo artists, fashion designers, and entrepreneurs or married to wealth.

It isn't easy to quit a career for some though. It was easy for me to quit teaching when I had my time in for a pension. And I knew exactly when the time was right. It was when I discovered my high blood pressure and began to feel the possible explosion in my brain during the adrenalin rush of teaching or coping in the classroom, I knew it was time to get out or get a stroke! I have known other teachers, however, who didn't want to quit and couldn't imagine what else they would do. One teacher I knew had a stroke and died two weeks after his retirement. I had hobbies and interests. In fact, being interested may be my greatest gift.

I got so interested that tonight I plan to watch a documentary about Victoria Beckham.

And by the way, best modern series, fictional, about sports, good relationships and good coaching is Ted Lasso It was marvelously humane and interesting and funny and a great look at soccer from the locker room.

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Five Belated Gratitudes for Dad for Father's Day 2026

Five things I am grateful for from Dad

1. Dad taught me how to drive.

2. Dad was generous in the gift of his labor: When I left home, he painted my new apartment for me.

3. When I bought my house, Dad gave me power tools: a sander, a saw, a drill.

4. Dad spent weeks one summer helping me renovate the attic to make a bedroom/playroom for Lavinia, my daughter, including taking out the pull down ladder and buildig a staircase to the attic.

5. The morning he found me on the porch when I had left my marriage, Dad drove me to college to complete my course so I could graduate.

6. Dad gave me good advice when I asked for it.

Being a parent is a difficult and thankless endeavor. Your only acknowledgement is that your offspring survived and grew up to become independent and self-sufficient. We had a stormy relationship, but Dad did the best he could, always! He was an interesting and complex person. He survived the Depression, the CCC, World War 2, and a brutal, dangerous industrial career as an Ironworker, and devoted Union man.

Dad died of heart failure in his home in West Virginia, sitting in his recliner in 2011, aged 89. Happy trails Dad, wherever you are - wrightj45@yahoo.com

David Sedaris' Safe Place and the most dangerous place on earth

Last night in an npr interview with David Sedaris, he was asked what was his memory of a safe place he would like to return to and linger. He mentioned being 17 and raking leaves on a golden October day. The next program I watched was the newest documentary on Pompei.

Archaeological excavations and discoveries at Pompei are ongoing and will continue far into the future because only 1/3 of the area has been excavated so far. In each new archaeological exploration of this place, new technologies reveal things about the people, the place, the time and the volcano. Only hundreds of the bodies of the several thousand inhabitants have been found. Presumably a great many took the hint from the preceding several days of earthquakes and got out of there before the fateful day when the volcano blew its top and sent unimagineably hot and poisonous clouds of pyroclastic flow down upon the cities Pompei and Herculaneum, killing every living thing and buring all of it in two stories of ash.

When I was about 8 or 10, venturing down into the dark, damp, mysterious cellar of my Grandmother's house on 10th Street in Philadelphia to pluck from the dusty and abandoned book case another of the hardbound European Classics, one of the ones I discovered was The Last DAys of Pompei which transfixed me. For years in idle fantasy or in nightmares, I imagined the screaming people fleeing towards the harbor with the scorching heat and suffocating poisonous gas falling on them and knocking them to ground and burying them in ash.

Once, I remember watching my mother pour a kettle of boiling water on an ant colony on our sidewalk in New Jersey, and I felt as though I could hear them screaming from this unimagined catastrophe like the people in Pompei had.

Over the years from my childhood to the present, National Geographic magazine as well as other magazines and television shows dipped back into this popular tragedy as new discoveries were made both about Pompei itsself, or Herculaneum, or about the behavior of volcanoes.

In my 20's, a time so far far away, with my then husband, I walked the streets of Pompei, the same cobbles that those terrified sandal clad feet had trod in their futile attempt to outrun the black scorching breath of Vesuvius.

Volcanoes, these mysterious mountains rooted in the boiling bowels of the earth which periodically like some insane god, explode in rage and kill every living thing and even send hurtling towards the unexpecting in far away places, giant drowning waves to wash away their civilizations.

When Sedaris described his "Safe Place" I instantly thought of mine and it was In A Book! Books were my safest places througout my childhood. They were my boats and my harbors, my tropical weathers and my fragrant spice islands, they were also my Pandora's box, because in them I discovered so many horrible dangers from volcanoes to pirates, to the dark side of human nature. Back in those days, I discoverd that people could be boiled alive by evil rulers, betrayed by their closest loved ones, lost at sea, murdered, injustly improisoned, burned alive at the stake, enslaved, DISEMBOILED BY THE KING!

Everything is in books, including the ever unfolding answers to the mysteries of the world. And even to the mysteries of the mind - the most mysterious place of all.

One of the things I worry about now that I am old - 80, is my mind. I hope I don't lose it the way my eye sight has faded away, and my hearing dimmed; but, while I was sitting on the sofa after I had turned off my laptop with the shows I had been watching, I tried to remember who the author was of the midnight blue hardbound book that was part of the set of Europeqn classics in Grandmom's basement, and was titled The Last Days of Pompei. To my delight, it came to me - out of nowhere, the foggy bottom of my ancient memory - Bulwer-Lytton!

So, what is a memory of your "safe place?"

Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com

Juneteenth to me a white woman 2026

Follow The Drinking Gourd:

All week, maybe all month of June, I have been pondering the immense and horrifying subject of American Slavery. For anyone not familiar with what Junetenth is, let me offer my own small context.

To anyone familiar with Gone With The Wind, the movie or the book, you will remember the cavalier fervor with which the young men of the plantation generation viewed the upcoming Civil War. They were jubilant, enthralled by the adrenalin rush, the fantasy they had of heroic action, sanctioned violence, man versus man competition. They vilified the yankee men as weak and drenched themselves in an intoxicated version of their own manliness, courage, and virility. When thy got thrashed in the bloodbath that followed, those who survived, maimed, traumatized, filled with despair and hatred, slunk off to their devastated homesteads and then fled south and westward, to Texas in particular. They took what resurces they had managed to hide away somewhere, sold out, and established their plantation struture elsewhere.

One of the basic tools of subjugation used against the enslaved African American people was the denial of the opportunity to learn to read and write. It was part and parcel of the entrapment. If they couldn't write, they couldn't forge travel letters to free themselves. They couldn't read maps to learn where they were. One thing that couldn't be taken away, however was the sight of the sky. "Follow the Drinking Gourd" a song, was an instruction to find freedom by finding the big dipper in the sky.

An often overlooked fact of the subjugation of women also involved the denial of the right to learn to read and write, a basic educataion. Girls were confined to learning domestic labors, cooking, sewing, cleaning. And even if a liberal patriarch allowed his daughters literacy through a hired tutor, advanced education was denied women through to the 20th century. The push to marry off women as young as possible is part of the confinement of women's potential to the patriarchal goal of producing male heirs to inherit the patriarchs' accumulated wealth. This system continues blantantly and publicly in places like Taliban controlled Afghanistan and in Saudi Arabia.

My childhood was devoted to reading and writing and to this day, I can't understand why everyone isn't impelled by this thirst to KNOW. To me, in books could be found the answer to almost everything! Why would anyone not take advantage of this FREE treasure! Libraraies! Public Free Education! My life has been devoted to this cause. Aside from continuing my own education into my 60's, I devoted my entire adult life to education which began even began in library service when I graduated from college with a degree in English Literature.

Juneteenth is celebrated because the people enslaved on plantations in Texas by the failed confederates who established farms and ranches there, had no access to information and so they didn't know when the emancipation proclamation was publicized. It took the Federal Troops to go down there and tell the people they were free - Let the People Know - Let the People Go!

That Racist Sexist Patriarcal system of exploitation of the lives and efforts of others for personal enrichment still lives on because it lives on in the bad side of mankind - the souless and greedy side, and it powers the MAGA movement that is destroying the country today.

As a teacher, and educated and literate citizen, and a minority who rose through the efforts and sacrifices of civil rights activists both in Emancipation, Suffrage And Birth Control, I celebrate this holiday and all that it means.

Happy Trails and Happy Juneteenth!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

White Guilt & Remembrance

June 17, 8:00 a.m.

Last night I watched a pbs documentary called ENSLAVED, narrated by Samuel L. Jackeson. A team of archaeologists, divers, historians searched for the sunken wreck of the ship the London, which crashed on the rocks of a bay in England. In the raging storm, The Captain refused the help of the watermen of the local village who went out in boats to help steer him into the harbor. It is surmised that he didn't want them to see the evil of which he was guilty. He had already been hauled to court but released for torturing African captives on his ship.

The sailors and the Captain got off the ship and to shore but they left the hundreds of African captives chained below decks to drown in the frigid storm waters.

A local man spoke of finding things from time to time, once some fingers and part of a skull eroding out of the cliff face, some bits of iron, a shackle.

During the show, Samuel Jackson travels to Africa and visits an artist in Ghana which was where the majority of enslaved people were kept and put on the ships for the transatlantic Slave trade. Kwame Akoto-Bamfo makes clay sculpture portraits of local people whose faces he finds interesting and he has several projects incorporating these heads, one is a field of heads around a tree, the sheer number of the hundreds he has created and placed there begin to give you a glimpse into the enormity of this movement of human individuals. In another the heads are just visible in water, which reminded me of the ship in the earlier part of the documentary and those drowned people.

Towards the end of the film, they talked to John Lewis the great Civil Rights Leader and he said that we must not "sweep this under the carpet" We owe it to the oeople who suffered this history to remember. I try to do that out of respect on holidays that remind us such us the upcoming one - Juneteenth.

Perhaps it would be more correct to say that what I experience when I am reminded of the deep horrors of this historical event, is more discouragement and despair at the inhumanity and the heartless cruelty that some men are capable of inflicting on others. I don't feel guilt, just sadness and pity.

Along with John Lewis, I personally feel obligated to acknowledge the suffering of others both those who were enslaved and murdered and those who died to end the atrocity by fighting in the Civil War.

This Saturday, June 20, a re-enactment Civil War Regiment (the 12th) will be encamped on our Woodbury Friends Meeting House grounds. There was some controversy over hosting this event because of the committment of Quakers to Peace, but I felt from the start that we must acknowledge and respect the sacrifice of so many who died to save their fellow human beings from this crime of enslavement and human trafficking and to stop it from spreading. Unlike my fellow Quakers, although I wish war were never again necessary, I think there have been times when we have had to stop and fight. The Civil War was necessary to stop the enslavement of African people and to rescue them and World War 2 was necessary to stop Adolf Hitler and the nazi War Machine which was murdering on an industrial scale. Many Quakers also felt the need to sacrifice and serve because to allow this to continue was unthinkable. Of course, I do wish men would advance and find better ways of resolving disputes and also would divest themselves of the avarice that causes them to steal land and resources from others and to exploit both animals and people.

As long as we hold the hope, it is a light to follow. This Juneteenth let us all honor the memory of the suffering of our fellow American citizens and their African families in this shameful period of American history and also the memory of the men and women who struggled and sacrificed to end it. Let's celebrate freedom and goodness and the joy that kept the souls of the people alive until they could be free.

Happy Juneteenth!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Ballerina Farm - lots of thoughts

Of course, Ballerina Farm isn't a new story, but there is a new twist! For those of you unfamiliar with the story as it began, a beautiful young ballerina named Hannah Wright met the handsome wealthy son of the founder of JetBlue airlines. He swept her off her feet the year she was graduating from Julliard and soon they were married and in months, she was pregnant with the first of the following NINE children.

Not daunted by this switch in the tracks, the little train that could with her "Co-founder" husband developed the Ballerina Farm business, a social media super hit with millions of followers. Hannah made everything from scratch, milked the cows, baked sourdough bread, gave birth at home with no pain relief medication, and did her fitness routine in the early hours before the children awoke. She stayed slim and beautiful and even competed in beauty contests and won Mrs. American twelve days after the birth of her eighth baby (and wore a swimsuit!).

Superwoman? Who knows. She avows her husband forvids nanny help but she does have cleaning staff and more than a hundred employees work in the business selling the farm products. Also, she has a full time teacher for her homeschooled children.

I watched a lot of short videos on YouTube, but one stuck out from the rest; Hannah was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by half of her brood of children, dressed in her Mrs. American tiara and gown. One toddler, sitting on the table was screeching (YES - SCREECHING!) for food, which Hannah patiently handed her, while another toddler in a similarly ear piercing shriek screamed for "Ba" which Hannah finally interpreted as water and gave the tot a glass of water.

Having been an older teen when my mother had her second set of three children, I was well aware of raucous demands of toddlers, their fits of temper, their full body emotional hysteria, and watching that kitchen table scene brought it all back. Don't get me wrong, my mother wanted a lot of children. She ended up having five with one lost in pregnancy. My mother tirelessly pushed through, providing proper meals, a well furnished, beautiful home, and loving parenting. It was most definitely never my dream. It still isn't. All the women in our "Cul de Sac" which was Roland Avenue, in the 1950's lived that life. They were ALL homemakers with working husbands. It was the era befoe women had credit cards or cars or any of the labor saving things we got later, like disposable diapers,or even,in that neighborhood education beyond high school. They spent their daysvacuuming and dusting, doing laundry, grocery shopping, starting dinner at 3:30 after we kids came home from school and were out playing, so it would be ready when Dad got home, then washing the dishes and pots and pans.

It seemed to me, at the time, that they were mostly happy enough in their lives. Who knows? Did they, even?

The Ballerina's life didn't seem that appealing to me, collecting eggs, milking the cow, mixing stuff up and baking it and feeding and answering the demands of all those children.

The TWIST! The Needleman couple did one interview too many and came under scrutiny and criticism. He talked over his wife and answered questions directed at her; he bought her an apron when she had said publicly she wanted a trip to Greece for her 34th birthday; He told the press his wife got so exhausted she had to take to her bed for a week sometimes. People got worried about her.

When I read more, I discovered some facts which made things more clear. Both Hannah and her husband Daniel were the children of Mormon families and each was one of nine siblings. At 17 Hannah realized her dream to escape to New York City and have a different life, but just at the end of her teens, she ended up right back where she started. DAniel was not raised on a farm, but in a wealthy suburb of Connecticut.

The TWIST: They are moving to Ireland for a change and taking up a course in Cookery at a famous Irish Cooking School that specializes in farm to table organic cooking. No word on exactly how long they will be gone, but I think the furor stirred up by the interview may have been hurtful to them and their somewhat "Disney" image, so they decided to get out of town for awhile. Smart move.

I don't care what life any woman chooses and I can clearly see the appeal a home-making lifestyle could have for someone without wider ambitions - the cosy daytime solitude, the simple repetitive chores without the pressures of deadlines and commutes.

Before I started my deep dive into the Ballerina Farm controversy today, my sister and I had been grocery shopping. She had the day off and I am long retired. I was saying how lucky we were that we both had careers that were interesting to us and that we enjoyed. I was a teacher, she was a hospitality worker - mostly waiter, sometimes bartender. My sister loves socializing, food, drinks, parties! I loved teaching and learning and both my subjects: English literature and Art.

I hope that Hannah loves her career too, and I hope those nine childbirths weren't as traumatizingly painful as my one child birth was - and I had an epidural! It was the 10 hours of labor before it that was horrible.

I can't help wondering what it is going to be like when those nine children are teenagers! Maybe they will send them away to boarding school!

Happy trails - wherever yours may take you!

By the way there was a lot of talk about feminist hating on the 'trad wife' ballerina, but in all my research I didn't see any at all and I think it was a fake enemy. No feminist I every knew would deny any woman her CHOICE in career or lifestyle!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

A 13 Year Old Girl Cut School one Day

Sittng on the porch today, I was thinking about this: A 13 year old girl cut school one day in a gritty post industrial white once-Irish town. She was very tall for her age and skinny and had bright red hair. She and her girl friend were strolling along and passed an open porch where a 27 year old man was sitting, drinking, and idling away the day. He invited the girls up onto the porch and gave them drinks. They all laughed and joked and drank and the girls became intoxicated. The man took the red haired one into the house and raped her.

The girls never told anyone because they had been skipping school and they knew they would get in trouble. They were frightened. Then, the red hair girl discovered she was pregnant.

The red haired girl had a boyfriend her own age, a boy who was innocent like she had been. She told him about what had happened. Then she told her mother. She and her mother decided to go through with the pregnancy. The mother was a darts champion at the local bar and spent most of her time at work or at the bar and possibly she felt a little guilty about the lack of supervision provided to her two little boys and her daughter.

The little red haired girl and I met when I was hired by my school district to tutor her at home in the last month of her pregnancy. Her row home was furnished with threadbare but serviceable furniture. Around the top of the walls just below the ceiling hung a collection of beer themed baseball hats. Each day, after school, I arrived at her home with her books and assignments so she could keep up with the classwork and return to school after her delivery and, hopefully, finish her education.

Often, I had to hire my 10 year old daughter to come with me to do the math as it was so different from any math I had ever seen that I was stumped! My daughter and I named the little red haired girl Pippy Longstocking because we had been reading the books and I had bought the video cassette.

We invited the red haired girl over to our house, one cold rainy day and the two girls sat at tv tables with grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup watching the movie Pippy Longstocking, and laughing. From the back, they didn't look much different as my daughter was already getting tall. From the front, one of the children was pregnant.

Before I became Pippi's home-bound tutor, her mother had gotten the whole story from her and the man down the block had been arrested. He had been convicted and sent to jail.

Just before the end of the nine months, Pippi began to cry. I asked her what was wrong and she said, "I don't understand how the baby is going to come out!" Fortunately for us both, I had a close friend who had worked in a community education program that had taught sex, pregnancy and child birth education and she had the materials and an overhead projector. She gave Pippi a class on child birth.

For a few months after the baby was born, I was still paid to tutor Pippi. She was a good mother, unlike so many of the other teens I had tutored who resented the babies after they were born and were impatient with the crying and the demands of an infant. One day, she showed up at the high school with her baby in a stroller; she was so proud of the baby, but the school officials asked her to leave. The kids were all in class anyway and there were no kids roaming in the halls to see her baby. She had walked so far and had been so proud and now she was embarrassed.

Over the years we lost track of one another and I was reassigned to many other home-bound students. Time went by. My own daughter became a high school student. I took her to my gynecologist for birth control when she told me she thought she should have it. She was so proud when the doctor asked if it was necessary for her to talk to her mother and my daughter said that I had told her when she felt the time was right I would bring her, no questions asked. We'd had experience, both of us, with teen pregnancy.

Years passed and my daughter graduated and moved on to a different life far away. One day in Spring I went to the J. C. Penny store in the local mall for a raincoat and umbrella. A tall, nicely dressed woman with bright red hair asked me if I needed help. It was PIPPI! She told me she had married the high school sweetheart who had joined the army as soon as he graduated and they had traveled with his postings and her daughter was now 8 years old and smart and good and doing well in school. I told her about my daughter in California working at DisneyWorld, and we chatted generally for awhile until she had to get back to work and I had to leave.

It was the best happy ending of all my home-bound tutoring stories. Pippi had a job, a husband, a good and healthy child, and a good life. I can only hope that I offered some help and support with that.

What made me think about this story was that a friend and I were celebrating Margaret Sanger a week ago. I had painted a portrait of Sanger for an Art Show during March Women's History Month, and I said how so many girls become sexually curious and often active by 16 years of age and how important it was to have birth control so that they had some chance to get their high school diploma, at least! My daughter had the opportunity to try several kinds of careers over the years and I, myself, had been able to travel and go to college and get a career, and after my divorce, to buy my own house. And now, I live comfortably with a pension from that education and career, all thanks to birth control and Margaret Sanger!

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

a letter to a pen pal

I copy my letter to a pen pal here because it is about writing and about blogging abd I want to share it with others. -

n Good Morning Sheila! Uma (my dog) and I are just back from our walk at the Delaware River and I was pondering this age related adjustment: letting go of what isn't really accessible anymore and recognizing what is. In my 70's I had to let go of a lot. Actually backing up to my 60's, I began shedding what was no longer viable and looking for what was. So in my 60's I gave up romance, after the good old college try. In my 70's I gave up the Outdoor Club and kayaking and hiking. Mid 70's I gave up the woods entirely - too many hiking friends were getting Lymes disease and the woods had become increasingly dangerous due to hunters.

For many years my favorite spot in the woods was Pakim Pond in Brendan Byrne forest. I had gone there weekly with whatever dog I had and often alone between dogs with never an uncomfortable event. Then I had two in a row. On one hike around the pond, when I was on the far side, a group of motorcyclists roared up. One yelled across the pond to me if there was a trail. I said there was but I knew I could get back to my car before any one of them could catch up to me.

The second event, in autumn, was the last time I went: As I drove up the dirt forest road to the pond, on both sides of the road, there was a line-up of hunters in camo with their rifles raised and aimed into the forest. My dog and I had orange vests, but the four hunters on each side frightened me off and we turned around and went home. I had seen two deer romping the week before and I was so sad to think these guys were going to kill them. It was ruined for me and dangerous.

I was thinking about your blogging with S.J. and what a good thing that was because you can write forever! The only parts of your body you need for that are your eyes, mind and your fingers! And writing is infinite - both reading the writing of others (which I can no longer do in books, but which I have already absorbed and I have an internal library from my life and career in books) and writing. Writing is an infinite practice like meditation.

Thanks to my laptop, even as my vision fails, I can enlarge the text and continue to write and I look forward to it. Of course, painting is still available to me as well, but what to do with all those paintings! I did start giving them away some years ago, one at a time to various people - my handyman, the tech guy who fixed my printers, the young fellow who is property clerk at my Friends Meeting, various friends, my daughter, but still, if I do 3 paintings for each show, they can mount up! Sometimes I have an idea that just tugs at me to be realized but one other solution lately has been small paintings. I frame them inexpensively and glue magnets on the back and they go on the fridge. Those are easy to give away too!

Your Jane Goodall portrait, by the way, is still in the SJAC show until the end of the month at which time I will seek out a box fit for mailing.

But the point is - WRITING! Writing doesn't need much. If you handwrite, an inexpensive journal (I use 12 by 10 spiral sketchbooks in case I want to draw or paint or collage in them as well.) Or if you want to avoid the material altogether, - the internet, the blog - pen pals!

One of my favorite subjects is archaeology. Making marks, and drawings, is one of the oldest cultural pursuits of human kind, even hominids! It is the basic expressive medium besides vocalizing. The very miracle of putting marks on something and someone in a different time comes across it and it speaks to them - miraculous!

Just think of you and Christine Doyle, and Elaine Simon seeing those blog posts about Salmon Harris and Tom Nicholas, as far away as all of you are - Montreal, Canada, Pennsylvania, Florida! and getting in touch and conversing with me! WOW!

Actually I did hear from other people on different blog posts but they were all one-offs. A man wrote me about Rob Sweetgall, my ultramarathoner, long since gone now, and a few people wrote to me about Slim's Ranch and a hidden historic town in South Jersey populated by a small close group descended from a freed slave, a couple of Dutch women, and a native American man.

That blog is some fun. I am glad the S. J. blog works for you and that you are writing! My big gratitude today is that I became a fluent writer and that it has helped me through so much as well as offered such intellectual pleasure.

The pen is mightier than the sword! The pen creates, the sword destroys. Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com

At the river: where it began and where it is ending.

Early this morning I was sitting on a bench looking at the gray rippling water of the Delaware River and thinking about how my life began near the river, in Philadelphia, and now now that I am 80, it is getting close to ending, still next to the river.

My ancestors, no doubt came up that river from Europe across the Atlantic. I suppose that likelihood because my ancestors were German and Irish and I know that a vigorous German colony grew in Philaelphia at the time of my German ancesors arrival in the early 1800's. Also, I have read a bit about the Irish coming over through the port of Philadelphia, as well as through the port on the eastern side of the river through the Immigration station in Gloucester City. I don't have firm facts or dates for their arrival, but I feel fairly sure that they came through this port. I look at the river and I feel the boat coming to dock after all that long time at sea and my ancestors being so eager to feel land under their feet again and get on with their lives in their new world.

I don't know much about the German ancestors in Philadelphia but a cousin, now deceased was given a wooden cover photo album with dozens of formal studio photography portraits of the German ancestors, Sandman and Young (Jung). My Great grandmother Catherine Sandman is in that album at age 16 - the others all look prosperou and good looking, and the fact that ehere are so many makes me feel that they had a vigorous family life and the comfort and support of a community of people like them. They were listed in the city directory by trade as bakers, brewers, tailors, watch makers and seamstresses.

I have a xerox copy of a group portrait of the Irish clan, McQuiston, Gallagher and Welsh. The patriarch, Hiram McQuiston, grandfather of both my biological Grandmother and my adoptive one, had a haulage company and brought goods from ships on the river to the stores and markets in the city. My adoptive Grandmother Lavinia McQuiston (Lyons), sister of my biological grandmother Sarah McQuiston (Goldy), all her life attended Gloria Dei, Old Swedes' Church on the riverfront. That is where my family went to church when I was a child and where I went to Sunday school. I have many memories of those Sundays going to church beside the river, walking in the ancient cemetery. My favorite memory though is the summer excursions on the Wilson Line to Riverview Beach where our church familes would all spend the day with picnic lunches and little boat rides in the sunshine and grass, so beautiful contrasted with our concrete and asphalt brick canyon world at home. I feel so luck to be on this side of the river.

We old folks talk about senior citien residences the way young men talk about cars. My river walk is from the parking lot of Proprietor's Park to the Gloucester City riverfront senior housing building. I almost never see any of the peole who live there, perhaps it is too hot for them to come out, or too early. I was looking at the building and thinking about what it would be like to live there, with the park right next door and that nice walking path, not to mention a view over the river.

It doesn't matter though, because my plan is to age in place and stay in my little bungalow until the end, but you never know......

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Returning - Lovers/Places

June 9th 2026 - Nostalgia

This theme really began with a place but it swerved into other territory. The place was my old school, Mary Ethel Costello School in Gloucester City, New Jersey. I had taken my dog for a drive down to Proprietor's Park aon the East bank of the Delaware River, after picking up my car from the garage where it had been given an oil change.

As I type this, I realize that I have been retired and away from M.E.C. now almost as long as I taught there. From around 1974 to 1984, I worked in the Library at Gloucester City in an Outreach Program. After my daughter was born I had to find a better paying job and fortunately my Library job had given me a connection with the School Superintendent who had accompanied the Outreach staff on many of our lecture tours. He helped me a few times during my career changes. The Library Outreach job was a grant program and part of the requirement was that we present our project at Educational conferences.

My next job from 1984 to 1994 was to teach Basic Skills and Compensatory English at the high school. From 1994 to retirement in 2006, I taught art at the grade school, M.E.C. an old brick three story not vastly different from the old brick school I had attended in South Philadelphia, The D. N. Fels School on Broad Street. In fact the population of Gloucester wasn't much different from that of my childhood on Warnock Street, working class white people, many with alcohol problems and a bar on every corner.

Driving past the now closed and abandoned building (a new school has been built since I retired in 2006) I remembered those summer end-of-school days, packing up my room for the summer and making arrangements for the school custodians to water the dozen or so poinsettia that I rescued from the main office after Christmas each year when they were no longer beautiful and no one watered them. They thrived on the room length counter in the Art room beneath my large windows overlooking the rooftops of the row homes of Gloucester. I could see down to the Delaware River and the bridge.

My favorite play is OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder. It perfectly captures my sentimental nature and the way it feels to live in a place all your life, or most of your life and the way it feels to re-visit your life.

When I go to lunch at Maritsa's in Maple Shade, I pass the houses my family lived in when my parents were alive and we all lived as a family, my first bank account, the road I drove down with my boyfriend Mike in his sports car from his home in Pennsauken to mine and back. I pass my own old high school, Merchantville H> S., another old three story brick building - this one now a grade school.

Always when I meet my regular lunch buddies at Maritsa's in Maple Shade, I also revisit the little white bridge over the Pennsauken Creek, site of swims and ice skating. All these places make a feeling not unline a kind of bruise on my heart, because it is the end of my life.

Since it has been 40 years since I moved from Philadelphia, I never re-visit those places in the City that were part of my life, the street where I grew up and floated paper boats in the gutter streams after a good rain, Warnock Street. Nor do I pass 8th Street where I had my apartment after my divorce and where I spent time with my two great loves after the love of my life, my former husband.

Truly, my ex-husband, Mike, was the love of my life. I adored him the way a teenage girl can - with that intense focus and the innocence. He seemed brilliant to me and admirably competent, and it wasn't all the 'look of love;' he really was extraordinary. He was a genius - certified! (Member of Mensa) and I have to tell you that for someone like me, his brilliance was intoxicating, mesmerizing. But that love was poisoned because with his brilliance came his madness.

Finally, I tore my heart in half and returned to the safety and peace of independence which I had discovered when I had left home at 18 and gotten my first apartment and removed myself from my father's intemperant control. My solitude didn't last long though, soon, I found another extraordinary man and the dance began again.

Rob Sweetgall, though, was a whole different kind of extraordinary. He was a kind, mild and thoughtful man but so thoroughly self involved and obsessed that inevitably, I became his assistant and ceased to be the star of my own show. But before long he was gone on his enormous adventure on the open road - his 10,000 mile ultra marathon around the USA.

While he was gone, I fell in love again, with an artist from the city, also both beautiful and extraordinary, also self-involved. This was the romance that took my train off the scheduled track and diverted it to the life I would lead from then on, because this romance ended in pregnancy. And when I say 'ended' that is exactly what I mean. We parted - he went his way and I went to New Jersey.

My daughter became the focus of the rest of my adult life until she, like me, left home at 18. Again, my heart was torn - I hear Janis Joplin singing "Take another little piece of my heart."

They are all gone from my world - the lovers, the schools, the houses before this final one, my daughter in England. Karl, the artist still lives happily married in Pennsylvania, and Mike still lives in Colorado. Only poor Rob Sweetgall has died out west in Idaho.

I saw a photograph once from an art show or a book on photography and it was a box of black and white photos spilled out onto a bed and the caption was, "She loved me once." I loved all of those men once, those extraordinary men, and once they loved me too. Once we were all beautiful and there are photographs to prove it.

Now they are ghosts haunting an idle afternoon in summer while I drink a chocolate milk from the Heritage Convenience Store on Hudson Street in Gloucester, that I bought on my way home from the Delaware River where I went to look at the other bank, where I was born 80 years ago, and began to gather all these memories.

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Woodbury Civil War Event on June 20, 2026

Woodbury Civil War Event on June 20

In an event co-sponsored by the Gloucester County Historical Society , re-enactors of the Civil War's 12th New Jersey Infantry Regiment, Company K, will stage an encampment on the grounds of Woodbury's Friends Meetinghouse at 124 N. Broad St. from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, June 20.

The free event will be a living history demonstration of daily life in the Union Army during the Civil War, including drilling, manual of arms, weapons inspections, and the various military supplies, equipment, and tools used by troops of that era. Visitors will be encouraged to wander the encampment, take photos, speak with the soldiers, and experience some hands-on history.

SEE MORE INFORMATION

https://www.gchsnj.org/a-civil-war-encampment-comes-to-woodbury-june-20/

Gloucester County Historical Society

Contact: (856) 848-8531

museum@researchgchsnj.org

Event Location: https://bit.ly/FriendsMeetingHouse | 39.84062, -75.1511944 Free Parking: https://bit.ly/WoodburyFreeParking | 39.8396111, -75.1511944

Everything is Teaching Us

Monday, June 8, 2026

The title is from a book of Buddhist teachings that I used to keep standing on my bureau to remind myself that life is learning and that everything is teaching us all the time.

A few nights ago, some show I was watching; I can't remember which one it was or anything else from the plot except this one scene. A young man released fro rehab for alcoholism returns home to his father who is in the last stages of his alcoholism. The father dies and the young man goes to AA which he has resisted going to because they are "a bunch of whiners" but he is so deep in despair he can't think of anything else to cling to. In the group, at the end of the session, the leader asks if the newcomer has anything he would like to add.

"Yeah," the young man says angrily, "You're a bunch of fucked up whiners, I'm fucked up, the whole world is fucked up."

All the people in the group nod benighnly and reply, "yeah, you're right man; I hear you. I feel you." And I got it. They felt his despair and they felt how they all had been fucked up and the world they had lived in was fucked up, and they were all trying to just get on with life.

I was struck by the kindness and radical acceptance of tha response of the people in the group. And I thought a lot about group support. AA is still famous for being one therapy that does actually work, maybe not for everyone but for so many. And I think one reason it works is that we are ALL so reliant on groups, social beings that we are. And addicts and alcoholics become so dependent on their addiction groups that even after rehab, they have no one to turn to but their old dangerous habit groups. AA gives them a new group with a new struggle - not where to get the money to get the next fix or the next bottle, but where to get the character strength to face the next day without the drug.

I find our Quaker discussion group very helpful. The older you get the less group experience is available. People like me, who were teachers, interacted with other adults every single day, but, as a retired from work and retired from volunteer work 80 year old, I find days when I hardly see another person. I am lucky in that I have neighbors who interact with me frequently in a number of ways, my neighbor who walks the dog for me each morning, the one across the street who puts out my trash and recycle when he does his, two neighbors who text with me every day, and most important, my sister who calls every day and whom I drive to and from the bus on work days when she needs a ride, like today.

I thought how soft and accepting that group response was, like lake water accepting someone in for a swim.

That scene taught me something about radical acceptance, affirming someone's feelings.

Everything is Teaching us!

wrightj45@yahoo.com