when October goes

So, I’m sitting here looking out the window at another cloudy Friday with rain forecast for Saturday. The breeze picks up and another shower of leaves falls. The poplar tree in my neighbor’s back yard is a little more golden today than it was yesterday.

Another October.

And when October goes
The snow begins to fly
Above the smokey roofs
I watch the planes go by

The children running home
Beneath a twilight sky
Oh, for the fun of them
When I was one of them

And when October goes
The same old dream appears
And you are in my arms
To share the happy years

I turn my head away
To hide the helpless tears
Oh how I hate to see October go

I should be over it now I know
It doesn’t matter much
How old I grow
I hate to see October go

For the unenlightened, that’s a Barry Manilow song. Barry’s corny, true, but that song…not so much. I rediscovered it after Daddy died. November, 2004.

The past three weeks have been a reminder of just how fragile life is. I finally got around to watching Defiance. What a great movie. After watching it I did a little research into Jewish tradition, which I really should know more about. I was interested in the blessings: “Blessed art Thou oh God, King of the Universe, who…” When we were watching the movie, hubby asked me why they break the wine glass at the end of the wedding ceremony, and I didn’t know. So when I was reading about the blessings, there was the answer.

To remind the couple that life is fragile.

Two weeks ago there was a shooting just down the road from our house. Two police officers were shot as they tried to apprehend a suspect who was threatening to kill his estranged wife, who was at work at the time. She was the manager of a local fast food restaurant. The suspect was killed. One of the officers also died a week later from his injuries. The community was devastated by the incident.

Life is fragile.

Last week we learned of the sudden death of a friend back home in Virginia. We’d known him for thirty years. He died of a massive heart attack. He was 58 years old.

Life is fragile.

Next week it will be November. It will have been five years since my dad died. Five years since my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, and my father all died, one right after another.

Life is fragile.

In Cielo, little Brenda had heart surgery last week. She is doing well. I don’t know how things are with Rosa, but hope to hear soon. I’m not going to be able to see her in January. I don’t like it, but it’s how things are.

Another breeze. Another shower of leaves.

Another October goes.

 

Sanidad del Cielo

I don’t know how to start this post.

Over on the Cielo page, at the bottom, there’s a picture over several women sitting together under a huge stand of bamboo. Rosa is one of the women in that picture, and I referred to her as a sister.

Yesterday I received the latest newsletter from the director of Mission Emanuel. Included was a story about Rosa:

I knew that Rosa had breast cancer. I did not know the extent until yesterday.

Wubby and I helped build that house in the picture. When I saw Rosa in June, she asked if I was coming back next January. I told her that I didn’t know, but I hoped so. I also told her that, whenever I came back, I’d be able to speak GOOD Spanish. She laughed, as if to say “Yeah. Right.”

There’s a group headed to Cielo in mid-October and I wish I was going with them. I feel helpless. I’d like to make something to send to her, but I don’t know what. Prayer shawls in the Caribbean? It’s too hot in October. January, when it’s beautiful, temps in the lower 80’s, the Dominicans wear sweaters and the Americanos don’t sweat. Much. So maybe a prayer shawl would be ok. I don’t know.

There was another story about another family. The youngest child, Brenda, is eight. She is sponsored by a friend of mine. Last January I got to spend time with my friend at Brenda’s house. She is adorable, spunky…and faces heart surgery.

This post is not about the condition of health care in the Dominican Republic, or in the US for that matter.

It’s about what one person can do to help another person, what one family can do to help another family.

The mission has established a fund to help defray the cost of major medical care for families in Cielo: Sanidad Del Cielo.

Healing from Heaven.

The first time I went to Cielo we dedicated a very small children’s medical clinic, in two rooms on the second (then, the top) floor of a small building that served as pre-school and church. Next month there will be another dedication for a children’s medical clinic. Ten-thousand square feet, located just beyond the bamboo stand, state of the art physical therapy, vaccinations, dental care.

I don’t have much of a voice with this blog, but with what little voice I do have I am asking. One person donating twenty bucks can’t make much of a difference. But a few hundred people, donating about twenty bucks a month over the last 15 years, have made a huge difference in the quality of life for families in Cielo.

Think about it.

Mission Emanuel

Sanidad Del Cielo

1220 E. Concord Street

Orlando, FL 32803

——————————

Right now the distance between Rosa and me feels like so much more than the 1500 miles between North Carlina and Santo Domingo.  And the distance between me and God feels insurmountable.

I’ve seen You calm the waters raging
in the rivers of my mind
Your spirit blows a breeze into my soul
And I’ve felt the fire that warms the heart
Knowing that it comes from You
Then I’ve let it turn as cold as a stone
Sometimes I feel like I’m as close as your shadow and
Sometimes I feel like I’m looking up
at You from the bottom of the

Grand Canyon, so small and so far
From the Grand Canyon, with a hole in my heart
And I’m a long way from where I know I need to be
When there’s a Grand Canyon between You and me

I’ve had the faith that gave me strength
for moving any mountainside
I’ve felt the solid ground beneath my feet
But I’ve had the bread of idleness while
drinking from a well of doubt
And it shakes the core of all I believe
Sometimes I feel like I’m as close as your shadow and
Sometimes I feel like I’m looking up
at you from the bottom of the

When there’s a Grand Canyon between You and me

Sometimes I feel like I’m as close as your shadow and
Sometimes I feel like I’m looking up
at you from the bottom of the

When there’s a Grand, Grand Canyon between You and me

Hopefully I can send something to Rosa next month that will help close the gap until January.

The distance between me and God? We’re working on that.

 

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Yeah. Love.

So I’ve been turning the past few days over in my mind, looking at them from all directions, thinking about everything Alecto already said about them, and wondering what, if anything, I could possibly add.

Not much.

But I’ll try.

I was blessed with the opportunity to meet Alecto at Hatteras back in July, so I knew what to expect as far the campground goes. Plus, I’d already gotten past the weirdness of meeting someone in person for the first time after getting to know her for the previous two years or so.

There was no weirdness to that first meeting, though. Not for me anyway. I don’t think there was for Alecto either. We met in the parking lot, I followed her to our cabin, got out of my car and into hers, and off we went to the grocery store for dinner fixins’. It was like we did this every day.

Since July I’ve found myself lapsing into Alecto-speak. I likes it. And I’s keeping it.

This time I got to see CG meet Alecto in person, and the magic happened again. And CG and I got to meet Florkow, and there it was again.

I’ve probably mentioned somewhere on here at some point that I moved around a lot growing up. Girlfriends? Had a couple of them, early. When we left CG’s hometown I was fourteen years old. Leaving those friends hurt so incredibly badly that I swore I would NEVER allow myself to hurt like that again. And mostly I didn’t. Spent the rest of high school and college all by myself in the girl department.

CG and I have known each other a long time. We lost each other for a long time. When we found each other again she said something that floored me. You know how you wonder sometimes if anything you did or anyone you met as a kid made an impact on the world in any way at all? Maybe not, but I do. After that first reconnection I knew that I had indeed made a difference in her life, and was amazed at that. Confession, repentance, acceptance, love. All of it. She’s been there ever since. And, through CG, along comes Alecto and damn if lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Sunday was a bad fibro day for me. These women saw me at pretty close to my worst. And it was OK. I did grab my sunglasses a couple of times so I could hide behind them, for a couple of reasons. One was to cover up the ouch-face. But the other, well, that was to hide a bit of sadness because I knew Monday morning was coming, it was coming VERY early, and we’d all go our separate ways.There were these moments when my brain said “girl, you better enjoy this ’cause it’ll never happen again, not in a million years.” Other times I thought “so this is what all those girls did after graduation when they ran off to the beach together”, only I think this was better, deeper, more real than any of that.

What will I remember? Everything. Who knew you can’t actually see the battery underneath the hood of a BMW?? Not us, and not Jack the weener dog’s daddy either. You know the little green plastic plug-thing that comes with a bottle of camping fuel? We learned what not to do with it. The best food to eat for lunch on the beach: leftover pancake and link sausage pigs-in-a-blanket, and peanut butter, jelly and potato chips on white bread. The best food to eat at the campground: stuff we cooked that had ingredients grown in the backyard, or on the farm. I learned that I can indeed eat raw clams. I have the shells to prove it. And three of us were wishing for a demonstration of Demond. There are surfers at Hatteras that really know how to surf, and waves big enough for them to show off their skills. They has skills.

How do you explain to anyone that you’re going to the beach with people you’ve never met, but you know in your heart that you’ve known each of them for a million years? For me, the answer still is: you don’t. There’s not a soul in this part of my world who would understand it, except my husband. And besides that, I’m greedy and if there was someone who could understand it, I wouldn’t share it anyway.

Because it’s mine; it’s ours. And I’s keeping it.

 

my friend, the house

(Yes, the girls are home. Yes, the girls had fun. Yes, there will be blogging about the trip when the road stops rushing by.)

Someone new found my blog while I was out with the girls. She read the “what is a house” post and made a very nice comment, and I remembered that I haven’t finished the story.

We sold the house to the guy who made the offer, the first-and-only-showing guy. Only we didn’t close on June 30. As often happens, things didn’t go quite as smoothly with the sale of his house as had been anticipated, so closing was delayed until July 20. Three extra weeks of nail-chewing.

Within the first week, all of the remaining landscaping, with the exception of two trees, one hydrangea bush, and a few hostas, was gone.

The old basement door and front door were replaced.

The porch and deck have since been rebuilt.

He’s started a retaining wall at the end of the driveway.

Everything is very pretty now, as opposed to the remaining shabbiness we left behind.

I still drive through the neighborhood on a fairly regular basis, picking up and delivering kids for riding lessons and church.

In one way, I feel like I’m looking at Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, after Linus says, “All it needed was a little love.”, wraps his blanket around it, and proceeds to decorate it with the lights from Snoopy’s doghouse.

And I feel guilty about how I treated my friend, the house.

(Darned tears…makes it hard to see the computer.)

But then, I remembered.

The new owner of my friend, the house, had to sell his old friend, his house, because of a divorce. I don’t know if he has children or not, but suspect that may be the case because of his desire to find a house with three bedrooms in the same area. His old house was only a mile away, in the opposite direction from the house we live in now.

He may very well be hurting, badly, separated from the children he loves. So, he loves the house instead.

And we loved it too. It might not have showed as much on the outside as it should have. But it was there, on the inside.

And we brought it here.

 

girls just wanna have fun

We’re going to do just that.

Alecto, CG, a friend of Alecto’s, and I are all converging on Hatteras tomorrow afternoon. Last July I was blessed with an opportunity to hang w/ Alecto et. al. at Hatteras and the plotting for this weekend began. Today I’m kidnapping CG and bringing her to my house.

I wonder sometimes, like daily, what I did to deserve the friendship of these women. I’m a very introverted person; making and keeping friends has always been hard for me. Granted, CG and I go way back…to the 4th grade. But we lost each other for something like 25 years or so. Alecto and I crossed paths through CG. It feels like I’ve known her all my life, too.

We are diverse; we are similar.

We are urban, suburban, rural.

We are Yankee, Rebel, mid-Western methodist, southern Baptist, heathen, liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian.

We are mothers, wives, daughters, sisters.

We are.

And we are gonna have fun.

 

so, anyway

As of yesterday we’re a home school. Little girl has hated high school since she started last year. As summer started winding down and 10th grade loomed imminent, her mood started tanking. So we downloaded the official form, gave our home school a very pretentious-sounding name, dug up my college transcript to prove I grad-yee-ated 6th grade just like Jethro Bodine, and mailed everything off. It took less than a week to get it back. Amazed. It usually takes any government agency, federal, state or local, a month of Sundays to do anything. Heck, I’ve had Medicare as a secondary insurer for almost 2 years and they still haven’t paid any co-pays they’re supposed to, so don’t talk to me about how everyone who has Medicare loves it. Everyone I know who has Medicare thinks a bit less highly of it than I do.

But I digress.

Yesterday we dropped by the high school to officially withdraw and thumb our nose at it, just a little, then grabbed a celebratory McGriddle (not me, just her) and headed off to the local used bookstores in search of stuff. We found some stuff and brought it home. She had one homework assignment to complete, and voila! we’re done. Her homework was to write something. Anything. Without thinking about rules, grammar, spelling, whatever. Just write.

Physician, heal thyself.

——————————

My mom sent me this email yesterday. Doesn’t matter if it’s a true story or not; the principle is dead on as far as I’m concerned.

Effort and Reward

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”. All grades would be veraged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.

The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

Do I believe there’s a professor somewhere who never failed a single student? Maybe, maybe not.

Whoever wrote this used Obama’s name, but in my estimation it’s not a criticism aimed directly at President Obama; it’s a criticism of the fundamental flaw inherent in socialism. It’s a wonderful concept; there’s just one problem with it: pesky human nature.

It’s the same problem I always had in school, and at work, with group projects. I wound up doing the work because I was not willing to take the lower grade, or create a less than acceptable product, because of everyone else’s lack of participation.

Pesky human nature.

 

If I had something worthwhile to say

I’d post it.

But I don’t.

 

on H.R.3200

I couldn’t help it, really I couldn’t. I had to go and look at it for myself.

H.R.3200 – America’s Affordable Health Care Choice Act. A.A.H.C.A If you try and pronounce the acronym you get something that sounds not unlike my cat just before he hawks up a hairball.

Same thing happened to me when I started reading this bill. No, I haven’t read all 1006 pages. Heck, I didn’t get past page, well, who knows–you don’t get page numbers when you view it online. It’s really close to the top, though.

‘SEC. 1173A. STANDARDIZE ELECTRONIC ADMINISTRATIVE TRANSACTIONS
‘(a) Standards for Financial and Administrative Transactions-

‘(1) IN GENERAL- The Secretary shall adopt and regularly update standards consistent with the goals described in paragraph (2).

‘(2) GOALS FOR FINANCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE TRANSACTIONS- The goals for standards under paragraph (1) are that such standards shall–

‘(A) be unique with no conflicting or redundant standards;

‘(B) be authoritative, permitting no additions or constraints for electronic transactions, including companion guides;

‘(C) be comprehensive, efficient and robust, requiring minimal augmentation by paper transactions or clarification by further communications;

‘(D) enable the real-time (or near real-time) determination of an individual’s financial responsibility at the point of service and, to the extent possible, prior to service, including whether the individual is eligible for a specific service with a specific physician at a specific facility, which may include utilization of a machine-readable health plan beneficiary identification card;

Let’s see here….why do we even need paragraph 1?? No wonder the thing is 1000+ pages long.

(B)…no…constraints for electronic transactions…not sure I wanna know what that means, but am afraid I do as it is defined elsewhere in the bill. Wait for it.

(C)…minimal augmentation by paper….um, 1000+ pages.

(D) (the juicy part of this little section is highlighted for ya) Excuse me? Eligible for a specific service WITH A SPECIFIC PHYSICIAN AT A SPECIFIC FACILITY???? How’s that work w/ the patient’s right to see any provider s/he chooses? Health plan beneficiary identification card?? We can’t have an ID card that distinguishes citizens from non-citizens for purposes like, oh, I don’t know, VOTING, but we can have an ID card for this?

I’ve bookmarked the text of this bill. At first I thought I could use it as reading material for those nights when I can’t sleep at all, or wake up at 3:00 AM w/ fibro pain and can’t get back to sleep. However, upon further reflection, I don’t believe it to be prudent to read this material and then try to sleep.

Nightmares.

 

on being out of touch

One of the really nice things about living out of my suitcase this summer has been the total lack of contact with TV. It’s a rule that, when in the DR, the TV stays off. There are no TVs at camp, nor was there a TV at Hatteras. So I’ve been blessedly clueless as to what’s been going on in Washington this summer.

Until this week.

Good grief.

The federal government running health care in America?

The president of the United States insulting the entire law enforcement population because one officer dared to do his job and an F.O.B. got his feelings hurt and created a disturbance?

Congress critters considering signing a 1000-page bill, that they haven’t read…wait, this sounds familiar. Health care, or economic stimulus? Does it matter??

There’s a fine line between being entirely clueless and being so overwhelmed with what’s happening that paralysis sets in.

Must find that line.

But, for now, clueless works. As does the ‘off’ button.