Life

Just an Old Folkie at Heart

/ still a dreamer / 2 Comments

FolkGuitarSometimes in the middle of the work, sometimes in the middle of the stress and nonsense, something just keeps shining through. And for me, that is music. Does music do it for you, too?

I love many forms of music, and certainly have several favorites, but what always feels as comfortable as a pair of old shoes, a cozy easy chair, is acoustic folk. No doubt growing up in the 60’s and 70’s in the whole folk scene has a lot to do with it, but what could be better while working to suddenly hear Jesse Colin Young, Bob Dylan, James Taylor? The sweet voices of Sarah McLaughlin, Lucinda Williams, Bonnie Raitt? Acoustic guitar music and folk span decades – it just never gets tired.

And the best of all … it comes streaming through my computer in iTunes. How wonderful is it to have access to hundreds and hundreds of radio stations playing whatever music you feel like hearing on any particular day? Just the best. Thank you, Apple! (and yes, I am on a Mac.) The folk stations that serve up the best, if you folkies out there are reading and are unaware of this gem on your computer, are Radioio Acoustic Cafe, Folk Alley, Grassy Hill Radio and GotRadio-Folk Lore.

Sometimes it’s the seemingly small joys in life that become the rich tapestry backdrops to the rest of our lives … when is there not music?

Honored to Receive the Honest Scrap Award

/ still a dreamer / 2 Comments

honestscrapawardI recently found I was chosen for an award by a fellow blogger, The Battered Trunk.

I readily found what I, as a new recipient, needed to do, but was unsure exactly what the award was about. A little online delving, and I found the following definition of the Honest Scrap Award on Buddhist Minister Rev. Danny Fisher’s, site. He says the following:

This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant. This award is about bloggers who post from their heart, who oftentimes put their heart on display as they write from the depths of their soul.

Wow! A special thanks for the award, then, Marstead!

And the instructions for the award are as follows –

THE HONEST SCRAP AWARD:

1. The Honest Scrap award must be shared!
2. First, the recipient must reveal 10 true things about themselves in their blog that no one else knows.
3. Second, the recipient must pass along this prestigious award to 10 more bloggers.
4. Third, those 10 bloggers must be notified they have been given this award.
5. Those 10 bloggers should link back to the blog that awarded them the Honest Scrap award.

OK – first the 10 things –

1. I was pretty much sewing all my own clothes starting at the age of 11.
2. In high school, I was accepted to all the top NYC/Phila Fashion Design Schools until I had that duh! moment and realized that I would be snuffed out like a bug under a stiletto heel. What was I thinking?! And I went back and re-applied to art school. Whew! That was close!
3. I don’t think there’s a creature on the planet that I wouldn’t find fascinating given the proper introduction (or distance, depending on the animal) I’m remembering an all-too-close encounter with a baldface hornet a few years ago.)
4. I miss the ocean.
5. I thought Howdy-Doody was an incredible waste of time and never ‘got’ the Three Stooges.
6. Notwithstanding the health implications, I could happily live on homemade bread and sweets, the best array of cheeses, and really good coffee.
7. I easily embarrass myself doing mental math in front of people (thank you nuns with flash cards starting in first grade.)
8. I always believed in angels.
9. After seeing the movie On the Beach as a child, I really believed the world could end. Like then.
10.I remember the flute passage in Seven Beauties playing in the courtroom while the proceedings went without sound being one of the most lovely pieces ever, but am not sure I could watch the movie again right now to listen to it.

OK – the blogs – let me say first, I have very little time to check out others’ blogs, and barely enough to keep my own freshened up regularly. I am not a big blogger, and honestly don’t know a lot of blogs to even list. However, that said, here are 4 that I visit regularly or periodically that I will say put their heart on display, and yes, two are dog rescues. I may add more later – this is what comes to mind right now.

Diary of A Children’s Book Writer

Writing for Kids While Raising Them

BAD RAP’s Blog

French Bulldog Rescue Network’s Blog

And thank you again Marstead of Battered Trunk for noting me for this award.

Can Children’s Books Reduce Hate?

/ still a dreamer / 8 Comments

JohnGrishamI got a letter from John Grisham yesterday.

At least that’s what the envelope said. I found it to be an appeal on behalf of a person and an organization that I’ve heard of, but knew little about – Morris Dees, an Alabama lawyer and friend of Grisham’s, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.  It is the mission of Dees and the SPLC to put hate organizations out of business and to teach tolerance.

I read the enclosed piece and was literally horrified at the abuses, savage beatings, murders and more that still go in in this country perpetrated by any number of hate groups upon innocent individuals of some minority status or other. I was beyond horrified; I was deeply saddened. (And mind you, I am not writing this to drum up donations for the Southern Poverty Law Center, but if you want to know what’s going on in this regard, you may want to visit the SPLC web site and find out for yourself – it’s very disturbing.)

What struck me were two things … I hear so many people talking about those in the world who hate and would destroy our country. I wondered, are people aware of how much hatred is alive and well, right here, within our own borders? Do they know that people are still being abducted, beaten, and hung? AND if that weren’t enough, that it’s often being done in the name of the abuser’s God? How have we become a nation with so much hate?

So … as an aspiring children’s book author and illustrator … the second thing I wondered was, what is being read to the young children of those people whose mission in life is to commit violence against people of a color, nationality or religion different than their own? What happened to love? To hope? To tolerance? Compassion? Do these people’s children read the same books as other children do?

Children’s book writers aspire to show a child a world of wonder, fun, sharing, understanding, friendship and caring. Can a mother whose husband goes out to senselessly beat a 16 year old boy into permanent physical and mental damage be reading to her child about caring for others? I am utterly confused and lost.

So I wonder, when a child is raised believing that hate towards others is an acceptable emotion, can a mere book, albeit written from our hearts and souls, have the power to change a young mind?

Freshness Expert

/ still a dreamer

FreshnessExpertwOne of the things that is so endearing about our pets is how they come up with these little quirky behaviors on their own.

One of my cats is the official, self-appointed Freshness Expert (and yes, that is with a capital F and E.) Just ask her.

Whenever I open a new bag of their food and am about to pour it into their little storage tin, Mewsette appears in a flash from anywhere. It’s her job to check the food, sample a few pieces, and assure the rest of us that it’s safe for consumption and, indeed, as fresh as the package dating promises. That done, she leaves the room and returns to whatever she was doing before.

FreshnessExpert2w“My work is done here!” she affirms.

Recently, she discovered that I had something 3-dimensional in my glass of water, although adding ice is hardly something I just started 2 weeks ago. She insisted on getting her little muzzle in there, (so yes, that was the end of that glass of ice water for me), and couldn’t get enough. Now when I give her fresh water after dinner, I add an ice cube to her bowl. Unlike the other two, who’d be playing ice cube hockey all over the kitchen floor in minutes, Mewsette does not want to play with it. She delicately laps the water keeping her tongue on the ice cube as much as possible. Ahhhhhhhh – refreshing!

So she has now expanded her credits to both Freshness Expert AND Ice Cube Connoisseur.

Alice Hoffman – Local Girls

/ still a dreamer

LocalGirls-AliceHoffmanOne of the things I love about reading Alice Hoffman is that I never know quite what to expect with the exception of one thing – I will be deeply moved by her story. I find Hoffman’s writing brilliant in her ability to take us so penetratingly into her characters, characters who are not heroes, but neighbors we see every day yet whose lives we  barely know. Local Girls takes us into the midst of a family who struggles with pain and loss, and whose characters cling to the idea of surviving it, or in some cases, succumb.

The local girls are Gretel Samuelson and her best friend Jill, who lives around the corner. They are teenagers no different than our own  or those who live next door, struggling to find where they fit, and in their case, how to manage life in the face of parents who are stricken with cancer, are mentally ill, or who have abandoned them. We watch, with Gretel, her mother Francine’s sinking into depression after the father walks out and at the same time faces the return of her cancer. We watch Jill’s mother, a minor character, being given shock therapy for her own depression until she appears as vapor, using one of Hoffman’s desecriptions.

Gretel does her best to stand by her mother, but her own confusion,  typical for her age then compounded by the pain in her family, causes her to fall in love with a boy who is terribly wrong for her. At the same time, Gretel’s brother Jason slips from an A+ student accepted to Harvard to a slow descent into drugs, unable to deal with the pain in any other way. Margot, Francine’s cousin, lives nearby and is an integral part of keeping the family on track in whatever way she can. Despite her own sadness at being left by her husband as well, she always believes in love. And then there’s Freida, Gretel’s grandmother, a strong figure, who strikes a deal with God to ler her daughter live and be taken herself.

Alice Hoffman is a writer who can pull this all off with humor, a striking depth of feeling, and an infusion of optimisn that is uniquely hers. Local Girls is the story of people you know, replete with pain, the fight to survive,  and larger-than-life portions of the grit of everyday living …. plus the touch of magic that is ever-present in all our lives if we are just open to it. I could not put this book down – for me, the mark of a great read. If you have known someone devastated by loss and fear who has plodded forward in spite of it, believing/not believing in a better day ahead; if you have been close to someone battling addiction, and their drive to numb the intensity of their pain; if you have watched women rise from the ashes and try one more time, then I suspect you’d like Local Girls.

I do find this story as much or more about Gretel’s family than the friendship of Gretel and Jill, yet ultimately it is their story we follow as circumstances take them in directions neither girl would have quite expected, yet may have secretly longed for.

And last but not least, Hoffman’s use of language is no less than exquisite. It is what brings a tale of everyday people in a simple suburban town to such rich and rewarding heights making Local Girls quite the amazing read.