These Are the Champions

 

As I watched Opi, sweet Obi, our cat, old and frail and growing thinner by the day, lick the light stream of water from the kitchen faucet—he likes his water fresh and flowing—I knew he would soon leave us and join Zoom Zoom, the cat who traveled to and from Hawaii with us. Zoom Zoom spent the better part of a year on my desk, getting off only to use the litter box—thank heavens for that. He even ate on the desk. (I had a long, wrap-around-the-corner one.) Those wild pigs that marauded in the night were more than he could handle. A mouse that big? No way.

Zoom Zoom and Opi--a desk can get really crowded.

In Eugene, Oregon, a group of five women, a like-minded group, who had similar spiritual understandings, studied ancient mysteries, went to lunch together, celebrated birthdays, and parties where we dressed up. Someone sang or recited a poem they had written.

Now there is only one—me.

Those women walked the earth; they lived their lives—some lost spouses, some divorced, one remarried—they raised their kids, and developed their place on the Spiritual platform of life. One taught us how to die; she knew it was time, she stopped eating and died.

Joy dropped from them like diamonds.

I will be forever grateful to have known them.

You’ve heard of the butterfly effect.  Ray Bradbury wrote of it in a short story. Arrogant time travelers went back to the dawn of life on this planet to see dinosaurs.  One person slipped from the wooden pathway that kept curious onlookers from disturbing the ecological system and accidentally crushed a butterfly. That small step altered history forever.

We don’t know how we affect the people around us—the air, the water, the plants, the animals, the planet.

What did John F Kennedy say?

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

See why there was such hope then? See why the young people rushed from their college studies to join the Peace Corps? See why we believed we could send a man to the moon?

We had excitement. We had hope.

 

Well, it’s been a wet week in Junction City. And I had been putting off painting the Tiny House because it was too hot to paint outside. You could call it Resistance, procrastination, or "I don’t want to do that," but I committed to doing it.  We debated about the color. I couldn’t find one I liked. Okay, we agreed on a color.  I bought the paint, brushes, roller, long handle, and the following day it rained. For three days it rained.

I negotiated with someone to paint it for me, for it has a high peak, and I’m not so steady on a ladder anymore. I’m not ready to join my friends on the other side.

It isn’t painted yet.

And then yesterday, old friends came in the form of BOOKS. Daughter Dear came into my office carrying a box, and asked, “Do you want a box of your old books?

“Sure,” I said, not knowing that they had been buried with my husband’s old research materials and shop supplies.

Wow! What a find!  There's that Orchid lei book my son-in-law gave me for Christmas in Hawaii. I had looked all over for that book, but not in the right place, obviously. There was the Kumulipo, A Hawaiian Creation Chant, translated and edited with commentary by Martha Warren Beckwith.  I excitedly found that book in a bookshop in Hawaii years before we moved there. I knew it existed and never thought I would have one. Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, one of the all-time great writers on writing, and Seabisquit by Laura Hittenbrand. What a writer! The first paragraph in the Preface of Seabisquit has my vote for being the best written:

“In 1938. Near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year’s number-one newsmaker was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn’t the Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn’t even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.”

“In the latter half of the Depression, Seabiscuit was nothing short of a cultural icon in America, enjoying adulation so intense and broad-based that it transcended sport. When he raced, his fans choked local roads, poured out of special cross-country “Seabiscuit Limited” trains, packed hotels, and cleaned out restaurants.”—Laura Hiittenbrand.

And you know I love horses.

Diamonds appear all around us while we feel hamstrung by a man who wants to rename New Mexico for heaven’s sake. He’s like a bird who steals other birds’ eggs or an old dog who pees on everything and says, “Mine, mine, mine.”

 

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man.”

We need a champion like Seabiscuit, who helped people out of the depression.

Any volunteers?

I love you guys. 💗Thank you for the honor of your attention.

 

P.S. Why are the cats champions? Because they brought us joy.

How About the Price of Those Eggs?

 

Or...

The good, the bad, and well, what I’m doing.

You know how we have had a long record of wrongs the President and his cohorts have done to harm this country and alienate our allies. Now you know he is changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America; how insulting is that?!

Well, that isn’t what I want to write about.

Notice that we don’t see much about the Epstein files anymore—he has done a good job turning our attention away from those.

I didn’t want to write about those either.

After committing absurdity after absurdity that would take pages to enumerate, and you guys know them already anyway, he is now setting the stage as he did before the last two Presidential elections, making us doubt the legitimacy of any election where he is not the winner. And look what he is doing with AI, portraying himself pumped up, then insulting his opponents. They are as fake as his qualifications for being the Chief of this country.

And the Republican Party is holding on by the skin of its teeth. Don’t you wonder why?

Ha ha. “Money makes the world go round.”

 

Sometimes we need to shut up and let a picture tell the story.

This is from Robert Reich’s Substack post:

$594 million in 2017 from his own endeavors.

$ 2.24 billion after he became president.

How do you like the price of those eggs?

Holy Schmoley!

A Reprieve:

Saturday: My daughter, grandson, and I visited a farm where she chose two baby goats to be Daughter Dear’s in the middle of September. 

I sat on a pile of pallets, and one little female goat climbed onto my lap and slept while Daughter Dear talked with the owner. She will be getting neutered males, gently neutered, using rubber bands. All the females were already reserved.

Neutered males are called wethers, and they are gentle and lovable; we know because we had two when we lived in the forest of Oregon. 

Here are two little females we bottle-fed in Hawaii:

All our goats kept the brush around the house cleared. All were free-range because we had the room. The goats we will get this time will need to be penned. Too bad, but necessary.

We hear goats love to eat blackberry vines, and blackberry vines are taking over the back portion of the property. Husband dear had cut them a few months ago, but the vines loved their hair cutting so much they broke out in song and grew new stalks.

I won’t use poison on them—and they know it.

Goats to the rescue. We have an extra wild area behind the outbuilding behind our backyard we call the Wayback, where I have my office and where I am writing to you right now.

My Saturday lap baby wasn’t for sale. The young man who ran the farm adopted her. She was the third of triplets to be born. Two larger, stronger males were born before her, and the mother said, “That’s enough,” and focused on the strong ones. Her adopted dad takes her into the house at night, and she sleeps on his lap.

I was recharged on the farm. I felt its peacefulness the moment I stepped out of the car.

Back to Writing:

For the last couple of weeks, I had been rewriting old stories, editing, and submitting some to agents with no responses, but I had a brilliant idea.

“You need to write a new book.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, write about things working instead of things not working.”

You know that people loved Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield—it sold a kazillion copies.

You know that people loved Robert Fulghum’s “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?” It was on the New York Times List for almost two Years.  

So, see, people do like uplifting stories. Yes, yes, I know, those were non-fiction. I am talking about fiction.

It doesn’t matter; it tells me people want to believe in good, to see the world as a safe place, to realize life has its struggles, yet to hold an idea such as W. Clement Stone had when he said, “I believe God is a reverse pessimist; He conspires to do me good.” With fiction, you need conflict, or you have no story—so say the writing gurus. Okay, we’ll see what transpires.  

Then, to give me cause for pause, this week I read a post by an author saying he gave up writing and it almost killed him. He had written a book; it was published and got good reviews, but it didn’t sell.

He was devastated.

He languished in misery. Stopped writing. Took up tennis, and became fanatical with it: lessons, practicing daily,

He didn’t miss writing.

And then it slammed in on him. He did miss it.

So, why am I writing when there are authors far better than me out there?

Because I want to.

So, I began, and for the first 24,000 words it flowed. It felt like the universe was throwing helpers at me.  Amazing people (fictitious) appeared on the road to somewhere.

 

Elevator pitch for “No Working Title:”

“Fifteen-year-old Josie is on the run—no folks, her 92-year-old grandmother has died, so with a GED, a driver’s learner’s permit, and being an emancipated teenager, she and her dog, Zeus, climb into Grandmother’s pickup and aim for parts unknown.”

 

P.S. Josie grows up.