The Raven Lunatic

Bird-watching a part of Tri-State's culture

2012-02-10T13:49:00.002-06:00

Good Morning

Bird-watching a part of Tri-State’s culture

Do you like watching birds feed? One of my great joys in winter and early spring is watching birds outside my office window. When I started working at home full-time, I took the television out of my office, avoiding one temptation for mindless distraction.

Yet, almost every day, I witness an amazing show at the feeder with more drama, pathos and humor than any television soap opera.

Two pairs of cardinals visit often. The scarlet males first check out the territory, and then the chunky females swoop in while their menfolk stand guard. One of the males often lands on my office window ledge and peers in, as if looking directly at me. (My always-indoor cat really enjoys this part, but while I see beauty, he sees dinner.) Bird-watching is a cherished part of Tri-State culture and history.
In 1810, a businessman named John James Audubon left his Louisville, Ky., mercantile to go west. “West” in those days meant Henderson, Ky., on the banks of a mighty river and close to the confluence of another.

Henderson is where Audubon — one of America’s greatest naturalists and artists — first pursued his hobby full-time.

Did he view with awe the same array of birds in the cypress sloughs near the Ohio River that we do today?

It was in these woods that Audubon first gained the inspiration for his “Birds of America,” a four-volume set of drawings that shows native birds in natural settings. Audubon left Henderson for New Orleans and, ultimately, England. He did not achieve his greatest fame until after his death. One of his folios sold at auction at Sotheby’s in London in 2010 for $11.5 million.

Both Audubon’s work and his inspiration live on at the John James Audubon Park off U.S. 41 in Henderson, as well as the Audubon Museum. Roads, buildings and infrastructure for the 724acre park were built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, with community support.

Today, you can experience numerous artistic treasures that Audubon painted, because Henderson librarian Susan Towells had the foresight in the early 1900s to put her passion for all things Audubon into action.

In addition to a complete folio of his four-volume “Birds of America,” the museum has many paintings as well as many objects from Audubon’s life. I particularly enjoyed a painting of a barn owl, because it was so familiar to me, having grown up in rural Indiana.
The detail in the paintings is precise and uncanny in its realism; one must see them up close to fully appreciate how amazing they are.

On my visit there, I learned there is an actual bird called a “snipe,” and it is not just the subject of a teenage prank, that popular game known as the “snipe hunt.”

The three galleries of the museum also have several Matthew Brady photographs of the Audubon family.

Of course, the park offers a multitude of other activities perfect for a winter or early spring day.

The trails in the park offer spectacular bird-watching opportunities. Perhaps you’ll see an eagle flying off in the distance or just enjoy the quiet of the trail as Audubon did.

— Amy Abbott amy@amyabbottwrites.com


Powered by TECNAVIA		Copyright © 2012 Evansville Courier & Press 02/10/2012

Notes from the Boobal Region

2012-02-06T15:57:00.001-06:00

Today I hit the two week mark on my new diet, lifestyle, imprisonment, mere existence. I have lost eight and a half pounds, which I celebrate because last week I lived in an assisted living facility with my parents. The facility had a fixed menu, and my mother’s failing health added a twist of stress.

The best aspect about this particular plan is that I am not hungry. It is similar to a diabetic diet, and the plan stresses eating six times a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and three healthy snacks. As someone who works at home, grazing is a concept I totally get. (Except I wasn’t grazing on celery sticks and yogurt dip, I was grazing on frosted sugar cookies and Coca-Cola.) If I eat what I’m supposed to eat, I’m not ravenously hungry. That’s improvement.

It took me a long time to gain the weight so I know it will take a long time to go off. I also have the metabolism of a miniature snail; I’m planning to walk with a friend several times a week when it gets warmer. I continue taking water aerobics classes three times a week.

As far as my body goes, I’ve noticed a slight change in the boobal regions.

My cuppeths no longer overfloweth.

While I compare my sturdy rack with that of the Green Lady in New York harbor, I do admit the girls weigh me down. How can Lady Liberty hold up her giant bazongas as well as that huge torch? My shoulders and upper back would really hurt.

I will know I have achieved success when I can buy a bra instead of a “brassiere.” If you don’t know the difference, think back to your childhood and remember Great Aunt Mabel who enveloped you in bosoms at every family reunion.

That’s what I’m talkin’ bout, Willis.

Getting weighed at the center is the worst aspect of the new lifestyle. Today I went in for my weigh-in, carefully planning to wear my summer Reeboks instead of heavy leather shoes. One cannot game the system too much.

I hate going in there. Immediately, its high school and I’m the fat, nerdy girl from the newspaper staff who is interviewing the head cheerleader. (I really did that once, God help me, and I have the clip called “Do Stereotypes Exploit Cheerleaders.” Yeah, we were still using Up Style in headlines, and gluing stories on paper with wax. Raise your X-acto knives in solidarity if you know what I’m talking about here.)

The women in the lobby, waiting to be weighed, would be anorexic of they just took off scarves and jewelry. All of them seem to know each other, and none of them know me. They hang around and jingle jangle jingle and pontificate on how much weight they have to lose. It is always seven pounds. All of them just need to lose “seven pounds.”

Just for effect, next time I’m going to take my pica pole (yeah, I still have it) and whack a couple of them on the head to shake some sense into them.

If I could just lose seven pounds, Muffy, then I can wear those white pants on the cruise to Antigua.

Muffy and Buffy and Cindy and Googie eventually all got weighed, and ran in circles screaming in delight over their mutual successes, and got into their white Lexus SUVs and drove away.

My little toe weighs seven pounds. I waited my turn, all the time observing behaviors for my best-selling future book, “My Ass Used to Weigh a Ton.”

Dad's New Normal

2012-02-03T12:40:00.000-06:00

This ran as a cover piece and Editor's Pick on Open Salon on Wednesday February 1, 2012.

Forty-eight hours ago I thought my mother was going to die. Soon, just two months shy of her 80th birthday. In the last week, she has lost the ability to walk and feed herself. Her lucidity has seriously declined, she has full-body tremors on and off, and she mumbles to herself most of the time.

I sped the 200 miles north to see her yesterday and she was in terrible shape when I came into her room. , I almost did not recognize her, as she sat in her wheelchair in her room. She was missing her signature pearls, and wearing a grey sweat-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to accommodate her petite frame. She couldn't lift her head.

I said, "Hello, Mom," and she looked up at me and said, "Hello, sweetheart. I love you."

Mom has decided she isn't going to die yet.

After watching her decline for ten years, I've made my peace with her dementia.

But it isn't about me.

Nor it is really about her right now because she is getting wonderful care, and unlike many older adults in the world, has everything she needs and plenty of love.

Now I worry about the new normal for my father, whose entire life has revolved around her care.

He was up an hour before me this morning, and went to the gym to exercise. He huffs and puffs as he walks now, but he is doing as well as can be expected. At breakfast his first cousin whom my father resembles joined us for breakfast and they told stories and speculated on tonight's primary. (I've always suspected my father was a closet Democrat; seven years in a retirement home adjacent to a major university has solidified his liberal leanings. Sssshhhhhhh. Don't tell anybody.)

The change in Mom's condition has wrought one good consequence; as a family, we reviewed Mom and Dad's advanced directives and final arrangements. My dad, brother, and I sat around their kitchen table with a big white binder in which dad had everything organized. Their funeral plans were made more than 15 years ago when everything was different.

The thing I admire the most about my father is his remarkable ability to adapt to change. From the death of his father when he was four to the loss of all of his siblings, Dad has manged to handle life with grace and a sense of humor.

Most of his named pallbearers were already dead or too old to lift a big oak box, and he laughed about that.

As soon as my brother left, Dad went to bed and I could hear him snoring almost immediately in the next room.

About an hour later, he woke himself up screaming and nearly scared the daylights out of me. He had a bad dream. I went into his room and talked with him for a bit, and he was better this morning. We labeled Mom's clothes and took her clothes and shoes over to see her.

While Mom is still unable to walk or get out of a chair, this morning she lifted her head when the physical therapist came to discuss the therapy assessment with dad.

Dad introduced me, and Mom lifted her head and reached out her shaking hand at the therapist, who happens to be quite easy on the eyes.

"I'm Marilyn," she said and flashed him a huge smile, her green-blue eyes blazing blue.

The human spirit is a great mystery, and the older I get the less I understand. For whatever reason, she is not ready to go, and was still quite capable of flirting with a handsome man.

What to take?

2012-01-30T07:49:00.000-06:00

My mom was moved into a skilled nursing unit today. Yesterday she fell again, and my father hurt his shoulder trying to get her up off the floor. She has been having breathing problems for 24 hours and isn't lucid or able to walk more than a few feet.
This morning Dad called the ambulance again, and they ran the same battery of tests the Medical Folk ran last weekend.

We all know what is happening. After ten years of dementia, her physical body has had enough. The question is: how long will it take? A day? A month? A year?

I'm going to visit her tomorrow, leaving my husband at home. He has diabetes and I worry about him, so today I roasted a turkey breast and made a healthy fruit salad and did six loads of laundry and basically behaved like someone on speed.

Now I'm finished with all my chores, and trying to figure out what to take. How long will I be gone? I don't know. Should I take Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes? I don't know.

After pondering this for a few minutes and running off my mental checklist of all the usual items: it hit me.

I know exactly what to take. I'm taking my books, my "Poems for Boys and Girls" by Helen Ferris, "Little Brown Bear Goes to School", and my Lutheran Book of Prayer.

My mother was an elementary school teacher and read to my brother and me constantly. She loved words and how they fit together in poetry, like pieces in a puzzle. So I will read her "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and things by Longfellow and Teasdale and Kipling. I will read bits of The Bard and I will read Luther's Morning Prayer.

I will read about Brown Brown and Miss Ringy Raccoon and the picnic with the chocolate cake. And somewhere, in some sweet space, on some level, I know Mom will again savor these words she read to me.

Sixty Years Ago on the School Bus

2012-01-28T16:45:00.000-06:00

This post was published on Open Salon on January 27, 2012.

Last week my mother took a fall, and although the ER said nothing was broken, she is weakening physically and appears to be in a huge decline. Her physical weakening has happened over the course of a year or two, but in the last six days she has almost gone to being bed fast. Today my father is getting help in their apartment, and I will be going in a few days just to provide him some respite.

Her time is coming. She is only 79 but her quality of life has decreased tremendously. She is getting wonderful care, and has a loving family who gives all they can give especially my dad. But he is exhausted.

I can't go today, and I feel so helpless. My brother is two miles away and I'll be there next week.

I probably think about it too much, but your mother is your mother. Most people would agree it is the most complicated relationship of your life. My mom suffered from depression most of my childhood; only when Prozac came out did she have a few good years before the dementia got her. When she was not depressed, she was sunny and talkative and funny. She was also a very good friend to many people.
How fortunate I am to have had her in my life until now.

I have a newspaper column that runs in a number of papers in my state. I don't often write about her dementia but I did this week. This morning I got the following email, which was a huge gift to me. And I don't even know this person.

Dear XXX
Where to begin ?? I know you, but you do not know me so will try to explain. But before I get into the subject, I/we love your "Raven Lunatic." It is delightful and I/we felt sadness reading the one regarding your Mother and her illness. Your Mother is the reason for this email. And this is just a little history of your/our family a few generations back.
Your Mother & I attended Center School together until she left to finish her schooling in Fort Wayne. We were good friends and I missed her smile and quick laughter. We rode the bus along all the bumpy country roads laughing when we were bounced and jostled about going over big humps and potholes, which was an almost daily occurrence. She was not only a good friend but a very kind person to all. We, my husband and I, learned to know your Dad as we always included them in our yearly 1950 Class Reunions. And yes, he is a nice person too !
Your Aunt was a friend of my older sister, also in the same graduating class sharing many happy memories. If you talk with your Aunt please tell her my sister is still in her own home taking care of herself very well.
Now on to your Grandmother Lenore. She and my husband's Mother, Fern XXXXX XXXXXX were friends all there lives, going to the same school. In later years, the "girls" as they called themselves, would visit, having coffee or perhaps tea, and reminiscing of their younger years and life in general. They grew up in really hard times and it was interesting to hear how they made things out of almost nothing. I especially remember their long conversation regarding televisions being in every one's home and how it would be the ruin of the country/nation !!!! And perhaps they were correct.
We are truly sorry to hear of your Mother's illness and the last Class Reunion she attended I was able to converse with her some, however knew she was not herself. How fortunate to have so many resources to help. If she has a good day tell her I said hello and give her a hug from us.
Again, we love your articles in the newspaper. You do a beautiful job !!
Your Mother's friend,

XXXXXXXX

I'm Glad I am Not God

2012-01-28T16:42:00.001-06:00

Published on Open Salon, January 25, 2012

My father has been having a bad week. Since my mother fell out of bed on Saturday morning, she has declined steadily.

Dad called the ambulance right away and they rushed her to the Emergency Room of the closest hospital, where they completed a battery of tests. Nothing broken, they said, and sent her home.

Of course, she cannot tell my Dad if she has pain. Her awareness, like Elvis, has long since left the building.

She isn't eating or drinking much, and she can't go more than ten feet until she is tired. They have a doctor's appointment for her in a few days. You know how physician's offices are; appointments are made on the triage system and doctor availability. Mom stands in a long line of geriatric women with dementia who are declining. The ER sent her home, there's not much else to do but wait.

Dad is frantic and tired and I don't always get the full story. I'm not really able to make the 500-mile-round trip this week.

Dad went to Walgreens this morning to pick up four prescriptions. He didn't notice until he came home, less than half a block, that they only gave him three. He called the Walgreens number and got someone at a call center. Three layers later, he got to talk to someone in the store, who figured out what was going on. He was very upset and frustrated by this, and out of breath from being angry. He is my mom's primary caregiver, and at 81, he has a six stents in his heart and has survived a heart attack.

My mother hasn't had a bowel movement for four days, and won't drink much of anything. I suggested -- from 250 miles away -- that he give her prune juice with a shot or two of 7-Up. Four or five months ago I gave him a recipe for "Power Pudding" that will do the trick, but he won't make it. Rather, he gives her two stool softeners, and the result of that is not pretty nor welcome by anyone. I've tried to convince him that she needs to have some prune juice or power pudding every day, but he doesn't want to hear me.

He also told me this morning that she had not had a shower in a week, because she was too unstable on her feet. Then he said he had gotten a shower chair. I felt awful, didn't I work in health care for thirty years? Shouldn't I have figured this out? But he didn't tell me, and things have obviously deteriorated from when I was there three weeks ago.

Dementia is like this, and I feel like I can write about it from somewhat of a "bully pulpit." My mother has had it for ten years, and three of my four grandparents had it.

My parents live in a retirement home, in the independent living area. Moving there was a wonderful idea, and they live about two miles from my brother who is very helpful with them. But they missed the window of opportunity for assisted living. She no longer qualifies, and I'm waiting for the day when they want to throw them out of "independent" because I think the only reason she is able to still be there is because he takes care of her.

She qualifies for home health care, but Dad doesn't want other people in his house. This makes me so sad because it would be such a relief to him. A nurse or social worker would come to the apartment and do a full assessment of her needs. Things like the shower chair, or a walker, or things I cannot even imagine would be offered.

Dad finally got a wheelchair through Medicare but he doesn't like to use it. I understand his point that it is good for her to walk, but I think we are passing the Rubicon here and I know it is so hard for him to deal with. This is the love of his life; they will have been married 57 years this summer.

She has a Parkinson's like gait (we've had her tested, she doesn't have it) but obviously has many neurological problems related to the dementia. She is unable to get out of a chair by herself; I wanted Dad to get a lift chair and he would have no part of it. I do know how to get an older or disabled person out of a chair--the old linking elbows trick--but he would have none of it and pulls her right up. It is uncomfortable for her, and I cannot imagine it does him any good either, but he persists. And he is her 24/7 caregiver.

I go to visit every three or four weeks and that gives Dad time out of the apartment. He also has a sitter who is terrific and provides wonderful care, but he is reticent to use her when Mom is "backed up."

We are coming to the point of no return, and I really don't know what to think. Should he get assistance in the apartment, or should he move her to the skilled unit in the same building? Money is not the main issue here, they have LTC insurance (which would have paid for some of the assisted living had they done it soon enough.) Maintaining the apartment and a skilled room will use up all their resources, which is fine, that's what they are for but its still a worry. They can cover it for four or five years, and then what?

I can't worry about the "then what" today because I have to worry about today.

One Day at a Time Sweet Jesus, One Day at a Time

2012-01-24T11:58:00.002-06:00

The first day of the new life is pretty tedious and I'm really really grumpy. I spent most of yesterday getting the food ready but I still wasn't completely ready.

I started out wrong. I am to make a "tea" with frozen lemon juice, hot water, and a sweetener. I bought the frozen lemon juice and put it in the freezer.

First mistake. You can't put it in the microwave because the bottle will explode, and, well, it was still frozen.

I've never been a big breakfast eater. My usual deal is something from the drive-up at the neighborhood coffee shop. This lifestyle change is going to require a sit-down breakfast with food that is laborious to chew. Since bread is a no-no, the diet requires making special oat bran muffins.

The little muffins will take some getting used to, but I appreciate them in the same way that I appreciate a new pair of Naturalizer loafers. And I'm fairly certain they taste the same.

I facilitate a women's group at our church. My "girls" range between ages sixty-something and eighty-something. After a nearly thirty minute breakfast, I scurried over to the church with my materials and my boom box.

I played some music—being a progressive ELCA Lutheran by theology, I am a Bible-thumping Baptist by music thanks to my paternal grandmother.

One of the songs was "One Day at a Time Sweet Jesus." I think this is going to be my mantra, though I became less spiritual the longer the session went on.
Sometimes we get off topic. We were talking about Jesus gathering his disciples, as the lectionary is now past Epiphany.
Today the girls got off on "cursing" and all I could think about were the bad names I had called that blasted muffin just an hour before. I imagine I'll be thrown out for swearing a two-by-two blob of oat brain and grated apples.

Being with these women who have lived amazing lives always buoys me up, so I was feeling pretty good at the end of our session.

Time to get weighed.
I arrived at the center thinking I could discreetly go inside and get weighed and get outta there. No, take a number for a consultation with a counselor.

There was a morbidly obese woman with a walker sitting near the door, and a crowd of women who were "Me in My Forties" discussing nail polish colors. I sat down next to the morbidly obese woman and smiled.
After a few minutes I was called back and weighed. I know I am a lunatic but every time I go in there, all I can hear is comedian Steve Martin's voice and he is saying, "Looks like we're gonna have to measure you."
I stepped on the intimidating scales, I weighed ten pounds more than I had last Wednesday. How could that be?

Then I looked at the chart. The person who weighed me had reversed two numbers.

The counselor asked me if I had any questions and I asked about olive oil instead of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." Her answer was "only in cooking," and she was somewhat disdainful.
This kind of thing makes me crazy, because I don't see what difference it will make. However, this is a path I have chosen for six weeks and I'm going to give it a try and not nitpick it to death. My other way of doing things, with the olive oil, sugar, candy bars, and chips, hasn't worked for me, so I need to be open to it.

Now I'm at home, having tackled my mid-morning snack and that blessed lemon tea (which really isn't that bad). I put a plate of celery to graze on until I make my lunch.
That should only take four or five hours.

Disclaimer: I'm not going to be writing about this diet every day for the rest of my life. Thanks for putting up with this. It's just how I cope with change. It helps me sort out my own thinking.

Monday is the first day of the rest of my life, dammit.

2012-01-22T16:49:00.000-06:00

Watch me, I'm stepping out on a long gang plank, and I'm not sure if I can dive in.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life, dammit.

Yeah, right. Who wants to believe that hackneyed old cliché?

For maybe about the gazillions time, I'm going to eat better, improve my health, and walk to the mailbox without huffing and puffing up and down our steep driveway. I'm starting a new diet plan that involves my going to the diet place three times a week and eating what is basically a diabetic diet.

My husband is a Type 2 diabetic and is also overweight, and is going along for the ride.

I've been overweight since my second year in college when I became acquainted with Mr. Miller (and his close friend, Mr. Miller-Lite). Wish I could tell you that I have some kind of deep psychological problem that makes me eat. It wasn't so much the beer, but all the carbs that went with the beer.

Frankly I think I'm a pig and I like food. A lot. I like food way better than alcohol. Gun to my head, there would be absolutely no choice. I would select the Béarnaise sauce over bourbon any day.

And I really like sugar. I would say by an addict's definition, I'm a certified sugar addict.

In my dotage this past year the weight has become a problem. I hurt my knee over Labor Day weekend, and I learned that I have severe arthritis probably due to a fall three years ago. For weeks I could hardly walk and it was very painful. The coup de grace was having to have my husband push me through the Louvre on our Once-in-a-Lifetime Special Trip in a wheelchair. Let's just say it probably inhibited our enjoyment of that special morning a tad, and I was embarrassed because it was about bad choices I've made.

I have been doing water aerobics in a heated pool two or three times a week for about two months. That is helping, but it isn't enough.

I have to do something else. And I'm scared. It's hard.

One day at a time is my mantra.

I have no clue if I can make it even one day without eating the crap I like. I choose this particular local plan because you can eat lots of fruit and protein. I've failed on Weight Watchers, both the class and the online version, because I eventually game the point system.

This Snickers bar won't hurt me today.

Oh, but it will.

And then I'm hungry because I've eaten empty calories, and it doesn't work for me.

So I've decided to try this way for six weeks. That's the first commitment. I can do this. It's only six weeks.

Today we went to the grocery and bought everything we need for the first week. I made a special muffin recipe that they want you to eat. I am getting ready to make "snack packs" of fruits and vegetables for us this week, so we can just pull them out of the fridge. I'm hard-boiling some eggs for protein snacks, and I ('m going to make juice from some beautiful oranges.

But for right now, I'm going to use up the last of the cream cheese and white bread and make some cucumber sandwiches for dinner. Every condemned man (or woman) gets a last meal.

EWoman "Between Us" column January/February 2012

2012-01-22T11:48:00.001-06:00

Ask me if I'm nervous

2012-01-22T11:45:00.002-06:00

Nervous, easily agitated, devastated, just plain jumpy

Amy Abbott

Thursday, January 19, 2012

When I was a child, my brother and I loved to ask my father, "Are you nervous?"
Dad would respond like a jittery Don Knotts on the old Steve Allen show with a high-pitched, "No!"
I come from a long line of nervous folks; people who are easily agitated, upset, devastated, reactive and just plain jumpy.
Ask me if I'm nervous today, and I'll jump 40 feet in the air and say "No!"
Tuesday started with oversleeping, and much scurrying around because our main bathroom was out of order. We hired "Handyman Kevin" to remove the 1977-era teddy-bears-on-the-beach wallpaper that was outdated and sappy when we moved in years ago. Repainting that room had taken a back seat to other priorities, like a new furnace or college tuition.
After that late start, I went to learn about a new weight loss plan.
Yes, you are correct, this is January. This is what I do every January.
This is the year. No more excuses. Won't I feel better when I've lost 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds? Why, I'll be able to roller skate! (No, I'm confused with the film they show fourth-grade girls reaching a certain maturity, "Now, You Can Roller Skate!")
The woman at the weight loss clinic took my "before" picture.
I said, "Oh, heavens, I have on a sweatshirt."
She said, "Fine, we want you to look as sloppy and fat as possible."
Guilty as charged.
Getting my picture taken made me more nervous.
Why did I think it was a good idea to get a double shot of espresso at the coffee shop on the way home? A double shot is not a relaxing antidote to an anxiety-laden morning.
I came home for two hours to put the finishing touches on the longest piece I've written since college. Thirty-five hundred words, plus a 600- word side bar. The story involved interviewing a dozen people and a great deal of research, writing and rewriting.
As I finished editing the final draft, the painter started putting up the molding with a nail gun. The main bathroom is next to my office.
Rat-tat-tat. Boom. Quiet. Rat-tat-tat. Boom. Quiet. Rat-tat-tat. Boom. Quiet.
I know he's just doing his job. Am I nervous? "No!"
I finished the story, despite the constant staccato blasts from the nail gun next door, and it was time to leave for my next appointment, my annual dental checkup.
Nothing like being stoked up on caffeine and nerves whittled down to the nubbins by the nail gun noise in preparation for a nice, hourlong siesta in the dental chair.
Something about scraping six months' worth of espresso off the back of my lower teeth, you guessed it, makes me nervous!
It went better than I thought with the hygienist until the dentist came in, and said, "I want to try this new camera on you." I asked him if there was going to be any additional expense, because we do not have dental insurance (a sad state of affairs that also makes me nervous, and has changed my behavior. I no longer eat hard candy or caramels.)
He said, "Let me show you on the screen."
The wall-mounted TV showing Dr. Oz went dark and my third upper tooth on the right showed up with an obvious crack in the top.
The dentist did not say this, but this is what I heard, "That will be $1,000, please, and we take MasterCard and VISA."
Just as I arrived home, I remembered a friend was coming over to pick up an extra printer we have. I hadn't moved it, so I could demonstrated the copy function, and of course, it immediately jammed.
My friend did not say this, but this is what I heard, "What a bargain this is!"
I opened several of the multiple odd-sized printer doors, and found the jam. Yes, I fixed it, but the whole encounter made me nervous. The nail gunner was gracious enough to put the heavy printer in my friend's car.
I just needed a nice, relaxing project to finish my day before I made dinner.
This wasn't it.
After giving my dad "Time" magazine for Christmas for the last 20 years, Dad decided to order his own copy, for whatever reason. Getting duplicate copies made him extremely nervous, so he asked me to take care of it.
I'm putting it off until tomorrow. I don't think my heart will take talking to a robot that doesn't speak any human language. I'm pretty certain if I try to deal with this today, I will become easily agitated, upset, devastated, reactive and just plain jumpy.
— Amy Abbott, amy@amyabbottwrites.com

Cowboy

2012-01-21T22:17:00.000-06:00

This piece ran originally on Fictionique (fictionique.com) on Friday, January 20, 2012. The author gives special thanks to LC Neal for her excellent editing of this piece. This is a work of fiction based on some facts.

He was eight when his father died.

Cowboy was a picture perfect little boy; blond curls and happy blue eyes. Despite his mother’s protests, he wore his tan cowboy hat and black, hand-tooled boots in the house. She insisted he take off his holster and silver-toned Colt 45 cap gun when he came inside, which wasn’t very often; not if he could help it.

He preferred being outside with his pony, a chestnut brown with a mane so flowing it could have been from a horse in one of his storybooks. He loved riding, often miles out to the west, pretending he was The Lone Ranger. Hi yo, Silver–and the chestnut pony flew nearly as fast as Silver in Cowboy’s mind–but when he came to the river, he never crossed. His parents insisted insisted he wasn’t old enough, not until he had graduated from a pony to a horse of his own.

He dreamed of himself at twelve, riding a big gray mare. When he was grown, maybe he’d head way out west and beyond, to New Mexico. He’d heard stories on the radio and from the farm hands, of the big cattle drives back to Texas. Young, tough men, real cowboys, drove enormous herds to market, through eastern New Mexico and on to Abilene, along the old Goodnight-Loving trail.

Cowboy thought about those journeys at night in his upper bunk, with his little brother sleeping peacefully below him. He would dream his dreams at the river’s edge, and turn around to ride his little chestnut home through fields where giant sunflowers lined the fence rows. He imagined the vast cattle ranches, where cowboys rode tall horses with saddles higher than a man’s head, across endless miles of trail, through vast open grassland. In his dreams, he saw cattle grazing, unencumbered and free, with only a few fences and gates. He would bring his own mare; he knew she’d have a good spirit, with a gentle mouth and an easy gait.

On the day his father died, Cowboy sat on the floor of his parent’s room inside the drafty old farmhouse with his little brother, and cut paper cowboys and horses out of old copies of The Drover’s Journal. The morning was steamy hot, a day you don’t expect to be so warm, so soon after planting season. His mother and the priest stood next to the metal framed bed, his mother fingering her rosary; the room was still except for the buzzing of flies, and the occasional sound of a labored, final breath. Focused on their play, the boys wouldn’t remember much about that day except for the glossy paper horses that crumpled too soon in the heat. Their older sister hung to the back of the room near the open window and twisted her braids, much as her mother twisted her rosary beads.

Cowboy would remember small details of his father later, like going to Mass and listening to him breathe too hard as he knelt to pray. He would remember his father’s admonitions not to cross the river on the chestnut pony, to always come home by sunset. He would remember him shoeing horses, a wisp of a memory of bitter metal and smoky smells. Mostly he remembered scents—the leather of his father’s broad saddle, the sickly sweetness of his father’s sick room, the tobacco his mother hid after the lung problems came back.

When Cowboy was twelve, instead of getting a tall horse of his own, his mother lost the farm. She couldn’t make it without her husband, asleep in his grave for four years. She and her children moved to town, a village of 500 people with nothing more than the small wooden Catholic and Baptist churches and a brick school. Cowboy hated it—he missed his pony that had gone to a neighboring farm. Even though he was too old to ride her anymore, he missed caring for her. There was nothing for him to do outside of school; his friends all worked on their own or other farms. He spent hours in his room looking at old horse magazines, occasionally walking the two miles out to an old neighboring farm to see his pony or help put up hay.

Waiting.

On a day soon after Cowboy passed his sixteenth birthday, the noon school bell rang and he walked out the back door of the schoolhouse for the last time. His mother was still at work at the café where she made rhubarb and blueberry pies at dawn, and hustled plate lunches for traveling strangers and neighbors until her children came home from school. She saw him standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and knew he was done. She didn’t say a word, put her plaid apron in the back room and motioned to her oldest son to come with her.

They walked to their little house in silence, and she led him to the lean-to that sheltered the family’s pre-war truck; beat up from years of riding on rutted farm tracks. In the rusty truck bed sat his father’s saddle, polished meticulously in contrast to the pocked metal truck walls.

His mother wiped her eyes, and said, “Go into my room. Look under the mattress and you’ll find ten one-hundred dollar bills. I’ve been saving it.”

Then he got in the old truck, headed west and crossed the river; his father’s saddle behind him, shining in the western sun.

Mothering, Over Time

2012-01-17T23:33:00.000-06:00

Open Salon Editor’s Pick

JANUARY 16, 2012 5:47PM

Mothering, Over Time

Something happens to your brain chemicals when you become a mother. That chemical change never, ever goes away. No matter how old your child is you worry.

Yesterday we put our only child on an airplane to go back to college for his final semester before graduation. I hugged him, and watched him walk away with his carry-on luggage and a small backpack.

And I swear, truly I do, that it was just yesterday he stood—wearing a red polo shirt and plaid madras shorts—waiting for the bus to take him to kindergarten. (The plaid shorts were probably a mistake, only one of many I’ve made as a parent.) That day I watched him step up onto the bus, and watched the yellow oversized vehicle wind around our street and back to the main road.

Our son has some minor special needs, and was in special education classes until second grade. For his kindergarten year, he spent half his time in special education class and the balance of the day in a standard classroom. He was the only five-year-old at the school who ate lunch in the cafeteria.

I worried every day at 11 a.m. (his lunchtime).

Would he be able to even find the cafeteria in that big building? Would he be ostracized because he was the only five-year-old in the cafeteria? Would I physically go over to the school, stand next to the hallway window, and secretly watch? (I did not.)

At his first teacher conference, he had it all figured out. He owned the place and was proud to show us the walk from his classroom to the cafeteria. Everyone seemed to know him, because as the smallest child in the cafeteria, he stood out.

Now he lives in a major urban area, and uses public transportation. During his freshman year, I worried. Would he be able to navigate the city, a place where he didn’t know anyone? Would he be able to figure out the maze of the Metro system? Would I have to go there and drive around, spying on him? (I did not.)

At parent orientation, our group leader told us that every year she sees freshmen come to campus who seem terrified and unsure of anything. A miracle happens, she said, in four short years. She will often see those same formerly frightened frosh—standing confidently in business attire at the Metro stop—heading downtown for an internship or job interview.

Most of my worry was for nothing, but all mothers know

you just cannot turn it off. Worries roll in our heads like waves upon a beach, sometimes subtle and sometimes crashing.

When a child is born, assuming he is healthy, the mother is generally relieved that the birth is over. That relief lasts for about thirty seconds until that child is placed your arms. I remember thinking, “How in the world will I know what to do? I can’t protect him anymore.”

With an infant, toddler, or young child, your worries involve safety and security. There’s a trick, however that you won’t read about in any baby book. Worries just change, they don’t disappear.

Is he ready for cereal?

Did I leave the iron on while I stepped out to answer the phone?

Is there an unprotected outlet anywhere in the house?

What if he doesn’t pass the kindergarten readiness test?

Should he play soccer or baseball, or both? Why is he sitting on the bench all the time?

Why can’t he figure out fractions?

Am I letting him watch too much TV?

Should I let him stay overnight at John’s house?

What if he can’t remember his locker combination?

Is he ready to drive alone? Can he make a good left turn?

Why isn’t he home yet?

What if he doesn’t do well on the SAT? What if he doesn’t get into college, and if he does, how will we pay for it?

What if, when, where, why?

And if you are very lucky, your worrying never ends.

Simplicity lost among all the choices

2012-01-12T06:29:00.002-06:00

Good Morning

Simplicitygot lost amongall thechoices

I grew up in a small Indiana town of 1,200 people. My family shopped at the corner IGA market. When my mom asked me to stop by the store after school for a loaf of bread, I chose from Holsum white or wheat or IGA brand. There might have been a loaf or twoofRomanMeal. There weren’t many choices.

Today we are overwhelmed with choices. No matter the item, it generally comes in multiple sizes and colors.

The increase inproduct choices reminds me of the switch from broadcast to cable television. How excited we were in the early 1980s that we would have multiple viewing choices. In the Fort Wayne area, we received only four or five broadcast signals. Even the basic cable of 1981meantmore choices, and initially that was so exciting. Today we have a digital cable spectrum, and even the new digital broadcast offers more choices.

I’ll go out on a limb here, and say that having 900 channels doesn’t really make any of them better. It just means there are more of them. And I think this is true for most products.

I’m not sure that quantity equates with quality; for me it just means confusion.

Recently a neighbor stopped by and admired our new refrigerator. He and his wife are interested in getting a new fridge at some point. He asked if he could come over another time and get the dimensions to see if the same model would fit in their kitchen. Wanting to save them a trip and get exact measurements, I looked in the manual that came with the fridge we purchased last summer. The manual did not contain dimensions, which struck me as odd.

I then went to this national brand’s website. While I had the model and serial numbers, I did not have the “item number” which is apparently different fromthemodel number. I was astounded that therewere multiple versions of this same fridgewith minor differences. Evenwith the numbers I had, I could not find the exact fridge.

Next I tried the company’s online chat.

I’m fairly certain I was talking to a robot. We’ll call her “Peggy.” Peggy was exceedingly polite and talked to me as if working from a script. My favorite part was when she said, “I can understand your frustration” as if directed by some off-screen cue because nothing I said indicated I was upset.

Peggy apologized that she couldn’t helpme unless I had the receipt, which was filed neatly away in my husband’s desk. At this point I had already invested enough time in this conversation. Nothing is simple anymore. Lesson learned and duly noted. When in doubt, go the simple route. Measuring tape it is.

Amy Abbott amy@amyabbottwrites.com


Powered by TECNAVIA		Copyright © 2012 Evansville Courier & Press 01/12/2012

Wedding Vows for the Long-Term Married Couple

2012-01-06T11:28:00.002-06:00

Originally published at Open Salon.com

Photo from Village Voice.

When you marry in your teens or twenties, there’s a magical quality to the ceremony. The white dress, the special music, the old brides dabbing their eyes with linen handkerchiefs only used for such a day. In front of each other, you recite your vows while your friends and relatives watch, tearfully or tragically. You break the glass or light the candle or drink the wine.

And then the real work begins.

The idea of getting remarried, or at least updating vows, might be of value to the long-term married.

We’re going on three decades, and like that old Honda in the garage, we need a tune-up and possibly a new fan belt. We’ve been faithful, obeyed each other in sickness and health, yada yada yada.

We need vows for a new time in our lives. And I wouldn’t mind going to Vegas and reciting them in front of an Elvis impersonator, but that’s just me.

For Him:

I, State Your Name, continue to take thee to be my wedded wife, despite reservations that defy common sense.

To have and to hold from this day forward, or until the Mayan calendar ends,

For better, for when you mate my socks, or make refried beans for dinner,

For worse, such as when your elderly parents and your brother with his bourbon bottle visit for days on end and eat hundreds of dollars worth of food,

For richer, for poorer, until Social Security and Medicare kick in,

In sickness with your constant hot flashes or in health on those days when your hormones aren’t raging and you actually behave somewhat human,

To love you even when you constantly ask me inane questions about football or when you mess up the remote on the big tv every time or forget to write down how much you spent for groceries in the checkbook

And to cherish you until death do us part and you cremate me and take my insurance money and go to Hawaii for a month.

Thereto I plight thee my troth for at least another thirty years

For Her

I, State Your Name, continue to take thee as my wedded husband, even though I really don’t like Sports Center or you running the channels constantly with the remote I can’t understand

To have and to hold from this day forward or until global warming sucks all the air and water from our universe

For better, on those nights when we can read side by side while listening to Riverwalk Jazz,

Or worse, when we have to drive somewhere we are obligated to go, but it is dark and neither of us can see well,

For richer, when we were able to travel to London and Paris and pretend like we are of Royal Blood even if we are on a tour bus with 30 other Baby Boomers.

For poorer, when we sit at the kitchen table and try to figure out how to pay all the bills because I lost a good job three years ago and now started my own business.

In sickness, when you are crabby because you have a minor cold, and in health, when you are so happy you’ll take all the recycling stuff to the dump by yourself on Saturday morning

Thereto I plight thee my troth for another three decades or so of bad puns and silliness and staying up too late

For Him

I will dig in my dresser drawer for that simple gold band we bought at Service Merchandise for around fifty dollars, and I’ll look at it once in awhile and remember that I am married.

For her

I’ll wear my wedding ring, also purchased at Service Merchandise for around thirty dollars, to business functions where I want people to know I’m still married.

Voice of deceased minister who married this couple, though he's been in the St. Peter's Lutheran Cemetery for fifteen years.

By the power vested in me by the State of Indiana and the Lutheran Church, I pronounce that I’ll be damned you stayed married for almost thirty years, and you seem good to go.

I now pronounce you Old Married People.

Coworkers of record

2012-01-04T12:35:00.002-06:00

My coworker has severe halitosis. I know this because he gets in my face multiple times a day and screams at me until I give him the attention he desires. He is self-centered and likes to distract me when I’m in the middle of deep concentration on a new project. And he just doesn’t really ever seem to consider my feelings. His attitude mostly stinks, and he looks like he is pissed off most of the time.

Since I entered the work force in 1971, dealing with co-workers has been a challenge for me as it is for most people. In more than four decades of work, I’ve encountered a cast of characters that would enhance any Frank Capra picture.

My first job in high school was with a weekly newspaper. Two elderly men set the type on ancient Linotype machines in the a.m., and headed for the local tavern in the p.m. I didn’t last more than one summer until I was lured away by the salary and glamour of working as a Dog N Suds carhop. There my co-workers were mostly high school cheerleaders who worked wrapped up in a boyfriend’s leather jacket and his oversized class ring anchored with wrapped yarn on her finger.

In college I worked in the dining service on an all men’s dorm, collecting dining cards before the dinner meal. My co-workers were primarily community women who donned silver hairnets with rhinestone accents while they scraped the mashed potatoes off the ceiling that the residents liked to toss upward.

When I finished graduate school I started in public relations with a university. On my first day my boss took me along to a luncheon meeting with the news director of a local television station. My boss and the news director managed to each down about five martinis and we returned to the office at 3 p.m. I was used to drinking Wisconsin Club beer at five dollars a case, and wasn’t sure the whole martini thing was a good idea.

Throughout the years, I’ve had co-workers who kept bottles in their lower desk drawers and opened the drawer frequently during the day. I also worked for a man who spent the entire day reading the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers in his office, never even disguising this fact. In a Florida hospital, I had a co-worker who kept a “teeny tiny handgun” in her purse (just like Nancy Reagan). Ironically, her boss was one of my co-workers who kept a bottle of bourbon in his lower desk drawer. Somehow the handgun and the bourbon never met, which is probably a good thing.

Guns also represented a “management problem” when I moved back to my home state and worked in a leadership position at a rural hospital. The night-shift surgical nurses didn’t like the 100-yard walk to their cars, and several kept handguns in their lockers near the surgery suite. This was several decades ago, before public places posted signs about such things. At the time, it was a controversy and employees felt that their “rights” were being trampled upon. The hospital got a night security guard and inspected the lockers.

Now I work at home, and my current co-worker doesn’t have a problem with guns or alcohol. The good news is that he shows up to work on time every day, scratches the back of my chair, and jumps onto the desk where he lies peacefully most of the day on my papers. Several times a day he’ll see a bird out the window and get in my face to tell me about it, but a few rubs under the chin and he settles down.

Despite his usual frown and negative attitude, at least he shows up and does what he is supposed to do.

2012: the year to overcome being overwhelmed

2011-12-31T13:19:00.000-06:00

2012: The year to overcome being overwhelmed | GOOD MORNING COLUMN

Amy Abbott amymcvayabbott@gmail.com

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Everyone in my family makes fun of me because I'm the Queen of Calendars. Every December I'm convinced that the new calendar I buy will be the best one I've ever had. This is the year, I tell them. This is the year I get completely organized.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who believes this. Many stores have calendars and planners in special displays.
But according to local professional organizer Amy Payne, getting organized is more than getting a new calendar.
Payne had a life changing experience several years ago at the Dallas Home Show. Payne, who is the mother of three young children, visited several booths hosted by professional organizers. She was immediately excited about the career opportunity.
Payne, who was an administrative professional, felt that her background in keeping others organized lent itself to the field.
"I help people go from overwhelmed to freedom," she said. "I help them get organized, and more important, learn how to stay organized."
Payne admits she was not born organized, but was "forced into being organized."
"I had two Type-A parents who are very organized and ran a tight ship," she said. "And I had three children in 3 years. That caused me to have to be organized."
Recognizing that the New Year often motivates people to get organized, Payne offers three tips:
Do something. Many people think about getting organized, but they are afraid to do something. Do anything. Take just one step in the right direction, and don't try to do everything at once.
Look online for ideas about organizing. There are many websites, blogs, books, and various resources to help you get organized for a specific area of your home or office.
Hire a professional. If you are completely overwhelmed and you aren't sure what to do in taking that first step, call in an expert.
"The main aspect of organizing for the New Year is developing new habits and routines. Finding systems and ways of organizing that work for you is the key," Payne said.
Calendars are important; Payne prefers an electronic calendar (an iPhone) and uses the app Pocket Informant (www.webis.net/#) to sync to Microsoft Outlook.
"I recommend that clients use dual calendars for family," she said. "This gets everyone on the same page. Using an electronic system allows multiple distributions.
"Some people insist on using paper calendars; some people just like that tactile feeling of being able to write on the calendar."
For me, somewhere in that endless pile on my desk is my new 2012 Week at a Glance, pristine and just waiting for me to get started.

New Year's Eve 2011

2011-12-31T13:16:00.002-06:00

Who knows which way the wind blows?

Several times a week, I read the online version of my hometown newspaper for the obituaries. As gruesome as that sounds, I have no family in that area almost 300 miles away. I moved away more than three decades ago.

Yesterday I noticed the obit of a man who was a year behind me in high school. Though I attended a small, consolidated rural school, there were quite a few people I only knew by sight or name. My high school class came out of three elementary schools, and he may have come from a different one. I really don’t know. I lived there all my life. Did he move to the town from somewhere else? I’m sure he did not know me, either.

By nature I’m a curious person, so I clicked on the link to take me to the memory page. There were dozens of notes – many from people I do know – offering sympathy and remembrance for this man. The obituary also noted that he was predeceased by an older sister, also someone I just vaguely knew who was a year or two ahead of me in high school.

Feeling like a voyeur, I also looked at the slide show the funeral home had posted. It was an odd feeling, observing the life of this man I did not know. I don’t know how he died; some pictures showed him looking haggard and gaunt. Many showed an apparently happy childhood and others showed pictures of him with his own children at holidays, birthdays, and on vacation.

I’ve thought about this man I don’t know over the past day. I’ve thought about how his loss means to those who love him and spent a life with him.

As we move into the New Year, I am always hopeful for the future but aware of time passing. Perhaps this man knew his time was limited. Perhaps he had no clue. Given the choice, I’m sure most of us would not want to know when the Grim Reaper will come for us.

Because of the world and national situation, I can’t say I’m overly optimistic about the New Year; perhaps it’s just that I’m cautious to proffer a prediction. By nature I tend to be cautiously optimistic, though I find sometimes my optimism gets mired in reality. The lesson for me—and probably for most of us -- is to live in the present, for who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Easter Seals display funds provide needed therapy

2011-12-30T09:09:00.000-06:00

Volunteers keep Ritzy's Fantasy of Light lit | GOOD MORNING COLUMN

Amy Abbott / Special to the Courier & Press

Friday, December 30, 2011

Our community is so blessed with a number of worthwhile charities that work year-round to make the lives of those less fortunate better. The people of the Tri-State are known for rallying around neighbors in times of difficulty or despair.
Except for the red kettles of the Salvation Army and the drives for the Santa Clothes Club, no local charity is more recognized at this time of year than the Easter Seals Rehabilitation Center and its Ritzy's Fantasy of Lights.
More than a quarter million vehicles have driven past the displays in Garvin Park since the first one was erected there in 1994.
More than 80,000 holiday bulbs light this year's 61 themed displays. And this year, for the first time, music recorded by the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra plays on a low-frequency radio station as patrons drive through the park.
More than $2.2 million has been raised since 1994 to benefit children and adults with disabilities, people who are your family, your friends and your neighbors.
I am a volunteer at Easter Seals. My husband and I dutifully spent four hours last week at Garvin Park as nearly 300 vehicles drove through the amazing light show. Our assignment was to stay at headquarters (a warm trailer), distribute materials and walkie-talkies to other volunteers, and monitor any problems that might occur. This is a very cushy assignment, compared to what most people give for this event.
I was amazed by the tremendous amount of hard work involved by a large number of volunteers over a 10-week period each year.
Lieberman Technologies donates warehouse space in the old Hahn Building to store the colorful displays each year.
Local electricians, contractors, and Teamsters spend about 1,600 volunteer hours setting up and taking down the displays each year. The Evansville Police Department helps with traffic when the displays are moved by flatbed truck. Security services are donated by the Security Enforcement Division of Comair throughout the event.
While the glittering light displays make a spectacular showing in Garvin Park each year, it is truly the hearts of people like Tony Weiss and other long-term volunteers that illuminate the event. Weiss, a member of IBEW Local 16, has worked as a volunteer electrician every Sunday night during the Ritzy's Fantasy of Lights for the past 18 years. He is only one example; there isn't room to list them all.
For the outdoor volunteers working at the admissions booth, there is no warmth except what they receive in greeting the cars. The electrician on duty has to monitor the displays, bulbs go out every night based on weather conditions. Each night faithfully, community groups come out to volunteer, including Southwestern Indiana Building Trades, Women of AT&T, families of Rose Smith, Danette Romines, Al and Cathy Bragin, Katie Strueh, Chris Grider, Ann and Jim Coy, Betsy Fulton, SW Indiana State Alumni Club, Newburgh Civitan, Newburgh Junior Civitan, Northside Kiwanis, and Green River Kiwanis.
The generous folks at Ritzy's provide not only event support but also meals at set up and takedown.
Ritzy's Fantasy of Lights runs through Jan. 1. Why not gather your loved ones and take a drive to Garvin Park to see the spectacular displays? For more information, visit the website at www.eastersealsswindiana.com.
Amy Abbott amymcvayabbott@gmail.com

7 nights to reflect, celebrate Kwanzaa

2011-12-22T00:38:00.002-06:00

7 nights to reflect, celebrate Kwanzaa

Museum in Evansville will kick off events

By Amy Abbott Special to The Courier & Press

Originally published 03:00 a.m., December 21, 2011
Updated 04:04 p.m., December 21, 2011

EVANSVILLE —Museum in Evansville will kick off events
By Amy Abbott
Special to The Courier & Press
Kwanzaa — which this year is celebrated Monday through Jan. 1 — was founded by Cal State Long Beach professor Maulana Karenga at the height of the civil rights movement in 1966.
Karenga, who is still alive, describes Kwanzaa as "a cultural message which speaks to the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense."
Kacheyta McClellan of Evansville and his family always celebrate the seven principles and seven elements of Kwanzaa in their home, and this year will be no exception. For seven evenings beginning Monday, McClellan and his family will engage in discussion about the meaning of the Kwanzaa principles in their lives.
"Kwanzaa, which is a Swahili word meaning 'first,' signifying the first fruits of the harvest, is celebrated differently by different people," he said. "Our family will celebrate the seven principles over seven nights, and remember the culture that our ancestors had and everything they went through."
The seven principles of Kwanzaa are: umoja, or unity; kujichagulia, or self-determination; ujima, or collective work and responsibility; ujamaa, or cooperative economics; nia, or purpose; kuumba, or creativity; and imani, or faith.
With his two sons, Kameron, 12, and Cheymon, 9, and his fiancee, La Toya Smith, McClellan will again this year share this special family time in addition to their Christmas celebrations. McClellan also is a member of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church.
"While Kwanzaa was originally designed apart from Christmas, it has evolved so that many families celebrate other religious holidays, such as Christmas or Hanukkah," the lifelong resident of Evansville added.
"Our family will begin our celebration by participating at the (Evansville African American) museum," McClellan said. "We enjoy it, and it is a great way to kick off Kwanzaa. Every night for the following seven nights we will talk as a family about the principles. I will share with my sons what it meant to me as a child, what Kwanzaa means to me now, and how to live each day keeping a particular principle in mind. We'll also talk about how the principles apply to our lives."
Children are traditionally given a gift, and McClellan and his fiancee will select books that offer the richness of their African heritage.
"Often the history books our children study in school are written from the perspective of the people who made up the majority in society," he said. "Schools teach that the history of African-Americans begins with slavery, and disregard thousands of years of history before that.
"When I was in high school, we studied the history of Egypt, and it wasn't mentioned that the Egyptians were black," McClennan said. "Later, I took my kids to the King Tut exhibit in Indianapolis because I wanted them to see the mummified Egyptian kings with jaw structures and noses similar to Africans."
McClellan particularly finds the principle of "nia," or purpose, to be very meaningful in his life.
"Before my kids go to sleep every night, we talk about purpose. This has become a ritual in our family as well, purpose helps keep us focused. I also really believe in saying encouraging and positive things to my children before they go to sleep each night."
The African American museum again will host a celebration, according to Lu Porter, executive director. "The event is at 6 p.m. (Monday) and different people will take part in the actual ritual itself."
Porter said the museum has been hosting the sacred event for the community for at least 10 years. The museum celebration will feature a table with the traditional "kinara," or candle, and Kwanzaa symbols, such a fruit. Some individuals may wear the traditional, colorful African garb.
Working in conjunction with the African-American Museum, the Koch Family Children's Museum of Evansville is featuring a craft theme for children's activities Wednesday, according to Director Stephanie Terry.
If You Go
---- What: Kwanzaa celebration
---- When: 6 p.m. Monday
---- Where: Evansville African American Museum, 579 S. Garvin St., Evansville
---- Call: 812-423-5188

Seeking Longfellow's vision of "peace on earth, good will to men"

2011-12-19T16:23:00.001-06:00

This is "The Raven Lunatic" Christmas column which runs in nine Indiana newspapers this week.

We often fail to reach the elusive—yet longed for—Peace on Earth. The history of the world is fraught with “wars and rumors of wars.” (Matthew 24:6).
At this time of year we chatter about the abstract peace—in prayer and meditation, in holiday cards, in worship services.
We are mindful also of the soldiers coming home from Iraq, having served our country for nearly ten years, working toward the goal of Peace on Earth.
We also send support and good thoughts to those still serving the United States of America in the military or Peace Corps, serving at home and abroad. These men and women and their families deserve our thanks and gratitude for their sacrifice toward the goal of Peace on Earth.
Peace is not just about war.
Many people in our country lack peace in their lives, suffering from job loss, poverty, hunger, abuse and loneliness.
More than 150 years ago, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow expressed his thoughts about Peace on Earth in a poem called “Christmas Bells” which later became the holiday standard, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” This is a favorite carol for me; I was totally enchanted last week when my husband was able to recite it all from memory for me.
Longfellow’s personal world was rocked in 1861 when his wife Fanny died from burns sustained from a fire in their Massachusetts home. Longfellow himself was burned trying to protect his wife from the flames devouring her body. Longfellow was left a widower with five children. Two years later Longfellow learned that his oldest child, Charles Appleton Longfellow, had been seriously injured in the Civil War and faced a long recovery.
During holiday time, Longfellow was particularly bereft. But on Christmas Day 1863 penned these beautiful words, that still resonate today in our increasingly complicated world. Poetry is best when it is read aloud; give yourself and your family a gift this year and read Longfellow’s meaningful words.
I wish you all Peace on Earth. Narrative © Amy McVay Abbott, amymcvayabbott@gmail.com.
Information for this article is from “The Christmas Carol Soldier” by Robert Girard Carroll. The Longfellow poem is in the public domain.

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had roll'd along th'unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bow'd my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong, and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

West Sider on mission to Russia with love

2011-12-17T09:22:00.001-06:00

Good Morning

West Sider on mission to Russia with love

Anyone who knows West Side resident Marilyn Wassmer can attest to her big smile and love of family.

One of her great passions in life is supporting her brother, the Rev. Myron Effing, who serves in the diocese of Vladivostok, Russia, a city of 600,000 people sitting at the head of Golden Horn Bay, not far from China and North Korea.

Wassmer, who is just a year younger than her brother, remembers saying the rosary with her siblings and praying for the children of Russia.

At 5, Myron asked their parents, Henry and Leota Effing, for a globe so he could see where Russia was, and know what the prayer meant. Ordainedin1972,Effinghasbeen at the helm of a remarkable change in the poverty-stricken city. According to his sister, Communists had taken over the 15,000-member Mary Mother of God Cathedral for use as the Russian State Archives. Under Effing’s direction, the cathedral was renovated to its original use and grandeur.

When Effing first went to Russia in 1992, he said the first Mass on the steps of this church in over 60 years. The rededicated cathedral opened in 1994.

“Because of the poverty level, the church started a charity organization. They feed the homeless, abandoned and elderly, run a daily soup kitchen, operate crisis pregnancy centers, support orphanage, and host (Alcoholics Anonymous) and Al-Anon,” said Wassmer. “A high percentage of Russian marriages fail, and the church is there to offer needed services to the people of Vladivostok.”

Effing has also helped to establish 11 additional parishes in the Siberian city.

Wassmer informally shares her brother’s mission with everyone she meets; she also speaks to parishes about the mission. She has been all over the state and gave mission talks in nine different parishes last summer.

“I love to volunteer for the mission, and I love speaking to people about it. It’s a fabulous story, and you meet so many interesting people,” she said.

Wassmer and Effing and their other siblings, Marlene Hasselbrinck and Merle Effing, are all Mater Dei High School graduates. Wassmer and her husband, Donald, have two sons and three grandchildren. She is a member of Resurrection Catholic Church and a retired certified dietary manager who served at Good Shepherd Catholic School.

Effing graduated from the University of Evansville; he also helped build the first telescope at the Evansville Museum as part of the Evansville Astronomy Club. He taught astronomy and physics for many years, but when communism fell, his heart led him to follow his boyhood dreams to Russia, “Everybody should know about the mission in Vladivostok,” his proud sister said, “Father Effing is one of our own. And he is doing amazing work. How awesome is that!”

If you are interested in more information about the missions in Vladivostok, call Wassmer at 812-985-3261 or visit www.vlad mission.org.

Amy Abbott, amymcvayabbott@gmail.

com


Powered by TECNAVIA		Copyright © 2011 Evansville Courier & Press 12/17/2011

Holiday tunes sound like Christmas to me

2011-12-15T07:37:00.000-06:00

Good Morning olumn, Evansville Courier and Press,

Holiday tunes sound like Christmas to me

What do you listen to during the holiday season?

You cannot escape the pervasive Musak of the holidays that is everywhere. The market must have decreed that recording Christmas music is a lucrative business or we wouldn’t have everyone from Elvis to Elmo singing holiday songs.

Research top Christmas music and you’ll discover it runs across all genres — from the sacred (Mormon Tabernacle Choir) to the profane (Dr. Demento).

And in between, among the most popular holiday music of all time includes the soundtrack from the CBS television show “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby also top the charts with their hits, “The Christmas Song” and “White Christmas,” respectively. I adore holiday music and my husband often buys me one or two of the latest Christmas CDs. I’m hoping for the “Canadian Tenors” Christmas album this year, which has been recommended by a friend.

But I’m not asking for the Justin Bieber holiday album. I tend to cling to the familiar. It’s seems I’m the only person in America who doesn’t have Bieber fever. In looking at the stack of CDs this year, I first wanted to listen to Johnny Mathis and Andy Williams, both icons of my childhood. And I’m so unhip that I have yet to own an MP3 player and — shudder! — still sometimes listen to albums!

My parents always had Christmas albums — purchased for about $3 at the local Mobil service station — that featured different artists such as Dianne Carroll and Ella Fitzgerald and of course, Burl Ives. Each of the gas station albums featured the famous group “Various Artists.”

When I looked through my stack of CDs, I found one by Billy Gilman. The CD is only a few years old, but I have no idea who he is.

Give me a mix of “various artists” like Karen Carpenter singing “Away in A Manager” or Johnny Mathis crooning “Winter Wonderland.” Those sound like Christmas to me!

Amy Abbott amymcvayabbott@gmail.com


Powered by TECNAVIA		Copyright © 2011 Evansville Courier & Press 12/15/2011

I believe in the big red elf

2011-12-14T13:54:00.001-06:00

Disclaimer: People with stars in their eyes and small children should not read this essay.

I still believe in the big fat guy with the long white beard and the red suit.

When I was a child, we lived in a yellow house in a northern Indiana village of 1,200 people. One hot summer afternoon my neighbor Betty Lou Saffer, her sister, and I sat at a wooden picnic table chewing over the issues of the day.

Betty Lou informed my six-year-old self that the Big Man was just a figment of my imagination. I still do not believe her, despite evidence to the contrary. She was a much older, wiser woman. She was six.

I am aware that Kris Kringle has helpers. That Jolly Old Elf cannot possibly be everywhere at once, so he has assistants who mimic his looks, personality, and ho-ho-ho-ing.

One of his helpers journeyed to my hometown theatre each year on a red fire truck. The front sidewalk sparkled in the sun or under the marquee lights, making the theatre entrance a magical place for a child. Members of the Lion’s Club provided candy and theatre owners provided the popcorn and drinks. Children enjoyed a popular movie of the day. (Going to “the show” at the Kent Theatre was a regular part of a village childhood. In 1967, I saw Gone with the Wind on the big screen for fifty cents.

Despite all the Santa sightings, those growing up in my town knew where the real Santa was! He was twenty-five miles to the east at Wolf and Dessauers in Fort Wayne. Some said he was a man named Phil Steigerwald, but I never believed them. This was the real Santa.

Santa had his own live television show on WKJG, channel 33, every afternoon during December. Children lined up to have their photo made with him. His elf Wee Willie Wand, dressed in traditional elf clothing, entertained children in line. My brother and I never missed the show, hoping to catch a glimpse of school chums. We never got there at the right time to be stars ourselves.

My childhood scrapbook has several pictures of my brother and me, shyly posing next to Santa. A visit to W and Ds meant that we dressed in our Christmas clothing, often a velvet jumper for me, and a white shirt, bow tie, suspenders, and dress pants for my brother. I suspect thousands of other northeastern Indiana children have similar pictures.

Located at the northeast corner of Calhoun and Washington streets, Wolf and Dessauers operated in the grand tradition of the great urban department stores. The large neon display outside the store gave a child’s heart the first hint that Santa was indeed inside this four-story building. Animated window displays enchanted and amazed me, long before more sophisticated technology left little to the imagination.

After telling Santa our secrets and having the requisite picture made, we took in a movie at the Jefferson or the Embassy, or had a fifteen cent hamburger at Fort Wayne’s original downtown McDonalds.

While my Kodachrome pictures of those visits to the real Santa are fading, the memories remain bright and multi-colored in my heart.

Hooligans Return on Christmas Day

2011-12-14T13:49:00.002-06:00

My husband thinks I am addicted to Angry Birds. Maybe I am, but it really isn’t my fault. The fault, dear Brutus, lies with the National Basketball Association (NBA)

And now those hooligans are coming back Christmas day. Yippy, skippy!

I was raised in a family that loved watching professional sports, and spent countless Sunday afternoons in our back yard while my father listened to the Cubs or the White Sox on AM radio. Baseball I can deal with, and even understand. (Let’s not get into juicing or Albert Pujols right now, okay? Did you see the market comparison between St. Louis and Los Angeles on Sports Center? Seems that Pujols will lose about ten million dollars by moving to the bigger market, assuming he moves.)

Football I can also deal with. Lying. Fair weather fan that I am, I could deal with it until Peyton couldn’t play this season. We gave up free tickets about two months ago because we didn’t want to drive to Cincinnati to see a Peyton-less Colts game. (Again’s, let’s not get into that right now, okay? And we won't talk about cities or companies and named stadiums.)

But I cannot tolerate watching the NBA. Having been weaned on a "classless" Indiana high school basketball system, basketball is sacrosanct. (Again, let’s not get in to what happened at the Xavier/Cincinnati game the other night right now, okay? Bad news all around. Everybody lost on that one. They all needed a good swift kick in the ass.)

Time has changed all three of the professional sports I’ve mentioned. Money is king and yes, I am cynical. But years of watching the NBA next to my husband – who considers his team in the NBA above all others – has taught me a few things. (Gun to his head – he would watch NBA over NFL or MLB.)

NBA basketball is boring. There are a few superstars that everybody talks about, and that’s about it. You can watch the last thirty seconds of the game and get it. (This is a little surprising that it lacks drama -- because NBA players sure have drama out of the stadium, she said wryly.)

The season lasts forever. Even starting late, I know the corn will be knee-high by the time we get to the playoffs.

The tickets are outrageously expensive and the food is outrageous expensive and the parking is outrageously expensive. A number of cities have built new stadiums for their hooligans, and mostly continue to fill them. I also love the concept of the “plaza” level where a server will come into the stands, take your order, and deliver your outrageously expensive food to you for an additional fee. (You caught me there, but those tickets were given to us, okay?)

But I love my husband. And he has missed his team lo these four months and seven days.

So I play Angry Birds and every once in a while say, “yeah, that was a great steal” or something that I deem appropriate. Now, I must go and kill some pigs.

Four Really Bad Holiday Movies

2011-12-11T14:32:00.000-06:00

Just about anything that’s on the Hallmark or Lifetime channel as a “Made for TV” Christmas movie isn’t on my viewing list. That may put me on the “naughty list” with fans of those cable channels, but they all feature bad actors and similar plots. And aren’t they all filmed in the same snowy subdivision in the western suburbs of Chicago, do they just use B-roll from “Ordinary People” or “Home Alone?”

Now that I’ve revealed myself as Mrs. Scrooge, let me have at four holiday movies that run over and over on television, and make me grab for the remote. Please let me find “Elf” or “It’s a Wonderful Life” and don’t make me watch these. Here are my four picks for worst holiday movies:

4. The last incarnation of “Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street.” (I could barely stomach the thought of Sebastian Cabot as Kris Kringle in the very bad Made for TV 1973 version that contained lots of stars from the time, Jane Alexander, David Hartman, Roddy McDowall, Sebastian Cabot as Kris (oddly sans his natural beard; he was forced to shave and wear a false beard for the role), Suzanne Davidson, Jim Backus, David Doyle and Tom Bosley.)

But I cannot tolerate the 1994 feature film starred Richard Attenborough, Elizabeth Perkins, Dylan McDermott, and Mara Wilson. According to Wikipedia, Macy’s refused to give permission to use its name and was replaced with a fictitious name. Little Mara Wilson, while so adorable in “Mrs. Doubtfire” is sickeningly sweet, and much of the movie is different from the original classic. The original version with Maureen O'Hara as the mother, and Natalie Wood as the daughter just shouldn't have been remade. It stands as a classic.

3. Jim Carrey in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” Yes, I know I’m a Grinch for saying so, but I don’t think his weird antics transfer to a live action Grinch. This Ron Howard film came out at holiday time in 2000, and was the number one film in the country for four weeks. Despite its popularity, the critics didn’t like it much and neither do I. Howard took on a difficult task basing a movie on a thirty-minute television special based solely on a children’s book. Much had to be invented, and I think it steered away from the original charm of the short television piece. That being said, I haven’t enjoyed much of Jim Carrey’s work except for “The Truman Show,” one of my favorite movies.

2. National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation”. This is a very funny movie, but it’s just too close to home for me. We indeed have own Cousin Eddie (though he’s on my husband’s side.) We don’t seem him anymore because of some family spat that didn’t concern or involve us. On my side of the family, I had some very weird great aunts who probably would have wrapped a cat. The first “Vacation” movie is hilarious, but this one certainly “jumped the shark.” Rated “L” for lame.

1. In my humble and basically uneducated opinion, the foulest holiday movie of them all is “Bad Santa.” Billy Bob Thornton plays—guess who—Billy Bob Thornton as a caricature. I have to turn my head away when it comes on the tube.

It's a Dog's Life

2011-12-08T12:59:00.001-06:00

Working at home has a completely different dynamic than working in an office. For one things, the distractions are different. While there is no obnoxious co-worker hanging over the cubicle wall bragging about his son's latest football achievements, there are things going on.

For some reason, our neighborhood has recently been overrun with dogs.

I am not a dog person; I am deathly afraid of dogs. It goes back to my childhood. It's not easy to admit, because most people truly love dogs.
I swear there is something in my DNA that sends out a swift radar signal to canines within twenty miles.

For the past few years, there's been a carefree golden retriever who thinks he lives with us. His radar goes off the minute I want to leave the house, arrive home, or go outside on the deck. His aim in life is to get inside our house; I am the target and he is the four-legged cannon ball headed right for me.

Neighbors probably wonder why I pick up the mail from the car; it is because of this beast and others.

Our neighbors the urban chicken ranchers have a new German Shepherd which has the face of a Nazi general. He likes to chase cars and stands in in the middle of the street waiting for one to pass. He must have a very dull and boring existence as we live in suburbia and the traffic isn't much.

I swear he knows when I'm about to do my daily errands. I see him half a block away, standing like Rin Tin Tin on the top of a mountain, triumphant and waiting for his lunch (which would be my ancient Honda.) His ears stand at full attention, and he looks like the proverbial cat that is about to eat the canary. Which would be me.
He chases me and every day he jumps out of the way just at the moment I would almost hit him. I have no intention of hitting him. Of course I'm going about ten miles per hour, so his level of excitement is probably diminished. And he never catches me. Every day, he tries.

This morning on my errands I went to the pet food store for bird feed and suet cakes (another distraction out my window are my feeding birds).
Entering the store right behind me was a woman with a large boxer on a leash. The store owners seemed to know the woman and the dog, and one of them called out the dog's name.

Did "Killer" run to the counter to see the store owner?

No, the drooling, germ-filled beast went right for me, and knocked the bird seed out of my grasp and me to the floor.

And of course I react as I always do, like Lucy in "A Charlie Brown Christmas"....."ohhhh, dog germs...."

Killer's owner was embarrassed and helped me gather my wits about me.

I came home, and there waiting for me was Yappy, the world's meanest tiny dog; the sunny golden who wanted to tell me about his morning; the Erwin Rommel lookalike; and two new evil-looking black mutts I've named the Death Pack. All waiting -- all in my yard like unwanted sentries.

It's so great to be popular.

Predictions from the crystal ball

2011-12-06T11:58:00.002-06:00

Good Morning, Evansville Courier and Press

2012 predictions from Abbott’s crystal ball

I met Jeane Dixon once more than 30 years ago. The famous psychic and astrologer was speaking at Indiana-Purdue at Fort Wayne and I drove her to the airport, as part of my public relations job. We had a nice talk about nothing in particular.

That’s the closest I got to anything remotely psychic. I have no qualifications as a prognosticator but here are my unqualified predictions (guesses) for 2012. So maybe I’ll just state the obvious.

I’m looking into my crystal ball and here’s what I see.

The economy will continue to be the main story for 2012, and its ramifications will reverberate across the world.

More Americans will go back to nature and “live off the grid.” Many people I’ve interviewed during 2011 talked about wanting to be more self-sustaining. More gardens are springing to life each spring, and canning has made resurgence. How ironic that we want to emulate the way our grandparents lived.

The movement to more online education — universities and K-12 schools are becoming more flexible and offering programs that meet needs of working students and parents.

With more mobile devices present, online shopping will gain a greater hold of the market. There was no such thing as Cyber Monday even a few years ago. Just don’t shop and drive.

With the housing market still bleak and long-term care out of reach for many, multigenerational households will become more the norm, returning to a time in history when grandparents, parents, and children lived under one roof.

I will win the Power Ball and endow all the arts and music programs in the Tri-State with unlimited funds.

OK, I realize you have to play to win, but a girl can dream, can’t she?

What’s your prediction for next year?


Powered by TECNAVIA		Copyright © 2011 Evansville Courier & Press 12/06/2011

"You Two Pixies Get Outta Here"

2011-12-04T22:01:00.001-06:00

Saturday night my husband and I sat in our recliners and watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the umpteenth time on network television. At the beginning, the network flashed the ubiquitous disclaimer , “This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen and to run in the time allotted.”

We knew full well that the longer the movie ran, the more frequently the commercial breaks appear. The disclaimer means that a two-hour movie will run in a three-hour space, so that more Lexus and Kay Jewelers commercials can run. (I really don't want a leased car as a Christmas gift, nor do I believe that a kiss begins with Kay, but that's just me.)

Like a moth to a flame, we can’t help ourselves and we rewatch this classic. It’s the same electronic magnetism that draws us each year to “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” with its quirky 1964 animation and Burl Ives songs.

In my humble opinion, Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a treasure. The movie premiered in December 1946, and while not a box-office failure, legend says it was a disappointment to the studio with stiff competition in that first post-war year. The film was nominated for five Oscars and beaten by the also wonderful "The Best Years of Our Lives" for Best Picture.

The film has gained in popularity over the years because of television viewing. The American Film Institute has it on the list of 100 Best American Films, and #1 in the Best American Inspirational Films.

I love its message of what is truly important in life. I love the romance of the original “Bert and Ernie” singing “I Love you truly” outside the rain-soaked house while the beautiful Donna Reed and James Stewart enjoy their wedding night dinner.

A few things bug me every year....

· The director wanted to show the beautiful Donna Reed aging, but why does she have to wear her hair up in a bun that makes her look like one of those Wagnerian opera singers?

· Was the run on the Bailey Savings and Loan on Black Friday? Did people get married on a Friday while other people were at work? (Remember, Uncle Billy missed the wedding, because he forgets to check for the string around his finger.)

· How does the new Mrs. Bailey, even with the help of George’s friends, get the old house in good enough shape in only the few hours between their wedding and the bank closing at 6 p.m.? Movie magic.

· And Zuzu’s teacher. Zuzu apparently catches a cold coming home from school. How does her teacher know this, if Zuzu caught the cold coming home from school? Of course George goes ballistic on the phone with the teacher, and then the teacher’s husband gets on the phone. Later at Martini’s (Nick’s in the alternate reality), George gets punched in the face by the teacher’s husband. Ironically, one of the most famous lines in the movie is from Zuzu at the end when she quotes her teacher, “Teacher says every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”

· My family has one scene that makes us roar with laughter and drives us crazy. As George’s alternate reality builds to a climax, we learn what has happened to all his loved ones because he never lived. George shakes Clarence and says, “Mary, I’ve got to see Mary.” Dramatic music plays in the background. “You won’t like it, George,” says Clarence, but he finally relents and says, “She’s closing up the library.” Oh, no, not that! It’s true, Mary Hatch works at the library, a fate obviously worse than death.

Having shared the moments that drive me crazy, I’ll also share what I feel are the loveliest moments (in addition to the “I love you truly” scene.)

· Violet Bick flirts with George and his friends next to the taxi cab. The camera shows the curvy Gloria Grahame (remember she was also the “Girl Who Cain’t Say No” in Oklahoma) walking away, shaking it for all to see. One of the men mumbles something about going home to see his wife, and George says, “Family man, eh?”

· The suitcase scene when George is given the suitcase Mr. Gower bought him, and put his name on.

· Mary Hatch and George Bailey are talking on the telephone to Sam Wainwright who is calling from New York. Romance takes over and George fights it and shakes Mary and then kisses her, while Sam is still talking on the phone, and Mrs. Hatch is listening in on the extension phone at the top of the stairs (Was there such a thing as an extension phone in the thirties, when this scene would have taken place?)

· The scene in which the newlyweds visit Mr. Martini and his family in their new home, and bring gifts.

Mary: Bread... that this house may never know hunger.

[Mary hands a loaf of bread to Mrs. Martini]

Mary: Salt... that life may always have flavor.

[Mary hands a box of salt to Mrs. Martini]

George Bailey: And wine... that joy and prosperity may reign forever. Enter the Martini Castle.

[George hands Mr. Martini a bottle of wine] (quote from IMBD.com)

George and angel Clarence Oddbody in the bar when Clarence orders a "mulled wine, light on the cinnamon and cloves." Shortly after Nick throws them out in the snow with the charming, "You two pixies get outta here!"

Each time we watch this classic, we bawl like babies at the end. It's always the same. The man from Elmira who wants to get home to see his family goes to the Bailey home and throws money in the pot. The auditor called in by Mr. Potter tears up the criminal complaint. Annie gives the money she was "saving for a divorce, if she ever gets married." And Harry Bailey flies in a blizzard from Washington DC to toast his brother, "the richest man in town."

What I Learned from the woods

2011-11-29T15:43:00.001-06:00

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau

We did not go to the woods for such esoteric reasons. We went to the woods sixteen years ago because we needed more space, and the house happened to be adjacent to a woods.

Over time I came to realize that this was not our property; we were just interlopers here. The place is populated with a variety of critters, some seen and some unseen. But we know they are here. And they know we are here.

Take the ground hogs (please). We have yet to catch one that we frequently see sunning in the afternoons on the side lawn. We found the entrance to his lair and closed it off; it remains closed. That probably means he has just found another route into his secret hideaway.

One evening I opened the back door to our deck and heard a squeal and saw a furball run directly past me. I got a glimpse. It was Mr. Groundhog, who apparently did not like the proximity. I deduced that perhaps this is why they are called groundhogs, because they do squeal like pigs.

We have a trap used for the various beasts, but we humanely relocate them to a Animal Witness Protection Program (the Isaac Walton League grounds five miles away.)

Last summer we caught something and it was the oddest looking thing we've ever seen. Gray with a very pointy nose. We've spotted red foxes in our yard, but this was gray. I sent a picture to our county extension agent, speculating that it was a rare gray fox. They are still laughing about the half-blind woman in the county who was unable to recognize a young raccoon, or the "highly unusual gray-striped fox" as the agent called it.

Be gone with him! Two years in a row we had raccoons get into our attic--the second year the coon made sport with our thirty-five year old roof and we had to replace it quickly. Initially we had to cover it with a large blue tarp because he did damage so quickly.

Most of the country is still overpopulated with white tail deer and our neighborhood is no exception. Until we built a fence across the back of our property, anywhere from four to seven deer crossed our yard after sunset each night, during every season. It seems our fence has only rerouted the inevitable, a neighbor complained to us that they have now found his garden and are having their evening appetizers on their travels through his yard.

When we still had an outdoor cat, I opened the back door one evening to fill his bowl. Eating the remains of Tiger's breakfast was a nice fat opossum, three feet from my screened door. Apparently Tiger's bowl needed to be refilled daily, because the mistress of the house wasn't smart enough to figure out that one little outside kitty was not eating all that food.

We've had the occasional large turtle. At our former home a mile from here, Beloved Husband was mowing the lawn and found a snapping turtle with a shell about a foot in diameter near the fence.

Rabbits show up occasionally. And we are blessed with birds, which we feed both in the back and front of the house.

Our neighbors have contributed to this zoo, with various dogs of all sizes and temperament (I think the common breed is Crotch Rocket because that's where they go to). Three houses up the street we have an "urban chicken rancher" who has the world's horniest rooster and six or seven lily white chickens that like to inhabit the middle of the road.

Beloved Husband, who thinks he is very funny, often pauses in the car and yells at them, "Why, why?"

(as in "Why does the chicken cross the road?")

These same neighbors also have peacocks which give the noisy rooster a run for his money. All of them are apparently confused with the time changes because they are making noise round the clock.

In calmer weather, I still enjoy sitting on the deck, though I've considered emulating Granny from "The Beverly Hillbillies" and protecting my turf with a shotgun across my lap. Ya'll come back now.

Author tags:

good fences make good neighbors, thinking about baseball, thoreau wouldn't have agreed with the urban chicken movement, little house on the prairie this is not

My Brilliant Second Career

2011-11-28T12:03:00.001-06:00

I was fortunate to be chosen by Salon.com to have the following article run in Salon's Life section on November 22, 2011, and picked up by AlterNet after initial publication. An earlier version of this piece ran on Open Salon in the "My Brilliant Second Career" contest.

My Brilliant Second Career

TUESDAY, NOV 22, 2011 7:00 PM CENTRAL STANDARD TIME

My Brilliant Second Career: The surprising leap from Viagra sales to journalism

After I was laid off from a Fortune 100 company, I gave up the corporate dream -- and began pursuing my own

BY AMY MCVAY ABBOTT

(Credit: Maisei Raman via Shutterstock)

TOPICS:MY BRILLIANT SECOND CAREER, LIFE STORIES, WRITERS AND WRITING, GREAT RECESSION

This is a series about people who stared down the Great Recession -- and reinvented themselves along the way. Do you have a great Plan B success story? Post it on Open Salon, tag it "My Brilliant Second Career," and we might publish it on Salon -- and pay you for it.

Jon Stewart was particularly pithy that Thursday night in January 2009. For weeks, my husband and I had been witnessing the economic roller coaster on television. But now, as we watched Stewart joke on “The Daily Show” about the Fortune 100 companies who’d laid off workers, it was horrifyingly personal. I was among them.

For nearly a decade, I had the mother of all sales jobs as a pharmaceutical sales representative; I sold Viagra and other medicines to urologists, family practice and internal medicine doctors. That Thursday morning, I’d been instructed to sit at home by my phone from 9 to 9:30 a.m. and wait for the call that would determine my professional future. The phone rang at 9 sharp; my district manager, awkward and stuttering, read a prepared text to inform me that I had been terminated. Later, I learned that he’d lost his own job the day before.

So, after years making great money, enjoying “Cadillac benefits” and the opportunity to travel the country on someone else’s dime, I found myself at a crossroads: an unemployed 50-something woman whose only child had recently left for college 1,000 miles away. I had worked in healthcare marketing and sales for nearly 30 years. What was I going to do now?

The change not only threw my life path and family finances into question, but it also shook up the ground rules we had lived by in our two-and-a-half decade marriage. Since I could barely hard-boil an egg, my husband, a college librarian, had always done the cooking. But now it only made sense for me to take on that responsibility. Meanwhile, my husband had grown accustomed to having time alone in the evenings after a long day at the university. Now, he found me practically charging him at the door with the outdated words: “How was your day, dear?” Our marriage seemed headed back to the 1950s, a prospect we both found disconcerting.

During the dull, gray days of that Indiana winter, I sat alone in our big, quiet house, wondering what to do next. I completed the company’s outplacement training and perfected my résumé. But there were no jobs for me, despite my decades of experience; going back into pharma sales would be nearly impossible. My company cut nearly 4,000 reps that day, and competitors were doing the same thing.

The thought of carving out a new territory at this stage of my life was daunting. But there was one dream I’d been putting off in favor of the more stable and lucrative life in the corporate world: to be a writer. Long ago, I’d been a journalism major in college. During my last few years in college, I interned at a small daily, the Columbia City Post and Mail. The 1970s newsroom was straight out of a movie. Edwin, our police reporter, wandered in and out of the office in his rumpled suit, holding a lit cigarette with an inch of ash hanging off the end. Eloise, on the copy desk, lit me up when I turned in my first story with several misspellings.

As I applied for jobs that didn’t interest me, or that screamed “Wanted: Beautiful twenty-something with Ivy League education,” I couldn’t help thinking back to Fitzgerald’s fabled advice to Faulkner, “Write what you know.” I know it sounds hackneyed. And I know that no sane person would want to work for newspapers, which were folding all over the country. But maybe that’s what ultimately sold me on the plan: What did I have to lose?

Three decades after I walked out of the Post and Mail’s newsroom, I tried to find my way back in. I contacted the managing editor and offered a free biweekly column. I had been journaling on my own, and already had a ready-made stack of essays on everything from angst over job loss to my defiant hatred of pickles. The managing editor was excited to get new content. She told me she would try it for a few months.

Why write for free? That’s an easy answer. Small papers don’t have the budget for columns, and more than income at that point, I needed an audience. It’s the same calculation made by countless bloggers, hoping that once people read my material they’d eventually be willing to pay for more; it’s just that my forum was a bit more old-fashioned than the Internet and, it turned out, so was my content. I wrote about growing up in small-town Indiana in the 1960s. I wrote about the people and places that nurtured me, the strange and endearing characters of that village, like the piano teacher with the full concert grand in her living room or the perennially young manager of the skating arena who whipped around the rink in his white, sparkling skates to classic skating tunes like “Louie Louie.”

Sometimes, I wrote about nothing. I wrote about disposing of kitty litter that had frozen in a huge, obscene clump in a garbage bag in the snow. I wrote about learning to cook, and the various mistakes I made along the way. It was working: I started getting letters from people with whom my reflections resonated. People told me their own stories, and they asked me to write more.

I suppose that it’s strange that the success of my new job involved nostalgia for another time. But so much about our lives now is harried and ever-changing; I think my columns were a way to remember and take comfort in a not-too-distant past. I’m not sure if life actually was easier then; but in our memory, it certainly feels like it was.

Armed with new clips, I landed a real assignment at a local woman’s magazine, one that paid. More articles spawned more work, and I began to write for an increasing number of area and regional publications. Last July, I self-published a book, “The Luxury of Daydreams,” which earned solid local reviews and brought more income, which I supplement by writing Web content and editorial material for healthcare organizations, a remnant from my prior work life.

While I’ll never make the salary I earned, I am making a living. As an independent contractor I can turn down assignments I don’t like and focus on the ones I do. I’m no longer chained to the golden handcuffs of corporate culture. There is no annual territory restructuring, no competitive intel on the new erectile dysfunction drug. I control my destiny.

Work fulfillment does not, however, pay the bills. I drive an 11-year-old Accord with peeling paint and nearly 100,000 miles. Going out for dinner is a special occasion, instead of the way I cope with frequent exhaustion and stress from a rigorous and inflexible corporate culture.

Working for myself is challenging, but life can accommodate more change and growth than we realize. Just three years ago I made an excellent living selling promises of sexual fulfillment and freedom from incontinence. The money rolled in, but I always wanted a new purse, or shoes, or a vintage fountain pen. There was always a bonus next quarter, a carrot dangling on the end of a stick. Now, I’m cautious with every dollar I’ve earned. It’s not easy. But I’m no longer selling someone else’s dream; I’m living my own.

: Amy McVay Abbott is a freelance writer in southern Indiana. Her book "The Luxury of Daydreams" is available at all major online sites and for immediate download on Nook and Kindle.More Amy McVay Abbott

We gather together over green bean casserole

2011-11-22T16:54:00.000-06:00

My column for this bi-weekly period as well as on ViewsHound.

We gather together over green bean casserole

For days now the Gourmet Cook in our house (that would not be me) has been planning his next moves. Thanksgiving is but days away and he is like Indiana Jones plotting to find the Ark of the Covenant.

By Amy Abbott - Tuesday 22 Nov 2011

For days now the Gourmet Cook in our house (that would not be me) has been planning his next moves. I can see the fire in his eyes—Thanksgiving is but days away and he is like Indiana Jones plotting to find the Ark of the Covenant.

I’m the everyday cook, and I worked up to that title. After years of not cooking, I took the helm of the Monday through Friday routine. I’m getting better, although I still become mortified by some recipes.

Now that we have an updated kitchen, my Beloved and I sit down every Saturday morning and plot out the week’s meals. I eschew anything with more than ten ingredients, so when he wanted mulligatawny soup last week, I balked. What I did do was prepare the ingredients and materials needed so when he came home from work, it was all ready. I think they call this a sous chef.

Mulligatawny is an Indian soup full of curry, other spices, and vegetables in a chicken broth, which has a heavenly flavor. “Seinfeld” fans might remember it as Elaine Benes' favorite from the Soup Nazi.

On Thanksgiving morning, I’ll be his sous chef if you add just two tiny letters, an e and a d to the end of sous. I will be downing a few sips of mimosas between watching the Broadway promos in that hour before the Macy’s parade and taking orders from the chef.

It goes without saying that I’m one of the luckiest women in the world. He is a marvelous cook, with incredibly high standards (those of his dear late mother.) However, sometimes he is a little intense, like when I suggested he could buy a pie crust.

Our old kitchen didn’t have the counter space to roll out the dough, so he would spread it out on the kitchen table which wasn’t ideal. After years of this, he finally bought the famous “pie crust in a bag”.

Yesterday My Beloved reverted to his old ways, using the expanded peninsula we now have. He made six homemade pie crusts, and was delighted with the Crisco buttery-flavored sticks he bought at the store. I will not be shocked if he wants to mill his own flour.

Earlier in the weekend he made the pilgrimage (alone) to the grocery store, complete with a list – organized by category. How has he stayed married to me for nearly three decades when my idea of a list is an illegible scribbled note on the back of a used envelope?

This morning he was up again early, preparing some of the items needed for the big day. Oh, and in his spare time, he made banana bread with the aging bananas that I was saving to make penicillin.

We’ve only had one small spat during this Holy Time of Preparation. Our son, who lives a thousand miles away, is coming home and requested a Baked Potato Casserole. I told The Chef I wanted to make it, “No, I want to make everything.” While I was initially offended, who am I to argue with someone who obviously gets so much pleasure out of cooking?

I get pleasure from eating, so we make a great pair. And lucky for him, there are going to be a lot of other hungry people at our house on Thursday.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A not so heartwarming holiday piece

2011-11-22T16:52:00.002-06:00

Perhaps everyone who is in the presumed second half of their life feels this way. Each Thanksgiving I have some morbid thoughts. Will I be here next year? Who will be around the table? Who will be missing? And then I take a deep breath, and work on that gratitude thing, that savoring thing, that being in the present thing.

Pass the cranberry sauce, please.

Years ago I read a book that suggested thinking of three items daily for which to be grateful. The author suggested that on some days, it might just be opening your eyes that morning. I have tried to adopt this philosophy, but I find at the holidays I let a little of the maudlin sink in.

Over the past two weeks I’ve encountered people dear to me who are suffering in ways they couldn’t have imagined a year ago. We all have people like this in our lives, or perhaps we are the ones suffering the unimaginable.

A college friend has been unable to find full-time work and now her old car is barely hanging on. She just got a 30-hour a week job, but is concerned that the junk heap won’t make the nearly one-hour commute, a commute worsened by a major bridge out due to infrastructure problems destined to take at least six more months to repair. She tried to purchase a car last week at one of those “We’ll finance anybody places” but they wouldn’t finance her because of a recent bankruptcy. She has a husband with bi-polar disease who is trying to get disability, and little family. Her eldest sister has Parkinson’s, a husband with dementia, and is working on a Medicaid spend-down to get into a nursing facility.

Then there are my friends who are in their mid-seventies. They had nine children between them, and married after their respective divorces nearly thirty years ago. His oldest son is mentally disabled and while he lives on his own, they spend hours with his FSSA paperwork and helping him maintain a fairly independent lifestyle. He has a contentious personality, but is able to work in a fast-food place and make a small living. Earlier this year his oldest brother and great advocate (probably the one who would take over for mom and dad) sat on his front stoop and had a heart attack and died. At age fifty-something. Just out of the blue. In his father, this has wrought long-suppressed nightmares of a war he fought long ago at age eighteen.

Finally I had coffee with a girlfriend I see several times a year. Her sister – also in her fifties – was diagnosed with melanoma early in the summer and lasted only until early fall. My friend, with the loss of her sister, has no remaining family left. Her sister had never had any problems, and was checked regularly by her physician.

Sometimes people make bad choices and sometimes things just happen. If I didn’t believe in a somewhat random universe, I might not survive. I think the universe is much like the winter wind, blowing in different directions on any given day.

Years ago when my husband’s 61-year-old father was killed in a car accident, people would say “things happen for a reason.” I’ve never accepted that, and I don’t accept it today. What I do believe is that we are given the strength from our Higher Power to handle what comes.

So as I survey the Thanksgiving table with all the special dishes and happy faces around it, I will probably again pause and wonder what it will be like next year. But, only for a fleeting moment. Then I will remember to savor, to enjoy, and to be in the present. For one never knows which way the wind blows.

Don't think being a janitor is easy

2011-11-22T10:40:00.000-06:00

As most younger Baby Boomer remember, the early 1980s did not offer great economic opportunity for anyone. Before we were married, my Beloved -- with his college degree in English and journalism -- worked three jobs to save for my engagement ring, graduate school, and the rent of a small apartment.

He worked as a stringer for a now-defunct daily newspaper, sold books in an independent bookstore, and worked on the night shift as a janitor in a large hospital.

Newt Gingrich suggested in a debate over the weekend that elementary schools should have a "master janitor" supervising children nine to fourteen to clean the schools.

Just for a minute, let's toss the concept of our hundred-year old child labor laws out the window, and ponder this:

Being a janitor is not easy work.

First, there are the chemicals that are used in cleaning. Some can be quite hazardous and require mixing. it is no accident that people who clean are required often to wear haz-mat suits, including masks and gloves.

Second, janitors are often required to do a lot of heavy lifting. My husband had to have special steel-toed boots to protect his feet in case something slipped.

Third, there is the issue of "what" they are cleaning up. I'm not sure I would want my nine-year-old cleaning up after a science classroom. He might not have the maturity to handle things appropriately, even under the supervision of the "master janitor."

I will give Gingrich one small point. That is, I think it is a good idea for children to bear some responsibility in the cleanliness of their classroom. But picking up spitballs and wadded papers around one's desk is a far cry from doing the heavy cleaning that most janitors are responsible for.

Mr. Gingrich, don't minimize the hard work of those folks who clean up after the rest of us. I would be very surprised to know if you used a yellow mop bucket and rag mop to do your own cleaning, though God knows you've made a mess of many things.

Addendum: My husband worked at that hospital before universal precautions. Though he worn a Haz-Mat suit to clean surgery, I was terrified for years about what he had contracted in one of twelve surgical suites he had to clean every night. Night usually meant emergency surgeries; anyone who has been around a hospital knows what that means. If you are in a hospital, make sure you thank the janitorial staff. They do what no one else wants to do, probably because like everyone else, they need a job with benefits. Okay, I'm climbing off my high horse now.

Choosing Movies for Dad

2011-11-20T11:51:00.000-06:00

Every day the routine is the same. My father gets up early and leaves the apartment, and heads to the basement for the treadmill. By the time he comes back, my mom is ready to get up. He bathes her, dresses her, brushes her teeth, puts in her bridge, combs and styles her hair, sprays a dab of some Elizabeth Taylor perfume on her neck, and gets her breakfast out. If she's sleepy after breakfast, he'll go to "koffee klatsch" with the men in the dining room.

Most of his friends are dead, and at age eighty, his career days and volunteer pursuits are mostly behind him. Yet he manages to stay very busy, always volunteering for something. For a long time he was picking up what he called "an elderly woman" -- age ninety-plus -- for church every week. Their church services start at 8:30 a.m. How he could manage to get himself in a suit and tie, mother in a lovely outfit, and still pick up a lady he barely knows is beyond me, but that's my dad.

For dad, though, he is now less busy than he has ever been. So he tends to be like a ten-year-old boy, getting into business that probably should not really concern him.

Last week I received a call from the activities director at the retirement home where they live in an independent living apartment.

"Your dad asked me to call you," the woman said, "Every Monday we have movies and he has been really upset about my choices recently."

Oh, brother, I'm thinking. My dad's taste in movies are very narrow. Can't have much swearing or violence unless its a war picture, and then not much more than John Wayne waving a gun. Absolutely no homosexuality. "I accept it, but I don't want to see it on screen." None of this sex before marriage business on the screen, either.

When he mentioned his dismay over current movies to me weeks before, i suggested he tell the lady in charge to go to the American Film Institute web site. They are always listing things, "Best 100 Films of the Century" or "Best Chic Flicks of 1979". I figured he could find something there. Of course when he went to her, she called me.

So I pulled up the list (http://www.afi.com/100years/movies.aspx) and sure enough there were some terrific movies. But I could also tick off the movies that I know would be unacceptable.

Godfather I, well, there's that business about the horse

Schindler's List, maybe, great flick but the reality he might not like

Chinatown, well, there's that business about the nose

Annie Hall, no, I can't see him getting the humor of Woody Allen (which is unfortunate, but I just can't see it)

M*A*S*H the movie, actually, he would probably love that one. He was 4F, but all his buddies went to Korea.

Streetcar. Who knows? A great work of literature with many truths and a good look into New Orleans, but would he be upset over the Blanche DuBois/Stanley Kowalski interaction. Should we call it rape?

The list had many movies the activity director could get on Netflix, including The Best Years of our Lives and Singing in the Rain, and ones I'm not sure he would accept like Tootsie.

She also told me that there was another resident in the same group who refused to watch any movie made before 2000. I feel very sorry for this woman. Now she is alternating between past and present movies to accommodate both my father and this woman.

She was also befuddled by his greatest loathing in the movies, animated animals. Want to see him go berserk? Suggest watching Charlotte's Web. As a man of the land, he doesn't believe animals should be "personified." Yeah, I know. That leaves out Bambi and a whole lot of other classic movies.

But I gave her my suggestions, because he is eighty years old and those Monday afternoon repasts with Mom, sharing a box of hot, buttered popcorn is about all he has to anticipate.

And next week, when they visit for Thanksgiving, we'll watch The Sound of Music or Oklahoma or The Music Man, something where there's little pain, no dementia, no aging, and a happy ending.

Red Kettle Launch

2011-11-19T15:15:00.002-06:00

Bell ringers launch annual Salvation Army Red Kettle campaign

Amy Abbott / Special to the Courier & Press

Originally published 12:21 p.m., November 18, 2011
Updated 04:39 p.m., November 18, 2011

EVANSVILLE —Community leaders, uniformed Salvation Army officers, and 13 students from Cedar Hall Community School met Friday morning in the Evansville Courier & Press lobby to launch the 2011 Salvation Army’s Red Kettle campaign, with a goal of raising $240,000.
With an iconic red kettle setting the scene, seventh-grader Mackenzie Jackson offered the first challenge of the $240,000 goal. Jackson is a member of the Builders Club, a group sponsored by the Northside Kiwanis, which supports the Army’s Red Kettle efforts with a food drive.
“Last year, our club collected more than 2,000 cans of food,” she said. “We want to challenge other EVSC schools to do the same this year.”
Jackson and fellow Builders Club members kicked off the annual campaign by ringing tiny bells.
Maj. David Minks and his wife, Capt. Shanda Minks, discussed the pressing community need.
“Each campaign takes on a personal meaning to me,” said David Minks. “Every day the Salvation Army sees those who are doing without. When the bells ring, it says, ‘We can do more’. When our funds run out, it is distressing because of the huge need.”
Approximately $238,000 was raised last year, said Sandra Appler, the Salvation Army’s director of development.
“It’s important that the community understand that these funds are used throughout the year, and not just at Christmas time,” said Appler, “When the floods came last spring, the funds to help people came from last year’s campaign.”
More than 9,000 volunteer hours are needed to reach the $240,000 goal during the holiday season, David Minks said. He said there will be about 33 Red Kettle locations in Vanderburgh and Warrick counties, with bell ringers working from morning to evening.
The root of this fundraising campaign goes back more than 100 years when Salvation Army Capt. Joe McFee pledged to feed 1,000 homeless people in San Francisco. He originally used a black cooking pot, but the color of the Army’s red shield was adopted and is now universally recognized as the symbol of the Salvation Army.
“Imagine what it would mean if everyone rang a bell for only one hour, said Courier & Press Publisher Jack Pate as he made the year’s first donation.
Those tech-savvy individuals who wish to contribute to this year’s campaign can text RING to 80888 or GIVE to 80888 to make a $5 or $10 donation, respectively.

Flouring the Cat and Other Lutheran Holiday Traditions

2011-11-19T15:14:00.001-06:00

A chapter from my new book due 2012, and a retread from 2009. This version from ViewsHound.

Prior to the first Christmas of our married life, my husband and I baked traditional holiday cookies. We also made a batch of homemade sangria in our little Largo, Florida apartment over a gun shop. Then we made another batch of sangria.

Last Christmas, I learned a dirty little secret. Because I am naive about such things, I had no idea this behind-the-scenes activity existed. I am not talking about the alleged whereabouts and existence of one Jolly Old Elf.

This is much more insidious.

Some people actually hire designers to decorate their homes for the holidays.
That is the secret I learned when researching a story about Christmas decorations. Those who use a professional decorator want their secret intact. Therefore, I am not naming names.

To each her own.

My family enjoys certain strange and random traditions holidays. We prefer the old-fashioned way, an eclectic mix of decorations and gifts gathered from our personal history. In addition, I prefer complete chaos evidenced by old plastic tubs and random, miss-marked boxes scattered throughout the basement.

As our family grew, we obtained more holiday decorations. Sharpie in hand, one year I asked my husband what I should write on the outside of a new box.

He said, in an exasperated tone, “I don’t care, write whatever you want.”
I thought, I’ll show him, so I wrote “Happy Birthday Vince Lombardi.”

Some future grandchild will come across our holiday decorations and wonder, “What in the world?”

We treasure our ornaments given by friends and family. There is the “Light up the holidays with gas” from the Indiana Gas Company via our friend Rex. Or the Shell station Santa Claus from the best man in our wedding. That ornament was free with fill-up. (“Uncle” Jimmy might be a little on the cheap side. When taking us to lunch, he prefers the Dairy Queen Full Meal Deal, and will often order the Children’s Meal.)
Santa Gator is one of my favorites, and I love a beautiful red ornament from the Hotel de Coronado in San Diego. When we had our only child, friends and family were so thrilled they gave us about half a dozen “Baby’s First Christmas 1990” ornaments.

That baby is a man now, and we still hang all the identical 1990 ornaments.

A construction paper tiny red hand, made by our son in kindergarten, always has a prominent place on the tree.

Prior to the first Christmas of our married life, my husband and I baked traditional holiday cookies.

We also made a batch of homemade sangria in our little Largo, Florida apartment over a gun shop.

Then we made another batch of sangria.

After the routine mixing, dropping, baking, and cooling, we were up for some excitement. That it, after we had another batch of sangria.

We decided to put flour in our hair to see what the future held. (The future has arrived. Believe me, gray hair is not very exciting.)

That joy didn’t last long. Hmmm, what should we do next?

There sat our grey cat Mikhail Barysnikat.

We floured the cat. Before you call the animal rights people, please know that at no time was The Kat in danger. We just gently added some flour to his fur to see what he would look like when he was older. The Kat was not thrilled with his instant aging, and hid under the couch.

My family of origin also had its own strange traditions. On Christmas Eve, we read the story of Jesus' birth from the Gospel of Luke. Then a family member reads “Casey at the Bat”, which bears no relationship to the holiday season at all, but I like to tell people it is an old Lutheran tradition.

On that evening, there is joy in Mudville. Our family likes poetry. Poetry is best read aloud.

My brother and I share a favorite holiday sport that we have passed on to our children. For months, we saved the cardboard rolls that come with wrapping paper. During the Christmas holidays, these “conkers” stood like holiday sentries in the corner awaiting battle.

Christmas morning the conker battle began. My mother, father, brother, and I each took our place in the living room with our weapons and fought to the finish. The winner was the one with the last intact roll. Imagine my parent’s surprise when our Lutheran pastor dropped in right in the middle of battle. How to explain? Okay, Pastor was Norwegian and not German. Let’s just say we told him it was a German Lutheran holiday tradition, just like lebkuchen.

Now we are just weeks away from the special holidays. We no longer need to flour our hair; nature has taken care of that. The conkers stand ready in a corner, awaiting Christmas soldiers for battle. Soon the tree will stand with its eclectic ornaments, each a special memory.

Happy Birthday, Vince Lombardi, and to all a good night.

Cousin Beulah's Porcupine Meatballs

2011-11-10T15:50:00.000-06:00

http://open.salon.com/blog/bernadine_spitzsnogel/2011/11/10/cousin_beulahs_porcupine_meatballs

Cousin Beulah’s Porcupine Meatballs

We have an orange Rubbermaid card box filled with thirty years’ worth of recipes on index cards and clipped from the newspaper. The entire history of a family is contained in that little index-card sized box.

When I was a young woman, I graciously accepted recipes but secretly rolled my eyes and stuffed the index cards in the orange box. Each woman at a wedding shower brought me a special recipe from her family, and wrote a “helpful” hint on the card. Again, I smiled graciously, and stuffed them in the box.

Over time, I began to appreciate what I had initially rejected.

Not only filled with recipes for comfort and familiar foods, the orange box is filled with memories, history, love, and care.

There’s several “diet” recipes from my late mother-in-law, including “impossible coconut pie,” a mixture which begs the question, “What WAS she thinking?” There are recipes from the early days of microwaves, and tips on canning mincemeat from my grandmother’s church group. An article clipped out of the Sunday Evansville Courier and Press provides instruction on making a pound cake – for us it was more like six pounds and it broke the beaters of our mixer.

Tonight as we enjoy one of the last few warm days before inevitable winter, I pulled out the worn white index card with my mother’s handwriting delicately placed on it. “Cousin Beulah’s Porcupine Meatballs” is written at the top in Mom’s perfect elementary school teacher handwriting.

My mom was one of those people who knew the history of everyone in her family and in her life, and had a million friends. I don’t remember Cousin Beulah, nor am I sure I ever met her. I think she was from Michigan. But I’ve eaten her porcupine meatballs, a winter-time concoction of hamburger, rice, onions, tomato soup, and Worcestershire sauce, all of my life.

When my husband and I married, we came home to Indiana from where we lived in Florida for the big family wedding. After we got back to Tampa, my parents sent us a wedding card. My mother was big on writing letters, sending clippings, and cards, and for most of my life filled up my mailbox with comforting and often obscure items from home.

Why she sent us a wedding card after we had been home for nearly two weeks is beyond me, but I’ve kept it all these years. Inside my mother wrote, again in her perfect Palmer-school handwriting, “We buried Cousin Beulah today.” That was it. No Happy Marriage, hope your honeymoon was great, nothing. We buried Cousin Beulah today. It still strikes me as very funny in a perverse kind of way, informative and yet terse.

Now as an adult I appreciate those connections to the past that my mother wove into our lives. Cousin Beulah, wherever you are, I love your meatballs. We are linked together by scant DNA and a fattening comfort food that tastes awfully good on a cold November night.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

2011-11-09T13:19:00.000-06:00

In my parent’s home and in many Midwestern homes, not much is more important than college sports.

Game day was never necessarily about this win or loss, it was always about the next one, or next season, or the next great quarterback Your team was good – all others were bad.

A multi-points victory over the Little Sisters of the Poor Division III football team was savored and proof that your team was the best.

While any loss to a real competitor like Notre Dame or Ohio State just proved what cheaters and losers that other school is. And that meant everything about the other universities was sub par. Why would anyone want to attend Ohio State or God forbid Notre Dame? It isn't enough that my team wins, no, yours must lose and lose badly.

Why?

Because our team is the best, and being the best at sports means everything.

Battle lines are drawn by color, and state, and division, and conferences. This parochial attitude covered everything in life, and provided evidence that the root word of “fan” is fanatic.

But what price, victory?

Joe Paterno who has ruled over State College, PA in his football kingdom for more than forty years announced his retirement this morning.

In the church that is college football, Paterno is the pope.

According to a CBS news story this morning, The beloved 84-year-old Paterno has been engulfed by outrage that he did not do more to stop Sandusky (an assistant coach) after a graduate assistant came to Paterno in 2002 after allegedly having seen the former assistant coach molesting a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State showers.

"This is a tragedy," Paterno said in a statement. "It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more."

But he didn’t do more. He did not go to the police when someone alleged that one of his staff molested a child in the Penn State showers. Read that again and soak in its meaning. Paterno did not go to the police when someone alleged that one of his staff molested a child in the Penn State showers.

How many children’s lives have been ruined, in site of this legendary locker room?

But nothing will change. College athletes and coaches will continue to be revered as royalty. There is always one more win.

The King is Dead. Long live the king.

If time could be recaptured, when the clocks fall back...

2011-11-09T08:45:00.003-06:00

Good Morning column from Evansville Courier and Press

November 9, 2011

If time could be recaptured when clocks fall back

Returning to Central Standard Time last weekend, I lose the joy of October and accept the reality of November. November means darkness after 4 p.m., the chill of fall lessened by the furnace, but not cold enough for a fire in the fireplace. Yet we are given a “magic” extra hour. Most of us sleep it away, feeling more rested on that Sunday and for a few days until our biological clocks catch up to nature.

In an alternate universe, what would you do if magically given an extra hour of your choosing? Would you choose something new, or would you bring back an hour from your past, to savor, redo, or simply review?

There are many hours in the far-distant and recent past that I would love to recapture and enjoy again — enjoying dinner at the Eiffel Tower with my love as the twinkling lights of Paris illuminated the evening, watching the sun rise in triumphant colors over a wooden cross at the Grand Canyon, witnessing our infant son’s three shocked blinks as the pastor made the Sign of the Cross and said “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” at his Holy Baptism.

These are moments that play over and over in my mind like unending reels on old, sepia-toned movies.

And there are the moments that I would do over, given the chance for another 60 minutes. I wouldn’t be as nasty to my mother as we prepared to pick up my wedding dress. My mother cannot be hurried, and I pushed her on that day which should be a lovely memory. Now she is in a world of her own, where whatever memories she has are hidden under the reality of dementia.

High school, well, high school is a series of moments most people would redo. I probably wouldn’t have slipped and fell on a piece of chocolate cake in the gymnasium in front of the entire athletic banquet crowd.

As we age, we learn that time — not money — is the really desired commodity. Unlike money, we cannot hoard precious hours away in a bank or under a mattress. But we can lose time as just as economies can collapse.

The falling leaves and the transition back to standard time remind us to spend our time wisely. Soak in the colors and richness of life. While the memories tucked away in snapshots and our minds are wonderful, nothing is as good as the real thing.

When I am anxious, I go to a “happy place” in my mind, an hour in time from a decade ago. I’m sitting in an Adirondack wooden chair on a Florida Panhandle beach. Our son is making sand castles at the water’s edge on this warm spring day, and my husband, clad in a baseball hat and beach clothes, reads a paperback next to me. My “happy place” brightens my dark November day.

What hours in your life do you savor?

Amy Abbott amymcvayabbott@gmail.com


Powered by TECNAVIA		Copyright © 2011 Evansville Courier & Press 11/09/2011

I'll have a shoe with cheese on it, and shove it down my throat

2011-11-08T20:26:00.003-06:00

Readers Guide Prize on Viewshound November 8, 2011

On the tour bus in London and on the Eurostar, our guide coached us. Speak French. They like to hear their language, and will respect you if you try it. Remember, eating at a French restaurant is an experience. Savor every course. Don’t be too quick to order your meal. Enjoy the wine.

This was our first “Pop across the Pond”, and London had been easy to navigate once we got used to cars driving on the left side of the road.

France was a different story. As comedian Steve Martin said in an early routine, “In French, oeuf means egg, cheese is fromage… it’s like those French have a different word for everything.” In a comedy routine from an album (yes, I mean LP) from the ‘70s, Martin goes into a French restaurant, trying to order a cheese omelette and tells the waiter, “I’ll have a shoe with cheese on it, and shove it down my throat.”

This is the cultural context in which we entered Paris, immediately in sensory overload on the ride from the train station to our hotel. Out of our 19th story hotel room, we had a clear view of the Eiffel Tower, a breathtaking sight.

With a few free hours, we wanted to get dinner, and listened to several recommendations from our guide.

We walked several blocks, not even having a clue we were on the Champs Elysees until later. We spotted an inviting place and looked at a menu. I was counting on my husband to communicate; he had read an entire manuscript in French in front of a jury to complete graduate school. OK, so it was a quarter of a century ago, but surely the words for “chicken with some kind of fattening, buttery sauce” haven’t changed that much.
We were seated inside a glassed area that offered full street view, and then the waiter handed us our giant menus.

Oh, how we anticipated this, slow, relaxing, savored meal.

First, a glass of wine.

The waiter sniffed at us because we wanted a glass, not a bottle of wine. (Don’t all waiters in French restaurants sniff, or when you read about them, the word sniff is always used?) You could see his mind racing and the Ugly Americans imprint practically appearing as a cloud out of his head.

“Red,” or “white,” he said.

I said, “Pinot noir?”

He said emphatically, “Red” or “White.”

Okay, I guess we didn’t have any other choices. My husband and I both said “white.”

The waiter wrote this down on his little pad and then said, “To eat?"

What? What about a salad? What about five courses? What about the "savoring?” I had just read the wine menu and wasn’t ready to order my meal yet. And I wanted a salad. But the waiter was pushy and so I selected something on the menu that looked vaguely familiar.

Pave de rumsteck de race Normandy, pommes Pont-Neuf.

In my shallow mind, I thought this was beef rump roast with new potatoes. I confused “Normandy” with “Burgundy” thinking it would be something close to Beef Bourguignon.

Or close enough. I’m eating in a French restaurant on the Champs Elysees, how bad can it be?

The waiter asked me in his broken English “how I wanted it?” I said medium well. At home I normally eat steaks medium, but I do not like my meat rare so I erred on the side of caution.

Almost immediately the waiter brought our two glasses of wine, both red.
My husband wanted to send them back, but I talked him out of it. Red is fine, I said. It’s a French restaurant in Paris. All good.

Within another five minutes, our entrees came out quicker than the daily special at Applebees.

My husband had ordered an “assortment of meats” which in France apparently means two. My plate had pork spare ribs and mashed potatoes on it. I don’t do ribs. I could do mashed potatoes, but it wasn’t even close to what I thought I ordered.
So my dear husband sent it back.

This time, I savored the ambiance while my husband ate his meal (which he said was good).

About 30 minutes later my entrée arrived. I am not sure what the 30 minutes were used for, because it wasn’t to cook the steak which was one of the rarest pieces of meat I’ve seen outside the Whitley County 4-H live cattle auction.

I sawed at the edges with my knife and ate the potatoes. I didn’t have the heart to send it back again. Nor could I endure the waiter’s sniff.

We did not have the dessert; for fear that the Mousse au chocolat would be rare Canadian moose (Filet of Bullwinkle).

You and me and Lisa

2011-11-05T22:16:00.000-05:00

Fifty-some years I had been waiting for this day. This Wednesday was the day, the day I was going to tour the Louvre, in Paris, France, the most famous art museum in the world.

My husband and I had never been anywhere out of the country, except for a few places in Ontario, Canada. Only a dim sum restaurant in Toronto’s Chinatown was remotely exotic, with baskets full of chicken beaks and Chinese CNN blaring overhead.

On a glorious October day in Paris, with the autumn sunlight diffused across the magnificent buildings of the City of Lights, I was going to fulfill a bucket list item, and visit the most famous museum in the world.

As our coach slid under the famous buildings to the underground parking lot, I was excited and apprehensive. Excited because of what this represented in my lifelong love of paintings, apprehensive because six weeks earlier I injured my left knee while moving boxes to our basement to prepare for a new kitchen.

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the Louvre, remembers the grand staircases from the movies. Would I be able to enjoy our visit, hobbling like Chester in Gunsmoke? Would I ruin my husband's enjoyment of the day?

As we arrived, the tour guide suggested that we visit the restroom before we begin our tour.

Like many European “toilettes,” the Louvre’s basement commode had a one Euro admission fee. I gave the matron my euro and she escorted me into the back to my personal stall (which cost about $1.83 in American money on that day).

Having done my bidding, I tried to get out. The door was jammed. Seems the harder I tried to unlock it, the more jammed it became.

Stuck in the loo at the Louvre--was this just the hellish beginning of a never-to-be-forgotten day in Paris?

I didn't know the French word for help. I screamed “help” in English so loud that members of our tour group outside heard me. The matron came running, unjammed the door, escorted me outside and shoved a bottle of water at me. (The French have a marketing strategy for their pay toilette--free eau water assures return customers.)

Back with my group, my husband and I walked past a Starbucks and a number of upscale shops until we reached the famous upside down pyramid designed by American architect I.M. Pei.

Several years ago the French wanted a new entrance for the Louvre complex and sent the art and architecture world in a tailspin by using a modern design that features a large glass pyramid and several smaller ones. The upside down pyramid is a key feature in the Dan Brown book, The da Vinci Code, and a favorite meeting spot inside the museum.

It was at this iconic spot that I had my meltdown.

Still a little shaken by my incarceration in that bathroom Bastille, I began to realize the enormity of the museum and the task at hand.

After seven days on a tour, my knee was not in good shape and I couldn’t handle stairs or standing still. Much of visiting an art museum is that slow dance around the paintings or objects, and weaving around other tourists like the Frogger video game. It dawned me on that on this special day; I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with our tour.

I spoke with the tour guide, and told her that all I really wanted to see was “the big Three.” “The Big Three” are the most oft-visited pieces in the Louvre, Winged Victory, the Venus de Milo, and da Vinci’s iconic Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting in the world.

The tour guide, who didn’t recognize that I was in pain or upset, said, “Oh, those three are in a different museum.” She was kidding.

I burst into tears--big, wet tears that rolled down my cheek and onto the floor, tears in full view of everyone in my tour group.

Perhaps this is not a big deal to most people, but I am not a person who cries much at all. Usually crying sets off an asthma attack, so I’ve learned to keep it in check.

But not this time. I sobbed.

The combination of time change, excitement, pain, and frustration made me take off like a colicky baby, except with an audience of tourists in the basement of the Louvre.

The solution was obvious: a wheelchair. My husband gave his passport to the Information Desk (yes, they wanted his passport) and an old, blue hospital-style wheelchair appeared before our eyes.

I felt terribly guilty. I never park in handicapped spaces, because my husband’s mother had been handicapped and I was always appalled at the number of people who had no regard for that, and zipped into the specially marked parking spaces. I’ve volunteered much of my life for community organizations that serve the disabled, so I just felt guilty.

My husband told me to “get over it” and we moved on to the glorious treasures inside the Louvre.

As it turned out, we had a superlative tour of the museum, seeing much more than our group. Because of the centuries-old superstructure of the building, elevators are scarce. To move from one floor to another requires moving through the labyrinth of galleries. We saw more of the museum than most people, including original versions of paintings we had seen the day before at the Palace of Versailles, including The Coronation of Napoleon and Marie Antoinette and her Children at Versailles..

Finally, the Big Three. Winged Victory was beautiful. Imagine that she was carved in first century BC.

The Venus de Milo from third century Greece was a dead ringer for my deceased Aunt Zoe. Venus, or Aphrodite in Hellenic times, is missing arms and stands in an oddly convoluted way. While others found this to be fascinating, I couldn’t help but wonder if Miss Venus also had knee pain.

We made our way with the throngs of tourists to a smaller gallery full of amazing paintings, and one small walled-off painting on a wall behind the entrance. How many images of this painting have you seen?

Of course the most famous painting in the world is probablyLeonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, La Joconde as the French call her.

While scholars argue about whether this icon lives up to her billing, she represents a great treasure in western art, and I wanted to see it. Time after time, people are disappointed by the Mona Lisa because it is so difficult to get up close to the smaller-than-expected painting. Tourists also often ignore three or more other da Vinci's in proximity to this painting in the Louvre. As Americans, we only have one permanent exhibit of a da Vinci painting. Ginevra de' Benci is also a painting of a young, attractive Italian noblewoman, and housed in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The Louvre has a special gallery for the Mona Lisa, and on the day we were there the gallery was filled with tourists, all holding their digital cameras up in the air to capture the famous painting. As my husband pushed me into the gallery, he was pulled to the side by our tour guide Isabella. Isabella told us that we could go up in front ahead of the rope line, behind which were hundreds of noisy, pushing art fans.

My husband pushed me directly in front of the painting, I took a picture, and we moved on.

But for one brief second there was no one else in the world, no one but my husband, me, and da Vinci’s most famous subject.

She smiled that sly smile at us, and her eyes followed us as we quickly merged back into the crowd.

Story and photos copyright by the author 2011.

Magical Thinking at the Mall

2011-11-04T13:58:00.002-05:00

What's wrong with our spending habits as a nation is exacerbated at the retail level.

Last Wednesday my brother and I headed to a local department store to buy clothes for our elderly mother, who has dementia. She is no longer able to shop, or even accompany me on a shopping trip. My brother was visiting, so I took him along to help select several holiday outfits for her.

While she is completely dependent on others, she is still able to attend a number of social events with my father. It is very important to him that she look nice. They live in an upscale retirement home, and everyone “dresses for dinner.” He also is active with his university in fundraising, and they attend a number of dinners, orchestra concerts, and programs.

I selected two Alfred Dunner slacks outfits with sweaters, both stylish and festive looking for the holidays.

Frankly, I went to the store on Wednesday because they advertise good sales. However, price wasn’t my main concern. Mom is an odd size, short but plump, and finding attractive clothing for her is somewhat of a challenge. When I find pieces that work, I buy them.

I paid with my credit card. My husband and I always paid our card off at the end of the month. We only have two, one that is used regularly, and the back-up one, for when card number one isn’t accepted. After my job loss three years ago, we don’t buy anything unless we can afford to pay it off that month. Sometimes that is a difficult rule to accept, but in this “new normal,” it is our reality. That wasn't always so; we spent a lot of our twenties and thirties bailing our financial ship with a tin can.

The clerk asked me if I had a store card. Was I going to use the store card and get the special discount?

I said no.

I said I don’t use the store card anymore.

She said, “Well, you are really stupid then. You could save twenty percent right now by using the store card, and then just write me a check and pay it off.”

It seemed to me that if the discount were meant to benefit me, that the store would give it to me immediately, no matter how I paid for my merchandise.

I don’t want to use the store card, which charges the usurious rate of 28% and offers me an ungodly high limit. I don’t care that I will save twenty dollars.

The more I thought about it, the more angry I got about it.

While twenty dollars is twenty dollars, and I would like to have twenty more dollars, the question to me is at what price? As Americans, we are so into the “instant gratification” and always looking for a bargain.

But that isn’t what this was about. This was about getting me to use a store card, hoping that like many other Americans I would run the card up beyond what I can afford, and let the card company charge me 28% interest on the balance.

Of course all the sales people are incentivized to push the store card. Have you purchased anything in a department store lately where you weren’t approached to use credit?

I don’t like being called stupid by a clerk in a store when I’ve just paid nearly two hundred dollars for four pieces of clothing. My days at Macy’s are now over.

Next, please.

Author Rick Reed featured in Westside Courier

2011-10-31T09:24:00.000-05:00

Evansville Courier & Press 10/28/2011, Page S16

Reed’s books drawn from days in law enforcement

By Amy Abbott

Special to the Courier & Press

At Rex Mundi High School, Rick Reed was always “right on the edge of being expelled,” he said. Now the author of several successful true crime books, Reed credits encouragement by his sociology teacher, Mr. Grotius.

“In high school, I started writing onepage short stories; I liked to start out one way and have a surprise ending. I have always liked surprised endings,” said Reed, a retired Evansville Police Department sergeant, who amassed a stellar record in a 30-year career across several agencies. “On one of my high school papers, Mr. Grotius recognized me and told me that I should write more. He read several of my papers to the class, and I began to feel some kind of connection to writing,” Reed said.

At barely 18, Reed entered the U.S. Army, where he had diverse experiences as a weapons instructor, intelligence analyst and languages and interpretation. Coming home from the military, Reed wanted a law enforcement career but tested positive for tuberculosis he had caught on Okinawa. While the TB eventually “burned out,” Reed could not get on the police force at that time.

Reed went to see Judge Miller, whom he heard was tough, and told him, “I just got out of the Army and I need a job. I’ll make you a deal, I’ll do anything you want for a month, and if you don’t like the looks of me I’ll say adios. Let me prove to you that I’m a good worker.”

Judge Miller laughed and said, “You’ve got a job.”

Reed worked for the judge for seven years as a bail bondsman, pre-sentence investigator and probation counselor. He eventually worked for the sheriff and local police departments.

During his early law enforcement service, Reed published an underground newsletter called “The Monkey Boy Gazette,” which roasted various people in the department. “The department didn’t know who was doing it, and then found out. I was called into the chief’s office, and told ‘when you put one of these out, we want to look at it first’.”

As his day career progressed, Reed started working on a 30or 40-page book off the clock.

“I clearly didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “I sent a letter off to an agent with 20 or so pages, and I got a nasty, hateful letter back that hurt my feelings, so I gave it up.”

But the writing bug had bitten him, and he kept writing, first in a notebook and then on a laptop. “I wrote a 450-page book in a year and it was horrible, with really poor grammar and writing. The plot was good. I let a few people read it, but didn’t get much farther,” he stated.

That was all about to change. During his time as a detective, a man named Joe Brown committed a heinous murder.

Reed said, “I was the one who caught him, and we discovered he was a serial killer.”

Ironically, a man named Steven Walker, an Allentown, Pa., reporter who had no clue about Reed’s proclivity for storytelling, called Sgt. Reed to interview him for details of the case. “I said ‘I won’t give you my materials, but I’ll work with you.’ Walker said he had a New York editor and told them he had the detective on the case. They wanted the book.

“We signed a contract 50-50, and I ended up writing quite a bit of it. When the book ‘Blood Crimes’ was finished, Kensington Press offered me a contract for more true crime books,” he said.

“Blood Trail” is the story of serial killer Joe Brown. Brown was sentenced in 1977 to life in prison for kidnapping and armed robbery. He was released in 1995, despite having beaten a fellow inmate nearly to death. According to Reed’s book jacket, “Brown later confessed that during the next five years, he indulged in a sevenstate rampage of torture and murder, his victims female hitchhikers and prostitutes. Now doing time in Wabash Valley Corrections Center, Brown maintains that he murdered no less than 13 other women.”

His 30-year law enforcement career behind him, Reed started teaching criminal justice at Ivy Tech College. He has written two other books since “Blood Crimes,” both of which have done very well with Kensington Publishing. He is also grateful for the community support.

He is extremely proud that “The Cruelest Cut” has on its cover a review by Nelson De-Mille, of a hero of his from the genre. DeMille is a well-known American author of thrillers and a favorite of Reed’s. The second in this series is called “The Coldest Fear” and was published in September. Both books are fiction and use Reed’s imagination combined with his diverse law enforcement and military background.

“The Cruelest Cut” was submitted as a nominee for the Edgars last year for “Best First Book.” While Reed did not win, he was thrilled to be nominated for the award named after Edgar Allen Poe, the great American writer who wrote “Murder in the Rue Morgue” and other short stories and poems.

“I like to write and I like people to read my work. I don’t expect to retire; I just want to write good books,” he said.

His avocation has offered him plenty of travel opportunities.

“I am able to visit New York several times a year, as well as attend book events all over the country. “ He has also been asked to serve on panels at writing workshops.

How does Reed gets his ideas and develop his characters?

Chuckling, Reed said, “I think I have a screw loose! But seriously, I just started writing as (the character) Jack Murphy. Ideas developed from him, and I pulled the plot out.”

“When I was a detective, I used a certain kind of interviewing technique. I used the “interviewing” technique with Joe Brown when he murdered Ginger Gasaway. I built a relationship with him, and then I worked on the relationship and then let him answer questions.

“I use this (same technique) when I’m writing a book. I can become that character for a day. I try to look through their eyes and see what they would see and what would be important to them. I keep notes and it helps me to build a person, instead of just a one-dimensional character,” he added.

Reed explained that in his law enforcement career he’s been shot at, had people pull knives on him, been almost run down, witnessed fights in jail.

“I’ve seen way too much, and I try to draw on all that, how it made me feel. You get into the zone and write from experience.”

Reed gets up early to write, and writes every day. He is newly married to his wife Jennifer, who is a nurse.

“She is very supportive of my work and gives me a woman’s perspective.”

For more information about Reed’s work, visit www.rickreedbooks. com.

I can become that character for a day. I try to look through their eyes and see what they would see and what would be important to them. I keep notes and it helps me to build a person, instead of just a one-dimensional character, Rick Reed, Author

Have Things Changed for Women?

2011-10-30T12:04:00.001-05:00

Betty Friedan called it "the problem with no name." Women of the '50s and '60s may have felt trapped by their own privilege.

I was one of the first generation of women for whom having a job and children was the norm.
Not so the Greatest Generation.
My mother received a college degree from a good university. She worked for several years as a second grade teacher. She is a gentle soul, with the internal magnetism that draws little children to her like bees to a hive.
When she was pregnant with her first child (two years after her wedding), the school administrators decided that it was too shocking to have a pregnant woman teaching seven-year-olds. They fired her. Her life became about raising her children, caring for her husband, and her aging parents.
Her husband came home every night to a home-cooked meal, ready for him when he walked in the door. His dress shirts, always perfectly starched and ironed, hung in a row in the closet they shared. She chose his tie every morning, and got out his wingtips, setting them at the foot of the bed.
He often had civic meetings in the evening, and ran out of the house after dinner. She cleaned the dishes and when he came home, he talked with her about the meeting, whether it was community or church or school. She advised him, and I could hear their discussions from my little bedroom.
She made her children breakfast in the morning and walked us to school five blocks away until we were old enough to walk ourselves. She helped us with our homework and corrected our grammar. As we grew, my grandparents needed her more and she drove them to doctor’s appointments, stayed overnight if one was in the hospital, got their prescriptions filled.
There was never any talk about her going back to work. In my elementary school class, there was only one mother who worked outside the home. She was a night nurse at the local hospital. We felt sorry for her only daughter. What must it be like to not have a mother at home? While mine was not a June Cleaver in a shirt dress and pearls, she always looked nice when she went out.
She and her friends met mid-morning in their pedal pushers for coffee, and talked about their children, their husbands, their small lives. My mother never seemed to me to want more.
When I was in fifth grade, a local church decided to start a pre-school program and asked my mother to locate materials and be the first director.
This was a side of my mother I had never seen. She went to night meetings, like Dad did, and she wore a blue tailored suit, white gloves, and a little white hat. She carried one of Dad’s old briefcases, filled with mimeographed blue copies of research she did at the library, and notes on lesson plans. She was a different person. For nearly three months, she balanced all her normal responsibilities and became someone I didn’t know. She threw off new energy for starting this pre-school.
One night she came home in tears.
The church decided against funding the pre-school. She had worked very hard on a pro forma, and the board was too conservative. They gave her a letter citing her hard work and excellent planning.
She never tried anything outside of home again.
I noticed a change in her after that. While I can’t pin down that this was the exact cause, she soon would be in major depression, a disease that would haunt her for years to come. She would be hospitalized for a suicide attempt, and participate in many private therapy and group sessions. Knowing what I know now, I suspect that the traditional definition of depression “anger turned inward” was exactly at work. She was too timid to speak out to her gregarious husband, overbearing parents, and growing, engaged children. But she was the proverbial wind beneath all their wings.
I think back on this sometimes with great sadness — as a woman who had many choices and as a woman who was ready to meet those choices because my stay-at-home mother invested so much in me.
I imagine it was incredibly difficult to “put herself out there” into a changed world after a decade of not working, or not engaging with the wider world.
She was always there when I was young, like an inviting tree in our back yard whose limbs reached out to embrace everyone around her. Always giving, never taking.
What did she need? What choices did she have?

The Value of a Lazy Sunday Afternoon

2011-10-04T10:35:00.002-05:00

This is my "The Raven Lunatic" column, currently running in eight Indiana newspapers.

The Value of the Lazy Sunday Afternoon

My paternal grandmother felt that Sundays were for several specific activities, church, family dinner, and “resting”.

Church was not a question. You were going—no ifs, ands, or buts about it. As an adult, when I visit my parents in West Lafayette, we go to the 8 a.m. service (7 a.m. Evansville time.) No, ifs, ands, or buts. And yes, I will make a “joyful noise” whether I like it or not! To quote my brother, “I can sleep when I’m dead.”

When I was a child many Indiana towns—including my hometown of South Whitley—had “blue laws” that prohibited certain businesses from Sunday commerce. Nor did schools or sports leagues schedule Sunday activities. Except for the occasional piano recital or Scout ceremony, Sunday was as my grandmother decreed.

There were few if any convenience stores in the area. I’m not sure that term was even coined yet; gas stations sold gas and oil and windshield wipers. If you needed to fill your car with gasoline, you did it on Saturday.

A few restaurants were open to accommodate the Sunday trade, but certainly no drug or grocery or hardware store. Banks were open 9 to 3, except on Fridays when they stayed open until six p.m. The flowers for our wedding twenty-seven years ago had to be delivered before noon on Saturday for the 4:30 p.m. wedding. The florist closed at noon.

There was a K-Mart thirty miles away, but it was Sunday – for heaven’s sake – and my family did not shop on Sundays.

After church and a fried chicken dinner at Kenny’s Drive In or Mullendore’s Broasted Chicken, our family watched sports on television or visited people.

My grandmother and my mother particularly enjoyed doing this, leaving the men at home and taking me along. Sometimes we just got in the car to see where we wound up, in the homes of other people who were also not shopping on Sunday.

My grandparents and I were “joyriding” one Sunday afternoon, when my grandfather decided to follow some smoke to see if there was a fire. My grandmother nagged him to continue east down Washington Center Road farther and farther away from their home. Soon, we were in Allen County and still no fire, just more white smoke from a distant point, that didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Almost to Fort Wayne, we finally sniffed out the source of smoke; a farmer was burning tires in an old barrel.

If there were no football games to watch, no baseball to listen to on the radio, no church afternoon activities, no fires to chase, no neighbors to visit, then we would sit on the porch. Just sit.

When was the last time you just sat on your porch or deck and did nothing?

With the nicer weather, I sit on my deck for at least ten or twenty minutes a day (yes, the Wi-Fi does work out there) but it is better when I just ponder the Wild Kingdom in the yard. Today Mr. Ground Hog stuck his ugly stubby nose out from under the yard barn, and I gave him a sly grin back (a knowing grin that says, “I know where the trap is, mister, and I know how to bait it.”)

A group of frisky squirrels played around the bird bath, still overflowing with this weekend’s rain water. If I wait long enough in the evening, a doe or two will cross the street behind my house to walk down to the neighboring lake for a drink.

My grandmother knew something important; she understood the value of resting. In a world full of constant stimulation, mind-numbing problems, and the threat of terrorism, a good rest on Sunday isn’t a bad use of time.

© by author 2011.

Complaint Department

2011-10-04T10:31:00.002-05:00

OCTOBER 3, 2011 10:57AM

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Several national banks are promoting extra fees, such as $5 per month for debit card use, to cover lost revenue with new regulations limiting certain fees.

This didn't hit home to me until my broker (rather, the administrative assistant) called to inform me that each monthly statement from each account would henceforth cost me $1 per statement per month. Like most people, my thirty pieces of silver are in diverse accounts, and we pay a fee for their management.

The broker then emailed an "application" to go paperless. It is fifteen steps! Fifteen. I'm 54 and half-intimidated and half-addled by computers. How will members of the generation ahead of us manage? I suspect their half-intimidated, half-addled Baby Boomer children will struggle through it with them.

I completely respect the idea to go paperless. What a good idea to reduce the number of mailings from these financial organizations! If I want a copy of a statement, I can print it out myself. It is also easy to review on-line, assuming I can remember where I put the passwords.

What I object to is the sudden addition of a fee that forces me to go on-line. One dollar per month per account adds up, and slowly erodes what is in the account. There are enough issues already eroding most people’s savings.

I understand the need to make a dollar, but I’m also beginning to understand why my paternal grandfather took $600 and buried it in the backyard during the Great Depression.

Evansville's Fall Festival

2011-10-04T10:28:00.000-05:00

OCTOBER 3, 2011 8:24PM

Deep fried Thin Mints, Pronto Pups,

and Kangaroo Jerky

Deep fried everything. Sugary drinks and sweets from Buckeyes to fudge and cobbler, naturally covered with vanilla ice cream. You name it, and you can get it at the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival. For more than a hundred years, this street fair in southern Indiana during the first week of October draws people from hither and yon, all eager to try the latest and greatest in carnival food.
My family has lived in southern Indiana more than twenty years, and we've headed to Evansville's west side each year to walk up and down Franklin Street with our "Munchie Map", seeking our annual treats.
We park in the same place (Reitz High School Athletic Boosters) and walk from St. Joe all the way to the end and then hit the booths on the opposite side of the street all the way back to St. Joe. Today we had corn fritters (my beloved had syrup on his) and cobbler with ice cream (his blackberry, mine peach.) My beloved also had a bowl of homemade bean soup.

The Fall Festival is sponsored by the West Side Nut Club, and charitable organizations make thousands of dollars selling food items during this week.
With 130 food boothes, there is anything you can imagine, and some things you cannot imagine. One of the new items this year was french fried Kool-Aid. No, I didn't ask any more about it. And I didn't sample.
We like to go on the first day, because everything is still very clean. Having managed a booth for a non-profit at the Festival from 1996-1999, I know that not every booth changes its deep fat fryer grease every day, while some change it twice. A Festival-wide grease pit is located in the middle, where the grease is taken.
My organizatino sold sausage burgers, pierogies, elephant ears, and bagged candy. I'm certain I've blocked out an item or two.
Sausage burgers have their own special grease that sticks on everything. After I had been involved with this organization as its Director of Development for two years, the local Knights of Columbus built us a custom-made Fall Festival booth. The Development office staff was allowed to give our input, so we had them construct a little closet as well as a special counter for our cell phones (which were bigger and bulkier in those days). They also purchased the Mother of all Ventilation Fans, which helped keep the booth cool from the large grill (for the sausage burgers) and two giant fryers (for the pierogies.)
Now, I know that people from upstate New York and Cleveland, Ohio, and Erie, Pennsylvania are going to go ballistic when they read that we deep fried the pierogies. Purists apparently boil them. I know these are fightin' words, but I find them disgusting and haven't eaten on since those days.
We put up our booth on Sunday morning and took it down the following Sunday morning. The organization's maintenance man did all the really hard work, I just had to be the administrative person there.
During the week, I didn't have to be there all day long every day, but I did have to open up at 7 a.m. when all the deliveries started coming, ice, burgers, buns, etc., and I had to close up shop at 1o p.m. and take the money to the drop-off box at the bank. With all those booths making hundreds of dollars per night, and with the large population of drug addicts in southern Indiana, it is amazing that there weren't more robberies of people taking money to their banks.
The worst part was always coming home. I learned quickly after the first night of the first year that I had to wear old shoes. The shoes I had on that day became old shoes. I also learned to go into our house via the basement, take a shower down there, and toss my greasy clothes directly into the washer.
After a week of this, I would nearly collapse. I didn't go back for a few years, but now husband has convinced me that we can't live without corn fritters. More than the food I like watching the people.
Here are some of my views from today. Walk with me down Franklin Street on this sunny October day.

All the pols are out. Both political parties have booths and one Republican candidate was smart enough to put the "Munchie Map" on the back of his advertising, as my beloved shows.

We walked more than half-way down the street to find the very special corn fritters. And they were so good (as pictured above).

Fans of the 1990s television sitcom Roseanne will recognize the twin spires pictured in the opening shots and B roll for the show. Director Matt Williams graduated from an Evansville university, and the fictional town of Llanford is based on Evansville's west side community, with its plastics plants and blue collar homes.

This mother and daughter sat at our table and I asked if I could take their picture as they enjoyed their ice cream.

As at many town festivals, the fire trucks and police cars and those servants of the public who use them were out in full force, along with all the local TV and radio stations.

This guy was my favorite, wearing a crazy hat and a T-shirt that said "funnel cake king."

As a throwback to the old German community that initially settled here, many locals eat "brain sandwiches." Yes, I mean those disgusting organ meats. Never have tried one, never will.

This young man checks out the menu board for this booth which offers an eclectic selection from deep fried Snickers to smoked pork chops. His buddy seems to be enjoying something indistinguishable.

My People, The Formicans

2011-09-30T12:08:00.000-05:00

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We are at the end of week four of the Great Kitchen Remodel. What was it about this venture that made me think it was a good idea?

Among the delightful surprises of this activity was the discovery of Old Mold behind the wall between the kitchen and the garage. In the Pre-Code days this house was apparently remodeled, with kite string for wiring, old rolled-up grocery bags for insulation, and electrical outlets all put in upside down.

The mold has long been dead but gave off that Old Mold smell. Naturally this involved more expenses to rip out all the dry wall and replace the insulation.

The dishwasher had been leaking so part of the floor had to be removed and some of the basement ceiling. More dry wall replaced. The good part about this is that since we had to dig into the basement ceiling, the plumbers moved the pipes out of the north wall and into the floor. In theory this should avoid future frozen pipes.

The wall cabinets and base cabinets are in and the counter tops arrived this morning. Who wouldn't love to have eight grand worth of solid surface or granite counter tops? Well, us, for one. Eight grand was about seven times too much. We are honoring our fore bearers, the Hoosier Formicans, a race of people who strongly believed that plastic over wood is the only way to go.

The electricians come next. I have to return the new ceiling fan, because my husband pointed out that it will hang in front of the television set. We thought were so so cool to have a TV mounted on the wall, and yet we weren't smart enough to initially figure out no one could see it with the fan in the way. So we will head back to the Big Box store to find a "flush mounted fan" (sounds like a commode, doesn't it?). Our original intent was to get a ceiling fan that didn't have to be disassembled to change the bulbs, but I'm not sure that is possible. Most of the flush mounts are one piece.

We are tired of eating out of the fridge in the basement or going out to eat. My typical lunch is rolled up dried beef with light cream cheese, Cheerios and milk, or yoghurt and an English muffin with jam. Oh, and bag salad. You can't beat the bag salad, but now we have to worry about listeria.

Since I broke the guest room sink three weeks ago, we are totally using plastic silverware and plates. There's something terribly unseemly about using current bathroom sinks to wash dishes, so I had been using the rarely used guest bathroom with its nice pedestal sink. The stopper was giving me trouble when I filled the basin, so I just gave it a nice shove and it went through the porcelain and made a lovely hole.

This is now about number 45 on the contractor's list of things to fix.

Now they are slicing the counter tops to make sure they fit. I have trouble concentrating, though I have about six projects due to editors. I find myself terribly distracted and unable to write anything more than this nonsense. Probably the lack of protein in my diet

The Old Hospital

2011-09-27T14:30:00.000-05:00

Can a building feel pain, or sense joy? Does it sense a life force coming into the world, or a soul lifting off into the ether? Does it know the fear of the people inside—when the cancer diagnosis comes or the Parkinson’s’ worsens?

The old hospital near where I grew up is being replaced with a new high tech health care facility that is part of a larger chain from a nearby city. The small, two -story building with its shiny hospital green walls and black and white tile floors will no longer be used. Built in 1952, only a few years before I was born there, it is being ditched for a new facility that will serve as a “feeder” to a large city hospital thirty miles away.

My parents moved to my mother’s hometown a month before I was born. My mother had been getting prenatal care from an elderly general practitioner who died when she was seven months pregnant. She then sought care from the only doctor in the little town where they would move; he still made house calls and also served as coroner. It never occurred to her to seek the care of an ob/gyn in a larger city.

On the day of my birth, my mom had a regularly scheduled blood test at the hospital. She hadn’t suffered any pain, but the hospital was ten miles from the doctor’s office. This Marcus Welby on Whitley County was there on his hospital day.

The staff broke Mom's water about 10 a.m., knocked her out with Twilight Sleep, a popular anesthesia of the day, and my father paced back and forth in the tiny father’s waiting room. At 1:30 p.m. I came into the world into the forceps-laden hands of the local doctor, who could have been a character from a weekly television drama. My mother was completely knocked out, and remembers nothing of my birth.

The next time I came to the hospital was thirty months later. Hospital rules forbade me from being on the floor to visit my mother, so she held up my baby brother to the window. I told my father, “I see Mommy way up high.” The hospital allowed two adult visitors at one time, during limited hours.

When I was ten, my maternal grandparents were on vacation in Asheville, North Carolina, when my grandfather had a serious heart attack. After ten days of forced medical incarceration for Grampy in the North Carolina hospital, my grandparents flew back. The hometown hospital had a new unit called the “Cardiac Care Wing” and my grandfather was admitted for two more weeks of “rest.” Amazingly, no close relative had a serious illness until I was ten. I remember walking into his hospital room and seeing my six foot something grandfather lying there hooked up to IVs and heart monitors, and being very afraid.

At fourteen, I had my upper wisdom teeth removed. This required a night in the hospital following the brief surgery by the local dentist. I was terribly frightened so my mother stayed in the room with me, sleeping upright in a very uncomfortable wooden and vinyl chair.

The last time I was in the hospital was after an all-night flight from Tampa, FL to this rural hospital in Indiana. My father called to tell me that my mother had tried to commit suicide and was in the hospital. I quickly charged a ticket on Delta and my boyfriend ran me to the airport. A friend picked me up in Indianapolis in the middle of the night and we arrived in my hometown about six a.m. She slept at my parent’s house while my father and I went to the hospital.

There sat my mother – then fifty – on the same floor where her father died just six months before. She had not dealt well with his death, despite his declining health from 1967 to the time of his death in 1983. She also didn’t deal well with the “Brain Drain” departure of her two children. Both my brother and I attended college in Indiana and then flew the coop – me to Florida, brother to Oklahoma.

My mother drank Drano. Or she said she drank Drano. We don’t really know. She wasn’t injured in body – but it was certainly a call for help. Seeing her in that bed, petite, sad, angry, belligerent, an amalgam of emotions, I didn’t know quite how to react. In this place of safety and healing, the green walls seemed to close in on me.

My mother was transferred to an inpatient psychiatric hospital, and began a journey of dealing with her demons.

How odd these vignettes seem now, in a world where one can have your chest sawed open for heart surgery and be walking on a treadmill a few days later. Imagine an overnight stay for wisdom teeth!

I never set foot in the hospital again, yet when I read about its demise in the town newspaper I still read (and also write for) I felt wistful. This building has been the heart of this community – it has witnessed beginnings and endings and tragedies and triumphs in between.

And I’m sad to see it replaced, even with a building more high tech. Will it have the same heart without the ghosts of a generation or two of its citizens?

The Joys of Handwritten Letters

2011-09-23T10:27:00.002-05:00

Handwritten letters are nostalgic yet rare | GOOD MORNING COLUMN

By Amy Abbott t

Friday, September 23, 2011

"Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company."— Lord ByronAlas, the lonely handwritten letter is falling away, like the fountain pen, ink wells and blotting paper. As technology changes the way we communicate, why can't we preserve the elegance and tradition of an earlier era?
Does your heart swell when your smartphone alerts you with a buzz that you have an email or a text?
Is it the same feeling you received as a teenager when you ran to your parents' mailbox to pull out an envelope from a far distant sweetheart?
Perhaps he was writing from Vietnam, or college, or maybe he's just a fellow you met at church camp? Ripping the letter open, you first read very fast to get through it, and then the second time you savored each word as if you could make the person appear in the flesh.
This intimacy of pen on paper brought your distant one to you in a way no email or text message could.
I had pen pals early, and I learned from my grandmother and mother the fine art of letter and note writing. Use a good pen with beautiful ink, and write on thick, porous paper.
The big secret to it was: If you write someone, more than likely he will write you back! I have love letters from my grandfather to my grandmother stuffed in a box somewhere, and I have a small gray box with the letters my future husband wrote me while we lived four states apart.
These are treasures, and I cannot imagine how young lovers of today will preserve text messages.
Not too long ago, I wanted to purchase a vintage 1940s pen like the one my grandmother used. The Schaefer pen was gold and black, with a speckled pattern.
I traveled to the Fountain Pen Hospital in New York City, on a sort of pen pilgrimage. Unfortunately, I learned the vintage pens are very expensive and beyond my means.
I purchased a nice reproduction and beautiful notes on which to write.
If you've never written with a fountain pen, try it sometime. The feeling of the ink flowing through the nib onto beautiful paper is the feeling of creating art with your words.
While my fourth-grade penmanship teacher might not agree my handwriting is art, writing with a fountain pen offers an intimate expression of feeling for both the sender and the receiver.
While writing a letter doesn't provide the instant gratification of email, it's a lovely gift to a friend.
— Amy McVay Abbott, amymcvayabbott@gmail.com

The Meaning of Harvest

2011-09-21T00:07:00.000-05:00

Purging the Kitchen, column for this week

2011-09-16T08:00:00.002-05:00

Kitchen cleaning revealed treasures... and other stuff

Like many other families in the new economic reality, we’ve decided to stay put in our present home instead of my fantasy of a modern, small home where everything is new.

So we are in the process of fixing and replacing, and in the middle of the Mother-Of-All-Home-Remodels, the kitchen. About the only thing I can compare this experience to is a colonoscopy. There has been an overabundance of nasty preparation and now I’m sleepy and waiting.

What I did not anticipate was the endless cleaning and purging it would take to get to the point where the contractors could begin demolition.
I made three distinct piles: pitch, save, or church rummage sale. Won’t patrons of the rummage sale want a box of 14 plastic funnels, or tacky Christmas placemats.

The “pitch“ pile racked up a stack of old spices. Oh my heavens. I have marjoram older than my college-age son.

The proverbial junk drawer was like being in the back room at the Museum of Science and Industry. How could all that Stuff be in one tiny drawer? Brown shoelaces, Super Glue, caulk, sticky white and gold letters for a mailbox. There were 13 Allen wrenches from various assembly products, screw drivers of every size, #4 and #9 shaped birthday candles, batteries, Magic Sliders, rulers, and baggies with orphaned screws, nuts, and bolts.

Then came the Tupperware nightmare. I have 100 lids and 100 containers, and about three of them match. I can’t put them in the church rummage sale pile, but I hate to throw them away. Someone suggested I give them to a daycare center for art projects. But what about the lids?

And the coffee mugs and drinking glasses. My husband has an unnatural attachment to a coffee mug I won in a radio station contest thirty years ago in a city we no longer live. I kept it.

We have a Sambo’s mug and a Mason’s root beer mug, each priceless possessions.

And why do we need two of those plastic spaghetti measurers? Who uses those? Who can possibly have the hand dexterity to put the spaghetti in those teeny, tiny holes? The grandest treasures we found were the matching tin Ponderosa coasters and tray, given to us by friends from a long ago trip to Lake Tahoe. My friend was just asking me about those on her last visit, wondering if they would be worth any money. I’m sure I’ll be going on Pawn Stars tomorrow, and they’ll be worth enough to pay for this kitchen remodel. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

The kitchen is now emptied; food has been moved to the basement fridge and all my pots and pans and dishes are packed away in borrowed plastic bins in the living room.

Meanwhile, we set up an “alternative” kitchen next to the old refrigerator in the basement; our George Foreman and a toaster oven. Our original plan was to wash dishes in the guest bathroom, which is rarely used. That plan fell through when I accidentally pushed the plunger down too far, and it rammed through the porcelain.

A hole in the pedestal means that all the water runs on the floor, which is not conducive to washing dishes.

People have often told me I am creative; it does indeed take a creative sort to completely destroy a needed basin in this way. Now we are using paper plates and plastic silverware. I’m hopeful the Environmental Police are not watching us this week. In a few weeks, I’ll have my kitchen back. Now I need to focus on learning to cook.

Amy McVay Abbott is a Newburgh-based writer. Learn more about her new book at http://theluxuryofdaydreams.

blogspot.com.

AMY ABBOTT

THE RAVEN LUNATIC

The Literary Club

2011-09-15T09:55:00.003-05:00

My mother belonged to a literary club for most of her life. They met monthly at a member’s home and someone would review a popular book.

If I close my eyes tightly, I can picture each member of the club. They wore their best dresses to the meetings, with high heels and the good jewelry. In the early 1960s, they wore tiny Jackie Kennedy hats and short, white gloves. They were all married -- or widowed -- and their partners were upstanding men of the community. Most of them were college educated, but did not work outside the home except for a few who were teachers or librarians. Literary group was their big night out, and they all loved books.

Books were selected for review at the beginning of the year, and no one hosted or reviewed on the same night. The review or the hosting sent my mother into a frenzy. When she hosted, she polished silver for days and borrowed extra glass punch cups from a friend. She brought out the linen napkins and the special table cloth for the buffet table, Though the group only had dessert, punch, and coffee, the women always made it an elegant evening.

In this river town of only 1200 people, these women’s lives were intertwined not only in the club, but in churches, school activities, and husband’s employment. They were friends and they supported each other, carpooling to children’s activities, making a casserole when someone died, or talking on an plastic extension phone about each other or nothing in particular.

The club is long gone. Many of the women have died. My mother suffers from dementia.

Now ten years since Mom got “lost” on the way home from the beauty parlor, she is late-stage vascular dementia. We received the official diagnosis from a world-class brain clinic in 2009. I say “late” stage instead of “end” stage because she could die tomorrow or live another fifteen years. That’s just the way it is.

I don’t write about her much anymore, because there isn’t anything new to report. She is diminished daily. Some losses come quickly and others are painfully slow. Having worked for thirty years in health care I know the worst is yet to come. There’s no need to think about it, tomorrow will take care of itself. I don’t even much worry about Mom anymore, but I worry about my Dad who is with her 24/7 and provides remarkable care.

Tonight I read on Facebook that one of the literary club’s members had a brain aneurysm. I don’t know any more about her condition, or even if she has passed. My thoughts have been with the family all evening since I read the news.

What makes me doubly sad about this woman’s illness is that I see how dementia has also robbed my mother, She cannot help her friend, she cannot experience loss, she cannot even remember this person.

As I pondered Mom’s friend and her life threatening condition I thought how awful it must be to lose the ability to grieve for your friends. Or laugh with your friends. Or know what friends are.

This is what I will remember, and on some level I hope my mother will think these good thoughts. When my Mom hosted the literary group, I often sat quietly in my room and eavesdropped. I was not supposed to listen, but I was interested in the books and the chatter after.

One night in 1971 my mother was hosting and I was listening in. The woman who suffered the brain aneurysm today had the floor, and announced she was pregnant with her second child. Dead silence.

She was forty. More dead silence.

And then this group of friends began to laugh, all of these elegant, proper women, who were the “It takes a village” of our village, laughed until they cried. And it was a joyful laughter. That baby boy was born a few months later and brought great love into his parents life and that of his brother, who was and is my lifelong friend.

White gloves and hats, White Shoulders and high heels, Wheels by Arthur Hailey or The Hidden Place by Corrie ten Boom.

Tonight, as I pray for my mother’s friend, I wish her a knowing peace from whichever side of the river she stands.

Thoughts on 9/11

2011-09-07T07:25:00.000-05:00

Good Morning (From Today's Evansville Courier)

Our lives never the same after Sept. 11 attacks

When John F. Kennedy was killed in November 1963, I was 6 years old. I remember little, except for the boom-boom-boom of Beethoven’s dirge from the black and white Dumont television during the president’s funeral.

When Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, I was blocks away in Washington, D.C. Several of us from a business conference knew Reagan was leaving the Hilton, and we hoped to get a glimpse of him. Suddenly a group of huge, black cars blew past us.

I didn’t know what happened until I called my mother in Indiana from a pay phone. Mom had their lone RCA cabinet television on, and knew what happened before I did.

Under a beautiful blue winter sky in 1986, I stood outside in Florida with some co-workers to watch space shuttle Challenger rise in the east. I remember that day very well; it was so cool that I wore a blue wool plaid skirt to work. Wearing wool in Central Florida is most unusual, even in January.

Even 100 miles away, the launch of a shuttle never grew tiring. This one was confusing; a minute or so after launch, something happened. Plumes of smoke flew in every direction, and pieces of the ship followed. The long, white smoke trailed off forever. Again, we had to rely on the television in the hospital lobby to affirm the horror we had just witnessed.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was getting ready for work. I watched ‘The Today Show,’ which isn’t live in Central Time. Suddenly the view shifted, the anchors mumbled, and the southward-focused camera on the roof of Rockefeller Center showed a smoking World Trade Center. Katie Couric said something about a small plane possibly off-course, hitting the Trade Center.
My husband also was preparing for work when the first plane hit, our sixth-grader was already at Sharon School taking the ISTEP test.

Even in the heartland, miles from any of the four terror sites, that Tuesday was a day never to be forgotten.

I never went to work. I couldn’t leave the television, and I sat there half dressed for hours. My company called eventually and told us to stay home; most physician offices were closing and didn’t need the interruption of sales reps. My husband went to work at the university — classes continued, but students were distracted.

At my son’s elementary school, his teacher wheeled in a television and turned it away from the students. She turned the sound down, but my son caught enough to know that something was up. The principal made the decision to continue the testing. At least every student tested on a level playing field, some with uncertain knowledge of the world burning.

When my son got off the bus at 3 p.m. I was waiting at the end of the driveway.

Later that evening I went to the store to pick up some groceries. Flying above me in formation was a squadron of F-16s. I knew what kind of planes they were from the movies. While we live between Fort Campbell, Fort Knox and Scott Air Force Base, I had not seen planes flying so low and along the path of Indiana 66 near the Ohio River.

While we witness history daily — sometimes up close — Sept. 11, 2001, was a day that compared to no other. I knew life would never be the same in my 11-year-old’s lifetime, even in this small Midwestern town.

Amy McVay Abbott, amymcvayabbott@gmail.com


Powered by TECNAVIA		Copyright © 2011 Evansville Courier & Press 09/07/2011

Technology continues battle with Raven

2011-09-02T11:56:00.000-05:00

Technology can be a good thing, but it also makes life more complicated

This morning I watched the great mechanized garbage truck rumble down the hill to our house. I don’t make a sport of this, but a neighbor’s contractor partially blocked the space where the garbage truck normally stops.

This is how it works: we pay a monthly fee for the giant garbage can. While there are two men in the truck, they rarely leave the cab.

A giant arm comes out and grabs the trash bin on either side, flips it upside down, and then dumps the contents into the grumbling bowels of the truck.

Things almost always fall out of the garbage can to the street, and we have to pick them up. And the truck moves on to its next victim, no human hands ever touching the can.

This level of automation seems to be present in many daily activities. We favor a sandwich shop in our town. When you pull up to the drive-up window, a digitized voice tells you the store’s hours, then a human comes on to take your order. I find this curious. I’m at the store; why do I need to know their hours?

I’ve been pondering how my daily life could be enhanced with further levels of automation.

Do you ever wake up before dawn and find your cat’s gaze fixed on you, waiting breakfast? What about a digital cat feeder that senses the cat is awake at four a. m.?

The cat could paw and knead against the robofeeder, which will automatically go into the kitchen, retrieve and open the cat food, place it on the floor, and pat the kitty on the head, saying in an emotionless digital voice, “That’s a good kitty.”

Why not a digitized robot phone butler who knows when someone is soliciting you for magazine subscriptions, or license plates, or monogrammed garbage bags? A truly modest proposal might be an actual robobutler to answer your door, saying something like, “Our hours are eight to five. We don’t talk to people who come to our door after five p.m.”

I am not against automation and progress. Imagine a world without Swiffer! Why we would have to go back to the old-fashioned yellow mop bucket and mop!

But I long for the days when I was able to operate a television remote without consulting a help line overseas. My ability to understand a remote that resembles a console at the Johnson Space Center is limited, so I’m watching less TV. So I choose my battles. I have to use the computer in my work, so I attempt to stay current and read all that I can. Remember when all computers came with manuals? One of the conundrums of progress is that most new electronic devices come with online “help” books, but if you can’t get the device loaded you can’t get the help.

I do not need a Smartphone, so I’ve stepped backward in time and use a cellphone that works as a phone. Amazing, I know. You dial a number, and you can call someone.

But I am still terrified about the future. Next week we are getting a new refrigerator. Have you purchased a fridge lately? Do your research; it isn’t as easy as you think. My parents had a simple fridge with metal ice trays in the freezer. So what if the icy tasted like tin and was a little fuzzy? It didn’t require a special computer panel, that will most likely be the first to go.

When you purchase the refrigerator, the sales person will talk endlessly about the reason for a multiyear warranty.

As you are buying the most technologically advanced refrigerator of your lifetime, the sales person is already telling you it is going to break.

That’s progress?

Amy McVay Abbott is an Indiana essayist and journalist. She likes to hear from readers at amymcvayabbott@gmail.com.

AMY ABBOTT

THE RAVEN LUNATIC

Prepping for the Girlfriend's Visit

2011-08-30T14:06:00.000-05:00

About thirty years ago last December, a nervous twenty-something young man appeared at my parent's front door. He was wearing a gray sweater (almost identical to the one I was about to give him for Christmas) and no overcoat, despite below freezing temperatures.

My parents huddled around him like they were examining a sirloin steak at the butcher counter.

My father did not think the young man was was prime until he delivered their first grandchild (not literally) eight years later.

And I'm not sure my future husband was too fond of them, either.

Tomorrow afternoon our adult son will bring his girlfriend of one year home for the first time. We've met her several times out East, so we don't have those "first time" jitters. But what concerns me is that this city girl has never been to the clichéd Fly Over states, except (yes, literally) for a stop at O'Hare Airport.

Our home is nothing like O'Hare Airport.

Today I'm doing the last minute cleaning of the house, which means scrubbing the area where the cat boxes are and ridding the basement of some damp, unknown odor. I'm heading to Target for a new comforter for the guest room. The current spread – that has a paint-spattered motif -- has an eight inch stain on it of indistinguishable origin. It looks like rust and it worries me, though I’m not sure it isn’t part of the pattern. The spread has been dry cleaned and the stain did not come out.

I've also been reviewing the things I should not do or say.

My husband has advised me. While I may refer to photographs on the wall, I may not under any circumstances get out the baby books or any video tapes (yeah, I'm dating myself.)

I am not to mention the following things:

That son – clad in a miniature white button-down dress shirt, red bow tie and suspenders -- walked out of his piano recital in the middle of his song, and returned triumphantly to NAIL that eight year old easy version of “Ode to Joy.”

That he took out the neighbor's mailbox while coming down the hill on his bicycle, and didn't have a scratch on him. (Wonder of Wonder, miracle of miracles!)

That he told us when he was about six and the neighbor's house was for sale that "when I grow up, I'm going to buy that house so I can always live next to you."

No, I'm not to point out the church where he directed a landscaping project for his Eagle merit badge, or the elementary school he won the fifth grade geography bee. I’m not going to mention how he loved listening to Riverwalk Jazz on NPR when he was a little guy. Nor will I show her any of his ribbons and trophies. Nor will I get out the baby book where I’ve kept the blonde curls clipped by the hairdresser when he got his first hair cut. None of that.

No, I'm going to pretend they are an adult couple, friends from Chicago perhaps, visiting us for the weekend.

(Except for the part where I open my wallet and give them all the money inside. Except for that part.)

The Queenmaker

2011-08-16T16:52:00.000-05:00

This post was featured on doesthismakessense.com today.

I watch the Presidential election like other people watch the NFL or NASCAR. I keep a scorecard and make pithy observations about my team and favorite players. And I like to watch the competition. My team isn’t getting any decent press right now, and probably won’t unless we have a solid jobs program and the unemployment rate goes down.

The opposing team is offering fascinating moves. Tell me, who do you think is the most interesting person from the red team in the 2012 presidential playbook?

Having just read “The Queen of Rage” and the “Leap of Faith” profiles about Michelle Bachmann in “Newsweek” and “The New Yorker” respectively, and having watched her work the Iowa State fair like a 4-Her works his prize Duroc hog, you might think I’ll name Rep. Bachmann.

But, no. Not Bachmann, or even the enigmatic Ron Paul, who was within a percent of Bachmann’s win in the Iowa Straw Vote Saturday (but largely ignored by the media, and I predict will continue to be ignored.)

I’m going for Ed Rollins here. the controversial Republican operative who is now her campaign manager. One cannot help but note a huge difference in Bachmann’s onscreen persona from the “pre-Ed” days to the present. One has to wonder, was it Bachmann’s huge presence in Iowa that killed Tim Pawlenty’s chances even after Pawlenty put all his coins in the Iowa Straw Poll slot machines? (Maybe not, to paraphrase pundit Stephanie Miller on CNN, “I’ll miss the electricity of the Pawlenty campaign.”)

The brusque Rollins is famous in Washington circles as a hard-charging Republican kingmaker. He deftly directed President Ronald Reagan’s performance in 1984 against Senator Walter Mondale. (Anybody remember the debate where Reagan said, “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.”

Of course, I cannot attribute that quote to Ed Rollins, Reagan said it in front of millions at a network debate, but I think it is curious that Rollins is now one of Bachmann’s chief advisors.

How far we’ve come! I was so mesmerized by Bachmann’s encores on the Sunday morning talk shows that I ignored worship at the local Lutheran Church to stay abed and catch the Congresswoman on almost every show.

She’s 55, mother of five children of her own, and raised countless foster children (23?) and she was bright-eyed and on top of her game for curtain call after curtain call this morning.

What amazed me the most is how she is handling the questions about her former “gaffes.” What does it mean for a Christian wife to be submissive? As a progressive but non-evangelical Christian, I’m always intrigued by the evangelicals who operate from what they call a “Biblical world view.” (For more information on Bachmann’s world view, read “The New Yorker” piece or this NPR story.)

At the Straw Poll debate earlier in the week, Fox’s own Chris Wallace played “hardball” with Bachmann and asked her to define what that meant, “being submissive.” As she did that night, and as she did in subsequent interviews, she gave an acceptable answer that even a pinko feminist like me could appreciate. “It’s all about respect,” she said.

This brings us back to Ed Rollins. She has been coached, and she has been coached well.

One cannot help but compare her to that other doyenne of the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, who seems to lack self-control in many things she spouts, while Bachmann gives more thoughtful answers. Show business?

The other Bachmann topic this week has been her handling of the Newsweek cover. She has said “no comment” or deflected of questions about the picture which made her look slightly crazy. Again, what would Palin do? Palin would be screeching about the “lamestream media.” (“Newsweek” isn’t exactly “The Atlantic” since it began shacking up with “The Daily Beast”. One has to wonder editorial motivation in putting up such a cover? I tend to think it wasn’t sexist or partisan, but rather a shot at getting “Newsweek” more attention as it gurgles down the drain.)

Both of these examples about Bachmann scream of Ed Rollins as a puppeteer to her dancing marionette.

Watch Bachmann. She’s shrewd and that scares me. And it scares me that Ed Rollins is behind the scenes, throwing lines.

Whether she will have the cache to get the swing states is still open for debate, particularly as Gov. Rick Perry of Texas entered the race this weekend.

What she may do is drive more independents and former Republican social conservatives into the arms of Mitt Romney (though some evangelical Christians don’t find the Latter Day Saints part of their “in crowd.”)

My money, right or wrong, is on the Rollins candidate.

State Fair Always a True Piece of Indiana

2011-08-16T07:59:00.000-05:00

This piece appeared as the Good Morning-Tri State Column in the Evansville Courier this morning.

Good Morning
Fair always has been a true piece of Indiana

Thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and families of the accident Saturday at the Indiana State Fair. What a freakish and horrible tragedy that gives us pause.

I could not help but think about my aunt’s sophomore year at Purdue (possibly 1948) when riser seats in the basketball gym collapsed and several students died. My aunt was a resident adviser in her dorm and had to make sure all her charges were safely in their room and talk with parents who called from all over the country.

As the stage collapse Sunday is investigated and people heal, I hope the State Fair will survive, because it is a true piece of Indiana.

My first trip to the Indiana State Fair was in 1967 with the Go-Getters 4-H Club. We bounced up Indiana 37 to Indianapolis in a yellow school bus, singing camp songs in the early August morning.

In the days before Disney World, the Indiana State Fair was an anticipated big event among Indiana children.

For the first time I experienced the World’s Biggest Boar in the hog barn; saw hardened, fancy wedding cakes and woven breads in the Women’s Pavilion (sans air conditioning); and rode the trolley from one side of the fairgrounds to the other.

Over the years, we would go back for the carnival, concerts at the Coliseum (Mack Davis, the Beach Boys) or to sample the Lemon Shake-ups or pork chops at the Pork Producers Tent.

There was always a stop at the replica Hook’s Drug Store with its antique apothecary mortar and pestle and colorful glass tubes and bottles.

While I never displayed more than my prize-winning county fair gladiolus at the fair, my brother and his 4-H pals showed livestock.

Children as young as 10 slept in the barns for a week, as was the tradition 30 or 40 years ago.

My father and brother went to the fair earlier this week, and I’m hopeful they were thinking of me at some point during the day, perhaps when they passed the fair taffy stand. Nothing says fair like the sticky, gooey pieces of sweet taffy wrapped in wax paper.

I think the 1-pound box should last all winter.

Amy Abbott, Special to the Courier & Press

Dino, Maybe Desi, but Billy is just too heavy

2011-08-12T16:50:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I'm whimsical, not eccentric. My friend "The Amazing" (yes, that's her name) and I went to visit The Concrete Lady north of Louisville, KY, today. Soon I will be the proud owner of a 150 lb. concrete dinosaur, either Dino or Desi. I'm hoping my artist friend Bren will paint Dino or Desi green.

I really wanted a Sinclair-type dinosaur (yup, that's dating myself.) The Concrete Lady had two of them, one was about 400 lbs. and the bigger one was about 700 lbs. Couldn't get them in the back of the old family sedan even with the seat down. Even Dino or Desi needs to be delivered, and my friend and her hubby will be doing the delivering with their truck.

We saw some really wonderful other concrete items. It was all I could do to not buy the matching His and Her Travelocity-type gnomes.

I posed next to this hippo of fun (let’s keep the comments to yourself) and The Amazing tried out the giant hand chair.

On the way west from Louisville I called my eighty-year old father, a man of tradition who has certain opinions about the way things should be. He is already quite chagrined that I’ve removed all the plants around our house and replaced them with rock gardens (I like rocks.)

But today’s conversation devastated him. Did I said, “Hello, Dad, I’m calling from jail because I’ve been picked up for a felony and just for fun I’m going to harm small animals when I get out?”

No, that wasn’t it.

I said, “Dad, I just bought a 150 lb. concrete dinosaur for the back yard.”

Do you remember the scene in "A Christmas Story" when Ralphie is blind and knocks on the door and his father says, "What brought you to this lowly state?"

That's the way my Dad sees this, what brought me to this lowly state?

He was appalled. He was devastated. He was disappointed.

“Well, I didn’t raise you that way.”

(Do you think I should tell him about the painted rooster?”)

How Things Have Changed

2011-08-10T15:14:00.000-05:00

Open Salon is a writer's and artist's playground that is operated by Salon.com. I write under the name Bernadine Spitzsnogel. Yesterday one of the group challenged writers to repost their first Open Salon essay. Mine was in November 2009. Somethings have changed; others remain the same. I am working every day as a freelance writer, and I am most grateful. There are many people not so lucky..

AUGUST 9, 2011 8:13PM

First Post Evah (Open Call)
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NOVEMBER 6, 2009 9:36AM

National Unemployment Level Reaches 10.2%

Dear Potential Employer:
I need a job. I lost my lucrative Fortune 100 marketing job last January, the month where nearly 600,000 Americans lost work.
There aren't too many encouraging word in the Flyover Region where my state's unemployment rate is much higher than the national average. This morning on the jobs sites I visit, the top three jobs with my "search agents" included:

marketing for a science company that required a degree in molecular biology, preferably a masters
marketing one of those "career colleges" that when admitted a student is loaned tuition money at a high interest rate
marketing a music program, travel four to six nights a month, requires previous experience in pre-K music program marketing, preferably a masters in education

I will apply for all of these jobs. My other options this morning under the search agent of "marketing and public relations" includes a career with Avon, truck stop cashier, and sales for lawn service. Not, as Seinfeld would say, that there's anything wrong with that.
I left journalism--my original career--twenty-nine years ago because I wanted to move out of my parent's house. My new job in public relations paid $14,300 a year. That was a fortune, compared to the $5 per hour I was making as a reporter.
Now I'm back in journalism, snapping up stringer opportunities. Why pay a real reporter full salary and benefits when they can pay me $75 for a story with three or more sources and 15 hours of research and writing?
When I figure out how much time I put in my stories, I shudder. I am grateful for the work, and frankly it extends the unemployment benefits. In my state, unemployment is week by week.
The bad part is that our state requires we report potential income, so when I write a story I am required to notify the unemployment office on my claim. Of course I want to remain within the law.
Stringers are paid thirty days after publication. Last week I was paid for a story I wrote in July for an October periodical. I'm working on things for April for which I'll be paid in May. Everyone tells me to cheat, but I won't.
I have four local editors and I fear for their jobs. They are not happy people, and of course, all the signs are bad for any print media. I have some online work, but haven't fully broken in to that market yet. I have several business clients, but I suck at ad copy writing. I haven't found my niche there yet. They want me to dumb down my writing. Dumb down.
So, Mr. Employer, you want to know, what are my personal and professional goals? I have three:

not lose my house
get good health insurance that provides some subsidy for diabetic husband's prescriptions
keep our son in his chosen college

My husband is an educator so he has a very stable, albeit low-paying job. His health insurance is four times what mine is--I have the blessing of cheap insurance from my former company through April for our family.
Salaries at his office have been frozen for two years, and they can't buy a paperclip without someone questioning the expense. His organization's long-term funds are invested in a company that folded, and purchased by another company, then "bailed-out."
Our family know that we are so much better off than most people. Outside of our house, we have very little debt. However, our liquid savings evaporates a little each month. The "Suze Orman" eight month emergency fund is on its tenth month.
Sunday is "Consecration Day" at church -- we need to give something, but the house payment has to come first.
All this being said, Mr. Employer, why should you hire me? I am smart and I have always survived. I had my child before FMLA and I came back to work when he was five weeks old, because that's what the employer wanted. I do have a master's degree, and I always do what needs to be done. Look at my resume -- really look at it -- and you will see someone who has demonstrated a work ethic and a commitment to her employer year after year. I have been an asset to every company and I will be an asset to you for many years.
You look at me and you see someone with silver hair. Ten months ago it was blond, but that costs eighty dollars a month, so I've gone natural.
Frontline had a special last week about unemployment. A fifty-something professional man said that if Captain Sully T. Sullenberg, who saved many lives by landing a plane on the Hudson, stood in a job line today, he would be rejected because of his age. I believe that's true.
I don't think employers want the best person -- I think they want the person who is "good enough"--meaning cheaper. And younger. I've landed metaphoric planes on many choppy rivers in my career, but I can't seem to convince anyone of that.
I look forward to hearing from you, Mr. Employer. We'll be in touch.

Accelerated Chin Hair Growth Sign of Dementia

2011-08-07T20:07:00.002-05:00

Image "Witch Hazel" copyrighted by Warner Bros.

In a recent scientific study that looked at post-menopausal women over a period of years, researchers have determined a causal relationship between appearance of chin hairs, their removal, and early onset dementia.

Leading researches at prominent US universities have been studying women in the post-menopausal age group, who—upon discovering this growth, generally ten minutes before a family wedding or photo session—will pluck the curly little devil out with raw force. This violent action, researchers believe, causes two or three more of the ugly grey hairs to immediately sprout from Said Chin, and is the beginning down the Slippery Slide to total, abject dementia.

For whom does the bell toll?

It tolls for thee—women of a certain age—women whose uterus is simply dead or in a jar at Sister Bertrille’s Hospital and Home for Aging Boomers. It tolls for thee.

Scientists tell us that the average sixty-four year old man whose prostate hangs low and and wobbles to and fro has more estrogen than your average fifty-four year old female. No wonder he cries at movies and Kleenex commercials.

While clinical studies often use only anecdotal evidence outside of the numbers, researchers felt this story was relevant and should be shared with the general public, and women of a certain again for whom that Bad Moon doesn’t rise.

Our subject, whose identity we cannot reveal due to strict FDA rules about confidentiality is a fifty-something, overwhite, Caucasian women of European extraction, who has had her uterus and ovaries removed surgically. To the uninitiated this means she is a dried up, old persimmon who has more testosterone in her body than my Uncle Morty (see it works both ways, kids.).

Since the removal of her “equipment” by the folks at Sister Bertrille’s, our subject has gained weight, noticed magnets in her nipples causing her breasts to hang lower, and has eyebrows like Broderick Crawford. With the HPPA police not allowing us to name her, we’ll call her “Bernadine,” a name we just pulled out of thin air.

Bernadine—due to a change in employment status—has also stopped pretending to be a blonde (at the cost of $80 every four weeks) and is now blessed with silvery, white wiry hair, most of which appears regularly on her chin. For those of you who aren’t blessed with this gift (or are still hiding it under bleach and various other chemicals), grey hair has a different texture and is kinky. Yes, I said kinky. Make of it what you will.

Every two or three days Bernadine fights this battle with the chin hairs. She plucks them out and usually two more grow in within hours. If she didn’t pluck them out, she fears she would look Warner Bros. witch Hazel.

Friday night was a bad night. Three chin hairs in one day. Distressed over this development, Bernadine nonetheless left home to pick up take-out Chinese for her husband. To protect his identity, we'll simply call him "Herman." Going into the restaurant she encountered a familiar face with a toddler on her hip. The woman said to the baby, “Tell Bernadine hello,” and the baby said, “Hello, Bernadine.”

Bernadine was looking through her memory bank. The face was familiar but she couldn’t place it. She patted the baby on the back and said to the woman, “Oh, I’ve written a book, would you like one of my bookmarks?” And the woman says, “Well, of course I know you’ve written a book, silly.” This made it worse. The chin hairs were now tangled up in her brain synapses, affecting the area of “recognition.” Soon language wasn’t far behind, and Bernadine just smiled.

As soon as the woman left, she said to the clerk, “Who was that?” And the clerk said, well, that was Katie Johnson. Bernadine slapped herself on the head, both sides. “Katie Johnson!” Of course. She cleaned my house last winter, I know both her children’s names and birthdays, I know her father, grandfather, husband and his entire family. They attend my church. I’ve been to their house. What in the hell is wrong with me?

Researchers wanted to share this brief anecdote to remind all women of a certain age not to pluck the chin hairs. But it may be too late for some of you. These same researchers have discovered than loss of brain cells is in direct proportion to how many placentas have been delivered. In a twist that challenges the known scientific literature, placentas contain tissue linked to a woman’s brain cells. Thus a woman who has had a child is clearly demented, and a woman who has had a child and has aggressive chin hairs is in deep, deep do-do.

This research has been reprinted from the Journal of Gyno-Crone-ology, Volume 15.

A Story About Baseball

2011-08-05T16:04:00.000-05:00

This was my newspaper column for this week, as well as an Editor's Pick on Open Salon.

Her guys may be fanatics, but she’d rather sit the bench

Bear with me; this is indeed a story about baseball. I have to round the bases before I can get to home plate.

Last night, I needed to water some new shrubs. Some workmen had rolled our hose back into the reel, which sits on a rock bed adjacent to the house. I went out the back door in ancient, floppy pink house shoes, expecting to turn on the faucet for the sprinklers.

Instead, I unrolled the hose into the yard and arranged it so the water would hit both our new lilac bushes and new grass. I ran back across the prickly straw over the new grass and turned the water on, as sharp rocks poked through the bottom of my worn slippers.

I stood back to assess where the water was going. It wasn’t even close. Rather than step in the rock bed again, I ran out under the sprinkler and moved it. I reassessed. Without my glasses on, it seems I couldn’t get close. After three attempts, I got it right, but was soaked from head to toe.

Back in the basement, I passed my husband who was watching a baseball game, and I headed upstairs to dry off and change clothes.

I returned to the basement, and my husband said, “Oh, did you just take a shower?”

What is the point of this story?

This is a story about baseball. My husband did not see me go outside; he missed the entire Water Drama, and didn’t witness my passing him dripping like Niagara Falls.

Why? It’s because the Cincinnati Reds now broadcast in High Def.

I know you are as excited about this mesmerizing social development as I am.

Now I can see the sweat on Jay Bruce’s brow.

I was born to a Cubs fan, married a Reds fan (still National League) and now my son is courting a girl who is a Red Sox fan. (I know, American League. As I write these words, their Saturday night date is a Nationals/Mets game.) Last Sunday I spent the day with my mother so my father, brother, husband and nephew could go to Wrigley.

The men in my life really like baseball.

I’ve been in more major league baseball parks than most people. I saw Denny McClain pitch in old Tiger Stadium; I sat across from the “Green Monster” in Fenway, and I’ve stood on home plate in San Francisco.

I saw Rafael Palmero hit a few out of the park at Arlington, Texas, and I witnessed Bo Jackson’s first White Sox at-bat, when he smacked a home run out of old Comiskey on a cold April Opening Day.

I have attended many games in Cincinnati and Chicago. We were there on Opening Day at Riverfront Stadium when former owner Reds owner Marge Schott brought an entire parade, including a large elephant onto the field.

But here’s the problem: I don’t give a Wiffle ball about baseball.

There, I said it. I’ve pretended to like it for more than half a century, enough to learn important baseball words like “change-up” and “tater.”

But I don’t suffer heat well, and so for every stadium I’ve listed I also know where the First Aid station is. That’s where they keep the free “cool” packs.

On my fortieth birthday I drank one cold beer on that hot July day and threw up for twelve hours. Rather than leave the park, my entire family of eight people moved from wonderful third baseline seats at Riverfront to the shaded patio above the outfield. Of course we didn’t leave the game, it was Cubs versus Reds.

That was the same game where my dad put the mail-order tickets in his bank lock box and it nearly took an Act of Congress getting re-issued tickets. Then before game day, he remembered where they were.

I’m as done with baseball as I am with rock concerts, short dresses, and high heels. I will watch the occasional game sitting next to my husband, tossing out occasional appropriate remarks.

“Did you see Scott Rolen hit that tater?”
Now I live in Evansville where the “red bird” isn’t the Indiana state bird, it’s a Cardinal as in St. Louis Cardinals — Stan Musial, Whitey Herzog, and some fella named Albert Pujols. I have learned a few things.

Like why did the manager leave Cubs pitcher Rick Sutcliffe in so long during the 1984 playoffs?

Who in the world likes the designated hitter? I mean, come on.

And what about Texas Ranger Josh Hamilton whose Windex-blue eyes are so translucent that his day average is a miserable 111 yet he can pop those home runs out at night?
Of note, I need to tell you about the game I did not attend.

While in Anaheim, CA, my brother and father attended an Angels game and saw legend Nolan Ryan pitch, while mom and I stayed at the hotel and watched a rerun of “The Flip Wilson Show.”

Now, that’s entertainment!

© By the author 2011. Amy McVay Abbott is a freelance writer who is over baseball. She does love her husband, son, and father very much, and will continue to support their interests.

She loves hearing from readers at amymcvayabbott@gmail.com.

AMY ABBOTT

THE RAVEN LUNATIC


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A Nod From the Local Folks

2011-07-30T00:43:00.000-05:00

Warrick columnist Abbott pens first book

Special to the Courier & Press

Warrick columnist Amy McVay Abbott has written her first book. “The Luxury of Daydreams” highlights thirty essays about life in Indiana. Several stories are set in Warrick County.

The book deals with transitions in life, and the reader will hopefully be entertained and uplifted.

Abbott is a freelance journalist whose column “The Raven Lunatic” appears in eight Indiana newspapers. She is a frequent contributor to the Evansville Business Journal and Evansville Woman magazine, as well as curated online sites including fictionique.com, talkingwriting.com and doesthismakessense.com. She also owns a consulting business that provides editorial and web content services to health and medical organizations.

She is married to Randy Abbott and the couple has one son, Alex, who is a Castle High School graduate.

She graduated from the Ball State University School of Journalism with a bachelor’s and a master’s in journalism.

Abbott will be having several readings and book signings in the area in August and September. Information about ordering and events is available at http://theluxuryofdaydreams. blogspot.com or she can be reached at amymcvayabbott@gmail.com.


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Good Morning Tri-State, Evansville Courier, July 27, 2011

2011-07-29T15:13:00.002-05:00

Good Morning

Waning summer retains sense of freshness

We are still in summer, the time before the anxiety of school starting again, the time before all the “rubber chicken” dinners dot our calendars, and the time when we haven’t yet given up on watering the grass.

The world is tense with the problems I need not delineate here. Yet for these few weeks, we still have the sensations of summer all around us.

Just for a moment, contemplate the sensory reality of summer and its richness today and in memory. My neighbor children, ages 6 and 4, love riding their bikes under close supervision of parents. I can hear the children racing up and down, the 6-year-old boy turning wheelies, the 4-year-old girl laughing and yelling, her voice probably magnified by that pink flowered helmet she wears.

Summer’s bounty offers the soft, slick feel of silks from corn on the cob, the slightly prickly edge of a fresh cucumber from a neighbor’s garden or the texture of that first fresh strawberry on the tongue.

The taste of summer’s fruits and vegetables makes us remember how good grandmother’s strawberry-rhubarb pie tasted, and that cold, refreshing swig of lemonade made with real sugar (before Splenda and middle-aged days).

Even on these hot, steamy days when the air feels as if it hangs in chunks from the oppressive humidity, summer mornings can smell like what the new Earth must have been like. There is freshness, cleanliness to early summer mornings, dew resting on summer flowers, odors that tickle one’s nose.

Finally, Indiana in midsummer is a breathtaking place, with some corn “as high as an elephant’s eye,” as the musical “Oklahoma” declares. The Tri-State has many high-contrast days when a Crayola- blue sky highlights green grass and gardens, and flowers and vegetation bloom in every color. Who has driven past a field of purple wildflowers and noticed that special gift from Mother Nature?

The problems of the world will still be here tomorrow.

Breathe in deeply and enjoy the moment, as summer is fleeting.

Amy McVay Abbott, special to the Courier & Press

Things that Tick Me Off

2011-07-28T19:30:00.001-05:00

Constitutional Convention, wikipedia commons photo

Today the air is thick and crunchy and my car and yard are covered with a fine dusting of dirt left over from the “new driveway” project. If you didn’t catch it on Reality TV, the Spitzsnogels put in a new driveway, as their old one resembled Stonehenge. Avoiding those Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments when revving my old Honda up an icy hill in January made for a death-defying and revitalizing experience.

. The new driveway is not yet “cured” (a term that should be applied to old alcoholics or large bunions) so we are forced to park down the hill, down the street. As if the neighbors weren’t antagonized enough by eight days of large, loud equipment rumbling at six a.m., now we are parking dusty, dirt-covered vehicles in front of their houses.

I set the stage to tell you that today I am annoyed with the world, damn sick of the heat, and ready to rumble. Rather than cause an altercation in my household, I think I will vent out my frustrations with the things that are bothering me, large and small.

People who call me on their cell phones and then carry on conversations with other people in the car, drive-up employees, and people on the street. The message to me is “You are so unimportant to me and any shiny object that even distracts me for one second is more important than you.”

And, hey, you called me!

A related crime is always answering when the “call waiting” kicks in. Discussing this at lunch with two friends, one friend said her sister used to do this. My friend was annoyed because it was usually her sister’s daughter who lived footsteps away, while my friend lived states away. So, my friend simply hung up on her sister. That fixed that.

But here’s the problem I have a sweet marshmallow center and doormat chest which makes saying no or standing up for myself nearly impossible. Rather I tend to act out by writing passive aggressive pieces like this. I don’t get my feelings hurt often, but things like this have a tendency to build up, and when it is this hot I feel like I’m gonna blow. It won’t be pretty.

Commercials for inane products. The talking diabetes meter is really bothering me. My husband is diabetic so I’m familiar with meters, and also familiar with the concept of re-inventing the meter every month so that insurance companies can pay for the latest and greatest. I supposed this is for people who are blind. I suggested to my husband that he should get a meter that said, “Hey, Lardo, why are you putting that chocolate milk in your mouth?” He was not amused by my heat-indexed snarky sarcastic attitude.

And while we’re on the subject of inane products, I saw an ad for something that will allow you to lift two thousand pounds, slide something underneath it, and then move that grand piano all over your house. Yes, I took physics in college and the concept of levers and fulcrums is familiar to me, but I just don’t buy it. Aunt Tillie is not going to move her cabinet full of priceless antique china across Uncle Selim’s Turkish rug. Ain’t gonna happen.

Borders going out of business. This just makes me sad and cranky. If I had a high-powered Nerf toy, I would find a bell tower somewhere and aim my Nerf balls at whoever is to blame. Since I have no one to blame, let’s pick someone. How about all those idiots in our nation’s capitol who can’t put their own interest aside to raise the debt ceiling?

And speaking of those idiots….when the US Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787 in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, CNN did not cover it. Surprised? Fox News didn’t show nor did MSNBC. Joe and Mika in the morning missed it, as did Hannity and Glenn Beck. Okay, I’m being ridiculous (but my brain is fried, its 105 heat index here) but my point is that our Founding Fathers made it a point to exclude media from the discussions in the room. What a great idea! I don’t want to see Luke Russert endlessly analyzing why Robert Morris left the proceedings early. Capicé?

One more and then mercifully I’m done, for now…our cable company is forcing us to add digital adapters to televisions that aren’t digital ready. What was all that digital conversion business about a year or so ago? Now we have to pay $1.99 a month for each converter. The cable companies’ hype is so that we can have more channels. I have 900 channels now; most of them are fly-fishing, sales of face masks and chemical peels, or old NBA games. Enough!

You may leave now.

Relative Strangers

2011-07-27T16:26:00.000-05:00

What is stranger than a family reunion with family you don’t know? My father moved away from his family of origin in 1949. I wasn’t even a gleam in his eye, nor had he met my mother.

For most of my childhood, we drove the two hours to visit with members of his family on their turf. I have photographic evidence that his family visited us, but I just don’t remember it. My dad is the youngest child in a large family and each of his siblings’ begat children early. Add a few more begats and another generation of begats and you have my father’s family now.

Over the years, I’ve tried to stay in touch with aunts and uncles. Now they are all gone, except for one aunt.

Last year I helped my Dad plan a family reunion for his family to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of his parent’s wedding. He hosted a dinner at the retirement home where he lives with my mom, who has late-stage dementia. The cousins asked to meet again this summer. I was against doing it again, because sometimes once is enough. We all left the reunion last summer wanting more. I think there is something in savoring and not pushing the envelope, but that’s just me.

My father scheduled this reunion on my birthday, but I felt uncomfortable celebrating with relatives who couldn’t pick me out of a police line-up. I asked my own family to refrain from mentioning it. My mom always took care of family birthdays, and she would have been the person to know details about each person’s life. It was the right thing to do. I would have felt awful if we celebrated my day, and Cousin David’s oldest turned nine that day.

My dad’s first cousin Arthur was the life of the party. At eighty-four, he is still a ladies’ man, and wears a jaunty white driver’s cap. He owns a limousine service, though rarely takes calls anymore. Arthur came late to the party after the group had moved from the central dining room to a private lobby to talk. My brother found him in the central dining room with four elderly women, all engaged in Arthur’s flirtatious rhetoric. One of the women was one of Arthur’s numerous ex-wives, still friendly with him.

Except for my father’s family, the others all live within a 30-mile radius of each other. I have no idea about their inter-relationships, though the wife of Dad’s nephew told me twice how close her husband is with his two brothers.

This woman and her husband, who is my first cousin, were supposed to take a tour out west a couple of weeks ago. My cousin had to have a heart catheterization, and could not go. He farms with his brother and last week they were combining oats when my cousin saw his brother slumped over the tractor off in the distance. My cousin ran to his brother and pulled him off the tractor, where he was suffering from the heat. My cousin, who was supposed to be out west, probably saved his brother’s life. Had my cousin not had his heart cath, his brother might be dead. His wife told me that for weeks she had a bad feeling about the trip. How lucky they were to have one cousin’s heart fixed, and his brother’s life probably saved.

My cousins still enjoy farming the old-fashioned way, and will probably tackle the heat again. At 72 and 73, they should stay out of the fields on a hot day. But I suspect they won’t. Their mother was my dad’s oldest sister. Ruth was under five feet tall, but tough as nails like her own mother. She did three weeks before my wedding day. After suffering some abdominal pain, surgeons opened her up only to find cancer was everywhere. They closed her back up, and she died a few days later.

It is a strange feeling to see all these first cousins and wonder, what, if anything, I have in common with them. I know nothing about their lives, except the basics. And we share a history, of our grandparents from long ago, a history only in pictures that are faded and crumbling.

One thing we share is the loss of a grandfather in 1935, who died of a heart ailment the year before his first grandchild was born. Our grandfather was 53, an age I just surpassed. I was happy last week to cross the “bewitching hour,” now having outlived that grandfather who only lives in the distant memory of my father who was five when his father died.

About twenty years ago we were at this same reunion, and I asked my cousin if it had been a while since the group had been together. She said, “Well, it’s been a long time, almost three months.” Two of her three adult children live footsteps away. I’m sure she could not imagine that my child lives 1,100 miles away, and I don’t expect that he will ever move back here.

Families are all different – I tell that anecdote with no opinion or judgment one way or another as to whether that is a good or bad thing. My father moved away from his family of origin; my husband moved away from his family of origin. I moved away from my family of origin and haven’t lived close to them since 1980.

Would life be different if I lived in one of the little Indiana communities where my cousins live? Six years ago, my parents moved near where my father grew up. It was because my brother and his family lived there. My father – knowing he would be caring for mom as she worsened with dementia – needed help. They had lived for fifty years where my mother’s family had roots, but now her family was all gone from that place, also.

The move has worked well for my parents, and for my dad a happy consequence has been getting to know again his ornery cousin Arthur (infamous for impregnating his high school English teacher when he was sixteen. That was his first wife.)

Arthur did share a serious story. His brother served on the USS Indianapolis in WWII and was one of the lucky who survived. Arthur did not tell much about what his now-deceased brother said of the day the ship was torpedoed after its 1946 run to the South Pacific with components for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. He mentioned that his brother told him that there was little time to get military direction. His brother, also my dad’s first cousin, said the boat was listing so badly that he could literally stick his foot into the Pacific and walk right into the water. Shortly after that – within twelve minutes – the USS Indianapolis was gone.

The captain of the Indianapolis -- who was criticized for years for not zigzagging to avoid Japanese fire – shared the same surname as my father and his cousins. That Navy captain was ultimately vindicated of his choice of route on that day, but did not live to see it. We are not related to him.

After Arthur told his story, things began to wind down. Cousin Janet needed to go home and let her dogs out. The children of my second cousins were clearly getting restless, and my mother was asleep. One cousin looked at my husband and said, “Nice you could be here again this year.” (My husband didn’t go last year, and kept asking me, “Who did you bring with you?”

“No one, you had to work. You just don’t remember. If I’m going to have a torrid affair, would I bring my secret lover to a family reunion?)

All the cousins left at the same time. My father was happy as we watched this group head toward their separate cars on this hot July night.

Anecdotes about a free market

2011-07-19T13:23:00.001-05:00

My vices are visible to anyone who knows me. Going to Starbucks a couple of times a week as the world goes to hell is probably not a good decision.

Friday I discovered that the pastry I normally buy with my coffee went up seventy cents. I hadn't been there for a few days, yet there was a long line of SUVs behind me and the adjacent lobby was full of people. Overpriced bitter coffee and sometimes stale or partially frozen pastry seems to be what the free market demands, at least in my little town.

My next stop was a half-day meeting for a charity, on whose board I serve. This charity serves thousands of individuals in our Tri-State area, both children and adults, with physical and mental disabilities. One of the topics we discussed was that the state reimbursement for therapy per quarter hour is significantly less than it was twenty years ago. That is a stunning statistic to me.

Of course this anecdote is just a smaller version of what goes on every day in our society, but this brought it home to me.

This organization provides services to more people with fewer employees and fixed costs have skyrocketed while both federal, state, and private insurance reimbursement has fallen drastically.

Of course, organizations like this have long depended on the generosity of corporations and private citizens to make up the margin through fundraising. Those glory days are long gone, as many of those with the gold are grasping tightly, unsure of how Moody's will rate our treasuries or what other catastrophe lies ahead.

I don't imagine Starbucks will be lowering its prices any time soon as it faces the same skyrocketing costs of goods and services.

Surprise. This is a rant. But I'm not ranting against the rich, nor am I advocating a "share the wealth" situation. Not by any means.

What I am saying is that we have systematically dismantled our social safety net. That old cliche that a society is judged by how it cares for its weakest members is a great indictment of our country today.

We are willing to pay four dollars plus for a bad cup of coffee, yet we as a society don't want to pay taxes to support those who are truly in need.

The American dream has always been pushed forward by the free market, and yet we found ways to better ourselves as a society through government. Imagine what life was life for a single, elderly grandmother before Social Security?

America was the shining city on the hill that could do anything--and I believe still can be. Look at Hoover Dam, look at our interstate system. Now read this week's Time and see the bridge China built in a few years that is longer than our Lake Pontchartrain Bridge.

The dream of coming to this country and making something of yourself is what makes us different from societies with a caste or class system. The Warren Buffets of this country weren't born with the Windsor name behind them.

What happened? I suggested it was about January 1981 when things started to change. What did Gorden Gekko say in Wall Street? "Greed is good." Greed is not good. Profit is good, and profit that feeds a strong social safety net is good. Greed has fueled our problems and now we are nearly two countries because of it.

With the passing of Betty Ford last week, I could not help but think about Gerald Ford. Ford was the first person I voted for as President. There is not one candidate among the Republican hopefuls that I would even consider voting for. The Grand Old Party has morphed into something I don't understand and haven't since the days of Bush the Elder.

I am not naive enough to insist that the world of the 1960s white middle class Protestant was the way. It was not. We did not enact the Civil Rights Act until 1964. Had I been a small black girl in Mississippi during that time, I would have had a very different life.

I do wax nostalgically for a day in which Republicans and Democrats were at least civil to each other, and religion and personal attacks stayed off the dais.

But my point is this: our progress as a society has stopped. Thwarted by greed.

This is no way to run a railroad. We are getting further and further off track. Rant over.

Unforeseen Dangers of the eReader

2011-07-12T16:29:00.000-05:00

The Raven Lunatic column which appeared in Indiana newspapers the week of July 5, 2011

In this house, we are book lovers--first class bibliophiles. Our mutual love of reading is probably a factor that drew my husband and me together. We both prefer an evening of reading and writing to a crowded party. My husband and I find our vocation and avocation through reading, writing, and a shared love of the written word.

Books possess something almost spiritual. Opening a new book, and diving in its pages to discover a yet unknown world is a sublime experience. My love affair with books began in the third grade in Miss Heckman’s class at South Whitley Elementary School. During the 1965 school year I came down with all the usual childhood diseases, and spent weeks at home. Miss Heckman visited our little yellow house on Walnut Street every few days, bringing school assignments and chapter books.

That winter she introduced me to “The Sugar Creek Gang” series of Hardy Boys-style books set in Thorntown, Indiana. In researching this column, I learned that the series was published from 1940 to 1970 and written by Hoosier Paul Hutchens. That long winter and the adventures I read only whetted a curiosity about the wider world beyond the little yellow house. And I’ve never stopped reading.

Because I consider myself somewhat traditional I’ve always felt “You would have to take my book out of my cold, dead hands.” (That’s a crude paraphrase of a Charlton Heston quote.) Since the inception of eBooks, I have firmly rejected them. I could not conceive of a world where electronic books sold more than traditional physical books.

I was wrong.

Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble recently announced they are selling more eBooks than physical books.

Perspective changes with age. Perhaps I should open my mind to the advantages of the electronic reader, less clutter, multiple books and magazines for travel, free access to classics, and spectacular back lighting for reading in bed. (That last one may not be important to most people, but it is important to me.)

An old proverb states “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

It was with every good intention that I purchased eReaders for us. As I walked out of the store that day with our new toys, I knew in my heart I would reread “Little Women” right away and finally finish “Jane Eyre.” How can any bibliophile admit to not finishing Jane Eyre? The devil, you say.

Some books would never be acceptable on an eReader—poetry such as my new anthology by Caroline Kennedy or books that feature treasures of art and architecture.

During the first two months I had the eReader, I savored some old favorites, purchased others, and bought some best-sellers. I couldn’t stop. I read an eclectic list—an inexpensive history of London, “Heaven is for Real,” “Peace like a River,” Wishful Drinking,” “Caleb’s Crossing,” “Computer Blogging for Dummies,” “Same Kind of Different as Me,” and Tina Fey’s book.

I was relentless; I couldn’t stop. I was reading more than I read since my 1965 forced encampment in my childhood bedroom. It was a good thing.

Then an unexpected plot twist, and something that had never happened to me before. I became addicted to a video game, Angry Birds™. Hostile Avians, Feathered Fowl, call it what you want.

Not since I slipped quarters in a college Pac Man machine had I become so engrossed in an electronic screen.

This goes against my character, the same strong will that would not let my child ever own a Game Boy, an X-Box, or, well, I don’t know a third one.

Wait, am I not a bibliophile? Don’t I eschew these banal things of the world? Don’t I see myself sipping unsweetened iced tea and reading “Little Women” in my own erudite fantasies?

Apparently not.

I succumbed to the Angry Birds™, and now sometimes I hear a voice in my head saying “Must Kill Pigs, Must Kill Pigs.” Isn’t that voice supposed to say something like “Which of the March daughters loved Marmee best?”

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, great. Go back to your newspaper, read “Time” magazine, read your eReaders or your physical book.

Get away while you can.

Do not under any circumstances download Angry Birds™ to your electronic device. For if you do, all sort of reason will fly out of your head, as quickly as the red cardinals bounces back on his slingshot to knock down the wooden towers. If you buy an eReader, simply use it to read. Remember, you have been warned.

Soon, I’ll get back to Jane Eyre. Really, I promise.

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Easter Seals display funds provide needed therapy

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7 nights to reflect, celebrate Kwanzaa

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I believe in the big red elf

Hooligans Return on Christmas Day

Four Really Bad Holiday Movies

It's a Dog's Life

Predictions from the crystal ball

"You Two Pixies Get Outta Here"

What I Learned from the woods

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Author tags:

My Brilliant Second Career

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My Brilliant Second Career: The surprising leap from Viagra sales to journalism

After I was laid off from a Fortune 100 company, I gave up the corporate dream -- and began pursuing my own

We gather together over green bean casserole

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For days now the Gourmet Cook in our house (that would not be me) has been planning his next moves. Thanksgiving is but days away and he is like Indiana Jones plotting to find the Ark of the Covenant.

A not so heartwarming holiday piece

Don't think being a janitor is easy

Choosing Movies for Dad

Red Kettle Launch

Bell ringers launch annual Salvation Army Red Kettle campaign

Flouring the Cat and Other Lutheran Holiday Traditions

Cousin Beulah's Porcupine Meatballs

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

If time could be recaptured, when the clocks fall back...

I'll have a shoe with cheese on it, and shove it down my throat

You and me and Lisa

Magical Thinking at the Mall

Author Rick Reed featured in Westside Courier

Have Things Changed for Women?

The Value of a Lazy Sunday Afternoon

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Evansville's Fall Festival

Deep fried Thin Mints, Pronto Pups,

and Kangaroo Jerky

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My People, The Formicans

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The Old Hospital

The Joys of Handwritten Letters

Handwritten letters are nostalgic yet rare | GOOD MORNING COLUMN

The Meaning of Harvest

Purging the Kitchen, column for this week

The Literary Club

Thoughts on 9/11

Technology continues battle with Raven

Prepping for the Girlfriend's Visit

The Queenmaker

State Fair Always a True Piece of Indiana

Dino, Maybe Desi, but Billy is just too heavy

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