So much for the warm and fuzzy, now let me hop up on the soapbox!

I just finished watching a segment on what is happening in Egypt.  In this segment the petite little female reporter was complaining about how those rioters actually punched her photographer!  Hello!  Here we have people who are fighting for a cause that means their very life and this guy has the nerve to stick a camera in their face!  I would have done a lot worse than punch him!

I would like to know at what point freedom of the press ends and infringement on human rights begins?  Have you ever watched the news very carefully?  I realize this all seemed to start about the time we bombed Baghdad and we could set in the comfort of our homes and watch the war unfold.  I realize further that we need to know the conditions our servicemen are laboring under.  What happened to creative writing?  Why must we practice the  "picture is worth a thousand words" philosophy?

In the center of every picture is a human being.  The man with his leg blown off, the woman sobbing with her dead, bloody baby in her arms,  the bomb in the car, on and on and on we go.  This is sensationalism at it's very worst.  Every station tries to go one better than the one before it did.  Whoever shows the most blood on the 6 o'clock news wins the rating war.  I am sorry, I do not look at it anymore.

Reporters have their jobs and some of them I admire very much.  Right now we are in the middle of very frigid temperatures and I just seen a young lady explaining to me how dangerous the weather was.  I could have been a little more convinced had she actually dressed for the conditions and not had to be seen with her lovely hair whipping around her well manicured face.  Just me.

I was taught, and by a very able teacher she was, that I must make the reader see what I see.  I must get my thoughts into the readers head and make them feel what I felt.  The victim must remain faceless.  I am perhaps out of touch with the media reality of today, but out of touch I shall remain.  In all my writing you will find only the essence of pain, tragedy, or grief.  Does that make me a better reporter then the one who motions the cameraman forward to see the dying face of the rebel?  I sure like to think so.

And how do we go back to the old style of reporting?  We probably don't.  Our world has become a world where seeing is believing why bother visualizing when it is right there to look at, up close and personal.  I have found the off button on my set!

Have you ever been in a situation where you let your guard down because there was something more pressing?   Can you describe your pain you felt at the lowest moment of your life?  Or do you need someone to take a picture and show it to you as a bitter reminder?  I don't.  I can still feel the ache and raw grief in every fiber of my being.  Shall I describe it to you?

And tonight will mark a new era!

I have fully recovered from my little dating fiasco of last summer, so I am going to try this one again.  Not real sure of this guy's political affiliations, but I have pointed mine out to him.  I even printed my profile description and gave it to him to study.  He does not have a computer so he has not read my blog.  I do not know if that is good or bad.  I have taken him to Weaver's Guild where he was the only man in a room full of women and he seemed comfortable.  He has attended my church several times and fits in well in that area of my  life.

OK, I met him and his brother and his sister in law at the craft fair last November.  They do woodworking, so I know he is adept at something.  Then I found out he is a weaver, so I sold him a loom.  And some thread.  And loaned him some books.  And some shuttles.  He was out for coffee and pie once.  He has met Tim.  And sister Mary, who thinks he is a very handsome fella'.  But you know me,  "Beauty is skin deep, while ugly goes clear to the bone."

So, he has a tremendous sense of humor which is a definite plus in my world.  He knows where I do volunteer work and why and seems very compassionate in that area.  He even goes to the gym several times a week and works out, so he is into the fitness thing.  He has a dog just like Elvira only his is a full blooded Lahso and Elvira is part Shitzu. 

So, after 8 years of dinging around on my own, I may be on the verge of entering uncharted waters.  After 3 months of casual friendship I am going some where in the dark, so I almost have to call it a date.  I hope nothing changes, cause I been enjoying the friendship part.  I do know Kenny did not want me to spend my life alone, but he may not get his way on this one.  Time will tell.

By the way, just for future reference, his name is Ray.

The end of an era here in my corner of the world.

A moving trailer backed up to the house and with that simple move we end an era here.  Twenty-five years is a lot like a quarter of a century any way you cut it.  I remember when Jacque and Clifford moved in.  There was a ratty old double wide trailer on an acre of ground.  The huge shop building was the only solid thing on the property.  They had no kids at home, but his mom and dad lived over on the corner.  They came with 2 dogs and a parrot.  That soon changed.

Seems the property came with a miniature goat.  Well, that goat was pregnant.  Soon there were 2 goats, and the cat, Blueberry.  Then came 3 turkeys and a few more goats.  Then the turkeys hatched babies, and they bought more goats.  Well, then along came a grand son, born to the son who was in the service and stationed  in Okinawa.  Then the dogs got old and died and they got more dogs, and more cats.  Pretty soon it looked like Green Acres over there! 

Well, then they adopted the grandson.  We adopted our grandson.  They were the same age and learned to get into lots of things together.  I got lots of good pictures before we got them trained to keep their clothes on and only pee in the house.  Some day those pictures are going to come in handy!

They decided to put a new double wide on the property since the other one was falling down.  They bought a camper to live in while that was happening.  I did lots of cooking, the neighborly thing to do!  The new double wide on a foundation was a definite improvement! 

Time passed and things happened.  They buried his Mother and Father.  I buried lots of people, including my mother, sister and husband.  When I needed some thing that I was incapable of doing, I knew Clifford was there for me.  Anything from a mechanical problem to untangling the barbed wire in the high wheeler to wringing the neck of the goose who was having seizures! 

We grew apart, but not really.  They were always there.  They waved and I waved.  Occasionally I baked something and took it over.  It became a more taken for granted thing than an active friendship, but  a friendship none the less.  Then she lost her job and he lost his.  A sign of the times.  Then it seemed that a major move was the only answer.  She scored first in North Dakota, of all places!

And that is why yesterday when I went out to start the car very early and found the Uhaul backed up to the door, it hit me.  And there was Clifford.  We made small talk about the weather and how it might slow down the move, but not much.  Then there was nothing else to say.  So I just hugged him.  Another part of my life is over. 

The Challenger Space Shuttle has exploded.

Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the disaster aboard the Challenger.  What were you doing that day?  I remember very clearly, I was cleaning house.  Now I do not remember because I never clean house and this was special, but there are somethings you remember because something else happened to remind you.  On the day JFK was shot, I made cinnamon rolls and cleaned a goose.  So January 28, 1986, I was cleaning house.

Kenneth had left about 8:00 AM to go out to the Eden yard with his cutting torches intent on cutting a railroad tank car in half lengthwise so he could make it into a rock trailer for hauling.  Daughter Debbie had come from town to help me clean house, more for company than actual work.  We got our coffee and then she remarked that the Challenger with the teacher was being launched and she would like to watch that before we fired up the vacuum.  So we set down to watch.

The astronauts filed by and waved to us and I remember feeling a sort of pride that America could do this and school kids all over our nation were watching the teacher lift off and fly into space.  The rocket raising over the cape was a beautiful sight, but then something did not look right.  There was absolute silence on the television and in my front room.  Then Debbie said, "Is it supposed to do that?" and I replied,  "Nah, I don't think so."  It was a life time before the man (Was it Walter Cronkite?) on the telly noted that something appeared to have gone wrong.

Thirty minutes later Kenneth came in the back door.  Of course we were still watching the reruns over and over, hope against hope that we would catch a glimpse of the Challenger emerging in one piece on the other side of the smoke.  Never happened.  Kenneth never went back and cut that tank that day.  He thought that might have been an omen, so he stayed home.  Deb and I rather lost our zest for cleaning house that day, also.

America took a giant step backwards in the space program that day.  Two years would pass before we tried again.  We had been kicked in the pants by a leaky "o" ring.  Ever see one of those?  The ones we used on the truck was about the size of a dime and just a very thin piece of rubber, open in the middle.  Ours cost about 7 cents.  Probably that was the most inexpensive piece on that whole rocket and for want of that tiny item, seven lives were lost.  Seven bright eyed pioneers of the great beyond that we call "space".

Some where in the back of my tiny mind, I am remembering a quotation.  Help me out here if you remember it correctly.  "For want of a horse, the rider was lost.  For want of a rider the country was lost."  Now, I know that is not right.  It may actually be a poem.  Bet my Sammy can come up with it for momma!

But you get the idea.  Another one Momma used to say was, "A stitch in time saves nine."  It all boils down to the same thing.  Make sure when you do it, you do it well and it will hold up for you.  If you do not mend your clothes at the first sign of a tear, you will end up having to do a real repair job on it later.

So there you have it.  Just some short musings of where I was 25 years ago.  How time flies!

What contitutes friendship?

Isn't this picture pretty?  It was taken at Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  I was there with over 200 acquaintances.  Imagine not being able to say 200 of my friends.  I once told my mother that I had lots of friends.  My mother, a very wise woman,  told me "If you reach the end of your life and you can count your true friends on the fingers of one hand, consider yourself blessed."

Well, here I am with more road behind me than I see in front and those words echo in my mind.  Mother has been gone for too many years now and I find myself more often thinking like she talked.  So, I got to thinking about how many friends I have actually had and are they still around.  For the first eight years of school I had a very best friend.  Her name was Barbara and I spent one night a week at her house.  Never saw her after grade school.

High school is a blur.  Then I married and moved around a lot so friends were hard to come by.  After the divorce I moved back home to Hutch.  There I became best friends with a waitress named Vi.  She had a daughter the same age as my son.  That one stuck through thick and thin and still exists to this very day.  She is a better friend then I am.  She writes, I read.  She calls, I talk.  I moved to Colorado and she moved to Missouri.  We have both buried our husbands.  I got to go see that girl this spring!

The next lasting friend I made was Frank.  We were in business with him and I liked his honesty and all his family.  He is still in business and lives in this town and I have not seen him for several years, but I still count him as friend.  If I called he would be here in a flash and vice versa.

Then came Renate.  Renate listens when I talk and I listen to her.  She is bluntly honest with me when I am wrong.  She and I use each other as sounding boards. We both work with AIDS clients so we have that to commiserate over; that and attending funerals together.

Then along came Kay, who winters in Texas, but we keep in touch and have breakfast every Wednesday when she is here.  We have in depth conversations and do a lot of gossiping.

So you see there is four friends, each perched on a finger.  I only have room for one more!  You know, either my mother was wrong or I am blessed beyond measure because I have a lot of people that I consider very dear friends.  Back home is Evelyn and Kay, Karen, and my sisters.  Shirley in Kansas City.  Amy in Florida. My dear friend Jade.  And all my Internet friends and that is before I start naming the ones here in Pueblo.   I am not even going to go there because someone will get their feelings hurt.

I have friends who have become lovers and lovers who have become friends.  (I like the latter better.)  I am truly blessed in that I can walk into any place in this town and there is someone I know who is very happy to see me, so I am not alone long.  More often than not their name escapes me, but they don't seem to mind.  This impresses me.  Most people want their name remembered, but my friends do not care.  They love me for who I am, not if I remember their name.

I have few rules that my friends must adhere to and failure to do so gets you off my list of friends and you then become a "this is".  So watch out for that one.  If you are still with me here you are my friend, or my dear friend, or my very dear friend. 

The first rule of friendship is to always be honest.  I gave up lying because I could not keep my stories straight.  So honesty is paramount.  The truth is what it is and should never be altered.  I respect the truth.  Lie even once and we are done.  The omission of a relevant fact is also a lie or at least it is in my book.  You are my friend because I judged you by your words and actions from the first day I met you.  If you neglected to mention that you are a serial killer in your spare time, don't you think I would want to know that?

I am loyal to my friends and I expect loyalty in return.  If you have something bad to say to me, say it to me, not someone else.  We can work out our differences if we know what they are and we face them head on.  Love has to come naturally, but a friendship is worth working to save.

You must respect that I am a Bleeding Heart Liberal.  You do not have to like it when I work with the AIDS clients, or the battered women, or the illegal immigrants, or pile my car with recyclable crap, or stop and give that homeless woman the money in my pocket, or stand nose to nose with a homophobe in the middle of the library and we get thrown out.  You don't have to  like it but you do have to accept it and if my actions embarrass you are free to just walk away.  Just do not attempt stop me or try to correct me.  I am on a roll!  You are free to voice your opinions and I will respect them, but they are yours and part of your conservatism.  It is best we not discuss politics.  LOL

For the most part I try to adhere to the 10 Commandments and so do my friends.  It is nothing we think about, just sort of comes naturally.  So once more I have digressed from the point of this blog entry.  I came on here to decide who to put  on that last finger to fill out my friend list and discovered that I am going to need a lot more fingers!  I love every body and they love me.  It is called making the world go round.  I can not limit my friends, nor would my dear mother expect me to.  So I will just hang on to what I have when the road comes to an end, I will just look back and see who all is still there!

Do we ever forget? I mean completely?

Kansas is a very flat state as you enter from the West.  You can see for miles.  Even a Prairie Dog will catch your eye.  So sometimes the foot tends to get a tad bit heavy on the gas pedal.  I know it does for me, especially when I am driving West and headed for my home in Colorado.  I had spotted these two roadside markers on my way down, so I was watching on my way back. 

The stretch of road between Syracuse and Lakin is as straight as a laser beam.  There are a few rolling hills, but if you have ever driven Kansas, you know just how little those rolls are!  The distance is about 35 miles.  That is why I was a little surprised to spot these and the sad part is, they are just a few yards apart and they are very new.

I could have researched this and found out all the details of who, what, when, where and why, as good reporters do, but I did not.  By being on the side of a highway, they by virtue of the location become public.  The details matter, but are of little relevance in this piece.   They can only serve as a reminder and memorial to the  people who placed them there for that purpose. 

I must confess that as I passed the first one, the blue cross, my foot came off the gas just a little.  The second one, brought it up a little more and by that point I was probably obeying the speed limit.  

I know these little markers can be found all along every highway in this proud land.  As we speed past a little beacon flashes on and makes us aware that some one died on that precise spot.  This has been marked by friends or family of the deceased and thereby committed forever to memory.  Or so it seems.  But years will come and go and the memorials will become faded and then turn to dust.  They will be replaced by newer ones with a different name and date.  That is just the way it goes.

My brother Jake was an enigma.  He was my only brother and I loved him dearly.  After I married and left home we sort of drifted apart, but not really.  I knew he was there.  I knew if I needed him he would be where I was, somehow.  His name was Delbert Leroy, but we never called him that.  We called him Jake.  Mostly Shakey Jake.  He made people laugh, and everyone loved him.  He had a scar that ran  from the bottom of his eye, across his cheek and down and back up.  A horrible looking thing that came from a horse kicking him in the face, but nobody ever noticed it.  He was that kind of guy!

My brother was killed in 1964 at an intersection some where near Inman, Kansas, I think.  Or maybe it was McPherson.  I know he had just gotten off work and he and his friend, John Rogers were heading for home.  Probably they were in a hurry.  Jake had only recently discovered the Lord and I think he was hurrying home to go to church.  He was not driving, but that is not important.  What matters is that there on a very lonely stretch of road, my brother and his friend went through a stop sign and into the side of a loaded gravel truck.  Clearly they were at fault.

Efforts were made to save Jake and he did in fact live long enough for me to get home from Western Kansas.  He wrecked on my daughters first birthday which was also my 4th anniversary.  He died on Halloween. I never went to see that intersection.  I never went to see the pickup or the gravel truck.  The day we buried him the doctors amputated Johnny's leg.  Four days later we buried him.  That was a bad year.

I did not put up a cross, but I have one in my heart.  I thank God every day from October 31, 1964 to this very day that he found Jake before he became a statistic.  I need no marker and hardly ever visit his grave.  He lives in my heart today bigger and stronger than ever before.  I think of Johnny occasionally and am secure that all the markers in the world would not make a difference.  I think he and Jake were talking about how great life was when the conversation ended abruptly.  I do not think either of them seen it coming.

So, when I came to this particular place on Highway 50, I stopped.  I stood for a while and thought about Jake.  And I thought about Johnny.  I can still see Jake in my minds eye.  Johnny has fade, but Jake remains there still 29 years old and still with his lopsided smile.  He will never grow old.  He will never loose his boyish grin.  His eyes will forever twinkle and I will forever think of him along a lonely stretch of road, or up in the mountains, or down by the river, and I will pray for him every time I pray.  I will never cease to thank God for the chance to know this little fellow that slipped through my life and brought me so much joy!



Dedicated to my brother

Delbert Leroy Bartholomew

October 5, 1939-October 31,1964

Follow the yellow brick road................

Sunday is the day I took sister Mary to meet her girls who will take her to her home.After driving for about 3 hours we are now at the beginning of the Yellow Brick Road.  I have this particular picture in a lot of my albums.  I never fail to honk  when I pass it, but usually stop and take a picture with whoever is with me.  All the husbands are framed by this back drop except #1 and #2. Reason for that being I did not even know Colorado existed until the long, legged guitar picker told me it was here.  He tried to lure me, but I just laughed.

 And here we start the last leg of the trip.  Daughter said we would not miss the truck stop; we would see it!  She was right.  Had she said an ant hill, we would have seen that also!  LOL  I lived many years on this flat land.  Kenny used to call me a Flat Lander.  He was so cute.  No matter which way I point the camera it is pretty much the same view.

 You can drive really fast cause there is not a thing to slow you down.  The highway is as straight as a string and goes for miles without the scenery being broken by a house, field of cattle, damn near anything.  Got the cruise control on and just kicked back coasting.  Probably warbling along with Johnny or Charlie or one of my other boys.  The thrill of the  open road!

 Now, here is the favorite part of the drive, the Welcome to Colorado sign which you can not read because I was too far away and going way to fast to focus!  (Little side note here:  I drive a Ford Focus. Do that cause it gets phenomenal gas mileage.) But the sign is up there....trust me. (snicker)

Before I leave this country I do want to put in a plug for the fair state of Kansas.  I lived many years on these flat plains and there is a lot to be said for the view.  You can look in any direction and see for miles.  You know where the river runs, because there are trees there.  In the summer the wheat fields are spectacular.  Oh, and signs of spring on the way down!  The winter wheat is starting to turn the fields green.  I saw at least 5 separate fields with baby calves.

The sunrise is beautiful and lasts for about 45 minutes as does the sunset.  In the evening the shadows start growing very long and if you are a little kid, you know that it is time to head for home or the dark is going to catch you.  In Colorado, the sun just sort of pops up and then in the evening it falls behind the mountains like that ball at Times Square on New Years Eve.  Those are the two things I miss most about Kansas.  Those and the humidity and the black ice.  (Little sarcasm there.)

Oh, but here is the view I most wanted to see!  Coming up the highway headed West, I noticed the sun was starting to set behind the mountains.  Oh, it was spectacular!  Having been in Colorado for over thirty years, I have learned that this was not going to last long.  I stopped beside the road, pulled out my trusty camera and snapped this picture for posterity.  Thirty minutes later I pulled into my drive in total darkness.  I do not get to see many pretty sunsets out here, but I think this one was well worth the wait.

So here I am in my very quiet house.  Sister Mary is home in hers.  I know you girls are reading this, so I want you to know first of all that one of her pill containers (with 7 boxes) is here on the counter.  I have not been down to her room to do the final shake down, although the Daisy dog is waiting for her to come to bed.  There may be more down there. 

What else you need to know, is that we may not have done a lot while she was here, but what we did, we did well!  I enjoyed my visit with your mother, my sister, and we laughed about some of the things of which you know nothing!  We had a life before all you little kids cropped up and both of us still remember that time.  Some memories never fade.  So enjoy my sister while you can and remember,  we are all traveling the same road and headed the same place.  North, South, East or West.  I still think, Heaven is best.

Aunt Lou