ARSENIC AND OLD INSTRUMENTS - UNLIKE LIPITOR, THESE ORIGINALS HAVEN'T LOST THEIR PATENT FOR REINVENTION

The New Horizons Band at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas may never threaten Hot Chelle Rae for space on most iPods, but the member-musicians aren’t all that concerned.  For over fourteen years the music department there has encouraged seniors to learn to play a musical instrument or re-learn long dormant musical skills. 

As odd as it may seem to see a room full of graying and white haired men and women coaxing dissonant squawks and screeches from assorted clarinets, flutes and other instruments, the pupils in the beginners band are determined to accomplish their goals.  The advanced band’s efforts actually can produce identifiable tunes.  One of those members, 63 year old Carl Backes, is reaching back through the decades to recapture the joys of music.

Carl learned to play the clarinet in fourth grade at McDonough 39 in New Orleans, LA.  As he moved into Junior High, he expanded his skills to include the bass clarinet.  Adding tenor sax while at Ben Franklin and John McDonough High Schools, he became one of the original members of the then-nascent Louisiana State University at New Orleans’ band, earning invitations to play in several All-City and All-State bands as well as the Pelican Boys State Band.

Finally, at age 17, Carl’s years of academic toil finally began to benefit him financially.  He got a job in a band on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter, laboring in obscurity to provide musical accompaniment for…strippers.  He even played in back-up bands for recording sessions and performances as well as the Navy band at NAS Memphis before losing interest in the 1970’s.

Life took up more of his time, adding the roles of husband and father, which necessitated more than the undependable monies that music provided.  And so it went as Carl worked first in the banking and finance sector, followed by the insurance industry.  Finally, in 2005, he retired with Peggy, his wife of 41 years.  Together they had planned to spend several years touring the United States and took possession of a brand new RV.  Then they ran into a little storm named Katrina.

Their home in New Orleans was destroyed, so their RV became their home, parked in a friend’s driveway for months, while they volunteered hundreds of hours cleaning up Ben Franklin High School before selling the gutted remnants of their house.  Carl and Peggy finally were able to embark on their journey across the USA, spending nearly three years discovering the West before deciding to build their new home in Denton, Texas.  They still spend part of the year traveling in their RV, making sure to always include JazzFest in New Orleans.

Like many older Americans, Carl does have a bucket list.  He takes occasional courses, belongs to clubs, and attends theater and concerts with his wife.  Several of his photographs from his travels have been published, and one was even purchased by National Geographic.  The musical score of his life has been full for Carl and tomorrow he will play in public – with the New Horizons Band – for the first time in 30 years.  Let the music begin.  Through The Lens: New Horizons Band « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth

EDNOR SCARDENS - From Semi-eulogy to Four Book Fiction Series

A cardboard box landed on my front doorstep yesterday.  As the UPS truck drove off, I felt a bit like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings...springing out the door, grabbing the box and withdrawing back into my house cave.  Opened the box and carressing "my precious", I sighed happily that the day I held my printed book in my hands had finally arrived.

The journey from first putting pen to paper - alright, hand to laptop keyboard - had been a long one, and I wondered how many writers had traveled the same road I had.  I was sure that none had started the same way.  Most begin with the intention of writing a short story, novella or novel.  They jot down ideas or carry a germinating story seed in their head for varying lengths of time until, like a baby, it just has to come out.  My own process didn't even faintly resemble that.  My creation was born of fear. 

Allow me to backtrack a bit in explanation.  Years ago, my parents began the sad journey from independent living to assisted living, to nursing facility, and I was afraid that I'd be called upon to put together a eulogy for one or both of them.  I'd been fairly self-centered as a teen, and when I married a military pilot and moved away from home, I missed alot of the everyday things that my parents did.  Long distance phone calls were expensive, and we didn't have the luxury of extended discussions.  The end result was that I missed the opportunities to delve into my parents' past lives, to understand how things really were for them growing up.  My mom had a penchant for spinning yarns about her life whenever she wanted to make a point or issue an obligatory parental warning "from experience".  My sister-in-law and I used to call it "The World According to Irene".  As an example, when she first entered an Assisted Living community, each new resident was welcomed in the facility's newsletter with a brief spotlight based on their answers to general questions.  Mom listed her favorite hobby as ice skating.  She was in a wheelchair, so you get the idea.  Even if I had gotten the time to delve into her past, I'm not sure the answers would have been dependable.

With each family member's passing, my original core of relatives grew smaller, and I had a recurring dream that when my turn came, there would be no one at the service other than my own children and grandchildren.  And they wouldn't know squat about my life before I became their mom.  The dream always continued with one of them standing at the lecturn, fidgeting, and then realizing that they knew very little about me.  It sounds selfish, but who can control their dreams?

So to save them this embarrassment and assuage my fear of an ignominious send-off into the great unknown, I sat down one evening in 2009, intent on typing out a half-assed autobiographic page or two that I could email them for safekeeping until the eventual time came.  What I hadn't counted on was how much I would remember.  As I wrote down little vignettes to keep the account from reading like a timeline diagram, I became possessed.  When I finally looked away from the computer screen, dawn was breaking through the window.  Without realizing what I was actually doing, I sat there, night after night, for three weeks straight, until more than 350 pages had been disgorged.  Surely, my kids never wanted to know that much.

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards contest caught my eye, so I edited like mad, changed the names of people and schools in the story and entered it.  Although I didn't make it to the final round, I wasn't willing to just let the manuscript sit, so I passed it around to family and friends, unaware that they were actually serving as beta readers. More changes came, adding and deleting to better suit a story that some would actually want to read.  It wasn't strictly autobiographical anymore, but the emotions of the main character still glowed in my brain.  I knew I couldn't let the story and the characters end there.  So I kept writing about them through  books 2, 3 and 4.  By the end of the Charm City Chronicles as I've dubbed them, the characters have matured into adulthood, some married, some living through tragedies and some succumbing to them.

I sent out query letters to literary agents and was encouraged by the number of requests I got for fifty page samples, but without magic, vampires and the like, I didn't find one willing to take a chance.  Then one day I got an email from the head of a nascent group...Fantasy Island Book Publishing, and the result is what you see in the photograph.  One journey has been completed, yet the most difficult one lies ahead:  marketing, media, social networking, and sales. 

And although they'll need to clarify which parts of the book are fiction vs. nonfiction, I don't think my kids will have as much trouble delivering a eulogy.  Just don't let let the opening line be, "The World According to Kathleen".         

STRADDLING DISNEY

A couple of weeks ago I took my seven-year-old granddaughter to Disney World for her birthday.  Yes, it was a ridiculously expensive present, but this past year has been all about the birth and cuteness of her new baby brother, so I decided that several days dedicated totally to her would be better than another box of clothes or the latest doll to hit the shelves.

She excitedly counted down the days before we stepped on the plane together, and she plugged herself contentedly into her iPod after the thrill of the rush down the runway.  As we sped through the clouds, I heard her singing to herself, “Baby, baby, baby……oh….” and knew that Justin Bieber was capturing her attention once again as he often does during our car rides together.  Her ability to memorize lyrics has vastly improved in the past year, and the result is often disconcerting as I hear her recite the rap streams that she and her friends practice while riding the bus to school.  She mimics Ludacris with, “She woke me up daily, don’t need no Starbucks.” 

Part of this is my own fault, as I often have music on when she’s in my house or car, and at times the lyrics are not always G-rated.  Some songs that sound so bouncy and fun turn into something rather different when the words come out of a teen-in-training’s mouth.  She LOVES Katy Perry, but I drew the line when she piped, “There’s a stranger in my bed, there’s a pounding in my head…I smell like a mini-bar….“  from the hit “Last Friday Night.”  Even I have sung along happily to songs like Foster The People’s “Pumped Up Kicks” without realizing it was about a kid taking a gun to school to shoot other students.

She has one foot in childhood, running full speed to the Mad Teacups ride and pining for an visit to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, while the other is planted in an adult society where she’s bombarded with suggestive television ads and songs with questionable lyrics.  She paints her nails and frets over whether she’s too fat to wear a bikini.  The child in her wants to hug the performers dressed in Disney character costume, but she declines when I ask her to stand with Minnie Mouse for a photograph.

At the end of one exhausting day at the Magic Kingdom, we wound down for sleep by watching one of the funny video shows with clips of babies and animals doing silly things.  A commercial came on with a scene promoting an upcoming movie.  A couple kissed and then the young man pulled off his shirt before proceeding to do the same for his girlfriend.  I managed to hit the channel selector before hers came off, and my granddaughter looked at me and asked, “Nana, do people always take their shirts off before they kiss?“  I quickly assured her that they do not.  Without skipping a beat, she added, “Did YOU ever take your shirt off when you kissed a boy?“

I’m all for giving truthful answers to kids’ questions IF it is appropriate, but I paused for a moment.  I knew that like most kids, she’d walked in on her mom and dad more than once in various stages of undress, so I flat out lied and told her I might have done it a few times but only with her grandfather after we were  married.  A cop-out, for sure.

As I watch her move in quantum leaps toward the awkward preteen years, I hope she keeps asking those questions.  As embarrassing as they can be, I want her to hear other voices….caring adult voices…to counter the too-much-too-soon culture we live in.  And I need to change the play lists on my iPod.     

The Five Dollar Love Letter

The story began sensibly enough, explaining how the U.S. Postal Service is going bankrupt.  Stop gap measures weren't going to help, said Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe in his Congressional testimony, as salaries and benefits comprise 80% of the organization's annual budget.  The rise of electronic mail has caused a dramatic decrease in revenue, he explained.  Ya think? 

Mr. Donahoe is the second highest paid government employee, second only to President Obama and one step ahead of Vice President Biden.  If first class mail volume has plunged, why hasn't the USPS behemoth shrunken accordingly?  Most of us communicate and pay bills via email and phone, using the mail service for things we can't handle in that manner.  The U.S. taxpayer would probably save money if the U.S. government offered free internet service and public computer stations instead.  Times have changed, but bureaucracy crawls, unable to adjust quickly enough.

He warned of the end of Saturday mail delivery.  I don't know about you, but I'm quaking in my boots at the thought of having to wait until Monday for my junk mail.  Cutbacks to three days a week delivery?  Bring it on.

The most bizarre part of the hearing came courtesy of Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill who lamented the absence of handwritten letters from her children.  She groused that she had to impose a rule, forbidding her college-attending progeny to send her text message requests for money.  "I was getting this gibberish spelling 'need money 2day'.  It's ridiculous!"  Is this woman in the early stages of dementia?  Do you have any idea how much we just paid to have her parenting rant entered into the Congressional Record?  Even worse, is she representative of who is in charge of running our country's affairs?  Gather closer, dear readers, to hear her idea to save the U.S. Postal Service.  She wants someone to come up with a marketing campaign to promote the "value of the written letter...to someone you love".  She prosthelytizes that we would all be surprised how far it would go to stabilize the Postal Service's budget.  Senator McCaskill has simultaneously made me embarrassed to be both female and a boomer.  I'm surprised that she isn't a member of the Tea Party, spouting that kind of idiocy.

Can someone please force Jon Stewart to become Dictator Emeritus of the United States of America?

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STALKED BY HURRICANES

In 2006 I moved, returning to my home state of Maryland after spending 36 years in New Jersey, Florida, California, Virginia, Puerto Rico and Louisiana.  If you guessed ex-Navy wife....bingo.  I repatriated to Maryland for two reasons:  family and New Orleans' weather.  For six months out of every year, I was a nervous wreck, watching weather forecasts over my shoulder from June through the first of December.

I'd been relatively lucky, and experienced just two partial house floodings that weren't related to hurricanes.  Both were related to excessive rainfall.  I'd lived in that house for years with no problems, but a combination of poor landscaping, fencing and a neighbor who installed an inground pool sounded the death knell.  After the first flooding, I put in new carpeting and decided to purchase flood insurance.  If you're familiar with flood insurance, you'll know that there is a 30 day period before the policy takes effect.  So, about 22 days after I purchased it, we had 21 inches of rain in 24 hours.  My kids still laugh at my futile attenpt to help the yard drain.....pushing water out of the gate with a broom.  I also knelt on the kitchen floor and cried, praying that the inevitable wouldn't happen.  God probably had too many other people to listen to that night.

Ever since then, my nerve endings would fire up whenever I heard anything approaching torrential rain.  I kept a list of things to pile into the car after having to evacuate twice in the path of hurricanes that missed us:  family photo albums, silver flatware and jewelry(looters), two dogs and a cat.  As August of 2005 came around with its stank heat and humidity, I watched the usual reports of yet another storm forming with an uncertain destination.  As the storm grew in size and intensity, heading toward the bullseye of New Orleans in the form of Hurricane Katrina, I joined the caravan of evacuees and headed toward Natchez, Mississippi to one of the few hotels that allowed animals.  Due to the scarcity of rooms, we were only able to secure a room with two twin beds.  You can only imagine being in that room for four days with the following:  me, my daughter, her then-husband, a 7 year old, 5 year old, 1 year old, two black labs, two cats, a Siberian Husky and a Malamute. 

When my daughter announced she would rather kill herself than stay another night, an old boyfriend of hers invited us to stay with him in Nashville, Tennessee.  I'm inclined to nominate him for sainthood as we stayed there for nearly two weeks before the authorities in Louisiana would allow us to return.   

As anxious as I was to return home, nothing could have prepared me for what I found.  Just a mile from my house, I asked my daughter where we were.  The devastation as we drew closer was unimaginable.  My own home fared far better than most to the south and east of me.  As I opened the front door, the smell of the refrigerator-freezer was stunning.  We bungied it up and hauled the entire unit to the curb.  There was no savlation for that appliance.  There was black mold piled several inches atop my favorite oriental carpet in the family room and forming on the baseboards.  We pulled up the carpeting and padding to join the refrigerator.  I'd had a new roof put on the house the month before (darn it!) which held up well, but lost several sections of the 6 foot privacy fence.  A possum had taken up residence in the garage.

Adding insult to injury, my insurance company denied my flood claim, but having worked in insurance previously, I knew they were wrong.  I argued policy wording with them for nearly two months before I wrote to the White House.  Within a week, the regional superintendant of FEMA came out to the house and decided that my insurance representative must be smoking crack.....of course, it was a covered loss.

So, I finally had the repairs completed, sold the house and moved back home.  Now, I sit at my laptop writing this blog while I keep checking the weather reports for the projected paths of Hurricane Irene.  I've raided my bathroom cabinet for sleep aids and leftover painkillers to suppress the anxiety which swells with each passing hour.  If I didn't have to babysit this weekend, I'd be cozying up to multiple bottles of rum on Sunday.  As far as I'm concerned, Katrina and Irene are both nasty bitches.  I hope God hears me this time.

CRY ME A RIVER....OR A POOPY CHOCOLATE PIE

Usuallty I read a book before I will see the movie based on that book, but I made an exception when I went to see "The Help".  As I sat in the theater, alternating between laughter and tears, I wondered what it is that makes people cry.  Well, I can't speak with any authority about anyone other than me, but I've come to realize that it is the human face and the written or spoken word.

When I was much younger, I didn't cry about much, other than tears of extreme frustration when I couldn't figure out how to do something...usually math.  To this day, I still think algebra sucks.  Once I reached adulthood and had a baby, something happened.  Some sort of biological switch was flipped.  After that and even today I cry over too many things and not all of them deserve the salty exudate.

I can't stand in a crowd and sing "The Star Spangled Banner" without feeling the moisture brim in my eyes.  This makes no sense to me as I'm not a USA-chanting zealot.  When I took a trip to Italy a few years ago with my sister-in-law to her ancestral home of Boiano, we visited a nearby cemetery and I was overcome, hurriedly wiping away tears.  There wasn't a soul there that I knew or loved, but the Italian custom of embedding photographs on the grave markers was heart-rending.  If the grave's occupant hadn't lived long enough to have a formal photograph taken, as was often the case with children, the photos were taken after death, with their little bodies surrounded by floral tributes.  All I could think of was the broken lives of the parents and families left behind.

Yesterday I drove to Gettysburg, PA to visit some old friends who were traveling the country in an RV.  We saw a film and visited a magnificent museum dedicated to the tens of thousands of soldiers who died there during the civil war.  The faces of the young soldiers, so many in their teens, whose bodies lay with diaries and pictures of wives, girlfriends or children in their uniform pockets tore my heart to pieces.

Sometimes the mind creates a visual, prompted by reading something sad.  You may think it ridiculous, but I can't read E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web" to myself or aloud to a child without my voice breaking when I come to the part where the spider dies.  The first time I ever heard of this classic story was when my then three-year-old son watched the movie on television.  When Charlotte expired, he turned to me and asked in an unsteady little voice, "Did Charlotte die?"  I nodded numbly as tears rolled down my cheeks and he ran from the room, crying "I'm never watching television again!".  Even White, the author, wasn't immune to the power of his own writing.  When he narrated the audiobook of "Charlotte's Web", he struggled through seventeen takes before he could get through it without betraying his own emotions.  White paced in agitation, berating himself and mumbling, "This is ridiculous.  I'm a grown man, crying over an imaginary insect."  And yes, spiders aren't insects, but that's what he reportedly said.

Things don't even have to be sad to make me cry.  If something is funny enough, I'll laugh until I cry.  If you've seen or read "The Help", and recall the chocolate pie scene, you'll know a prime example of that.

So go ahead......post/share something strange or unexpected that makes you cry.  Just don't expect me to sit here dry-eyed while I read it.




 

ARREST ME......Please!

How many times can I be arrested?

It’s pretty hard to read or watch the news without being alternately horrified and laugh-out-loud amused at the things that human beings do.

The blurb about the man who let his 8 y.o. son drive his truck on the interstate while the guy slept, intoxicated, in the back beside his 4 y.o. daughter left me shaking my head, but when you think about just the everyday things we do, it really isn’t all that difficult to be ticketed or even arrested. I wondered how many things I could do to bring it on purposely.

When I woke up, I turned my iPod/Bose unit up loud enough for my neighbors to call the police. I walked the unleashed dog and left his bag of poo on the sidewalk. I hate carrying that stuff! Since I only had one bag with me, when he poo’d again, I didn’t clean it up. After dressing for the day, I left the house to go to the post office, leaving my purse and driver’s license in the house while I exceeded the 25 mile an hour speed limit with an unrestrained child and a dog in the back seat. The package that I mailed contained a bottle of wine. I took the clerk’s pen.

I stopped by a local nursery and bought two tomato plants with a check from an old closed bank account. When I got home, I selected a spot in the common area of my townhouse development. Since we’re not allowed to raise vegetables on our own property, I planted one there too. The framing around my front door was looking a bit worse for wear, so I painted it orange….not an “approved” color., and hung my laundry out to dry (also not allowed).

After dumping some old paint down the street drain, I left the can in the paper-only recycle bin and decided that I liked my library book too much to bother returning it.

My errands left me feeling hungry, so I had lunch at a nearby restaurant and walked out without paying the check. After all, a crowd was gathering around the kid and dog who looked a little sweaty while waiting in the car. When I returned home, I could hear the garbage collection truck’s motor rounding the corner. I couldn’t miss it again, so I dashed out of the shower and placed the trash can by the curb. Why should it be such a big deal that I didn‘t have any clothing on?

Before heading home, I decided to cool off by tubing on the nearby Gunpowder River. After parking the car on some guy's front lawn (not my fault that there weren't any spaces left on the street) and renting a tube, I secured my cooler of beer, flopped onto the rubber surface and drained a can of beer. There weren’t any trash cans nearby, so I tossed the empty into the woods. Deer will eat anything, won't they?

It had been a trying day, so I decided that I needed a sleep aid. The stuff had expired, so I flushed the capsules down the toilet.

Ridiculous? Yes, for the most part, but for better or worse I did it as a small illustration of how closely our lives and activities are governed by those we vote into office. Let’s face it, the majority of laws are created in order to protect us from the criminal and thoughtlessly harmful acts of others. I’m thankful that I live in a country where citizens and lawmakers care enough to at least try to keep my food sanitary, my water clean and my neighborhood safe. It helps to remind myself when I send those quarterly tax payments….from the bank account that actually has enough money in it.