Truth, Love, Biology, Stones

 “I wasn’t born in a barn, but I got there as fast as I could.” A kindred spirit wrote that. Actually, barns aren’t my forte. I like the wild open green fields where the animals frolic, and the air smells fresh.

But I loved my run-in barn, 24 x 12 feet, open on one side where my two horses could be dry and out of the rain. And I kept the rubber-matted floor clean. They used one side for their hay, and the other side for a bathroom. It worked perfectly. I cleaned it every morning.

My love of horses must have begun when I was six years old, before I ever touched one. My father took me to the carnival when he came home from the war. I lusted after one of their prizes: a small horse statue. He bribed the hawker to sell it to him—I’m sure that was meant to be a surprise when he won it, but I knew the truth, and it forever endeared him to me. He disappeared from my life after that…for 38 years.

When I was nine years old, my mom and step-dad moved from a small town in Oregon to a house on one acre of land outside the city next door to a farm with a number of acres, two horses, a cow, chickens, and rabbits. There, one of their two daughters, a high school student, would pull me up behind her on their big horse, King, and we would take off roaming the countryside.

The other daughter rode their old mare, King’s mother. Sometimes we would go to the store to buy Grape Nehi, or to the creek to swim, or to an old racetrack grown up in weeds but still fun to encircle. During hay season, in the cool of the evenings, we tried to get the horses to jump the small piles of hay the boys raked up from windrows into small stacks. Only the horses plowed through instead of jumping them, and we had to rake the hay into a pile again.

Why Lois spent time with a nine-year-old is beyond me, but I will be forever grateful. She was my mentor, and she sent me on a journey of wishing, dreaming, and praying for a horse of my own.  

Three years later, we moved away from Lois and King, but I got Boots. My horse. A super horse. My step-dad chose well. I totally loved that horse.

And now I am in love again.

With baby goats.

It happened yesterday when I drank my morning coffee sitting in clean, sweet-smelling straw, holding a baby goat. He was quivering, and I held him until he was warm and snuggly. The other goat was a bit standoffish, but by afternoon all of us were sitting in the sunshine, happy as three otters on a creek bank, with the babies nibbling grass and crawling on my lap.

Daughter dear, grandson and I picked up the goats on Sunday afternoon. It’s Tuesday now, and we’re settled in, happy. This morning, I, again, drank my morning coffee sitting in the straw and holding a baby goat. They greeted me with “baas.” I thought they were crying yesterday, but I think they were happy to see a person.

How am I going to get anything done?

These are boy goats, but will not be Billy goats. They are called wethers; that is, a neutered goat. They haven't had surgery, but they have rubber bands—you figure it out—it’s your biology lesson for the day.

And now I am here with you. It’s Tuesday, blog day.

Last Tuesday I was a mess. I had already written the blog the night before. I would clean it and publish it in the morning, I thought. The trouble was, when morning came, I fiddled with it. I didn’t like it. I changed it. I lost it.

Lost it? What the heck? Where did it go? I searched. I thought I could get my history back. I couldn’t.

After hours of trying, I rewrote the blog, but it didn’t have the enthusiasm of the first. I thought I had it together.  I wanted to get my blog out. I hit publish. Then refused to look at it for two days. But when I did, I screamed bloody murder.

What a mess.

I’m embarrassed.  

I cleaned up my mess, and I’m off again. It will not stop me.

And this brings me to the question I began for this post a few days ago: “Why is it that when someone from the opposite end of the political spectrum from me will say I’ve been lied to, when apparently they've been given the truth?”

We used to expect people to tell us the truth. A liar was soon ignored.

Ignoring or shaming tended to weed out liars. Honest Abe, remember him? Nixon probably would have gotten away with his break-in, but he was caught lying. This administration can lie right to our faces, even with fact-finders right behind him, and half the country doesn’t care.

But half the country does care—you know how a lie will travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. And the people who care are walking the hard road, against constant opposition.

It used to be that we expected reporters to have integrity. Do you know what integrity means? I thought it meant telling the truth, but it actually means speaking within one’s own moral system. Can you believe it? A person with no morals can tell you lies and be within their own integrity.

This shocked the heck out of me.

But this morning, I looked up the word integrity. I found it described basically as I originally thought—to be honest.

Integrity:

• Honesty: A steady refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any situation. [1, 2]
• Consistency: Acting in the exact same ethical manner whether people are watching or not. [1, 2]
• Wholeness: Deriving from the Latin word integer, meaning a state of being whole, complete, and undivided in character. [1, 2]
• Soundness: Maintaining an unimpaired, solid condition, often applied to moral character or physical structures. [1]

 

Do definitions vary? And if it’s from AI, AI knows only what we tell it.

How can it get smarter without the data in the first place? It’s like history. His Story. Written by a man. Recycled by a man. Run through the biases and the thought processes of a man.

 

What if the data is wrong? Whoops.

 

Yesterday an ad caught me. I was curious –a honey cure for Alzheimer's? Only one dollar a day? It can be found in your kitchen? Numerous celebrities, their voices and faces online, claimed that their fuzzyheadedness disappeared within a week. They could remember words again. I looked closely; has this been AI-generated?

The faces didn’t look exactly right. But wouldn’t the media need permission to use people’s faces and voices to sell something? Would celebrities allow that?

Honey is a hot topic these days. It’s good for you; it’s not good for you. Alzheimers is a hot topic; everyone fears it. The fear of losing our memory—now that’s a good distraction.

It isn’t plaque buildup in the brain that causes Alzheimer's, so said this ad, it was something else. Okay, I’ll bite. What is it?

I watched for at least one half hour—it felt like an eternity. That’s one reason I blog—you can read me in two minutes. And if this has any AI content I will jump up and down and scream.

I hate those long commercials that give their credentials, their life story, their research, their conclusions, and then I find that, of course, they had made a world-shaking discovery, something they would sell to you.

Whoops, I told you my horsey life story.  

This particular ad I’m talking about came from substances found on a tiny island with fresh, unspoiled soil, water, and nutrients not found in the US. They believed two minerals found there could soak up the toxic metals we accumulate over time that cause Alzheimer’s. One was found in their wild honey. The other was in their water.

The people raised on the island rarely got Alzheimer’s.  

A picture on the ad showed someone stirring honey.

I saw no kitchen, and no menu.

But I did see a bottle of capsules available for purchase.

How much did they cost?

You had to wait a while until they disclosed that.  

The special price was reduced to about one dollar a day.

They did not mention that confiscating that rare and precious commodity would use it up. I don’t think there is an endless supply of wild honey on a small island.

I wasn’t born yesterday.

But I don’t want to doubt everything either.

This is like the touchstone, said to bring one’s heart’s desire. Legend said you would recognize it by touch, for it was always warm. A person learned it was on a rocky beach, and so he searched, picking up stones to feel their heat. And so, to eliminate the stones he had checked, one by one he threw them into the ocean.

One day he found the stone; it radiated an uncommon heat. It was the touchstone. His arm, however, had become so used to throwing stones that before he could stop himself, he slung it into the ocean.

Sleepy time.

P.S. The ad I mentioned is considered a fraud.  Bill Gates does not have a cure for Alzheimer’s. How can whoever controls our information get away with this?

Something

 

 

I thought I would make you hungry. This doesn’t have much to do with the story I’m telling, except that I mention the Carnegie Deli in New York, and at the time I was writing about it, it was closed. I wondered if it still is. It is open, and here is a picture of their Rubin sandwich.

 I should have sent this blog four days ago when I was hyped, tickled, and excited.

For some reason, I’m not today.

Maybe I’m scared. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe it’s a completion let-down. Maybe that our washing machine broke down and I need to clear the space for the delivery man to bring in the new one. - Life happens.

Maybe it's not knowing if this novel I’ve had in the works for over thirty years will go anywhere. Yet, yet, I love my characters. They deserve a life, not to sit languishing in my computer.

In my novel,  Song of Africa: Miss Sara Rose wrote at the beginning of her journal:

“There is an old saying that once we start weaving, the gods will provide the skein.”

It turned out to be true for Sara and for me. I did not know when I began writing this story where it was going or where it would end. But the ending came.  A second Sara, a young Sara, entered the picture and completed the story.

I did not see that coming.

When I began this novel, I heard that a protagonist needed to be young and beautiful. So, out of rebellion, I choose to write about an unmarried 65-year-old schoolteacher who retires on the first page. She is beautiful, I couldn’t resist.

“A spinster school teacher?” said a friend. “That will never fly.”

“Oh yes, it will. You don’t know what happens in the story.”

Also, at the beginning of this writing, I didn’t know how a 65-year-old woman would feel.

What a difference 30 years makes.

Of course, I haven’t been working on this story for all of those 30 years. I have done other things, but I kept going back to it. I have aged. My story has evolved. I figured it was my learning story. At first, I wrote by hand, then I learned to compose on the computer. And when I tried to add dialogue, exposition, and description all wrapped together as true novelists do, I felt like the carnival performer spinning plates on vertical poles. The performer runs from one pole to another to keep the plates spinning, if one gets wobbly, it is likely to fall.

Five days ago, I was about ready to chuck the whole thing, for I couldn’t get the beginning right, and after tearing the chapters apart to have time jumps, I put them all back together in chronological order.

Miss Sara Rose leaves her little town of King’s Valley, Kansas, and embarks on her lifelong dream—to ride a river in Africa. And there enters The Rocinante, not the river boat of her dreams but a broken-down old launch (named after Don Quixote’s horse) that takes tourists up and down the Gambia River. The Rocinante has a skipper, a Caucasian engineer from Los Angeles, California. Thus enters a new life for Sara, a romance, a granddaughter, and when another Sara, Miss Sara Rose’s namesake, arrives, well…how much should I tell?

Surprise, I unintentionally ended up with a beautiful young protagonist.

It is the story of three women, Miss Sara Rose, her granddaughter, Patrice DeShane, and Sara Andrews, Aunt Sara’s namesake, their lives and loves. At the present time, it isn’t so outrageous to write about older people falling in love. See, if you wait long enough, your idea will become common. Better get with it to be on the leading edge.

I love hearing about work in progress, so I thought I would tell you a little about what I am doing. And that it is important to complete a project.

When I read the Introduction to Rosamunde Pilscher’s, novel, the NY Times bestseller, The Shell Seekers, where her publisher tells her he would love to make her rich and famous, but so far, she hadn’t produced the goods, she asked what that might be. “A story that spans your life,” he said. “a big fat novel for women.” She took the challenge and in her 60’s wrote The Shell Seekers. When she heard the news that it was a best seller, she was home alone in Scotland, so she shared a celebratory whiskey with the dogs.

I took that as a directive for a novel that spans some 80 years.

Song of Africa, a novel of 96,326 words.

Working cover by me: