wedeb90

with apologies to Nora Ephron, who feels bad about her neck

2010-11-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

I feel really bad about my legs. Thay have served me well, and we have had mutual respect for each other. Only twice did I fall and really hurt them: once on a tennis court, once rushing to get a frozen yogurt cone and tripping over a planter..And, of yes, up the steps frpm the garage to the house at Harmons, helping to clean up the Bloody Mary remains. On July 4th.

They are medium-looking legs; no one ever said "wow. look at them gams", but no one averted their eyes because I had thinny, stick-like legs, either. Or did I wear long skirts or pants to disguise them. They were just my legs and they suited me fine.

Until I hit 91. And it's not as much that they look much worse, but they have mostly stopped working. During the day, with considerable help, I can use the walker for the short 26 steps to the bathroom. It's 26 when I am not shuffling or mincing along, but walking like a real person.On a walker.

At night, that is a different story. Back and forth in the wheel chair! I hate that. And I wish my legs would reconsider our happy, long relationship, and show a little gumption and let me get up and go.

Euthnanized Enthusiasm

2010-11-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

In the '60's, when I was in my '40's, we plaintively asked, "Where have all the flowers gone?" Now I am in my '90's. and we are well into the next century, I plaintively ask, "Where has all my enthusiasm gone"?" I am too lethargic by half, and, once a political wonk, I now, hardly, my dears, give a damn.

I miss getting excited, I miss getting involved, I miss being passioante about something-- about anything. (Even at 91, I miss being passionate about passion, itself.) And all of this, at long last, is what aging is.

The election, tomorrow, would have had me worked up into a fine lather. I definitely have my preferences, but not enough to stay up into the wee hours of the morning. I certainly prefer Strickland to Kasich; I prefer Fisher to DeWine; it may be close ( the Governor, anyhow), but I am not going to want to escape to Canada or Outer Mongolia even if my candidates lose. Even when Ohio State loses.

Maybe it is alright to smother my enthusiasm; maybe, finlly, at my age, I have a little perspective on life.

I liked the other me better; but this is the me I've got.

Time is a terrible thing to waste

2010-10-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

This is in the nature of being a confession. (Note: I am even equivocating on the subject matter). So let me just come clean. This is a confession. I have been a lazy bum for almost a week.

For ninety years, I was an industrious little bee, bed-ridden or not. At 91, I caved ( temporarily, I hope) and just laid back and closed my eyes at every available opportunity. I know I am of an age when I can forget chores, and goals, and deadlines, but I have lived too long with a to-do list to be suddenly faced with a blank note bad. It is bad for the mind and worse for the soul.

Last Friday night, after I dozed through Washington Week, I didn't know what to do with myself. My son had sent me a stack of wonderful books for my birthday, and I felt too dumb to start reading them. I'm not talking Proust (I've always been too dumb to really understand him); I'm talking Alter and Remnick; wonderful writers I thoroughly enjoy. So, I firgured I'd watch an old NCIS.

My brother had told me, a few years ago, that these are good episodes to kill an hour. To kill time... ( kill time!) horrors, that is a punishable infraction. It worked, and I fell in love with Mark Harmon, my new friend, " Leroy Jethro Gibbs". It's like pistachio nuts, you know you can't eat just one pistachio nut. If you don't get that, it's because it is an inside joke--Abbie and Gibbs and mine.

Well, I watched an episode I had watched twice before, where the Iranian mother-in-law and Mike, Gibbs' mentor, sit on the same deck and watch their joint grandchild playing with her mother.

Three viewing of that is only one too many--- but here I am, back in the land of the living.

Thank the good Lord. Blessed be.

Tough Love

2010-10-22T11:12:00.000-07:00

Who knew that so much love can do you in (temporarily)?

Or that I could tell a lie, continuing to post as Wedeb90)?

I did and I do. Full confession.

My son, Tim and his daughter, Hannah, my youngest grandaughter, came for a pre-birthday celebration on October 14. We ate our version of the city's finest food: Rubino's pizza, City Barbecue, Block's bagels and Bob-bob Evans' chicken and noodles. My twenty year old could be six again, and I could be seventy. Only my digestive system knew for sure, and it said, ""Phyllis, you idiot, act your age, "but I wasn't listening. It was worth the small digestive price I paid.

By Wednesday, October 20, when wedeb90 became wedeb91, I thought I was ready for whatever small celebration would come along. Wrong. No one, not even Mother Theresa, could be so overcome with caring and goodwill. Twelve full hours of calls, gifts, flowers, phone calls, Facebook messgaes, e-cards....

After D.G, brought me Guiseppi's spinach lasagna, courtesy of lovely Vesna, I was completely out of steam. Yesterday, I was back to square one, where Hospice had come in. I was diappointed in myself, and my unforgiving body. I couldn't walk. My legs locked in under me; I needed the wheel chair to get to the bathroom. My hands kept shaking. I could barely talk to my children. I slept almost all day, and then all night, opening my eyes long anough to watch Gray's Anatomy. ( I guess I thought it would make me feel better, to see people in worse shape than I.)

When I woke up this morning, I was fine. Back on the walker, like any good quarter back, staying "in the pocket", instead of hanging on for dear life at a 90 degree angle.

I didn't age 10 years overnight. I feel like the spring chicken I am, and you wil, I hope, be hearing from me as wedeb90 when I might actually be wedeb95.

Blessed be.

My friend, Alice

2010-10-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

In the city where I live, where many of my friends live, there is no reason to identify a person as "my friend". In the ever-shrinking circle of wagons that protect me, no known enemy approaches, and we are all friends. By my age, all those who have no particular interest in me and my well-being, have all dropped away, out of sight.

But after I have called Alice, in Massachusetts, I always explain that I have spoken to "my-friend-Alice". She has only been in Columbus once, and that was Christmas vacation of my freshman year in college. 1938. Not one person who met her then is still alive.

Yesterday, I reached her answering machine. We hadn't talked since I went into Hospice care, and it seemed strange that she wasn't home. Ten minutes later she returned my call: she was still in Rockport, at a house on the beach there. It had been her parents house, where she, her sister and brother- in- law live during the summer. She has her own apartment in town and she is returning there next week.

"How are you"?, I asked, of course. "Well, I'm fine" she answered, except I had to have some surgery on my eye this summer, and so I am just seeing out of one eye, but that's ok"was her answer.

"My friend, Charlotte from California from kindergarten came to visit", she told me. "I remember Charlotte", I told her, even though we had never met.

"Anything else new?", I queried. "I'm still doing a little counseling on the phone; just a few clients" . She is almost 91 years old, still working. Still of good cheer, a laugh peeking through her voice.

Alice got her MSW after her three boys were fairly grown; her nice, MD husband had died very young, and she has been a working single mother for quite a while. One of her sons became a doctor, too.

Plus, she must still be beautiful; she always was.The last time I saw her was at a college reunion nearly ten years ago, and, mirror, mirror on the wall, she was the fairest of us all.

And so we touch base, and I feel refreshed and restored.

She is my friend Alice. I confer the words as a title, which I bestow with respect and love.

Wede I be

2010-10-11T10:24:00.000-07:00

It suddenly dawned on me that you know that wedeb90, but, for many of my new friends, you know little more about me than that I am in Hospice care, have a bad (but loving) heart and observe life, primarily, from my bed. Which has its benefits, believe it or not.

What you cannot know is: once I was as busy as anybody in town. I truly love my community, and it is much more exceptional than is generally assumed. Quantifiably exceptional. We have the number #1Lbrary in the country and the number #1 Zoo, among other bragging rights. I have been a lifetime volunteer, and even worked for the Mayor and the city at one time.

I keep referring to my DD, which translates to Designated Daughter, and her nom de plume is D.G. Fulford. Do I have you utterly confused yet? Well, she and I wrote a book together called Designated Daughter, the bonus years with Mom. She describes the last twelve years since she moved home from Nevada to be my ever-ready, ever-steady other half. I contributed my own reactions to her actions, and the book (excuse the commercial) is available in hard back wherever books are sold. Or in your libraries in the many countries where so many of your reside.

All the other clues I drop about me and my lucky life give me, I hope, form and shape. Just know how appreciative I am, and how much your comments mean to me.

My new fall wardrobe

2010-10-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

A nip is definnitely in the air, although we are having a few delightfully warm days, every other week or so. But I have to put my mind, and my daughter, on what I need. I day-dream about a new purse, or a pair of shoes; wouldn't an up-to-date blazer be nice? (Or does anyone still wear blazers?)

It's all make believe, this coversation between me and me; I really need new nightgowns. I have one flannel gown that was mistakenly put in the dryer after the first wearing, so if you look at the too short sleeves, you might think the wearer is a growing girl. That is, until you look at the arms themselves. They scream "old woman".

So, my really fine DD ( have I said often enough what a good daughter she is?) went up to the mall and began the search.She found only four in my size, and brought them to me so I could choose two. It was easy: the two extra small, from one store, fit; the plain small from the other store were too tight.

So I am happy with my new fall wardrobe: pink. to match my pink room, (foolishly girlish, I'm afraid), a room no self-respecting man would live in. But no man except my family enters, anyhow. And the only man I really want to enter has been gone twelve long years.

The other gown is white, with a bluish-gray design, with red cardinals, the official bird of the state of Ohio. That's my scarlet and gray football nightgown. How very, very well-dressed I will be every Saturday.

And she brought me a box of gingersnaps, too.

Blessed be.

Really, really who am I?

2010-10-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, my daughter was sick; she ached all over, especially her shoulder. She tried holistic medicine, and then main-stream medicine: x-rays, blood work up, EKG. As she continued to feel under the weather, I felt more and more helpless. I could not even go the few miles to her house, and there was not one thing I could do once I got there. (Needless to say, she is well again, or I wouldn't even be writing this.)

I am extremely lucky to have care-givers in times of crisis. Rosie is the laughing, happy girl from Jamaica, who has been in the United States, on her own, since she was eighteen. She is educated in the hospitality industry and has worked at Disney in Orlando and the Westin Hotel. While working there, and during the times she works for me, she graduated from college with a degree in the management of medical recocods. Her mommy, in Montego Bay, calls her at least once a day.

Tall and beautiful Lise came from Rwanda.She worked at Delphi in Dayton for a few years, and when they went belly-up, she was able (it's a long story, with a long series of pitfalls) to get her tuition paid at a nursing school in Columbus. In a few months, she will be an LPN. She would like to continue on for her RN, but that is one tough road..... Her parents call her every day, and after she talks to her siblings, she is homesick.

As I fall asleep at night, I think about Mrs. Gardner in Jamaica and Mrs. Urejani in Rwanda.We are thousand of miles apart; we have never met. But I know that, at their very core we are the same people. We are mothers. Make that a capital M.

What passes for exitement

2010-09-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

It was around 5:30 p.m., and, as usual, the heighborhood was quiet; the weather was clear, my dinner was started in my old electric overn, and ---poof, with no warning, the electricity went off.The small, little sound that I heard and ignored, was, of course, the sound of a blown transmitter. I can't evn count the number of times this has happened to me in my 90 years.

We have had outages that lasted so long we had to empty our refrigerators and freezers. We have had outagea so severe water pipes froze and I styed at a motel for two nights. I used to even enjoy the outages when dinner was in the oven, and I could say to Bob, "Good, let's go out to dinner".

Bu this was my first outage, stuck in an electric bed and unable to go anywhere. The house would get cold, but I have extra blankets. The food -in the oven wouldn't cook but the food in the fridge was still available; jellied consomme, sour cream, and sliced turkey for a sandwich. The only real concern was the electric bed ,which was frozen in the sitting position.But, c'm on, Phyllis, I thought, we have other beds.

Suddenly, just as quietly as it went out, the lights came on and the electricity was back.

But the cable was out, too; no phone, no TV.Then I remembered an old analog TV we had.. and I had gotten a converter for that. Just for an"emergency" like this, I guess. So I watched CBS, which is my Tuesday night channel of choice, with a new" NCIS" and "The Good Wife,"

As I went to sleep at 11, the regular TV had set itself to the correct time. I didn't even try my cell phone to call my landline.

So how would I react if there actually was some excitement? I'll let you know if it ever happens!

Legally Legal

2010-09-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

The other day, I discovered that my handicapped parking permit had expired in July. Not that it should matter, because I am going no where--no where, at all.

But what if I did need to go to a doctor in an emergency, which I won't, because I am in Hospice. But, really-- what if? And my daughter found a handicap space, she got me in the wheel chair, and we had no permit and .....

One of the deadly sins to me, is to use a space to which you are not entitled; interpreted broadly, it is fair to say that I value integrity above all other virtues. And so for good measure, I contacted the Ohio Bureau of Motor vehicles. (Permit division).

(They answer their phone, which is more than I can say for their drivers' liscence division. Mine is due to renew on October 20, and because there is no circumstance in the world to get me behind the wheel, I do need a valid ID, I suppose.)

Back to the permit people. I gave them the id# on the card, and explained that I was sure I had had the request to my doctor before July rolled around, and that he had returned it. Needless to say, I was a little preoccpied at the time. They had no record of this, so they will send me a new request form. Don't hold your breath, it will be sent in two to three weeks time.

P.S. I reached Susan Hospice on Friday afternoon and the table was delivered at 7:00 p.m. It's working great.

My Space

2010-09-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

It is not that I am being crowded out by people, or that I feel I deserve more space than I have; I have a whole bed to myself...even a whole room.

I am being hedged in by my communication devices: the bed control, the tv control, the phone, the laptop, the thesaurus, magazines, books, a little pile of papers that need tending to, a small baggie with my compact and lipstick...

I am having a hard time thinking, let alone writing. If my house has not always been impeccably clean, it was always neat. Clutter drove me crazy. (Only one of our children inherited the "neatness" gene; the other two thrive in disarray,) I still have a lot I want to say, but by the time I get the correct device in my surrounding (bed)scape, I want to pick up the magazine at hand, instead.

I was talking( complaining) to my Designated Daughter about this, when we both remembered a table Hospice had lent Bob, with a leg that slides under the bed and the table top can be moved over or beside the bed.

I just called Sue, my awesome nurse, and one will be delivered to me!

I probably won't write any more often, but I will be much more comfortable doing it.

The worst words

2010-09-21T10:44:00.000-07:00

A number of years ago, when the grandchildren were in their teens, we were talking about some long-forgotten subject, that caused me to comment: "you know what I think are the four worst words in the English language: " I think you should.'" It gets under my skin for anyone to think he/she knows better than the person to whom they are speaking, what the person should do. What is wrong with "Would it be a good idea?" or "what if you try x or y".

A grandson spoke up to add that his worst words were "shut up". He hadn't heard it at home, I'm sure. Those words were also verboten in our house. It was a contemporary, with bad manners. And then another grandchild added, "I think the worst words are ' you dirty liar'".

Which lead us all to the worst sentence: "I think you should shut up, you dirty liar," a families' words of wisdom that is exactly what the family does not believe.

I think it is a kind of funny anecdote, worth blogging about. I'm sure every family has words they choose to live by, by not using them.

And I need to push the "dislike" button for one of my "heard on TV" phrases. There are weather men, when referring to an area, say "And that's where the tornado touched down at." Edwin Newman, we miss you.

Thank you, again and again, for your kind reponses to my BBC video. I wish I could answer each and everyone. I think I shoud--- but I cannot, But I have read and relish every single one. You are eloquent and kind... and there a quite a few of you!

Setting the bar

2010-09-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

All of you wonderful readers have mde me realize that. even though I was assuming that I was writing for my own amusement and pleasure, there are people all over the world who now will search out this simple little blog.

And my thoughts and my fingers and my sense of humor are kind of freezing up, even though it is a beautiful day in my neighborhood. I am distracted by the men, pounding and cutting and repairing the deck across the way. A huge tree fell across the deck, not last Thursday, when we had ten tornados touch down in Ohio, near, but not on, us. This accident happened in an earlier circular high wind, and it looks as if it almost took out not only their deck, but a beautiful sculpture in the yard by Alfred Tibor, who survived the Nazi death camps and made the horror of them live on with the anguish of his stylized figures.

I do not want to disappoint you. Even more, I do not want to disppoint myself with careless writing; I have already inserted and erased commas all over the place. I will read this over and decide whether I just have the late Sunday afternoon blahs, or whether I need another day to get over myself.

These two days have been a lot for a 90 year old blogger to comprhend. But she knows enough to realize that such a miracle as the BBC has wrought happens pretty infrequently.

Next blog, I think I will try to trace back to the beginning, how this all began. We may have to go back to Adam and Eve.

On being overwhelmed

2010-09-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

To all of you who saw the BBC post of this 90 year old blogger and took the time to write me from all over the world: I, from whose mouth and fingers words usually pour out, I am nigh on to speechless.Thank you, thank you everyone.

And thanks to Daniel Sieberg and his crew for such sensitive editing... and for wanting to come to Columbus to meet DG and me in the first place.

I knew that the media's reach was far and wide --but the speed in which I got comments from all over the world was incredible.

With gratitude to all of you. May the days ahead be good for all of you. I send my best wishes.

walking on Hospice Air

2010-08-31T11:11:00.000-07:00

This morning, D.G. and I were invited to be guests on All Sides with Ann Fisher. D.G. went to the studio, and I joined the conversation on the phone. If talking about Hospice and end of life issues can be a blast, this one was.

Ann is a very knowledgeable and gracious host, and her interview with Drs. Morrison and Jackson that preceeded us was a treasure trove of information that had to have been helpful to all those listening. D.G. and I were just ourselves, overflowing with gratitude for all of our experiences with Hospice Care. And to Ann for affording us the opportunity to tell her listeners what Hospice does to give a family peace of mind, a sense of calm, and the knowledge that help from nurses is but a phone call away, 24/7.

I'm about to take a nap-- after all, those of us in the public eye :-) need to get our rest. But first, I want to post this on my Facebook page--if only to beat D.G. to the draw!

And I learned a medical term for what drove me to the end-of-life conversation: it's called "intractable nausea."

the moving finger writes, and having writ moves on...

2010-08-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

My Uncle Harry used to quote that phrase, which I have since learned is from the Rubyyat of Omar Khyyam (thanks Google). I have no recollection of why or when Uncle Harry said it, but I thought it was both out of the blue and out of context. As I had the urge to write a wedeb90blogspot today, those words become exactly apporopriate, and I understand them. I have been writing--something, anything-- for years, and I can no more stop writing than I can breathing, which, thanks to all the good care I am geting, I seem to continue to do, successfully.

I think what prompted this blog was looking over some of the 70 blogs I have posted since December, 2009. Why did Sir Edmund Hillary climb Mount Everest, a reporter asked. "Because it was there," Hillary replied. And that is the simple answer as to why I am a blogger : the blogger dashboard is there in front of me, bare, and the moving finger writes.

My blogs, and my Designated Daughters blogs, are going public (in her case, puiblic-er, she's on Womens" Day blog spot three times a week). We are going to be on Ann Fisher's show on Tuesday, August 31 in the 11:00 a.m. hour,on WOSU radio when the subject will be Hospice care. I know two physicians will be talking from 11:20 to 11:40. and then D.G. and I will be heard, she in the studio, me, at home, in bed.

We are experienced in the subject. Bob was in Hospice care for three months beforr he died; I was in once before, and I "graduated" with the help of a wonderful physical therapist. This time, I am in as long as the afore-mentioned-heart keeps beating. And I am at its mercey--- and in the hands of the Lord.

It's not the heat. it's my stupidity

2010-08-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

It is really hot and muggy; Ohio at it's summer worst. Plus, I hate, hate, hate air-conditioning. But how callous and unfeeling of me to complain. There are hundreds of people out there who have no air-conditioning to turn on. Our brave troupes are sweltering in Afghanistan. It is terrible enough that our brave troupes are in Afghanistan at all.

I'm up to my old self, again; bitching about circumstances I have no right to bitch about, and then feeling guilty. If all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players, what is my role? Cranky old dame? Normal for 90? Or just aching for a spell of lovely weather?

That's it! I am aching for a lovely, breezy, 75 degree afternoon with the chance to veg-out on the deck with a wonderful book. (The last wonderful book I read was the Imperectionists. It was so good I read it twice.)

That breezy afternoon ain't gonna' happen. I faithfully watch our TV weatherman, who looks to be about 19 years old, and I am so unamused at his boyish enthusiasms that I pay scant attention, primarily because he loves to talk about rain; chances of, possible storms, or pop-up showers, even SEVERE weather, (run to the basement) . Ha.

I am more than aware that parts of the country have had devestating storms and floods. I support the Red Cross when they ask for help. Here we are: back to cranky 90.

Yesterday was nice, mid-morning, so I was wheel chaired out to the front driveway, in my pink nightgown and looked at my newly weeded (?) front yard. Outside, in my nightgown! This is what I have come to? Phyllis Harmon Greene, who was known to wear gloves and hose and even an occasional St. John.

I don't think I appreciated 80 enough.

On being a (Hospice) patient

2010-07-31T07:23:00.000-07:00

I am in Hospice Care, at home, in my own bed and it is weird, unreal, surreal, but REAL. I finally know that the root of my evil is a failing heart with its fibrillations and pacemakers and old valves. They, or it, has a right. It's 90 years old, for heaven sakes.

After a miserable month of retching and nausea that made me moan like the tennis Williams sisters' serving, my doctor could not prescribe for me, without actually seeing me. I knew I could not go to his office. Our son Tim found a way. He secured an impressive private ambulance service who maneuvered their way down my terrifying driveway. DG rode with the driver, Tim followed. They took me to a pre-arranged examining room, the IV was set-up and waiting, the EKG was done, blood drawn, a thorough end-of-life talk ( no death panel, this) and by the time the ambulance got me home, I was enrolled in Hospice.

My New Yorker magazine ( August 2 issue) arrived the next day, and although I had not felt like reading for weeks, I was drawn in by the cover. There was this little old person, pedalling all alone on a yellow road, through a lovely forest. The rider had to be me; I was on the road to eternity. When I looked at the table of contents, I found an Annals of Medicine article, "Letting Go", a scholarly, well-documented argument in favor of Hospice care, written by Atul Gawande , Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. I am likely reading more into this than it is, I know, but it felt absolutely cosmic to me.

That night, I fell into the first real sleep I had had in over a month, not drug-induced, just good old-fashioned sleep-sleep. The crickets, the katydids, the cicadas were singing a musical, a magical surround-sound outaide my bedroom window. I was at peace with myself, with our hard-won decision. I am in the hands of the Lord.

How I spent Fathers' Day

2010-06-20T12:18:00.000-07:00

To be honest, I have not been feeling all that good this week, and it was with trepidation that I went to sleep last night, wondering if I could go to the cemetery with DG today.

I woke up feeling better than I have. and so off we went to Greenlawn. The day was beautiful, the sky was blue, and aside from missing a turn or two on the way to section 41, we arrived with Bob's favorite day lilies in hand. DG placed them on the overgrown headstone. The whole place is unkempt, but still beautiful, with the huge trees and the birds and God's blue skies. We sat in the car together, then, and rememberd DG's Dad, and we cried because we think he would be pleased to see how well we are doing.

Then we drove around to the other side of the section, and we put day lilies on my Dad's head stone. He has been gone since 1938. Still, he is always in my thoughts. He was, to my children "the real Al Harmon"; as much as they and I adored Al Harmon Jr., they are still respectful and loving to a man they never knew. There have two Al Harmons since my brother; we have Rocky, Al III and Weiler, Al IV. And I think it is appropriate to include Alex Ruben, named for Molly's Dad.

We stopped for Starbucks on the way home, and visited with each other some more...

A perfectly wonderful day. I wish the same to all your parents out there.

I don't have time to edit this. The Pebble Beach golf tournament has just come on. It's kind of ironic that I am rooting so hard for Tiger, who doesn't seem to have been a wonderful father, but his Dad was so important in his life, and in his skill , that it is fitting that I salute all fathers everywhere, including, of course, the fabulous fathers, Bob and Tim Greene.

The need to know

2010-06-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

I have always been a policy wonk; long before there was such a descriptive word. I read every paragraph James Reston wrote, and corresponded daily, by letter, to the Eisenhower White House. (Oh, that Ike; he must have had his mind on Kay Summersby; he never responded to my letters. I thought-- and I still do-- that the better informed a citizenry, the better the country would become.

Wrong! wrong!

Now, I am ready to throw in the towel. Everyone has what they consider an informed position, and everyone feels a need to write about it. There are paid pundits and self-promoting folks who use Jack Cafferty, for instance, to get their two-cent worth of "wisdom" out to the public.

Have a certain point of view, and you will find a newspaper, a radio station, a news channel to give you access... and validity and visibility. We are drowning in words. (Believe me, I love words, I'm a writer.) Just don't use the words foolishly; use them so they are useful , not full of hot air.

I was not going to blog today, but this morning, as I tried to digest the Dispatch and the New York Times, I had my a -ha moment. I just don't give a damn. It seems incredible but no one is credible anymore.

I may spend my days idly watching soap operas, eating boxes of bon-bons as the world turns.

It's all about my driveway

2010-06-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

Norah Ephron wrote about her neck and Sarah Silverman about her bladder, and it's my driveway that is worthy of a blog, if not a book.

"Many long years ago," the story begins. The house was built by people who wanted nothing but the best. Not my style, exactly. Not my style at all. We bought it, though, because it really is a great house and, eventually, the heavy velvet drapes with the lace panels beneath wore out... and I have lived with the stone-encrusted bathroom counter tops so long I don't even notice them.

The house sits below a (very) small hill. It is a horizontal house and it seems to me that, if in the beginning, they could have designed a semi-circular drive down the hill past the house and then up the hill, again, to a road hardly ever travelled, life would be a lot easier for my aging friends who come to see me. But I'm no engineer and the property is narrower at the top than down in the back So. We have a driveway that is a pain for guests and, in winter, unmanageable.

We always drove down into the garage, and backed up to the street. When I was in my prime, I could almost do it with my eyes closed. Others, less familiar with the terrain have come close to tipping over. "Come close" is the worst that ever happened. Thank the good Lord.

It is these difficult Ohio winters that have, truly, caused the problem. Adhering to the principle of "nothing but the best, the original drive was concrete. By the time it became ours, the concrete was cracking up. We had taken on as much as we could handle to buy the house. Concrete was too much of an investment.

We went with blacktopping. Blacktopping, blacktopping year after year after year, because the %^&#&* concrete base kept cracking up beneath the blacktop.

The black-toppers are here today. They have applied one coat and an asphalt patch, and will be back this afternoon for coat two.

At this terrible time when the Gulf beaches are covered with tar, it is ironic that I am needing more tar.

The world is so full of problems. Norah's neck or Sarah's bladder or Phyllis' driveway seem ridiculous to even mention. But I cannot help thinking about it, imprisoned as I will be for 72 hours.

May I call you Phyllis?

2010-06-01T14:03:00.000-07:00

I was making one of those necessary, and usually annoying, phone calls: to order shoes, or question a charge, or change my gas supplier, at the end of a two-year contract that I should never have chosen in the first place. I wish I could remember exactly who it was, for this is a kudo to them or their phone rep.

After I had identified myself to a robot, either by my phone number or the last four digits of my "social", a lovely-sounding human being said to me, "May I call you Phyllis?" I was dumb-founded! How long has it been since anyone asked your permission to call you by your first name? Daily, someone calls and says, 'Phyllis, are you interested on our special price for grub-control?", when they aren't even my lawn service, or, in my e-mail, there are messages from purveyors of goods I have used that start, "Phyllis, it's time to send Carolyn flowers again."

It is not that I think I ought to be called "Mrs. Greene" because of age or seniority, although I am always older than the caller. Are there any jobs for 90 year old gardeners or even on phone-banks? I think not, although there are plenty of the aging population who could use the income and welcome the diversion.

I have always suggested to care-givers that they call me Phyllis. They are my friends, as is everyone who helps me in anyway. Nobody should expect due-deference; that should have expired with slavery. I did have a severely ill friend whose family had called in Hospice. The nurse, on her first visit, called the client by his first name; his wife saw the expression on his face and when they left his room to talk, the wife said, "I think he would prefer to be called Mr. K.....". 'Nuf said.

When I first got very sick, three years ago, I had a care giver who had lived in Paris most of her life, but whose family still lived on the Ivory Coast, where her mother, the matriarch, had care-givers of her own. She had some relationship to African royalty. Martha refused to call me Phyllis; it was improper to use a first name for an older woman. She referred to me as "La Contessa". I was never sure she meant it as a sign of respect, or if she was inferring that I was surely not worthy of the title, and , in some way, she was condescending of me.

Whatever. Please, just call me Phyllis. It is very nice if you ask what "title" I prefer. I would appreciate your asking. But I warn you in advance, if you are comfortable with Ms., Mrs. or hey you, just say it. But remember, I ain't no Contessa.

2010-05-26T14:39:00.000-07:00

This morning, I went to the Legacy exhibit at the Columbus Jewish Center. Toby Brief, another Designated Daughter, who came home when her father died, volunteered to be the innovator, designer, historian and curator of one of the most exciting historical exhibits I have ever seen. She has given meaning and beauty to the story of the Jewish immigration to Columbus, Ohio. It was a wonderful experience, looking and listening as D.G. pushed me around in my wheel chair.

As I have been contemplating the wonderful ninety years I have led, I have zeroed in on the events of these nine decades; this morning I realized how privileged I am to really have personal memories of my antecedents. There is hardly anyone left to whom I can talk about those people. As a little girl, my father took me to see his father, and two old ladies who were his step-grandmother and, I think, a step-great aunt. Aunt Bet was a little, round old lady who lived up a steep flight of stairs. Great grandfather, Henry, had arrived in Columbus in the 1860's and had run a grocery store. He brought his first wife and their children, and when she died, he remarried and had more children.

There were fascinating maps of early Columbus, the merchants side by side on High Street. There was a section devoted to the early junk dealers, all of whom grew prosperous by turning their scrap metals into something else.

At each stop I babbled on, I kept saying, "His grandson was in my confirmation class" or "yes, she was Uncle Harry's sister."

The collection of items is beautiful, and beautifully presented. The meaning is even more significant. Keep the old pictures and artifacts. Write your memories. You probably have no idea what it will mean to future generations.

Political news made personal

2010-05-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Alert: this is not a political blog, but, I think the reason it appeared on the front page of the Dispatch is a subtle reminder that it is much better to have the Casino in Franklinton than in the Arena District. Of course, if we hadn't had a constitutional amendment in the first place and blah, blah, blah...

Whatever. The cut was an old car lot and the copy was:
   Holy intentions for an old car lot
   West side Catholic Church is looking to a former Ford dealership as a new soup kitchen and museum
   Long before the dealership, the ground was home to the Convent of the Good Shepherd...
This is where my story begins.

In 1942, after many months of heart-to-heart, Q&A, countless contention about the advisability of marrying a brand new infantry Second-Lieutenant, I finally was the winner and my parents would send me off to Oregon to be married. We announced our engagement in July, when the groom was home on leave before moving to Medford, Oregon to help activate the 91st Division at Camp White.

Whether it was a delaying tactic or a sign of the times, we could not set the date until my trousseau: slips and gowns and a beautiful floor-length velvet robe could be hand stitched by the Nuns at the Convent of the Good Shepherd. Those Nuns were very slow at their stitching. Time, and my groom, were a' wasting.

Finally, finally at long last, the arrangements were made to travel to Portland, Oregon for the wedding. Bob's mother and my mother went with me on the train. The flowers, the Rabbi, the photographer had all been arranged for. The small ceremony in a suite at the Benson hotel, and then dinner in a private dining room there, and off we flew to Medford. My mother gave us the left-over liquor which I tucked into my luggage. The plane, a DC-something was not pressurized, and as we snuggled in our bumpy seats, the tops popped off the scotch and the bourbon.

Arriving at the St. Francis Hotel at 3:00 a.m., our promised room had been given to someone else, but, they had an empty bridal suite for us. As we opened our luggage, the suite smelled like a brewery. The Nuns had slaved in vain! My navy, monogrammed lingerie bags had faded on to everything! We draped them around the living room and went to bed. Laughing.

And we lived happily ever after. Laughing for 56 years.

How family history becomes FAMILY HISTORY

2010-05-21T10:53:00.000-07:00

It is the small things that happen that remain in the mind and in the heart that, without our realizing, become family history. Not that the importance of writing it down hasn't been hammered into my head by my daughter, whose Remembering Site is one of the things that she does for a living. It is what struck me, just after Mother's day, and I felt compelled to tell the story to my nieces, on Bob's side of the family.

The California Greenes visited often; the children alone, Bob's brother and wife--make that wives--Bob's brother and mother together. My side of the family, the Harmons, knew the Greene side but they didn't have many shared memories.

And this is the FAMILY HISTORY that caused me to smile, as it grew, in my mind, from lower case to upper.

For years, on Mother's Day, my sister-in-law and brother hosted a delicious picnic, serving among other things, veal sausage on the grill, sliced , speared by a toothpick, as an hors d'oeuvre. When Bob's mother moved to Columbus, she was invited to the party and she loved those veal sausages. As the years went by, they began to be called Grandma Ethel's sausages.

Grandma Ethel has been gone more than twenty years , Bob, twelve. And my brother Al a year ago January. Sue now lives in a lovely condo, so this year, Sue and Al's youngest daughter hosted the event. I couldn't make it, but D.G. did, and she told me that as the appetizer was taken off the grill, someone said, "Oh, Grandma Ethel's sausages."

How happy it would have made Bob to know his mother is in the collective memory of my side of the family. I passed the story along to Bob's brother's daughters, for they, too, should share this really nice piece of family history.

A'panting we will go

2010-05-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

My (laughingly-called) wardrobe is old and tired. That puts me and my clothes in the same boat, and if I rejuvenate the one (clothes), maybe the other one (me) will be perked up. I'm not looking to be high-styled, never was, never will be. But, truly, I need new pants. I do own some decent (old) tops, which just will have to do. How wrong can you go with Talbots, circa 2000?

The problem is, pants; nice tailored pants are hard to come by. DG said she would go shopping for me, and I told her I thought jeans were not age-appropriate for me. She burst out laughing. Where do you draw the line, she asked? They were okay for you at 90, but at 90 1/2, they aren't? I think that is it. I am really over that 90 line,and no more jeans for me.

So, good designated daughter that she is, she bought me some pants, just like the tan pants I already have, but newer.

Obviously, clothes just aren't my thing and this is the last time I will discuss them publicly. But you may see me out in public one of these days, so please notice my pants.

Or what you can see of them as I sit. And sit. And sit.

A gloomy sort of day

2010-05-13T13:39:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, actually quite infrequently, a day comes along and I am dispirited. Not necessarily about myself, but about the whole world. Of course, we all are wearied by the on-going bad news: the Greeks are broke ( and so are we), the oil keeps spilling, nothing gets solved in the middle east.

( I went to my thesaurus, trying to find the exact word I was looking for and found "pain in the ass"). It is one description of the pain the world is inflicting on us all. It is also a pain in the heart and in the mind. That is worse.

Then I began to wonder why I was feeling gloomy and out-of-sorts and aha!: I had read the morning paper after breakfast instead of before dinner, my usual routine.

Thus, I was turned off by the bad news, both local and national, before I had a chance to get my bearings.

The Dispatch, itself, is a sad remnant of its former self. It gets thinner and weaker, as its' rates keep rising. We are newspaper people, D.G. and I say to each other. We need to subscribe to the local paper. I wish the old Citizen-Journal was still around. I really liked that paper, in a very personal way. Dick Campbell was a great guy, and our paths crossed often in the day.

In this worst (I hope not, really) of times, it is wise to get the day's news when the day is almost over. We know not to cry over spilt milk.

Mother vs. Daughter

2010-05-09T10:55:00.000-07:00

No, my daughter and I are not having a fight. We have never had a fight. She, nor I, ever really fight with anybody. I am mulling over the role of daughter and the role of mother, trying and trying to compare the pluses and the minuses.

I have been a mother for 63 years; a daughter for 88. Right off the bat, that makes me an extremely lucky woman. Can I draw a comparison? Which role is better? Easier? More fun? Rewarding? Difficult? None of the above?

Of course, if you are born female, you have no choice; every girl child is somebody's daughter. Whether you want to be a mother is up to you, and Roe v. Wade, and Planned Parenthood.

Here is where I need to gather my thoughts and apply that old force-field analysis.

I began this blog yesterday afternoon, and wanted my brain to simmer over-night, to find a truly fascinating and logical answer to my own kind of dopey questions.

This day has been full of incredible kindness and love, tangible and personalized. Flowers and cards and Facebook messages from my real children and the children of my heart. (Yes, Hofheimers and Lazaruses that means you.) And Bob sent the most beautiful, big, matted, professioanal photograph of the Masters' tournament at Augusta, amen- corner with the azaleas in bloom, and glimpse of the Hogan bridge, that I wait each year to see again.

So why even try to frame the questions? Being the mother is the best job in the world. But that is a typo. I meant joY.

Mothers' Day. This is the day I can truly celebrate.

A Shingles Shot Saga

2010-05-04T12:46:00.000-07:00

As best I understand the Health Care bill, I am all for it. It hardly matters to me personally, since I am 90 years old and have medicare and my excellent HMO, Medigold, absolutely faultless since the day we enrolled. But I support the Health Care bill for the people who won't be bumped because of a pre-existing condition, for the people for whom escalating premiums are so prohibitive. And I love the Palin-defined "death panels", because any physician worth his salt has that rational kind of conversation whenever a patient is speeding toward physical disaster.

So let me tell you my shingles shot saga.

Last Saturday, friends came by to say hello, and bring me magnificent tulips from their yard. They told me of another friend who was miserable with shingles for the second time. They said their MD had recommended they have the shot. They immediately did so. I had no idea that such a shot was even available. My mother had shingles in her head, and even the strongest pain meds hardly helped. Another friend got them five minutes ( or five hours) after her husband died and she suffered for months.

So I e-mailed my doctor's office to ask for his advice, and his nurse returned my call twenty minutes later and reported that he thought it was an excellent idea, and there would be an rx for me at the front desk. Their office does not carry a supply because it needs to be administered immediately from a refrigerated mix. They suggested I go to a mini-clinic in a pharmacy. I wanted to go that day, but Tim was coming for the week-end, and I certainly didn't want to be bothered by a sore arm or reaction, or whatever. I knew none of that would happen, but my daughter felt it might.

Thus, last evening at 4:30 when my caregiver arrived, we went down to Walgreens at the corner where there were two signs in the window that said "Shingles shots available." The only time I had been at Walgreens was the drive-through window. It is a gigantic emporium, and the only way for me to get to the pharmacy department was in a wheel chair. So, in we went and the young woman on duty said the person who gave the shot was only there certain hours on Tuesday and Thursday. I suggested to her it might be wise to give that information on the window signs. She allowed as how that might be a good idea.

Monday night, I called Krogers where there is a mini clinic, who assured me there would be a shot-giver available all day. This morning, Tuesday, I had a hair appointment at 11 a.m., in a strip mall across from Krogers. I bestirred myself a little early and, once more, I had to be wheeled in to the clinic, which was like a mile from the front door. Never having used Krogers for any medication, I filled a lengthy form, the kind that seems endless when you go to a new doctor. We seemed to be second on the sign-in sheet.
After what seemed like an endless wait, we learned we were not supposed to be at the clinic but at the pharmacy, one window down. I handed my prescription to a pleasant older lady on duty, who said it would be twenty minutes to process it. The insurance company, ya know, and all that. The minutes were ticking away. What if I just paid for it, myself, I asked. That would be $300 she said. I'll use my Medigold, I said. I will be back in forty-five minutes. We drove across Broad Street and arrived at JeAni's salon (ha) just in time.

Once washed and blown dry, with an added treatment for my dry scalp, back to Krogers we went. At the pharmacy window, I was greeted with the news that they couldn't read the signature of my physician.
The telephone of the office was there, but not a list of the physicians in the practice. So we waited another ten minutes until they did whatever they were doing. I was wheeled into the clinic office and got my shot.

And that took less than a minute and cost $25.00.

So what is the point of this whole long saga? It has nothing to do with the parameters of the government involvement with health care. It's about human competence, logical thinking, good training.

And the patient's patience.

Ro-Ro's birthday

2010-05-03T13:09:00.000-07:00

My aunt Rosina would be 110 today, and the world would be a better place if she were still here. Kinder, gentler, all those good words George H.W. Bush used to say. Rodney King could have learned "Can't we all just get along?" from her. She was a 100% loving woman, who was 100% loved. If there is a down-side to that image, it is that there was no steel in her, so that when she was blind-sided, she really felt the pain.

My mind's eye sees her laughing with love and great humor. She had two fine sons, two beautiful grandaughters, one niece (me) and three nephews. Which eventually gave her fourteen greats.

She loved to recount the story my husband told to explain his mother-in-law's family. When they were young and lived in Hartford City, Indiana, they had a pony. Amy, the older sister and my mother (the one who got the steel) , Bob explained, got the first ride. The younger brother, quite successful in business as the years went by, sold the manure at a profit, and Rosina went to visit the pony's sick grandmother. Is that a parable or an allegory? Whichever, it is a great description.

Whenever one of my children had a birthday, whether it was a first or a fifteenth, she explained to them that it was the best age to be. That was just how she saw the world.

She had a voluminous number of correspondents. She stayed in touch with all of her mother's and father's siblings. There was an aunt Nellie and an aunt Edith and an uncle Morris. And more. That is why, when she was sick and in the hospital, hundreds of cards poured in, and she wanted to answer each one. I took a shopping bag full of them, and told her I would write the notes. I couldn't possibly do it; it wasn't necessary to do it. But once the shopping bag was out of sight, she stopped worrying. And I felt my not-writing was a little white lie.

That was the day before she died. So many, many mourners. Rest in peace, RoRo. Give yourself a break. Maybe, in heaven, you can allow yourself to think only of yourself .

Toot the Horn

2010-04-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

My Dad, who has been gone now 58 years, often told me "He that tooteth not his own horn, his horn shall not be tooteth."

I was never quite sure what the lesson was supposed to be. He was out-going and well liked, and successful in the insurance agency he founded sometime soon after World War I. But he never bragged or showed off about any of that. Was he telling me that tooting oneself was a good or bad thing; that hiding your light under a bushel is wrong. You need to participate, to be out there, to be counted. You need to toot.

As I sit here and look at his picture on my desk, taken when he was, perhaps, fifty, he is forty years younger than I am now. Yet the words from that young head still resonate in this old head, and they instructed me to be whoever I am.

I caught up with a young man on Facebook this week. We had worked together for the community's benefit, and I told him what good memories I had of the projects we tackled together, and that I still am concerned about the world around me, especially the world of Columbus, Ohio. His lovely response was that he was not surprised about my focus on the world because, he said, you were always "other-centered."

My Dad would be happy to know that Brad Quicksall had tooted my horn, for me, and that I am tooting it forward, for all of you who try and care and strive to make your community a better place.

Our words to our children are never lost. Whether they are heeded or not, they are there, in their heads.

Kind of scary, isn't it?

Me and my Toyota problem

2010-04-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

It's not that I ever owned a Toyota, but Toyota's acceleration problem and my acceleration problem are exactly the same. I cannot slow myself down. Mentally, I mean. Physically, I am r-e-a-l s-l-o-w. And that compounds the problem; my mind races blithely on, while I am seriously sedentary.

I put my mettle?, medal?, mental? to the pedal, and I'm off to the races. Each morning I wake up and have a to-do list. A list of no import, yet important for me. Checks to be written, groceries to be bought, charities to be given, housekeeping to be done. And I am not able to do most of them alone.

Frustrating; extremely frustrating. Here's where my sitting room, of which I often speak so fondly, comes in to play. In the little space around my chair, I find everything I need. Here I am the captain of my ship; the phones--cell and land-line, the TV control, the call-for-help buzzer, my address book, my calendar are all at my command. The whole world opens up to me when I go to my laptop on the perfect table I bought years ago from a catalogue for $8.95. It is light-weight and on runners, I can push it aside or pull it in close. And here I begin to function.

I am a life-long student, with a huge world out there, waiting to be studied. I have been carefully taught to keep learning and listening. What if I had never learned about the computer? What if I did not have my Toyota-impaired brain? What if I had been satisfied to sit and daydream?

My racing mind slows down as I begin to do the things I have been wanting to do. My home page is the New York Times, which I read pretty thoroughly, then I read my mail, and then I go to Facebook, and then I start a blog. Eventually, I will read a book or my Kindle and the morning paper. The day is not nearly long enough.

Am I lucky, or what?

Oh, I remember it well

2010-04-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

There are so many things I can't do; like going out to lunch or a party or a meeting. Or a grocery. Or my kitchen. But it is no big deal. I love my aging house: the living room is bright and sunny, my bedroom is all pink and pretty, and my office is blue, with one wall so full of family pictures that I think if we hang one more, the whole thing will fall smack down into the room.

I have vowed not to live in the past, but when an outside source reminds me of what was, and the role I was privileged to play, I am filled with happiness and satisfaction.

A wonderful wind is racing around my life, transporting me back to the exhilarating years when I was out and about, and so busy with the community.

Early this week, the Dispatch reported the new and exciting change of FirstLink to HandsOn, Central Ohio. There was a report of the origins of the organization and the tremendous growth it has had, how important a resource. It so happened that, in the early seventies, I chaired two committees at the United Community Council that gave birth to both the Volunteer Action Center and Community Information and Referral Center. Later they merged, and in cooperation with the Junior League, became CallVac. It was thirty years ago, that they became FirstLink, under the leadership of Marilee Chinnaci-Zuerker.

We had a great party for CallVac at the Governor's Mansion, when the Governor lived in Upper Arlington. We celebrated, staff, volunteers, the technical guy from the phone company, who had helped us set up the system so that a client, with one dime, could contact us and be directly connected to the agency who could help. Tom Battendberg was there, with his beautiful horn, as were the young women who ran the kitchen at the mansion.

And that was when some of us learned what a data base was.

Also, last week, there was a picture in the paper of the city's tribute to the Holocaust and its victims. There, walking toward the river, were Greg Lashutka, Buck Rinehart, Mayor Coleman and Alfred Tibor. They were on the way to the Battelle Riverfront Park, where Mr. Tibor's statue to freedom stands. Mel Dodge, Director of Recreation and Parks had appointed me to a committee to decide where, exactly, the art work should be placed. If Mel asked, you accepted. So there I was, with Dean Jeffers and a few others riding around in a van, making our choice. And, if I remember this correctly, Mel over-ruled us.

And the next day, out of the blue, there was a post on my Facebook page from Jim Barney, and a comment from Brad Quicksall, both from my days when they, and I, worked with Mel.

And to top it all off, on June 2, my son, Bob is the speaker at the Columbus Metropolitan Club for their thirty-fifth birthday celebration. Thus a founding mother of CMC and a founder's son will cross paths.

And that is one meeting I am going to. It may look as if I am in a wheel chair, but, really, I will be jumping for joy!

Getting It

2010-04-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

This exploding world of technology is almost more than I can comprehend. Since the days of the first computer, I was captivated by that skimpy little device, and I caught on, and caught the fever. And I still have it, the desire to do more and more. It is mind-bloggling; I am dancing as fast as I can to keep up, though, and I am kind of getting it.

Getting it. What a meaningful phrase. When I was ten or eleven years old, someone would take us to the Glengarry Road pool, on the Three-C Highway, to spend the day, every day. For lunch, we would walk up a small hill to a lunch counter, to eat grilled cheese sandwiches. I kept trying to teach myself to dive off the board. Over and over again. Finally, in one miraculous moment, I got it. I gracefully entered the water, hands together over my head, legs together, pointed toes following in one smooth motion. I had it, by George, I had it. Just as Eliza Doolittle had " the rain in Spain," I had the dive.

And what does this have to do with technology? It is the lap-top I am learning to master (very slowly). I am pretty old to have a multi platform presence, but I am getting the e mails, the Facebook, the links, the blogs, the on-line comparison shopping, the news of the world, the You-Tube videos.

My work space is so cramped it is laughable. Yet, it allows me to reach for what I need without getting up. The thesaurus is on a lower shelf of a table to my left. It's a real reach to pull it up, but I can do it. My notes are scattered in notebooks on a table on the other side. I hate to waste paper; I remember Anne Frank and how hard it was for her to write her diary, using every available inch of white space she had. I have plenty of notebooks, but I. write on both sides of the small notebook paper, thus confusing grocery lists with blog ideas and things I want to remember.

To see me, compulsively typing away, you might think I had a deadline to meet, or people holding their breath until my next blog.

Dream on, Wede, dream on.

But I am getting it; I am getting it.

on being wedeb90

2010-04-12T08:57:00.000-07:00

When I was young and eighty, I became an author.

Taken from some diary entries I wrote, after my cherished, bed-ridden husband escaped from the indignities of his illness, I began to write a book, and within a year, I was published. I had my few brief moments as an Amazon best seller, (really brief), but I was hooked. So I wrote another book, Shedding Years, growing older, feeling younger and then, when I was approaching ninety, my daughter and I wrote a book together. She is the designated daughter, I am the grateful mother.

So what does it mean to be Wede, at age 90. By the way, Wede is my grandmother name, bestowed upon me by Grandchild #1. From the moment she was born, I always said " Hi,Sweetie" when I saw her. And she really was a sweetie. So, she discerned that this is how big people spoke to each other, and, when she first learned to spell, she chose w-e-d-e, and Wede I have been to one and all for some thirty plus years.

So what does it really mean to be a ninety year old great grandmother who writes, not for a living exactly, but writing as a professional? I have, indeed, earned a little cash, emphasis on little. I still have the fire in my belly to keep writing, the knowledge that I am not a shriveled, wrinkled, white haired old woman, (which is what you see on my outside). I am open to whatever comes along, and thank my God every night of my life. More than once.

AT&T has a new ad. I like it a lot. It is about the new technologies available to all of us; if we could understand them, I guess. It is the punch line I like: Rethink Possible. That is exactly what the last ten years have taught me, that being ninety doesn't mean being on my way out. I may be, what with my fibrillating, pace-makered, failing heart. But I don't think so. There is no end to the possibilities.

Years ago, I was sitting at Boston's Logan airport, waiting and waiting to depart. A young woman was sitting next to me, busy with some strange device on her lap, which I later learned was an early laptop computer. I couldn't help but ask her about this, and she told me she traveled for AT&T. Then I had the audacity to ask her what the message of their current commercials meant. I don't remember them now, but I could not relate to them; they were vague, ephemeral. Which is one reason I like Rethink Possible. I understand it, and I can personalize it, and, what's more, I can do it!

I anticipate wedeb95.

My secret pleasure is really very public

2010-04-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

I thought I might be the only person who watched NCIS, and suddenly, my choice was vindicated to find that, every week, it is one of the most watched shows on television. The NCIS that I so enjoy is the original with Mark Harmon. I am addicted.

It was probably two years ago that my brother, Al Harmon, ( no relation to Mark) told me about these
police procedural shows, and said it was a good way to pass an hour. When I found myself bored, I decided to give it a try. And in my memory of useless details, I knew that Mark was the son of Tom Harmon, the Michigan half-back. He was exactly my contemporary, but he certainly attended the wrong University!

Be that as it may, I began to really enjoy this NCIS; NCIS Los Angeles. not so much. I began to search it out in the Dispatch TV Guide, which they call Click. It is an unweildy, complicated newspaper insert, that arrives in the Sunday paper. In my never-ending whining about the good old days, I remember with fondness that little book called TV Guide, which my mother often subscribed to for my children.

Now I know how to search CBS or USA, and I find NCIS somewhere every night. I am really challenged to find anything else I enjoy. I cannot even enter the conversations about American Idol or Dancing with the Stars or Lost or The Amazing Race or Desperate Housewives or Entourage. Sixty minutes, yes; Mad Men, Grey's Anatomy, sometime, all sport shows. I can hardly wait for four o'clock this affternoon, when I can see Augusta, Georgia again. I always look forward to April and the Masters, for the beauty of that golf course and the azaleas.

Thus, I leave you now and turn on the TV. And study Click for tonight's NCIS.

Where have all the giants gone?

2010-04-07T13:14:00.000-07:00

I may be what is termed a cityphobe, if that is the proper definition of someone who loves her city too much. But Columbus, Ohio is a great city, and it grew to be great by the involvement of the Giants, the last of this generation, who just died at 97, John G. McCoy.

He turned a small midwestern bank into a global powerhouse, and brought the Columbus community along for the ride. Growing was what the local Giants did: the Lazaruses, the Wolfes, Preston Davis, Ferdinand Howald, and all the others who jump-started the civic, cultural, business and charitable institutions that make this city what it is today.

Their role, they felt, was to provide a strong underpinning, adaptable to growth. They had vision, and they had practical smarts. ( I feel a little foolish, here, to be taking on a subject more appropriate to George Will or Paul Krugman or Susan Sontag.)

The city has grown and changed and morphed from the 20th century to be ready for this forward movement we see in the early part of the 21st.

For ninety years, I have grown (or shrunk) and changed and morphed along with the city. I am overwhelmed by our shared history.

And, frankly, in over my head with this blog.

The world in a nutshell

2010-04-02T13:13:00.000-07:00

I'm talking Google here, and all the other search engines. People have their preferences, Bing, Yahoo, Dog Pile; even Ask Jeeves may still be in existence.( It is. I just Googled it to find out.)

All of this information at our fingertips; is it a good or a bad thing? Well, of course, it has to be good. A thought crosses our mind or the partial memory of a song appears in our heads, go to Google. You will find all the foot note information you need to write a term paper on the thought, or retrieve the lyrics to the song, and the date it was written and which crooner sang which version, when.

When I was a little girl, my parents bought a World Book encyclopedia, from a door-to-door salesperson. It was a luxury for us. We scoured it for information. My Dad bought us an up-date volume every year. The Encyclopedia Brittanica came into our possession after Bob's father died. Our school age children used the old World Book to cut out pictures to embellish their hand-written elementary school reports. My grandchildren have never had to research anything on paper. And my great-grandchildren already have Wikipedia. Thank heavens their good parents read to them from real books every night before bed.

Computer illiteraccy will soon be more disabling than illiteraccy, unless it already is. Just read the blogs and comments and posts of people who know exactly how to say something on line, but whose grammer and use of language would get them a D in an English course.

My heart almost broke when those beautiful little wooden library drawers vanished. Everything arranged alphabetically, coded by the Dewey decimal system, replaced by the computer. It was easier, and/but less brain-taxing.

I fear we, as human beings, may be squeezed out of existence by technology. There will be too little room to breathe. The machines will have taken over our world.

There are, I think, movies and TV shows with variations on this theme. I'm too lazy to Google it.

You could have fooled me, April first

2010-04-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

I just came in from my deck, and it felt as if it were July first out there. It is weather made-to-order for me; the sun was tanning my face, even as I sat down.

I know, I know; this is terrible for my skin, but perfect for my soul. Soul beats skin, everytime.

There was a lovely little breeze and the wind chimes were singing away. Each time I hear them, I remember buying them, at a beautiful bookstore on Longboat Key. Long, long ago, long ago. They were supposed to have been especially designed so that the music was reminiscent of a theme of a symphony.. or something. Today, like always, it sounded like a tiny, heavenly choir.

We only have one chair on the deck; winter's dirt is still there, and it is going to be power-washed and stained, hopefully, next week. Then, the rest of the furniture will be out, the pots waiting to be planted. My umbrella will be up, so I can be a little careful of the UV rays, and too much heat to this old grey head.

Today was a special day, back to basic summertime. It is a day I need to share; too good to be true. On a scale of one to ten, this was a million.

Everybody, of course, talks about the weather, so, I am cutting myself some slack, and blogging this cliche, because it was all too nice to keep to myself.

From an infected toenail?

2010-03-29T11:02:00.000-07:00

It is possible, probable, ultimately unavoidable that our deaths will be caused by something. We are born to learn this lesson; I find it comforting to be so sure of something, and know that at age 90, whatever that something turns out to be, I have had an exceptionally long and happy life. I am ready and accepting; I know, also, that I am good to go for years to come. My life, to me, is a miracle.

My latest tale is about a toenail, and the new miracle that developed just this week-end. I was awakend at 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning by a pain so severe that it felt as though my toe was in labor. A throb, then a minute let up, then the throb again. It passed through my mind that it might be gout. Gout! I haven't had much alcohol at all in a decade; none at all in the last four years. Eventually, extra strenth Tylenol earned me a few hours of dozing. By daylight, I could see that I had an infection in a corner of my toenail. Rosie, my caregiver, dabbed some neosporin on it. D.G. made her 9:30 call, and insisted that I call the doctor's office. They used to have a physician cover the week ends, when he would check in hourly for any calls for help that had been phoned in. That is no longer a service.

And I called Dr. Stephen Shell, at home, and reached him as he was leaving for the airport. He phoned in an anti-biotic perscription for me, and Rosie flew to the Walgreens right at my corner, and I had my first pill by 10:00 a.m.

As much as we know about infections today, I need not lay out a "what-if" scenario for you.

I had just finished a book, Friday evening, Lit by Mary Karr. It is a sassy, funny, poignant memoir of her recovery from alcoholism, and how, when she was at her lowest, she was saved by religion.

I didn't need the lesson of "Let go, let God". I have held to that thought for years, and on my sitting room wall is a plaque that reads "Bidden or not bidden, God is here."

Mary Karr describes the long road to learning that. I have had the miracle of knowing.

I think it is ok for me to talk about my miraculous life; this is a thank- you note to whatever supreme being is watching over me, and all of you.

I'm adding my toe to my grateful list.

Political Pot Pourri

2010-03-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

My request for an absentee ballot arrived in yesterday's mail, asking for a minimum amount of information, so that I could be sent an absentee ballot. They asked my party affiliation, and my birthdate and my address. I was pleased they did not ask for anything extraneous, but I thought they could have used much cheaper paper instead of this "card stock."

That same mail also brought the reminder census post card, the THIRD piece of mail I had received from the census bureau. First, a notice that the form was going to arrive, as if I hadn't read that in the papers and seen it on TV for the last six months; the form, itself, followed in two days. I returned it immediately, only to receive the reminder card. How many millions of dollars was wasted on that foolish process?

Hearing constantly about waste in government, we think of "pork" and "bridges to nowhere" and special deals for Nebraska. That is millions in waste; I am talking pennies, or maybe even dollars. I am a child of the depression years, not really affected personally, but I saw those men selling apples on street corners, in freezing weather and no gloves! That such poverty could exist, and still does, taught me that savings, large and small, can make the difference between comfortable and miserable. So I want the lights turned off when they aren't needed; don't let the refrigerator door stay open longer than necessary. I was an energy saver before Al Gore told me why it is so important. (My husband, Bob, told me.)

On the absentee ballot, I marked Democrat with a bold, black check mark. My voting record is pretty consistent. I cast my very first vote, as a senior, at Wellesley, for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, continuing to vote for him until he died. When Eisenhower ran, I didn't care whether he was an R or a D. Like so many voters, I just liked Ike. That slipped me in to the Republican camp, and before I knew it, I was a Rockefeller Republican. He had the credentials and the values of the Democrats, which, I think is why he lost his place in line, and here I was, stuck with Nixon. I came back to the more liberal side of the fence as soon as I could, and have been there ever since.

In the winters we spent on Longboat Key, I am sure most of my friends were Republicans. An air of civility prevailed, and one just didn't discuss politics at dinner tables or cocktail parties. From 1980 until 1998, I only once declared, "I am an L". I think they were somewhat surprised, but Bob was born and bred an R, so all was well.

It has taken me a lot of words to get to the point: political civility has completely disappeared. I am appalled at what I see on the internet and in comments to columns and news articles.

I am overjoyed that Obama's health care plan has passed, even though now we are back to the ugly infighting. God bless the United States of America, land that I love.

Death by a thousand paper cuts

2010-03-22T13:45:00.000-07:00

Don't worry! I'm not really dying by anything. What is true, and has been true is what I have written before; I am really fine, I feel good, but, hell, I should, I am only 90!

I have just finished an amazing book, by Diana Athill, a great English editor, Somewhere Towards the End. She is startlingly honest about her life, to much of which I could not relate. She had been a highly sexual woman who never had, nor wanted, children, and she was an atheist. But as she confesses to the small humilities and indignities that we old folk face, she gives me the freedom to complain just a little bit.

I have never been thin-skinned; I don't take offense easily or often. And my actual skin, my epidermis, that which covers my bones, has been as tough, or tougher than most. For years, my pleasure was to burn myself to a crisp in summer or in Florida, and not be sun-burned, but just a nice, dark brown. The few little skin cancers that I had have been easily removed, and if the price I paid was a few more face wrinkles, I pay that gladly.

Now, however, I have so thin a skin that, at the slightest touch, I bruise or bleed. It hurts. And trying to heal small wounds is so hard to do. At one time, I owned a little Johnson and Johnson stock, but I sold it the minute I heard that a Chicago pharmacy had sold some bottles of tylenol in which cyanide or something like it had been placed by, obviously, a deranged person. I should have held on to the stock; I have contributed mightily to their bottom line, buying all their wound-care products for the last three years.

There is no easy fix; there is no fix at all. So, I shall continue to bump and bruise and bleed, knowing that it doesn't matter all that much.

As Diana Athill says, "One doesn't necessarily have to end a book (blog) about being old with a whimper, but it is impossible to end it with a bang."

Fingerprints

2010-03-18T13:10:00.000-07:00

I read this quote somewhere on the Internet: "Our fingerprints don't fade from the lives we touched." Google attributes it to Robert Pattensin, but it has showed up in a lot of places the last few weeks, on FaceBook and Twitter. I want to be utterly honest (as always) and so, now you know these words are not mine.

I wish they had been, but I would have switched it around to say that the lives that have touched mine will never fade from me; I tend to keep relationships going as long as I can. Of course, I am not that good at remembering names, but it is very seldom that the "touch" disappears.

For instance, I met a woman in Florida, once, in a pre-arranged tennis game, and. as we sat out between sets, she talked about a handicapped grandchild who had found a new world in a computer. This happened years before the advent of the computers as we know them today. I think it was that five minute conversation that propelled me to computers, in their earliest commercial form. And from which I am deriving so much pleasure as I write this blog.

A small fingerprint grows to tremendous proportions.

There is an entire other story that popped into my head as I read the quote. In 1956, or thereabouts, Tim brought home from pre-school, his hand-print in clay. I'm sure his older brother and sister had done the same, but, for Bob, this was the time and this was his inspiration. The Bron-Shoe Company where Bob began and ended his business life, was thriving because sentiment was their business, the ability to bronze baby shoes ( foremost) among other things they did. Bron Shoe was the largest, and then the only such manufacturing company in the country.

Bob dreamed of setting up a new product for the company, and we began to count our riches. We envisioned a future with a yacht, we really were that naive!

Our high-school baby sitter was a beautiful artist, who went on to be an artist in the advertising department at the Lazarus store, and after that, taught art in the Columbus Public School system. Roseann sketched a circus wagon, with a wheel to fit the hand-print. The box, that eventually would contain a ceramic version of the circus wagon design and a package of clay for molding, was eye-catching and well-done. The name of the product was Imprints.

On a Saturday, for friendships' sake, Bob was given a "square" at the front of Lazarus, and there he stood, all Saturday afternoon as customer after customer passed by. And did not buy.

Imprints was a dream unrealized, but I had a closet full of boxes that I gave to all my friends' children as our Christmas gift to them. Today, on my "family" wall in my sitting room, I have a round, black ceramic plaque, with Tim's handprint in bronze,with a small bronze engraved plate that reads, "Tim's kindergarten handprint, 1958.

So "the dream lives on, ( obviously not my quote, either). And the fingerprints that have touched me will remain visible to me, always.

It's 3:30 p.m.; do you know where your 60 year- old daughter is?

2010-03-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, I admit it. I am an inordinately anxious mother. Most of the time, I am just an ordinary anxious mother. Sometime, even a regular mother-mother. But my very grown children are never far from my mind. And, truth be told, I think it is all a part of being a M O T H E R for all of us.

Calling-on-the-clock has its upside and it's anxious side. DG calls at 9:30 almost every morning. Until it gets to be 10:15 and I haven't heard from her, I calmly think she is asleep. But at 10:16, I simply have to call her to be sure nothing bad has happened to her. Neurotic, maybe, but that is why she calls me at 9:30 a.m., to be sure nothing has happened to me overnight.

I found myself way beyond neurotic the other afternoon. I had spoken to her, as usual, at 9:30, but at 12 noon, there was some news that seemed important at the time, and called her. The answering machine was on. So I called again at 3:30, and still I got the answering machine. I was, for whatever reason, freaked out. And I left my nervous voiced message: "Where are you?"

When she called a short time later, she told me she had been doing her usual errands. Of course: CVS, the Post Office, the Cleaners, Trader Joe's. Thinking about the foolishness of it all, we had a good laugh. It was stupid/funny of me; but how I felt was how I felt.

Remembering back many years... I had been staying with my mother at an apartment in Florida as she was recovering from a heart attack and a newly implanted Pace-maker. I was with her at a Spa (at a five-star Hollywood Beach hotel) when she had the heart attack. The hotel's doctor diagnosed the attack, but wouldn't call an ambulance until I gave him a check for $50. He sent us to a second-rate hospital, but we were strangers in a strange land. We were there for five or six weeks, as I remember it.

My husband, my brother, my sister-in-law all spelled me over the long ordeal from the ICU through to this last stage, in a lovely beach apartment, waiting to be released to fly home. We had an RN with us during the day, and, one afternoon, I rented a car to drive to visit Bob's mother who lived in Bay Harbor. I had to take a bus down to what is now South Beach for a car rental place, and then drive north, visit for a little while, return the car and, bus on home. I was gone less than three hours, but when I returned, my mother began to cry tears of relief, she had been worrying so about me. It was irrational, just as I was irrational last week.

We have come a "furr piece" from 1982; rental cars will pick you up at home, there are cell phones to make instant contact. We don't have to know where anyone is, yet we can reach them. So why didn't I call DG last week? I didn't want to distract her on a freeway with a call.

So call me irrational, call me illogical, call me unreasonable, but, DG, just call me. Or better yet, I will now call you. I have nothing to say but I want to hear the sweet sound of your breathing.

A Shared History

2010-03-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

This could have been titled "Another Leaf," but I don't want to scare you off. And it ultimately isn't about the death of Harriet Bracken at age ninety, although I mourn her passing. Her daughter called me yesterday, saying she knew her mother would want me to know. And then the Columbus Metropolitan Club sent an e mail to notify many people that one of the Founding Mothers and the Club's first president had died.

I first knew Harriet in the Lazarus advertising department. She was Harriet Oelgoetz then and my boss. During the war, with Bob overseas, I went to be a copy-writer. I had majored in English so I knew my nouns from my verbs, but I had much, much to learn about journalism. It was a great experience, but as soon as Bob came home, I didn't want a career; I wanted a family. The road I chose was the right road for me. Even if I could have succeeded in advertising, I would not look back on it now with the sheer joy I feel, looking back on my life as a mother.

Meanwhile, Harriet moved to become a vice-president of the Huntington National Bank and a Columbus power-house. By then, she had married, had two children and was one of those women who "had it all".

   In 1976, thirteen women came together to form an organization, the CMC, that would bring to the public the opportunity to discuss and debate in a diverse forum, local, national and international affairs. Our mission was to be the best place to have a community conversation. Harriet and I were two of the thirteen, all with the energy to make things happen.

   We combined our lists from all the organizations to which each of us belonged and mailed a letter of invitation. We expected that our next step would be to make hundreds of follow-up telephone calls. I think we were all dumb-founded to get so many responses to our letters AND requests from others who
asked to be invited! Everyone was welcomed, of course. That was the point. We tried to keep the dues low, and we actively recruited men and members of the Black community. We were top-heavy with white women.

      We started with a volunteer administrator, who kept the files at her home. Eventually, we could pay an administrator and have a small office. Because women were not welcomed through the front door of the downtown clubs, we rented a back room of a popular restaurant for lunch time, and had various events there. When they had some mafia-like problems with, I think, a chef, we moved to an office building and had our own rooms, a micro-wave the only heating unit allowed. Marg Haldi was a fabulous chef, and that small office/cum/restaurant was a lovely spot to go for lunch.

   Our program schedule and venue has changed much since our first meeting. We had a Forum once a month at the Motorist Mutual Building, and then a mid-week conversation in a smaller room, wherever we could cadge a free room. For a while, it was in a room of the law offices of Bricker and Eckler.

   The Forum has been at the Sheraton Hotel, the University Club (now gone) and for the last years at the Athletic Club. There are marvelous Forums, great special events, evening meetings...

   When we began, we hoped we could be like the Cleveland Club. I think we have left them in the dust. Our membership is somewhere in the neighborhood of 700, and I think we easily have as many, if not more, men than women. To my sorrow, I can no longer attend but can see a complete video of each Forum from the Home Page, thanks to a relationship with WOSU.

   We have become a true community institution, and this is my salute to all those who have shared in the history of the Club, and a sense of gratitude for having been allowed to be part of it all.

Physical Phitness for Phyllis

2010-03-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

Everywhere you look, everything you read, every time you really think about your health (which is as seldom as possible for me), the importance of being physically fit is in- your- face.

I have never subscribed to gym classes, or health clubs, or personal trainers; that's for smart and careful people. My whole life I just assumed that I would keep walking, until I could walk no more. And that would be when I would be dead.

The spring we came home from Florida, 1998, from what we knew was be our last winter in our personal Eden, Bob figured out a way to bring the washer and dryer into a closet on the same floor as our living, dining sleeping, office rooms. It was ingenious what he did; I thanked him, but thought to myself, "that is really unnecessary; I will always be able to take the steps."

I was brought up short by the medicine gods, in 2005, or maybe the real God, when I found myself on the operating table to repair a hernia on the left groin and, back a week later, for a hernia on the right side. That was the beginning of a long getting-really-sick back to a getting-real-better time. I had an epiphany about trainers and therapists when I had a young man teach me to walk again.

I can walk, but not far, and if no one is with me, I use a walker.

I am literally terrified of breaking my hip.

I am back to my own self-prescribed therapy. With someone to walk beside me, I walk all around the house, which is not really big at all, but very horizontal. I have made it up to one walk-through twice a day. I'm aiming for two twice- a- day.

Is ninety too old to stay in shape? It better not be, because my goal is to run around the house in two more years.

Last Leaves, old friends

2010-03-04T08:36:00.000-08:00

Not too many years ago, I was having lunch with Lucile Kirk, who had recently lost an old friend, and she said to me, "I don't want to be the last leaf on the tree."

I think about that, often.

Because I am one of two close friends remaining from the CSG class of 1937. I am also one of two close friends remaining of the Wellesley Class of 1941, and also one of two close friends still alive from our memorable Saturday Night Crowd of seven couples.

This gives me a 50% chance of being the last leaf of three different groups of old, old friends.

   Not that there is anything wrong with that! It doesn't sadden me, or make me happy, and I have figured a way to stay in touch with all of those who have left us. I write a little something to them every now and then, and they reply, in my dreams. They speak to me, directly, and I don't need a dream-book interpretation. I get the message, I truly do.

   I can send an up-date message to my missing friends, here on my blog. That's a totally new concept for most of them but I am sure they will catch up quickly. Just remember wedeb90 blog spot, and we're back in communication. This is comforting to me, even if it sounds as if I am slightly nuts.

   I just need to believe that our memories are the way we never really lose anyone.

  Dear all,

Where ever you may be, my old friends-- you could actually be anywhere, I have no idea of the choices for the after-life-- but I just know that there has to be a way for me to reach you, sophisticated as communication is today. I always like to think that people in heaven are making phone calls to me when a face or a name or a dream comes to me, unaware. But how do I know if you are getting the messages from me to you?

I see you, each in your own outdoor, garden-y rooms, amid soft, pinkish, purpley clouds, in hidden grottos, and in clover-filled pastures, beside the still waters of a diamond-clear stream, in the gardens I always wish for but have never achieved. Bob’s special cloud, I know, must have a small road banked with day lilies , under overarching trees, just like the short, quarter-mile stretch of country road on the way to Hide-A-Way Hills.

Watch for my next blog. Bit by bit, I will fill you in on what's been happening to me since last we met.

With love to all of you

Common courtesy

2010-03-01T10:33:00.000-08:00

   We are all aware that the culture in this country is in a deplorable condition. We have become accustomed to men wearing backward baseball caps in restaurants, to high school students with either their bosoms overflowing their tops (girls) or their bare butts on display, pants falling down (boys). Some of us, from another generation may not like it, but we are used to it.

   We live with the fact that old-fashioned manners have disappeared with the years, that even the columnist, Miss Manners herself .has become something of a dinosaur, and opening a door for a lady is macho and anti-feminist. We hardly notice the boorish and the vulgar.

   In the last few weeks, I have had three experiences that brought me up short. It was none of the above that made me sit up and take notice. It was that my use of common courtesy astounded-- well, not astounded-- but so surprised the recipients.

   I mailed a check to pay my Wellesley Club dues, and the treasurer called to thank me. Now, it was I who was really astounded. I have paid those same small dues since 1941, the year I graduated. Thank me for paying my dues? She explained that some of the older members who no longer attend meetings do not pay. I understand; there are some organizations to which I have always belonged that I now do not pay, either. Those organizations hound me year after year to re-join. This is much ado about due(s); nevertheless. It was so nice to be thanked.

   Next, Temple Israel called to say they had a gift for me, and a volunteer would bring it to my door. I told her that I couldn't get to the door at that moment, but I would in a very short while. She asked if she could leave it by my door, which she did. Because I didn't get a chance to thank her in person, I sent an e mail to the Temple administrator, asking where I should direct my thanks, and did I receive the box of Purim goodies because I was 90? She said my e mail was more thanks than was expected and it wasn't really because I was 90. I could read between the lines that my acknowledgement was a surprise. Why?

   And finally, I ordered a magazine for a friend on-line and the order went through but there was no place for me to pay for it. So, I called the subscription department, and they were surprised that I had
made the effort to pay them.

   There is a moral to these stories, somewhere in this blog.

   To be nicer. more polite people, instead of going with the flow, we could try to divert the flow from spiraling down ward and begin, like salmon, to run against the tide.

   Using common sense, we might find a consensus on the rules of common decency.

   It's not Jane Austen I yearn for. It's just Emily Post.

and I can't get health care, health care off my mind

2010-02-25T12:06:00.000-08:00

I hope most of you heard Keith Olberman's remarkable comments on CNBC about his father who has suffered the tortures of end of life health care. Tubes and stents and tracheotomies and surgeries, all the horrors of life in the care of fine doctors, whose sole mission seemed to be to keep his father alive!

The comments were aimed at the recalcitrant Republicans who are making a public option, pre-existing conditions and escalating insurance premiums impossible to enact.

Mr. Olberman has medicare and the finest part D policy, but the out of pocket expense have been huge. For that family, money is not the issue, at all. For most Americans, it would be. It is.

I live with the issue of death and dying lurking somewhere in my mind. I think most ninety year old people are aware of its possibility! I am not worried about it, and my children and I have talked it through and are on the same page. So is my doctor.

No heroic measures! Do not resuscitate! Call Hospice to allow me to die with dignity. It's as simple and humane as that. It is all on paper, in my file at the doctor's office, in a desk drawer at my house, and with my power(ful) attorney, which is what my daughter, who has my power of attorney, calls herself.

Designated Daughter, the book we wrote together, was the memoir of our journey from the early good years when she became my companion after Bob died to the later years when I began to fail, the bad years. I felt the book was the rehearsal for my death, only I recovered from Hospice and am still around.

So ,we have finished rehearsing; we are ready for the main event. It won't be soon, but we will be ready. I only wish the very smart Keith Olberman and all the physicians had been able to relieve his father of his terrible physical suffering and admit that when it is time, it is time.

My grandmother ( I cannot even calculate the year she made the observation) said there should be a sign of every hospital's front door: "Abandon Hope all Ye who enter here". I don't know if she was a pessimistic kind of woman; I know she was a smart woman.

It's my fault if I get an ulcer

2010-02-24T11:00:00.000-08:00

I have spent the entire morning on the phone and the computer, trying to do two simple things: order a magazine subscription as a gift and order some easy-open caps from my new prescription provider.

Unfortunately, I made it much harder for myself than I needed to.

There was one of those tear out forms in my magazine on a pre-paid postal card. My identity is hardly worth having, but I was hesitant to send my credit-card info out into the great unknown. So, without thinking about putting it in an envelope, I decided to call the magazine. I was asked to leave my number and they would call me back. But, they didn't. So, I called the editor, who couldn't have been nicer. Had the situation been reversed, I am sure I would have been annoyed at the chutzpah of a reader, making a nuisance call like that. But he transferred me over to the subscription manager, who also asked me to leave a message. Feeling more frustrated than before, I went on line and placed the order, but there was no place that asked for my credit card info. So, I called again, leaving a message that I wanted to pay for what I had ordered. When he called me back, the manager took my card number over the phone. He was mildly surprised that I had gone to so much trouble to pay for what I ordered.

This has to be some shady world we live in.

Next, I tackled the drug provider. Surrounded by all my needed information, I waited and waited and waited to speak to someone who could send me the right size , easy-open caps for my bottles. While I was endlessly hearing that an agent would be with me shortly, my call was interrupted by my CPA who had a few matters she wanted to discuss.

After our conversation, I went online again, and tried to order the caps. Following directions of page after page, I still came up empty. We don't even need the damned caps for a week or two. Finally, after lunch I found another phone number, and,just like that I spoke to a helpful woman who is ordering them for me today.

I'm really not going to get an ulcer, but how many ulcers have I given to the people I do business with?

Health Care Hazard

2010-02-22T12:34:00.000-08:00

   I am having a most unfortunate problem with the health care system. Not nearly as difficult a problem as the Republicans are making for Obama. Annoying, though. Very annoying.

   I am not even sure of the questions to ask to find the solution, or even what to do if I finally frame the questions.

   First off, know that the problem has nothing to do with my provider. Medigold is an HMO under the auspices of Mt. Carmel Hospitals. They do everything right; we joined when it was first offered eleven years ago and have not had a problem through MDs and RXs and Hospice and Home Health Care, routine visits or ordering meds through the mail. They are very available on the phone. Everyone should be so lucky!

   At first, I thought that the constant ringing of my phone, only to hear the beep, beep of a Fax machine was the fault of my phone provider. After many attempts to use my *60 to block the calls, I eventually went far enough up the chain, to corporate, to report this. They sent a technician to the house, and it took him a long time to block the three numbers who had been frequent callers.

   One of the barriers to blocking the calls is to insert the offending number super-fast. I have a caregiver who can do it; I simply cannot. I suggested that perhaps the blocker might be given three-seconds more to make the report. It is still barely one-second.

   Now I have six blocked numbers, and they all have been made by health-related facilities.

   One the first faxers was Ohio Psychiatric Hospital. I called them on their real phone and was given a helpful hint.He thought the person running the fax machine had not used the 1 or the 614 before dialing, and by being one digit off, the call came through to me. I so alerted Altercare and blocked them. I thought I had blocked Monterey Nursing Home, but they are at it again. Consulting the yellow pages, I find multiple Montereys in the state of Ohio. Different facilities, different personnel, different fax numbers.

   My theory is that they are all ordering medication. Some have pre-set their machines to send at 1:00 a.m. My phone has been quiet all morning. But when this happens again, I am only allowed 14 more numbers to block.

   Would I change my phone number ? Never.

   Could I add an amendment to the Health Care bill that all medical supply companies, all pharmacies, everywhere use the same fax number, which then would be able to direct them to a specific supplier? Who would care how long the queue? Who would care how long Fax 1 waited to be sent to the supplier of their choice?

   If only I had a congressman who would listen to me.

Facebook and the dueling grandmothers

2010-02-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

It is just a basic fact of life. Let's face it (or rather let's Facebook it). There is nary a grandmother who doesn't want to show off her grandchildren, and now we all have a new, much more effective way to do it. There they are, lovely grandchild after grandchild; They come to us in profile pictures, and posts, and, e-mails, too.

I remember baby brag-books. Most grandmothers carried one; whisked out of purses at first greeting. There are many different opinions about the internet, the many constructive ways it can be used. Admittedly, frivolous uses, time-wasting uses also exist. Think forwarded jokes. But it certainly is a fine way to share your kids. Only to your friends, but now you have more" friends" in cyberspace who touch you every day than you have in real life.

There are a lot of sweet babies out there, but none as cute as mine. There I have said it.

In the interest of full disclosure, as they say , I must confess that I am not talking about my absolutely magnificent grandchildren, because they are in a completely different age category. I, for their competition, will enter them in the 20-30 year old category. But I do not know how to post a picture. Let alone put this blog on my Facebook page.

It is as a great-grandmother, that I join the competition with Zach 5 and Nate, 2.

And I have a very good chance of winning this competition because both of their parents are technology wizards. ( This is not bragging about my granddaughter and her husband. Didn't I just say my grandchildren cannot be in the competition, because they don't qualify, age-wise?)

Maggie and Jon post so many beautiful photos that I look forward to each day. I could win on quantity alone. I can see the funny things they say and the notes Zach writes I am their Wede and I can feel them near, even if there is most of the country between us.

I can hear my daughter, the grandmother, shouting with joy. I am declaring her the winner.

And, I am the only judge in this contest.

Everybody talks about

2010-02-16T09:03:00.000-08:00

The weather. Always have, always will. From the meaningless "how do you like this heat," to the inane "this is some snow," it is a sure conversation starter.

But I am really not blogging about the ten inches on my lawn, or repeat how blessed I am that my caregivers are making it to me in a Level 2 emergency. Yet, the truth is that the snow is almost up to the mailbox on its' high stand at the top of my drive, and these wonderful women continue to be true to they're calling and to me.

When Bob called last evening, as the snow was continuing to fall, he asked what was my level of anxiety. I answered honestly; Zero.

By now, you are scratching your head and wondering why in the world am I even writing, saying a lot of nothing.

I am writing because I cannot not write! I can Facebook or real book, Shadow Tag, by Louise Erdrich. It is making me think a lot. These are weird people; do they love or hate each other, they are destroying their children in the tension. It is a lot more interesting than how I have chosen to spend this half hour.

But write I must. It is not my Judeo-Christian work ethic or my need to be creative.

It seems to be a basic need.

Now I feel better.

My Funny Valentines

2010-02-13T12:37:00.000-08:00

   I am sitting next to a picture of the Tuesday luncheon group. Bob, Chuck, Westy and Bob L. Mary lent it to me so I could have it copied. Corde had found it at her mothers. It is hard to tell where it was taken, but it looks as if it might be one of the incarnations of the old Broad-Nel. My funny valentine is smiling broadly, and if it only had audio, I think he would be saying something, making all of them smile.

   As I began to write about my funny valentine, I thought it would have more currency if I went to my "P-Q" file in the bottom left drawer of Debby's old bedroom, where I thought I might find some old valentines Bob had sent me, filed under Personal.

   What I found was a lifetime of love, not only from Bob but all of my children, as well. There are beautiful letters Bob wrote me, and even one he wrote to Harry when he was coming home on leave, December 1941. He said he was going to ask me to marry him but was worried about "shipping out."

   There were such clever notes, when he gave me my first cell phone, and answering machine, and microwave. And the Cartier watch that I have worn for twenty-five years.

   He thanked me for always laughing at his humor. There was no way I could have done otherwise. They were funny, even on the second and third hearing.

   The file is really thick, for there are treasured messages from all of you. Bob's Esquire column about the woman in the photograph, a message left by the coffee machine by D.G. in the terrible months we were taking care of Bob, and many, many letters from Tim, and his marvelous poem about my old Baker desk at my 70th birthday gathering.

   Notes from the grandchildren, records of their accomplishments. I wrestled it out of the drawer myself; I am going to need help putting it back.

   I also unearthed a beautiful note from Jack Roth when I was sick, and from Lindsey, not even for a special occasion.

   For giving me a lifetime of joy, and an afternoon of happy tears, this is my valentine to you.

   To all the funny valentines: Bob and my children, Bob, D.G., and Tim. And to their children, Amanda, Nick, Maggie, Tucker and Hannah. And to Maggie's children, Zach and Nate, this Blog's for you.

about loyalty, and commitment, and high personal standards

2010-02-10T13:39:00.000-08:00

When Bob died, those long years ago, I made one of the best decisions I have ever made. I bought long term health care insurance. As always, I over- analysed and studied and compared policies and, in the end, based my choice as much on the salesman as on the benefits. I had been thoughtful, but also, it turned out, lucky!

Wedeb90 is not just the blog title, but an accurate description. I am 90; I think I am pretty good for 90, but there are too many things I cannot do. Little things. Open the top of a fresh bottle of water--or even walk to the refrigerator to get the water. Change a roll of toilet paper. Manage my check book. Get the morning paper at the door. After years of being able to do almost everything, it is difficult not to do anything.

But I have my wonderful care-givers and this blog is an effort to express my appreciation for them. It's not only how well they do their job; they are all STNA (state-tested nurses assistants) and each one is good at dressing and bathing and cooking. They bring to their work a greater gift. The gift of themselves. They are Jehovah's Witnesses and they live all the ethical canons of the Bible.

Not only in their professional role, but in their personal life, they do justice, are merciful, and walk humbly with Jehovah. Honest to a fault, dedicated to their client, they have managed in this second terrible Ohio winter to be here on time and on duty in blizzards and on ice-covered roads.

   I read that some mailmen have abandoned their route until the streets are safer. I'm glad that they are lightening up a little on that "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" bit. Yet nothing will stay my people from their appointed rounds.

   To put a more personal face on this, let me tell you a little about them. Rosie came from Jamaica, six years ago, and now has a degree in Health Information Management. Lise is from Rwanda and is about to enter college to become a LPN. Michelle has been doing this work for some years and her experience should qualify her for an advanced medical degree of some kind, too. And Jackie is the strength behind them all, doing the staffing and scheduling and the transportation, when needed, and buying me bulk items on her Sam's Club card.

   For all those dedicated people who work their way through school, I doff my hat. I am the recipient of that work ethic, and in that, I am blessed.

   But the best part is that they are my friends. We laugh together and, on occasion, cry. I welcome them each with joy, and I hope they are as happy to see me as I am to see them.

On writing--and reading

2010-02-09T10:51:00.000-08:00

Writing, whether it turns out well or not, is extraordinarily hard to do. A long list of authors will tell you that they suffer pangs of doubt and some say they do not enjoy writing very much. Geoff Dyer said he thought it would be the "inventing" part of a novel he would like, but he likes re-writing better. Joyce Carol Oates quotes D.H. Lawrence who explained, writing to his mother, as "Art for my sake". Be that as it may, the real reason we all write is so that someone might read it.

   If you are lucky enough to be published, you constantly check your Amazon standings. That can make you feel awful if you are in the five-digit category or wonderful if there are a few readers' comments to validate that what you are doing has been helpful.

   So, the bottom line is that we write to be read. And in this wonderful city of Columbus, Ohio, we have the #1 Library in the country. There is nothing that the library cannot do. We can order books on line, they tell you when they are ready to be picked up. There is always a real, live person who will help you on the most esoteric questions.

   Andrew Carnegie's gift to build libraries, free of charge for every body, is , to me, the most important philanthropic gift ever given. Our downtown library received a building grant of $200,000 in 1901. Those wide marble stairs were there, and the circulation desk was through the front door, on the right of the foyer. I grew up loving that library and I love it still. It encouraged me to be a reader and---ultimately a writer. I was 80 when my first book was published. Thank you, Mr. Carnegie and thank you, too, Pat Losinski, the executive of the current library system, for your stewardship. In this time of shrinking finances everywhere, you are working miracles with the miserly 2.22% of the much-diminished total general tax revenue that is your budget share.

   If your have any interest in what I have read since Christmas, or what I have on order from the library, or what I have read on my Kindle, I'll be happy to e mail you. Not that any one of you needs my list, but I would also welcome suggestions.

   I have a bad feeling that this second try of The Lost Blog seems un-spontaneous. Because it is. Good words, once lost, just cannot be recaptured.

Friends. Retitled A Beautiful Friendship

2010-02-01T10:23:00.000-08:00

   I thought for a long time about what this title should be. Casual friends? No, that's not what this was, this friendship. Un-casual? What does that mean? Ships that pass in the night? Completely wrong description.

   So let me tell you about Mary Collins and maybe you could help me with just the right words to describe what she meant to me, and, I think, what I meant to her.

   A Texas reader did just that. She commented that it was a beautiful friendship, begun in a beauty parlor and it was, indeed, beautiful. That adjective does it for me.

   Mary lived in the same little community as I, but in this neighborhood, older ladies who don't walk too well never meet each other. Mary was my age exactly, and we went to the same beauty parlor with back to back appointments with the same excellent beautician.

   We met there every week for years. We chatted, mostly inconsequential things. Her son took care of her, he did the grocery shopping and the cooking and the driving, and she lived with him. In the beginning of our friendship, I was still driving, but he dropped her off and then picked her up.

   As time went on, Mary had more and more difficulty walking, and so Jan, the son, bought her a transport wheel chair. I was still walking, but no longer driving, and so I needed to be driven to my appointment. Most of the time, the duty fell to my daughter; once or twice, I had a visiting son drive me.

   Mary seemed to be on a kind of plateau; I started to slip downward. My last visit to the beauty parlor, my back pain was intense. By then, I had a caregiver to help with my meals and my dressing and showering. Eventually, in 2008 I was in Hospice care, and then gradually, miraculously, almost recovered. Or as recovered as you get at 89. It took much longer to get mortally sick than it did to get amazingly better.

   Mary died last week, just after her ninety-eth birthday. Jan called to tell me, which was so exceptionally kind of him. He said he didn't want me to read it in the paper. I knew she had fallen and things weren't good. The obituary was long and lovely, and she had had a family devoted to her. The picture was a recent one ( which I think obit pictures should be), but once, a few years ago she had brought a picture of herself as a beautiful young woman. That is the picture I like to remember.

   Would we have been friends if our paths had crossed seventy years ago? Probably not; different interests on different paths.

   But she was truly my friend, as our paths converged, and I cried with Jan when he called. I will miss her weekly smile, and her good humor.

   Rest in Peace, Mary. And I know your hair will look lovely forever.

A stream of mindlessness

2010-01-27T14:09:00.000-08:00

This is an experiment in writing, Am I able to do a stream of consciousness blog, which is so unlike the way I write? But having just read Nicholson Baker's quite wonderful The Anthologist, I began to see how you can really write a simple story and embellish it with all the other wool-gathering thoughts that float through your head all day. And all night, too, in your dreams.

So let's begin with what just happened. There was a phone that kept ringing and ringing. And it stopped for a minute and started over again. My land line is right beside me and my cell is on the charger across the room. I called my caregiver to tell her I thought it was her cell, and she was just on her way back to make sure I was ok because she thought I wasn't answering the phone. This does not feel like a very auspicious beginning.

So rewrite it, Phyllis, I say to myself, and start again.

A phone was ringing and it wasn't mine. I remember Franklin Avenue, where we had a rotary dial phone in the breakfast room. That was where my Dad used to see me in the morning and say Good Morning, Mary Sunshine. When my mother remarried, she gave that breakfast room table to her sister,because my aunt Rosina and her family moved into our house and, I think, her son, Dick, has it now.

I haven't seen Dick for a long time. There were six of us first cousins, the two Kohn boys, the two Weiler boys and my brother Al and me. I was the only girl and the oldest. I don't know if that is supposed to make you happy or sad or have some kind of difference in your psyche. We didn't have psyches or psychiatrists in the world of my growing up. I've learned since that they did exist, but not then, in the heartland of the country.

This is the best place to live. I thought I wanted to live on the East Coast when I graduated from Wellesley. I had been "pinned" to a boy from Providence who went to Brown. We had been girl -and- boy friends for years, when we had been Junior Counselors at Forest and Indian Acres. On our nights off, we walked to Ladd's drugstore in the village of Fryeburg, Maine and then we walked to the railroad station and drank beer on top of the box car. But then I met Bob Greene and, in a few short months, I found the man who would be my first choice, and I got to choose him.

Both my boyfriend and my husband are gone. So is Harry Kohn and my brother, Al. I don't much like that my mind has wandered to the sad place. Bob and Al's loss are wounds that will never heal.

A real author would forge through the valley of the shadow of death and emerge into green valleys, beside still waters.

Or back to Forest Acres, where, when I was a twelve years old camper, Madeleine Someone from Eau Claire, Wisconsin played the bugle to wake us in the morning and owned The Oxford Book of English Poetry. She let me read it some afternoons, and I had a crush on her.

Crushes were the rage. We Form IX at CSG picked out the Form XII girl to have a crush on. That meant that we hoped she might say hello to us in the hall. I had a crush on Helen Harvey and, of course, Madeleine whoever, and on poetry.

That poetry love has lasted forever. Which is probably one of the reasons I wanted to read The Anthologist.

So, now I know and you know, I don't have anywhere near the skill to use such a sophisticated technique. But we all knew that before I struck the first key.

So, I am going to post this blog. You certainly don't have to read it to know my name does not belong in the same sentence as Nicholson Baker.

But I am going to post it , anyway, because I tried. And I am happy that I did try.

That Happy Birthday Balloon is moving again

2010-01-23T12:25:00.000-08:00

   Do you remember that birthday balloon I wrote about in December? It had arrived in October, atop a beautiful basket of fruit, sculpted like flowers. It was a gift of the Hofheimer boys, sons of my best friend, Lois. It had flown off toward the ceiling of the dining room and, since that is a room I never use unless my family is here, I just didn't think about the balloon again-- until December.

   In December, somehow, that balloon had travelled to my sitting room, and I have looked at it each day to remind me that it had come as a gift of love. I tend to see "Sermons in stones and good in everything."( Which turns out to be William Shakespeare; I have always given William Wordsworth the credit. Whatever. )There was that love hanging above my dictionary stand, steady as she goes, until this morning.

   When I came to the Blue Room and began the same old routine: NYTimes, e mail, Facebook, I glanced up and the balloon was GONE. It had floated itself across the hall and was sitting atop the bookcase in my daughter's old bedroom.

   The Hofheimer boys, boys ages 55 to 65, have been D.G.'s friends forever, but they wouldn't have gone to her room. It is their mother, Lois, who is there in the balloon. She never was shy about saying what she thought, and D.G. and I both believe she's in there to say she still thinks D.G's. hair is too messy and then ask her out for a lovely dinner.

   I hope the balloon stays on and on in my house, although I know that the helium can't last forever.

   But love and friendship can. And I know it will outlast Lois and me and the boys and D.G. There will always be a balloon of love afloat in the world. Look for it in your house; it is there somewhere.

I'm fine, thank you. Why do you ask?

2010-01-18T09:53:00.000-08:00

I am finding myself more and more on the defensive when kind and polite people ask me, "How are you?"

I have no reason in the world not to be fine; I have no pains, and my ills lie dormant. I have loving and devoted family. And yet, I get on my muscle, because it feels as if I need to defend my position as "fine."

   It feels to me as if that old automatic phrase, "Hi, how are you?" asks for an explanation of my exact, up to date description of every aspect of the good health I am enjoying.

   Each time the phone rings, and it isn't even all that often. I am compelled to say, " I feel wonderful. I'm great. I am so happy and my days are so full. How can I be so lucky?" I say it to my children, daily, and to the plumber, to the carpet cleaners and my care-givers, who know exactly the state of my health, as they bring me my meals, help me in the shower and get me dressed.

   The fact of the matter is that I am unsteady on my feet, my back can be painful, at times. I do not have much stamina and I take an awful lot of medicine. I have a pacemaker and stents and heart fibrillations and--- I feel wonderful. ( Do you think: maybe I am a little nutty?)

   Am I protesting too much? I don't think so, because I do feel wonderful and I am content with my mostly-at-home life. There is something in my psyche that puts a chip on my shoulder; subconsciously, I seem to have a need to prove what is obvious: a year ago I was at death's door. I have lived a miracle, and how does a simple, ordinary ninety-year old lady, me, account for it all.

OMG, I say to myself. Of course, it is my God, my Father who art in heaven.

how has "erudite" become "crudity"

2010-01-15T12:16:00.000-08:00

Many year ago, there was a summer theater north of Worthington, called Playhouse on the Green. Professional actors came from New York, for the summer, and performed a different show, every two weeks, using local amateurs in small roles. Only Bob Greene was too talented for walk-on parts. The director, Paul Pruneau, saw that, immediately, and soon was giving him the lead.

Those were wonderful summer nights, driving on country roads, to rehearsals. And, between rehearsals, going over lines with him in the backyard, the children already asleep.

And what does that have to do with erudition and crudeness? Well, it does. Because one night, Bob and Phil had a conversation about using "swear " words on the stage. Clark Gable had just shocked the movie world by telling Scarlett O'Hara "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. "When," Bob asked, "would the F word ever be tolerated by the public?"

   We know, now, how soon it happened, how prevalent it is. It is probably the most used adjective in our culture. Culture, I use the word begrudgingly.

   I confess that I have used it myself, not often, and not to the public in general. And certainly not to describe something good!

   From this not-so-staid old lady, I am sending you a list of very effective adjectives. Use them judiciously and be surprised at how impressive you can be.

   Here they are, straight from my Thesaurus: wonderful, wondrous, remarkable, extraordinary, superb, amazing, phenomenal, flabbergasting...

   Oh hell, go to your own dictionaries.

on being a mere person

2010-01-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

Reading the New York Times article about the history of the Time Warner/AOL merger, I was reminded of my own attempt to be a "player". How pitiful was it ,as I look back at the whole sordid mess, to think that I had a fighting chance to do something about it?

I have written before about my on-line book group, in a blog called Book Groups R Me. It was truly important to all of us in the group; we were thriving under the wing of AOL, and then, (mixed metaphor), they pulled the rug out from under us.

Jo in ABQ was the most technically capable of any of us, and she used all of her on-line smarts to tell AOL that they were making a horrible mistake. Of course, we had no idea of the magnitude of the contemplated changes, but even to the unsophisticated GGOBITS that we were, it looked like a stupid marriage.

I decided that I would just call them and alert them to the damage they were about to commit. I called my broker to get the corporate number, and I called it. Of course, I couldn't reach Steve Case or Gerald Levin. I ended up speaking to an underling of an underling in the advertising department, I think.

It is a funny story in retrospect, but it is a very unfunny fact in real life.

It is the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it ". TIME was once a wonderful newsmagazine, but it was beaten into a pulp of its former self by the twenty-four hour news cycle. WARNER; whatever did happen to that great movie studio? The AOL today is so much a tangled web that my old book friends are heading elsewhere. One of our members' daughter did try to set up a site for us; we would consistently lose our ability to access it.

Make it simple, stupid. That is all we were asking.

But that foolish story is just the lead-in to my real concern. In the cacophony and the dissonance, no one hears anything. Everyone says something. How can we speak to one another above and beyond the noise?

This is a subject of immense importance. In a democracy, who can hear a single voice ? Signing on line petitions does not seem to bear much weight with the receivers of our outcries, whether for or against. The phone lines to our Senators are always busy, yet many of us keep trying. What are the statistical odds that the vote tally is close to accurate?

The voices in the wilderness are not heard, even mobilized by Move On. The individual stockholders who show up at annual meetings don't have a chance against the block votes of the majority.

We watch NBC shoot itself in the foot. We believe Barry Bond's or we don't. We think airport security is getting better. We have no idea what our strategy is against AlQueda. I trust the government; many do not.

Being a mere person is a sad concept in this gigantic and complicated world. It knocks the naiveté right out of you. Am I not able to change with the times? I think it is more than that.

Each one of us is lost in the wilderness, and I am afraid.

Forgive me for pretending to be Camus.

Facebook sorrow

2010-01-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about my Mother a lot lately. Actually, I think about my mother all the time, but, as I have moved from my eighties to my nineties, I have a new ( and aching) pain.

I am feeling that I have things so much easier than she did. Not that she lived an underprivileged life, in any way. She had grown up in a household where she didn't need to lift a finger. She never learned to cook. My Dad was a good provider and, although we were far from rich, she never had to be a housewife, in that old-fashioned sense of the word. After my Dad died, very young, fifty-two years old, she remarried into an even more privileged life.

Not that she was ever idle, sitting around eating bonbons. She was a super-active volunteer, serving in the Red Cross efforts during both World War I and World War II. She set up and organized the Blood Bank, delegating tasks, supervising and checking on the on-going work around her. She served on local Boards and National Boards; she knew how to take charge. And she did.

She travelled extensively to far and exotic places, she made so many friends on the way. She would get letters, or visitors, or phone calls from many of them. She had a Columbus circle of interesting people. She had a hair appointment every Friday, and the woman who was scheduled just after her had started a very successful stock club, ( do any of your remember stock clubs? ) These two bright women would meet for lunch and discuss the market.

What I regret, for her, was the emptiness of her days when old age caught up with her. Oh, she played cards and went out to meals when she was well enough to do that. She had moved into a new high-rise apartment building, after the death of her second husband. She was surrounded by friends from her previous life and friends she made in the building. But the days grew longer and her abilities decreased. Television was not stimulating or even very well-done. And, of course, she died long before computers began to change the world.

It is, I have finally realized, Facebook that is making me sad for her. I can sit in my house and my comfortable chair and touch base with so many people that I love. What if she could have laughed at what color brassiere her granddaughter is wearing. To know where her great-grandchildren are practically every hour of the day and night. (There is some of that information she probably shouldn't know. ) And I shouldn't know, either.

With Facebook, she could have kept up with the He/Shes, two homosexual men whom she had met in her travels, and who kept in touch, by mail. They were bright and funny, but on a slow boat to China or on a South Pacific Island. She could still be communicating with Ida Reiter, a fellow Red Cross volunteer or Lucile Curtiss, a fellow community leader. Or Mildred Whitman who had given birth to a son on the same day she gave birth to me, at the same hospital.

These Facebook opportunities, the chance to say a fleeting hello and touch base with far-flung friends is, for me, an incredible pick-me-up.

By bringing multitudes of people from outer space into my small room, I am still in the world, despite age and infirmities. There are endless possibilities for me.

I wish she could read my status update.

It would make her happy to know that, at ninety, I am very happy.

on the anniversary of my brother's death

2010-01-08T07:14:00.000-08:00

Over the course of many years, the Harmons and the Greenes had dinner together. In Columbus, on Sanibel and on Longboat Key. It was always a pleasant and fun evening. Fancy didn't impress us, but we did enjoy the food and the ambience of upscale restaurants. After Bob died, Sue and Al invited me to dinner, often, and they even allowed me to take them a few times.

I have had my lucky fill of white table cloths and gourmet food. I look back on those with pleasure, knowing that my out-to-dinner days are over, but remembering, too, that my last best meals were at the Hickory House.

Definitely not a white table- cloth place, but five star ribs . We liked the nice, ordinary aura of small town Reynoldsburg and the very smokey bar where we sat on high stools to have our drink, waiting for our table number to be called. Sue was a good sport when she came with us; she hasn't eaten meat in thirty years. She settled for a shrimp cocktail and potato skins.

Evenings when she was busy elsewhere, Al would come pick me up and we knew, without even considering an alternative, we would head to the “Hick House”. In the early years, we both drank Vodka; I had to trade-down to wine ( my coumaden dosage, my pacemaker). A short time later, Al had to do the same ( his back operations, the pain, the oxycontin).

We didn't need to see the menu to order the half slab of ribs, well- browned home fries and apple sauce. Al was always so patient with the young girl at the podium, so pleasant to the waitresses, complimentary to the manager. Going there for lunch a few months after Al's death, the manager told me how sorry he was to read of my brother's passing. Al, from among a really large clientele , was memorable here, like everywhere, because in every encounter, he paid kind attention.

It was a truly grand evening. Our conversations were interesting, topical , political and personal; we each had much to share. No disagreements ever; no disagreements ever in our life. Al's children now say that he was different when he was with me; he was like a little boy again, just happy and comfortable, with his blue eyes sparkling, a Paul Newman look-alike. I probably was different, too. In our eighties, we were, once again, the two little Harmon kids, running through the sprinkler in the back yard on Franklin Avenue.

Rest in peace, Al. We are doing well,really well, but, oh, how we miss you.

Focus on Fear

2010-01-04T12:17:00.000-08:00

Hanging on my kitchen wall, where I used to see it every day is a print of an old Irish saying, author unknown; of one thing I am certain, he or she is a parent.

It reads:
   God keep my jewel this day from danger
   From tinker, from pookah and black-hearted stranger
   From harm of the the water and hurt of the fire
   From horns of the cows going home to the byre
   From teasing the ass when he's tied to the manger
   From scones that would bruise and the thorns of the briar
   From evil red berries that waken desire
   From hunting the gander and vexing the goat
   From depths of sea water by Danny's old boat
   From cut and from crumble-from sickness and weeping
   May God have my jewel this day in his keeping

I kept this in my kitchen where I would see it, daily, reinforcing all my prayers for my children. I was not an overly nervous mother, but their safety was never far from my mind. I liked it best when I knew they were all asleep in their own beds.

Today, it is horrifying to think that none of us are safe, anywhere. I am not overly nervous about that, either, because it is so completely out of our control. Since the Christmas Day ( almost) bomber, we are assaulted with newspaper articles and TV reports; Embassy closings in Yemen, can we move the terrorists from Guantanomo to Illinois? Is the President handling the situation well? For me, he is. There are others to whom Dick Cheney is still spouting his theories.

But we do have more to fear than fear itself, and we need to recognize it. The San Francisco Chronicle quotes the same prognosticator who previously had reckoned that the day of rapture would be in 1994; that passed without the world coming to an end. Previously, he had mathematically discovered that the Apocalypse would happen in 2012. The new date was just announced by Biblical scholars: May 21, 2011. There are good people who are true believers. They are not afraid. I do not believe any of that, but I know there is more to fear than the end of the world.

The recession is not over; there are still more homeless than beds in shelters; jobs are still very scarce; and there are children in Columbus, Ohio who carry home school provided food in their back packs to tide them over throughout the week end. It is scary out there.

So. take care. Happy New Year.

On Overload

2009-12-30T12:48:00.000-08:00

Everybody else is doing it. Why shouldn't I? Everybody is making lists, what's been good, what's been hot, what we can live with, what we can live without.

The year, the decade is about to end, and even the most cock-eyed optimist cannot feel happy. 2009 was too much, just has every year been since 2000. We are weighted down with the woes of living: from hungry families, to city budgets, to states in poverty, to a country in fear and at war, to a world in terror and even terrorists at odds with each other. CNN showed a map of the other side of the world, where Yemen blurs into Somalia, where Somali bleeds into Iran, and then Iraq , and then Israel, and.....

So I find myself going out with a whimper, when I personally have every reason to go out with a bang. The world is too much with me. I am a part of all that I have met, or read, or seen.

Thus, my list added to too many lists

Too much sorrow.

Too many lost loved ones

Too much Facebook

Too much fear

Too much weather

snowstorms across the country

too many shovelings of my driveway

cold, cold in Florida

Too much pontificating, too many pontificants

Too many frustrations

it took me half an hour and delayed e-mails until I was able to get to my own blogger dashboard.

But wait 'til next year. If the Bucks beat the Ducks, that will be our omen that things might resolve themselves. There are not enough good people to do it, but we can hold onto hope.

And, in the meantime, I am going to eat a second piece of candy, or maybe a third. And wait for TBDBL to come marching down Colorado Boulevard, and the really best band in the land, The Ohio State School for the Blind, marching proudly close behind.

Happy New Year, all.

Appropriatenss

2009-12-27T12:45:00.000-08:00

That is a real word. I just looked it up on my new Kindle

I am also going to be an old fogey, as I broach this complicated subject. (It's complicated is, I think, a new movie out this season.) Why not? Everything is complicated.

Before the Kindle, before the movie, I have spent a lot of thought on what's appropriate. What is for me may well not be for you; thus this will be my take on what I think is appropriate for me. I stand by the rule of the four worst words in the English language: I think you should.

First off, when I wake up in the morning, I begin to wonder if I have to get dressed. At ninety, I should allow myself to be in a robe, ( a nice robe) all day. It would be very comfortable, but inappropriate, because I enjoy having visitors, and spending too much time on Facebook, and reading the Times on line, and eventually the Dispatch before dinner, the morning paper at 5:30 p.m. The morning paper is robe time.

Then on to what to wear. I truly think that blue jeans are for younger every-bodies; they are also pretty comfortable. Thus I wear them, and chino slacks, and blue button-down shirts as if I were thirty years old again. Not wrong, exactly, but my white hair does not do them justice.

My daughter gave me a pair of old warm up pants that are comfortable, and would be reasonably appropriate but for the fact that they are "Heidi Wear", the couture line of the famous Hollywood Madam. The logo is at the waist, on the front of the pants. We have customized them by taking the elastic out at the bottom and making them look (almost) like gray flannel tailored slacks, and I have some nice, old, long pullovers so I am not advertising her label!

I find I am temperamentally unequipped to be ninety. My speedometer is out of sync with my age. There is so much I want to do in a day and my body can't get up to the speed of my mental schedule. Do I have to write a blog every few days? Of course not. Nobody cares that much. Do I think I am Paul Krugman or George Will or any other of the really good columnists I know? But I just cannot sit and relax (read) until I have x'd off my whole list of "To Dos".

And finally, there are times I would like to adopt the initials that stand for words in e mails and on posts. I know the real words, and have used some of them a time or two in my life. But a woman of this certain age, actually a lady of this certain age, knows it is completely inappropriate for me to omg and wtf and F*%^#K all over the internet as the only adjective in the world.

Unless, of course, you are an old lady Carmella Soprano.

Christmas Greenes

2009-12-24T10:35:00.000-08:00

I'm dreaming of a white Xmas, and an overly decorated Xmas and a sick Xmas, all like the ones I used to know. I have run the gamut, from 1919 until now, and the so, so various versions are dancing like sugar-free plums in my head.

So some random Yuletide thoughts:

I am especially touched as the local TV news features a message, nightly, from a soldier in Iraq or a Marine in Iran or a military family stationed in Germany. As they send a Christmas greetings to their family, here in Ohio, they each finish their thirty-seconds with "Go Bucks." Why do we mean so much to each other because of a football team? It seems unbelievable. But those two words have become the essence of my living in this wonderful community. So merry Christmas, Buckeyes, wherever you are.

I'm remembering the Santa Clauses I have known. Three real Santas, and the invisible one -and- only who came in the night.

It was around 1930 that the first red suited Jolly St. Nick arrived. He was the tall, thin boyfriend of a German babysitter who lived with us, He walked in Christmas morning, bringing my brother and me a Scottie puppy. The most trembly little pooch ever. In the space, between the legs of a cabinet in our living room, Dink went, and stayed for all the years he lived with us.

Debby (DG) had her tonsils removed too close to Christmas. She couldn't go down town to Lazarus to see Santa, so Santa came to her. Up the driveway, in a cab. And after that, generation after generation, we all trooped down to the jolly old man with our gift lists. I was still at it with my grandchildren, until only Bob and I lived here.

There was a third appearance at our house on Bryden Road. It was a friend in a not-too-convincing red costume, and he ho-ho-ho'd and I think, stopped to have a drink. From the wonders of childhood to the joy of being fifty.

I have gone the whole nine yards, from stockings on the mantel to trees aglow, angels on the table, the Bexley elementary school choir record on the stereo, from a bow-tied staircase and outdoor lights to an everyday decor (one poinsettia). I am happy and content. Thinking of the gifts received over these years, a happy marriage, three loving and attentive children, beautiful grandchildren--and even great grandchildren, I know I have been, way out of proportion, blessed.

Peace on earth and Joy to the world.

TLC skin care

2009-12-22T14:02:00.000-08:00

I wish my mother, gone now these many years, could know about the attention being lavished on her ninety year old daughter's skin. She could rest in peace, at last.

What I didn't do for my skin was the bane of her existence. In every other way, I know she found me a loving and devoted daughter; she thought (wrongly) that I was perfect inside, but what, oh what, she bemoaned was how bad my outside was becoming.

I showered daily and washed my face, morning and night, with plain, old soap. It was easy and quick, and no one could have been cleaner."Cold cream your face", she would say repeatedly, as she would look at me, glowing, I thought within the love of my family.

We used perfectly good soap, too. There was something about the smell of Ivory soap that Bob couldn't stand, so I bought Palmolive or any brand o the grocery shelf, preferably on sale. I didn't use any lotion on my skin while I sat in the sun. Pool side or at the beach, my skin was just out there.

After one lovely Thanksgiving dinner full of turkey and gratitude, as we all sat in my brother's living room, my mother looked at me , and by then, my very visible wrinkles and said, "If you don't do something about your skin, I'm not going to let you balance my check book any more! " What an incentive. There was no one else to do it. At least, no one offered. I remember that evening with such joy.

But now, now when it really doesn't matter, my skin is being cared for with such tenderness that I wish I could tell her about it. My caregivers choose what goes on my skin; at the moment,Oil of Olay Cream Oil intensive body lotion after a shower with Oil of Olay Supreme Cream Oil body wash. This should make the Proctor and Gamble people pretty happy, but not as happy as it would make my mother.

Solstices, Equinoxes, and the seasons roll

2009-12-21T14:59:00.000-08:00

Today is Winter solstice; the path of the sun from north to south comes to a stop before reversing itself. At least, that is what Google says. It means winter is officially here.

Actually, what is happening is that summer is on its way. The days start, minute by minute, to get longer until the Summer Solstice, when the days start to edge toward early darkness. The ancient astrologers and voodoo workers have us all confused. I am more than happy to believe in the established rituals that welcome in the seasons, the Equinoxes that announce Spring in March and Fall in September. But I would like to put a happy face on it.

So, today. know that spring is on its way; forget the reality of the cold, the snow, the ice, the gloom. I want it both ways and I can make it happen with a tap on my keyboard.

We make our own climate. Today, at precisely 17 hour ( 5:00 p.m.) and 47 seconds we start moving toward spring.

The tail of two balloons

2009-12-19T10:14:00.000-08:00

On October 16, the riveting episode of the boy trapped, overhead, in a floating balloon was the story of the day. But No! It wasn't the story of my day at all. That was the day my family, all my most beloved, were here to celebrate my ninetieth birthday.

And celebrate we did, in full Buckeye regalia, in a living room that had become The Ohio State stadium with banners and balloons and Brutus Buckeye, scarlet and gray m'n'ms, and a cake that was an exact replica of The 'Shoe. The loving thoughtfulness of my children was magical. I have not stopped thinking about it for a single day since then.

But how did we get from Colorado to Columbus, Ohio in two easy paragraphs? Because, I have a balloon story of my own, about that day, and it's all about love.

I was lucky enough to hear from many people. Among the lovely surprises was an arrangement of fresh fruits, shaped into flowers, topped by a birthday balloon of shiny gold with Happy birthday written on it, designs and ribbons decorating it.

It was a gift from three brothers whom I have loved since the day they were born. They are the sons of my life-long friend, Lois, and we have an unshakeable bond.

There is magic at work here. The fruit disappeared in the first twenty-four hours, but the balloon flew to the ceiling of the dining room. And stayed and stayed.

Mysteriously, it moved itself into the hall, floating past three bedroom doors, until it came to rest in my blue room, the room I created for myself nine years ago, and where I now pretty much stay. It is my TV room, my radio room, my computer room and my eating room. Two walls are full of family pictures. This is your life, PHG, like the old TV show.

Up in the corner, above the dictionary stand, two months from its launch, the balloon still sits. Full of helium and brought here by the wide world of love.

It says everything I need to know about the power of staying connected. "Its all good," as my son Tim likes to say.

A personal health care debate

2009-12-17T12:27:00.000-08:00

I happen to have a great health care provider. I am not saying who or why, just that they are excellent: premiums, benefits, availability-- all any client could ask for. So what is my beef? Even this excellent provider is "tweaking" itself, and I have to wonder why?

After a call from a company I had never heard of, asking if they could come talk to me about my health care, I said "no" until I checked out the provider to see if this was legit. They assured me that it was, that they were interviewing a random selection of their members about their services, Another call to set up a date and time. Okay and on my calendar. I was then called to choose another date and I was still being agreeable.

One more call, by a third person, who said the other scheduler was confused. Her interviewer didn't actually work in this area.

Finally,yesterday, we had a sit-down, Ms. X and I. I answered 19 pages of questions, that ranged from the date of my tonsillectomy ( age 5) to the status of my mitral valves. (I have no idea; I think not so good.)

That I spent the time, that somebody (who?) spent the money for what really was a useless exercise, I have no idea. My gut feeling is that some bureaucrat, somewhere, demanded this be done. When or how the information is transmitted, moved from paper to an electronic system, who, eventually, will use it will remain mysteries.

You think Joe Lieberman is messing up the health care bill? There are a bunch of Joes out there, doing too much, doing nothing.

Book Groups R me

2009-12-15T14:53:00.000-08:00

I just plain love reading books. Always have. Always will. And I just plain love book groups, too.

When I first learned to use the computer, Deege, my daughter, (she was still Debby then) sent me a clipping from the LATimes, about a woman,whose husband was retiring, and they were moving to a new community. The woman knew no one. The article didn't exactly say that the new place of residence was the husband's choice, not hers, but I got the feeling. In her loneliness, she had gone to her computer and found friends all over the world.

She found them through AOL, of all places. AOL was America On Line, in 1983, a free-standing entity and not AOL/Time/Warner. That merger, in 2000 and then the un-merger, this year, has changed the lives of not only its vast numbers of employees and users, but of my GGOBIT book group who met each other there.

AOL had all kinds of ways to meet people. Chat rooms got a bad name for themselves with the inane conversation of teen agers, but to special interest groups there was a path, by which you could narrow down your search. There was AOL Seniornet, with sub-sections. One of those was Arts and Leisure, and there you could refine your search to Book Discussions and Reviews.

That was the birthplace of GGOBIT, Greatest Global Online Bookclub in town.

For years, we were GChap or GoGrandma or Jenco or Shirlsbt. It mattered not what we looked like, for very few of us had ever met face to face, or what our politics or religion, or where we worked, (or had worked), where we had gone to school, where in the real world we lived.

There were a few clues: when Jo in ABQ became Jo in Tx, we figured that out. GinnySF was kind of obvious. Over the years, we became real friends.

We talked of other things, cabbages and kings, birkies (a shoe choice of many), beans (a disgestive problem for some) but mostly books.

We panicked when we saw the first AOL move. They were eliminating Seniornet forums and sending us to Seniornet.org which wasn't the same thing at all.

We tried to change the course of history. If they had listened to us, the whole Time Warner fiasco might never have happened. We would still have a book home in the wild, wild world. As it is, we maintain our connection by e mailing our GGOBIT list when something important happens in our life.

We did put together a collection of essays. Twenty memoirs of the "regulars" talking about who they are, how they came to GGOBIT and how the friendships of our first nine years are among our most treasured.

Some of the old friends are gone, but unlike old generals, we cannot, will not fade away.

Anchor A' way ( for news groupies only)

2009-12-13T12:18:00.000-08:00

As usual, I fell asleep before the end of Gwen Ifill, on Friday night. Not her fault. It's just something I do. It likely is in my DNA.

I have been a great fan of Washington Week in Review from it's beginning in 1967. The Duke- Bode years were fabulous, and Gwen is great. I feel a special bond with returning guests, I remember Cokie Roberts husband was an early regular.

I especially wanted to be awake at 8:30 on Friday, because I just knew Gwen was going to announce that this was her last night.

And how was I privy to this switch, to come. Jon Stewart had practically tortured Gwen into admitting that she would soon replace George Stephanopolous on ABC's Sunday morning This Week.

So where was George headed? This was getting to be very complicated. Diane Sawyer is to be the evening news anchor on ABC to replace Charlie Gibson. George, it seems, is headed for Diane's old spot on the ABC morning show. I never watch morning shows, unless they have a special guest.

Many people get up and turn on the TV before they brush their teeth. My teeth are a high priority for me, because they have served me so well for so many years. I miss the first news of the day, but I know it is right there on my laptop. As the world spins on its axis.

I had made myself comfortable with the old gang. Katie had taken over for Dan, and I do think she is good. But CBS has so un-perked her that I miss that homey charm of The Today show.And then Tom Brokaw moved on to write wonderful books. And charming, urbane Peter Jennings died.

So PBS, please make the announcement. The suspense is killing me.

Maybe, just maybe, Gwen is headed to CNN, dressed as Wolf Blitzer.

Blogging is hazardous to my health

2009-12-11T10:19:00.000-08:00

I am addicted to blogging. Before I open my eyes in the morning, unbidden, a blog subject grabs me, In truth, sometimes I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and have to reach for the flashlight and note pad, that are beside my bed, to preserve the thought that woke me up. Is this normal? I think not.

I know a really, really good writer who writes one blog a week for CNN. ( You can find him on the CNN home page, I'm sure). I receive it as a link from the author, Bob Greene.) He is an excellent columnist and author, and he can limit himself to writing once a week. What is the matter with his mother who can't get three steps away from her desktop?

It is a terrible interruption for me to have to go to the bathroom. I have half- lost interest in eating lunch. The sun shines bright in my living room, but I stay in the north-facing sitting room until I have finally had my say for the day. My bedroom is aglow with sunshine and. once upon a time, I would take a short nap there, or just have an hour lie down. If I rest depends on finishing my blog.

And I can't start to write until I have read Facebook from top to bottom, news feed and live feed both. They suggest more blog ideas. And so it goes.

So I say to myself: "Hush your mouth, once in a while. You can't be interesting every day. Let your ideas simmer for awhile, they may be richer, like good chicken soup."

Check in again tomorrow. I have no idea if I can quit cold turkey.

The winter of all our discontents

2009-12-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

The dark silhouette of leaf less branches outside my windows could be beautiful... if they were seen against a bright blue sky. But this is Ohio, and the sky is grey, and the wind is strong. If a last leaf might still have been clinging to the limb, it is far, far away now.

I have been thinking about last leaves for a long time. My friend, Lucile Kirk, once told me, over lunch, that she didn't want to be the last leaf on the tree. That was a few years ago, and now she has left us and, as in winter's past, so have Lois and Harry and Bob and Artie and Leonard and Evelyn. If you are ninety as I am, you can substitute your own list of missing friends.

We were once part of a group of seven couples, who met regularly on Saturday night. Now there are two of us, Artie's widow, Jackie, and I.

Not so long ago, I was a class mate of five or six local members of the CSG class of 1937, who met regularly for lunch. Now, there is Caroline Davis and I. We talk on the phone, and we share many intimacies because we have the trust that comes with an eighty year friendship.

At Wellesley, we were a compatible group of young women, who ate at the same table together for three years. (Yes, we had round tables, and table cloths and waitresses!) Now, Alice and I reach out to each other from Boston to Columbus, and she will say, when we have the "last leaf" conversation, "You remember my friend Muriel, from kindergarten" and I do, even though we have never met. I just know she is still on Alice's branch.

It was just a year ago that I saw my wonderful brother, Al, for the last time. That is hard to bear.

It happens, this time and change. I write this, today, not because I am mourning those who are gone, because, of course, I am. But I am celebrating those who remain, and the newer, younger people who have become dear to me.

And sometime, sometime, spring will come.

Remember Pearl Harbor

2009-12-07T12:42:00.000-08:00

I heard FDR say, on a radio where I was visiting with some friends, " a date which will live in infamy"and in a flash, I knew World War II had begun, I knew my true love had been drafted the previous January, and his tour of duty was to be for one year. He was now an infantry man with more years staring us in the face. I had no idea of where he was at that moment.

He turned out to be in an elevator in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on leave from Camp Shelby. He took the high road, as always, and joked, "I know Pearl Schwartz, but who is Pearl Harbor"? Then he sent me a telegram, "War or no war, I still love you." I think you paid by the word for a telegraphed message.

I didn't know that our friend. Leonard York, was actually at Pearl Harbor. He was one of the 1282 wounded that day, and he died many years later of injuries he sustained that day.

I, also, did not know we were part of the "greatest generation".Tom Brokaw had to tell us so, in 1998. At the time, I was hard pressed to believe we were any greater than any other generation. But that was the year my true love died, age 83; and I remembered the details of our lives. We probably were special, never really talking about that day or those years, but always looking. hopefully, to the future.

So today, I salute us all for our duty to our country, but my eligible grandchildren have no duty to Afghanistan. The way war is waged today is different, but it is still war.

And as FDR also said, "I hate war."

Woe is We

2009-12-04T12:30:00.000-08:00

My first thought this morning, before my eyes were really open, hit me right in the blog. If only Obama governed the way he plays basketball, America would, again, be all that it can be.

You know what I'm talking about: that half smile, the joy, the passion, the I-know-exactly-what- I-am- doing, the I'm in charge, get outta my way. No time for slow deliberations, to pour over every option, devise a strategy. Just go out there and make a few double-triples (whatever that is) and the game is as good as won.

Can't you see the other team, Achmininajad, Natanyahu, Karzi, and all that bunch, plus Glenn Beck and John McCain and mealy-mouthed Mitch McConnell muttering to themselves, "this guy really knows what he's doing" as they commit foul after foul, time running out, with no chance for them to win

You can think about style and substance. Obama has them in abundance. Style got us JFK. Substance got us Abraham Lincoln. Style and substance gave us FDR, four times. On the campaign trail, Obama showed us both. Now, it seems, he is weighted down with the substance and his style is cramped. Even Michelle's smile is beginning to look a little fake.

Come on, try for a few three-pointers, drive hard to the basket, "accidentally" throw an elbow. There are a lot of us cheering for you. Get my blood flowing, which my heart is increasingly unable to do. When you win, we all win. Just put on your Nike's and DO IT.

Another landmark, down the tube

2009-12-03T12:45:00.000-08:00

Even before my first sip of coffee, I got mad, and sad, and resigned to the speed of the changing world. The City of Columbus wants to sell the Champion Golf Course. The course is too difficult, it is losing money, and zoning would permit single family housing.

In an earlier and happier time, that property was The Winding Hollow Country Club. It opened with a nine hole course in 1921, and it was there I learned to swing a three-wood, my favorite club. Sometime, when I have trouble falling asleep, those nine holes are the "sheep" I count. I can follow myself from one to nine, envisioning every tree, every little creek, every, every rough.

The course grew to eighteen holes, designed by Robert Trent Jones, in 1948. Bob, my husband, was Club President , and in his official capacity, we drove Robert Trent to the airport after a meeting. Wanting to be gracious and interested, I asked him when he had first decided to become a golf course architect. The "you idiot" look he gave me--it chilled me to the bone.

Public housing was, eventually, built just north, and above, the long 16th hole, far away from the Clubhouse. A few times, members were robbed at gun point. The three-C highway was no longer a prime location. Lock, stock and barrel, a new Winding Hollow was built on Babbitt Road, a better address. Beautiful building, tennis courts, snack bar, all the amenities. And then members began to disappear, for even more desirable places. It morphed into a few other incarnations, and I lost complete interest in what was going on.

So why does this news about the sale of the old WHCC bother me? I truly did not care; after Bob served as President, we remained members only until after my brother, Al Harmon, had served his term.

But I feel the ground shifting under me with the loss of each landmark. Change is progress, I know, I know. But could just a few places remain a little longer? My roots grow deep and wide, at ninety. Please don't pull them out any faster than you have to. Whoever "you" are.

Fair Avenue School

2009-12-02T11:35:00.000-08:00

The Columbus Dispatch just announced the closing of nine schools in our public school system. They were well below capacity in number, and most had been rated D by whatever standards they use to judge accomplishment. Children left behind. For all the extra effort of the administration, creative and innovative thinking, the schools are fighting a losing battle. It is sad. Fair Avenue elementary is one of those schools. I believe the news release reported that it was built in 1890.

When I was six years old, I went off to Fair Avenue school-- on foot, holding hands with my six year old best friend, Lois. She lived across the street from me, and she was my cousin, to boot.

I cannot believe our parents allowed us to walk that far, but this was 1925, and it was completely safe. We walked east two blocks to Morrison, turned to head north to Franklin Park South, and then it was only two blocks east that we arrived at school, no other street to cross. We were scared and thrilled.

As I thought and thought about our journey, I had to turn to Mapquest to be positive that I would not be setting you on a wild goose chase, looking for two little girls, one with blue eyes, one with brown. But that is exactly where we were for five, wonderful years.

Our principal's name was Miss Hammond, and she always wore purple. To be summoned to her office was the scariest thing in the world. It was in second grade that I made my one and only appearance. I had gone to the boys' side of the playground during recess. And I had good reason to go: I wanted to talk to Edward Underwood, a handsome swain whose father was Superintendent of Parks for the City of Columbus and he lived in a house IN the park. He was my very first Prince Charming.

Diversity was never an issue. We were all white, all middle class. But there was one little African-American girl, Annie Ransom. How sad for her, one-of-a-kind, her dark, pretty little face in a sea of white. She had an autograph book and I wrote. "Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you." And then I went back to stalking Ed Underwood.

In second grade, I also walked across in front of the desks with a pencil in my mouth, lead point first and embarrassed myself, bleeding down my chin.

By fifth grade, our classroom was upstairs. Walking down the wide, wooden stairs, two by two, at days' end, felt, to me, as exalting as changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace.Too much A.A. Milne on my reading list, I guess. And our fifth grade teacher, Miss Schroll, had a broken arm. I wanted one so badly, just to walk down those steps with my arm in a sling.

At that point, Lois and I moved to Columbus School for Girls.

And CSG was the most phenomenal educational experience I ever had anywhere.

The worst words

2009-12-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

In a family conversation, one time, someone said, "I think you should" and I interrupted immediately, by saying, "I think those are the four worst words in the world." I believe they never need to be spoken, even adult to child.

There are much kinder ways to communicate; I am a Dr. Benjamin Spock graduate who learned, early on, that a parent needs to treat the children with as much respect as house guests. Presuming we are gracious to our guests.

At this point, someone else chimed in, "I think 'shut up' are the worst of words, and then another nominated "you dirty liar" as their worst. So if you see the banner on our family tree, know that "I think you should shut up you dirty liar", stands for the best of us, and judge us accordingly.

I am sure there are families all over who have had similar discussions, each one with their version of what is unacceptable. They just don't need to tell me that I should like theirs as well as I like mine.

It is 9:30 a.m.; Do you know where your daughter is

2009-11-29T13:08:00.000-08:00

There is much to be said for staying in touch. Especially for any parents who want to be connected to their also aging children and their not-so-young grandchildren. I'm talking 90-ish parents, 60-ish children and the next generation, who, I believe are called the Y's, or are they the X's?

The major changes in the way we reach out to one another astounds us great-grandmothers. During our college years, we wrote lovely letters to our parents and hardly ever spoke on the phone. There was usually one phone per dorm floor, used mostly for emergency calls and date-making. And dates were local calls, boyfriends near-by.

By the time our children were in college, they phoned home on Sundays--collect. We had desultory conversation, no details, not all we had described in our letters home. It could be said we were in touch, technically.

And now, in the obvious availability of constant contact, we say even less. The alphabet has been corrupted, emotions are abbreviations, wtf and omg.

All of which make us grateful for the telephone calls we still receive, the letters that are written, the devotion expressed each day at a pre-designated time.

Keep them cards and letters coming. We love them.

A first hello (do I hear an echo?)

2009-11-28T13:36:00.000-08:00

This is my first crack at blogging and I make a solemn promise. It is the only blog I will ever write that is specifically about me.

I need to translate my blog-name, because it makes no sense unless you know what a "wede" is. It is my grandmother name, awarded to me as a gift when my first grandchild was less than a year old. When she could barely talk, she would look at me and say something that sounded like "weedy". Eventually, we figured out that when I saw her, I always said, "hello, sweetie". She thought that is how we huge people all around tiny Maggie greeted each other.When Big Bird and Bert and Ernie taught her letters and sounds, she wrote that I was w-e-d-e. Of all the names attached to me over the years, Wede is my favorite.

The "B" proves that I am really with it. I have no idea how to send a text message, but I know that letters stand in for words and words stand in for paragraphs. I love the English language; I revere its proper use. Rather than fight what is happening, I join it. So you have also now learned that I am a peacemaker, even in small battles.

Finally, the 90 is self-explanatory, if I can devine how to attach my picture to the blog. I was ninety-years old on October 20 this year of our Lord, 2009. I love being 90.