Follow up on Beckham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Beckham - because of the World Cup 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Five Belated Gratitudes for Dad for Father's Day 2026

Five things I am grateful for from Dad

1. Dad taught me how to drive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com

Juneteenth to me a white woman 2026

Follow The Drinking Gourd:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails and Happy Juneteenth!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

White Guilt & Remembrance

June 17, 8:00 a.m.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Juneteenth!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Ballerina Farm - lots of thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy trails - wherever yours may take you!

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

wrightj45@yahoo.com

A 13 Year Old Girl Cut School one Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

a letter to a pen pal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wrightj45@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Returning - Lovers/Places

June 9th 2026 - Nostalgia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Woodbury Civil War Event on June 20, 2026

Woodbury Civil War Event on June 20

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

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

SEE MORE INFORMATION

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

Gloucester County Historical Society

Contact: (856) 848-8531

museum@researchgchsnj.org

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

Everything is Teaching Us

Monday, June 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything is Teaching us!

wrightj45@yahoo.com