Thinking about death this week

On July 17th/18th I had a severe cardac episode which subsided over the span of the night. On the Friday of the episode, I also lost my cat, Booty. In the following days, although weak, I began to recover from the effects of the heart episode, but Boothy never came home and I was terrified that he had gottten stuck in the shed of the neighbors who had gone on vacation. They were the last ones to see him alive on Saturday when they went away. I couldn't sleep at night thinking of him without food or water for days. My sister and I had both gone to the shed but by then he would have been dead. It was an awful week. On Thursday the 23rd, Booty's body was found in my recycle bin and on Sunday the 26th, my sister came over and buried him for me in the pet cemetary in the back yard.

She found 2 bottles when she dug his grave, one of them from 1891 and the other from 1927. They were easy to identify by their names and serial numbers. Sue dug the dirt out and I washed them. The 1927 bottle seemed to mean something to me.

Today, still struggling every day with sadness and crying periodically during each day, I read about Bettye Saar dying. She was one of my favorite artists. I saw a show of her work called Souvenirs at the Academy of Fine Arts (now closed after a hundred or more years). She would have been 100 on the 30th of July 2026 having been born on that date 1926.

The Body Keeps the Score was the title of a book I heard about during a book review interview on npr some years ago. The gist of it was that memories are not only in our brains but the emotions of the experience are also filed in our bodies. The 10 days from my cardiac episode have been riven with deep sadness and emotional pain. When I read about Bettye Saar, I remembered that July 25th was the anniversary of my mother's birthday. My mother would have been 100 in 2024 having been born July 25th in 1924. I think some of my misery was the memory of my mother hidden in my body and surfaced in the sorrow of the death of my animal companion and the painful episode with my heart.

My sister was with me today and did a lot of work for me. She is a light in the dark coal mine of my current existence. Her energy and her vitality give me stength and the work she does gives my life order. She is the gift my mother gave me.

That's all I had to say about all of that. Hopefully as time goes on, I will continue to recover and reach the calm surface of my life again.

Safe seas fellow voyagers

wrightj45@yahoo.com

I Remember - an instant unexpected prompt

This morning, when I was driving my sister to the bus, she was telling me about the young women she is working with this week at theh Convention Center. In her job she gets moved around as needed from buffet to coffee concession and other stations. At the coffee concession, the young women were talking about how much they love their boyfriends and how good their boyfriends smell. My sister was laughing about it. We both were, being oldies - she is 61, and I am 80.

As often happens in my mostly quiet life, I was thinking about that after I drove home and it reminded me of a smell. I was born in 1945, and this instant momentary memory must be from those first five years when my father was a ironworker and we lived on Warnock Street in South Philadelphia. Dad came home from work one day and through the open door came a rush of cold winter air and he brought with him a cloud of industrial smells - motor oil, metal, flannel and beer, mixed in with the winter smells of the industrial area where we lived. Just south of our neighborhood was Publicker's where they made whiskey and you could smell the mash, in odorous wafts.

I guess it is part of the territory of OLD that these memories from the far distant past flash into your mind. I feel a desire to record them for some reason, mostly I guess because they are GONE things - ghosts of a vanished world.

Our coal bin in the basement on Warnock Street, a dark black dusted enclosure into which periodically a metal shute was inserted through a small front window and a coal truck dumped a clattering cascade of black chuncks of rock. From that small room of rocks, my father would shovel coal into a scuttle and then into the furnace that heated our house.

It doesn't seem to me that I lived that long ago and yet these memories seem as old as though they were stories like Little House on the Prairie, or the Waltons.

While we are in the basement with the coal bin, let's revisit my mother's washer which was a large round white enamel tub with an agitator. The clothes went in, the soap, the water and the agitator beat the dirt out of them. They they were drained and rinsed in another tub, a square metal one; then put through the ringer. Yes, that is the origin of that old expression which you don't actually hear often anymore, "Put through the ringer." My mother fed the clothes into two rollers over yet another large tub and they squeezed the water out. Next the clothes went into a large pan of starch water, got rung out again and then hung out on the line in the backyard to dry. And speaking of smells, the fragrance of the fresh laundry after it was unpegged and put into the laundry basket and brought into the house, the fragrance of fresh air and cleanliness is unforgettable. My mother had a large machine that ironed which she called the mangle. It was two large cloth covered rollers, heated, into which she fed sheets and pillow cases and some of our larger items of clothing. Other, smaller items, had to be ironed on the ironing board - which is a thing you don't see much anymore either because modern synthetic fabrics are wrinkle free. Our old one was wooden.

There was a lot of labor in laundry in my mother's day. There was a lot of labor in EVERYTHING in my mother's day. Her cooking involved her seated at the table peeling and dicing fresh vegetables, shelling peas and preparing various kinds of meats. She took fish from a wooden box and soaked it overnight in waater to get the salt out and made cod fish cakes. She cooked large chunks of meat, then boned them and saved the left overs to put through a hand grinder that clamped onto the edge of the sink drain. Into the funnel at the top went the meat scraps and out the front came long noodles of meat to be formed into chicken or ham croquets or meatballs or hamburgers. Rarely did mom use canned products, and I HATED them. How revolting those canned green beans were - like the corpses of green beans. And most of all I hated canned salmon, a big dinner table quarrel because apparently it was expwnsive and considered a bit of a treat to the depression era folks like my parents, but unutterably disgusting to me with the thin translucent bones still enlmeshed in the pink flesh. The vegetables, by the way, came via the huckster, who drove his horse drawn wagon down the alley behind our brick row homes, calling out to the housewives, who would come and squeeze and smell the produce, make their choices and he would put them in the hanging rocking scale and the money would be handed over.

Also down that alley came the milkman to deliver our glass bottles of milk with the cardboard lids that you could peel back to lick the cream off the top of the milk. The milk went into the ice box, yes, a cabinet into which went a large block of ice which also came to us via a truck that came down the alley. The back doors of the truck were opened and a man bearing huge tongs would wrestle out the block of ice and carry it in and slide it into the ice box. As the ice melted, my mother would have to take out the pan of melt water and empty it into the sink.

Even simple meals like breakfast involved a lot of labor. My mother made oatmeal and cream of rice or cream of wheat for us in a saucepan with boiling milk. Those pots and pans! Those iron kettles and iron skillets, so heavy and so hard to clean.

Childcare was an enormous labor. Diapers had to be rinsed of the fecal matter into the toilet then into the diaper pail. Then down through the laundry cycle of labor and out on the line. Thos diapers were stiff too. They had to be pinned on the baby, not an easy taask and a delicate and dangerous one. Someone could get a nasty stab in a thymb or finger or the baby could get a puncture when you were trying to jab that diaper pin through those cloth diapers. Glass bottles had to be sterilized in a big metal rack dropped into a huge cauldron of boiling water. Babies used a lot of diapers and bottles and bottle nipples in a day so this was an ongoing labor. And they had to be bathed and powdered and dressed and walked about outside for fresh air. My mother was the devoted and proper kind of mother. Babies went out with hats! No baby blinking against the beating sun in my mother's coach; her babies had beautiful sunbonnets, and handknitted and crocheted hats and mittens, sweaters and blankets. Mom didn't knit them all, all the women of her era knitted and crocheted and each baby was born into a women's party of handmade gifts, hand sewn blankets, quilts, sweaters anc booties.

It was a mother's pride to walk her well dressed baby in its pastel finery in a large, safe, roomy baby carriage with a convertible roof.

One thing our mother did have time for, however, was making things. A toy she made for me which I have since made, although not for any child, just to see if I remembered how, was the Quaker oatmeal box baby cradle, cut cardboard made the stand for the bottom; the oatmeal box was covered in fabric. Inside was a sewn little mattress with blanket and pillow. An inexpensive celluloid baby doll went inthe cradle.

All the women of my mother's era were skilled needleworkers and made knitted and crocheted items all the time. One favorite was 'doilies' which went on the backs and arms of chairs and sofa's or on tables . These followed intricate traditional patterns with names like "pineapple" and everyone had them. Also the more ambitious made crocheted table cloths. No women from that time still made lace but lace table cloths for the dining room table were imported from the old countries or inherited from ancestors who in our neighborhood were Italian or Irish. Every summer my Grandmother Lyons took down her Irish lace curtains and washed them by hand and strung them up to dry on needle encrusted wooden stretchers in the dining room. Those doilies they made were exquisite.

Needless to say with this round of endless tasks, a woman of my mother's era had little spare time to herself or to visit with friends. A lot of the visiting happened when walking the baby carriage, or hanging up the laundry, and often in the era before air conditioning, on hot summer nights when the neighbors put out their folding aluminum chairs and sat on the sidewalks, the porches, and the steps and drank highballs or beer and chatted while we kids roller skated on the asphalt street, mostly uncluttered by cars in those days when hardly anyone could afford a car. We played half ball, with a stick (probably left over from a broken broom) and made skooters from wooden crates, a 2 by 4 and old roller skates on the bottom. The front of the crates would be festooned with hammered on bottle caps, and if you were lucky, reflectors. A bar of wood (another cast off from a broken broom or mop) served as handle bars. Of course our fathers made these for us.

For some reason our cheap hollow pink rubber "nipple" balls were cut in half to play with. perhaps so they wouldn't go far when hit. The roller skates were metal wheels on a metal plate with leather straps to go around our shoes. We had skate keys which, if I remember correctly, were used to adjust the length of the metal plate under the shoes. The asphalt of the street was fairly smooth, again, because there were few cars yet, so the skating was pretty smooth. The other favorite pastime I remember was sailing paper boats folded from a newspaper down the gutters when it rained and the gutters became fast moving canals.

Of course my brother (who is a year and a half younger than I am) and I had store bought toys as well. I alsways had a doll in a carrying case with a set or two of clothes and accessories in a little drawer in the case. These were given to me by my Godfather Neal Schmidt, about whom I have often written. I still have one of those dolls from the Philadelphia Effanbee doll company, a 'walker' whose head would turn when you 'walked' her. I don't remember my brother's toys very much. Although the toy he had that was actually my father's toy, was the Christmas train set. It was my father's pride and joy. He built elaborate train platforms at Christmas with tunnels and bridges adn track switches. Those trains were I think Lionel. The whistle, and again, the smell of motor oil, the perfume of the Industrial age. Magical - the villages so different from our brick row house neighborhood - little paste board houses with bottle brush evergreen trees and the little molded metal people waiting at the train station seated on benches, or skiing down the hillsides, sledding, in their painted red sweaters and bright blue trousers.

There was a pond made from a mirror with ice skaters, and lamp posts, and snow on everything. What amazement and joy on Christmas morning when we awoke to see our parlour transformed into this little world of winter beauty, the platform two feet high and surrounded by brick paper. At the back corner was the Christmas tree purchased down 'the Neck' which is what they called Sonehouse Lane, a fascinating historical settlement of early German immigrants who drained the swampy Delaware estuary into canals and little truck farms. They raised pigs, chickens, cows and kept horses to pull the wagons of their produce through the allies. They were driven out by the developers who made the airport.

Happy trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Booty's Grave July 24th 2026

Yesterday, July 24th, my sister dug a grave for Booty in the backyard beneath a nice shady tree and near the graves of my other pet who died and weer buried here over the years: Whitey White, Cocoa, Honey, Little Yock, Dexter, Seamus and Padrai and Golly. There is a little memorial garden overgrown by Lilyof the Valley now. When my sister was digging, she came across two old bottles. She dug the dirt out of them and I soaked them and cleaned themwith an old toothbrush.

One bottle, the taller, thinner one with a slight green tinge is a Union Bottle Company, Ferry Ave., Camden NJ which operated from 1888 to 1891, so it is really old. The second one is Suburban Dairies, Oaklyn Avenue, Audubon, 1927 later merged with Abbotts Dairies in Philadelphia.

My grade school, D. N. Fel School on Oregaon Ave. took on us a field trip to Abbott's when I was a small child and I remember walking in the factory beside the conveyer belts with the metal racks full of clanking and clattering bottles being washed and sterlilized to be used again.

The finding of the bottles was a click that turned the dial of my mind away from the grief of losing my cat friend Booty, into the history channel. History somehow makes me aware of the present as infinitely precious and simultneiusly very fleeting and insignificant.

The bottles are standing in front of my Great grandmother's sewing machine from the same era.

Something to ponder = wrightj45@yahoo.com

A very sad post - Booty is dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wrightj45@yahoo.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Remembering those old time summer yummies - Ambrosia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Premonitions and strange encounters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wrightj45@yahoo.com

A Glorious afternoon with Art Journalist Tamarie Bitgood

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Kelce and Swift wedding - an option and on celebrity privacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Trails to you until we meet again!

wrightj34@yahoo.com

4th of July - a Music Post - Oh Susanna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

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

Learn to Draw!

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

Register for Summer Still Life

Register for Beauty of Summer

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

Thursday, July 9, 2026

2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. | Adults

Merchantville Public Library

Drawing for Grown-Ups: Celebrate the beauty of summer

Merchantville PUBLIC LIBRARY

130 South Centre Street

Merchantville Public Library

130 South Centre Street

Merchantville, NJ 08109

Contact Number (856) 665-3128

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

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

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

wrightk45@yahoo.com