You are seeing the thumbnail of an animated card waiting for you over on my Facebook page. The festivities in the town square here are set to the tune of Sousa’s Liberty Bell March.
The tune, famous in the 1970s as the theme song for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, accompanies the ringing of the Liberty Bell in my holiday greeting to you. Jacquie Lawson, designer of elegant, animated cards for all occasions, is based in Sheffield, England in the United Kingdom. Incidentally, on July 1 Jacquie featured a maple leaf-studded flag for Canadian readers.
To all my Blog viewers and followers around the globe – Happy 4th of July, however/whenever you celebrate independence & freedom.
Just as every issue of The New Yorker features a cartoon in need of a caption, today’s post offers a photo calling for your input. There’s one below to get your wheels turning, but I think there are other possibilities.
Even eighteen wheelers have patriotic ties.
The back story: This photo was taken in 2005 when Cliff was in the Chicago area doing his art/music shows. Most likely our son Joel, who was in graduate school in the city at the time, was driving as Cliff snapped the picture of this truck on the Interstate.
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Carl Stoneseifer was one of my dad’s best employees at Longenecker Farm Supply in Rheems, PA. He was both personable and competent, as my dad would say, a “crack” mechanic. I remember how sad Daddy felt when Carl moved on.
His wife Helen was a talented quilter. On May 20, 1976 Helen’s picture and write-up appeared in our hometown newspaper, The Elizabethtown Chronicle. The quilt, in honor of the American bicentennial, was a cooperative effort by her sister, her daughter-in-law, and another friend. However, the designs featuring various patriotic symbols were her own.
Memorial Day is a time to remember all those who sacrificed for our country. This weekend also heralds the first official holiday weekend of summer.
How do you observe it?
Can you provide a caption for the photo? I’m excited to see your suggestions!
Coming next: Purple Passages: Secrets of the Grimké House, Charleston
Names have always fascinated me. I’ve even written about names and naming in previous posts: What’s in a Name? and The Name Game.
But what about name changing? Celebrities, like actors, musicians and other entertainers have changed their names as a way disguise their ancestry, make a statement or achieve a unique identity.
In mid-century, British-sounding names in the entertainment industry were thought to be more appealing to the public than Slavic, German or Jewish-sounding names. Thus . . .
Robert Allen Zimmerman → Bob Dylan
Issur Danielovtich Demsky → Kirk Douglas
Helen Lydia Mironoff → Helen Mirren
Entertainer Whoopi Goldberg apparently began life as Caryn Elaine Johnson.
Dancer Fred Astaire was once Frederick Austerlitz.
Actor Ben Kingsley’s birth certificate reads “Krishna Pandit Bhanji.”
Lady Gaga’s Italian heritage is revealed in her birth name, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta and Jennifer Anniston’s Greek ancestry in Jennifer Anastassakis.
Vanilla Ice probably signed his grade school papers as Robert Van Winkle.
The suave designer Ralph Lauren was once Ralph Lifshitz!
My maiden name was Longenecker, which was changed to Beaman when I married. As a teacher, I would tell students how to spell my name using the 3-little-words approach: Be-a-man. Very rarely was my last name misspelled.
However, my first name (Marian) apparently is tricky to spell. It is often misspelled and in a number of puzzling variations. People with PhDs (not you of course!) and book authors (again, not you!) are the most frequent offenders. Yes, I’ve kept track of them – ha!
Marion
Marianne
Mariam
Miriam
Marrian (on a name card at a dinner by a computer that stuttered)
Mariana
Marina
Miram
No wonder John Wayne is no longer MariOn Morrison!
Can you add any other interesting name changes to the ones above? Maybe you have some examples of strange naming or spelling from your own family . . .
P.S. Even if you mangle the spelling of my name, we’ll still be friends. That’s a promise! 😉
Coming next: Purple Passages with the Bard of Avon
Grandmother Kayaks from Maine to Guatemala for the Children at the Dump
These were the words in my invitation to a reception promoting Project Safe Passage honoring Dr. Deb Walters’ efforts to raise funds via her Kayak trips.
A stellar professional career behind her, this woman is paddling with passion in her mission to rescue children and families who live in the garbage dump of Guatemala City in Guatemala, providing them with literacy programs and medical help.
Who is Deb Walters?
Dr. Deb has always been adventuresome, having made solo trips to the Arctic, kayaking around the Northwest Passage, and leading kayaking expeditions, which she began in 1981. Several years ago, she was among a group of Rotarians who went to Guatemala City, saw the need and decided to do something positive about it. She reports, laughingly of course, that when she embarked on her first journey one person came up to her and asked this question:
The Need & How The Safe Passage School Helps
Over 9 million people live in Guatemala City, Guatemala, and 10,000 of those people scavenge for food in the city garbage heap and for any items they can find to sell to survive. Safe Passage was organized in 1999 to rescue these people from their dire situation through literacy and medical help. Kayaking is Deb’s way of fund-raising for this organization. She has reached 92% of her goal to raise $ 150,000.00 to fund expanding the school to include grades 3 and 4.
Safe Passage Educational Center houses classrooms, a cafeteria, library and a medical clinic, serving nearly 2000 family in 2014.
Provides literacy: English speakers are 3 times more likely to get a job. Incomes of Safe Passage graduates are 5 times higher than that of the average resident of Guatemala City.
Provides teacher training for local public schools.
Deb’s Day in her Kayak, a Chesapeake 18 model
She says every day “feels like I’m jumping off a cliff!” Typically she paddles 2-8 hours daily, monitored by her husband Chris back home via a tracking device that reports her whereabouts every 10 minutes. He helped her assemble tents, suits, cooking ware, and other travel equipment.
The children of Safe Passage have donated yellow, rubber ducks “El Patito Amistoso” for her kayak, so she has companionship while she travels.
Dr. Deb and Guatemalan boy: Safepassage.org/kayak video
Hazards:
Drug cartels control some sections of the waterway. “If they see you, they shoot you.”
Deb has encountered sharks, alligators, and whales. When she encounters a marine animal, she “looks them in the eyes while she sings.” Once however, at night she and her kayak were flipped over by a manatee on the Inter-coastal Waterway in Florida.
Once she kayaked out of the U. S. security zone, and the Coast Guard came after her with guns a-blazing. She could have been fined $ 500.00 and served 3 years in prison. The officers relented, however, when they discovered her cause and escorted her to safety.
Interruption!
After completing 1057 miles from Maine to South Carolina, her most recent trip was temporarily stalled by intense shoulder pain alternating with numbness, and Deb had to stop four times in the early part of the trip for medical attention. Doctors discovered a herniated disk in her neck which was surgically repaired with a titanium piece which in an X-ray looks to her like the image of a “thumbs up”! She says, jokingly, “I’ve been screwed!”
She is hoping to resume this latest trip in October and complete the remaining miles to Guatemala City.
Success Stories
One 73-year-old woman in the garbage dump enrolled in Safe Passage so she could help her grandchildren do homework. She herself learned to read and now she is writing her Memoir!
Another woman named Miranda rescued from the dump exclaimed after her success: “If you believe you can do it, you can do it!”
Final Words from Deb:
“Like many people who embrace an adventure, I learned more from the people I met than they learned from me.”
After her presentation, Deb admitted: “Even though I’ve seen this video many times, I never see it without tears in my eyes.”
Maybe your story is not as dramatic as Deb’s, but it has involved getting out of your comfort zone. We’d like to hear about it – or your response to Deb’s adventure.
Did you ever have a Pollyanna? A secret pal back in the days when mail traveled only in paper envelopes with postage?
As I was going through one of my Boxes under the Bed, I found this quaint gem sent to me at college in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. The charming card is signed Pollee Ann, obviously a reference to the main character in the children’s book series Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter, who finds the glad in everything. Though she was tragically orphaned and sent to live in the home of her gruff Aunt Polly, 11-year-old Pollyanna has come to represent eternal optimism as she spreads cheer, sometimes secretly, all around town.
My secret pal spells her name “Pollee Ann,” an interesting sobriquet for Pollyanna. And the card reached me in spite of the fact there is no street address or zip code, not introduced into the postal system until 1963. The termZIP, an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan,was chosen to suggest that “mail travels more efficiently, and therefore more quickly (zipping along), when senders use the code in the postal address.”
Image: Wikipedia
Have a Zippy St. Patrick’s Day!
Some celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by baking/eating cupcakes or cookies with green icing or wearing a shamrock pin. How do you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?
My auburn-haired granddaughter Jenna is very cute, and people frequently tell her how pretty she is. From an early age (here at 3 1/2), she has loved to primp and preen.
Even before she turned two, she would wake up, put on a gaudy plastic tiara and blue Lucite high-heels and toddle around her bedroom, every inch a princess. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with play-acting. But since then, in our Nana/Grand-daughter talks, I have reminded her that there are two kinds of beauty, the inside and outside kind. One lasts. The other one fades. Last year for her 9th birthday, her Grandpa and I collaborated on a gift to help her remember the meaning of inner beauty as she blossoms into a young woman.
It looked like this:
Here is the verse close-up:
We have talked about the meaning of those solemn and ancient words from the King James Version: favor, deceitful, vain — and have discussed what the verse written centuries ago might be saying to a young girl like her today. She knows for sure that there is nothing wrong with being attractive, but looks are not the most important thing in her life.
to be continued . . .
Wanda’s Story
I don’t know Wanda’s last name, but I know what she looked like before/after her appearance on the TV show “What Not to Wear.” Hosts of the show, Clint Kelly and Stacy London, help Wanda, a family therapist from San Diego, transform from boring beige to beautiful blue. In the course of the metamorphosis, the 47-year-old career woman, reveals that she grew up in a Mennonite culture and thought of beauty as something “to be frowned upon,” something even “dangerous” to use her description.
Here is Wanda’s frumpy before and stylish “after” look:
You can see her “before” pict and hear a snippet of her story on this short YouTube
For Wanda, no more “monochromatic modesty or khaki catastrophe.” She exclaims at the end of the show: “Now I can walk into the future with my inside and outside more coherent.” In the grand finale, a band of friends and relatives gather around the stage to applaud the transformed Wanda who glitters in stylish heels and a purple “date” dress.
As the banner on my welcome page shows (Mennonite prayer veiling paired with a pair of sassy red heels), I can certainly relate to Wanda’s viewpoint. You can read about it in a former post. My own metamorphosis from plain to fancy did not happen nearly as quickly as hers, but over the years I have tried to focus on the qualities that reflect inner beauty just as I try to model them for my grand-daughter Jenna.
What about you? Maybe you are not 40-something anymore. You might be 50, 60 or beyond. Still there’s beauty at any age. That’s certainly what I think.
Do you (as Wanda now thinks) believe your inside and outside appearance should match?
How do you define Beauty?
Coming next: Moments of Discovery: Mother’s Quilts
Actor Tom Hanks in the movie Forrest Gump tries to strike up a conversation with a tired nurse seated beside him on a park bench. Holding a box of chocolates in his hand, Forrest offers her a treat, “My mother always said, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” You remember the scene. Here is a 38-second clip from the movie:
“Health by chocolate” is one of the phrases that popped up on the web when I researched the health benefits of eating chocolate, which may stem from the antioxidant flavonoids find in the cacao bean. Another website listed 9 benefits of eating chocolate. Rich and delicious dark chocolate especially (at least 70 % cacao, a disease-killing bullet) is “good for more than healing a broken heart” it touts.
Among the nine benefits included in this article were a healthy heart, possible weight loss (because it lessens one’s cravings for other sweet, salty, and fatty foods), stress reduction, and even higher intelligence in the short term because chocolate boosts blood flow to the brain.
The box of chocolates Forrest Gump was holding contains way more calories than this article suggests because the candies were probably filled with nougat, sweet cherries, caramel, and other taste-bud ticklers. But he’s right, unless the box lid is imprinted with the different flavors, you never know what you are going to get. Usually, though, the surprise is pleasant.
In the 2000 movie Choclat, Vianne Rocher, played by Juliette Binoche, tries to guess Roux’s (Johnny Depp’s) favorite chocolate confection. Vianne tries more than once to offer the treat that will get an “Aha” from him, including presenting him with one in a special white box. Later she succeeds unexpectedly as you can see here:
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Receiving or giving a box of chocolates (or even savoring hot chocolate) is a welcome experience any time of year.
What is your relationship with chocolate? What is your favorite kind of chocolate?
What is your favorite warm beverage? It’s February, and by now you have tweaked the art of finding comfort in a cup. Is it tea, coffee or a hot toddy?
Maybe it’s hot chocolate!
In promoting the Fifth Season of Downton Abbey, PBS used tea to tantalize. Twitter was chirping with the hashtag #BIGsip and illustrations of how to party like the British:
The tea at these fancy gatherings was probably brewed through ceramic or metal sieves. I doubt there was a tea bag in sight!
Once I was invited to a tea party at my professor’s home. There was a bold disclaimer on the invitation: Tea will NOT be served. Instead, there were other fanciful beverages, none of which was served warm. Twice I invited faculty to my home, and we actually had flavored tea – and coffee.
So, back to the question: What is your favorite warm beverage (and/or treat) this time of year? Spread some sugar, honey, or . . . .
A woman is like a tea bag ~ you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water. Eleanor Roosevelt
Bonus: RANDOM ACTS OF COFFEE! Coffee drinker pays it forward ordering coffee for the next 500 (gasp!) customers at Canadian coffee shop.Read all about ithere!
Remember the days when kisses and hugs displayed affection at the end of hand-written letters? XXX OOO
Then came smiley faces with a circle, two dots for eyes, and curvy mouth, maybe even a dot for the nose. Hugs were shown as parentheses: (((( )))) They still are!
With online communication, showing mad, sad, or glad emotions has become sophisticated, expressed graphically as emoticonswhichcan be divided into three styles, western or European, Asian, and a two-channel style which includes Japanese.When I write an email message, I can choose from these icons shown below. Just hover over the desired icon, click on it, and I can be cool, with glasses, cry, feign innocence, wink, claim my lips are sealed, ask for money, even YELL (last icon).
Facebook has even more choices: Confusion conveyed here!
Some Facebook icons are called stickers. And they are large and sticky! If perchance, you click on one of these, the emoticon swells to a one-inch size, gobbling up your text. I have learned to refrain!
If you want to get really fancy on Facebook, Beep the Meep is available, a fictional alien who appeared in the weekly comic strip Dr. Who Weekly.
If felines are your friends, by all means click on Pusheen the Cat, a roly-poly character in an animated comic series.
Author Angela Ackerman has commented on how writers can use words so they appear as pictures in readers’ minds in her book, The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Emotional Expression co-written with Becca Puglisi. The Amazon overview says this about her guide:
One of the biggest problem areas for writers is conveying a character’s emotions to the reader in a unique, compelling way. This book comes to the rescue by highlighting 75 emotions and listing the possible body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for each. Using its easy-to-navigate list format, readers can draw inspiration from character cues that range in intensity to match any emotional moment.
In other words, show in graphic detail that your character is angry, don’t announce it, easier said than done.
Blogger A. Piper Burgi has posted more vivid word choice suggestions for writers in a recent blog postentitled Increase Your Emotional Vocabulary.
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What do you think of the emoticon craze online? Is it right down your alley or do you think the icons are goofy or fake?
If you are a writer, what are your secrets to conveying emotion with words?
Bonus: A curious story: The man with a frozen smile (Jonathan Kalb, “Give Me a Smile,” The New Yorker, January 12, 2015)
Coming next: Acquainted with Grief: Author Elaine Mansfield Speaks
You are seeing the thumbnail of an animated card waiting for you over on my Facebook page. The festivities in the town square here are set to the tune of Sousa’s Liberty Bell March.
Plain and Fancy 