Django & Friends Storytime

01/02/2019

It's closing in on Midnight. The last few minutes of the first day of 2019. There are a lot of superstitions that go along with the 1st day of January ----. Must have Black eyed peas and greens to insure luck and money. Can't do laundry. Whatever you do that day is how you will spend your year. Well, the Black Eyed Peas (with a smoked turkey drumstick for flavoring) are all but gone. Not quite enough to turn into Miss Ruby's peas and greens soup. So is the cornbread. There is enough of the pot roast and veggies to turn into beef stew tomorrow. I didn't do laundry but the dog got a bath. I vacuumed, cleaned the carpet and mopped. I spent a good portion of the early hours editing a few manuscripts. Working on programming for what just may be a radio show. Listening to songs. Then a good part of the day working on photography and trying to track two or three hawks that circle the area looking for prey. I don't think they have any special superstitious meal needs but who knows without being able to ask them? I also worked on, as a neighbor said "a perfectly good shirt" as she wondered why I was splattering it with paint. So, if what you do and how you end the first day is indicative of your year, this is the scenario: I'm in my pajamas but still paint splattered because I'm not done yet. The Dog is asleep beside me. The Cat is making it very difficult to type-or see my laptop screen. Spiked eggnog has been replaced with Vernor's because the cough still won't go away...and I am listening to more songs that I'm 'dissecting' for an article. All while waiting for an email answering a few more questions. Coming a little closer to my bucket list interview and editing a few more photos. It promises to be a very good year.

09/19/2018

09/16/2018

EVENING WALK

I made a wish on a falling star. Turned out to be a fast moving airplane but some stars fall slower than others. September is a good month. The start of Fall. It was to still in the house so Toby the Killer Chihuahua and I took a walk. I've been staying at my Mom's while rehabbing our house. She lives in a 55+ community of single wide and modular homes. It's usually 70% deserted this time of year. The snowbirds still at their homes in the North. There was a slight breeze moving the night air. The skies pitch black. Stars bright. The half moon straight up and glowing. We walked down a street of shuttered homes where even the stars, moon and new street lights couldn't put a dent in the darkness. My Mom has lived here for 5 years now. Even in high season , 8 pm brought a silence to the neighborhood. Doors closed. Curtains drawn. Not a whisper to be heard. Hurricane
Irma and a year passing changed a few things. Quite a few residents packed it up and moved back North for good. Some others moved off. A few died. A lot of homes went up for sale. Most sold quickly.
Toby, the Great Rabbit Hunter was stalking a trail of a hopper. Sniffing the ground as I stopped in the dark to make out the Big Dipper, Little Dipper and Dog Star. That's when I saw the falling star that was a plane. That's also when I heard laughter rolling across the 9th hole of the golf green. Well, maybe not exactly rolling but when something happens out of the norm, it could be considered as 'rolling'. A flash of white caught Toby's attention and he made a start toward it. But it was a half hearted start because Toby is an old man in dog years and isn't really interested in catching rabbits. He is more into marking every spot that every other dog in the vicinity might wander by and taking a couple of craps on his walks. Which he proceeded to do instead of chasing the rabbit. The rabbit realized this quite quickly and stopped at the edge of the road to chew some more grass and stare at us with a column speaking indifference. I waited for Toby the Crapper to finish, peered in the dark to scoop up his 'gift' in a recycled plastic bag and gave his leash a shake to get him moving. We were headed to the mail boxes. The trash can that sat beside the mailboxes. The direction of the laughter. Two fields over the low rumble of trains switching rails disturbed the night air. Instead of the usual dominant sound it was a backdrop to Spanish words that caught my attention. Standing in the middle of the street, under the yellow glow of one of the new street lamps that were a courtesy of Irma, was an older couple new to the community. Talking with another older lady standing on the stoop of her home. Guess they are actually courtesy of Irma as well. Quite a few of the homes have been bought up the over the last month by refugees from Puerto Rico. I've been watching the transformation of a sleepy community to one bustling with activity: Power washing aluminum siding, scrubbing outdoor furniture...The Lady now on the stoop is out every morning sweeping the road in front of her place. The couple she was talking to lived a half block down. Their small yard has become a veritable garden even in the scorching heat and incessant rain. Every morning that I take Toby out for his morning constitutional I see them on their screened in porch having coffee. They always call out a greeting. Now, my recalled Spanish picks up their gratitude for a fine meal. The sweeper lady thanked them for the conversation and fine bottle of wine. I wondered if they knew each other back on the island.
I nodded as I passed by. Took a small detour to drop off Toby's 'deposit' in the trash bin. Then started on the home stretch. The couple fell in behind me, softly conversing with each other. Well, I didn't want to be rude so I looked back to vocally say 'Good Evening." And remark how it was much to nice out to stay indoors. "Yes. A beautiful evening." The man spoke carefully as his wife nodded her agreement. A short conversation about the pretty moon led into me asking how they were getting along here. Did I mean the community? The city? The State? Did it matter? The man squeezed his wife's hand and both smiled. "We are finally settling in. " He said. "With our own place now it finally feels like home."
I took a turn on the next street. Thinking to hard on his words to want to go back inside so soon. There's a house on the corner that has become a wonderland with lights, raised gardens and statues. I headed that way while Toby the Ever Alert dog sped up a bit when he realized he had new territory to mark. We took in the lights and shadows then walked past it back into a darkness that seemed even more so now. A Shooting Star streaked across the sky. A real falling star this time. I made a quick wish and caught myself smiling at the throwback to childhood. Can you catch a falling star? Some stars fall slower than others. Some fall quicker. Sometimes people do find another home....I started to think about throwing a block party...

07/06/2018

Summer stories. What are you reading and/or writing?

05/02/2018

She stood five foot one in high heels. If she ever wore them. Which , she told me with a smile, she never did. Sisal Woven flip flops was her usual footwear. Hiking boots when she ‘headed into the hills.’ To explore. Pick berries. Gather roots and herbs. Her white hair was cropped close to her head. Her skin smooth, tanned and wrinkle free. She was 76 when I first met her in the lobby of the Orlando airport. She was heading back to her adopted home in Honduras. I was heading someplace or other. We were both at the mercy of airplanes running late. So we talked. She had spent her life teaching school in Pensacola. Had been retired some 12 years. The last day of teaching, when she walked out of the building carrying her box of mementos (from the children, she said, everything else was left behind in case another teacher could use them), she headed to the airport to fly to a new life. She had nothing to hold her back. Married at 18 her husband had been killed in the Korean war less than two years later. There were no children and she never bothered to remarry. She had nieces and nephews. Grands. A few friends. That’s who she had just spent a month visiting.
“Why Honduras?” I asked. Fascinated with this petite, effervescent fearless woman breaking all the stereotypes and modes of her generation. Any generation, really.
“I spun the globe and picked it with a pin.” She said. “After doing research and spending vacations there, I knew I chose right. I found a place in a little village. A two room walk up off the town square. No electricity. But it has a bathroom and running water keeps hot from a cistern on the roof. I have a small generator that keeps the icebox cold. I walk to the market everyday. Lots of fresh vegetables and fish. Now and then I will travel to the seashore but mostly I stay up in the mountains. I have all I need ...and more.”
She started teaching school there just for ‘something to do that would help the ‘mainly mestizo village.’ The children called her Senora G. She was ‘paid’ in vegetables and fruits. Eggs and an occasional chicken.
“They needn’t pay me at all.” She said. “But the families insist. I so enjoy the children. I’m the adopted ‘mamacita.’ “ And her green eyes shone with laughter, love and pride.
Eventually her boarding was called. She left me her address and contact information. Just in case my travels took me her way. I gave her my email. Every now and then I would send her notebooks, pencils, books and other supplies. She always sent a gracious thank you note signed by all the kids she was currently teaching to whatever address I had on the box. One early winter I was heading to a conference in Tegucigalpa and, from the map, her little village looked to be about 75 klicks away. I contacted her and told her I would like to visit. She laughed and told me it was more like 150 but I was more than welcome. I asked her if I could bring her anything.
“A good bottle of sherry.” She said. Her private stash had run out two years ago...and maybe a bottle of Macallan. She had a taste for good Scotch.
I promised her if I could ‘smuggle it in’ I would. I did. Along with two crates filled with clothes, socks, underwear, sundries, candy, school supplies, book bags, canned goods and other donations put together by a friend’s foundation that brought a huge smile to her face and tears to her eyes. Senora G had aged a little but she was tireless in showing me around ‘her’ village. Introducing me to the children, their parents, folks at the markets, shoppe keepers. It seemed she knew everyone and everyone knew her. The transport back to the Capitol was waiting as we reached her home. I walked her up the 3 flights of stone stairs to her spacious 2 rooms and wondered how many times a day she made the trip up and down those stairs. She seemed to read my mind and smiled. “Not as many as I used to.” she nodded.”But they keep me in shape.” We had a cup of that great Honduran coffee. Mine laced with sugar and canned milk. Hers laced with a good dollop of Macallans. I asked if she was going to be heading back to the States anytime. She shook her head.
“Home is here now. So is the heart. They will bury me here and that will be just fine.”

We stayed in contact off and on. High tech eventually reached even her remote small village and the foundation sent her a satellite computer. When the moon was right and the stars were aligned, she could send emails. Not that she did so to often. One day she sent me a note that she was giving the computer to a “young woman who will be taking my place someday.” Time passed. I stopped travelling so much but would still send a box of supplies every now and then. A bottle of sherry and Macallan’s when I could. I would get the same handwritten, multi-signature ‘thank you’ note on the boxes. A more personal reply on the liquor. More time passed. I’ve kept the same email since the beginning of AOL. I don’t use that particular one so often but monitor it just the same. The message came through early on Sunday morning.
“Sending regards from Senora G for all you have done. She has gone to rest now and will see you on the other side. God Bless.”
Macallan’s not my drink of choice but I poured a glass, neat, and toasted the setting sun that night and the strong soul that was Genevieve Greer. Forever in memory as Senora G. And that was just fine.

03/02/2018

Ramblings from Chapter 8 through 16 of "Seems Like Life" (aka 'Some of My Lies May Be True: A Semi Autobiographical Work of Fiction. Maybe.')

The Cuban waitress at the West Caribbean Cafe likes my hair. She asked if it came from a bottle. I said it comes from age. I told my cosmetologist niece about it and she told me ‘girls’, especially Latino girls, came in all the time to ’get that color’. Sort of like I’m trying to go the Emmy Lou Harris route and turn silver white. But the vestiges of blondes just won’t give up. I’m pushing 60. I don’t know when that happened. I don’t think I feel 60. But what’s 60 supposed to feel like? I also don’t think I look it. Or act it. But, again, what is it supposed to look like? How is 60 supposed to act? I guess the aches and pains and stiff joints would be a tell-tale sign. But I’ve had aches and pains and stiff joints since my teen years. When I was 12 I broke my left arm playing King of the Hill with my cousins. I remember the Doctor saying I would probably ‘feel some discomfort’ in middle age. My little finger no longer stretched to play chords on the guitar. That ‘pain’? A little early unless middle age was my 20’s. If so, I outlived it. I blew out my knee playing a pick up soccer game. I remember the tennis coach who plucked me from the city courts while I smacked balls around with a friend, standing in my hospital room crying. I was ‘going to be his champion’. Instead I can always tell when it’s going to rain. Three days ahead. What I can’t tell is when it’s arbitrarily going to pop out of place, blow up like a balloon and force me into a Quasimodo impression as I drag myself across a parking lot. An airport. A floor….Someone tried blowing me off a mountaintop one time and I broke a few bones in my right foot. I could feel the blood filling my boot but I was more concerned about the man I loved dying in my arms as we waited for our driver to make it to a base camp and then back to us with help. We had hired the driver and jeep in San Sebastian, a small village in the tri country regions of Central America, to take us up the mountain. Jake had gotten a line on an arms deal involving the US Government and was set on breaking the story. I had a bad feeling about it but he wouldn’t listen. He knew my ‘bad’ feelings were usually on the money. It was my ‘rep’ afterall. I couldn’t let him go alone. Wouldn’t let him go alone. He tried to make me stay in the Village. We still had a lot to do and our wedding was only 3 days away. A rifle shot, blown tire and a tumble down the mountain forever altered those plans. Altered my life too. I buried him on what was to have been our wedding day. Then walked away from hard core journalism for the most part of forever. It was more than Jake’s death. After help reached us and pried his dead body out of my arms, I made it back to the shared newsroom in San Sebastian, pulled his notes together, adding what we had found out and finished the story under Jake’s byline. I had just typed -30- when my friend/mentor/editor JC Ross walked into the room with Zeke O'Brian, a Stars & Stripes reporter. JC...the man responsible for my start. Hiring me on the spot at a luncheon in Waterford, Michigan for Phyllis Schafly, the Anti- Equal Rights Amendment
speaker, as we caught each other bouncing a fork against what was supposed to be baked chicken. Muttering at the same time how we always thought ‘Rubber Chicken Lunches’ were a cliche. When I showed up in his office the next day he exclaimed he could not hire me. I was too young to even get a passport to travel alone. I told him I’d already quit my job...Okay I was a stringer at a local paper and they didn’t know I was still in High School either. I worked the office, rewrote stories, took stories off the wires, transcribed those coming in over the phone and kept the reporters moving. Including JC, who went back on the road, rather ‘airwaves’ , because I was just ‘damned to young’. JC, who made me promise, as a criteria for employing me, that I continue with my education. I took an early out in high school, passed the exams in a top 5 percentile and started classes at the junior college, then University of Michigan, while waiting to be ‘legal.’ I was 16. JC, who came off the road one day, found a story waiting for him on his desk about a secret faction of the K*K operating out of a Church basement. Names, dates and times included. He remarked that it was an excellent, well written piece and just as he started to ask who wrote it realization sank in and he literally groaned. I showed him my new passport. He allowed once the story hit print I was going to need that passport. He was right. When the story hit I was in Central America covering some political happenings. I was 18. JC, who was going to begrudgingly walk me down the aisle in the little San Sebastian Church. Zeke had gotten wind of the ‘accident’, contacted JC, and they headed to the hospital I was supposed to be at. Knowing it would be best for me not to be there. I had already been grilled by the ‘policia’, and the US government ‘guys’, and stuck with my ‘out for a ride in the countryside with my fiance’ story. There was no way I was going to the Government ‘hospital’ and so I disappeared in transit. That was a better option than risk being 'disappeared' once I got there. JC’s relief upon seeing me turned to concern when he saw the bloody boot, then consternation as he read the story I handed him. Before he could say anything, Zeke picked me up and carried me to, first, a ‘local’ doctor who cut off my boot, patched up my foot, put a soft cast on and was paid by cash. Second, to a ‘safe’ house until he “unruffled some feathers” and ran interference to get me home. Or at least out of the Country. On the day I was to leave , JC showed up. He told me the story was Pulitzer material...a fitting tribute to Jake...but he couldn’t print it. To do so would not only unravel a carefully constructed web but also endanger many lives. I said I understood. And that was why I couldn’t do the job anymore. When you can no longer print the truth because of ‘politics and reasoning’ what was the use of it? I walked away. I was 27. I felt like I was 100. JC called to check on me when I hit stateside. He asked me to “take some downtime. Six months or so. Grieve. Recharge.” Six months led into a year. Then two. He kept contact. Then a plane he was travelling in slammed into a hillside and there were no survivors. McIntosh Publications was sold to a conglomerate and I figured I was out of the game for good. Started on my ‘second’ life. That was two lives ago. I went to work for others. Worked for myself. Helped raise some children. Looked out after family. Started a few businesses. Did some travel writing. Purple prose stuff that agitated some of the hard core journalists still in my circle.Those still out there fighting the good fight. Trying to right some wrongs. Getting slapped about, caught in the wrong place and, occasionally, giving their all for a byline. I’ve written and performed more than my share of eulogies. Said goodbye to pieces of the past that came haunting. Stared off at more than one horizon trying to make sense of it all. I skitter through the news, politics and reasonings, and all I’m sure of in the absolute is that the old music is still the best music. That the important things in life are family and friends who mean something. That people come and go and, occasionally, reappear again. That in the greater scheme of things age should be the least of considerations and that change isn't found in a bottle.

11/18/2017

I knew you before all the others.
Before your name became commonplace in the pages of history.
Before Our People spoke it softly when held in conversation.
I knew your deep sense of trust. In yourself. Your people. Your Country.
How, when presented with right and wrong, you truly believed the people would choose the right.
Because, to you, that was the only path to be taken.
With trust came faith.
You carried it on your sleeve for all nations to see.
Like lovers carry their hearts.
I knew the bravery.
The firmly embedded spirit that kept you in the forefront leading the way against all injustices.
Carrying on the battle of our people.
Faced with the inevitable, you marched forward to your fate. Head held high and jaw firm, never did you allow one ounce of fear to invade this private moment.
Leaving to those of us left behind a warm smile and the shout to "Carry On!"
Carry on For Freedom. For justice. For our Legacy....
You pushed ahead to pave the way for whatever lies in the unknown.
Yes, I knew you before ANYONE.
The deep Pride I always held in you only blossomed fuller with the ages.
And the realization of the great many deeds you accomplished served to fulfill my faith in you.
Now, when people come to ask the questions about you and all that you stood for...I proudly look them in the eyes as my own fill with the hot tears of grief and pride, and tell them true...
I Knew Him Before ALL the others...

09/08/2017

Call this one 'The What I've Learned From Life's Surprises'. Some years ago when I was in a Central American tri country mountain area, I awoke before dawn on the day I was to be leaving and couldn't get back to sleep. Packed and ready, I decided to go out and take some sunrise over the mountains pictures...and find a cup of coffee. One hotel worker was at the desk and shared his pot of coffee with me. Cup in one hand , camera in the other I went outside and started walking away from the hotel. I was struck by an oddness in the air. A tangible, palpable natural electricity. A few minutes later I was also struck by a rumbling and shaking. Then horrendous sounds of trees screaming, bricks crashing and a feeling that the World was coming to an end. When the shaking finally ceased and I picked myself up off the ground there was an eerie silence. It lasted long enough for me to wander if my hearing was shot. Not a bird. Not a cricket. And, then, a buzzing that grew into a wail. I headed back to a pile of bricks that had been the hotel. Found the front desk clerk, Gilleo, stumbling around. Discerning we had just experienced an earthquake , we set about trying to find more survivors. By mid morning we had pulled a number of people out of the rubble and had many more join us from the small village about a mile away. Gil, who was working his way through medical school, had set up a reasonable facsimile of a triage unit. A cooking area had been set up and we were gathering whatever food stuffs, blankets, sheets, first aid kits and anything else that could be used, into the area. I was amazed at the resourcefulness of the locals. The willingness of most of the handful of guests to pitch in. The inaneness of a few who complained relentlessly. And the couple who thought their best contribution was prayers. It took 5 days for help to reach us. Clearing a pathway up the Mountain. The best and worst of humanity was on full display. But mostly the best. The lessons learned during this trial was to always believe the good in people. Learn to look past frailties in those to weak minded to adapt. Be prepared. Think fast on your feet. And know, in Heart and Soul, that fear is a state of mind that can be harnessed. Once harnessed, it makes a powerful ally. The phrase that kept coming up was "We are in this together. We have to work together."
And, so, with this coming Storm and the unknown being brought with it, I ask you to look deep within yourself. Find that unwavering truth that you will face and conquer all obstacles. Once that is realized you then have the power to help others confront their own problems. Prepare. Treat each other with kindness. Lend a helping hand. And, remember, we are all in this together. Stand together. And , please, Stay Safe!