Donna Speaks: A Winter Magical Mystery Tour

I've always thought that winter is a magical time of the year.  Yeah, most trees are naked, but that means I see the night sky's sparkles with fewer obstructions.  And, on a crisp, cold nights, sounds seem to go further and sound clearer.  Plus life couldn't get much better than sitting 'round a blazing bonfire on a near freezing night with a bunch of friends.

One of my favorite things to do is to go for a walk on a cold, moonlit, night.That's what we were doing several years ago on the turn rows of fallow fields on the outskirts of Natchitoches, LA.  "We" included my older sister and her two daughters, me and two of my three sons, and a couple of friends.  

The coyotes were especially talkative that night with their yelps and yips, howls and barks, signaling each other about the best hunting areas.  We were hoping to get close enough to see the rag-tag creatures.  We were not at all afraid of the coyotes: there people and wild animals both had plenty of room to live and eat without competing with each other.

We tromped down the muddy roads, looking, listening, giggling, and "booing" each other  Suddenly, I thought I saw a small flash of light on the sole of one of my youngest son's shoes.  Jeff was walking in front of me; I turned my full attention to the bottom of his tennis shoes. And there it was again: flashes of whitish, greenish, bluish, reddish lights.

"Hey, guys.  Stop a minute,"  I had to say several times to get everybody's attention.  "Look at the bottom of your shoes... Really, stop and look."  When they looked, almost everyone had shoe soles that lit up - especially when you'd step in a particularly muddy spot.

After lotsa "ooohs, aaahs" and "wows", we started speculating on the cause of our glowing soles.   "Little space creatures falling from the sky."  "Alien rain".  "Space snot".  And so on. Even left over poison from the crop dusters.  The adults wove fantastic stories to scare the kids. The coyotes were forgotten.       

A few days later, after I got home, I investigated our strange encounter. Come to find out, we had walked on the larvae of fireflies: Lampyridae.  They are a family of insects in the beetle order Coleoptera. They are winged beetles, and commonly called fireflies or lightning bugs and create a cool light through bioluminescence.  All of these beetles lay their eggs in the dirt.  In the winter, the larvae burrow in the ground for protection.  It had rained and the ground was muddy, and we had disturbed the larvae. Only some species light up when disturbed.  We were lucky.  We got the "glow worms".  

In the late 50's, the Mills Brothers even recorded a song about these beetles.  The chorus and first verse goes as follows:

Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer                                                                                         

Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer                                                                                        

Lead us lest too far we wander                                                                                                         Love's sweet voice is callin' yonder                                                                                               

Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer                                                                                         

Hey, there don't get dimmer, dimmer                                                                                               

Light the path below, above                                                                                                             

And lead us on to love

That was a wonder-filled Winter Magical Mystery Tour!

Althea, have a great week.

Evolution and Other Divisive Observations

Evolution:  Hundreds of thousands of misguided folks do not believe that evolution is how we got here.  And I know this will not convince them because they choose not to believe facts.  Here's the only fact you really need to prove evolution:

Post WWII, antibiotics worked on bacterial diseases.  Now many diseases are antibiotic resistant.  What happened?  The bacteria evolved! As they needed to survive, they changed. And as they change more, we make the antibiotics different. It takes less time now for the bacteria to change than it used to. We don't have many antibiotics left because they are no longer effective.

It’s what happens when any living thing needs to change to survive. I fully expect children to have enormous thumbs in a few decades because of their use of cell phone texting.

On a different, but kinda related note, in a Catholic church in New Orleans, if you turn the chandelier light on,  you can see a shadow of what the believers are calling Jesus.  (I know that sentence is convoluted and probably not grammatically correct, so don't start with me.)  A friend thinks it looks like Che Guevara.  Or more likely just a shadow.  So turn the light off and stop with the kneeling in front of that column, OK?

And who knows what Jesus looks like?  Were you there back then? He certainly was a middle eastern Jew, so dark skinned and probably curly haired. We really don’t know if his hair was all that curly as you see in that shadow. He certainly was not blonde and blue eyed as he is portrayed by US Christians.

Guess that church will have to leave the lights on and put a bigger collection box next to the apparition.  After all, the church needs more money to defend all those pedophile priests and it needs all your dollars to keep women from being priests.   It could find an origami expert and have lots of shadows that would correspond to whomever they wish. Wonder who would bring in more money? The Pope or Brad Pitt?

     Photo from New Orleans Times Picayune, 2 April 2012

Whatcha think?

Now in December 2015, I have no idea if the shadow is still there or not.  I expect not and the collection plate donations have most likely decreased. Time for more shadow art, doncha think?

What Makes it Terrorism? And When will it Stop

The powers that be have decided that the San Bernardino mass shooting is terrorism.  What on earth makes this terrorism and Robert Dear’s shooting at Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood  not terrorism?

Lots of people think that PP employees and patients deserve to be shot, but is that what we have sunk to in this country?  Abortions are legal and no matter what you believe, until they are illegal, you must leave those people alone. And what the hell makes you think that killing people is the way to force your beliefs on others.  We are sick and tired of extremists of Christian religion getting a pass because everyone in this country does not believe as they think we should. 

Chris Harper-Cooper, the shooter at Umpqua College in Oregon was a bi-racial conservative Christian. He only killed Christians and was killed himself.  Was that terrorism?  Why not?

What about Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook who killed 20 children and teachers?  Oh, that’s right. He was a confused, probably mentally ill 20 year old boy.

And Dylan Roof, who killed  9 black church goers at Sunday Services in Charleson SC.  He was a racist, a white one and certainly no terrorist. Being a racist is fine in our country. 

For that matter, we are getting sick and tired of the rabid religious right republicans trying to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives. 

But back to San Bernardino.  So because the shooters were of middle eastern descent, even though they were US citizens, born and raised here, they are terrorists. Oh and they are Muslim. Is that what makes them terrorists?  

Riddle me this:

What the  hell is the difference between the extremist Christian rabid right wing Republican, Robert Dear, who committed mass murder at Planned Parenthood and the extremist Muslim rabid right wing Republican who committed mass murder in San Bernardino?

And will any of this make people stop shooting everyone they please? I doubt it. 

As long as anyone at all can buy assault rifles in the US, they can shoot anyone they wish.  Of course the NRA putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into Conservative politicians pockets might have something to do with the shooting never stopping.

It is sad what this country has come to and no one seems to care.

Donna Speaks: Love Thy Neighbor? Fear Thy Neighbor?

I originally wrote most of this post over a week ago. I had named the post "Fear Thy Neighbor".  Jan, with her editor's privilege, changed the title.  Here it is again, with lots of my editing, for San Bernardino.

In June of 1985, my parents came to visit us in Berlin, Germany, where my ex was stationed at the Tempelhof AFB.  Mom and Dad had to change planes in Frankfurt before reaching their final destination.  The airport in Frankfurt had been bombed two days before their arrival.  The Arab Revolutionary Organization claimed credit. Needless to say, my parents arrived in Europe very shaken and asking if they had to go through Frankfurt to go home. (Yes.)

Shaken.  Huh.  An understatement. Scared shitless. I don't think they would have come but for the monetary investment in the tickets, et al.  I also was reluctant to put my parents in danger.  Who would want their parents to fly into an airport bombed by terrorists two days before they landed?  But I rationalized, and my parents probably did, too: "They" wouldn't bomb the same airport again so soon. Anyway, Germans are really good at cleaning up messes, and my parents said the Frankfurt airport "looked normal".

We enjoyed a month of travel with my parents.  We spend a week in the Netherlands, staying in a small North Sea shore town, we traveled to Amsterdam and Delft.  We drove through Belgium back to Germany and stayed in a castle on the Rhine.  From Frankfurt we took a high speed train to The City of Lights, Paris.  The Folies Bergere was evening entertainment, and the next day, during site-seeing, my ex's pocket was picked. Before our return to Berlin, we enjoyed a view of the Alps and great German food in a small Bavarian town.

And, lucky for us, statistics once again won and we were all fine the entire six weeks we traveled throughout Europe.  And, you know, that is what it was: Dumb Luck.  Those folks in San Bernardino were simply at the wrong place, at the wrong time.  I'm sure no one at the holiday party was an evildoer.  No one there had shot, stabbed, raped, bombed, or otherwise seriously harmed anyone. 

But there they were: a-rat-ta-ta-tat-a-rat-a-tat-tat. About 70 times the news said.  And they were gone.

Back to Berlin: The next year, in April, our family was returning from a spring vacation in Amsterdam. As we arrived at the Frankfurt train station to catch the American train to Berlin, we were unnerved by the significant increase in security.  Soon we learned the reason: the bombing the day before of a Berlin disco frequented by American service men.  There were 230 injured, 40 were Americans.  The bomb killed four Americans.  The bombing was carried out by Gaddafi's secret service.

Once again, we dodged the bullet, we rationalized that since we didn't go to bars, we were ok.  Are you rationalizing that since you don't work for the state of California, you are OK?  Or, are you gonna go get an assault rifle and be ready when "they" come?

As a result of the Berlin terrorist attack, my children's schools were now guarded 24x7 by armed soldiers.  Their school buses were now escorted by machine gun mounted jeeps. Bomb threats were no longer an anomaly.  How do you explain that crap to your kids?  You do your best and, instead of cowboys and Indians, they play soldiers v the Red Army Faction and make play bombs outta old batteries and discarded wire.

We found no way to rationalize this. I just wanted to grab my kids and go HOME... where it was safe.

Then, not long after, there were the early morning sounds of close gunfire that woke me and my ex.   The ex Marine veteran of Viet Nam and now Air Force sergeant said:.  "Automatic... like M-16s... somewhere behind the high school."  We could see the high school, across the street from our fourth floor apartment, through our bedroom window.

The police blotter I grabbed the next morning at work told me what I wanted to know.  The night before, the US Army tank headquarters, located a stone's throw from the back of the high school, was attacked by un-named terrorists, but the Red Army Faction was suspected. This information was never released to the public.  

I was privy to lots of "stuff" not released to the public in my job as a social worker for the American Community.  Like the bomb they found in a brief case in the American hospital.  They didn't even try to evacuate the hospital, hoping they were lucky enough to get the bomb out before it exploded.  They were;it didn't.  There were more, but you get the idea.

Three months before the end of my ex's tour - August 1987 - as soon as my three boys finished school, we were on a plane HOME, where we would be safe.  

We all made it home.  Everything turned out OK; we were lucky again.  And I literally kissed the safe Louisiana ground.

And then there was 9/11... Paris... San Bernardino. And more "terrorist" attacks (defined by the FBI as four or more killed) since January 1, 2015 than days we have had this year.  And still thousands more of us Americans are killed by other Americans than terrorists.  Terrorists, so far, don't hold a candle to our neighbor.

And it matters not if the "active shooter" is our kid's bullied-once-too-much-fellow-student or a "radicalized" young man from the Middle East, the motivation remains the same: Hate.  And, almost always, it is hatred of the unknown, hatred of what we do not understand, of the different.  Sure there are other factors, but hate is the motivator.

And rationalization is the way we bullshit ourselves into believing it won't happen to us.

Several years ago a client of mine, let's call him Joe, told me an amazing story.  He and his brother-in-law were driving home to Slidell from New Orleans on Interstate 10 early one morning.  As far as they could tell, they were the only vehicle in sight, on either side of the interstate. Then, out of nowhere, a pick-up truck comes careening across the median, heading straight for them.  Joe had no time to react, and crash-boom-bang, the truck smashed into the front side of Joe's car.  Joe and his bro-in-law weren't badly hurt, and climbed from their car, now in the ditch.  Mad as riled-up-hornets, they looked into the cab of the truck, and found no one. 

Ten or so seconds earlier, ten or so seconds later, the pick-up truck woulda missed 'em.  And, so it is for all of us, everywhere.  Not luck, or fate, or fault.  It's just that shit happens.  And, as the song says, "sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug".

There is a cure for the ubiquitous hatred.  Live well. Be kind.  Accept - even if you do not understand. Love one another.  Tell the people you love that you love them.  Often. Perform random - and, if possible, anonymous - acts of kindness.  Give freely; accept humbly.  Know that we are all in this together: Our Mother Earth,  the Blue Sky, the Deep Ocean, the Ever Changing Wind.  Even the Lions, and Tigers, and Bears are in this with us.

Miss Althea, have a good day.    

Dumbing Down the US

No, not me. I'm retired, but still tap at the keyboard every day.  

I hired a kid, maybe 25 or so, to do the heavy work in the garden. I wanted him to do the bed prep and to set up the soaker hoses and then mulch the veggies I had already planted in another bed.

He had never seen a tomato plant before. For that matter, he had never seen a veggie garden before.  I asked him to snake the soaker hoses near the stem of the tomato plants.  After he did not move, I realized he had no idea what I was talking about. He did not know what the plant was, what a stem was or why he was doing what he was doing. 

Aha, sez me, a teaching moment says the old teacher in me.  I explained what we were doing and why. Showed him the baby bean plants because the seeds had come up.

Showed him why we plant bean seeds a couple of weeks apart because I don't want all those beans at once, so we plant them in stages. I explained that the tomatoes would grow and yield nice red tomatoes, the likes of which could never be found in a supermarket. 

Not only did he not know what a veggie garden is, I found out he didn't care. 

He had no curiosity whatsoever.  I asked him to bring me a bag of fertilizer from several feet away.  

He brought two bags to me, the only two nearby. One was lime, the other fertilizer.  The bag had FERTILIZER written on the side.  He either couldn't read or had no idea what fertilizer was.  None.  I finished the placing of the soakers, the mulching, the fertilizing while he watched and then I sent him home.

And we wonder why young folks are unemployed.  I sure know the answer for this particular young man. Not that this couldn't happen with older ones, but it seems to be epidemic with youngsters.

What happened to his natural curiosity, that wide eyed discovery and learning process that every baby is born with?  Did the schools pound it out of him with their regimentation? Did his parents not care?  Why is this happening everywhere?

And with the way the schools and jobs are being dumbed down to suit the new work force, do we care?  Guess the politicians care because an uneducated populace is easier to control.

Who Else Lives Here

Cardinal

Bluebird eating the dogwood berries

       

Along with us and our two four legged inside family members, we have plenty of outside critters to share our space. Some of them walk on four legs, some on two and some just crawl. We love all of our wildlife and would not destroy one of them ever. 

Some of our residents are poisonous, but we have an agreement with them. We don't hurt them and they don't hurt us.

Our house is free of mice and rats and other rodent like critters

They all add to our ecosystem, keep it in balance and provide pleasure to everyone who sees them.

Even the neighbor's cows come by for visits.

Even the panther and the cougar who ran too fast for us to get photos are welcome around here. We didn’t see the bear, but were told by the neighbors that he was wandering around looking for a snack.

Butterflies at Gunner Pool

Momma and baby in the driveway.

Red finch

Indigo Bunging at the birdbath

Scarlet tanager flying away - he's camera shy

Pileated woodpecker. Noisy guy and really big, about 18" tall

We do have other critters, but they are not all 'ready for their close ups'. We enjoy them from afar.

So now you have seen some of the folks we share our lives with and we are richer because of them.

Who Lives Here?

Well, we live here of course. Actually the two of us comprise the staff of all the other residents of both the house and the grounds. That sounds elegant, doesn’t it? Well, it’s far from elegant.  We live on top of a mountain - they call it that. It’s actually a 1200 foot tall hill in the Ozarks, which really aren’t much in the way of mountains either. Not after the Rockies. I mean, c’mon.

So two dogs live here and sleep inside. Most of the time anyway.  The black one who has a mind of her own occasionally decides to sleep outside, so of course we provided a soft bed on the front deck for her to sleep on.

                                               Their favorite activity.

And this is what they do when they are not chasing squirrels or other dangerous animals outside.

Bella arrived in our driveway here before we moved in. We were in our RV in the driveway when we heard a dog yelp in pain. She found her way to the RV door whimpering. It was raining, so we picked her up and in she came, wet and cold. She was a pup. We made the decision to take her to the vet and then to the animal shelter. And then Donna named her. Right then I knew that Bella was not going to any shelter.

The vet said she was probably about 4 months old. That was in March of 2011, so she is about 4 years old now. Whoever abandoned her and pitched her out of their car 4 years ago should be taken out and shot. How can people do that to animals?

Anyway, Bella is probably mostly Golden Retriever, has the black tongue of a Chow and who knows what else is in her DNA. She has very long legs for a 65 pound dog. 

Bella’s talent is eviscerating doggie toys. She can have the floor covered with stuffing in 5 minutes. She is also an uncertified therapy dog. Bella wants only pats and scratches. Many of Donna’s clients came mostly to see and pet Bella. Donna and therapy were an afterthought.

Sandy was abandoned in Slidell LA. She was found by a neighbor of ours who already had 8 dogs. Or maybe nine. Anyway she sure didn’t need any more dogs, so Sandy came to live with Donna, Bella and me. Oh, and her name. I know she is a black dog, but the woman who rescued her, our neighbor, is named Sandy, so now we know two Sandies and one lives in our house and gets waited on, foot and foot.

May I come in now, so I can go back outside?

They are both double coated, web footed water dogs and go in the filthy stagnant farm pond that sits on the rear of our property. And then want to come in the house right away. They stand to get toweled off, but reluctantly.

We have other boarders around here. I may visit them tomorrow and introduce you.