In Town, the End of an Era. In County? No Change. (Warning: Rant)

You'd expect that a town with a population of about two thousand people, a majority of whom are active seniors, would be..."conservative" in the sense of not eager to change anything for the sake of change.

Most of the time, in my town, you'd be right.

Gate City, the town proper, lost a good councilman just before the election.

https://cartertrent.com/tribute/details/324228/Allan-Roberts/obituary.html

 "I didn't think you liked him? He wasn't one of those bald blue-eyed men you fight against the tendency to dislike, so why didn't you like him, anyway? Because he was a Republican?"

I didn't dislike Mr. Roberts at all. Au contraire! As a widow with black hair and a top-heavy figure, I rate other people's husbands based on how completely they leave me alone. I ignore them. If I'm friendly with married people, it's with the wife not the husband. But I do like and respect other people's husbands when they treat their wives right and have nothing to say to me. I'm disgusted by the way small-town types carry on because "He never shook my hand the way he shook her hand at church!!!" I prefer that other people's husbands find someone else's hand, preferably a man's, to shake. Councilman Roberts rated high. He was loved and will be missed. 

I live and vote in the county, so when I went to vote last week, I received a ballot with no town councilmen on it. 

Oh, such a ballot! Lots of positions were on it. "Be sure to fill out both sides!" the election judges were telling every single person as people filled out their paper ballots with normal ballpoint pens. 

On one side of the ballot, in exactly one slot, there were two names. The one D incumbent was being challenged by an R. 

Otherwise, the incumbents, all R's so far as I know, were running unopposed.

No points for guessing that the one R challenging a D for a position in local government won the election--though, for the position in question, party politics don't make much real difference.

This is a town that was painted blue in the 2020 election by one thing. Our D senators sent out letters and e-mails that told everyone, in essence, "I'm trying for all I'm worth to send you money but that mean old President Trump won't let me." Those of us who were paying attention knew that Trump actually did want to send people those second COVID handout checks, but wanted to strip a lot of additional boondoggles out of the bill authorizing the said checks. But a lot of people weren't paying attention, because COVID actually happened around the time the election took place, and there was a lot more interest in who'd had it and how bad it was. Also a lot of people who were paying attention were not Trump fans. There was a third party candidate. That candidate got some votes, not because anyone thought wossname was going to win, but because people wanted to vote against both Trump and Biden. Nevertheless, although there hadn't been a lot of Biden campaign signs actually set up in lawns, a lot of Biden campaign signs were brought in and set up outside the polls on Election Day.

Two years ago we had a lot of people who wanted to vote for Democrats. Where are they now? 

As a guess they're looking at what the Party of the Burro has wrought, in the past three years, and hiding themselves from public view in shame. 

Some years the D party has campaigned on things like peace, fixing potholes, postponing the implosion of Social Security, and other good things. Some years Ds have actually accomplished good things. But this year? Hello? 

Wages have dwindled. Prices have doubled. Businesses have gone under. Censorship is being tolerated. Specifically, censorship of the fact that government nannyism tried to bully people into having vaccines that turned out to be neither safe nor effective. 

Nobody has a right to be angry about this--we knew it has always been a strong possibility with new vaccines--but people are, especially if their vaccinated relatives died. I don't, personally, feel especially angry about the possibility that the COVID vaccine that he wanted to show people was safe killed the last man I'm likely to be able to love in any carnal sense of the word. He wasn't young; he'd been ill for a long time. He'd fought off cardiovascular disease by staying physically active, and Lyme Disease had interfered with that; who knows how many non-fatal strokes and heart attacks he'd had. But it does seem odd that, instead of a fatal stroke, he suddenly developed post-vaccine cancer. It does fit a pattern that makes people want to vote in an administration that will overhaul its policy on attempts to allow government to try to manage people's health.

Our national income is down, our national debt is up, yet we're pouring money into a foreign war...and what are Ds doing about it? Spouting inflammatory rhetoric in support of something that is not a nation, or anywhere close to being one, and ought to be stifled by treating them as the psychopathic murderers they are. Do you care about Palestinian children? I do. I want people to stop encouraging the parents of Palestinian children to imagine that what Hamas did can possibly have good results. Encourage them to surrender and beg for mercy. (This web site takes no sides in international disputes, but we're not talking about an international dispute here. We're talking about punishment for common criminals, or, in this case, uncommonly despicable ones.)

Our experiments with small-scale, controllable socialism--old-age and disability pensions, college scholarships, government meddling in patient/doctor relationships--are ruining our budget, damaging our society, aggravating poverty...and what are Ds doing about that? Screaming that everything and everybody is "racist," that's what. Making no positive contribution whatsoever.

I've voted for Ds in the past and I may vote for some in the future. In fact, in our little local election, I voted for the D incumbent; her party politics don't matter and I had no objection to her job performance, nor had I heard if other people did. But in any election where party politics do matter, at the present time there is just no positive reason to vote for the Party of the Current Administration That Is Doing Nothing Right At All. 

I never used to think a presidential administration could get much worse than Lyndon Johnson's. The current administration has shown that that thing can be done.

I say the administration because I don't think it's President Biden's fault. I think he's been a party spokesman rather than an independent leader all his life, and it's not really his fault that now, when he looks like a representative of people who are heavily medicated for cardiovascular disease, who tend to be easily confused, his party has been hijacked by extremists whose policies can fairly be called insane. 

Robert Kennedy is not exactly a conservative, politically. His whole family have been famous for being liberal, but in a sane way that can fairly be called liberal, as distinct from Loony Left. Kennedy's stated positions on issues definitely aren't Republican but there's a reason why, as an Independent third-party challenger, he's getting a lot of support from conservatives. Because he represents the kind of attention to the actual concerns of the public, together with an awareness of reality, that the D Party used to be, and ought to be, and has currently ceased to be, that's why!

D readers, this web site loves you, but you have got to stop listening to the extremists--R's are really good at ignoring their extremists--and start talking to the people you allow to represent you. We do not need to be a one-party nation but nobody can possibly support the party that is steering this administration.

The Last Years of Oogesti

Well, obviously Oogesti was not his name. It comes from u gv sdi, which is a Cherokee nickname for a possum, though the word for "possum" they officially teach now is si-qua-u-tse-tsa-s-di. It was what I called a friend of the Cat Sanctuary who grinned, growled, and hauled away the recycling, for a few years. His real name was of English origin and will not be mentioned online, since his children are still alive. 

He was some sort of distant relative of mine. On the Cherokee side, though he looked White. I never paid much attention to him until his wife died, around the same time my husband died. He was still forty years older than I was but he started going out and drifting around just to see if anyone had anything he could do to keep busy. 

Oogesti had a big television set and a big reclining armchair. Some day, when he could no longer go out and make himself useful, he planned to use those things. For a long time, even if he and I cooked at his house, he avoided the armchair, left the television set alone, and sat at the table or on the couch. 

I liked his little old house. I expected that at some point I'd be the housekeeper and home nurse, and put a claim on the house as part of my wages. That's a fairly common arrangement in my part of the world, when people's children all have their own homes. I used to take a load of laundry out to Oogesti's house and clean the place while the laundry was going around. 

He talked about dates and marriage and "girlfriends." I thought he wouldn't be a bad stepfather to have, but it soon became obvious that Oogesti didn't want to remarry any more than my mother did. Neither of them needed money. They were set in different ways. Still, when some of The Nephews stayed at Mother's house, Oogesti was always useful and welcome there. The kids loved him, and he them. 

They liked my Significant Other in a shy, awestruck way. He was serious, usually working on something when they saw him. They watched him work and made sure they didn't get in the way. But Oogesti would sit down and read their favorite storybooks or play little-kid games with them. They called him by his given name and, shortly after arriving at "Grandma's House," they asked where he was.

Oogesti and his wife had had a Dog Sanctuary for some time. When Dusty the Shelter Cat was not working out for me, Oogesti adopted her, and she became the Queen of the Cat Sanctuary on his side of town. Dusty had seemed like a little spring kitten at the shelter but, when new cats joined her and Oogesti, she presented herself to them as a tough old street fighter. Somehow it seemed that new cats always were willing to humor Dusty and act scared of her (she was a small, slim cat), and Dusty always softened up and even acted friendly with some other cats before they found their homes. 

Mother was in the process of losing all of her and a half-dozen other relatives' savings on an investment that might have been profitable if she hadn't tried to make it grow too fast. There were always things to do there, too. 

Good times were had by all for several years. Well, less good times, too, but that's beside the point here. Anyway, one foggy night, as he was taking me home, Oogesti's vision and driving were so bad that I volunteered to drive, and he thought I'd better. In the next week, Oogesti scheduled cataract surgery. 

"Lie down as soon as you get home," he was advised, as was his daughter, who made time in her busy schedule to take him home from surgery. "After that, stay at home and lie down as much as possible for ten days, to prevent hemorrhage and loss of all benefits of the operation."

I walked out toward town on the day after the operation and saw Oogesti sitting on a rock beside the road. "I'm not going to stay home, but I thought I'd better not try to walk too far uphill at one time," he explained. He could see clearly. He was delighted with the results of the operation and planned to have it done on the other eye as soon as the surgeon thought advisable. He wanted to drive around town telling everyone how well his operation had gone. More good times were had by all, all the rest of that summer.

The second operation was done in early October, 2013. The day after the operation was a fine, mild day, and of course Oogesti was out on the road, sharing the good news. He found me sorting a load of plastic and metal for recycling and started to load it into his car.

Then he said, "Excuse me," and walked up the road, around a corner of the hill. I remember that the old slang phrase, "Off to do a Billy Carter," popped into my mind as I continued bagging up and loading recycling. (The service we used asked that recycling be sorted into bags; I used up lots of plastic shopping bags.) After five or ten minutes had passed, I thought it might be a good idea to check on him.

He was lying face down in the middle of the road. He had fallen forward, bumped his nose, and spilled a good deal of blood into the sand.

"Are you all right?" I stooped down beside him.

"Dizzy," he said. "Can't see."

"Hemorrhage?"

"Yeah. That." He was disgusted.

His pulse was normal. "Any sort of pain?"

"Only where I fell!" He was thoroughly disgusted. 

"Can you get up out of the road before anybody drives past?"

"Help me." 

"Do you want to call the doctor?"

"No. See if I feel better." He was in denial.

"Should I get my phone, anyway? It's in the house."

"Mine's in the car. But just stay here for a while."

We had been sitting on a log beside the road for another five or ten minutes when the Professional Bad Neighbor drove up. Several people in his family are born with a deformed face. It looks like a lopsided grin and can be considered cute when they are young, at least until you realize that it is not a smile. Any real expression does grotesque things to their faces. The Bad Neighbor got out of his truck, looking grotesque, and shouted, "What's the matter with him?"

"Fell and bumped his nose," I said. 

"Shouldn't you call a doctor?"

"He didn't want one..."

"He ought to see one," said the Bad Neighbor. He knew Oogesti's real name, and shouted it out. "Do you want me to call an ambulance for you? You need to see a doctor."

Nothing was wrong with Oogesti's hearing. Cell phone whipped out. Button pressed to turn it on. "Yes, call them," Oogesti said, facing the facts at least. He'd been wrong, and now he was blind, with no hope of restoration even of blurry vision ever again.

The Young Grouch drove up. The way he's acted sometimes when people surprised him at home, I thought he might decide to beat up the Bad Neighbor. He recognized Oogesti, though, not as a relative of his but as a friend of his grandfather's and uncle's, and came over to us. "Would it be better for him to sit in the truck?" Oogesti recognized his voice, gave the Young Grouch and me his arms, and let us guide him over to sit in the Young Grouch's truck. It wasn't much but the young man wanted to do something, and Oogesti let him. 

At this time none of us knew the Professional Bad Neighbor for what he was. All I remember noticing about him was that he stayed on the scene, trying to give the Life Saving Crew the impression that he was the grown-up and the Young Grouch and I were children. I remember finding that annoying, but less annoying that it would have been back when he was wasting a perfectly good opportunity to do the world a favor and get killed in Vietnam, when the Young Grouch and I really were children. 

Then the ambulance rolled up, and some more strong young men started to lead Oogesti into the ambulance, and he lost it. I'm not sure whether it was that he didn't know their voices, or was afraid lying on his back might do more damage, or was just starting to feel the emotional weight of what he'd lost. 

"It's all right," I said, "they're only taking you to the hospital."

"Don't need a hospital."

"Where else is the doctor going to see you?"

He settled down and let himself be strapped in, and then I was sitting in the front of the ambulance, filling out a paper, tucking Oogesti's watch and glasses into my pocket. I thought I ought to go to the hospital to help them locate his daughter; but the EMTs said they'd be taking Oogesti to the hospital in the helicopter. I'd have to get myself to the hospital.

No sooner had this information sunk in than another neighbor's car rolled up. "Where are you going?"

"To the hospital. Mr. -- got up too soon after surgery and has to go back."

That was an interesting story, so the neighbor was glad to drive me to the hospital. I thought it would have been nice if she'd stayed to take me back, but she didn't. Driving only five miles per hour over the legal limit, we beat the helicopter to the hospital by a good fifteen minutes.

I told the emergency room staff I'd come "with" the patient who'd be arriving by helicopter any minute now, gave his name and age, the name of the doctor who'd removed the cataracts, his address, the names of his children. "That's all," a nurse said. "Emergency patients can't have visitors and we can't discuss anything with anyone but the next of kin. You can go now."

I walked out just in time to see the helicopter land. I looked, but I'd seen Oogesti the last time I ever would see him when we'd loaded him into the ambulance. 

He was eighty-seven years old. He remembered the tuberculosis epidemic; he'd seen people die, but he'd never had the disease or the antibiotic that was used to prevent it. He had been ill exactly once in his life, with a gallstone, which had been quickly treated. He'd retired from a government job after thirty years of good service. He'd sung in a band that sold several records. He'd been made an honorary elder of the Lakota Nation--although, and because, he'd been unable to document that he was part Cherokee. He had a great-grandchild who looked Cherokee, as he said most of his siblings and cousins did. He'd been recognized by one of those Special Resolutions, in the state legislature, as an artist. Like most of my relatives when they get to that age, he'd had another forty or fifty years' worth of things he wanted to do, but he'd known he'd had a longer and better life than most humans. 

Mother's house was close to the hospital. I walked out to tell her the news; we had dinner and did a few errands, and she took me home. 

Now it was entirely up to Oogesti's children to tell me whether he'd even survived. None of them ever told me a thing. He'd been married twice. The first wife, still living with one of her children, had walked out because she was tired of Oogesti's lame-brain extrovert company. Her children were barely on speaking terms with their father but had made it clear that they were opposed to the idea of another stepmother, if Oogesti had been serious about giving them one, which I don't think he ever was. The daughter of the wife who had died had been friendly when she was ahead of me in school, but I thought the idea of a stepmother who was younger than she was might cause her to panic too--never mind its being a joke--and I'd avoided her too. A few days after the trip to the hospital, a man who looked like Oogesti walked up and said "I've come to get my father's car," and I said, "Take his watch and glasses, too, while you're here," and there was an end of it. 

I thought Oogesti had probably died, or had a stroke, in the emergency room. He was strong enough to survive the hemorrhage and intelligent enough to adjust to being blind, I thought. But if he was alive--patients had phones in the hospital. He certainly knew my phone number. He'd be calling everybody to report on the outcome of whatever had been done about the hemorrhage. He'd call me, for sure, either to tell me to come out and be his housekeeper, or to tell me whether his sister out west had officially invited him to move in with her. Whenever we'd talked about the housekeeper job he'd always said he'd prefer, if possible, to live with his sister. Either way, it was not in Oogesti's nature not to tell me what was going on. So my phone didn't ring, and the phone at his house had been disconnected, and after a few months the newspaper reported that his little house was up for sale. So I figured he'd died, and his horrid son had been so opposed to the idea of another stepmother, even younger than the first one, that nobody had even notified me of the funeral. 

Actually it turned out that his older children were holding him incommunicado. The last time I saw Oogesti alive was almost five years before he died--in 2018. I never saw an obituary in the newspaper. It was 2020 before I thought of checking online, and saw that an obituary had indeed been posted, saying that "the family's wishes" were to have no funeral. Oogesti's older children did not want to act polite to any of his friends.

He might have been a difficult patient. He might have been unreasonable. Knowing Oogesti, I'd guess that he probably was those things. He could be very annoying even while healthy. How he reacted to having his own plans and wishes for "real retirement" totally discarded, I would imagine, must not have been a pleasant scene to watch.

Maybe they honestly wanted to get to know their father before he died. Maybe they did; maybe a bond was formed; maybe Oogesti felt honored by his children in some way. I hope so.

Meanwhile everyone else's lives went on. Most of what the world needs to know about my life is already on this web site, somewhere or other. The world does not need to know anything about anyone else's life. Except that, over those years when everyone thought Oogesti was dead, and then the years when he really was dead, my neighborhood was not as friendly a place as it used to be. Nobody really quarrelled with anybody. Once in a while people still spoke pleasantly and did nice things. But less often. Unpleasant things happened and suspicions arose. Some of the suspicions, when spoken aloud, were indignantly rejected--but someone was certainly trying to make the neighborhood less pleasant than it had been.

All my life I've been well aware that it was a great blessing to live in a neighborhood where doors weren't locked. Now they are. 

Nobody wanted to recognize a harassment campaign when we first saw it. Maybe an animal broke something, carried something off, knocked something over. (And in some cases a four-legged animal really did.) Maybe the wind blew a door open, the damp air caused nails to work their way out of walls, the earthquake caused things to fall off the shelves and land all the way outside the fully enclosed shed. Maybe we'd forgotten where we'd put things that went missing. Right, and maybe the water line burst because it had frozen--in July. Maybe a chilled, slow-moving snake just blundered up toward Gulegi's house, in May--maybe snakes find ways to chill themselves on warm nights! But surely, if a human being was doing the kind of stupid pranks that were being done, it had to be a kid. No full-grown man with a job would be sneaking around in the middle of the night picking screws out of door latches so doors wouldn't stay shut, releasing mice and rats in batches into cellars, pulling rain gutters off roofs...Even when you hear a noise like footsteps on your roof and like a claw hammer prying out nails, you tend to believe it was really just squirrels. But around the time some of the leaks in my roof reopened after having been fixed, I heard noises like footsteps and a claw hammer.

Long story short: that's what Professional Bad Neighbors do, when they want to acquire a lot of land for less than the owners would consuder as a price, especially when the owners like living where they do and aren't interested in selling. In a family where the average IQ score is high, the Professional Bad Neighbor was "the smart one" before I came along. He's intelligent, in a sick way. He didn't get much opportunity to be creative or clever on his job. He's made it a hobby to try to "run the (families) off" our ancestral land, which we have so carefully preserved.

I heard "Maybe X did that," and "Would Y have done that?" and I'm quite sure that X and Y heard "Maybe Priscilla did that," too.

So one day, about two years after Oogesti really died, I went into town and heard, "People are saying you killed Oogesti. Saying they found his body in the ditch beside the road!" 

"Say WHAAAT," I screamed, and "Who said that? Where'd they get a crazy story like that? I never heard for sure that he was dead, but if he is, he died in the hospital. That was years ago. When did you hear such a tale?"

"It's been all over town--this summer!"

"Who could have started it? His children know better than that, and don't stand to gain anything from it--so who could possibly..." 

"All I heard was, they found him beside the road..."

"Well, all I say is, it's not a good idea for anybody to go around repeating stories like that! Prozac Dementia is what it sounds like. Pure dementia!" 

I went home and filed that under the inexplicable random unpleasantness of a morally corrupt world. I have loved, and lost, and missed, quite a few other people more than I ever did Oogesti. I listened to his stories, because they were interesting, and let him make himself useful when he could, and was prepared to be his housekeeper in exchange for his house; that was about all. That might well have been more than his other "buddies" and "girlfriends" felt for him. But who could be so nasty...

A little later I heard the Professional Bad Neighbor boasting about his successes in bad-neighborship, and all became clear. Nobody seriously believed Oogesti was murdered. Anyone who knows his real name can find his official obituary. He died, more than ninety years old, in a medical care facility approved by the Nanny State. But someone who ought to have been able to remember finding Oogesti beside a road--sitting on a log, on the steep bank above a road that has no ditch--was nasty enough to have spread an outright lie. For a Professional Bad Neighbor, a lie no one could possibly take seriously is minor. He's done so many things that were worse.

It's been about a year, and from time to time, from someone who knows very well that nobody "killed" Oogesti, I still hear: "What did happen to  poor old Oogesti?" 

This is what.

Status Update: Single Again

The private person known to this website as my Significant Other stopped fighting early this morning.

He'd been fighting Lyme Disease for years. His best season was 2020, while "Roundup" was off the market. In early 2021, feeling confident, he wanted to have the coronavirus vaccine first and show other people that it was safe. Toward the end of 2021, he called to tell me he was going in for surgery and would call again afterward. He never did call me again. He said a few words to family members, and his Tracfone was paid up in case he wanted to use it, but apparently he never called anybody. 

When he and I were in school, we read about the heroes of medical research in the older generation, Walter Reed and Jesse Lazear, who worked together to prove that yellow fever was mosquito-borne not airborne. Dr. Reed lived to receive the rewards for the study. Dr. Lazear died of yellow fever. 

There will be a proper obituary, giving his name, age, real-world biography, and all that, in due time. It will not appear at this web site.

The World Without The Queen

Queen Elizabeth II died at the age of 96, having been ill but not disabled, having lived to see her great-grandchildren, having been Queen for as long as people used to believe they were supposed to be alive. 

Do all blogs have to mention these facts? Is it even appropriate that they do? I'm not even one-quarter English; Mother's English ancestor came to the Carolina coast in the early seventeenth century, and during the intervening years his descendants married Irish, French, and German Americans. I never lived in England. I never saw the Queen. My husband, who was born a British subject and had spent a little time in England, and his brother, who lived there for several years, were anti-monarchists. Blogging about Britain's loss of their Queen feels a bit like trespassing at a funeral.

Then, of course, somebody had to repost the recording of the British crowd waving little American flags as "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played at Buckingham Palace. Right. That crowd ought to understand. 

In a remote way it did mean something to me, probably to all the women who were little girls in the 1960s and 1970s, that Britain had a Queen Regnant and Prince Consort. There were people, back then, whose mission was to discourage little girls in order to give little boys better chances at jobs and scholarships. Those people wanted little girls to imagine that there was just something proper, something feminine, about backing down and slacking off and being frivolous and making sure always to come in second so that someone male could come in first. Men were supposed to make the decisions and women were supposed to cheer for the men...Er. Um. Except that the United Kingdom had a Queen, a wise mother figure who knew when each of the Empire's daughter nations had grown up and waved and smiled and conceded independence to those nations. Long ago in the bad old days when England had Kings, our ancestors had to fight a war to get ourselves recognized as a separate country, but now the United Kingdom had a Queen who was letting the other former colonies be as free as they wanted to be.

Of course the decision to do that had not been made by the Queen entirely and alone. When I look back on the mania for all things British in the American pop culture of my childhood, what stands out is that Britain had lost a lot of money in the war. Buying everything they shipped out was a way to show support, so we bought all those books and songs about people who were actually poor, but in such a, well, classy way. Heating bedrooms only with a hot-water bottle or a hot brick, making meals of tea with jam and bread, not putting ice in drinks, walking or bicycling instead of driving, not being "on the phone" or having "all the mod. con.," sounded like good things when the British did them. Americans who made that sort of frugal choices tended, in the 1960s, to awfulize them and suggest that "having to" do without every fad anybody was selling was the sort of trauma that forced people to turn to lives of crime. Despite the old stereotype of Britain having been divided into a class of decadent insensitive rich people and a class of miserable malnourished poor people, in my youth Britain was giving the world a powerfully inspiring message of liberation for the less wealthy. My parents weren't rich so, although Dad had no English ancestry at all, they encouraged us to revel in aristocratic English-style frugality and look down on extravagance.

Part of this aristocratic frugality was, of course, having a Queen, who had been pretty as a fairy-tale princess, who had Crown Jewels and royal robes for a few ceremonial occasions, but who was setting a fashion for sensible, practical clothes. Her skirts weren't impractically long or short, her clothes weren't fussy or frilly, her look didn't change much from year to year. She'd been a Girl Guide. She'd been a tough, practical, thoroughly modern princess, a role model for all little girls. She usually wore things that were suitable for work because, as a princess, she did work.

The other countries that had been colonies were, of course, getting their independence so easily because Britain couldn't afford any more wars. Still, if the British Empire had still been governed by greedy, arrogant people, heavier taxes and more blatant exploitation of the colonies might have seemed like a more prudent option than just celebrating their independence. The wormier sort of people asked publicly why they should even be polite about the passing of "a symbol of colonialism." That might have been a reasonable question to ask at King George's funeral, but how the Queen, so often seen giving her blessings on newly independent nations, got to be a symbol of colonialism is unclear to me. In fact, as the Queen reached middle age, the world was hearing a good deal about "Mother England" and "her daughter" countries, and the Queen didn't make a bad symbol of the prudent mother who sends her teenaged children out into the world with real, unselfish concern for their well-being.

By the 1980s the British economy was, if not as robust as people wanted, at least on its own feet, and other ethnic groups demanded their turn to dominate pop culture in the U.S. In the U.K. the Queen paved the way for other women to be elected to positions of official power, showing the world even more abundantly that the nation's best years of peace and prosperity have come during the long reigns of its Queens.  

The world became accustomed to Britain's having a Queen. Our expectations of what it means to grow up as a man or a woman changed during, and partly as a result of, her reign. Without denying that nearly all people are born with one kind of anatomy or the other and are likely to be happiest when they follow their anatomical destiny, we let our idea of women's anatomical destiny mature; we accepted that being "feminine" eventually ceases to mean being a pretty girl and comes to mean being a wise, responsible, authoritative grandmother. The top military leaders of the world will probably always be men, even if humankind learns to wage its wars through trade or at least technology. The best way to lead a nation or an organization may not be through war, or even based on the methods people learn in war. The best leaders in times of peace may be women--mature, gracious women who know when and how to back away and let other people do things for themselves. 

Britain has laid down "the White Man's Burden" of appropriating his neighbors' wealth and accepted, instead, the "burden" of leading the world in actual achievements. In theory a man, or men, could have presided over this historic change. We are about to see how well a man who's been trained for the role for seventy years can perform it. Meanwhile, women around the world may give thanks that we've seen how well world leadership can be done by a woman.

So it's appropriate that the rest of the world join the British in honoring the passing of Qieen Elizabeth II, and in praying that King Charles III and his son will be worthy heirs.

Pre-Obituary: Grandma Bonnie Peters Moves On

KANSAS CITY, Missouri.--Bonnie Dale Lassiter Peters, 18 January 1935 -- 9 August 2020

The nurse, teacher, patient advocate, life coach, Health & Temperance Minister, Celiactivist, cook, restaurant supplier, frozen-food entrepreneur, church youth group leader, active grandparent, model of active seniority, and less-successful writer known as Grandma Bonnie Peters has taken her next step forward.

Upon reaching a plateau in recovery from a stroke, which was where she was the last time I visited her, she had some symptoms tested and learned that she had liver cancer.

She was 85 years old. She had been the home nurse for patients whose liver cancer had reached the almost unbearably disgusting stage at which they were sent home from hospitals. She rejected chemotherapy and planned, for this summer, The Last Road Trip, during which she planned to revisit scenes of her childhood in Kansas and Oklahoma in the company of relatives in Missouri.

Though willing to continue helping her friends at the retirement project, if able, on return from The Last Road Trip, she was making no commitments and was eating only a few bites of food at each meal before the Trip. On being notified of her plan to take the Trip, I said to relatives who doubted that she had the strength to survive it, "That's the point."

According to her younger daughter, who was driving, GBP rented two rooms for the two of them for a week, in a suburban hotel outside Kansas City. Her plan was to go to bed early Sunday night, wake up early Monday morning, and spend the day with relatives. She never woke up.

She wanted people to remember her as someone who could still walk, talk, make plans, and manage her own affairs, and so they will. Though she never recovered the fortitude to walk back up to the Cat Sanctuary, she will be remembered as the retirement project resident who practiced walking with great regularity and determination, and encouraged others trying to recover to practice walking around the track at the project, also.

She was the one who responded to the news that friends and relatives were postponing visits, for fear of infecting project residents with last winter's flu, by saying, "I'm here in my friend's flat, helping nurse her through the flu." She wanted to die "with her boots on" and almost literally did.

A lifelong advocate of simple memorial services, GBP was minimally insured to cover the cost of only the simplest. Following an open-coffin service in Missouri, which was attended by the disappointed relatives, she will be cremated there, and the ashes will be disposed of at a simple service on the Virginia/Tennessee border next week.

She was the daughter of Everett McCoy Lassiter and Ruby Jewel Garrett Lassiter ("Texas Ruby"). She was preceded in death by her sister, Mabel Lassiter Kerby; her husband, George Albert Peters; and two sons, David Floyd Peters (1969-1982) and John Kevin Peters (who lived fewer than 24 hours in 1984). She is survived by two daughters, four grandchildren, a large extended family, and many friends, students, and patients.

Remembering Senator McCain

Everyone knows that funerals induce gushes of emotion. Sometimes the emotions people express still surprise me. 

I remember the year John Kennedy died...not the President who was murdered, whom I remember only from old news video, but his son, who was about my age and used to publish a cheerful little magazine that aimed to get ordinary people to think about public affairs. I boarded a commuter train, and a regular rider got on at the next station, crying real tears, saying to people she knew, "I was just thinking about that poor little Caroline Kennedy. Now all of her family's gone!" I thought that was unusual, and wondered whether the woman knew the family personally. I mentioned that to a Black friend who said, "That's why they say White people are coldhearted. I don't believe you ever cried about John Kennedy! He was one of your people!" 

He was, and a fine specimen at that; but, no, I didn't cry. Not real tears. I don't expect that Caroline Kennedy shed a tear when my brother died, either; in fact I would have been shocked if she had.

I didn't know U.S. Senator John McCain, either, personally. I first heard his name when George Peters called me and said, "Find out about the Republican candidates in the 2000 election. I think McCain is the one who wants to be the 'Voice of the Unborn' and, if so, we'll back McCain." Well, no; I read Faith of My Fathers on tape, all the way through, so GP could make an informed decision. He decided McCain was a tad too liberal for him, Ambassador Alan Keyes a hair too conservative. He backed W-for-Walking-Target Bush.

Still, Senator McCain's rise to national fame won respect from both of us and from most people. 

He said in Faith of My Fathers that, apart from supporting better funding for the Department of Defense than your average Democrat, he could be described as a moderate Democrat as accurately as a moderate Republican. I do not have a problem with that. I think it's the position that best represents the majority of this country. But the extremists on both sides, who admired McCain's image without having read his book, were surprised and disappointed.

A certain non-writer at this web site claims to have known John McCain personally from Vietnam, and I wished he would write the obligatory tribute to the late senator. They did, and do, have something in common: physical toughness. Extreme toughness. I don't know whether they ever met after Vietnam but I think they'd have had to salute each other for the ability to work harder, through more pain, than any two ordinary random men who've never had a worse pain than an impacted wisdom tooth. I think Ronald Reagan, who cracked jokes about the bullet in his lung, would have called them heroes. 

So I expected to read some lachrymose funeral pieces about how much people admired Senator McCain and regretted the nasty things they'd said about him in the course of their everyday partisan mudslinging, and yes, the e-mail contained some. 

I was surprised to receive e-mail from the individual who claimed the blame for having campaigned against McCain with ugly letters about his adoptive daughter. Fundraising, yet. I would have imagined that, for this week at least, that individual would be sitting at home with the curtains drawn. Of course, for all I know, he is, and some smartypants borrowed his name to ask people for money. Needless to say, that e-mail was promptly deleted.

Then there was the politics-to-the-end story about McCain having banned Trump from his funeral...I don't know whether the McCain family are chortling or crying about that. It's none of my business actually. 

And then some correspondent complained that, making his obligatory statement that mentioned Senator McCain having been a great American, Trump wouldn't be likely to say that about his U.S. Senator...some of you readers may have seen that e-mail too; for others, I won't mention which correspondent or which senator are involved. 

Not all U.S. Senators will be remembered as great Americans even in their funeral eulogies, but that is sort of the job description; it's just that many of them don't do very well at it. 

Maybe some readers think they'd do better. Maybe that's even true, for all I know. Try it and see. Read the bills your elected officials have to read. How would you balance the requirements of your constituency, while doing all that reading, and enough side research to do that reading intelligently, and also being on call to help your individual constituents with pensions and scholarships and all that? Many Congressmen give up the attempt. The ones I have now, like the ones they've replaced, do at least try to work consistently with their constituents on some of the major issues and balance that with the pension and scholarship things. Rick Boucher, the Democrat representing the mostly Republican Ninth District in Virginia before Morgan Griffith stepped forward, used to be well known for serving his constituents as individuals and mostly not voting on legislation where there was no hope of consensus. At that he was well above average. Some of them just vote the party line, drink heavily, and behave badly toward Bright Young Things. But McCain was one of the U.S. Senators who actually did a large part of the work in the job description. There are others (Ron and Rand Paul come to mind, and...and...there aren't all that many). They are great Americans. 

But last night, I fell asleep with a list of other great Americans who (so far as I know) have been overlooked by President Trump running through my head...I mean to say. Is Trump the one you want to give your funeral eulogy? Senator Dole (and President Kennedy), who showed Senator McCain how working through intense pain was done, and Aretha Franklin, and Mitch Snyder, and Sam Walton, and Israel Cohen, and so many other public and private people whose loss has been felt by the whole nation, would probably have been glad. Ron Paul, Jimmy Carter, the Bushes, Ben Carson, and anyone else in Washington who is old enough to worry about Trump being able to attend their funeral, should probably give thanks. Eulogies are not Mr. Trump's major talent.

They're not mine, either. When I do sincerely mourn, I have little to say. When I go online to write, I'm in the snarky sort of mood that composes a sentence like, "However disappointed the extremists in both parties were by his politics, John McCain was a real hero and a great American," and, although I believe this to be true, I immediately think: "Summarize in a Sentence! Eulogies While You Wait!" 

I wished he'd been more of a fiscal conservative, and a stronger one--nevertheless, I respect what I observed of what Senator McCain did in the Senate, as well as in Vietnam. He seemed to be one of our more sincere, less corrupt elected officials, according to his beliefs, which obviously were not the same beliefs held by a great number of political pundits. He did not necessarily represent everyone in Arizona, but he consistently represented the ones he did represent. His life history is a record of extraordinarily tough jobs, done extraordinarily well, in spite of pain and hate. We should all be a little braver and tougher for having known what we've known of John McCain.

Keep the faith, Gentle Readers.

Morgan Griffith on Billy Graham and the Opioid Epidemic

Politics makes strange...well, y'know!

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"
Billy Graham and the Opioid Crisis
Members of Congress gathered together on the morning of Wednesday, February 28, not to vote or meet in committee, but for another important purpose: to honor the life of Reverend Billy Graham, who died on February 21.
Billy Graham was only the fourth person to “lie in honor” (distinct from lying in state) in the Rotunda of the Capitol. As an expression of the nation’s respect for him, the President and the Vice President attended as well as many congressmen and senators. The security requirements for this event made it necessary to cancel most congressional business.
An honor guard carried a casket containing Reverend Graham’s body up the steps of the East Front and placed it in the Rotunda. Instead of the flag-draped casket familiar to ceremonies such as this, Billy Graham lay in a simple pine plywood casket topped with a cross.
This rather plain-looking casket, however, has an extraordinary back story. It comes from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a place called “Angola” because it stands where a plantation populated by slaves from the African nation of Angola once stood. Prisoners make caskets there, and this particular one has burned into it the names of three craftsmen, two of whom were imprisoned for murder and one for armed robbery.
The story of the casket is a fitting coda to Billy Graham’s life. Jesus was crucified next to two criminals, one of whom doubted and one of whom believed. To the one who believed, Jesus said, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” Reverend Graham being laid to rest in a casket made by criminals follows in this spirit, the one that he spent his life preaching.
After the ceremony concluded, Members of Congress offered condolences to Reverend Graham’s family. His son Franklin told us they were honored by the tributes, but as I replied, “We were the ones who were honored.” I believe many of my colleagues feel the same.
Billy Graham was important because he brought a message of hope to millions.
The opioid crisis, in contrast, has devastated lives across the country. This tragedy consumed the attention of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health during the afternoon of February 28.
Too many lives have been cut short by opioids. As Subcommittee Chairman Michael Burgess (R-TX) noted in his opening statement, 115 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose. In the year 2016, 1,405 Virginians lost their lives in this epidemic.
I noted earlier that most committee hearings for February 28, including other E&C hearings, had been cancelled, but the opioid crisis is too serious for us to not move forward as scheduled.
We have held several hearings looking at challenges posed by the opioid crisis. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, of which I am also a member, examined “pill dumping.” In fact, Kermit, West Virginia, population 392, received nearly nine million hydrocodone pills over two years. Notable examples of this practice occurred closer to us in West Virginia, where two pharmacies in the town of Williamson, population 3,000, received 20.8 million pain pills over ten years; similarly, during a ten-year span in Mount Gay-Shamrock, population 1,779, a pharmacy received over 16 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone.
For point of reference, Hurley in Buchanan County is roughly 33 miles from Williamson. It’s hard to imagine pills from Williamson did not make the journey into Southwest Virginia.
We are also studying the threat posed by fentanyl, a dangerous synthetic opioid.
Our past work prepared us for the February 28 hearing, the first of a series meant to look at specific legislation to help alleviate the problem. Doctors, pharmacists, researchers, and law enforcement officials offered their feedback on several bills meant to address the crisis.
Countless factors contributed to the emergency we face today, and a broad variety of viewpoints are essential to resolving it. Issues of health, law, and culture are all at play. But it’s a challenge that must be faced.
Many Southwest Virginians understand this crisis because they live amongst it. Most of us know someone who has been touched in some way, who has struggled with opioids or, all too often, lost the struggle. Let’s honor them by working to spare others from this tragedy.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.
"

Morgan Griffith's Brief Tribute to Shimon Peres

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"
On Wednesday, September 28, at the age of 93, Shimon Peres passed away after a lifetime of service to his country. He was a founder of the State of Israel and regarded as a prominent leader in the development of Israel’s strong defense. Peres was also the Ninth President of Israel, the Prime Minister, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and founder of the Peres Center for Peace.
Peres was highly regarded around the world for his persistent efforts to improve relations between the Israelis and Palestinians.
I was fortunate to meet with him during a visit to his peace institute in Israel several years ago. Among other initiatives, the center brings Palestinian and Israeli children together for activities such as soccer, to foster understanding of the opposing cultures.
Often in life when people are able to actually interact with each other, although they may disagree, they no longer view the other as the enemy. Instead, they see one another as people. Peres was devoted to implementing this belief.
The current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, although a political rival, noted in a statement on his passing, “Shimon devoted his life to our nation and to the pursuit of peace. He set his gaze on the future. He did so much to protect our people. He worked to his last days for peace and a better future for all.”
I am sorry for Israel’s loss of this great man.
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov
"

Remembering Suzette Haden Elgin (Ozarque)

(Reclaimed from Blogjob, with all its links and the following tags: a soft answer turns away anger, GAVSD books, Language Imperative, miseducation of Christians about communication, Native Tongue, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Ozark Trilogy, persuasive communication, pre-Internet life of Priscilla King, science fiction and fantasy, Suzette Haden Elgin, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, verbal abuse.)

This started out, per +Andria Perry 's suggestion on Google +, as a book review. It was hard to write as a book review without including a long overdue obituary blog post. That made a double-length post. To spare your eyes, I'll break it up--since I've already posted a book review this morning, today you get the memorial piece, loaded with book links, and next week the straight book review will appear. Click on any book image to buy the book from the Amazon Associate who posted it there, or use the addresses in the left-hand sidebar to buy any or all of these, or the others, from me.

One of the most valuable books I ever read was The Last Word, actually Book Three in a series that grew to more than twenty books. Prentice Hall published the initial "trilogy" in which this one was the volume that discussed how to make presentations so persuasive that people didn't argue, thus getting "the last word." Other publishers bid higher for some of the other books, and some of the limited-interest books, like the one for verbal self-defense in law enforcement, were self-published; final counts vary depending on what people include.

While the writer known as Suzette Haden Elgin (and as ozarque.livejournal.com ) was alive, she kept the rights to market her books through her own store and web site, so I never wrote reviews of them but steered people straight to her. Now I can sell them as secondhand books for profit, but I've not cared to think about it. She was a good pen friend (and e-friend) for a long time.

In 1987, I was a sickly university dropout, still clinging to a useless hope of recovering my life with the "help" of Seventh-Day Adventists. "Vapping" was their dialect. Sneaky verbal attack patterns were what I'd learned as the way educated people spoke English in Maryland; I knew I didn't enjoy listening to it, and didn't like to be told anyone had guessed I was from Maryland--but I didn't know why. Nor did I know why the non-Adventists in Maryland with whom I worked disliked Adventists and, often, disliked me.

Like a lot of women at that time, I'd experienced life as one big beauty contest; I am indisputably "the plain one" in my family, so maybe people didn't like my face...except that most of the jobs I got were pretty-face jobs, and, on closer examination, people seemed to be more alienated after I talked. Was it my accent? No, in Washington they didn't seem to think I had one. Color? Most people seemed to see me as White. Hostility to "smart," "bold," or "liberated" women? That was no more of a problem in Washington than envy of my looks is in my family; for similar reasons. (I sometimes fail to recognize envy because I've spent most of my life around people more abundantly blessed than I am.) Deep-rooted emotional problems from the past that were unconsciously seeping out...that was the default explanation for eeevvverything in the 1980's, of course, but therapy hadn't uncovered any buried emotional traumas from my early childhood.

Later John Bradshaw would write a book that described the kind of "childhood wounds" that had made it possible for me to mistake snarky hostility for a regional or class dialect. I never met him, but my psychological profile appears in the chapter of Homecoming titled "Healing Your School-Aged Child." It's a matter of miseducation more than emotional trauma, so I think it's valuable, as did Elgin, to emphasize that improvement is a cognitive process of learning skills...because there are times when a mean mouth is a good thing to have. It's just that those of us who developed a mean mouth in middle school can also benefit from learning more gentle, grown-up ways of communication that weren't taught in the middle schools we attended.

Anyway, in 1987 I stumbled across The Last Word in a library, and this book really did change, possibly even save, my life...my business life, anyway. It offered a simple, rational explanation of why some of the things I'd so often heard and said are so annoying, and what to say, instead, when I didn't want to sound like a hateful, poisonous, conceited teenage troll. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense was just what I needed to go from "dropout and failure-in-life" to "Bright Young Thing whose typing, editing, computer, and hostess skills are valued in diplomatic circles."

Well...until I'd acquired a serious enemy within that community, anyway. But that's another story. (So is the question, "Why diplomatic circles more than federal circles, when you're obviously so much more interested in domestic issues?" but its answer is short enough to fit here: brown eyes.)

Elgin's name was already familiar, though I shared an apparently widespread reaction: "The same person who wrote those wonderfully quirky, short and funny yet deep, tasteful yet intense, science fiction stories, also writes serious nonfiction?" (Or vice versa.) She did. She was. She wrote songs and poems, too, and also blogged, recorded live music, and did visual art. Her old-style Southern Lady voice was consistent throughout. It was only when Earth Song came out that I realized that the Laadan Project (a scientific study of constructed languages) had been real, started subscribing to Elgin's privately printed Newsletters...and made a friend for life.

Her life wasn't nearly long enough; she was only in her mid-seventies when she "really" retired, even from blogging, and not even eighty when she died. (There will never, ever, be another blogger, blog moderator, writer, polymath, or Southern Lady like her...not that that's stopped me trying.)

I never bought the cassette tapes of her "filksongs," or the "special" booklets and teacher/trainer notes about GAVSD. I did, at some time or other, buy a copy of each of her full-length books except Pouring Down Words; over the years some were damaged or permanently "borrowed," but I still have most of them and can recommend all of them...the novels to anyone who wants to read quirky science fiction novels, and the books about communication to anyone interested in building their skills. And the Ozarque blog, at which the writer discussed all of her books, other projects, interests (including charities), and life.

The Ozarque blog "is being maintained as a memorial." For her many readers, pen friends, and e-friends, it's the best memorial she could have. It revived her writing career at a low point and made her, at an age when most people dismissed blogging as a fad, one of the world's champion bloggers--so, no points for guessing, she was also a booster of blogging and the Internet.

https://ozarque.livejournal.com