All I see is a pink ball...

It is Christmas all over the world, and contrary to popular belief it is Christmas at my house.  I do not have a tree and all the trappings.  There is no Christmas music wafting from the stereo.  And last night I missed the service at church for the first time in many, many years.  But it is still Christmas morning here.

Yesterday I went to a friends house for lunch.  I dined with Ross Barnhart and his brothers and most of their wives.  His cousin was also there.  It was lovely and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.  Today I am staying home.  I have some things I want to do today, but right now I am thinking back to Strong Street.

I know we lived there for several years, but I am not sure how long.  My favorite Christmas is the year I received a pink ball for Christmas from Santa Clause.  Santa always left our gifts on our chairs at the table.  That year I received a coloring book, a box of 8 Crayola's, 2 chocolate candies an orange and a pink ball.  It was about the size of the orange and it was the most wonderful ball in the world!  When I dropped the ball it bounced very high.  I threw it against the house and it bounced back.  It was so wonderful, but of course , that did not last.  It was just a matter of time before the wonderful pink ball picked up a sticker and no longer bounced.  The last time I recall seeing it was deflated and living in a mud hole.  Soon the coloring book was all colored, the Crayon's broken and missing from the box.

The last Christmas I recall was the last one I want to remember.  Jake told me Santa was not real and he knew that for a fact because Momma was going to let him play Santa and give out the presents that year.  I did not believe him, so I asked him what I was going to get and he told me.

"It is a tin doll house with a mother, father, brother, sister and a dog. A black dog." And that was what I got.  Jake had assembled it by pushing the metal tabs through the slots and folding them down to hold them in place.  And sure enough, there was a pink mother and father, a boy and a girl, and a little dog.  It had a couch and chair, a table and 4 chairs, and a tub and stool and sink in the bathroom.  The kitchen had a sink, refrigerator and a stove.  Jake told me he would get me more stuff someday.  But it never happened.

Some how the wonderfulness of the doll house was over shadowed by the sadness the Santa was not real.  All those years, it had been my momma cleaning other peoples houses and saving money a little at a time to surprise me.  It made me sad to think of her doing without so I could have something I really wanted.  I came to hate that gift more every day.  Momma never knew, but I did.

I hated the poverty that was our life.  I hated that my father did not ever touch me or carry me like he did Mary, Donna and Dorothy.  I told myself that he probably did, when I was little, but I do not remember that.  He spent a lot of time drinking when I was growing up and I attribute it to that.  Sure doesn't help these many years later.

So today, I am staying home, alone.  I am alone because I want to be, not because I have no one.  I have 6 children who have mates and children and some of those children have children which means I am a great grandmother.  I have nieces and nephews.  I have very good friends.  I just want to be alone, so I will.

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and pray that you all enjoy life to the fullest.  I know I am going to do just that!

Peace!

It is legal here in Colorado, so.....

Yesterday my middle daughter arrived here from Kansas.  This is a piece of information that seems trivial, but marked a big day in my life.  Oh, she has been here before and I am always happy to see her, as I am all my offspring.  But yesterday was special in more ways than one.  I had lunch with Michael McQuire and Teresa Cordova from church.  Michael and Jimmy, his partner, gave me a homemade fruit cake with lots of frosting and pistachios, which I love.  Thank you boys for a special gift.  Then I hurried home as I had a plan for the afternoon.  First I called to see where Dona was in her journey, and then I planned her surprise!

As you know, Colorado is home of the free and the brave, as is every state in our union.  It is also legal for marijuana!  Now, I have never tried marijuana as a recreational drug, but I do make a pain cream out of the leftovers furnished to me by a dear friend in Canon City.  Some how he extracts the hallucinogenic properties and he is left with something that looks like a bunch of dried up leaves pressed into a block.  I then take that, cook it and turn it into a pain cream that will put your sciatic into a deep sleep almost instantly.  Very good stuff.  It contains none of the hallucinagenic  of marijuana and I have many people who swear by it, me included!  But that is beside the point.

I know my friend, Shirley,  used "gummies" to help her sleep, so I know pot has properties that are beneficial.  I have heard of marijuana brownies and how the high is different so I have been researching that aspect.  YouTube is full of information, so Saturday I made "cannabutter."  (I should interject here that a friend of mine had provided me with a big bag of weed a month or so ago.  His instructions to me were to turn it into something that could then be turned into cash.  I told him I could not use it in my pain cream so we agreed that edibles was the way to go.)  Thus began my venture into the world of marijuana edibles!

First another friend showed me how to remove the "buds", grind them into something I forget the name of and then take the "trash" that was left and use it for my pain cream.  Every part of the plant is used for something.  So I put the pain cream stuff aside and proceeded with baking with the "canna butter" when I got home from church.  First I made chocolate cookies.  Then I made chocolate cake bars.  I left the bars in the oven a little too long so they came out harder then I would have liked.  I will do those different next time.

So the unsuspecting daughter was met at the door with a cookie.  At 4:20 (which in itself is symbolic) she ate one half of a 2 inch cookie.  The following is the observation of subject:

1.  It tasted like "weed", but that is not a bad thing because it IS weed.
2.  At 4:50, she felt giggly.
3.  At 5:00 she was "stoned".  It was a very good "stoned", whatever that meant!
4.  She remained in the euphoric condition of "mellow" until she returned to her normal state at 7:20.

Now it should be noted, that during that time frame, she and I visited in our usual way.  So, I think I can safely say that this experiment was a success!  I think my cookies will be useful.  I do need to work on the preparation of the product, but that will come with time.

So all you people out there who think I am just your usual run of the mill grandma, please keep in mind that I still am.  I approve of marijuana for its medicinal properties, but I do not use it.  If you want to use it, I am here to help you enjoy it in a safe way and in the comfort of your own home.  I am not quite ready to take this to market, but I can see how that can happen.  It may be that this is as far as I go with it, but who knows.

In the meantime, I will put my baked goods in the freezer and when the time is right, I will proceed.

Or not.

Apparently I am pretty stupid.

Apparently I do not know the law.  See, I always thought that if someone was "delivered a summons to appear in court" that it meant they had to show up when called.  I further believed that if I were in that position, I would be required to tell the truth.  Now I never did claim to be the smartest bulb in the box, but some things are drilled into my head and have not left, lo, these many years.

I was raised that my country was a country of morals and scruples.  A country of immigrants.  A land of opportunity where I could be anything I wanted to be.  A free education.  I can recall the voice on the radio many years ago that declared.  "The war is over!  We have conquered the enemy."  It meant little to me than because my world was Nickerson, Kansas.  The only enemies I knew about were the cougars that screamed down on the river and the Gypsy's who camped outside of town to steal children.

Washington, D.C. was many miles away.  After Roosevelt had his "fireside chats," Harry Truman was President.  He was a "home grown boy."  I think his wife tried to be a singer, but failed.  Or so I remember it.

The point is this:  From Roosevelt until now, I remember all the Presidents.  I always respected the President because that is how I was raised.  I also respected the minister at church and the principal of the school.  Public figures were to be respected.  They were honest and open.  They loved their wives and respected them, or so it seemed.    There was no scandal in our little town, or at least none that touched my life. (I did hear once that the dentist's wife had too much to drink and drover her car into a ditch.  He later divorced her and married his nurse, but even that could have been heresay in my little mind."

The point is this, I was raised in a different world.  We respected our elders.  We respected our leaders.  We stood up when the flag was presented and we placed our right hand over our heart as a sign of respect.  We never questioned it.  We just did it.  It was the right thing to do.  The days of sand and shovels are behind me now!

I have never voted a straight ticket in my life.  The first election I voted in was for John Kennedy.  I voted for Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.  The rest were Republican votes.  Well, not Donald Trump. I figured Hillary was better qualified, not that I liked her personally, but I decided early on that if Trump would not produce his income tax returns, he was not honest.  Seems I nailed that one.

Now, I know I am going to piss off a lot of my Republican friends, but I wonder if they are really thinking straight?  The man has been in office for 3 years now and has yet to produce a tax return.  He will not even stand up and defend himself in an impeachment hearing.  He has ordered his minons not to appear.  The world laughs at us!  Our environment is going to shit!  Every day that I turn on the news I am amazed at what he has pulled over night.  I do not feel safe in my country and I am not proud of what we have become.

What bothers me most, is what this administration has done to our country.  His son, daughter and son-in-law hold positions of power in government business both here and abroad.  Immigrants are dying on our southern border.  There is no regard for life.  No respect for women.  No respect for minorities.  Russia is our friend while the Indigenous citizens have been shoved onto land that is polluted by the Keystone Pipeline.  Our schools are funded by our teachers!

I could go on and on, but it is pointless.  If you are my friend and you think I am radical and nuts, count me out of your circle.  I like to think that my true friends will see a little bit of wisdom in what I am saying.  But if you are content to set in your warm houses and cuss the homeless, count me out.  If you can look at our migrant population with disgust, cross me off you mailing list.  If you can look at Mitch McConnell and smile,  delete my phone number.

Our country is in the shitter and we all know it.  If you think I am right, let me know, but if you think I am a lunatic, it has been enlightening knowing you.  Enjoy your selfish bigotted life.

Peace and prosperity to my loving friends.

In a perfect world.

I have a little grandson who is going to be 4 in February.  In a perfect world he would be my great grandson, but as you all know, this is not a perfect world.  He is very smart, or at least I think so.  My mind does not recall how old my oldest child was when I was divorced and began supporting myself by working 2 and 3 jobs.  The point here is that I never kept the baby books up to date.  I do not remember when any of them started walking, nor what their first words were.  I do not recall when they started stringing words into sentences, nor when they picked up a pencil and wrote.  In a perfect world, I would have done that, but in the reality that was my life, a roof over our heads and food in our tummies far outweighed the baby books.  We all survived.

I had 5 children,  8 grand children, and 11great grand children.  I now have 6 children, 7 grand children and 10 great grand children.  There have been no deaths, just a reshuffling of status.  Kenneth and I adopted one of the grand children, which makes him a child now instead of a grand child.  This also makes his son a grand child instead of a great grand child.  And that , my friends is how I now (at 78 years of age)  have a 3 year old grand son.  And this also brings me to the point of this story.

For privacy sake, I shall call him Little Boy.  Little Boy goes to pre school and is very smart.  My children went to Grandma Bensing who was paid to keep them alive for however many hours I was at work.  Little Boy is 3 1/2 years old and knows his alphabet, his numbers and speaks in sentences.  He spends 2 days and one night with me.  It seems to me, that every week he is growing and maturing into a little old man.  I do not remember how my kids grew.  It seems like they were little and then they were big and then they were gone and I never saw it happen.  I have their school pictures and I remember some of the things they said that surprised me, but I just do not know when it happened.

I remember once when Susie was tiny, they wanted to take her to school for show and tell.

I remember when we had a fluffy puppy and they gave it a bath and when the hair got wet it scared them because "Fluffy's bones are poking out!"

Debbie was always the little mother.  Came from being the oldest, I guess.  I sent her to Church group one Saturday.  It was on the river.  She left the group and walked up to my working place which was about a mile and a half up main street.  They could not find her when it was time to leave.  I received a frantic phone call wanting to know where she was.  At that time she was walking and no one knew where she was.  But I do not remember how old she was.  Probably 10 or so.

I remember Sam carrying on long conversations with the cat.  I remember being at the bank with him one day and he wanted something and I told him I did not have money.
He said "Why are we here?"
"This is where I bank."
"Get some money from here."
"There is no money in here."
"Well what kind of bank is it that has no money?"

Dona and Patty always slept together wrapped in each others arms.  Patty would fall asleep when I brushed her hair.

Sam had a speech impediment and could not make the "h" sound.  This made the teacher think that his father was a hard working man who should be providing for us better because he "did three jobs" instead of "Daddy does tree jobs."

I never missed a program at school, or a conference, or an outing, or a birthday.  I just did not write it down.

So now when Baby Boy does something, I am amazed.  He speaks in sentences.  Wednesday night he counted his toes.  Several times.  He had 10.  I have a pair of skeleton shoes which separates my toes into 4 compartments on each foot, the 2 small toes going in one slot.  He counted my toes.  I had 8.  He counted again and I still had 8.  He counted his.  He had 10.  I finally had to take the shoes off so he could get an accurate count.  Good memory and reasoning skills there.

He likes to eat Chinese so we stop and I order one meal with the fried rice in a separate bowl.  That is all he wants.  His dad is a meat eater; he could care less. My kids ate anything that did not eat them first.

He raked the yard yesterday with the mop.  His dad grew pot in the closet down stairs.

His dad took him fishing and he caught a cat fish.  When Bret asked him why he did not take the fish off the hook, he said, "Because I am too afraid."

It makes me very sad when I look back over my life and see what I missed raising my kids.  I should have had time to write things down, but the time did not come until later in life and now I have to rely on memories.  Most of my memories are shrouded in a cloak of sleep deprivation and running from one job to another.

I only wish I had taken the few moments it required to jot it down, but at that time other things took precedince.  Now it is too late, and when I die the memories will die with me.

And that makes me very sad.

Jake Smith and his grinding wheel.

Now this is a grinding wheel!  It is not the one in Jake Smith's back yard, but it is pretty close.  His had a bicycle seat on the end where the pedals are located.  He used to set there and pedal which caused the stone to rotate.  He would hold an axe blade against the side.  When the first side was sharp, he would turn it over and sharpen the other side. He would finish by dripping water on the blade and the spinning stone.  When he was finished he had a blade that was so sharp it could be used to shave and he tested it by removing a patch of hair from his arm.

Granted he could not make a living by sharpening axe blades, but it did help supplement the income he and his wife received.  She cleaned houses for some ladies in town to help make ends meet.  He was a retired police officer, or so I heard.  He would occasionally "strap his  service weapon" on his belt and scare us kids.  He was quick to tell us how fast we would be dispatched to the other side if we did not get out of his yard.  And to emphasis that he meant business, he would twirl the pistol on one finger.  Then he would set down in the chair that was located by a tree, lean back against the tree and have his afternoon nap.  

One afternoon, Jake and one of his cronies waited until he was sound asleep and then they crept up and carefully encased the old guy in ropes so when he woke up and started to tip his chair back down, it did not tip.  He pulled the ropes over his head, tipped the chair down.  Sadly when he stood up to walk, he found his feet were tied and catapulted to the ground.  He did not find this nearly as funny as us kids hiding over in the weeds behind the shed did!  Damn lucky he did not shoot us that time.  He knew who did it, but of course we all lied and said, "No!  Jake went bike riding and he is not back yet."

Life was so simple back then.  Sorry to say I have not seen one of those wheels in years and the one I saw was in an antique shop and priced far out of my range. Nor do I own an axe.  I do possess a 10 pound sledge hammer and a hatchet.  The hatchet was a pricey little purchase, but there are times when that little guy comes in very handy.  I used it a couple times to separate a chicken head from the body, but I do not do that any more.    My favorite way to butcher chickens was to grasp their feet, step on the head and jerk upward.  It was quick and painless, but barbaric.  Kenny's mom used to tie thier feet together and hang them from the clothes line.  She then streeeeeeeeeeeeetched out their head and proceeded to cut their head from their neck with a butcher knife.  Now THAT was barbaric!  I could scald and de-feather a chicken faster than anyone in the county, but that is history and I now buy my chicken breasts at the local frozen food section.

I just remembered why I started this blog!  I came across my hatchet the other day and noticed that there was a nick on the blade and that the blade was dull.  I have an electric grinding wheel in the garage with coarse and fine wheels.  I used to use it to sharpen my hoe, but since the snakes have taken over the garden, I do not plant any more and that area goes to weeds for the geese.  I am sure at some point in time I am going to have to do something, but for now, I am just going to have my humble breakfast of grits and cheese  and think about something else.

May Jake Smith rest in peace setting in his chair, propped against the tree, dreaming of his bygone life as a peace officer retired and sharpening axes and knives on North Strong Street, in Nickerson, Kansas.

My daddy did not have a gun.

He did not have a gun.  What he did have was a buggy whip and a 2 x4.  My brother tasted both of them.  I did not.  I did live in mortal terror that I would.  I could tell when he was mad or that something was bothering him because he would rub his thumb and fore finger together and talk to himself.  He was a strange man.  He did not seem to have any friends that I knew about.  He had a few acquaintances.  He also had a couple farmers he worked for on occasion.  John Britain and Ed Crissman.  Mostly he just hung out at the local pool hall where the "ne'er do wells"  hung out.  He worked there some afternoons.  He did let me go in there once when nobody was there.  He actually played a game of dominoes with me.  Of course he won.  He always won.  Score was kept on a stick with a series of holes.  Each time one of us made a score the stick was moved forward a  number of holes.  The score was always a multiple of 5, so 10 points was 2 holes  and so on.  I still enjoy playing dominoes, but rarely find anyone who knows how.

I always thought my dad was a very big man, but I think he was 5'10" which is not tall at all.  He had a ruddy complexion and hair with a reddish tint.  I inherited neither of those.  My sisters and brother did, but I was a miniature of my mother.  I had brown hair and hazel eyes that turned to blue or green, depending on my mood.  Dad's skin was light and mine was darker.  I tanned very easily and the sisters burned easily.

My father did not like pets.  We never had a dog and the cat mom kept as a mouser was not allowed in the house.  Mother did have a canary at one time.  It had a cage that hung on an iron post that kept it off the floor.  The cat did come in one time on my watch and made short work of the canary.  Mother was livid.  Seems the bird was the only thing that really gave her pleasure in her mundane world.  She had received it from Grandma Haas.  Not sure mother ever forgave me for that little fiasco.  I do know she never forgot.

Dad never interacted with any of us kids but Mary.  Mary looked a lot like Dad with his rather ruddy complexion and the hair that had an almost red tint, but not quite.  Mary was always delicate.  I do not mean sickly, because I was the sickly one.  I had my tonsils removed when I was 10 or 11 and then became the healthy person I am today.  Donna and Dorothy were bordering on being pudgy, but Mary was just delicate.  There is no other way to put it.  Josephine was the oldest and she was a half sister.  Jake was the son.  I was the oldest daughter born to the union.  Then came Donna, Mary and Dorothy.  That made me the middle child and I lived the "middle child syndrome" my whole life. Still do.  I am not quite happy with anything I do so I try harder.  Just can not do anything completely and revel in success.  I always fall just a little bit short.  You would think after this many years I would give up on that!

Don't know why I got this in my head today, but here it is.  Guess I will go downstairs and do something constructive.

Randy Travis calls this "Pickin' Up Bones."  Just makes me wonder if we ever really escape our childhood?  There are only 2 of us left now.  We live 400 miles apart and visit sporadically if at all, but it is enough to know she is there. And I am here.

World AIDS Day & the Quilt

I do not know when Pueblo began the commemoration of World AIDS Day.  I do know that at that commemoration there were only 2 people.  They went to the Arts Center and put black ribbons on several pictures.  Then that evening the 2 of them held a candle light vigil.  She was the sister of a young man who had passed from AIDS and he was a victim.  I never knew his name, but I still see her today.  It was through her that the Pueblo AIDS Memorial Quilt was conceived.

The next year there were 5 of us.  3 of us were parents of a gay child.  The third year there were 2  mothers and my daughter Debbie with her biker husband Hammer.  For some reason we thought we had to stay until midnight all the years before.  That year, Hammer told us we were nuts because it was cold enough to freeze the b@^^s off a brass monkey and there was no one that knew we were there. He was right!

From those humble beginnings many things transpired.  Someone started the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt early on.  It lives in California.  It is constructed of individual panels measuring 3' x 6', which is the size of a regular grave.  I conceived the idea for a smaller version of this constructed of 1' x 2' panels.  The Pueblo AIDS Memorial Quilt was dedicated at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center on December 1, 1997.  For several years, that was it's venue until we started having World AIDS Day here.  The library is now it's home through December.  It is still stored in my basement.

The big quilt in California is now too big to be displayed any where.  The last showing of it was on the mall in Washington D.C.

NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt

The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, often abbreviated to AIDS Memorial Quilt or AIDS Quilt, is an enormous memorial to celebrate the lives of people who have died of AIDS-related causes. Weighing an estimated 54 tons, it is the largest piece of community folk art in the world as of 2016. Wikipedia

Tomorrow at 2:00 we will gather to recognize World AIDS Day.  Part of that celebration will be to recognize the loss of one of our leaders, John A. Tenorio.  He passed one year ago the day after Thanksgiving.  John was my friend.  I was the mother he lost and he was the brother I lost.  Our friendship had gotten off to a rocky start many years before, but we had both come to realize that this was a friendship blessed by God and misunderstood by man.

Sunday we will add his panel to the quilt.  It is simple.  The fabric is one of the plaid shirts he always wore.  The Christmas card he sent out the first year he was a grandfather is in the pocket.  There is a picture of him and his brother, Len in the city hall parking lot.  It does not tell a story.  It is not a work of art.  But it does hold a lot of tear drops, because I miss that boy more than words can say.  It is just something that will mark the life and death of John A. Tenorio.

May he rest in peace knowing he leaves behind a legacy that will never be forgotten and an empty place in our hearts that will never be filled.