I am in the lucky generation; I am the daughter of those who were young during the Depression and in early adulthood in WWII. My grandmother made my mother a winter coat out of an older one, sprucing it up so it looked nice. When Roosevelt spoke the day after Pearl Harbor, she listened to it over the public address system in the school auditorium. My father went in the service in 1942 and came back to Indiana in late 1945 and was discharged at Fort Benjamin Harrison.

He was in the signal corps and said he never was a “real soldier”. He’s gone now. His hair was white and he had become frail.

I look at these pictures of old men and the pictures of young men in combat and realize they are the same. I feel for them; I feel for me. Something so important, something that reaches so deeply into your soul and it passes in a lifetime. Maybe that is the real reason they made stone and sculptors – because at least there is something to touch, something as strong as they were.

(Well, okay, bronze is good as well.)

A musical and pictorial tribute and thank you in in album form on the Internet now. My husband sent it to me and I send it on to you.

I have always wanted to feel that which is the  ‘whatever’ – zest, passion, determination, courage – of an adventurer, an explorer, a “what if we did this?” person. Today I saw another link to the Apple commercial that so many people like because it salutes those who take a different path. Yes, I like it also; but I think the writers stole it from Walter Lippmann. I know when I heard the partial narration of this on a made for TV movie, I sought it out and committed parts to memory. It is here at the bottom of this link and here is a bit of it (well, around half of it):

The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.

Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighed by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints and the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.

No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.

I’ve had the respiratory flu (I think) with a touch of gastric symptoms for about two weeks now. I don’t feel so bad anymore, but when I sit down and happen to be tilting one way or the other, I wind up in nap phase. I don’t know that I can say I am tired or sleepy, but just that  – poof – there I am dozing away. It was 10 this morning when my cell phone jolted me awake. I call my mother every morning around nine every morning and evening. This morning, I had my usual 8:30 am conversation with my neighbor (She’s 90 and lives alone) across the street and thought, “Oh, I’ll just wait a few minutes to call Mother.” That didn’t work.

I’ve been lucky and haven’t had flu bouts in recent years, and darn it, the year I do have it they won’t allow human subjects in high school science experiments. My grandson could have used me, instead of those beans.  We could have done coughing videos relating to the timed dosage of cough syrup (some of which was pretty cool by the way) and a series of “hair-do” pictures.

I just thought of something; we have the boy watch old movies to further his cultural education and the last one was “Arsenic and Old Lace”. Okay, going for a caffeine fix.

My father died eight years ago; I suppose he felt tired for some time before he fessed up to being pretty ill, but he did not allow he might have the flu until January 8th. We took him to the hospital on January 15th, supposedly for rehydration. I remember watching his feet go down the back steps of the deck – me on one side of him, my daughter-in-law, a nurse, on the other. I thought maybe he wouldn’t be coming home. He didn’t. He died on February 10th and we buried him on the 14th. My youngest son had come back when he was ill because we thought he would have many good days and some months or so. One semester of college didn’t seem that important at that time.

I don’t know how we got started doing it but he and I would really form a bond with these bears we would see in GoodWill; it just seemed we had to bring them home. I don’t know about Quentin, but I didn’t want them to be just material and stuffing. I guess I wanted them for a little while to be real. I needed them to be real because if they could be real in my mind, other things could. Actually, I never really thought that, and didn’t much think it now. it just seemed okay coming out on the keyboard. Looking back, I think Quentin knew I needed something soft and comforting and innocent. Maybe we both did.

As we – but mostly it was me – started getting a pile of these bears, we noticed some of them were exactly alike except for color and label. We referred to them as “the fam” , adopting the phrase from the movie “What About Bob.” At least that’s where I think we first latched onto it – Bill Murrary and “the fam”.

We gave them names and so we wouldn’t forget we stuck their names on their butts with masking tape.

This bear is Demonesque. We pretty much went with the first impression thing, so I don’ t know that he is. I will say that in the last years, he has nothing mischievous.

Maybe it is time to pull the masking tape off and send him back to GoodWill.

I don’t like housekeeping and I wind up being  behind the eight ball most of the time.  It is my reputation and fine, okay. Or not fine, but I live with it and so do others because I have some redeeming features. There may not be many, but there are some. Anyway, I have decided to be as painless as possible about getting things in order while giving myself little gold stars I can look back on.

It did not occur to me to take a picture of a cluttered room and then one of it cleaned.  Overwhelming. I am going to try pictures of small areas, and I guess in the after picture, you will just have to take my word for it I have not moved the stuff four or five feet to other side.

Here is my first picture:  

Will I even be able to fulfill the first attempt of this plan? Do not hold your breath.

They send me these catalogues, but I don’t look at them . . . because I scope out the website daily. I love it when they have 30 to 40 dollar shams on sale for $1.50, not to mention all the other sale stuff. But, now I am thinking of paying (gasp) full price for some clothes for summer. To justify this, I will have to go back to my habit of changing my clothes in regard to what I am doing. Well, that’s not so bad. I’m going to look now and pick some stuff out . . . and then maybe I’ll head over to LL Bean. I feel like it should be a rose and yellow year – not together though. I think I have been a red and navy person my whole life long – it’s just so darn practical. Well, we’ll see; we’ll see. On the other hand, I’m always up for khaki – especially when it’s vintage (safari days) Banana Republic. Hey, better check ebay for “found in the attic” goodies.

Ghurka – that’s another ebay search.

As far as my feet are concerned, I already have my beach trekkers.

Into the Wild – That’s a Redbox movie – one dollar a night rental. I got it without knowing anything about it and my husband said it was supposed to be fairly good. It was about a young man who graduates from college – Emory – and heads off on a “tramp – vagabond – hobo” adventure without telling anyone where he is or if he is alive. I believe, according to the narration provided by his sister, he was sending his parents a message. Were they really so bad they deserved that? Is anyone ever so bad they deserve to be left with a big unknown that goes to sleep with you and then lets you wake up for a moment unawares until it says, “Remember me.”

My grandfather was 50 when my mother was born and so we have sort of a chronologically skipped generation in our family. His name was John Shimp and he had a sister Elizabeth who married Floyd Skirvin and moved to Oklahoma. She had three little boys and one day – one very hot day – two of them turned up missing. She ran all the way out into the prairie to find her husband and then collapsed and died of heat stroke. I don’t know if if my grandfather was in the group of her brothers who went out to bring her body back to Sturgis for burial or not.

She’s there in the 1910 census (her first name was Sarah after her mother) with her husband and three boys, Earl and Glen and Ross; she is not in the 1920 census. In that census, they are back with their dad’s folks in Michigan.

Anyway, I have heard that story all my life as a warning about exerting in the heat, just as I cannot remember being cautioned about rusty nails, since an ancestor in another family branch hit his foot with an axe and wound up dying of lockjaw.