IT'S A LOVELY DAY TODAY

Some days are so full of sunshine we feel like we are back in Hawaii on the beach. That was today for me.

As I usually do on the second Wednesday of each month, I headed down to Cafe Touche on Main Street in Hayesville, NC, the prettiest little town you will ever see. Victoria hosted our dozen or more writers and poets to her coffee shop at 10:30 a.m. where we spent an hour and a half talking, laughing and sharing poems and stories. 

Featured today: Glenda Beall

I began my reading with an old poem of mine, November Trees, which was published by Jayne Jaudon Ferrer on her Poem a Day site, and also in my chapbook, Now Might as Well be Then, published by Finishing Line Press. That poem plucks hard on my nostalgic heart strings. It was written after my brother, Ray, was diagnosed with cancer. 

The second piece I read was a personal essay, A Wonderful Evening at the Emergency Room. It is a humorous episode, so funny in places, I could hardly read it without laughing. My audience seemed to enjoy it as well. Compliments followed, and I left on a high with my friend Mary Mike, knowing I had a publishable essay to send out. 

NADINE JUSTICE, author of  I'M A COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER,
BUT  I CAIN'T SANG

The rest of this sunny day was spent with dear friends; lunch with Mary Mike, preparing with Nadine Justice for her book celebration party on Saturday, and being treated to a nice birthday dinner by my "guardian angel" and neighbor, Ginny W. 

MY DEAR FRIEND, GINNY W.

When I finally got to my computer tonight, I found a great critique of a poem I sent to Will Wright. 

It could have been raining, hailing, blowing outside, but my day was bright and sunny. I hope yours was, too.

How can you believe that people are basically good?

Is it because you live in a quiet rural area where we have mostly white people you can relate to and who relate to you? Believe me, there are places where, if you lived there, you wouldn’t think people are basically good. 
What about those places where people drive through and shoot into houses, where families have to crawl from room to room to keep from getting shot? Do you think those people are good?

I had to answer this line of questioning and I’ll share my words here.
I know I am fortunate to live in a place where I feel safe, where the people I encounter are decent folks. I know I am lucky to live where I can meet total strangers and smile at them and say hello without worrying about any repercussions. But I don’t believe my situation is all that different from most of the people living in this country.

Sadly, we hear on the news media only the most heinous crimes of the day, and we see them over and over. With all the television networks covering “news” there is not enough to keep news fresh all day, so they show the crimes over and over until another terrible thing happens to some person the next day in Atlanta or New York or L.A.

While that horrendous crime took place, millions of good people were going about their daily routines with no news coverage at all. Millions of nurses were caring for sick people. Millions of teachers were working to teach young children how to better live in this world. Mothers were caring for babies. Fathers were working at ordinary jobs earning a living.

I am afraid the average person who watches news channels all day long gets a skewed idea of what life in this country is really like. In fact, older retired men and often women do watch cable news all day long. A friend in Florida says she is surrounded by "angry old white people."A doctor in Texas explained it best to me. If a human being watches bad news, frightening news, over and over all day, it wrecks his nervous system and depresses him because he can’t fix any of these problems.

One of the major causes of depression is being loaded down with responsibility but having no authority to control the situation. When the story is told over and over on TV, and the person watching becomes more and more agitated over what he is seeing, he gets frustrated and upset. He can’t go to Iran or Libya and do anything to help. Without his knowledge the media is manipulating him. He becomes angry and has to turn this emotion on something or someone. His anger toward a situation becomes anger toward the president or the government, or anyone he thinks has power to do something.
He believes that every murder in a ghetto in New York is the norm for all people who live there because he sees it over and over on the News. He sees that neighborhood as a place filled with nothing but bad people. I don’t see that. In every neighborhood, even here in the mountains, some people resort to crime. A man was killed while washing his car in a rural community by two low-life punks passing through. In fashionable communities in Atlanta, we see on TV, a man killed his wife or a nanny killed the children she cared for. But that doesn’t mean that all the people who live there are bad.

I have never seen so many angry people as I have the past four years. Most of these people don’t really have any reason to be that angry. Often they are angry over something they heard or saw on TV News. They have nice homes, live well, and if their lives were the same as forty years ago, and they were at work all day instead of watching the news channels, they would be happy and enjoying life. We are letting others control our happiness when we watch the pundits on TV and become emotionally unhinged over what they tell us - some true and some not true facts.

I challenge anyone who feels angry about politics or the way our country is heading to drop out of the news all day syndrome. That includes online news as well. Besides being bombarded by TV and radio, we have the latest news flashing at us when we turn on our laptops. I went to Hawaii for ten days and did not watch any news at all during that time. What a wonderful vacation! Not just because of the beautiful beaches, the ocean breezes and watching the chickens scratching the manicured lawn beside the pool at the Marriott Resort on Kauai, but the silence, the absence from the never-ending-talk about politics on every media channel.

If you can’t go to Hawaii, just turn it off and tune it out. Like my wise husband, Barry, used to say, “Why worry about it when you can’t do anything about it?” His positive nature was a breath of fresh air and I am trying to breathe that fresh air now. He would not talk about politics and hated when I did. However, he always voted.

Now that this election is over, I hope we can find other things to discuss, other things to watch on TV, and if we don’t feed the monsters, the news channels, maybe they will go away or at least go back to giving unbiased news coverage. I know Ted Turner, when he started CNN, never meant to build a monster that would multiply and tear our country apart.

Coping with Environmental Illness

Most of my friends and my readers know that I have to cope each day with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity   This is also called Environmental Illness, or other names, but the one most used now is MCS. Like fibromyalgia for many, many years, MCS is not recognized yet by most of the mainstream doctors. I suppose the drug companies have to come out with a prescription drug labeled for MCS before most doctors of western medicine will actually own up to telling a patient what is wrong with her. 

While there are hospitals in Canada especially for patients who suffer environmental illnesses, I know of only one place in the United States which tries to treat MCS. That is in Texas. 

If you think the MCS sufferer simply doesn't like your perfume, or can take an allergy pill, that is not true. The fact is the perfume makes her sick. I loved my husband's aftershave which he wore the first ten years we were married. But when I became sensitive to artificial fragrances and became ill from being around them, he was most agreeable to leaving it off. He watched me suffer with asthma like attacks, excruciating headaches, extreme fatigue and depression after being exposed to chemicals we use in our daily lives, petroleum based fragrances which simulate the odor of flowers, and other created fragrances used in almost everything we buy today.

 He became my biggest advocate, especially when he was in the hospital, and the staff came into his room wearing fragrance, or when they tried to clean his room with toxic cleaners. 

We put a sign on his door asking that no one come in the room wearing fragrance. This was at Emory Hospital where people are supposed to know how to care for sick people. The nurses did not wear fragrance, but the others on the staff did not understand and did not seem to care that I had to wear a mask in the hallway or why we insisted on clean air in the room. I was the canary in the coal mine. If the toxic scents closed up my breathing tubes, it was also damaging to my husband whose immune system had been destroyed by chemo and all the other things his body had ingested over the month he was there.

More and more people are speaking out and trying to make this problem known. I hope you will help by sending this blog post to others, by sharing it on social media and talking about it to your friends.

You can read a post by a blogger who tells her story of coping with MCS. 

http://cookingforthechemicallysensitive.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/accepting-life-with-multiple-chemical-sensitivity-mcs/ 

Do you know of anyone who deals with this illness? How do you and others try to help?

Relish the transitions

in your life-

they will happen anyway.

The Day After the Election

Although I'd like to pretend that today was just like any other day, I have to face reality. Today we have elected President Obama for a second term in office. So many people I know in the south seemed to base their vote on the fact that he is not white. I hoped we had progressed beyond that, but the racist remarks regarding this president proves the point. Perhaps we should rejoice, because, after all, the racists didn’t win this election.

For my Republican friends, I extend my condolences because I think you might have seen the last chance to elect a man who holds the old conservative views. It seems the country has moved away from what the typical white man of the south thinks is important. More women will have their say in the future, and most women, even if they don't tell their husbands, will vote to have control over their own bodies. Most women will vote for good health care for their children.

Our country is more diverse in population than it has ever been. This country began by welcoming those who sought refuge here. In recent years, immigrants came and took the lowest paying jobs in our society, the hard jobs of working in the fields, the jobs that uneducated black people held in times past. The white people who once controlled the black population, either by denying privileges or, at worst, murdering them when they forgot "their place", had little power over the more recent immigrants. 

Large farms in the south have depended on migrant workers from Mexico for many years and were responsible for bringing them here, but I don't hear anyone making laws to punish the farmers. These immigrant workers are now all over the country, often in businesses where management doesn't pay decent wages. President Obama actually has deported more illegal immigrants than any other president, but that tidbit of information hasn't seen much light. By whatever method was legal and humane, he has been able to stifle the flow somewhat. I think more will be done in the next four years.

I believe young people the age of my great nephew, a freshman in high school, will see a woman president, and probably a United States citizen, descendant of Latino parents, become president in their lifetime. And why not? Why do people think that only white men possess the skills to lead us? 

My mother's generation was taught to believe that, and too many in my generation still accept, that the male is most capable of leadership. I am surprised to learn how many women would not vote for another of their gender for president. These same women are often the movers and the shakers in their communities and in their homes and church. I think their natural intellect cannot displace the prejudice they harbor -- prejudice passed down for hundreds of years, that tells them women and people of color are not worthy. 

I have faith in the ordinary people of this country. Perhaps because I see so many good people who care about their neighbors and fellow countrymen, especially when a natural disaster has devastated life. Maybe it takes years of living and living through loss to know what we should appreciate, what is most important in the big picture. Maybe compassion for others comes through our own suffering and sacrifice. I see differently now. Financial success can be fleeting. We all have our ups and downs, but in the long run American people, I believe, are generous with their time and their aid in a time of crisis.

I believe that the United States will see a future where a more cool headed leadership prevails, where greed for material things is replaced with concern for quality of life; for better education; for care of the elderly and concern for human life— where war is not the first course of action considered, but the last option taken. 

On Our Own - Widowhood for Smarties

Silver Boomer Books has published an anthology, On Our Own - Widowhood for Smarties, and I am proud to have two of my poems, Sleeping Alone and Solitude, published in it.

These editors have put together a book for everyone who is part of a couple. If you have a husband or a wife, a life-long partner, or if you have lost your love, read this book of essays, fiction and poems. . 

I have to be honest. I have been published in anthologies that I never read all the way through. But I love the work in On our Own, Widowhood for Smarties. 

From Silver Boomer website: "The writers of this collection express the range of emotions at the loss of a spouse but the overwhelming message is affirmation of the strength they find to create new lives after deep loss. Widows and widowers will read these stories and poems with knowing nods, sighs and smiles. Other readers will find insight into a common human condition and perhaps courage to face their own unsought new beginnings."

If you have lost your mate or know someone who has made this journey through grief, give them this book. They will know as they read the touching and heart warming writing of these men and women, they are not alone and the crazy things they feel are not crazy at all.


Solitude

I’ve always needed time alone
to gather meandering thoughts,
musings on life, mine and yours.
I snatched my moments
where I found them.
But now the stillness whispers to me.
Careful what you ask for.

Waking in our quiet house,
no one greets me with, “Hey, Hon,
Get me a cup of coffee, will ya?”
No one sits in your chair,
No one speaks but the dog.

Hours pass while I make
eggs and toast – no coffee-
not for one. Feed the dog
and cat, answer e-mail, fewer
now it seems.

Slowly I learn to use the quiet,
to ponder my future, to cry
when I am stabbed with memories
so precious I can’t bear the pain,
to face the hard reality that you
will not return.
I am alone inside the
silence that I craved.
               --- Glenda C. Beall

Order a signed copy  of On My Own, Widowhood for Smarties from me for $15.95.

 Email me for ordering information. nightwriter0302@yahoo.com 

Birthdays - what to celebrate?

Me and my tiny birthday cake. It was too pretty to cut, but it  tasted good.
In my hair is the lovely flower used to make leis in Hawaii.

Birthdays are big milestones when we are children. Remember when you were ten years old? How about that wonderful birthday that we thought would change our lives -- sixteen? Drivers License!!
Some can't wait for the day they reach drinking age which used to be 18, but is now 21. During those years we anticipate future birthdays with excitement.


Having celebrated a birthday recently, I faced some facts I'd not looked in the eye before.

1. No matter how much people say, You don't look your age, I don't feel any better about ageing.
2. No matter that the nurse at the dermatologist's office said I had "wisdom" spots on my hands, I know they are due to all those years I baked in the sun at Panama City Beach when I was young.
They have nothing to do with wisdom, but everything to do with age.
3. No matter that I used to celebrate with roses and wine, now my roses are on the tiny cake and my therapist said I need to drink more water.
4. No matter that I had no loving card from my husband this year, I know he still wishes me a happy birthday, and I can read the ones he gave me for all my birthdays in years past, because I kept every one.

How Can We Not be Thankful?

Fall at my house in the NC mountains

We have enjoyed the raining of red and gold along my street and postcard views along every curve in the road. How can we be anything but thankful and happy to live in this glorious place?

Blue Ridge Parkway in Fall

CIVILITY - HAVE WE BECOME A CRUEL COUNTRY?

Watching Katie today as I sat home feeling under the weather, I heard the theme of her show was the meanness in our culture today, the put-downs of celebrities and anyone who is in the public eye. Guests on the show included the anchor woman who responded to the hateful e-mail about her weight; Tyra Banks and Lolo Jones, who have been fair game for those who enjoy the anonymity of sitting at home behind a computer screen while they spew bad things about people they don’t even know.

The subject is actually Civility and the lack of it in the world today. Why has a generation or more come up enjoying the embarrassment or humiliation of others? Criticism is popular now. In fact everyone is a critic of some kind. I never liked movie critics and never believed them because what they liked has never been what I liked. 

Should the creation of the Reality Show bear some blame in this? “A big check connected to bad behavior” is part of the problem according to the psychiatrist, Dr. Sherry Blake. Reminds me of training a dog. The media, I believe, has trained our society to be mean instead of kind as once we were. When Housewives of Anywhere are fighting and cursing and getting high ratings on TV, that coarseness grows in our community. Katie Couric called it a “culture of cruelty.”

I have always abhorred this type of behavior, even when my own brothers played pranks on their peers, on their girlfriends, and even their own brothers. The jokes were cruel and mean spirited, not funny as the jokesters believed. 

Mean behavior brings success in our society today, especially when it comes to competition. Lolo Jones, Olympic athlete, says she  concentrates on the good things people say, those who support her, and ignores the others. Competitors in politics pay millions for mean spirited ads portraying each other as buffoons or liars.

I find so many good people in my life, and in my circle of friends, that I can’t imagine the pain of having others attack me verbally and publically.

Today as I pampered myself, I called a neighbor who sells eggs from her own chickens. I’d never met this woman, but I ordered a dozen eggs and told her I was not feeling like driving today, but was going to call a young man who sometimes ran errands for me, and I would get him to pick up the eggs.

Elizabeth insisted I not call anyone. She said, “I’ll be over in a little while to bring your eggs.” 

When she arrived I offered to pay her extra for delivery. She would not accept it. “I’m glad to bring these to you,” she said, “and if you need me to go pick up a prescription for you or anything you don’t feel like getting out for, I’ll be glad to do it.”

Elizabeth is living with her father and caring for him because he is not well. She is already a caregiver, but is willing to take time to do for me, a perfect stranger. Those are the people we need to hear about. The Elizabeths of this world need a format for their voices, but they are usually too busy caring for others to send out Tweets or post on Facebook. 

Let’s use media, the Internet, to tell the good things that take place every day by good people. Find ways to show kindness because everyone out there in the world has insecurities, self-esteem that could use a boost, and even if we only give a smile we can brighten the life of a stranger. 

Do you have any good news about kindness? Please share it with all of us.