From Paddington Station to Japan

After school today, Nathan and Elena took me to see Paddington 2--which was terrific for the kindergartner, the fifth grader, and the grandmother.

What a wonderful expressive face on this kind little bear!  I fell in love with London and Paddington Bear all over again--and enjoyed all the good British actors, including Sally Hawkins, who starred in Shape of Water and Maudie, and the two Hughs--Bonneville and Grant.

Since we were the only ones in the theater, I took a few screen shots

After the movie, the kids took me to their favorite restaurant, Fujiya Gardens, for sushi.  Ironically, their favorite restaurant was once upon a time the favorite of their grandfather and mine, back when it was on Fredricksburg Road in the early 70s.

Kindergartner Elena and Fifth-grader Nathan love their sushi and dumplings and Japanese sodas!

From another blog....

My friend Diana introduced me to her friend's blog, "Writing For Self-Discovery"--which I always enjoy reading when it comes into my inbox.  Carpe Diem seems to be on the mind of all of us lately and I think this blog post describes it so well:

When Memories Replace Movement – What do I want? by writingforselfdiscovery

This morning I’m looking out a frosty window at a world as far removed from my tropical home as it could possibly be and I’m pondering a question that I answered six years ago:

What do I want?

Moving to Bali was a fabulous decision then. There were no grandchildren. One daughter lived on the West Coast, one on the East Coast, and one in the Midwest. None had married.

Everything changes. I’m here in Minnesota in the dead of winter because my youngest just gave birth to twin boys. Eighteen months ago I was in New York to meet my first granddaughter. All three of my children are beautifully partnered now and their lives have taken on new dimensions. They’ve indicated that my physical presence (more often and prolonged than it has been) is very much desired. They want me to be an integral part of their lives. What a beguiling draw that is.

Yet my love of Bali hasn’t diminished. If anything it’s deeper now than ever. I have an intimate circle of friends. I’ve created a life around writing that nurtures me as does the warm climate. I love the exotic landscapes, the thunderous rains, the balmy winters and the Balinese families that have claimed me as their own. The two scenarios couldn’t be more different or compelling.

There's a ‘knottier’ question though, and I suspect I'll resolve my dilemma as I reach conclusions about this:

At the end of life, what will I regret NOT doing? 

That’s the game changer and it’s a tough one. The unknowns are problematic. There are no guarantees. Anything can happen at any time to alter circumstances. There’s a haunting sense of carpe diem. Time is running out but there’s no way of knowing how much is left.

I want it all of course! I want to experience the joys of participating in the lives of my children and grandchildren. I want to continue my Bali adventure. There are still places in the world I want to see, and some I’ve seen that I want to revisit. I’m fortunate to have those options and the good health to pursue them…now. But most of all, when I approach that future time when memories replace movement and possibilities have reached the age limit, I want no regrets.

Monday Notes

Monday is my errand day--downtown library, upholstery shop, Volkswagen service, AT&T to figure out why my phone only makes and receives calls in the car, stuff like that, then ending with a movie with two Lindas to see Phantom Thread.  I just popped in home to re-heat leftovers for lunch.

My "absorbing errand" is this notebook.  I'm starting mine with a scrapbook of letters, cards, and photos from and by my family.  After putting them all in separate boxes, now I want to lift words and pictures without destroying the originals and put the words and faces in the notebook.  First step is to learn now to transfer images to paper, what kinds of papers to use, and how to paint over the pages once assembled.  It's like making up my own art class, and I'm enjoying it throughly.

The idea is to have all my treasured family memories in one place, so I don't have to search for a particular picture by going through various boxes.  But from that idea springs a desire to learn techniques that I never learned.  The Chic Sparrow notebook covers are almost infinitely expandable, so I highly recommend going to their site and looking at options if this project sounds interesting to you.

Searching for books in the downtown library is fun, but unwieldy for me having been away from Dewey Decimal System for so long.  The good part is that you find books you weren't looking for; the more efficient way for me is to search for books online and have them put on hold at a branch library.  I spent an hour there this morning and they didn't have a single book I was looking for, but I did pick up a book of poems by Ursula Le Guin, who died last week.

First Letter From Day

I have spent this afternoon going through two big boxes of letters, cards, and photographs of my children and using them to make a scrapbook in my new journal.  Memories tumble on top of each other like confetti, going back and forth in no particular order.

Here's my daughter as a baby, then a bride, then a 12-year-old dancer, then a mom, then pregnant before that baby is born, then a mom of two, then a big sister welcoming her baby brother into the world, all aglow with love, then a teacher with quotes on the blackboard....

Here's my baby boy, then a boy batting at a ball in Little League, then a firefighter on his first day standing beside Granddaddy Lloyd, then a daddy of two, then a little boy again riding a tricycle, then a groom, then a baby in his sister's arms....

I found a "Thank you Mommy and Daddy for giving me a baby brother" card from the seven-year-old big sister.

I also found this note on a recipe card:

PLESE COME PLAY WITH ME!  Be my friend for a while. I love you!  Check YES or NO or MABEY SO (With three little squares where I checked yes!) But NOW plese!

I write back: In five minutes.

She writes: NOW 4:29. When you come it will be 4:34.  5 Minutes OKAY


I wish I had hung up the phone at 4:29.  I want those five minutes back.

Sunday Notes

It's rare that the whole Texas family spends the night together, but we had a two-house house party last night--the kids sleeping inside with me, the parents sleeping in the casita.

Joy, Elena loves the book you gave her--
Rodeo with little flaps! 

Jan, Kate, Sebastien and Makken--
Elena thanks  you for the art supplies! 

At the dog park.
 Conway Twitty is the best dog ever!

Elena, Conway, Nathan, Bonnie and Will

Nathan is Mr. Love Bug

May Sarton

Ever since reading Anne Morrow Lindberg's Gift By The Sea decades ago, I've probably read more memoirs and journals than fiction.

There was a time--back when I was leaving the country of Marriage and moving into the country of Solo--that I read and loved May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude. She also wrote other memoirs, all of which I'm re-reading with even more interest than the first time--House By The Sea, At Seventy, and another written when she was 82. She also wrote fiction and many poems.

Here are some May Sarton lines  to start your day:

"Loneliness is poverty of the self; solitude is richness of the self."

"Does anything in nature despair except man?  An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair.  It is too busy trying to survive.  It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting.  Is this the key?  Keep busy with survival.  Imitate the trees.  Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain.  Sit it out.  Let it pass.  Let it go."

"There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious balance. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse.  I lose my center.  I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces.  I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it."

She writes about the lovers and loves of her life--this one in fiction, but still, herself:

"I loved them in the way one loves at any age--if it's real at all--obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them; I put them into novels (disguised of course): I brood upon why there were as they were, so often maddening, don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters.  I lived with their faces.  I knew their every gesture by heart.  I stalked them like wild animals.  I studied them as if they were maps of the world--and in a way, I suppose they were."

Writers of  journals and memoirs--not famous people--are like friends you can visit any time you want, even after they have left the world they write about.  May Sarton is that kind of friend for me.   I still remember reading about her death years ago while I was house-sitting for Linda and Steve on Cape Cod.  I knew her so well, though I'd never met her in person, that it felt like a little grief descended.  But she lives still, in her writing, and what she has to say is as real and true as it was for me when I first met her books.

I sent Day a traveler's notebook from Chic Sparrow and she loves it!  For the past two days, she's been home sick with a cold and we've had fun talking about her plans for doing her journal.  She's a very visual person and will likely use hers for drawing and quilt planning.  Inside each leather cover are four elastic bands--and you can put a journal in each band.  I have one for recipes, one for writing, and one for keeping notes, pictures and other random things.

Here's mine:

Day's is red with pockets inside and white stitching, the deluxe model:

I heard some people talking on NPR about how they are so busy they often wish they'd get "a little bit sick" so they could take a day off and read a book in the middle of the day!  It's wonderful being semi-retired and able to read a book any time we like, or make one.

It's been a good week.  Joy came for lunch on Tuesday; Pam and I shopped at Soft Surroundings, and Elena and I saw Coco on Monday.  Here's our precious six-year-old shopping at a vending machine:

Today I stuck to my plan--to stay home all day and write.

CoCo

Coco is Miguel's ancient great-grandmother

First movie of the year with my six-year-old was CoCo, the Golden Globe winner for animated films--as it should be.  It was a beautiful story about a little boy named Miguel who went to the Land of the Dead to get his great-grandfather's blessings to be a musician.

The animation was impressive on every level and I loved it!  Elena, however, while she watched it with great attention and interest, found it sad.  She only likes happy movies, it turns out.  I didn't find it sad--I thought it was excellent, but it's possibly better for older children and adults than for little kids.

Miguel and his Dog

Miguel's Family:
Day of the Dead

Sunday Notes

I like days like today--when I slowly and lazily check a bunch of things off my list:

Getting both a flu and a shingles shot.  I'd had the shingles shot already, but when a friend got shingles this year, I decided to investigate.  FYI: the old shingles shot was only 65% effective and I remember it costing $300 out of pocket.  The new shot is a two-part shot that the pharmacist recommended everyone getting even if you've had shingles and even if you've had the previous shot. My Medicare covered it entirely and it's not only 90% effective but if you do get shingles, it will be very light.  Shingles can be very serious and we don't want it.

Shopping at HEB, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Trader Joes.  I bought a little gadget a friend had told me about--should you, like me, get the occasional whisker on  your chin.  It's called Flawless.  Everyone says it works.  I'm postponing flawlessness until after my nap and a few chapters of YO by Julia Alvarez and another book I'm enjoying--the Ursula Le Guin essays.

So here I go--about to be flawless, flu-less (I hope) and shingle-less with lots of good stuff in my refrigerator.

All that and a stack of good books calling--what a good day!

On Walking

From today's Brainpickings--by Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind and The Willows:

Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking — a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree — is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you whilst you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life firth of every sort under your feet or spell-bound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that…; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow.

In a sentiment which, today, radiates a gentle admonition against the self-defeating impulse to evacuate the moment in order to capture it — in a status update, in an Instagram photo — Grahame observes:

Not a fiftieth part of all your happy imaginings will you ever, later, recapture, note down, reduce to dull inadequate words; but meantime the mind has stretched itself and had its holiday.

Saturday Notes

If I could make one retroactive request from the maker of people, I'd ask for a teeny tiny bit more of Carlene's DNA in the mood department--and a few other departments I won't mention at the moment.  But for today, my funk has lifted, as have the aches and pains that precipitated a week of low energy .   After a few days in the doldrums, it's such a relief when it passes and the physical pain along with it!

For one thing, the weather has turned--and that's always a good thing for the body cold-sensitive conditions like Crest. 

For another thing, today has had so many pleasures:

Chris came to San Antonio from Kerrville to take a poetry workshop at Gemini Ink, and we got to have a too-short but wonderful visit and lunch together at Adelantes.

Then Pam asked if I wanted to go to Soft Surroundings (my personal favorite clothes store) and I wound up buying two pair of good jeans and a blouse--with Pam as my super shopper advisor, running in and out of the dressing room bringing me jeans to try on.  We decided that you get what you pay for in the jeans department--no more Ross and thrift shops for jeans!  Besides, if you spent enough, which I did, you got a free Baby Foot.

Commercial Moment:  This product is one that really works--if you have leathery soles from going barefoot, which I do.  It's $25 and it takes off all the rough skin after about a week of using it only once. I used it last year and the results were impressive.

So now it's almost night and I'm planning on Pleasure #whatever: starting the new season of Frankie and Grace on Netflix while eating bacon and eggs and grits.

No Time To Spare

       Well, we've had a touch of rain overnight, looks like!  The plants will be happy--those that are left after the freeze anyway.

       I'm reading a book of essays "Thinking about what matters" by Ursula Le Guin, the prolific writer in several genres.  The actual title is No Time To Spare--a title that grabs us all.

       An almost-ninety-year-old writer, she writes about age, time, writing, and cats in these short punchy essays.  Pam delivered the book to me on Thursday and I plan to finish it today, but it's one that will keep unspooling in my mind after I've finished.

       Okay, so aging: Many of my friends, like me, will soon or have recently turned 70--give or take a half-decade or so.  A few are older, a few mere babes of fifty-something, but all of us are aware of time: what we do with the time we get, what we've already done, and what we might as well put in the "not likely to get done" bucket.

       Ursula Le Guin faces aging head on, and she objects to the chirpy reassurances of younger people, "You're not old!" We can know, from experience, what it feels like to be thirty and forty, but they cannot know what old feels like.  I remember not knowing, back when we seemed to have forever ahead.

       Old is not entirely chronological--some people are vital into their nineties, some are old at sixty.  But still--let's face it, she says--we're old in a culture that values youth.  We don't have all the time in the world and it's imperative that we choose the life we want for as long as we're here living it, doing what we choose to do with what Mary Oliver calls our "one wild and precious life."

       In her title essay, "No Time to Spare," Ursula Le Guin writes, in a nearly ten-year-old essay (after being queried by Harvard: "What do you do with your spare time?"):

     "An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome.  But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied.  I am free, but my time is not.  My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing  prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen...with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes...with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Crazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep.  None of this is spare time.  I can't spare it.  What is Harvard thinking of?  I am going to be eighty-one next week.  I have no time to spare." 

Friday Notes

Quote Of the Day:  "A man should never be ashamed to say he's done wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."  Alexander Pope--a quote found in the lid of my tea.

Question of the Day:  Why can't a government shut-down include the closing of offices of legislators, White House staff and POTUS instead of national parks?

Pleasures of the Day: Going to yoga with Jan at Two Hearts.  Spending an hour poking around in Barnes and Nobles while drinking a cup of chai.  Two enjoyable phone calls.  Jan giving me her recipe for delicious soup.

Misery of the Day: Trying on seven pair of jeans at Ross--none of which fit or looked remotely flattering.

Happiness 2

        "Happy childhood = Happily Afterwards" is not always true, but if it is for you, please let me know.

         Happy comes and goes, sometimes settling in for a while, sometimes elusive, sometimes ramped up as jubilation, other times more muted.  My emotional weather patterns vary, but when CREST flairs, my HQ plummets for days at time.  I've been struggling off and on with winter blues and this autoimmune disorder, so decided today to reboot, to see the rheumatologist, to be reminded of the elements on the protocol that I need to follow more stringently: avoiding foods and drinks that contribute to inflammation.

        The anti-inflammation diet is essential for people with auto-immune diseases, but I've been gotten off the wagon a bit lately, which may account for the blues and myalgia.  I don't have fibromyalgia, just simple myalgia--which means muscle aches.  What sets off myalgia is sugar, fructose, gluten, Diet Coke, artificial sweeteners, etc.

        There are so many factors in the happiness factory!


         "This is Us" is a series about a family: three children of two  parents who love them and each other.  In some episodes we witness their childhood in flashbacks; in others we see the children as adults.  Their mother is married to her late-husband's best friend.

        The adopted son, Randall, the "easy" child, is a great father and husband, though he has his own anxieties, one of which is the imprint of being abandoned as a baby. The daughter is obese and addicted to food, and she's about to get married. The biological son is, in this season, in recovery from alcoholism.

        As part of his recovery program, his mother and siblings attend a meeting with him, and they all wind up saying things they've kept to themselves for years--their resentments and beliefs about each other. It's rocky, honest, and real.

        In "Rita"--the excellent Danish series I just watched--Rita is a wounded child, sometimes reckless in her personal life, a single mother of three, a chain-smoker, and a wonderful teacher. She takes risks in her professional domain--and those almost always advantage her students. No cookie cutter teacher, working in the less rule-bound Danish system than ours, she relates refreshingly honestly to children, including her own.

It is January 16th and I have spent this cold, cold day entirely inside.  Schools are closed and the streets are quiet.

My CREST is exacerbated by cold air, so my sweetest neighbors, Jan and Kate, brought me both brunch and dinner--delicious!

There's a beautiful movie on Amazon: MAUDIE.  It's based on a true story of a woman in Nova Scotia who painted even though she had severe and crippling arthritis.

A series on Netflix, I'm enjoying tonight is RITA--a Danish movie about a teacher named Rita.

Travelers Notebooks

Last week, I discovered Travelers' Notebooks: leather-covers which can be customized to hold whatever you'd like: smaller journals, planners, sketch books, each held in place by elastic bands.  It's such a big thing that it has its own Facebook page and a bunch of videos on Youtube.

Check them out on Amazon and Chic Sparrow.  You might like them, as I do.  Women (on You Tube) use them for planners, art journals, recipes, travel journals, and memorabilia.

They come in all sizes, in various colors of leather.  Day had given me some thin journals for Christmas and they fit perfectly into the size I chose--along with a few other soft-cover journals.

It inspired a different kind of journey: going through letters, papers, my writing, old journals, handouts, recipes, birthday cards, some e-mails I printed back in the days of AOL.

Here's how far I got before stopping to watch This Is Us: I separated them into categories.  The next part of the journey is going to take some time, but I plan to put the best of the best of what fits into my new turquoise notebook, while also adding new things to it.



 

Making Art = Happiness

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. (Pablo Picasso)

Elena, Sebastien and Makken
painting coffee filters

This is Gran-Jan showing off her coffee filter creation

Elena helped me clip pieces of plants that had frozen and fill up the pots for fresh plantings.  She had a choice--go see Coco or make things--and she chose making things.

And then, of course, we had a Glue Party!  We kids love putting Elmer's Glue all over our palms and peeling it off.

The Glue-Hand Brothers

The search for happiness: 1

I had a happy childhood--which, to me, means I had parents who loved each other and their children and showed it every day.  I assumed (since television families also seemed happy) that this was the way of the world.  When  I did see glimpses of less happy childhoods, or heard rumors of divorce, it was shocking.

Only when childhood is long over do most people talk about it, write about it, and see that the experiences of childhood unhappiness colored the rest of their lives.

A few days ago I posed the question: when have you been happy--or happiest?  I haven't gotten but one response so far (hope I get more!) but this letter  (from someone who wants to remain anonymous) affected me  deeply:

Anonymous:

I've had a margarita. It has prepared my psyche to share my thoughts on happiness.  What is it?  I feel as if I've pursued it for several decades. A glimpse of it appears occasionally.  Childhood experiences write on the slate of who you are or so Dr. Phil says.  I believe it.  How do you see your father try to choke your mother without being impacted?  How do you experience your father calling you a whore on your wedding day without carrying the sting of that for the remainder of your life? How do you remember like yesterday the strange feeling when your parents didn't argue using the word divorce for about a month and trying to figure out what felt weird about your daily life?  How I envy the children who didn't believe that the word divorce was the family normal.  

I've always had enough food, shelter, clothing.  I'm grateful for a mother that was rigidly stable.  Her life might have been more fulfilling had it been more flexible, but it helped balance my father's volatility. 

Some of this pain probably comes from beginning a life review as I approach my birthday  The great escape I made when I married led to decades of wishing I had found another way out of my hometown.  At the time, with no money and no skills, marriage felt like the only alternative.  

Anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure, best describes my current state of mind. This will pass, but I can't remember happy.  On a cognitive level, I'm sure I've known happiness, but I'm unable to access it. 

Fortunately, I know steps to alleviate my current state.  This is the knowledge that comes with cycling in and out of depression since 6th grade. The steps toward a healthier state of mind are in my knowledge base.  It's highly likely that I will take those steps and feel better.  In fact, I just took the first step by writing this email. 

Getting What You Want

Good morning, Everybody!  And good morning to the frost on my windshield!

One thing I love about the cold is that it keeps me inside doing things I've been saving for days like these.

Yesterday I made two soups and put them in containers to warm up for tonight's guests--four friends celebrating Gerlinde's birthday.  I loved chopping onions and garlic.  I love getting under the covers and reading when the house smells like simmering meat and vegetables.

Anyone my age, give or take a decade, knows the iconic Rolling Stones song,  "You can't always get what you want...But if you try sometimes, you get what you need."

It came to mind as I was watching "This is Us" and it's been looping over and over in my head ever since.  Betty and I love the father of the triplets in this series.  He's not perfect, but he's about as close to perfect as a woman might want in a man--so I'm pretty sure a woman made him up.

At Marga's party on Monday, she read a line from Picasso that goes along with the theme--she's going to translate it from German and send it to me and I'll give you the exact quote--but it goes something like this:

"Finding and searching are different things.  To search for something is to look for something lost, something stored away.  I go out to find-- to discover something new, something I didn't know was out there."

Marga  enjoys traveling solo.  Her friends were aghast when she took a trip to Berlin alone.  "Won't you be lonesome?  What if you get lost?"

"No," she said.  "In meandering around, I'll find new things, meet new people, experience things on my own.  There's no compromising about what to do, what to see, and if I see a path, I just take it."

I'm sure she also enjoys traveling with a good traveling companion.  But if the companion isn't interested in a particular trip, or if there is no companion with whom to travel, a solitary trip has its perks, too.

To search for the "perfect" man or the "perfect" house (or the castle or whatever described in the travel brochure) can be a set up for disappointment.  Rambling the back roads of life, you find people, out-of-the-way adventures and scenic views that are not pre-packaged: maybe imperfect, but yours for a moment or a lifetime.

Or--to combine Marga's, Picasso's, and the Rolling Stones: we don't always know what we want, but when we find it, it just may be what we need, or maybe even what we love.

*****

The Picasso Quotation

Pablo Picasso –

Quotation appears to have been listed in the volume Picasso:  Ueber Kunst  (Picasso: About Art) – published by Diogenes Verlag, Zuerich, 1988, an edited volume that contains excerpts from Picasso essays related to art & artists.

Text of quotation is in German; translation from German into English: M. Speicher, 2-28-15


I do not go searching – I find.

To go searching, that means to go looking for goods that had been stored & were used up

and wanting to find what is already known.

To find, that is the fully new.



All ways are open, and what is found is unknown.

It is daring, a holy adventure.



The uncertainty of such daring can be undertaken only by those who know that they are secure in insecurity,

who are guided in uncertainty,

who let themselves be pulled by the goal

and do not determine the goal themselves.

First day of 2018

This morning begins mine and Betty's 70th year here on Planet Earth--as she reminded me in a midnight email We've known each other (and mostly loved each other except for third grade when we fought over Brenda Cootie) for 65 of those years!

This year will mark Carlene's 93rd year, Will's 40th and Elena's 6th--and that's just the youngest, one of the middles, and the oldest. Six years ago, on the 16th of January, Elena came into the world two months before we expected her, a tiny four-pound magical being.

I watched several episodes of "This is Us"--a series that features the kind of men Betty and I think we'd have done well to choose all those years ago--then fell asleep to the sound of fireworks in the neighborhood.

Firsts and lasts collide on New Years Eve at midnight when the year ends and the unknown year begins.  I woke up thinking about how many people are sleeping off hangovers, how many babies were conceived in the celebratory mood of the night, how many feet are waking up aching from high heels and dancing.   I couldn't help thinking, too, of all the families grieving over the death of someone they loved in 2017--by gun violence, disease, drugs, fires, and storms.  

This will be a year of first steps on little baby feet, last steps, and feet that can't walk at all.  A year of shouting and making love and secrets coming out of closets.  A year of refugees and homeless and hungry; a year of prosperity and luxury travels.

I'm going to a party this afternoon at the house of a Marga, a woman I admire so much--one of the women featured in the book for which I was photographer: Wonderful Old Women.

Then on Wednesday night, I'm having a gathering here at my house of four other wonderful women to celebrate Gerlinde's birthday.