On the Porch or Over the Fence

Today, December 19, Saturday, I was texting with a neighbor who has moved away. She mentioned how she used to like to sit on the porch with her mother and watch people go by. In the summer, I do that as well, although because I have a woodland style yard, not a lawn, I can't really see anyone and they can't see me. Nonetheless, it reminded me of days when I sat on my Grandmother's porch in Philadelphia. She lived on a moderately busy street, 10th Streer, and there was a trolley line, so when she and I sat on the porch we had the fun of passers=by as well as the rollicking bell ringing trolley car to watch. My mother used to talk over the fence back in the days when there were housewives who took a break from hanging out the laundry, or cooking up big pots of family style food, to chat over the chain link fence, a baby on one hip, another in a stroller, and maybe a couple in the yard. The fence days were on Roland Ave, Maple Shade, NJ and we lived in a new development, in a circular cul de sac, so the housewives, who were the ones home all day in those 1950's days, were in a sense, cut off from the rest of the world. Very few had a driver's license or a car. My mother had both! She also was one of the few who had a 'charge card.' Thinking of those more languid childhood days made me think of those big pots of food that were always cooking because women were economy minded, it being just after the war and the depression, and there being large families to feed. My mother's big pot meals were: sauer kraut with pork in the pot, served with mashed potatoes, beef stew, lentil soup with carrots, potatoes and hot dogs diced into it, many varieties of bean dishes including bean soup, to name a few. There are quickie versions for so many soups. My last blog entry mentioned the qickie version for beet soup that used canned beets instead of fresh beets. I have a quickie lentil soup, and a quicki corn chowder recipe too. I call them my disaster dishes because they are soups made from canned goods, so in a time of disaster, say a winter without electricity or when you can't get to a store for fresh produce, you can make a few soups with canned goods: 2 cans of creamed corn, a can of regular corn, one to two cans drained of sliced white potatoes. Just combine them in a pot with a bit of vegetarian bouillion to a desired thickness or thinness, and you can thicken or cream it up with plain, unflavoried Siggi's yoghurt. The lentil soup is likewise super easy, 2 cans of lentils (I found them in the ethni food aisle, bottom shelf) a can of drained sliced carrots, and a an of drained sliced potatoes. Easy and fast. There is a good recipe for entirely canned chili ingredients too: a can of red beans, a can of black beans, a can of white beans, a can of corn, a jar of salsa, a spoon of chili powder. Voila! Presto! I serve this over rushed up lime flavored tortilla chips with grated cheese on top. It is also good with brown rice. So these are all things you can keep in your cupboard and when it snows and you don't want to pull out of the driveway, you can make a quick and easy meal with canned goods. Needless to say, all of these soups probably taste much better with fresh potatoes and fresh carrots than canned, and given a choice, I go for the real fresh vegetables over the canned, although I am definitely through forever with the pressure cooker to cook beans. Dr. Oz says the canned ones are just as nutritious! I think I will go into the kitchen right now and make some potato and corn chowder, but I will use the bisque recipe and fresh potatoes and frozen corn. All of these are infinitely better tasting and more healthful that canned soups, though, so get out your soup pot and try one! Then, next time you are chatting over the fence with a neighbor, pass on a simple recipe!

Tools of the trade

This morning, after I gave up trying to take the dog for a walk because it was too dangerous (owing to the snow folowed by freezing rain wh'd had overnight) I decided to make my weekly soup. Someone had kindly cleared the snow off the sidewalks all the way down the street but the freezing rain had made them like a skating rink and even with TRAX on my boots, my Husky/Lab dog was so excited she was pulling and a red light went off in my head - broken leg, broken hip - DANGER! Turns out it was a great day for cooking, however. Every since I was sick over the summer, I have made it a part of my new lifestyle to not only walk the dog 3 miles a day, but make a big pot of soup and eat soup for my big midday meal every day. Last week it was minnestrone. This week it was to be BEET soup also known as borscht to those with experience with Polish, Russian or Jewish foods. My former mother-in-law was Polish and made many hoemade and elicious Polish dishes such as golumpki (stuffed peppers or cabbage) and Latke (potoato pancakes) and both beet soup, and cherry soup. I took out some bowls I haven't used for 30 years that I bought in West Virginia at a place called The Honeymooner's Souvenir Shop. It was 3/5 of the way to my parents house and when my daughter was little I would stop there and buy her Cherokee made moccasins, and coal bears, and cedar boxes. One year, I bought a set of nesting bowls that reminded me of my Grandmother Mabel's bowls. Grandmom Mabel's bowls were thick pottery, and a pale creamy beige almost the color of skin. There was a 1 inch border around the top with a stipe, sometimes maroon, sometimes a pale turquoise blue. I loved those bowls and I can remember her dicing potatoes into the bowl for potato salad, whcih my mother also made but with different bowls. Grandmom's bowls were from the 1930's. My bowls are what was known as 'stoneware, als a creamy off white with a royal blue stripe. Since I was making beet soup today, I got out my sharpest knives (not very sharp actually since I don't cook much). Beets are tough. They are like little bleeding wooden golf balls. I was reminded of my other Grandmoder Lavinia Lyons' paring knife. That was a super sharp, razor sharp little knife. The blade had been worn down over the many years into a crescent shape from paring round things like beets and potatoes. Grandmom Lyons always warned me not to touch the paring knife because it was so sharp. She kept a dark gray sharpening stone in th drawer to sharpen that paring knife, just what you need to cut something like beets or turnips! Cooking can do that, bring back memories of your grandmothers and mothers. I always remember making potato salad with my mother. We girls would be set to dicing the celery and the onions while the potatoes boiled and the bacon sizzled. She sliced the potatoes thinly into the big mixing bowl, that in another bowl, she mixed the mayonaise, vinegar, celery seed, onions and celery, which she then poured into the potatoes and lightly mixed along with the sliced hardboiled eggs. When it was all lightly tossed and mixed, she added the bacon, broken into crispy small pieces (what was left after we children all stole strips of it from the draining towel to eat. Here is the recipe for the beet soup I made today: sautee a diced onion and one chopped clove of garlic in olive oil in a large pot, dice a potatoe and add it. You can either used two cans of sliced beets here or two cups of fresh beets. I used 3 fresh beet (about 1 cup) and on can of beets. Cook for 15 or 20 minutes, adding vegetable broth as needed, it will be two cups total. Simmer another 14 or 20, up to 30 minutes. Use an immersion blender to puree. When I serve it, I add a heaping tablespoon of unflavored plain yoghurt. Some prefer sour cream (the original folk recipe). Today I made a dozen corn muffins which I liven up with cranberries and walnuts, and had a nice meal of soup and cranberry/nut muffins for a cold snowy day! ENJOY and when you do, take the opportunity to visit with the memories of the cooks you fed your childhood, the grandmothers and mothers, and sometimes fathers (my father was the Sunday pancake chef complete with a double electric fryer that he opened at the head of our huge family dining table. On one side he cooked bacon and sausage, on the other pancakes, and eggs.) It was a special Sunday ritual of my childhood. I would like to find some of those beautiful old bowls in an antique shop like the Red Mill, perhaps or the place I used to visit in Burlington, Antique JUnction? Meawhile, I will enjoy visiting with my West Virginia neting bowls from the Honeymooner's Souvenir Shop which has sadly been repaced by the Honeymooner's Gun Shop, not a very optimistic souvenir for a newlwed couple!

Visit to the Museum of American History in Deptford, NJ on Dec. 12. 2020

December `12, 2020 The most fun thing I have done this month is to visit THE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, in Deptford, NJ. with my sister, yesterday. On the brochure offered by the founder, Jeffrey Norcross, archaeologist his mission statement is: “Our museum is not a building filled with artifacts; it is a building filled with history told with artifacts.” Although my purpose in visiting on this trip was to look at the model train displays, from the 1940’s and 1950’s, my favorite items in his collection have always been and always will be the little metal figures molded from melted down artillery shells and bullet casings. What I learned this time, was that in a lower shelf in a nearby case, was the photograph of the grandmother who collected them in Germany after the second World War. It is a marvel to me that something so fanciful as skating and sledding figures would have been made from the debris of unimaginable destruction and violence. Thinking about his grandmother, I realized that he must have been the little boy in the family that was interested in history and so she passed her collection on to him, as did the other relatives, who gave him their fishing reels and favorite lures, and the old farm equipment from their farms in the Maple Shade and Pennsauken areas. So many of the items resonated with me in odd ways. He has a collection of hand carpentry tools and I also had two planers which I have carried with me over many decades for heaven only knows what reason. One of the planers had a wooden handle/holder obviously roughly hand carved from a block of wood another, a Stanley 45 planer, was actually the subject of a series of drawings that I did back in the 1970’s. These tools spoke to me of the hands that had held them, the things they had made, a time before electric tools when a carpenter needed strong hands and muscles to shape the wood for furniture or for buildings. Near the reels and lures, their is a group photo of four men and their catch. Maybe these were Jeffrey’s uncles or grandfather. The addition of the family photographs makes all the things so much more eloquent, to me. I have some things like that, my great-grandmother’s treadle sewing machine in its wooden case, which she used in her trade as a dressmaker when she was still a young girl of 16, according to the federal census I found doing family history. I have her heavy solid metal iron too. One year I made a booklet for each sibling of the family heirlooms so that when I die, they won’t simply end up in Goodwill, but someone will rescue them and hold onto them the way Jeffrey N. held onto his family’s possessions. I don’t know who that descendent will be because contemporary people don’t seem to have much sentiment for old family things. I don’t blame them. Why should young people have to go forward burdened by the left over possessions of the relatives who came before them. You have to care about those people and those things, the way I did about my grandmother’s things, her quilts, her photographs, her diary and her mother’s sewing machine and iron. Anyhow, I really enjoyed that day and wish more people could visit and enjoy that museum and take their children with them so that some of the magic might rub off on them! The Museum of American History 138 Andaloro Way (used to be Andaloro Farm) Deptford, NJ 08093 856-812-1121 www.southjerseymuseum.org (also on facebook) hours Thurs. thru Sun. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

18th Annual Antique Toy Train Show at the Museum of American History, West Deptford

The 18th Annual Antique Toy Train Show Nov. 27th, 2020 thru Jan. 31st, 2021 Featuring O and O-27 gauge toy trains, from the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. Lionel, Marx and American Flyer engines, with adjoining cars, will race on two diverse platforms. Vintage Plasticville buildings from the 1950’s will further augment the display. Vegetation and auxiliary structures will give the platforms a traditional holiday appearance. Museum of American History 138 Andaloro Way, West Deptford, Nj

The Holidays to Me

It is Thanksgiving 2020 and I am Home ALone! But I don't mind. Long long ago, in early childhod, I perfected the creation of personal happiness with minimal material rosources. So I am watching tv, drinking coffee, eating pmpkin bread that Holly made as a birthday gift for me. Thanksgiving, to me, was always about paricipating in a family gathering, but when my parents died, getting together lost a lot of its immediacy. We gathered together to visit our parents, my siblings and myself. Once the parents were gone, we became the parents, and our offspring had far far less motivation to visit with us, and so many of us had only one child, the draw of the siblings was also absent. Needless to say, the PANDEMIC has changed all of that anyway. It is a communal duty to STAY HOME this year and to NOT participate in the spread of this deadly disease. Some years, I visited with friends when I was alientated from y sister who lives closest to me. The trip my brother in West Virginia made to New Jersey was a big motivation for reconnectin with that sister because she would have us to her house and I would visit with my brother. But he is adamant about wanting to protect himself from this vius and has stated unequivocally that he will not be coming up for Thanksgiving or for Christmas. I often think about the hours at the kitchen table that we girls would spend chopping and peeling, dicing and chatting while my mother pulled it all together into the meal that took hours to cook and minutes to consume! I miss my mother more than any other part of it. What I don't miss is the hour in front of the sink scouring the baked on gravy out of pots and pans and the piles of dishes and cups and saucesrs after the dinner was over, when the males all retreated to the living room to watch football and the cooks and cleaners settled into phase three of the process, but at least we had one another to talk to during all of that. Christmas has NEVER been a consumer event for me mostly because I never had any money. I have always celebrated Christmas but it irritates me to hear so many of my non-celebrating friends deride it as "too commercial." I feel like saying that it is what we make of it. If you don't make it commercial then it won't be, but just as they don't want to rake leaves, they also don't want to put up trees or lights. They don't want to bother with all of that. Personally, it makes me happy though I have reiced me decorating to a fraction of my pre-old-age level. And I have help. Without the help, it would have to be reduced even further. What I love about it is the light in the time of darkness, the many stories about reemption from gloom and pessimism and selfihness into communal warmth and connection, even as my communal warth and conenction is more with other species than my own these days. My family, still around the number 7 or 8, as it was when it was human, is now multi-species: canine and feline. And they are good companions too! My dog and I just had our morning wawlk and I admired the Christmas decorations newly strung up in my neighborhood where the houses are almost entirely small, quaint bungalows that look remarkably like the little houses on our Christmas tree platform of my childhood. I was born in 1945, and my childhood is almost entirely portrayed in A Cjristmas Story, the wonderful movie based on the work of storyteller Jean Shepherd. He so perfectly encapsulated essential aspects of my childhood and youth in his stories. It is those memories also that I celebrate along with the cultural inheritance that i Christmas. My Great Northern Barbarian ancestors carried these lighted trees and symbols for hundreds of years and there is wisdom in them. I can feel it, and I commune with them each year when i also, light the tree and the the darknss for myself and my little fraction of the world. Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas!!

Model Train Show - Perfect for Christmas

The 18th Annual Antique Toy Train Show Nov. 27th, 2020 thru Jan. 31st, 2021 Featuring O and O-27 gauge toy trains, from the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. Lionel, Marx and American Flyer engines, with adjoining cars, will race on two diverse platforms. Vintage Plasticville buildings from the 1950’s will further augment the display. Vegetation and auxiliary structures will give the platforms a traditional holiday appearance. Address: 138 Andaloro Way, Deptford, Nj 08093-1627 Admission $4 adults, less for children and members of roups Hours Thur., Friday, Sat., 12 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Whitesbog for my 75th Birthday

Today, November 13, 2020 was my 75th birthday. Due to the pandemic, I didn't have a party as I most certainly would have done in other years for such a mementous birthday - after all, a wuarter of a century!! And My mother die at my age as did the mothers of a few of my friends, which i a reminder that although today 75 doesn't seem all that old, it is in fact, pretty old. So since so many places were closed, my daughter and her husband came down from New York to spend the day with me. They brought me my favorite soup, which Lavinia's husband, Justin, had prpared, Butternut squash soup, and we bought take-out sandwiches and ate here, at my house. I had decorated early for Christmas so I could enjoy the decorations and lights for my birthday as well, so it was cheery and festive. Then, for dessert, we went to Eiland Arts Center in the old re-purposed Merchantville train depot, and bought coffees and treats in lieu of birthday cake since I have just recovered from a bad case of diverticulitis and none of us thought a cake sitting around the house was a good idea. We drove to Whitesbog next, and although the harvest has been over since October, it is still a hauntingly beautiful place, especially in the late afternoon on a day like this where dark bottomed clouds, reluctant to leave the battlefield where they had so recently triumphed, sat layered across a determined blue sky and a radiant sun threw light beams against the iridescent green lichen growing on the dark trunked trees and lit up the orange and red leaves of the late autumn shrubs along the wood that borders the white sand roads around the bogs. While my daughter was here, she showec me how to switch my browser from Safari to Chrome so that I could blog again, the brower turned out to be the reason I couldn't use my old blog anymore, so I am BACK!

Sorry - No new post. New blogger will not accept text.

Retirement Aug.22,2020

Retirement post date August 22, 2020 As is so often the case, blogger has improved upon something that was working perfectly well so now I can’t use it properly anymore! I am resorting to writing my blog on a word processing program and transferring it over. I can’t make the type larger anymore on blogger. In Sept., I may no longer be able to blog since blogger only let us borrow the ‘old’ version until Sept. 1st, when the new model is imposed and I can’t blog on it at all. Last week, I met a couple of friends in the park who are not yet retired. I retired 13 years ago, as soon as I could. My health had begun to deteriorate and I wanted to spend the next few years as a free woman exploring my options and my world. My first year, I took off entirely. Some days I would get up and get in the car, pick a road from my New Jersey Road Atlas, and just drive to see where it would take me. In this way, I discovered so many wonderful new places such as Bivalve and the Bayshore Discovery Center there. After my year of total freedom, I settled in to volunteering for the next half dozen years. I volunteered at several local historic sites such as Red Bank Battlefield, Alice Paul Foundation, Gloucester County Historical Society, Camden County Historical Society where I also worked part-time for a couple of years as a suitcase history storyteller in schools. These were such fruitful years because History was a bit outside my former fields I taught English and Art in my education career. I loved it! Learning about the history gave me additional places to seek and discover. For instance working at Red Bank Battlefield opened the whole world of Revolutionary War History to me and we, the volunteers formed a club and took many field trips for instance to the homestead of William Penn. On my own, I explored South Jersey sites such as the site of the Battle of Chestnut Hill and Trenton Barracks, Battle of Princeton site, and Monmouth Battlefield. Now I had the opportunity to join the Outdoor Club and explore hiking and kayaking. So many new places were opened up to me such as Jim Thorpe, in Pennsylvania where I hiked up a waterfall in summer and when it was frozen in winter. My knees and back began to give me trouble so I was no longer able to manage stairs, or long hours of tours. I took up painting again and got re-acquainted with some old Rutger’s College fellow artists from the print-making program. We formed an Art Club. Soon I had a lot of paintings and I began to look around for local, group show notices. I showed work at the first annual Atsion Arts and Crafts Fair, Fortnightly Annual Scholarship Art Show, Haddonfield, and at, my favorite, Eiland Arts Center, located in the old historic Merchantville train station where, this Spring I won first place in the BRAVE 100 Art Show celebrating the Centennial of the Women’s Suffrage Amendment. I began to write again and participated in Poetry readings, a couple of writing groups, Riverton Writers, for a decade, and Owl Grove for two or three years. After putting an entry in The Mad Poets Society Annual Poetry Contest, I was thrilled to win first prize and get published in their Journal with my poem RAIN. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But that’s not all. I also now had time to try my hand at writing books and I wrote three which I independently published: a historical novel called White Horse Black Horse, a relationship novel called 181 Days, and a memoir called 1969 On The Road. When I worked all the time I had neither the energy or the time for any additional hobbies or even a social life. At that time, also, I was raising a child and by the time I retired, she had grown up and launched herself on her own creative and independent life. I was free from responsibility and had only the usual household chores to hold me down. As they say in advertising - WAIT!! There’s more! I had so much free time that I tried some new hobbies in arts and crafts. I made a scrapbook for my sister for her 50th birthday, and my daughter for her 30th, then one for myself for my 70th! And I began a long and, of course by its very nature, endless foray into family history. It is amazing what you can do when you are free! So if you contemplate retirement and don’t know what you will do, perhaps this will help you just a little to explore a few ideas I have posted. Some of the things my retired friends do, now that I have time for friends too, are: volunteering at Animal Shelters, Wildlife Rescue, Political Campaigning, gym memberships and fitness, a few have written books, some have developed new careers that are offshoots of the old careers they had, and many do art and writing. A few have taken cooking courses and one or two like to travel. One gardens and one has done various projects related to her church. Many friends are history volunteers, which is where I met them, and the ones I met in the Outdoor Club still hike and kayak. Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

A Memorial to Rob Sweetgall - a Life Well Lived

Back in 1981, when I still lived in New Jersey near the Cooper River I had the opportunity to see the Edward Payson Weston 6 Day Race. It was held on a little running track on the Pennsauken side of Cooper River. For 6 days, ultra marathon runners ran/walked/jogged as many miles as they could stay upright to finish. I was a lap counter volunteer and I counted laps for Rob Sweetgall. Shortly thereafter, Rob and I began to date and I did a few small things to help him start his biggest accomplishments his dream and his goal for his life, to run around the perimeter of the United States. It was to kick off his new business in Creative Walking for Fitness. He had been a chemical engineer for Dupont but his family history of heart disease propelled him into life changing career in promoting fitness by walking. Hw wrote about a dozen books on the subject and reached countless thousands with his lecture tours to promote walking fitness in corporations and schools across America. While he was on his year long odyssey, our paths diverged. He went on to complete not only his 10,000 lie perimeter walk/run program, but to walk in all 50 states and yet another 11,000 mile walk run. Eventually Rob married an herbal healing expert named Darcy Williamson and by all I found doing research on them, they lived a healthful and happy life in MCCall, Idaho. Rob died in 2017. I didn't know he had died until I looked him up the other day on google and found his obituary. He was a kind and sensitive man and I am glad he had the opportunity to live his creative and fulfilling life to promote wellness and fitness. Rob loved the outdoors and I am happy that he lived the rest of his life in McCall, Idaho, which by the photos on Maven's Haven (his wife's herbal medicine studio) looks like a beautiful place of mountains and forests. And I am happy that he had a wife who shared his passion for the natural world and for healthful living. Both of them wrote many books which are available on amazon. Darcy Williamson has written many books on herbal medicine and edible wild plants as well as some history of her homeland of Idaho. Rob has a dozen books on walking for fitness as well as one he and Darcy wrote on fast and healthful meals to go with an time-economical fitness program for people with busy lives. In honor of Rob, I plan to plant a couple of trees in my yard in September, and I will buy one bookworm each author. Rob had a powerful impact on the lives of all who met him and he was an inspiration to us all. To my sorry, I found that at least 4 of the original Payson 6 Day Race marathoners have since passed away, Harry Berkowitz, Wes Emmons, and Sabin Snow, as well as Rob. Wes was the oldest and died at 83. Rob was only 69. He died of cancer. Their stories are living examples of how people can live the life of their dreams and how you can step out of a life that doesn't fit and make a success of another lifestyle, outside the conventional path you may have found yourself on. I hope this blog post inspires any readers to look up Rob Sweetgall, Darcy Williamson and Edward Payson Weston, all heroes for health and for the environment. Happy Trails, wherever your life may lead you! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

So sorry - it didn't work. The old blogspot format just deleted all my paragraphs and my attempt to enlarge the font.

Pandemia Journal - My Blogger book club - The Janes 8/5/2020

Don't know if there will be another blog post after this one. There is a "new and improved" format for blogspot that no longer allows me to post so this may be the last one. I can only do this one because there was an allowance to use the old format one more time, however the old format was not the one I used and it doesn't allow me to make the text larger - sorry! So, I can barely see this type as it is. Maybe I can type it on 'pages' and past it in - I will try! Blog Post - My blog book club and my invisible friend. Recently, after spending a few evenings watching El Chapo as part of my Latin American experience, i watched one episode of Immigrants, a series on illegal immigration and the ICE debacle. I got so depressed by the brutality and heartlessness in both of these series, that I needed to take a break and visit a gentler, simpler, imaginary place - AVONLEA, Prince Edward Island. When I was a confused, terrified, misfit child, I found Anne of Green Gables in my Grandmother Lyons’ basement bookcase. As I have said before about this bookcase, I have no idea why it was in the abasement and no one but me had any interest in the books at all. I don’t know whose they were originally, although my Uncle Joe Lyons told me the Tarzan book was his father’s, my grandfather, Joseph Lyons, Sr. Anyhow, there, I found a girl like me, a dreamer, a book lover, a storyteller, who was humiliated at school, and traumatized in a number of ways in ordinary life. Anne showed me you could survive and thrive despite it all, and I did! Watching the series again, with new fresh eyes, I realized what a profound impact the book had on my life. My lifelong interest in one-room schools, my 35 year career as a teacher, my love of writing, and so much more (my love of trees and my feeling of empathy and comradeship with animals.) This time, I noticed how as my life moved on, so I became other characters in the story - during my motherhood/teacher years, I became a kind of Marilla, and now in my old age, I have softened into kind of Mathew. It came to me that the delicious details, the deepening profundity of the simplest dialogue, the momentousness of ordinary little things, came from a world where a woman was so confined by culture, community and law, that she was forced to ponder and use for her resources, the long littleness of life. Then I thought, how much L. M. Montgomery, Charlotte Bronte, and Jane Austen had in common. Their focus on the psychology of the intimate life, the customs, the hypocricy, the conventions in constant jousting with human nature, was created by their very confinement within the Victorian cage of their times. If I had a book club this would be what I would like to discuss. But being a freewheeling, follow my own trail kind of reader, I don't join book clubs. Last month would have been the start of a long period of Latin American authors. Well, I hope something gets improved so I can continue to talk to you, my invisible, imaginary friend. You are like the imaginary friend in the china cabinet that Anne Shirley spoke with in her years of solitude -Katie in the clock! Happy Trails, Jo Ann

Pandemia Journal - Mexican politics in the El Chapo era

Perhaps you, too, are watching the Netflix series on EL CHAPO.  Probably, I wouldn't have been watching this if it weren't for my recently re-discovered interest in our southern neighbors.  In fact, at the time when El Chapo was in the headlines, I was already disturbed by a kind of 'Robin Hood' 'Pirates of the Caribbean' mythology that was growing up around him.

After we all saw the bodies hanging from the overpass in Juarez, we began to become aware of the murderous pathology that had infected the politics and economics of Latin America.

It was a sad eye-opener to watch the three season series, which was about 30 episodes and very detailed.  It was all far far too complicated for me to try to summarize, by the way the corruption spread upwards like a kind of social gangrene, was interesting to see in a map kind of way.  

Needless to say there were many profound thought inspiring aspects to this film series as well as to the political and social world the series portrayed.  It is a work of art, not a documentary, but sometimes they are the very things which touch on the ineffable, the hard to see, hard to comprehend things.

One repetitive aspect that was occurring to me was the answers to the question:  What is the best way to live to be happy?
To the drug lords, it seemed to reside in willful domination over others, power through emotional manipulation and intimidation as well as bribery, expensive accessories such as Rolex watches, sports cars, the acquisition of as many 'prize women' as possible, into a kind of harem with beautiful models and celebrities at the top of the list.  The material goals were far more than these, and so were the desperately clever strategies to capitalize on an opportunity to achieve the means to get those goals.  A big one was the goal to be "The Boss."  Kind of like a one god only model.

I couldn't help by contrast that philosphy with more Eastern ones like Buddhism, where the main goal is to recognize your mind, comprehend your thought patterns and de-throne them so that you can achieve peace through inner power rather than outward materialism.

And then, the other contingent weighs in, the reformers who devoted their lives to worthy causes to support and assist their fellow human beings. 

The same argument falls into the history of the Quaker religion, when the individual spirit, direct communication to god from within, revelation oriented Quakers came to debate with the orthodox Quakers who wanted a kind of imposed conformity and a profession of spirituality through action rather than say, meditation.

I don't claim to know the answer or to even think there is one, but I have tried most of these approaches at some point in my life and I have become what I am, a simple, solitary, somewhat materialistic human (as in I have a house and a car and pets), and I do manage to fall into periods of meditative state periodically throughout my day.  I have felt spiritual yearning from time to time in my life, but conventional denominations and church groups were unappealing to me and I have serious and well-thought out opinions on such things as 'holy books' or 'spiritual leaders,' or even the 'one god' concept.  I can appreciate it as a unifying force in society but utterly irrelevant and superstitious seeming to me.

What would I think is a good life at this moment?  Well, I try to think of the things I have done that I feel were good - my long career in education, raising my daughter, managing to independently buy a small, humble, but utterly comfortable house, I got educated and I still educate myself,  I seek to understand other people and the world around me and I have values I hold to be high oral ones that eventuate in good for the most people, abstract concepts that reveal themselves in law such as justice, equal opportunity, fair play, honor in making agreements, and so on.  Also I believe that right behavior begins at home in kindness and compassion towards the animal companions who come into your life, understand an support for family and friends. 

Well, I didn't want this to get too long, so that's a good enough start.  By the way, we don't have the old standard "Crime Doesn't Pay" for no reason.  Depending how things evolve over time, I believe that crime doesn't pay in the real things like peace,, happiness and a sense of self worth.  I am sorry for those who are denied by circumstance the opportunity to have a long relationship with the joy of those things.

Happy Trails,
Jo Ann

Pandemia Journal - Taking a Lessons from Home-schoolers: Education in the Pandemic

History teaches us so many things, not least of which is the long evolution of education.  A perfect and local example  is the Clara Barton one-room school in Bordertown.  In the Colonial period, children were taught at home by both their at-home parent (usually a mother) and hired tutors.  

In 1852, an ambitious and high motivated young teacher came to Bordertown, New Jersey, from Massachusetts.  Her name was Clara Barton.  The community gave her a ramshackle little one room building to begin the first public school.  On the first day six children showed up and they all pitched in to clean up and ready the school for more.  Clara Barton's efforts eventuated in 500 students.  She was so successful, that she was put under the supervision of a male administrator which outraged her, as it should, so she left to found first the registry of wounded and dead during the Civil War, and finally the Red Cross.

My point with this blog entry, however, is that there were models available to us to use as temporary solutions during the pandemic.  
My idea is that a group of PTA type parents and retired educators could form a cooperative.  If there were, say four teachers, on hourly tutoring wages, and a set of perhaps ten parents, A teacher could meet at the backyard of the Brown family on Monday and tutor in (if it were me) English, Art, and History.  On Tuesday the small group of 5 to ten students could meet at the Green family backyard for Math and Phys Ed.  Whys Ed could be croquet, while ball, bad minton, and if there is a pool, swimming and pool safety.  
On Wednesday, a parent volunteer and chauffeur could help the tutor take the children on field trips to, for example, Red Bank Battlefield for a history lesson, Bivalve for a science lesson, Funny Farm for a lesson in science, the planetarium (I think there is one at Glamssboro) for astronomy, There are literally hundreds of small museums and historical societies and nature centers like the Palmyra Nature Center, that could be used as learning destinations. 

I think this could actually be done with three tutors!  Possibly even with two!  I know I, personally, could do History, Art, Literature and Language Arts, and probably lower level Science.  A Science tutor could perhaps handle pays ed.  

The Home Schooling folks could teach everyone a lesson in how to do education on your own.  Don't get me wrong, I think children are better off in school and that home-schooled children miss a o, including exposure to diverse cultures and personalities, however, in times of pandemic, home-schooling could offer us a way out of children not having any education.

And by the way, home tutoring was the only education until the 1800's.  One room schools came next.  

Some of the advantages of the home-tutor idea aside from safety from the danger of large groups confined in building which we know makes a perfect way to spread corona virus, would be children would have more one to one attention, and tutors with small groups would be better able to get them to wear masks!  Taking temperatures could even be a way to teach health and science!

Heaven knows there are plenty of talented teachers who have retired who may be willing, on a temporary basis and hourly tutoring wage, to do such a thing.  Detrimentals would be the fear of litigious and fault finding parents.  There would have to be some legal involvement to begin with because there is always a parent who would become aggrieved over something or other who would see an opportunity to go to court like going to the bank.  

The parent group would have to be carefully selected, as would the tutors.  There would have to be some protection for the home-owners as well for the same reason.  And there remains the bathroom issue.  My suggestion would be a team of parent chaperones who could help with bathroom issues and lunch (although a brown bag from home would be best for this, especially in view of nut allergies and so on).  

In the Sunday New York Times today there was an article on POD SCHOOLS which sparked my idea of home-schooling models.  If the tutors were paid even a generous hourly wage, it could be supported by a contribution arrangement, so for example, a $50 an hour, could be covered by - well, I can't teach math and trying to figure out that cost per 10 families, for example, is already making my head tired.  We would need a treasurer/accountant.  If you had a truly cooperative group, probably most supplies could be individually supplied by the parents for each child and some plan for students who have low income families like a scholarship.

Needless to say there would be some risk for the tutors even with such small groups and if a teacher is retired, she or he probably is old enough to have some of the health concerns related with aging, high blood pressure and such.  Lots of legal releases would need to be drawn up and signed.

Just an idea that creative and energetic parents and teachers might like to consider!  I have always loved the one-room school model in education history, and I have done a bit of tutoring for enrichment, privately, as well as the full range of home-tutoring when I was still employed  I did English as a Second Language, home-bound tutoring for students absent for medical reasons, and many community ed night classes as well as Lab School experience.  One of my favorite courses at Glamssboro State College for my first Bachelor's degree was in ALTERNATIVES IN EDUCATION!  Back in the 1970's this creative approach was very popular and many models for learning came from it.

Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
wright45@yahoo.com   (my e-mail)

Best Day in 6 months - BIVALVE, NJ

A TRUE FRIEND - If you are like me and fall in love with PLACES, you will understand how happy I was today when a true friend volunteer to take me to visit a place I loved from the first moment I laid eyes on it:  BAYSHORE DISCOVERY CENTER, in Bivalve, New Jersey.

At one time, Bivalve was a busy, wealthy, thriving community of oyster fishermen, and rich people's summer vacation homes.  Hundreds of box cars rolled in and out of Bivalve each day carrying oysters to Philadelphia and New York.  It was a golden harvest until the mid 1950's when a bacteria was brought in via bilge water in ships and infested the oysters and killed them.  Almost overnight the devastation destroyed the oysters, the communities that built up around the harvest of them.

My dear friend and fellow history buff, Barbara Solem volunteered to drive me down to Bivalve to see the new exhibit, a temporary exhibit of relics brought up from shipwrecks along the coast.  Some of the most interesting items pointed out to us by the tour guide were round bottom bottles designed to keep the corks wet by not standing upright on flat bottoms, and a ships telephone in almost pristine condition, giant lobster claws as large as baseball its, some beautiful china, cutlery and many other items of interest.

I didn't think I would ever get back to Bivalve because it is an hour and a half from my house and not many would be willing to go there.  In the past, when I drove, I could persuade people to go with me but now that I can't drive that far (old car - 14 years old and 200,00 miles on her) it isn't possible for me to go to many of the far away places I once loved.

I was a tour guide at Bivalve for a couple of years till my car began to suffer from its old age and I didn't feel safe driving so far anymore.  

BIVALVE is a kind of ghost town with a boardwalk and a series of old shops for sails, ships engines, a post office, a shucking shed and an oyster cafe among others.  That's on the land side, on the water slide there are decks and we were able to sit at a table out there and eat the lunch we bought at a Wawa we passed when we hit the bottom of Route 55.  It was so cool on the docks, a brisk breeze came in off the water and we sat beside the remains of the old masted schooner CASHIER which has been slowly and sadly sinking into the mud and disintegrating.  The wheelhouse of the old Cashier was rescued, but sadly there was never enough money to dryadic the Cashier itself and make the necessary repairs which became or of a millions of dollars project of replacement than repair.

Fortunately, this being as Saturday, we did not run into shore traffic.  The tour guide told us the traffic is mainly bad on Friday nights and Sunday nights.  We hit one or two slow spots due to a flat tire repair in one lane, and a bottle neck where 55 forks and the left side becomes 322 to Denisville.  The way home was entirely traffic free.

Something about the lonely, even ghostly quality of the place spoke into my heart and I became infatuated with that place.  I read everything I could get my hands on about it.  Many of my old entries are about books I read abut this most southerly part of New Jersey, the old SOUTH JERSEY magian the history one, not the new travel one, and many books like MAN, THE SEA AND INDUSTRY, andTHE MAURICE RIVER.  I was captivated by the story of the old man who all his life wove the baskets they used by the thousands in the oyster industry.  I saw a photo of him from the WPA days, sitting in front of his little one room house, weaving the baskets.  For some years I tried to find one of those baskets to buy but no luck.  When I found them on-line, they were too expensive.

As much love and happiness as I experienced there was also a feeling of sadness for the day when I was a volunteer there and got to go every week and spend time there.  It made me aware of how trapped I have been during the pandemic, and even before, by my failing eyesight, bad knees, and old car.  My roaming and adventurous days have come to an end and I miss them.  

When I went there in the old days, I took all kinds of turns and side streets to explore the area, I roamed freely with hours of free time since I was retired and had no reason to hurry home, no dog waiting for dinner, no schedule to keep, such freedom,  It was one of those times you think will never end but they do.

Much thanks to the generosity and friendly love that brought my friend Barbara Solem to volunteer to take me there and share the day with me.  As we ate lunch on the dock, the cooly elegant Meerwald schooner came slowly gliding along like a swan.  I took photos and after I rest up, I will post some here.

If you haven't been there, you should really go - you won't be sorry, and there are no crowds!  But you must wear a mask!  Entrance fee is $5 for seniors and $7 for general public.  If you aren't vegan or vegetarian, you might want to have lunch on the docks with something from the oyster Cafe' which is what the family we saw visiting that day were doing.  Other than that family lunching on the docks it was quiet there as I always remember it being, and peaceful.  What a lovely day and a great friend to spend it with.

Barbara Solem is the author of three books on the history of the PineBarrens so we share a love of old places and history.  Other places I miss dreadfully are Pakim Pond, and the Maurice River Bluffs where I used to hike and take Captain Dave's boat ride. "Those were the days, my friend I thought they'd never end..."

Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com

Pandemic Journal, July 30, 2020 President Obama delivers Eulogy for John Lewis

Just after having read the Mary Trump book TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH, I put down the book feeling frightened and sad about our future as a country.  Then I turned on MSNBC and heard President Barack Obama deliver his eulogy for the enormously effective and courageous activist John Lewis.  President Obama renewed my faith that someone we can pull ourselves out of the quick sand that is this period of Trump and the Pandemic and the looming economic collapse.

The struggle has gone on and must continue to go on in order to ensure that all American citizens can access our legal rights and participate in our Democracy.

What a stark contrast between President Obama's diligent preparation for his job leading our country, his measured and intelligent leadership as well as his inspirational honor and goodness.

A merciless pirate has captured our ship of state and done everything in his power to divide us, crush African American citizens, women, the rich immigration flow that has kept our farms thriving.  He has used the office of president to enrich himself personally and to crush everyone else.  Mary Trump did a plain spoken but informed portrayal of the pathology in the father and son relationship between Fred Trump and Donald that created the monster who roams the halls of the White House today.  Fred Trump made his fortune off taxpayer money through FHA funded housing developments and made sure he didn't pay a penny in taxes off his profits.  

When his eldest son couldn't follow in his footsteps and didn't want to, Fred Trump destroyed his son with constant humiliation and shame and made of him a depressed alcoholic who died at 42.  The younger son saw all this and protected himself from his father's fury with defensive lying, disembling, casting blame on others, and hiding his failures under bluster.  Fred Trump put all his hopes on his second son teaching him that empathy was weakness and that the only thing that could be considered success was amassing wealth.

When his second son failed by buying an setting up three casinos which then competed with one another and drove each other out of business, Fred bailed him out, over and over again.  Donald began funded by his father and his father kept him afloat through all his failures.  His father used Donald's penchant for self promotion to achieve his own ambition of fame.  Their name became label, a brand.  

Having made many loans to Trump to keep their own investments from being lost when he went under, the banks and investors continued to prop up Donald through four bankruptcies.  Donald never learns from his mistakes because his insecurity cannot allow him to accept that he has made mistakes.  He just lies, casts blame, and then fortifies the delusion that what he did was actually a success, even a great success, and then, the greatest success.

We need the example of truly good, brave altruistic men like John Lewis and Barack Obama to remind us that they exist and are not simply hero myths.  

Thank you President Obama for renewing my faltering faith in my fellow man!

Happy Trails, John Lewis, after a life well lived.
May we all find the courage inside ourselves to do the right thing, which might be to look at our own attitudes and behaviors and change them to make us better people so we can make the world a better place.
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com

Pandemia Journal - Portland Moms

Today, something happened that has never happened to me before.  I was reading THIS WEEK news magazine and I read a column on the Portland demonstrations.  A group of Portland Mothers made a protective guardian line to protect the protest marchers from assault.  Armed militia clad in camouflage gear in unidentified vans, allegedly sent by the Federal Government attacked them.  They shot the mothers with rubber bullets, giving one mother a fractured skull, and they tear-gassed them.  The Veterans came to protect the mothers too and then the husbands formed a group and came with leaf blowers to blow away the tear gas and protect the mothers and the vets.  

First, when I read that they had shot that unarmed and non-violent mother in the face with the rubber bullet, I spontaneously fell to tears -it just spilled out of me, a result I think, of an overflow tank of anxiety and fear and sorrow that has come about since the destabilization of our country from the pandemic, the obviously unstable and irresponsible president and his gang, and from the violence against citizens caused by our increasingly militarized police force.  

Watching the end of the new series on the Russian Revolution, I saw this same hatred, and cold hearted violence when Marxists murdered village people suspected of giving horses to Leninist groups who stole the horses and burned down the peasants homes and fields.  They lined up and shot whole families from the littlest, not even walking yet, to the oldest grandparents.  Same thing in Germany, Poland, and Cambodia.

An elderly Cambodian woman my sister has worked with on the 'Meals on Wheels" food assembly line in Pa.,  told her than the Kmer Rouge attacked her village and slaughtered everyone except her.  She was 5 years old.  They killed her parents in from of her and disemboweled them.  They left her there alone, stripped naked, amidst the dead bodies.  I don't now how she got rescued, but she eventually made it to America.  

You have to ask yourself who can do such things?  And then, here we are in America and a camouflaged militia man shoots a Mom in the face with a rubber bullet and fractures her skull.  She could have been his mom.  What goes wrong with that individual man that he could do such a thing.  No one made him shoot that older woman in the face.  It is so hard to understand the "blind and ignorant thing"* in the heart that would allow someone to overcome their lifelong acculturation to protect elderly women, mothers and grandmothers, and actually shoot one in the face. 

 *The quote above came from a novel I used to teach when I was an English teacher.  It was called A SEPARATE PEACE, by John Knowles.  It was a classic coming of age novel set in World War II and it asked that very question, how could someone do such a dastardly thing and Knowles wrote that it was a blind and ignorant thing in the heart.  I think of it more as a compartmentalization of the heart - a wall between what you know is right and what some barbaric and savage spurt of destructive impulse escapes and allows someone to do a savage act.  


To think that an American man could shoot an American mother in the face with a rubber bullet - but then, too, to think an American policeman could kneel on an American man's neck until the life was crushed out of him, or to think that in an American town a mob of men could beat an American Man senseless and torture him and hang him until the life is strangled out of his body, it is too hard for me to accept.  

Usually, at this point, I say "Happy Trails" but today it is a trail of sorrow.  Sorry to drag you into my morning gloom, but I had to write this down to escape it.  Usually I put these things into my daily journal which I have kept for more than 50 years, but increasingly I have come to talk to this blog in the same way.

Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com

Pandemic journal July 26th, 2020 -FEAR - REVOLUTION - and a RESOLUTION

In my world, I have learned so much from movies and often movies have sparked an interest that burned throughout my life.  It may have been Dr. Zhivago, Pasternak's great novel turned into a masterpiece of a movie, that inspired me to learn about Revolutions.  Also, it taught me to fear them.

The aftermath of the heady days of the Russian Revolution the time after  poets, writers, thinkers and hopefuls all over the world celebrated like people in love, was horrible.  Not only the immediate aftermath but all the succeeding decades were torturous, and not at all what people hoped for and expected.  It took a lot of people a long time to realize how totally the Communist Revolution had not only failed but had become a murder machine of the magnitude of a weapon of mass destruction.  After the Civil War between the Marxists, Leninists, Bolsheviks, when the Stalinists took over, people were killed by the millions in purposeful famines and forced evictions.  An entire generation of artists, writers, thinkers, and scientists and other professionals, were imprisoned, tortured and killed and freedom in most forms was trampled to dust.

The times after a revolution are always so hard, all the rebuilding of destroyed buildings and infrastructure, the collapse of food economies, the collapse of law and order.  Not much has been written about the aftermath of the war on the ordinary people; where is the great novel about the ordinary people trying to re-establish the world on their farms and in their burned out shops?

Watching a new Russian tv series on Netflix about the Russian Revolution, I suddenly was able to empathize with the feelings of fear and disapproval of so many people in regard to the massive protests for BLACK LIVES MATTER. I think they are afraid all that collapse will fall on us next.  

The missing piece is that there are so many opportunities for reform through negotiation, compromise and redress, that it doesn't have to go that way.  The blessed placid beauty of peace and order can be maintained by a governing body that is ready to listen and understand the needs of the people, the proletariat.  It takes wisdom and nobility and empathy for that to happen, but it is the way to peace and transformation with destruction and death.  

Our leadership now is so blockheaded and inept, that all it can see is DOMINATION.  What is needed is COOPERATION.  When I was a teacher I took part in a program called Peer Mediation, and it so interested me in the visible efficacy of its principles and practices that I began to do a little study in CONFLICT RESOLUTION.  I was convinced then and I remain convinced that this could be the most important course any individual could take and if enough people learned it, we could make a better world

Pandemia - Toxic Masculinity and Trump

It is Saturday, July 25th, and on my morning dog walk, I was pondering 'Toxic Masculinity" and our current president, which isn't to say he is the only president that I would say had been infected by some aspect of T.M.

Toxic masculinity as I define it would be an overt drive to dominate others by verbal abuse or physical force, combined with a devaluation of human traits considered 'female' such as sesitivity, empathy, compassion, hence the use of pejorative gender based terms such as 'pussy' to denote cowardice and weakness.  An added third part of my definition would be a celebration of men, male brotherhood, and the segregation of the sexes.

The denigration of women and female culture and characteristics, is  apparent throughout our culture.  As with the subjugation of other races, the subjugation women has always depended on economic dependence as well as uncontrolled pregnancy and motherhood.  
Throughout history, economic depravation has forced women into sexual subservience.  Starving, hopeless women, often with suffering children to care for, have been forced to allow the brutalization of their bodies for money to survive.  Likewise, women in abusive marital circumstances have often been forced to accept the violence in order to stay alive and to keep the children alive.

Each day, I await the arrival of the newly released book by Mary Trump, a doctor of psychiatry who has written about the poisonous family dynamics that have erupted in the disaster of Donald Trump.

Wikipedia defines toxic masculinity, which is a term that originated in the 'men's movement as:

The concept of toxic masculinity is used in academic and media discussions of masculinity to refer to certain cultural norms that are associated with harm to society and to men themselves. Traditional stereotypes of men as socially dominant, along with related traits such as misogyny and homophobia, can be considered "toxic" due in part to their promotion of violence, including sexual assault and domestic violence. The socialization of boys in patriarchal societies often normalizes violence, such as in the saying "boys will be boys" with regard to bullying and aggression.

Self-reliance and emotional repression are correlated with increased psychological problems in men such as depression, increased stress, and substance abuse. Toxic masculine traits are characteristic of the unspoken code of behavior among men in American prisons, where they exist in part as a response to the harsh conditions of prison life.

Other traditionally masculine traits such as devotion to work, pride in excelling at sports, and providing for one's family, are not considered to be "toxic". The concept was originally used by authors associated with the mythopoetic men's movement such as Shepherd Bliss to contrast stereotypical notions of masculinity with a "real" or "deep" masculinity that they say men have lost touch with in modern society.

I am familiar enough with toxic masculinity in my own life which, no doubt, has caused me to have a lifelong interest in gender politics.  
My father was a complex and confusing person.  His own father was somewhat of an absentee dad being a Merchant Marine who was mostly away at sea until he was killed in Baltimore in an alleged hit and run incident.  The death of his father plunged my dad into a mostly male world at a vulnerable age.  After his father died, my grandmother and her mother kept the family together with work as seamstresses and money from boarding roomers.  When his grandmother suffered a catastrophic stroke, living at the seashore with her son, my grandmother was forced to leave her youngest, Joe (my father) on his own at age 16 in order to care for  her totally paralyzed mother.  I don't know why she didn't take my father with her, maybe it was too much to take care of a 16 year old boy and a paralyzed mother, while trying to work and make enough money to stay alive, but at any rate, my father ended up joining the Civilian Conservation Corps and working on Skyline Drive.

That work experience set him up for his next, predictable, career choice, to follow in his father's footsteps and join the Merchant Marines. Both of these experiences put my father squarely into gender serrated circumstances for the next 10 years of his life since the Merchant Marines led into the United State Navy in time for World War II.

When my father came out of this period of his life into marriage and fatherhood and a job in the civilian sector, he was still in a gender segregated career in Ironwork and Structural Steel.  A young man surrounded by hardened older men on whom he must depend for his safety and survival under the most dangerous of circumstances, will learn and adapt to their cultural expectations.  My father became a hard-working, hard-drinking 'man's man.' 
He was complex however, because he was also affectionate, devoted to family, I would even go so far as to say enamored of family life.  He reveled in it.  His fatherhood began with me, his first born daughter, when he and my mother were only in their twenties.  

My father was never abusive towards my mother and I think it was because of his relationship with his mother, but he was abusive towards his first two children, me and my brother Joe, and particularly abusive towards my brother, a small, pale, sensitive boy who my father seemed to feel he had to "toughen up" in order for my brother to survive in the man's world.  When I say 'abusive' I mean he hit us and he beat us with a belt, not frequently, but often enough to terrorize us.  My father was in many ways like the fairy and folk tale characters I read about.  He was the giant ogre at the top of the bean stalk that Jack climbs, and he was the sad beast in Beauty and the Beast.  

One of the movies that I felt reflected his personality changes when he got drunk was Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde.  My brother wasn't the only one who got a view of my father's outlook on what you need to survive.  Once after a particularly angry quarrel in the kitchen of our row home in Phila., dressed in a little white petticoat, I stomped my foot and declared I was going to run away.  I headed upstairs to pack a little suitcase and my father said "Don't bother.  Nothing belongs to you.  I worked for it, paid for it, and it all belongs to me but you can keep your petticoat."  I never forgot that lesson and it was a base for the many additional lessons I learned about independence and money.  I always worked and I always paid my own way.  I never wanted to be vulnerable to any man.

But it happened anyone when I got married to a man who was drafter and I became an army wife living in a foreign country.  My husband's mood swings weren't caused by alcohol but by mental illness.  He was later diagnosed with bi-polar disorder.

Throughout my marriage, I was 'groomed' to perceive myself as lesser, as less intelligent, less competent, less capable, inferior.  These lessons were subtle and often disguised as affection as in his nicknames for me which were like the names you give a dog "Sport" and "Ace."  Having learned to live with my father's personality changes when he got drunk, I soon adapted to my husband's personality changes when he became enraged.  Again, I protected myself as well as I could by placating, avoiding, ignoring and after a dozen years, escaping.

Both in childhood and later life, I did meet men who were gentle and kind, non-threatening and reliable in the sense that their personalities stayed stable.  My godfather was one.  He was the most sensitive, kind, attentive man I ever met.  He had no hidden agenda.  I never had to fear him or be wary with him.  My maternal grandfather was similar.  He was kind, patient, paid attention to me, a child, never threatened or frightened me.  Both of these men had also been in the military during war, my grandfather in WWI and my godfather in WWII, but somehow they had evaded the indoctrination into the kind of masculine behavior I later came to call 'Toxic."

They never used genderized terms to insult people such as "sissy" or "pussy" and neither of them drank to intoxication.  My godfather worked in an ice cream factory and my grandfather was a postal carrier in Philadelphia.  Frankly I don't believe I ever heard either of them raise their voices.  They could be shelter in the storm, though neither would ever intervene when my father was on a rampage, no one did.  No one protected us, not my mother nor any other relative ever said that beating us was wrong.  In our South Philadelphia working class culture, it was a norm, so was weekend drunkenness and so was physical violence both in the family and in the community, in public and in private.

This seeping poison of toxic masculinity has been bubbling up again as a reaction to the rise of feminism and gender equality.  I feel such empathy for the fear that African Americans must overcome in the face of the proven danger of racism, because I have lived with the fear of sudden unbounded violence all my life.  It wasn't the police who harassed or beat me, it was closer to home and more complicated because my father was also devoted, loyal, and supportive in surprising ways.  When the last of us was born; there are five of us, we could all say with certainty that our father and mother loved us totally and would do anything for us.  We didn't suffer what children of absentee fathers suffered.  My father was a good provider; my mother didn't want to work and she didn't have to, although she WORKED, in fact, about 15 hours a day cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, sewing, raising children, making a beautiful home for my father to come back to.  And he appreciated it!  He always told my mother what a wonderful meal she had provided, and they were affectionate and playful with one another.  She always reminded us if we dared to complain, "You father works his fingers to the bone to provide everything for us.  Be grateful!"

From the interviews I have heard with Mary Trump so far, it appears the patriarch, Fred Trump, was an intimidating, abusive, and cruel man who destabilized his eldest, sensitive son, to such an extent that he was dead at 41 from alcoholism.  I have seen this father to son emotional abuse at close hand, the father is always more competent, the son is always incompetent, father holds all the cards.  Father sets the standards to which the son must conform, regardless of his own traits or desires.

My favorite educational philosopher, Gardner, said "Don't ask how smart a child is, ask how is that child smart."  

No one was asking any such thing of Trump's sons.  They had to follow the path to get the money and any variation to the plan brought painful repercussions.  Frightened children, will, of course, lie and dissemble to save themselves from pain and punishment, so did enslaved people, so do women.  Donald Trump's constant shifting of responsibility and blame is to save himself from the humiliation he always feels coming.  

Does it make any difference to know these things about him?  I think we should all be more aware of psychology as well as the way it informs and propagates feelings and attitudes in our society. We need to think about the things we say,  the words we use and their impact on impressionable children.  We need to protect vulnerable boys from bullies in the playground and in the gym, and the kitchen.  Our culture has to shift and we need to open the windows and doors and allow the sunshine in to dispel the long built up mustiness of restrictive and punishing racial and gender behaviors.

Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
ps.  When I bought my house, myself, with my own money, my father said he had never been more proud of me.  He bought me a sander, a skill saw and an electric drill/screwdriver.  He also helped me finish the attic over a long grueling hot summer.  He taught me how to drive a car, and when I didn't have a car of my own, he drove me to all the places I needed to go for documents to buy my house.  My mother gave me her car!  Today would have been my mother's birthday.  I am the age she was when she died.  My father lived on 14 years after my mother died, but the light had gone out of his life.  My brother went to live with him.

Weekend Fun for July 24th weekend.

This just arrived by e-mail - "the Craft Co-Op is still having Christmas in July until July 26th!! Get a jump on your Christmas shopping...lots of amazing Christmas goodies here!  Our summer hours are Wednesday - Sun 10-4.

Also, the Rancocas Woods Craft and Antique Show will be held this Saturday, July 25th 10-4.

The last 2 shows have been awesome, great vendors, food, entertainment, great shops and food establishments! Show starts at 10am and ends at 4pm!  Hope to see you then!!"

I would like to add that if you decide to go, please wear your mask and keep social distance.  New Jersey has stabilized in regard to the corona virus, let's keep it that way!

Happy Trails, 

Jo Ann

Latin American History - very short, very brief

Apologies right out front:  This brief summary is ONLY my understanding of what I have seen and read from the Simon Bolivar 60 episode series, the documentary on Mexico's history I wanted last night, and various other informal and short sources.

This is meant only as backdrop for the reading and reviewing of the novels I mentioned previously by famous Latin American authors.

As I see it, England, France, Spain (and less importantly for my purposes - Belgium, Holland and Portugal) great empires of the 17th and 18th centuries, began initiating trade with the indigenous people of the Americans in the 1600's. - Spain and France via the Caribbean and then South America, France also in Canada (the fur trade) and Britain in what is now US.  
IN THE BEGINNING
1.My impression is that Spain wasn't initially about colonizing, mostly they went to the Carribbean and South America to extort gold and silver from the indigenous people through hostage taking and conquest.  At the same time, they brought diseases from Europe to which the indigenous population had no immunity and hence wiped them out in untold numbers.  
2.Second phase, the Spanish invaders realized there were crops to be made profitable and they established plantations and turned the peasants into forced labor and also imported vast numbers of African people into slavery on the plantations.
Primogeniture:  Since only the eldest son could inherit according the long tradition in Europe, second sons often were forced to go into the military or the church.  Here was a whole new avenue for these second and third sons - they could run the hugely profitable plantations - sugar, coffee, cocoa.  
Along with the Spanish aristocrats running plantations, Spain sent the church to convert the survivors of the epidemic of European diseases, to Catholicism.  And along with the church came the traders and bureaucrats to control the import and export of these new plantations and the colonies developing around them  Interesting note:  Because the church was so prevalent and powerful, the church records became the ONLY records of births, deaths, marriages, and were vitally important in social organizing.
IN THE MIDDLE 
Eventually, even beaten down people reach a point where they can no long go on with the existing system and so the slaves, tired of murder, rape, exploitation and discrimination while doing all the hard work, rebelled.  Let me interject here that we rarely learn about the very many slave rebellions that were occurring in the Caribbean and South American, or for that matter in our own South in America.  There were many!
The overtaxed, exploited and restricted village peasants (made up of indigenous people and Spanish who fell down the financial ladder, as well as small merchants and artisans) joined with the slaves under the leadership of Simon Bolivar.  His personal charisma, gifts of rhetoric, and personal beliefs were enough to pull all these angry factions together to form an army with the purpose of 1.Kicking the Spanish out of South America, 2.gaining control of the markets, trade, and the bureaucracy, 3.bringing a more equitable system to serve the largest number of people, a kind of Socialist system, 3.Uniting the different colonies into one South America.
THE END
Against all odds and anyone's predictions, Simon Bolivar and the peoples' army succeeded through super human effort and infinite dedication to the cause, to drive out the Spanish rulers.  Soon, Columbia, Venezuela, Bolivia (named for Bolivar), Peru, all the coastal colonial port city colonies, were cleared of Spanish forces.
But new destructive forces came into play:  Greedy merchants saw this as an opportunity to take over with them at the top and continue squeezing the population to afford their wealth accumulating efforts.  They took over the old bureaucracy and used it to defraud people of inheritance, to steal property from widows and elderly vulnerable people, and to tax again the peasants and the poor to support the separate units of military that were developing under individual war lords.  
In the end, the states were never brought together, and instead became autonomous countries, each with its own economic and political system, which is the state of these countries today.  The war between rapacious capitalist business practices and the need to provide for the needs of society at large are still at war.  And you can see the results of this continuing struggle in what has happened in Venezuela today.

Indeed this is very instructive to understand what is going on with most of the countries that were colonies and that took back their land and expelled the colonial overlords.  A very similar pattern emerged in Mexico (Benito Juarez the emancipator) with a succession of profit motivated leaders followed by leaders who promised social reforms and a socialist system to serve the needs of the people.  These two forces seem to alternate back and forth.  Much the same has happened in Cuba.  

Needless to say, we could examine this pattern in Africa as with the Algerian take back from France, but I don't want to get off topic.

So, all this constant flux and disorder made opportunities for ambitious criminals such as the drug cartels which came in and, in some cases, took over entire countries such as Columbia.  Drug trafficking, building on those ancient trade routes, has become the new national economy of Columbia and is swiftly trying to take over other countries as well.  Now drug lords force peasants to grow the crops they need for the drug trade, and they kidnap and enslave the youth of the peasants to work in their criminal gangs.
If the peasants/farmers resist, they kill them and destroy whole villages.  Hence our huge population of Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Colombians attempting to escape and come to Norte America.  
None of this in any way suggests that I have ideas about how this could be fixed.  I do not.  It takes a lot of money to support a Socialist system and people must be altruistic enough to be willing to pay into taxes more than they may realize they are getting back.
If people don't want to pay into the pot, then big money cannot be amassed to support public needs such as highways, bridges, a defense army, police forces, a bureaucracy to keep the records and make strategy.  Any successful Socialist/Democracy requires a heavy tax load, which in successful S/D republics like Sweden, the people are willing to pay because they see that they reap the rewards of their sacrifice in a better society.  

Now you know roughly what I know and with that in mind, I begin my next phase of exploring Latin American literature.  I am going to read Sandra Cisneros THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET.

Happy Trails,
Jo Ann            wrightj45@yahoo.com

Archaeology Day at Whitall House, Red Bank Battlefield Coming Up!

James and Ann Whitall House, Red Bank Battlefield, National Park, NJ Archeology Day will be Sunday, August 16 from 12pm-4pm. We have a number of activities planned: SJ Archeology Society will provide displays of artifacts sourced from local sites. We will be busting out our brand new museum cases to display items from our museum. SJ Archeology will be offering a metal detecting demonstration. Archeologist Jesse Walker will be offering a talk on his work studying Native American sites along the Delaware River. Masks will be required and social distancing enforced!

Pandemia - If i had a book club.....Latin American authors

If I had a book club, it would be about big themes.  For example, my previous period of reading would have had the theme of Big Thinkers of the 21st Century - Amos Tversky, Danny Kahneman, and Yuval Harari.  The first book in that reading list would have been Michael Lewis's book THE UNDOING PROJECT, in which he breaks down and popularizes the economic/psychological theories on decision making.  As I have mentioned before the simplest and fastest way to explain their far more wide sweeping theories about decision making were that sometimes people (and in particular leaders) make decisions based on gut instinct which is always heavily  tilted from previous personal bias and emotional reaction rather than basing their decisions on information gathered and evaluated.

That is life changing idea if you give it a chance to expand in your mind and even apply it to your own decision making process.  The book shows the ways that the theory was applied to, for example, baseball player recruitment and evaluation, see the movie MONEYBALL.  

Yuval Harari wrote SAPIENS, a history of human kind which traces his perspective on the long march of civilization, and the social, economic, religious, environment, and epidemic events that helped shape it.  His book is a big investment in time and concentration but well worth it.  Harare has appeared on BBC World News as a commentator and my favorite quote from an interview with him was when a journalist asked him what his predictions are about the aftermath of the pandemic.  He said, and I paraphrase from memory, 'The one thing I can tell you is that it is unpredictable because everything will be changed, everything will be different and new.'

In regard to the Michael Lewis book and the decision making theory, the obvious poster child for our current uninformed leadership in the person of Donald Trump is a man who scorns the educated and the informed, feels threatened by facts and information, and wants his own emotional state to rule public perception and policy.  He wants what he wants regardless of what the data suggests, hence, he urged his followers in the Southern states to ignore the pandemic and open early without masks or protections.   They did, and now we reap the deadly harvest as our numbers of new cases in those states, particularly Florida,  rise to the highest level to date.

My next book club theme would be Latin American Authors beginning with Isabelle Allende.  I read her book ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA, and gained so much insight into the history and spread of slavery in the Caribbean, in particular Haiti/Dominica, and she takes the story to New Orleans, La., after the revolution that eventuated in those countries throwing off the French and Spanish colonial rule and becoming independent nations.  The story of the main character, an enslaved woman, is emblematic of the experience of so many women in that world, although, of course, the main character is privileged in ways that field slaves were certainly not, and therefore her story could go on longer.  Field slaves had something like a 6 year life span once they entered the fields.  Between the heat, the fevers, the  malnourishment and resulting weakness and susceptibity to deadly fevers, the violence and the wide variety of deadly snakes and insects, the plantation workers in the Caribbean had little chance for long life.

Isabelle Allende, although she lived in several countries, was a native of Chile, so if you wanted a broader, pan South America survey, you would want to add these authors:
Mario Vargas Llosa, from Peru, I read his book THE STORYTELLER
Jorge Luis Borgas - Argentina
Gabriel Marcia Marquez, (winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature) most famous book:  LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
Carmen Boullosa, Mexican, LEAVING TOBASCO, LA NAVE DE LOS LOCOS
Christina Peri Rossi-Uruguay, short stories, poems, 
Gabriel Mistral, (another Nobel Prize winner) SONETOS DE LA MUERTE
Sandra Cisneros, Mexican, THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET

Needless to say, when I looked up most famous Latin American authors the list was all male, and I had to go to a list of female Latin American authors to get the women authors listed above.  That is very odd because at least two of the women authors have received international acclaim and popularity, Cisners and Allende.

I have already read on Isabelle Allende book and one Mario Vargas Llosa novel, because I knew their names and ordered their books, but yesterday I ordered three or four more books, one of which just arrived, the famous LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA.  That is the book I will begin reading next. 

If it were my book club, I would ask each member to choose an author to read and then we could all trade books and at the next meeting people could compare their reactions.

Well I don't have a book club and I don't want to be in a book club of the type that are popular with my friends.  I don't want to waste time, at present, on 'only entertainment' reading, which is what is most popular so far in these clubs.  They read the best seller pop novels.  I need to read by a theme, like in education.  I want to learn.  That doesn't mean that I disparage entertainment reading in general.  I love various authors in the 'chick lit' level of writing and that would even make a great theme, however at present, I feel the need to learn and fill in the gaps in my personal education.  

By the way, I have three college degrees, the first was in Literature (no women authors included and no authors from South America, Mexico or Canada, our closest neighbors).  All my lit courses were still totally tethered to European literary history and tradition and classic American lit often ending in the 1800's, just like the history we took in high school which never seemed to get beyond the Civil War, if it reached that!

What kind of book club would you like?
wrightj45@yahoo.com

Happy Trails,
Jo Ann