Category Archives: Striving

My Life Thus Far: The Fifties

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Posted by on in Community, Family, Striving

January 26, 2016, Prescott-

I have decided to look at my 6 1/2 decades, in terms of each year’s high point, low point,places and people in the heart, and amazing things. Where there are no listed “People in the heart”, Mom and Dad were a given. Obviously, this has meant some very deep psychic chrononautics, memories and reflections, with regard to my first decade, the 1950’s; so, here goes.

1950- High Point: I bounced out, towards the end of the year, albeit almost feet first.

Low Point: Almost coming out feet first.

People in the heart-Mom and Dad,  my three living grandparents.

1951- High Point: Being the center of attention.

Low Point: Uncle Jim went to war.

Places in the heart: Gooch Street, Melrose (our first home) and the duplex on Central Street, Saugus (our second home).

1952- High Point: My sister, Cheryl, was born.

Low Point: Dad worked nights.

People in the heart:  Cheryl, Cousin Dale, Grandma.

1953- High Point: Playing with Pal, the collie mix.

Low Point: Russell, my best friend, got caught sneaking candy out of our house.

Places in the heart: Grandma’s house, Aunt Hazel’s and Uncle Ellie’s house.

1954- High Point: Walking up to Grandma’s by myself.

Low Point: Getting spanked for it.

People in the heart: My paternal aunts, Carol and Margie, who were my first teen babysitters; two little girls who were my friends, but whose names I forget, and Russ, the first boy to be my friend.

1955-High Point: David was born.

Low Points: Moving to Adams Avenue, to what at first struck me as a shack. (Dad and Mom made it into a real home, though); Grampy Boivin died.

People in the heart: My first peer friends- Eddie, Allan, Mario and Tommy.

Place in the heart: Conrad’s Farm (They had horses!)

1956- High Point: Learning to read.

Low Point: Realizing I was different from the other First graders.

People in the heart: Miss Lavin (my First Grade teacher); Father Lawrence McGrath (who gave me First Communion); Donna, Ellen and Nancy W., my girl classmates.

1957- High Point: Getting to go up Blueberry Hill by myself.

Low Point: Getting bullied in the neighbourhood.

People in the heart: Bobby Matthews, who stood up for me; Jimmy and Jack, my                  friends down the street.

Places in the heart:  Blueberry Hill, where I hiked and sledded; Pleasant Creek, where I went to meditate.

1958- High Points: Learning my multiplication facts; family visit to Cape Cod.

Low Point:  Getting pelted in the head with acorns.

People in the heart: New friends Charlie and Clyde; Miss Nugent (my Third Grade teacher.

Places in the heart: Johns Pond, Cape Cod; The Field, and Nannygoat Hill, Saugus.

1959-High Points: Visiting family in Stamford, CT; vacation in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Low Point:  My friend and classmate, Donna,moved.

People in the heart: Cousins Danny, Kathy and John.

Places in the heart: High Street, after dinner during Daylight Savings Time; Franconia Notch and North Conway, NH.

Amazing things in my 1950’s- The transformation of 48 Adams Avenue into a nice family home. All the times I walked into neighbours’ unlocked houses, when I was 5 &6, until Father McGrath mentioned, at Sunday School, that it was wrong. A teen party upon which I happened, at age 8. (They let me stay a while, long enough to realize just how beautiful girls are). Learning the joys of walking, which took me everywhere in Saugus.

This was the time of American Bandstand, Mighty Mouse, Tom and Jerry, and my first forays into nerdiness: Perry Mason, Feep’s Fantasmic Features and Hawaiian Eye. It was when I learned that not all grown-ups liked kids, even when they worked with us. There were those, like my First and Third Grade teachers, who did love us. They are the ones I remember most clearly.

As the Fifties closed, I was slowly branching out as a person.

 

 

 

 

Hibernation

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Posted by on in Inspiration, Service Activities, Striving

January 20, 2016, Chino Valley- It’s easy to enter into hibernation, physical and /or mental, in the somnolent season. I linger in bed a bit longer, in January, than I do even a month prior, or following. The darkness does not spur one forward. It is the sense of light; the inner sense of duty, that gets me going, during these days of what passes for winter, around here.

I will be going up to Colorado, next week, leaving Wednesday morning and getting back sometime on Sunday, the last day of January. Much of the time will be spent talking, pondering and internalizing ways to promulgate the the beneficial use of essential oils. I am encouraged when I see how many people are taking to these time-honoured healing media. Whether through the company whose products I promote and use, one of its competitors, or that most American of systems, DIY, essential oils cast forth no side effects.

I digress. The topic at hand is hibernation. I wish the Wall Street bears would go back into hibernation, and stay there. They have a job to do, though: Teaching us all not to be greedy, for what one holds too tightly, others can and will take away.

Winter, for me, though, cannot be a time of slumber, or of sorrow. I must go up north, and tend to my part in the healing arts. I will miss my precious children, those three school days, but what I bring back will only help them, and everyone else I meet, to have a better life.

That said, I may sleep in (until 6:30) tomorrow- unless the call to duty comes beforehand.

Sleep? Whazzat?

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Posted by on in animal and plant life, children, Fiction, Striving

January 17, 2016, Prescott-

It had been about four months, since the last sighting of the fishermen. Nadia, a red head among Romanians who had mostly jet-black hair, could feel the energy of those African fishermen, as they stared at her, and at the two, equally-ginger toned wolf-men who alternately barked orders at her, sometimes literally, and led her, tethered at the neck by a leather-collar, which they had devised from the hide of a small eland they had captured, about five months earlier. Rather ironic, her plight, Nadia thought- a woman being walked about by wolves. It all reminded her of an old Korean film she had seen, “To The Rose Inn”, she recalled, in which a man leads his female captive around on a leash, she walking on all fours. “At least, I am allowed to walk upright”, she mused.

Narcolepsy was affecting the were-creatures, especially as they had discovered the local beer, which they were foolishly imbibing even in the the throes of a full moon. They had stolen a goodly amount of the brew from some inebriated fisherfolk, whom they found snoozing in midday, about two weeks earlier. It was this act which led to Nadia Donescu’s recovering her freedom.

On the morning of a waning gibbous moon, Nadia awoke to find her captors snoring, and lying in a copse, about 400 meters away from their usual spot- which was practically right next to where she was tethered. Across the glade, she heard strange noises: It seemed someone was slashing brush with a machete, but she couldn’t be sure. The noises got louder, waking the two brutes. The vocalist became clear: It was a bull elephant! The wolf-men looked at one another, then at the pachyderm. They chortled to one another, in delight. Not paying the slightest mind to Nadia, they each grabbed a roughly-hewn atlatl, which they had fashioned from local flint, and attempted to encircle the snorting beast.

Nadia had her eyes on the elephant, too, but was more concerned with loosening the collar around her neck. With the men otherwise engaged, and the bull warily eyeing them, she was able to extract herself from the shackle, and dart behind a baobab tree. The bull elephant suddenly made for the man to his right and lifted the shrieking werebeast clear off the ground, throwing him into the cove. A Nile crocodile had an unusual lunch, that morning.

His partner-in-crime readied his makeshift atlatl and aimed for the crazed bull. The weapon grazed the animal on his left temple, further maddening him and directing his attention to the now-hapless werewolf. The man could not outrun the elephant, but tried to shimmy up the baobab. The mad bull wrapped his trunk around the man-wolf, threw him to the ground, and stomped him, in one fell swoop.

Nadia wasted no time in clearing out of the disheveled camp, and ran towards the road she remembered from one of their infrequent forays into the fishing camps along the lake. In short order, she happened upon a Chinese construction worker, and his two children, sitting by a koi pond they had devised, in which the children’s pet goldfish were happily at play. The older child, a girl, took two of the goldfish, placed them in a plastic bowl with some lake water and covered it with wax paper, secured with an elastic band. This, she proudly offered to the disheveled Nadia. The father spoke some German, as did Nadia, and offered to take the newly freed woman to the nearest town. Nadia was only too happy to accept.

Everlastings

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Posted by on in Matters of Faith, Personal Values, Spiritual, Striving

January 16, 2016, Prescott-

God is reflected in the everlastings.

My love for my soul mate is everlasting.

Lemuria and Atlantis are not.

The joy taken from hearing children laugh, puppies bark and kittens mewl is.

The ups and downs of the financial markets are not.

A California traffic jam sometimes seems like  it is.

The joy of time spent with good friends definitely is.

The Sun, as vital as it is, is not everlasting.

Beauty and radiance will always be found, somewhere, so they are.

Earth, as familiar as it is, is not everlasting.

The Universe, with neither beginning nor end, is.

The stuff in my cabinets and my refrigerator, definitely is not.

I, in some form, will be- at least I strive to meet with God’s pleasure.

 

The Odd Fishmonger

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Posted by on in animal and plant life, Fiction, Striving

January 14, 2016, Prescott- (The following is based on a Scavenger Hunt prompt including love letter, werewolves, taxi service, lost key, fish sticks.)

Laszlo had grown up in a Hungarian community in Constanta, a port on Romania’s Black Sea coast. So he found it second nature when, as a young backpacker exploring the outer limits of our world, he decided to stop a while on the island of Lamu, off Kenya’s golden shore.

He camped on the beach, filleting and grilling the fish that he caught, each morning, and bringing it to a local woman, who dipped the meat in a spicy batter and baked it her beehive oven. She then sliced the fillets into fish sticks, which were sold to German tourists, who reliably showed up for a quick lunch, each day, nearly ten months out of the year. Lasz got enough of a percentage from these sales to allow him to live a simple, but satisfying life, under the radar of the National Police.

One day, while walking the beach, with a metal detector he had purchased, Lasz found a lost key. It turned out to fit the trunk of a taxi, and had been lost by a former Somali pirate who had also settled on Lamu, and used his vehicle as sort of a Lamu-style Uber. The taxi service was quite lucrative, and the grateful ex-pirate offered Lasz a partnership, making him an alternative driver, three days out of the week.

This, once cleared with a suddenly attentive Kenyan police captain, involved a bit of “gifting” to the captain. Lasz drove the captain’s children to school, free of charge. In return, he got a work visa. Between the fish mongering and taxi service, Laszlo was becoming a fixture on Lamu.

He wrote his long-ago sweetheart, a Romanian girl, who had studied at the London School of Economics, and who was casting about for a future. Nadia was intrigued by her dear friend’s love letter, and made arrangements to travel to Kenya. On the night before she was to fly from London to Mombasa, she was approached by two rather scruffy, but suave, men. They learned of her plans, and asked whether they might accompany her to Africa. They did not seem to have any ulterior motives, and were not threatening to Nadia, so she agreed to meet them next morning, at Heathrow.

The men showed up on time, documents and tickets in hand, and the three boarded the plane together. It was a delightful flight, from London, over Europe and the Mediterranean, North Africa and Sudan. As the plane flew over Uganda, however, night fell. Then, the two suave, scruffy men started to transform. Somewhere over Lake Victoria, encountering a full moon, the werewolves appeared.

Laszlo waited several days for his Nadia, until a news flash from the BBC reported that a plane had gone down, with 300 aboard. All but three were dead. The three missing passengers were not found, but the word among tribesmen on the north shore of Victoria is that two hairy wolf-apes, and their captive white woman, are occasionally spotted in the rough terrain above the Lake.

Repricing

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Posted by on in Inner Struggles, Personal Values, Striving

January 9, 2016, Prescott- I read a discussion about the current downturn in investments, even as the economy is improving, overall. It was explained there that what is happening is the repricing of stocks, akin to maintenance that is done on equipment, necessitating a brief shutdown. This will supposedly take another week to complete, and stocks will decline a bit more. Then, things will reset themselves, more realistically. That is a bit less threatening than the disorganized freefalls we saw in 1987 and 2008, to say nothing of the horrors our parents and grandparents saw in the Thirties.

It set me to thinking. I have been in transition mode, since returning from southern California, last July. Work is more urgent, and my sense of community is more front and center. We reprice ourselves, so to speak, whenever a change is felt to be needed. Nobody, it seems, stays in a holding pattern, even when they think that’s what’s going on.

On my recent visit to the place of my childhood, I didn’t always get the feeling that I was understood by those around me. I tended to speak more slowly and act more cautiously when there, and it wasn’t always comfortable. Maybe because I had a fair amount of baggage, and often felt in the way, when I was growing up, I fell into a default pattern of behaviour.

So, I made an effort to stop myself, reprice, as it were, my worth and make the effort to do for others, this time around. It wasn’t understood, or accepted, back there, but I am going with my renewed sense of self, anyway. Revaluing myself means that no one, no matter how important they were in my life at one time, can knock me back down to a dependent state. I have work to do, goals to accomplish and people to love.

2016 Winter Reads

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Posted by on in Literary criticism, Striving

January 7, 2016, Prescott- I haven’t posted a reading list in quite a while, so here goes.

Reads in progress: Terra in Cognita, William Barnes; Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin; Keep Moving, Dick Van Dyke; The Dinosaur Heresies, Robert T. Bakker; The Witches: Salem, 1692, Stacy Schiff. The last two are tomes, so they will take longer than the others.

January-February: The Disappearance of the Universe, Gary R. Renard; Marco Polo, John Man; John Adams, David McCullough.

March- Sphere, Michael Crichton; All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr; Prairie Erth, William Least Heat-Moon.

These are all fascinating books, of various lengths and levels of intensity. I will also be adding books to my Kindle, the efforts of Carsten Aretz and Ally Larkin, as well as anything that Jeff Markowitz and John E. Glaze come up with, in the near future.

 

Bean Soup

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Posted by on in Personal goals, Slow Food, Striving

January 5, 2016, Prescott- This is one of those periods when the challenges that get thrown at me, by the Universe, however maudlin they may be next to the plight of countless refugees, come to be seen as blessings.

I have resolved the financial challenge that hit me as soon as I got back here, and the compensation will be in my hands on Thursday. In the meantime, I am warm, dry and, when I’m not working, occupying myself at home with many of the things that get put off, in the course of a busy life.

One of those things is inventorying the types of beans I have, sitting in the cupboard, and readying a multi-bean soup. With my crock pot poised and ready, I should have a hearty series of meals awaiting me tomorrow morning. Beans take time, but sustain me, in the few instances of this First World existence that I find the wallet empty.

Meanwhile, as I ignore calls and e-mails asking for the money I don’t have, my preparations for a more solid future go on. It’s been a good morning, thus far, and I aim for the afternoon to be just as fine.

Calm and Bright

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Posted by on in Personal goals, Personal Values, Striving

January 2, 2016, Prescott- The sense of calmness was all around me, this blessed morning, as I walked downtown, to deposit my rent in the landlord’s account. There were few outside, other than tourists headed to a taxi stand, baggage in tow. In Wild Iris Coffee House, I took a hearty breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, surrounded by a dozen or so awakening souls, under the steampunk ceiling. Calmness and brightness, then, are not confined to the ancient German skies that are illustrated in the most tranquil of all Christmas carols.

This year has started out as a benign counterpoint to the tumult of the last two years. I’m certain it will not entirely remain so, with a turgid election facing our nation and the onward march of a world in transition. It is, however, largely what we the people make it.

In my own space, I have determined to make small forward steps- like downsizing my possessions and their accompanying junk. I no longer feel the need to keep every receipt from the last 7-10 years, what with the banks keeping electronic records. I don’t have to hang on to all manner of keepsakes from every classroom I’ve covered since Penny passed on. Books that I’ve read will be passed on to the Friends of Prescott Public Library. My wardrobe will, gradually, be updated, with the oldies but goodies passed on to the clothing bins- a process I started this past year.

Exercise will be more consistent. I will show up in the gym more often. Travel will be more on foot, meaning I walk more, locally, and when away from this area, park in one spot and walk from there. My visits to friends and family will be shorter in duration, and certainly less intrusive. Indeed, as I look back, the best times I’ve had visiting with people are those in which I did not overstay.

These are commitments, not “resolutions”. My resolve, though, has not changed, from years gone by. I enjoy work, exercise, service, learning and being there for my loved ones. The course will remain the same.

Highway 16

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Posted by on in Community, Family, Hiking and Nature, Personal goals, Personal Values, Service Activities, Striving, Travel

January 1, 2016, Prescott- Yes, I know it’s still 2015, here in the American West. It’s New Year’s Day in Rouen, France, one of my ancestral homes. It’s also 2016 in: Silesia, Poland; Bremen, Germany; and Tours, France- three of my other ancestral homes. In 5 1/2 hours, the New Year will come to Old Town, Maine, where my Native American relatives still live.  I am starting to beat a dead horse.

I will use the road motif for this year’s posts, much as the Road took me to age 65. Highways indicate assertiveness, clear vision and moving out with a purpose. So I intend 2016 to be.

I came back to Home Base, yesterday, to find I have a financial issue to settle, and will tend to it next week. In the meantime, bills and rent will get paid and I was, thankfully, able to fulfill a promise I made, last week, to help a sick friend. My nest egg isn’t growing right now, but neither is anyone else’s, in Wall Street’s mad rush to sell anything that’s not nailed down. My nest egg IS nailed , though, so the bears can just go back into hibernation.

Meanwhile, I am not hibernating. The next three days will see me on one trail or another, as we enjoy crisp, clear weather. The schools will be back in session next week, and I will be ready for whoever needs my services. The certification process will take a bit longer- ADE doesn’t save transcripts, so those need to be re-sent, and my long-ago teaching internship host will need to verify that I did complete “practice teaching”- in Fall, 1975. So, I see that process being successfully completed by the end of January.

My essential oils have benefited me, health-wise, and I will be at three conferences, this year, that focus on their promulgation. This month, and June will find me in Boulder and September features an International Convention in Salt Lake City.

Travel in the summer will depend on how well I do, work-wise, this winter and spring. A week or so in Reno/Tahoe, at the end of May, is a given. Anything beyond that, though, remains to be seen. In any case, the focus will be on time with friends, not on “Here’s Gary at yet another fabulous site!” I never want the latter to be how all this is viewed.

Reading is still huge for me, and with the Kindle, an excellent library system and three nearby book shops, I will never run short of material. I am currently engrossed in “The Witches: Salem, 1692”, Dick Van Dyke’s “Keep Moving”, “Terra in Cognita”, by a fellow Baha’i: William Barnes, “Extreme Ownership”, and “The Dinosaur Heresies”. My tack is to read at least ten pages of a book, then go to one of the others, and so on.

This year marks the Centenary of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s initial offerings of “Tablets of the Divine Plan”. I will have much more to say about this remarkable set of documents, during the course of the year. Suffice it so say that, without the guidance I have received as a Baha’i, the person some in my family remember from long ago, and still think they see, would still be stumbling around- and I would not be blogging, to say the least.

This year also marks the Centenary of the National Park Service. I will visit several National Park holdings in Arizona, and around the Southwest, in the course of this year. Most certainly, my boots will meet some trails of the Grand Canyon, and Canyon de Chelly, for the first time in 18 years.

Most importantly, though, is WHO I am going to be in these next twelve months. That will never be defined by anyone but yours truly. To say otherwise would be to invite chaos. Some, not far from here, want me to move nearer to them. That is not happening. Others would rather I stay as far away from them as possible. So be it. Any given decision could be resolved in at least seventy different ways. The factors, for me, are these: Service to those in need, especially children and youth; my own family’s well-being; my ability to fend for myself (I am not presently, nor will I be, a burden on anyone else); and, lastly, the overall circumstances of the world-at-large.

Happy 2016, one and all!