Memorial Day World War 2 Memories - Part 2

My father, Joseph Robert Wright's best friend was George Neal Schmidt, known by everyone as Neal. He was my Godfather and he, too served in the US Navy in World War 2. He was a quiet man, dignified and calm. He was the most patient and peaceful man I ever knew aside from Grndpop Lyons. Many a Saturday afternoon my Godfather Neal Schmidt and I sat in the tv room of my family's house on Roland Avenue in Maple Shade, NJ, and watched the old black and white movies together, quietly and peacefully. When I was in my teens from the late l950's to the 1960's,He stayed with us for weekends for many years when we first moved to Maple Shade, but then my mother, for her own reasons decided she didn't want a permanent weekend house guest and she had my father disinvite him It broke my heart and it broke Neal's heart.

Uncle Neal was already broken hearted because his beloved fiance' had been killed in a catastrophic auto accident one week before their wedding. Neal never recovered and remained a sad bachelor for the rest of his life. He went to live with relatives of his deceased fiance' where he stayed until he died at St. Mary's Convalescent home.

Awhile before Neal died, my father had asked me and my sister Sue to find out where Neal was and visit him, which we did. He was so old and frail. He recognized me, however. We went to his Catholic funeral as well. One of the relatives gave me some of his paper memorabilia which I put into an album. He had a lot of funny WW 2 postcards and postcards of battleships and countries where he had been stationed.

I have one toy, a doll, left from my early childhood which makes her about 75 years old - she is a Betsy Walker from the Effanbee toy company. She was given to me by Uncle Neal Every Christmas he gave me a beautiful doll in a carrying case.

I wish I had kept up a closer relationship with him over the years. We young get so caught up in our own busy and dramatic lives it is hard to make those spider web lines back to the old even when we love them. I tried my best with my grandmothers, but I lost Uncle Neal.

I loved him and I hope wherever he is, he feels that love and knows that i remembered him on Memorial Day 2026.

Remembering and honoring the dead seems to be one of the better, kinder rituals that we human beings have carried in our long human history.

Since I believe in the Universal Consciousness, it may actually have some positive function, this act of love and remembrance.

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Memorial Day May 2026

This morning I spoke on the phone, to my brother Joe who lives in West Virginia. I had called to wish him a Happy Memorial Day Weekend. We were both celebrating in the same way, watching movies and documentaries about World War 2. We were raised on the history of World War 2 because our father was in the US Navy and our mother not only vounteered for the Red Cross but also was a Courier at the Philadelphia US Navy Yard.

His participation in the War inspired in my intelligent father a life-long interest. He read so many books and watched every movie and documentary there was. He owned dozens of video cassettes. Over the years, Dad and I watched a German movie version of Stalingrad, a Russian movie versian, and an American movie version. We both loved history; it was one of the things we had in common. Before he died, I had brought him a book about the Battle of Tassaferonga; he was there and witnessed it from his ship.

My mom kept a Strawbridge and Clothier box under her bed with old black and white photos of her and dad in Florida in the 1940's.

my father had been in the CCC when he was 16. His wudiwed mother had gone to Ocean City to nurse her mother who had suffered a catastrophic stroke and was paralyzed. Dad was left on his own with an older brother, Clyde and wife. Edna, the wife didn't like having my dad around, so he joined the CCC and was sent to Skyline Drive to work on the scenic highway. He fell in love with the woods.

That's another thing my father and I had in common, a love of nature and the woods.

Back to the 1940's - after the CCC, my father followed his father's footsteps and joined the Merchant Marines. The second World War broke out and he went from the Merchant Marines into the US Navy. He and my mother met at the Philadelphia navy yard and fell in love. While my father was stationed in Florida, they married and Mom went to live in Miami with dad until he was shipped out. She came home pregnant with me.

We have been the lucky ones - immensely, miraculously lucky because my father came home alive and uninjured.

My teenaged boyfriend, Mike, was drafted in 1965. We were overjoyed when he got orders for Germany instead of Vietnam. My brother, Joe had joined the Marines and had been sent to Vietnam. Thankfully, he too came home alive and uninjured. So so lucky, this family.

My Uncle Yock, Grandmom Mabil's brother served in WWI and WW@, having lied aobut his age for both. Too young for one and two old for the other. His destroyer was torpedoed and sank in the North Atlantic and my father's troop transport picked up the survivors, including my Uncle Yock who got to live to an old age. They all got to live to an old age, Dad, Uncle Clyde (Dad's bother who also served in the Navy), Great Uncle Yock, and even my mother's father Joseph Lyons, who served in World War 1 on the Mexican border! All of them got to be old men.

To honor the memory of the risk and the suffering and the service of men like them, I devoted my weekend to watching documentaries about the conflicts that tore the world apart in our history. My family actually had a Civil War ancestor too, Hiram McQuiston, who was at Gettysburg, and a Revolutionary veteran, {eter T. Cheeseman and his brother Richard, both of served and survived (both of them on my mother's ancestral side). All of them lived to have families and futures and to experience the great gift of old age.

What struck me this year, as no doubt it had other years, was how young all thoe boys were - whether Civil War or World War 2, they were so young; boys really. And they were thrown into the maw of death and forced to see and experience unimagineable horror.

Last night I watched a brilliant and stunning new 6 part documentary called: World War 2 From the Frontlines, a British documentary which first aired in December 2023. Modern film techniques like much improved colorising turned the documentary into a new and lving experience.

A sample of the traumatic horrors the young were forced to endure: A pilot who had been ordered to bomb Hamburg, Germany during the last year of the war. The generals and president and prime minister decided that bombing military targets wasn't having enough effect. After the city had been firebombed to demoralize the German civilian population which still supported Hitler's efforts, the pilot was ordered to go back and bomb a post office building in which thousands of survivors had sought refuge. "This isn't us," he complained, "This is what Nazi's do, not Americans." He was ordered to do it anyway, and he had to follow orders. All his life this weighed on his counscience. All these young young men forced to see and do such terrible things, but because they persevered and carried the burden, the World Was Saved Because I was born in 1945, the year the war ended, it was a very real and living memory to everyone around me for the next ten years. When our family got a television, we watched solemnly and reverently every episode of Victory at Sea. I still her the theme music

I think, now, that watching that, and so many sea battles that my father was in or around, reminded him every day of how lucky he was to have survived. And my father really was a grateful man. he really savored life and he rarely to never complained. Life was good - no - better than good - life was a miraculous gift. Both of my parents seemed to radiate that attitude. They celebrated life.

It is all so long ago now, and in so many ways forgotten. Once about fifteen years ago, I went to the largest WW2 re-enactment in the world, which is held at Reading, Pa. It was amazing, and it awakened so many of my own early memories. I was raised on all the old music of the 1940's, the Big Band era and it causes my heart to race even now. I think we children absorb a lot of the emotional climate of our parents especially in those early years when we are absorbing EVERYTHING. So I feel something that is a ghost of the feelings my parents had from that time, the danger, the fragility, the innate and indescribably ephemeral nature of life, and the miracle of it.

All this week, until Monday, in honor of the sacrifice and suffering of the people who endured those times, I will immerse myself and remember.

Happy Trails! Be grateful!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Great Documentary on General Grant - netflix

Last night, May 15th, I watched a brilliant documentary on GeneralUlysses S. Grant. If you don't know me well, you may not know that I am an avid learner and I LOVE history! Even though I have read a couple of dozen books on Civil War History, I learned so much from this documentary.

There are so many topics to touch on in relation to this documentary, but I will begin with CHARACTER:

These days of so many bad men in positions of power, it was a great relief to be reminded of good men. When I say bad men, I mean selfish and corrupt men who are greedy and put accumulation of wealth and power above service to the country and the American people. I mean the politiians in charge today.

Ths documentary set the record straight on one of the great men of our history, General Ulysses S. Grant. And it reminded me of one of the heroes of all time, President Abraham Lincoln. Grant was faced with every wave of poisonous obstacles imaginable with the hardest tasks a man can face. He was a brilliant tactician who was pushed into corners where he had no opportunity to use his talents and he was forced to serve under lesser men who couldn't see the big picture, or who were unable to act.

In the beginning of his career, Grant was stuck out on the prairie in a dead fort with nothing to do. He was away from his new wife who had given birth to his first child. He fell into melancholy and drinking. Almost faced with having to resign he cleaned up his act. The Civil War brought him into the Western front where he could see opportunities for success but he was held back by foot- drgging stick-in-the- mud superiors who put their own ego and pride ahead of success. General Halleck was one of those. Grant showed him areas of potential success and Halleck had no interest in doing anything. Lincoln struggled with this throughout the war, one lazy or incompetent general after another. Finally, when he saw Grant's successes, he knew he had found his general, the one who wouuld stay the course and fight.

Grant carried the reputation of drinking thorughout his career despite the fact that he never again fell into the bottle. If anything it was cigars that were his addiction and his downfall. He died of throat cancer afteer his terms as president and you have to suspect that the 20 cigars a day that he smoked caused that.

I really never understood the map of the battles of the Civil War until I saw this documentary. I knew individual famous battles but not why they were fought where they were fought until I saw the battle plans as set out in this doc. For one thing, I never understood the importance of the rivers before.

Something that occurred to me while watching this program was how the modern MAGA movement has its roots in the defeat of the Cnfederacy. It is the Southern States including Texas that are the most rabidly anti-federal government because the government defeated their confederacy and ended slavery and the freedom of white men to exploit the labor of enslaved people. In the MAGA movement especially as stated openly by traitors like Steve Bannon, the destruction of the federal government was one of the goals so that the corrupt and the greedy could be free once again to rape the environment and enrich themselves at the expense of the country and the America people. We defeated the Confederacy in the Civil War but the poisonous snake reared its head once again in the political present.They re-branded the issue as States rights when it was always about the exploitation of people of another color. It is no coincidence that so many Confederate flags flew alongside the upside down red white and blue American flag.

But what hurt my heart was that we have no Ulysses S. Grant to save us now, nor any Abraham Lincoln, no man whose good heart is devoted to the service of the country - only robber barons.

Well, not to despair, all is not lost. many times in all our wars things looked grim and a miracle came along. Anyhow it is good to know as much about history as possible, so much to learn about the pattern in human events: "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Winston Churchill. >p/> Happy Trails! If you wish to communicate please use my e-mail rather than 'comments' as comments is entirely polluted by spam.

wrightj45@yahoo.com

OK I will admit it, I am sad.

Monday, May 16th, 2026 Mo/> My topic today is being sad. I almost never admit that I feel sad. At the doctor's office we fill out this lomg chart on a clipboard about our food habits, our emotional state and I would NEVER say that I feel sad. it does ask if we (old people, patients) are depressed, and in fact, I am NOT depressed. But every day, sometimes more than once a day, I am sad and even cry. When I say 'cry' what I mean is a tide wells up of emotional ache that begins in my chest, around my heart, and surges up to my head and my eyes fill with tears and sometimes the tears spill out down my cheeks and I have to get a tissue to dry them. This is painful, not a good feeling. I think the old term 'heart sick' is an apt one because I think this melancholy is both inherited and part of my heart disease.

I have a variety of practices to combat this sadness each day, my morning latte' from Dunkin Donuts, and an activity, writing in this blog, distracting myelf with the e-mail news feed which often kicks up an idea that I follow and that leads me ut of the woods. Writing this blog is a major palliative.

Today my usual dog walking neighbor, John Krauss, was not available so I walked Uma down by the river at Proprietor's Park. I smelled the river on a little breeze and it brought back memories of Gloria Dei Old Swedes Church and my early childhood when we went to church there early on Sunday mornings and I smelled the River.

Trips into the past are often one of the prompts to my sadness because I am always saying goodbye to the world now, goodbye to my wonderful life. My heart is, in fact, sick. I have two kinds of heart disease and I am 80, so truly my days are numbered. Love prompts the sadness too because these are things I loved and because I am one of the fortunate ones in that I have loved myself and my life. So, I am NOT depressed, being sad is something different.

Mom was not sad, so I inherited this from my father. Dad was sad but not articulate. He never verbalized what was going on with him, except once when he said he couldn't do anything anymore. As always, I made my constant mistake of trying to 'fix' this, correct it, by telling him he could still sit on the porch and enjoy the view of the mountains and the peace and beauty of an afternoon. He just looked at me and the look represented that I didn't understand at all what he was feeling or trying to say. He was correct. I didn't validate his feelings, I wanted him to find a better way.

We talked about this in church on Sunday, trying to fix things rather than sitting quietly with them and validating the feelings.

My sorrow is a little different. Not having been that much of an action oriented person in the first place, I can cope with my loss of vitality and mobility. My sorrow comes from saying goodbye to so many things I have loved, like the river, like church on Sunday at Gloria Dei Old Swedes Church, Mom and Dad, the men I loved in my youth, about whom I had written yesterday. That no doubt promted a great tide of sorrow, thinking about those men I loved who are dead, like Rob Sweetgall. He was a good, genle and sweet man and he is gone, like my best childhood friend Chris Gilbreath (later Borjet). Like my grandmothers.

After the walk along the river today, I drove along the workers' Mill Houses built in 1840 to house the factory workers who labored daily in the nearby mill which was still standing in the 1980's when I went to work in Gloucester City at the library. I thought about the mill workers getting up and making breakfast and walkng down the road to another day in the factory. The old fashioned alley between the back yards reminded me of the alley behindmy Grandmom Lyon's house. Everything reminds me of the past.

I am not sad anymore, the walk and the coffee and the writing has switched my train onto another track and I am going to close now and have some breakfast.

My sorrow passes like a morning fog for which I am grateful. The porch also cheers me up and when I sat there for a few minutes after the walk and I looked at my trees and listened to the birds singing I felt FORTUNATE, which is another emotion I experience every day, gratitutde for my immense good fortune! I have been given such a wonderful life filled with treasure.

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Edward Payson Weston and How Ideas for blog posts happen

Edward Payson Weston (born March 1839, died May 1929) was an extraordinary man. He was an ultramarathoner - not the first, but the one who popularized the sport the most. His career took off when he lost a bet about the presidential election. He bet against Abraham Lincoln! The loser had to walk to Washington D. C. and attend the Inaugural Ball.

Weston challenged many other walkracers but his edge was endurance. He admitted later that he had been chewing coca leaves and that popularized the chewing of coca leaves - an early influencer!

Ironically, Weston was killed when he was struck by a New York City Taxicab.

Edward Payson Weston came into my knowledge when they held the Edward Payson Weston Six Day Race in Pennsauken on the Cooper River in 1980. It was organized by Ed Dodd a Collingswood resident and local school teacher.

At the time, I lived in a brick townhouse on the south side of the river with my then husband, Mike. He had suffered an infection of the heart and we had given up all smoking and taken to bicycling and jogging and walking. I walked the 4 miles around the river almost daily and so, I came across the race and I vounteered to be a lap counter. We lap counters sat at a table and as our 'walk/racer' came by, we noted the completed lap on a chart. My walk/racer was Rob Sweetgall, and he checked on me constantly to make sure I didn't miss a lap!

At the time, my marriage was on the rocks and we were separating. My ex-husband had been a heavy pot smoker and I think the marijuana had helped him keep a lid on his volcanic temper. When he got sick and stopped smoking, he began erupting! His rages were fierce and terrifying and generally caused by such things as automobile problems.

Only someone held in thrall to the unpredictable and violent temper of someone else can understand what it is like to live that way, or perhaps someone who lives in an earthquake zone or below a volcano. I have always been a fairly controlled and mild person by nature, even, I might say, on the timid side. His rages paralyzed me. To make a long sad story short, eventually one of them gave me the energy to walk away. I packed a backpack during exam time at Rutgers where I was getting my Bachelors in Art, and walked the miles to my parents' home in Maple Shade. My father found me on the porch in the morning and gave me a ride to Rutgers so I could finish my exam and get my degree. I already had a job at a library, so I had some small income.

After I left Mike, I began to date Rob. He lived in Newark, Delaware. We had gotten to know one another while I was his lap counter and I had found him very attractive. He was mild and kind and very good looking, tall with sandy blonde hair and peaceful blue eyes and a wide grin. He was the opposite of Mike and that had its appeal as well.

I moved to Philadelphia and Rob and I began to date in ernest, by which I mean he met my family and I went to Brooklyn to meet his mother, her four sisters, and Rob's cousins, also teachers. Rob was working on preparing for his big tour around the perimeter of the United States to kick off his new business venture and his passion - promoting cardiovascular fitness with walking. He gave lectures and demonstrations at schools, corporations, really any place that showed interest. He had lost all of his uncles to heart disease from sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy diet and he was a man on a mission. He was connected to the Univeersity of Delaware and a doctor, Dr. Nieves, who took measurements of various cardiovascular indicators and supported Rob's efforts. Rob was compiling a list of volunteers' homes that woud give him a bed on his tour from such groups as Rotary and Kiwanis, so we traveled to a lot of those groups for Rob to give his talk. He was good at it. People liked him.

Fortunately, at that time, the company that my ex-husband worked for opened a new branch in Colorado and he moved there, so both his move, and my new move to Philadelphia had removed a lot of the fear and stress in my life. It was a good time. Rob and I decided we would marry when he returned from his tour. I saw him off at the Zero Milestone marker in Washington D. C. on July 4th.

Each month, I took a plane to some destination along his tour route and we spent a day or two together. This kicked up a whole new anxiety in me which, no doubt had its orgin in something much deeper, but I began to fear flying. I started to feel a presentiment that I was going to die in an airplane crash. I didn't want to do it any more. Also, I began to see how my whole adult life I had been tugged around the goals and passions of a man, and not my own direction at all except of course, that I had chosen each man. I had gone to Philadelphia to make residency in Pa. so I could get into graduate school at Tyler and pursue my goals, a masters degree and then a phd. I loved college and was good at it.

A low tide of resentment was beginning to rise inside me. I wasn't aware of it yet. So, when I met Karl at the New Year's Eve party of an old college friend of mine, Roni Chernin Levy, I didn't realize how vulnerable I was. I was untying my connection to Rob. Karl's appeal was that he was an artist, the world that I wanted to move into and he too was kind, mild and attentive. I accepted his invitation to visit his studio and see his work. He was making large sculptures of fish from light wooden frames over which he stretched canvas upon which he painted. They were wonderful. I was entranced. I didn't want to fly around the country anymore. I fell in love with Karl. We began to date, and almost immediately, I became unexpectedly pregnant.

The rest is a different and enormous (for me) story so in short, I gave birth to my daughter and moved to New Jersey, and once again, stopped seeing a man who had re-directed my life, (whether on purpose or by accident.)

The Edward Payson Weston Six Day Race was held each year for a couple of decades and then fell out of fashion along with jogging and running, and indeed, fitness. The culture moved on to something else. I kept in touch with some of the racers, Wesley Emmons, Philadelphia jeweler, Sabin Snow, psychologist (I read a few years ago that Sabin had died), Ed Dodd, who got divorced and married one of his former high school students. He'd had such a kind and supportive wife during the Race, and several chidren. Parker Barnes, the winner of the first race and a computer programmer (like my ex-husband) married another computer programmer and as far as I know, still is alive in Pennsylvania somewhere. I don't know what happened to Don Choi.

The Old Six Day Race is coming back in April of 2027 according to a flyer on the internet. I think they may have held it in 2026 as well. In the 1980 race, Park Barner made 430 miles.

Periodically I look up people I once knew to see what happened to them now that we are all in our 80's. Park Barner is alive but his wife died. I remember her vividly because in that world of ultra-marathoners, she was an anomaly. She sat in a beach chair, stout when all the others were thin as racing greyhounds, and she SMOKED and drank canned soda! Everyone else was macrobiotic and no one smoked anything! Did it extend their lives? Hard to say. I would have to make a graph. My poor sweet Rob Sweetgall died of cancer in 2017 in his late 60's but he did lead a good life and he did good work for his fellow man and achieve his goals. The cousin of my ex-husband, Harry Berkowitz, another marathoner, also died. My ex-husband is still alive at 82 in Colorado. I don't know about Ed Dodd.

Googling up info on some of the old racers, I found this: "Two very influential ultrarunning pioneers, Ed Dodd, of Collingswood, New Jersey, and Don Choi of San Francisco, California, brought their race directing and running skills to the 24-hour arena in the 1970's. These two legendary runners developed a friendship during that year which would later result in the reestablishment of the modern-era multi-day races, including the renowned six-day race. Dodd and Choi can be considered the “fathers” of the modern multi-day ultras. This all came about as Dodd uncovered the history of 19th century Pedestrians, and they both gained experience running 100 miles in 1978, and put on ultramarathons."

And I found this:

"Park Barner of Pennsylvania was one of the greatest American ultrarunners of the 1970s. He was the first competitive American ultrarunner to become broadly known outside the ultrarunning community. He was shy, disarmingly humble and a man of few words. He avoided the spotlight, never was a self-promoter, and was known for his relentless metronome pace rather than speed.

Barner won, and he won often. At one time he held the world record for the 24-hour run and other ultra-distance American records. But he said that he didn’t really need trophies or wins to feel satisfied. To him, running was something he enjoyed doing. He said, “It makes me feel good. I sort of feel like a kid.”

Happy trails however long and whatever speed!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

True Romance

A Canadian pen pal and I were looking back on our historic romances. She had married a man and helped him build a boat that they used to sail to Hawaii! I had married a man who had been drafted and I went to live in Germany with him when he was posted at Wharton Barracks, Heilbronn. My first (and only) husband and I traveled around Europe for most of a year visiting about 38 countries in the VW van he had outfitted during his free hours in the army post wood shop. It was very comfortable. In the early mornings, he would reach out of the sleeping bag and turn on the little propane stove he had hooked up with the percolator all set up on top. The heating coffee pot would heat the camper and we would get out of our double bag and begin our day on the road. We were happy then, Mike and I, on the great adventure of our youth. I wrote a little book about it.

e Mike and I met when I was in high school, age 16. He had graduated and he was working in a pharmacy (where he was able to get condoms!) When he got drafted, we married. We came back to the US and during the 1970's traveled a lot in another camper he outfitted, driving back and forth across America and across Canada. I think his marijuana smoking helped to keep his temper in check but when he got sick and had to stop smoking, his rages got out of control and so did he. I left him in 1981. We had been together from 1961 to 1981. He moved to Colorado with the company where he worked as a computer programmer.

During the time that I lived in New Jersey, before I moved to Philadelphia, I had volunteered to be a lap counter in the Edward Payson Weston Six Day ultramarathon on Cooper River Park. A small group of elite ultra marathoners were running non-stop or as long as they could without stopping, and the one with the most miles won. I can only remember a few of the names, Wesley Emmons, a Philadelphia jeweler, since passed away, Don Choi, Sabin Snow, Rob Sweetgall (whom I later dated). I can't remember the name of the winner but I will look it up, something like Park Barnes or Barnes Parker. Anyhow, I was the lap counter for Rob and we hit it off. When the race was over and my marriage had ended, I moved to Philadelphia and helped Rob prepare for his around the country 10,000 mile ultra marathon to kick off his new business to promote walking/running as a cardiovascular fitness practice for corporations and schools. I designed his brochure and went with him on is lecture tour. We dated for about two years and planned to marry on his return. He owned a home in Newark, Delaware, but we mostly stayed in my apartment in Philadelphia. After he left on his tour, I flew to meet him once a month all over the country. While he was gone, after about seven months, I went to a New Year's Eve party given by an old college friend of mine about whom I wrote recently on this blog, Roni Chernin Levy. At the time, she was divorced also, and living in Germantown. At her party, I met and fell in love with an artist, Karl. He lived in a studio in South Philadelphia. Soon after our affair began, I found myself pregnant. My birth control failed; I was using a diaphragm as they wouldn't give me, a smoker, birth control pills. I had to tell Rob what had happened. I was afraid he would break down and fall out of his marathon, but he was a strong man and no quitter. He continued his marathon and later met and married a woman from the Rocky Mountains and they went on to have a happy marriage and write several books together.

Karl and I broke up before my daughter had her first birthday. He was doing renovations on a building owned by another artist and they fell in love. I moved to New Jersey and bought a house, and got a full time job teaching in a high school in order to provide a decent life for my daughter. I wanted a home with a back yard, a nice school, and I needed medical benefits as well as a liveable income. Before her third birthday, Karl and his now wife took me to court for visitation rights. It tore my heart out.

There was crushing heartbreak in between each of those paragraphs for all the people involved. My ex-husband and I truly did love one another. We grew up togetherk knew one another's parents. It wouldn't be too far a stretch to say I adored him. I thought he was wonderful until he became terrible. I lost a marriage, my faith in my main human being, a home, all my money, everything. I was too afraid of him to fight for half our assets, though my father thought it was cowardly of me. I had to pick up the pieces and start from scatch.

His heart was broken too, I know that, but he did marry again and they had a son. Eventually, they divorced as well and I am sure she went through the same misery I did.

Rob's heart was broken when I betrayed him. He came to visit when his tour was completed and when he saw my baby, he cried, no doubt at some level thinking that it could have been his baby had things been different. He went on to marry again as well. I am glad he found happiness.

They all married again, except me! I mothered instead. I worked full time Monday through Friday, all day Saturday at the University, three or four days after school in home tutoring programs and one or two nights a week in community education. I had no more time or energy left for anything but the house-work, yard maintenance, grocery shopping and child care. It was no sacrifice; I was happy and I didn't miss romance at all. My heart was broken and I was too traumatised in that area to be able to take another chance.

When my daughter grew up and left home, in my 50's, I dated, disappointingly. There were a couple of men I saw for more than a year, but I wouldn't have married either of them and they knew it. Those relationships faltered and petered out. One of them found a woman who would marry him, the other one died of lung cancer from his work as a dry waller.

So that is the cliff notes of my life in True Romance. I have now lived longer with my oldest cat than with any man. It is my cat at 17 years, my daughter at 18 years, and no man has ever lived in this house, my marriage lasted 13 years to separation, 15 years to divorce.

I don't have much to say about any of it. I DO NOT miss being married or being in a couple. There was a decade from age 55 to 65 when I might have felt a little of that, but it passed. I am glad that I experienced true love in a couple of its versions and I have no regrets. It all worked out fine.

Because of where i live, I often drive by the house where I lived when I was married, in Collingswood facing the Cooper River, where the Edward Payson Weston Six Day marathon was held. And I drive down a back road from Maple Shade through Pennsauken that i often drove on with my boyfriend in his TR3 sportscar. Mike was a car guy. Today I passed the garage that used to be a repair shop for imported European Sports cars and where he took some of his sports cars. When we met and dated when I was in high school, he drove a midnight blue convertible corvette which was the apple of his eye. One of our dates was to go to the Admiral Wilson Boulevard, which at the time, the 1960's boasted a long strip of car lots and was very popular.

In Germany, Mike drove a vintage Porsche which he had sent back to the US while we traveled in our VW Van. Do I miss him? A little and as soon as I do, I remember his rages and my fear, and his intimidation and his deceptions, and I don't miss him anymore. Really I don't miss any of them. If I search my heart, I find no fondness for Rob, though he did no harm to me, or for Lavinia's father who did a geat deal of harm to me. But I hold no resentment at this late stage either. I am 80 and Karl is 70. We are old people now. My ex-husband is 82! Some of the men I dated have died and I read their obituaries, like Rob Sweetgall - you should read his! It is very moving and impressive. He was a good man.

Happy Trails! whether on the road or thrugh life or the valley of love.

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Childrearing challenges

Due to Mother's Day among other things, I have been thinking a lot about the difficulties of childrearing. Two of my favorite commedians Mike Birgiblia and Tom Papa do funny bits about child rearing. Both have said that having babies holds women back. It is true. I was thinking about it just a few minutes ago because I had a cat on my arm (he is obsessed with embracing and sitting on my arm, my right arm, and a cat on my lap and the dog was lying on my feet. I wanted to get up and I wanted to type. It reminded me of my early days of motherhood when my child needed attention.

I am a solitry person by nature and a writer and painter by avocation, neither of which go very comfortably with the demandes of child rearing and 'demands' is the right word. I don't think anyone realizes until they are in it the relentlessness of the demands of small children. They want attention! They want food and comfort, play and diapers, bathroom, food, attention, they want all their needs met all the time. I remember how har it was to carve out a little time to read.

I didn't want my daughter's father to have weekends visittion but he took me to court and I couldn't fight it. For my child's sake, I thought she was too young - she was in the midst of toilet training and I didn't trust him to be careful enough of her safety - he didn't pay attention! There was an old Spencer Tracy movie where he is watching his daughter's baby (Elizabeth Taylor is is daughter) and he begins to watch a baseball game in the park. He leaves the baby in the coach in a shady shrub and goes over to have a better look. When e returns the baby is GONE! Eventually he finds the baby at the police station. Once when Karl was watching the baby at the Seaport in PHiladelphia, I went to the bathroom and came back to find him toaking to a buddy and Lavinia walking along the restrining wall beside the Delaware River. She was a toddler!

Nonetheless, for better or worse, I was forced to hadn her over to fate and in the end she survived, and after the first few months, I began to relax into my newfound vacation! I could read! I could sit in peace and quiet and think without constant demands. I could go off on foot or by car at will and drive around or go to a museum or a hike. It was wonderful.

When they are babies the demands are even more intense. I remember walking around my apartment at 7 pm with Lavinia in her fussy period shrieking in my ear. She was fed, she was burped, her diaper was changed and it was time to sleep but before she slept, most evenings through the mystry of baby processes, she had to go thorugh some kind of cranky period.

Relentless is the word I would use and Mike Birbiglia used that word too about his fatherhood experience with their new baby. The demands change over time and the spaces between demands may alter but the relentlessness remains until - as in my case - they leave home.

The blessing in all of this is the LOVE which is a love that is infinite and indescribable. It is an evoluti9onary, profoundly physical and emotional bond that is as old as mammalian life on the planet. The mystery of a person growing adn developing inside your body is too vast to comprehend - the creation of a new human being inside your own body! What a power. It is Godlike. But these are abstractions. The physical facts are that when a baby is born, you are enslaved to that baby's needs. It is hard.

I was blessed with patience and tolerance so I only had one or two ruptures in my equanimity. One was in West Virginia when Lavinia was in later toddler, perhaps 3 or so. She had still napped up to that period and I can tell you, sometimes I held on by a thread to that hour of two of peace when she napped. That one afternoon, though, in West Virginia, the day the napping ended, she was all wound up and didn't want to nap and I was making her stay in bed and trying to make her go to sleep, reading her a story. My mother said "Oh Jo Ann, let her go, she doesn't need her nap." And I yelled at my Mother "You don't understand, I need her to nap!" That said it all. I needed that hour in the day to drop my vigilance and let my attention rest. She didn't nap that day or any other. It was over.

I can remember, too, one night kneeling on the bathroom floor while she had her evening bath, thinking, when is she going to be able to shower! I was so tired, so tired. I was working full time and by evening, I was spent. My job took a lot of energy - teaching, and a lot of patience. At night I was exhausted but every night I had to make the bathk kneel on the floor, pick up the child, dress her in pajamas, read her a story, empty the bath, all before I could sit on the sofa for an hour before I had to go to bed.

It is odd how these drains and strains stand out so much now when I think on the past - where are the joys and delights? They were there, just like in love, but somehow we remember the break-ups.

My daughter was out on her own by 18, as was I in my youth. It broke my heart and took a year or two or more to get over but I did. And in the next few years, I got over more. And when she untied the strings one by one over the following years, it was painful, but as I realized and said to myself many times, "Her freedom is my freedom." And in time, I got my life back. I have had twenty years of retirement and those twenty years my child has been grown and on her own, so my retirment included from parenting. I all worked out. And her father's involvement and his wife's involvement, eventually also contributed to my return to freedom, like a whale released from Sea World, I was free in the ocean.

Happy Trails

As always - comments is spam polluted so if you want to rech me use my e-mail

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Donating my Library -Periods and Passions

May 12, 2026 - This Saturday, My great-=niece Alex and her husband, Rob, worked for me for 2 hour s@ $25 per hour each, taking down my Art books from a floor to ceiling high book shelf in the stairwell to my attic. Rob climbed up on the step ladder and took the books down, Alex catalogued them,and I dusted them and sorted them into keepers and donatables.

I am donating my Art Books to the South Jersey Artists Coalition for their just being created resource library. This gives me the push I needed to let go of books that I was no longer using. This bookcase is the final holdout of a huge lifelong collection. All my other collections have been donated to the Free Books Project in Camden City. Those books went into book Arks all over the City - 1,500 to be exact. Suburu Corporation sponsors this project and Tom Martin, who lives in Collingswood is the head of the project. I have been donating to his project for 5 years, thousands of books and so have my friends who have down sized and moved.

Each of my collection describes a period of my life. The first collection to go were my health books,, books like "BLUE ZONES" and all my vegan and vegetarian cookbooks, my Heart books by Dr. Dean Ornish, yoga books, self-help psychology books. Next went my fiction - all of Klaus Ove Knarsgard's volumes "MY Struggle," All my fiction and memoir. After that went all the history: Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War 1 and World War 2. Then the New Jersey books - everything from Pine Barrens history books to Cape May beach books. After that, the poetry collection from the attic.

Previously I had donated all my Women's History books to The Alice Paul Foundation Library in Mt. Laurel, NJ.

I still have clusters of books here and there - my coffee table books about Ireland, Scotland and I still have 3 shelves of Art Books to go through.

The Art Books went last because I can still see pictures although I can't read text anymore. As I have mentioned before, I am losing my vision. I have Fuch's Dystrophy and although that seems cruel that an artist and writer should be stripped of her vision, it is a small blow compared to the loss of memory and thinking skills some of my brilliant friends have suffered.

The Librarian, Tom Clapham, a brilliant man with a remarkable memory who could answer just about any question I might ask over the 40 or more years of our friendship, was the first of my friends to lose his memory. His dementia showed up first as his inability to find words. He would be stuck mid sentence in a kind of trance. Eventually he couldn't hold a conversation at all. Also, he lost things everywhere and he was a fussy sort of person who had to carry a great many items wherever he went, umbrella, vinyl stachel, sunglasses, hat. Whenever I drove him somewhere, as he had never had a driver's license or car, he inevitably phoned me when I got home from dropping him off, to tell me he had left his glasses in my car, or his satchel, or his hat, and I would have to drive back to return them. On top of that, he wouldn't come out when I got there. I would phone to tell him I had returned, and beep the horn, and wait. He kept everyone waiting. He seemed to slow down to mostly stopped. He would ask me not to beep because it disturbed his neighbors. He left few options for resolving things and had no concept of inconveniencing others. He is gone now, deep into the 'Land of the Lost' with family members somewhere in Maryland. He can't speak at all now. He would be early 80's this summer if he is still living.

Each of those collections of books represented a period of my life when I had a passionate interest, a deep hunger for information. I would devour the books I bought on whatever that subject would be. My mind drank the information which opened up worlds to me.

That experience was the one I had experienced from my early chidhood. When I read my mind absorbed and created the worlds I read about inside my head. I went into them. That is why books like Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, were so intoxicating to me because her descriptions of the natural world of Prince Edward Island, the groves of wild flowers "The White Way" and the fragrances and blossoms bloomed in my mind. That whole world came alive inside my mind in a more intimate way than movies did.

I almost forgot my mystery collection. When my father died in 2011, I read every single book by Agatha Christie, P. D. James and Dorothy Sayers. I read Patricia Highsmith too, but didn't care for her as much - too much malice. I think the reason I needed and dove so deeply into mysteries during that period of suffering which was compounded by having lost my mother first and then my father - both parents, was that seemingly unsolvable tragedies could be solved by the right detective. An old lady who listened carefully and observed closely like Miss Marple, could put together the puzzle pieces and see the whole picture. Because I was gifted with the ability to really become part of what I was reading, books saved me from emotional pain.

Books were my sanctuary, my escape, my guide through the treacherous jungle of living, my adventure, my road maps, and my companions. I can remember the books I read at various times of travel such as reading Pioneer Women in an airport while I waited for my flight to meet my fiance' - an ultra-marathoner named Rob Sweetgall. I was taking a plane out west while the women in the book were traveling by covered wagon. I remember reading about the women who lost their minds in the solitude of the prairies with the solitude and the endless moaning of the wind as the only sound. So many had been eduated women from small towns where a woman could have expected to be surrounded by loving family while she endured the danger and excruciating pain of childbirth. She could celebrate the holidays and important occasions of life with family and friends and church congregations in the small, safe, cosy town where she grew up, but instead she was alone in a rough cabin with no neighbors, no town, no doctor, no midwife, nothing but flat prairie and endless moaning wind while her husband who had lured her into this hell was off hunting or getting lumber for weeks on end.

Epic Voyages: In the airport on the way to Germany after I married to my high school sweetheart who had been drafted and sent to Europe, I was reading the Voyage of Charles Darwin on the Beagle. This was not my first trip on the high seas. Starting in early childhood with Treasure Island, and later Gordon McKay in a tv show called Adventures in Paradise, plus the epic Hawaii by James Michener, I had been traveling to the South Seas for some time. My favorite book on that subject was the one I borrowed from the Maple Shade Library in 1957, after my family had moved there from Philadelphia. It was my first Library card and I was intoxicated by the miracle of a place where I could borrow any book I wanted from rooms filled with books, and the book I chose was The trilogy that included Mutiny on the Bounty, and Men Against the Sea, Pitcairn Island, authors Charles Nordhoff and James Hall. I remember reaching up and picking out the royal blue cloth covered hard bound book with the title embossed in neat faded gold letters. The last book I read about Pitcairn Island, about five years ago in 2020 was a journalist's follow-up, an expose' about generations of child sexual exploitation that had become part of the culture of the descendants of the original mutineers. First the mutineers kidnapped Tahitians to enslave the men and breed with the women. They killed the men. Then the nine mutineers fell to fighting amongst themselves and killed one another until only one man was left The current inhabitants of Pitcairn Island are the people who descended from the Tahitian women and the murdered mutineers, and the men descended from this family tree took to sexually exploiting the female children in each generation. The generations of women who grew up in this culture just accepted it as their fate although some tried to send their children away to boarding schools to get away. Eventually the men were convicted and imprisoned on their own island in a prison they built.

For some years now, as my vision became more and more impaired, I took to listening to audio books which I love. I am trying to remember the last book I actually read. The final collection was books by journalists who explored a variety of subjects such as "Salt" and "Cod" and the hisory of how these products and industries evolved. Maybe "Nomadland" was the last non-fiction book I read. I think the last fiction was the series called "Three Pines." That was a murder mystery series set in Canada.

Fortunately, although that great passion has been taken from me, my ability to paint has improved, or at least I think it has - who knows if what I see is what others see. Anyhow I won a prize in March of this year for 15 miniatures I painted of women of exceptional contributions to the world. And I have had four portraits in two shows this Spring.

This brings us back to Art Books. I haven't come across my first Art books yet in the shelf clearing process. I bought three or four volumes from a set on famous artists when I was about 16 or in 1961. They were on a sale table in the entryway of a book store that was in the Cherry Hill Mall which was opened in 1961, the first climate controlled enclosed mall on the East Coast and the largest mall in America. The books were something like $4.95, affordable in a time when books were far more expensive. I bought Toulous lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, and Gauguin. I still have them and I will keep them along with some of my favorite women artists when I come across their books in the clearing out process..

It is inevitably a sad thing, this clearing out and one I have long rebelled against. The Swedish Death Clearing trend that was so popular in the past couple of decades, I found it particulary outrageous - to suggest I should clear myself out before I die so I don't leave any work for my descendants! Erase myself and my material culture record, how self-effacing. Why shouldn't my daughter do that for me? Perhaps it would help with the grief.

Well, time to get on with more than my blog post for today - so Happy Trails!

wrightj45Wyahoo.com

My Mother's Day - How Things Can Work Out

Families are such strange and interesting formations. I have friends who have regailed me with the stories of their irritations and inconveniences with their families and complaints about various family member's behaviors, decisions and choices, who then promptly forget and claim their families NEVER have strife or conflict. It becomes a kind of competition of "my family is more harmonious than yours."

Literature and magazine articles suggest that there are a lot of family conflicts and that it is common enough to be part and parcel of the experience of living.

For my Mother's Day, I had my great-niece Alex, and her husband Rob working on helping me take down my Art books from their dusty entombment in the attic stairwell and sort through the ones I mean to keep and the ones I can donate to the South Jersey Artists' Collective Library. I offered them $25 an hour each for 2 hours work. Rob took the books down, I dusted and sorted and Alex typed a list of the titles. 12:30 - 2:30 =$100

I had asked Alex's father, my nephew Joseph, if he wanted to do my front yard - mowing, raking, weed whacking for 2 hour=$100. First he said yes, then he dropped out. He had said he wanted to do yard work for extra money, but the truth is he is not healthy enough for that kind of work anymore. He has suffered from severe divericulosis, so bad that the doctors wanted to remove part of his colon, but he checked himself out of the hospital and he just lives with it. On top of that, he bought into the dark underbelly internet culture and bought "coloidal Silver" a snake oil supplement sold by the unscrupulous to the unwary. It poisoned his kidneys and his liver. He also drinks and smokes and is in his 50's. I fell sorry for him. It's ok that he didn't want to do it. It is hard work. I don't want to either.

I also offered the job to my other nephew, Archie who is always in need of money though gainfully employed as a Union electrician. He said yes and then he also dropped out, but he later changed his mind and came over. I bought a pizza for us.

Archie did a terrific job on the front yard - best job anyone has ever done yet, and he was worth every penny of the $100, plus, he had a chance to visit with his cousin Alex and to meet her husband, Rob.

In my sister's heavier drinking period she had gotten into a battle with our nephew Joseph, Alex's father and our brother Joe's son. Joseph, as I said was into the underbelly of the internet conspiracy nuts and Alex is an antivaccer. Her sister has autism and Alex works with autistic children for her career as an aid, so I suspect she has a deep need to believe autism is caused by something external that can be controlled and not be the real culprit, genetics. So they all argued vehemently.

In my sister's defense, Joseph, Alex and Rob swarmed into her house and showed very bad manners, gobbling up food without waiting until everyone was seated and had been served and leaving without offering to help or to show gratitude. And Sue was drunk and antagonistic and prone for a quarrel. So now none of them speak to one another.

Sue also doesn't speak to our brother Neal, in Philadelphia, because he got tired of her stories of the low life people she encountered on the bus and he blocked her phone calls. She was hurt "After all I have done for him, over and over, and all his crap I have listened to...." So they don't speak anymore either. None of us speak to our sister in West Virginia over her rancor at my father having left living rights to our brother Joe to his house. MaryAnn owns the house but Joe gets to live in it until he dies. She blames us all and her resentment was so volatile that every time I called her I had to listen to a semi-hysterical rant from the beginning to the end. I finally didn't want to hear it anymore and stopped calling. I still send cards which are not reciprocated.

But today, all these young people worked cooperatively and efficiently and got a lot of work done for me. I am particularly pleased with the yard work. It looks so nicde out there now. Archie worked really hard and did a really good job.

Also for my Mother's Day, I got a big box from Lavinia with a sweatshirt, an electric kettle, an assortment of hand creams. From Alex and Rob I got 6 cartons of books sorted and catalogued to donate to the SJAC. From Archie I got a beautifully cleaned up front yard. I wish I could say Uma was good. She was constantly underfoot and the biggest barking annoyance immaginable.

Meanwhile, I think my oldest cat and most loving and devoted Lucky, 17 years old is slowly falling asleep into death. He has slept nonstop for two days. I did get him to sip a small dish of water this morning, but he is just fading away. I try not to think about it because it makes my head and heart and my whole body hurt from the sadness.

Death is everywhere, the old man I used to see when I walked Uma along the railroad track, I called him Railroad Tom, died. I hadn't seen him for a long time so I asked the neighbors that I see. John told me our neighbor Helen Gasparon, another walker like John, told him Tom had gone into the Veterans Hospital last year and died. He was 94 or 92. Every day he walked up the railroad to the 7-11 to buy lottery tickets.

We have only gotten half way through my Art Library, less than half way, because we did the two highest shelves and have three middle shelves still to go. They will take longer because they are smaller books and some shelves may be two books deep.

It was too much stress for me today, and I feel uneasy and sad. Tomorrow I will meet Loren Dann, founder of the SJAC at 11:00 after Quaker Meeting at 10:00, to deliver the books for the library, then I will drive to Clarksboro to pick up Sue to go to brunch/lunch at Maritsa's with Archie and perhaps Bryson. After that, Sue and I are going to find CostCo in Cherry Hill and I am going to get a membership so that I can make an appointment to get tested for hearing aids there. It must be done. I can't ear any more. Everyone sounds as though they are mumbling. Fortunately I can hear the laptop and my phone audiobooks.

Mother's Day - I hardly know what to think about it. I did it; I got pregnant, by chance, carried to a live birth, raised a child to a healthy and successful adulthood, all the while, working full time and part-time and earning our keep and buying this little house. I cleaned the house and mowed the yard, and did without a car for many years. It was a long hard hike uphill in thin oxygen, but I did it. Somehow, I found the strength. When I think about that, what comes to me is that I really had no choice - I had to find a way to do it - find the strength to get through it. I don't have any feelings beyond that except a deep gratitude that my child was born healthy and whole and that she was a good child and an easy one, at least until adolescence, but that was near the end, so it didn't last that long - maybe only a third of the child rearing experience, from 15 to 18 when she left, the same age I was when I left home and like me, she never came back. She is, I suppose, a happy and resourceful adult living her own life.

Happy trails, long and winding though they may be and sometimes trails of tears,

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Well, sadly, I won't be going on this train ride but it is my plan to get the annual holiday schedule of this train and take the ride one of these days! I love trains! My family has taken all kinds of train rides like Strasbourg in Pa., and Jim Thorpe, also in Pa. and my father arranged train rides for us all over West Virginia. The last one we took as a family in West Virginia was the holiday train out of Petersburg which was also a short ride with a meal on board. It was a Thanksgiving/Harvest holiday train ride.

One of the things I love about the Agatha Christie detective series Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple which I watch on pbs, is that so m any are set on trains. Also, in my childhood, so many of the Thin Man movies were set on trains.

Mother's Day Express

May 10th | All Day

Woodstown Central Railroad

This Mother’s Day, bring Mom out for a fun old-fashioned train ride. This 18-mile roundtrip between South Woodstown and Mannington, will take passengers over Salem County’s first railroad line, dating back to 1863. Along the way, take in the lush forests and some of New Jersey’s most rural and beautiful farmland from our authentically restored 1930s train.

Mother's Day 2026

This is my Mother's Day Card to my Mother Mary Lavinia Wright, passed away to the Universal Consciusness in 2000 accompanied by the Leonid Showers, and to my Grandmothers Lavinia Lyons and Mabel Wright.

My mother, Mary, was beautiful, generous, kind and warm. She smelled like baking cookies and she wore 4711 Cologne. She was a vivid and vigorous person with many friends. My sister and I often reminisce about how much fun it was to stay home from school sick and listen to my Mom and her girlfriends from the new development cul de sac as they sat in their curlers and house dresses and smoked their Salems, ate Steve the Breadman's delivered donuts and drank coffee from the cheerfully burbling big silver percolator in the dining room of our house on Roland Avenue. My Mother painted ceramics on Main Street with her girlfriends and she made us elephants and pumpkins and Christmas trees that had little plastic birds that lit up from a bulb inside the tree. She was in the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion Women's Auxiliary, and she ran the fund raiser church suppers for St. John's Episcopal Church. My mother was a devout Episcopalian. She loved babies and had 5 of her own. She loved keeping house and made her curtains and drapes and upholstered her furniture. I especially thank my mother for all the books she bought me for holidays and all the magazines to which she subscribed and all they taught me about the world, photography, art, and writing.

Every day after school she was in the kitchen peeling carrots and potatoes and snapping beans and peas. In those days everything came as it was when it was grown. We often sat together and split pods to releaase the peas. As a special treat for my father, my mother would make rubarb pie in season. Awful gelatinous and fibrous stuff we thought, but my father loved it. My mother honored my father and put out a big meal on the Dining Room Table for him every night and reminded us of how hard he worked to provide for us. In return my father thanked my mother for the wonderful meal she made for us.

One year at Christmas my mother made a traditional plum pudding and set it ablaze! She made fish cakes from dried salted cod that came in wooden boxes, and she ground left over ham and made croquets. She was a hearty and enthusiatic cook. She made each child a favorite birthday cake. Mine was black walnut pound cake.

They had a good marriage, my parents. My mother was all forgiving and one of her sayings was "IF all were known, all would be forgiven." My father was amused by my mother and devoted to family living. They had both been orphaned and had Depression era poverty in their childhood. My mother had to quit high school to go to work to bring in money to help the family. She had been adopted by her aunt Lavinia along with her sister Sarah. Her other sister, Betty had been adopted by another family and the three sisters, to my knowledge, were never reunited. So much of my mother's early childhood is lost. Her Aunt Lavinia, whom she called Mom and we called Grandmom, was reticent to a notable degree and wouldn't tell me anything about my mother's biological mother or father. And if pressed she made up stories such as that they died in a car accident. They did not. Why Sarah's husband put their little girls in an orphanage is lost to time, but perhaps as a lone man, he just couldn't cope. We had no contact or information from his family. My Grandmother cut them off if they ever tried to visit the girls. His name was Levy Goldy and hers was, of course, Sarah Goldy.

Lavinia Lyons was always, in my memory a somewhat sad and dreamy woman. She spent all her time in the house cleaning and cooking. Her house was spotless. She had black flocked wallpaper with red satin roses on it in her Victorian parlour, and a Victorian sofa. There was a piano which Grandpop played, a club chair and a curio cabinet with some china in it. The chocolate pot from that cabinet is in the curio cabinet in my house, a house warming gift because I loved it.

Lavinia had also been orphaned in her childhood and she and her sister, Sarah had been raised by their Grandparents, the McQuistons. Lavinia and Sarah had been Garwoods. Their father William C. Garwood had been a drinker, allegedly, who had visited his grandaughters in the orphanage. My mother remembered him smelling of alcohol, with a large mustache and a bag of candy. I was told that Lavinia was heartbroken that the girls had to stay in the "Friendless Children's Home" in Camden, New Jersey, until she could marry and adopt them. She married Joseph Lyons, a gentle, soft spoken, kind and patient man, who had been in World War I on the Mexican border. He worked as a postman. They had an Irish setter named King! And they had a small garden where King and Grandpop took refuge when necessary from my Grandmom Lavinia who, apparently, was given to occasional short spurts of irritable temper. Also Grandpop chain smoked hand rolled cigarettes he kept in a cigar box and I think the smoke and the prized Irish lace curtains were a source of trouble. Those curtains had to be hand washed and stretched out on wooden frames lined with straight pins, to dry. The other bane of my gradmother's existence was the parade of black ants that periodically marched, single file into her back kitchen along a counter below a window. I remember her cursing them. She had a mouse who peeked out a hole in the cellar doorway, but they seemed to have a detente although I was warned to wash pots and pans before use just in case of mouse droppings. Grandmom Lavinia had one child who died, a Joanne, and three children who lived, Joseph, Susan, and Lavinia. I grew up with them. They are all dead now.

Two quick memories of Grandmom Lyons are of accompanying her into the back ally to buy produce from the huckster with his horse drawn wagon, who came from "Down the Neck" an ancient neighborhood of reclaimed swamp turned into small farms farther South of our neighborhood. Another memory is of Grandmom eating "Pigs feet" in a cube of jelly with Aunt Bee. Aunt Bee was from around the block, the Adams/Welsh part of the maternal scots/Irish ancestry branch pf the family and famous for their ancient and fairly threadbare parrot who could talk and often called "Peggy!" He also wolf whistled at young women walking along the sidewalk when he was on the porch. I was always warned not to put a finger in his cage because he was a biter.

Another slight memory is of a weather house that sat in the ceiling corner of my grandmother's porch, and when we sat on the porch, we could look to see if the man with the umbrella was out to show us rain or the milkmaid in her blue skirt to show fair weather. I have one of those of my own in my kitchen ceiling corner.

I want to thank this Grandmother especially for the books she gave me from her book case in the basement. There I received Tarzan, all of Dickens, all of Twain, the Outdoor Girls on a Hike and a selection of Great European authors such as Boccacio and deMauppasant.

Grandmom Mabel came from a German family, also from Philadelphia, and she and her mother were seamstresses and made a living from their sewing. During the Depression and preeeding and during World War !, they took in piece work and sewed uniforms for the Schuylkill Aresenal. My Grandmother Mabel made quilts; it wa her hobby and her art, and I suspect her meditation. She was a Catholic and she gave me her crucifix with its compartment behind the figure of Jesus for holy water and a candle. I gave this precious relic to my Cousin Patty who is Catholic and we both loved our Grandmother Mabel so deeply.

Mabel worked on the Boardwalk in Ocean City selling tickets to the Merry Go Round from a little sentry box. She lived at 6th and Asbury Avenue, renting a second floor apartment from her sister Emma who owened the building. She had moved there to take care of their mother, Catherine Sandman, who had suffered a catastophic stroke and was copetely paralyzed and bed ridden. For fourteen years my Grandmother took perfect care of her mother, kept her clean, smelling fresh, and dressed in lovingly knitted booties and embroidered satin bed jackets under a hand made colorful quilt. I was able to sit and visit with this GreatGrandmother in my early childhood. She had the best bedroom, in the front of the apartment facing the firehouse, from which, at the ringing of the bell in the tower, under which, a red roaring fire truck would come hurtling on its way to save a building on fire somewhere. We all rushed to the window to see the firetruck racing out onto the street!

I remember one breakfast when my grandmother let me go to the basement and fill the coal scuttle from the coal bin (which everyone had in those days of coal heat) and bring it up and use the little shovel to pour coal into the fiery mouth of the pot bellied stove that heated the kitchen. We sat at a little table nearby and I remember she had sectioned my grapefruit for me and gave me a grapefuit spoon to eat it. Also, I remember playing old maids card game with her and I remember her laughing. She found me amusing, but I can't remember why. She was a woman amused by life though it hadn't been easy on her. She had been widowed in her thirties with three sons to raise and her niece, the daughter of Emma, her sister. Emma's husband didn't like the lttle girl so Grandmom Mabel took her and raised her. Emma's married name was deFusco. After Great Grandmom died, Emma raised the rent and my Grandmther had to leave her little apartment. She moved to a couple of others before her sons bought her a house at 10th and Bay Avenue where she lived until her heart attack in her 80's. She tried living with her sons but there was a problem with the wives or the children and it never worked out. Then she had another heart attack and ended up in Evergreen Nursing home in Woodbury for 2 years until she died. Life is unfair; she who had lovingly cared for her mother for 14 years had to die alone among strangers; I visited her after work once or twice a week and read to her the updates on her soap operas from the newspaper. It still makes me cry.

I want to thank her for her cheer and her stoic way of facing up to everything. And I thank her for her gentleness and her delight in my company. I loved her quiet, orderly, tidy little house and the peace and quiet set an example for me. She was an independent woman who made her own way in the world and lived a small gracious life without being dependent on anyone, a free woman. She belonged to the Democratic Women's Club, the Village Movie Club, and the League of Women Voters.

The Grandmother I never met, Sarah, I send out my warm heart waves to her; she died so young, only 25, and left her three little girls. It must have been so hard for her. I have her photo and she looks so young and frail.

To all these women and the ones who came before them and all the hard times they faced and the good lives they made for themselves and their children, I remember you and honor you and thank you this year on mother's day and every year and every day!

Love, your descendant, a mother also wrightj45@yahoo.com

On getting your Writing Done

May 2, 2026 - I saw this in the Atlantic Daily on my e-mail feed and I thought it was important for you and for me about getting our writing done.

I have completed and self published three books, and have written a book or two that I simply spiral bound the manuscript. I like to write - NO - I Love to write. It just burbles out of me like a spring out of a mountain. So many people I have known over the years have told me that they feel they have a book in them or that they could be good writers but they simply don't write. Back in the 1970's I started writing journals and I have kept at it ever since. It made me fluent. This blog ha also been a way to practice this art that I love. Here is a good excerpt from the Atlantic article on how a great writer gets it done:

"If Isabel Allende’s office needs to be painted, it has to be done by January 8 or put on hold. Every year, that’s the day she starts writing.

Allende’s January 8 ritual is a form of what social scientists call a “commitment device”: a ­self‑imposed restriction of freedom in service of a larger goal.

The pattern goes back to January 8, 1981, when Allende began her first novel, The House of the Spir its. Ever since, she has cleared her calendar and started a new book on that date, assuming she had finished the previous one. The ritual has helped her publish a book about every 18 months for 43 years. Today, at age 83, Allende ­is the most translated female ­Spanish‑language author in the world, by far" …

So, set aside a time of the day, especially if you have a time of fairly idle moments, or a day of the week to do your writing! Mine is early around 10:00 a.m. Get your story told! Also, join a writing group for a little extra incentive. I belonged to one for 25 years and I loved it. I especially enjoyed hearing the short stories of others in the group, all of whom found ways to get their pieces printed in magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapaers!

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com