Remembering a long-ago Saturday

The long-ago Saturday that is on my mind today was February 28, 1959.  Let's see, 2026 minus 1959 is 67 years ago.  That's the day I married.  I remember as we left the church, that car-loads of friends were lined up to follow us.  We got into our "getaway" car driven by a friend, but went straight through it to another friend's car going in the opposite direction.  Yep, we almost got away, except for those who happened to be parked going in that direction.  I no longer remember details, but I do remember divorcing him 14 years and three children later (also in February).  The three children, all married now, gave me seven grandchildren.  The first one made me a grandparent on grandparents day.  And now I have six GREAT-grandchildren).  This photo includes four generations (I'm wearing red):

Summer Solstice

Summer officially began last night at 9:42 p.m.  Let me tell you a story about the change from spring to summer in 1963, exactly 62 years ago.  My youngest child was born four minutes before that spring became summer.  That means all of my children have reached retirement age and COULD quit working.  Some of their children also have children of their own, giving me SIX great-grandchildren (so far).  Are any of you reading this blog post also proud great-grandparents?

A book, a photo, and a coincidence

Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America ~ by Jane Borden, 2025, cultural anthropology, 304 pages

This colorful and enlightening pop history explains why the eccentric doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders are still driving American culture today.  The current rise in far-right extremism as a natural result of our latent indoctrination, so the author proposes that the United States is the largest cult of all.

Since the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock, cult ideology has been ingrained in the DNA of the United States.  Journalist Jane Borden argues that Puritan doomsday belief never went away; it went secular and became American culture.  From our fascination with cowboys and superheroes to our allegiance to influencers and self-help, susceptibility to advertising, and undying devotion to the self-made man, Americans remain particularly vulnerable to a specific brand of cult-like thinking.

With in-depth research, Borden uncovers the American history you didn’t learn in school, including how we are still being brainwashed, making us a nation of easy marks for con artists and strong men.  Along the way, she also revisits some of the most fascinating cults in this country presenting them as integral parts of our national psyche rather than aberrations.

Family photo

A photo I found recently among my stuff shows my dad holding my little brother and me when there were only the two of us children.  Since Billy was two-and-a-half years younger than I was, I think the photo was taken about 1944 or 1945.  I believe our car was a black 1940 Chevy.

I could call this coincidence #1142

I love coincidences.  I went to the Café one morning this week and got back to my apartment a bit before noon.  I looked to see how many steps I had taken by that time.  There would be many more steps before I went to bed, but I smiled when I saw that at 11:42 a.m. I had taken exactly 1,142 steps.

Here's what I posted this week:

1. Monday's focus was on food, HERE.  Fried okra is my favorite food.
2. Wednesday was a "purr-fect" day to "Adopt a Shelter Pet," HERE.
3. Thursday was about May Day protests, HERE.
4. Saturday was a family birthday, HERE.  My twins are now 65 years old.

Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

Another family photo, another book (or two)

Bonnie, Bill, and Ann on East 26th Street in Chattanooga around 1949 — or maybe 1950.  We're all dressed up, so it may be Easter Sunday.  Our baby brother (born in March 1949) would have been too little to pose with us.  Our dad was the meat cutter at Brainerd Grocery, and we rode to church in the back of that delivery van that he drove.

Mine to Do: Journal ~ by Tracy Brown, 2015, journal, 134 pages, 8/10

Donna gave me a journal for Christmas in 2019, and now I have "found" a journal she bought for her Kindle.  I wondered if I should read it, since it's "someone else's" journal.  But as I flipped through it, I discovered she never did "write" anything in it.  She did, however, rate it 4 stars of 5 at the end.  That means she at least read through all the prompts in the book.  I wonder if she bought this book about the time she got me that gift journal in 2019.  Here are a dozen prompts I noticed as I looked through the book, and I decided to read this short book myself:

• "If things go wrong, don't go with them!" ~ Roger Babson
• "Peace treaties never occur until people from all opposing sides begin believing in their common benefit more than their individual success." ~ Tracy Brown
• "Remember, when old patterns are broken new worlds can emerge." ~ Wendy Craig Purcell
• "Forgiveness is giving up the possibility of a better past." ~ Unknown
• "Love one another, and do not strive for another's undoing." ~ Seneca Proverb
• "I was raised in what I consider to be not a melting pot, but a salad bowl." ~ Edward James Olmos
• "The future depends on what we do in the present." ~ Mahatma Gandhi
• "Prejudice is like a hair across your cheek.  You can't see it, you can't find it with your fingers, but you keep brushing at it because the feel of it is irritating." ~ Marian Anderson
• "I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.  I will not refuse to do something I can do." ~ Helen Keller
• "We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
• "We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry.  And we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color." ~ Maya Angelou
• "It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end." ~ Ursula LeGuin

Amazon's description:  Capturing your thoughts in a journal is a great way to explore the complex issue of race-based hatred and violence.  The primary question is:  "In response to race-based hatred and violence, what is mine to do?"  I think it's interesting that Amazon also has this:  "There are 0 customer reviews and 1 customer rating."  That rating is a 4-star rating, so it must be Donna's rating directly from her Kindle!  Wow!

The author's page is WhatIsMineToDo.com.  Visit that page, if you want to be challenged to clarify what actions you might take to end race-based hatred and violence.  Click on the link to hear Tracy Brown's 14-minute TEDx Talk, where she encourages us to "Speak up, and stand up."  I also learned on Amazon that there's a BOOK, not just a journal.  Same name (almost) and same author.  Here's THAT information:

Mine To Do: Responding to Race-Based Hatred and Violence ~ by Tracy Brown, 2015, race relations, 132 pages

This book is a sharing of thoughts and emotions related to the topic of race-based hatred and violence.  Instead of focusing on statistics, demographics or politics, this book reminds us of the many ways racism impacts our daily functioning.  Each of the essays encourages the reader to consider what specific things can be done to build relationships that are based on respect and fairness.  Tracy shares information and ideas to help individuals navigate their personal journey in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society.  If we want to see change in our world, each one of us must answer the question, "What is Mine to Do?"

The day after the Charleston murders, Tracy Brown found herself sitting in a jury room considering whether she, a black woman, could be a fair and impartial juror in a case where a young white man killed nine innocent people because of the color of their skin.  What happened as a result of that morning has become an unexpected call to action for all people committed to mutual respect or willing to take a stand for fairness.  In addition to the thought-provoking quotations included throughout the book, there is a helpful collection of inspirational quotes provided at the end.

Deb at Readerbuzz hosts The Sunday Salon.

Looking at four generations

This family photo was taken in 2011.  I also posted it HERE.  I am standing next to my grandson; my daughter and my son (and his wife) are sitting in the chairs holding THEIR grandchildren.  My grandson's wife (mother of the youngest of my great-grandchildren at the time) is over there beside the Coke machine.  That's FOUR generations, and I'm the great-grandmother.  It's still hard to imagine myself the mother of grandparents.  I have seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren now.

This photo of me with my twin daughters was taken in 2016, when they visited me in St. Louis.  I also posted it HERE.  I enjoy sharing family photos with my friends, who also share pictures of their families.  We're proud grandparents and great-grandparents.

Feeling discouraged

Covid-19

My sister's son died of Covid on January 1st of this year, and yesterday my brother's son posted on Facebdook:

"Prayers appreciated.  My wife, 1-year-old son, and 3-year-old daughter have Covid.  Get vaccinated, folks; this is not just about you." 

Caturday ~ my first kitty cat

Clawdia was so happy when it warmed up enough Thursday to open the windows to the sunny day.  She jumped up into her favorite window to bathe herself.  And that, dear readers, is my perfect segue into what I want to share today.

Word of the Day

se·gue / ˈseˌɡwā,ˈsāˌɡwā / Used as a verb = (in music and film) move without interruption from one piece of music or scene to another.  Example:  "It segued into another subject."  Used as a noun = an uninterrupted transition from one piece of music or film scene to another.  (Or in this case, from one subject to a similar one in my blog post.)

Among the things I brought back from my storage unit in Chattanooga last year was my Baby Book, the one my mother had so carefully kept about me, her first child.  This is what she wrote (see photo at top) about my first pets (plural, as she kept adding to the list):

• Her first pet is a kitty cat named "Tiger."  She got him July 1942.
• She had a dog named "Scrappy" but he either ran away or someone took him when Bitsy was two and a half.
• She got a white Bunny for easter when her birthday was the day after easter and she was three years old.  We didn't have a proper place to keep it so her daddy took it back to it mother on Mother's day.  We kept it about three weeks.  Bitsy called it "Bunny."

So I had a kitty cat when I was two, a dog when I was two-and-a-half, and a bunny when I was three.  And I guess you figured out that my nickname was Bitsy, huh?  And that is why, when a high school English teacher had us write our autobiographies in high school, I chose the title Bits of Bonnie.  And I still love animals, like little Miss Clawdia.

What generation are you in?

This must be an older chart, since I found a younger generation (see below).

There are seven human generations alive right now:

• Greatest Generation — born between 1901 and 1924
• Silent Generation (Traditional) — born between 1925 and 1945
• Baby Boomers — born between 1946 and 1964
• Generation X — born between 1965 and 1979
• Millennials (Gen Y) — born between 1980 and 1996
• Generation Z (Zoomers) — born between 1997 and 2011
• Generation Alpha (Gen A) — born between 2012 and today

Dates vary, but I found the idea here and edited it slightly, based on my online research.  Names is parentheses are alternates I saw.

The generation that has just died out was called the Lost Generation, born between 1883 and 1900.  My in-laws were born in the 1890s, and I can remember standing at the bedside of my maternal grandmother, looking at a bedside table full of pill bottles that was at my eye level.  She was born December 22, 1880 and died in May 1943, when I was three and she was only 62.  I can't find a name for that generation.

I'm not sure how "silent" I am, but I was born in 1940.  Although I'm in the Silent Generation with one brother and one sister, our "baby" brother born in 1949 is a Boomer.  Yet we are all the same generation of my family.  My three children are all Boomers, too, like their Uncle Jim.  Six of my grandchildren are Millennials, but the seventh was born in 2000, making her Generation Z, along with the first two of my great-grandchildren.  My other four great-grandkids are Generation Alpha.

This can be totally confusing, you know?

A memory popped up

While reading Chapter 5 of Trevor Noah's Born a Crime, I was brought up short by his memory of getting a set of encyclopedias.

"My mom ... bought a set of encyclopedias, too.  It was fifteen years old and way out of date, but I would sit and pore through those.  My books were my prized possessions.  I had a bookshelf where I put them, and I was so proud of it" (p. 67).

A memory popped into my head, and I stopped reading.  I was back in my own childhood.  We lived in barracks that had been converted to apartments for military people returning from World War Two, when there was not enough housing available for them and the boom of babies that ensued.  My dad had been drafted into the Army in late 1944, even though he had two children and another on the way.  Those barracks weren't built as solidly as most houses, and when it rained really hard, water would drip from the ceiling.  Our apartment was on the second floor, so I guess it was a leaky roof because rain was getting in somewhere.  Anyway, when it rained, we'd run to cover our beds or anything we didn't want to get wet.

One year, our mother bought a set of World Book Encyclopedias.  Maybe a traveling salesman had knocked on the door, and she began to make monthly payments on those green and white volumes.  I was like Trevor about those books.  They were special, I learned things from them, and I wanted to know all those things.  After we acquired those special books, when my brothers and sister would run to cover their beds, I invariably ran to protect the encyclopedias.  If I had to sleep on a damp bed, so be it.  But I didn't want those special books to be ruined.  So I ran to the bookshelves.  I kept those books safe, and — after I grew up, married, and moved away — the family still had them.

While looking for an online illustration for this post, I found a fun article about "People of the Book, yes.  But which one?"  Was it Encyclopedia Britannica?  or World Book?  or Compton's?  In pre-internet days, which encyclopedia was in your house?  We were a World Book family.

Word of the Day

en·sue / inˈso͞o, enˈso͞o / verb / ensued is the past participle = happened or occured afterward or as a result.  Example:  "After the war, a boom of babies ensued.  We call them the Baby Boomers."

Memories are made of this ... and this ... and this

Chattanooga telephone directory, September 1944

A woman named Cathy posted this picture in the "You Know You're From Chattanooga If..." group on Facebook, saying, "This piece of history is talking to me!  It’s been through some rough times.  Hopefully I can preserve it."  And she was willing to look up names for those of us who were curious.

I didn't know if our phone number in 1944 was in the name of William E. Setliffe, Jr. or Bonnie Reynolds, since we moved into my maternal grandmother's house with my Aunt Bonnie in 1943.  I memorized my address and phone number as a child:  3208 5th Avenue, and 2-9060.  I thought my paternal grandfather — William E. Setliffe, Sr. — might also be in that book, even though he died during that year.  Cathy reported, "There's two listings for William E. Setliffe Jr."

• W E Setliffe Jr (r) 822 E Main....6-8990
• Mrs. W E Setliffe Jr (r) 3208 5th Av....2-9060

She added, "I don't see your grandfather listed."  I didn't remember off-hand which month my grandfather died (I was only 4, after all).  It was probably earlier in 1944.

My dad's listing at 822 Main Street would be the grocery store he owned at the SW corner of Main Street and Central Avenue, directly across the street from Miss Griffins Foot-Long Hot Dogs.  Her little stand used to be right at the corner in a little triangle until the streets were widened.  Her place is still at that corner, but now it's bigger.  I asked if Gladys Setliffe was listed, but Cathy didn't find my dad's mother listed.  I remember that she lived on Cameron Hill after his father died.  When she remarried and moved to Florida a few years later, I was in the third grade.  That would have been the spring of 1949.

Mom, me, and Dad holding my brother Bill, in the house on 5th Avenue about 1944

Family memories

Then I started thinking about the (r) Cathy had mentioned.  I presume that means "residence," and both listings have that (r) designation.  When I was very young, we lived behind the grocery store.  Then we moved about a block up Main Street (toward the Ridge) before moving in with my Aunt Bonnie after my maternal grandmother died.  Maybe the grocery store had no phone, or maybe my dad had one in the back where we used to live.  After all, who would have had time to answer the phone all day, when he was running the store by himself?  He was also the meatcutter, chopping and weighing and wrapping meat.  Phones were not as ubiquitous in the 1940s as they are now.

Word of the Day

u·biq·ui·tous / yo͞oˈbikwədəs / adjective = present, appearing, or found everywhere.  Ubiquity is generally used to describe something "existing or being everywhere at the same time, constantly encountered, widespread, common."  Ubiquitous can also be used as a synonym for words like worldwide, universal, global, pervasive, all over the place.  Example:  "Phones were not as ubiquitous in the 1940s as they are now."

Blast from the Past

Imagine the smile on my face and the uplift this message on Facebook gave me last week.

"Hey, Bonnie — I feel badly that we've lost touch over the years.  I think the last time I saw you was at a Bible study when you were leading Forrest Avenue United Methodist here in Chattanooga, but I still remember you fondly from Baylor days when you worked in the library.  You were so encouraging to me in so many ways.  In fact, I used to call you my 'guru,' and you'd sign your notes 'bjguru.'  I'm back in Chattanooga now, although over the past decade or so I worked some here and some outside of Philadelphia.  I just happened to think of you the other day and wondered how you were doing, then thought I'd check Facebook and see if I could find you.  Looks as if you're in Missouri now: what led you there?  Hope you and your family are safe and well and that you're happy and enjoying life.  You were always a great influence on me, and I'm grateful."

Keith was in high school when I met him in 1974 at Baylor School in Chattanooga.  I was working in the school library, shelving books much as I do now at the Crown Center for Senior Living.  That's how I paid my way through college for my first degree.  I remember Keith bringing the children's choir from First Christian Church to sing at Forrest Avenue United Methodist, maybe in the late 1980s.  A group of six-year-olds.  More memories.  Keith and I are now Facebook friends.

New normal

Three of my great-grandchildren today, with their mom.

And the youngest fought it all the way.

Write about your childhood

Write about an experience from childhood that has stuck with me?  Okay.  I could combine this with a page from Michelle Obama's 2019 book, Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice (unpaged):

"Describe your childhood home.   What are some of the details that stand out the most?  What made your home different from your friends' homes?"

In 1943, we moved into the house my mother grew up in (see the black-and-white photo below, taken about 15 years earlier).  I wrote about my mother's family a couple of weeks ago and used that picture of them in front of their home.  My grandfather Monroe, on the far left, was killed in traffic in 1930, so this may be 1928 or 1929.  My grandmother Inez is standing beside him, with their children lined up according to age:

The four siblings on the back row, left to right, are Chandler, Paul, Bonnie, and Howard.  Coming back from right to left are Mark, Wylee, Mildred (my mother), and Allen beside their mother.

Click to enlarge the photo

The children grew up and left home, except for my Aunt Bonnie on the back row, who stayed and took care of their mother until she died in 1943.  The rest of them decided Bonnie, who never married, should have their share of the house.  When my parents moved us into that house with her, I was only three years old, but I do remember one thing about that moving day.  I had seen my mother pack my toys and stood watching the movers carrying in the boxes until ... sigh of relief ... I saw my toys being brought up the three steps and across the front porch that's behind my relatives in this picture.  The bricks in this photo weren't quite so visible when I lived there.  My grandmother had a green thumb, and by 1943 there were huge bushes all along the front of the house.  The flowering bushes grew where my uncles stood for that photographer.  The bushes extended all the way to those three porch steps (mentioned above) to the right of what you see here.

Eventually, Bonnie sold the house and moved in with me and my children on Signal Mountain in 1973.  We'd built a basement apartment for my husband's parents, but after we divorced, my mother-in-law chose to move out, even though I assured her I wasn't divorcing HER.  (My father-in-law had died several years earlier.)  Being there after her son moved out was awkward for her, so I understood.  When I invited my mother, it was time for Bonnie to quit living alone, too.  Born in 1904, she was 13 years older than her little sister.  The two of them shared the apartment in my basement, using twin beds that once belonged to Mark's children (the tall brother on the right end).  Those twin beds are probably as old as I am (80 in April), and I sleep on one of them now in St. Louis.  (The mattress is much newer, of course, and I'm ready to replace it again.)

Give details of the home, our instructions say.  I have a hard time imagining how two parents, six sons, and two daughters could live in a two-bedroom house.  Off the living room was a sort of sitting room, so maybe some of them slept there.  I wrote about the living room in January, specifically about the coal stove that vented through the fireplace and the coal shuttle that was beside the stove.  I learned to play the upright piano in that living room, which looked very much like the photo at the top of an antique piano I found online.  There was a dining room open at an angle from the living room, a pantry closet out the other door, and an eat-in-kitchen beyond that.  There was a screened-in porch between the kitchen and one of the bedrooms that I considered a shortcut, at least in the warm months.

In the side yard, to the left of the automobile parked in the driveway in the black-and-white photo, were lots of growing things.  (Remember, my grandmother had a green thumb.)  I especially remember two large crepe myrtle trees with pink blossoms like these.

In the back yard were a plum tree I could climb, a detached garage with a place to store coal on one side, hyacinths beside my sandbox, a rock garden, a flower bed enclosed by a row of bricks, forsythia ... lots of flowering things planted by my grandmother, in other words.  We moved away from there in 1949, shortly before I turned nine years old.  What I remember best are the growing things and playing that piano.  I still take sheets of music downstairs to one of the two pianos here in the Crown Center and try to remind my fingers how to play.  Would you like to hear a cat play the piano?

I don't remember much about homes of friends.  (I haven't been a child since the 1940s and early 1950s, after all).  But looking back now, I don't remember pianos in the houses of my friends, and I think we had more flowers and flowering trees than anyone else in the neighborhood.  Interesting.

Unexpected find on Facebook

It's an odd feeling to run across a random old photo of my mother online.  My brother had kept up with a neighbor from our childhood on Facebook.  I hadn't seen her in years, so I decided to look at her FB page and see how she's doing.  Clicking through her posts, I suddenly came upon these two photos.  On October 31st, she tagged my brother:

"Jim, I was going through pictures the other night and found these pictures of Ann and your mom.

My guess is that they are from the early 1960s, about the time my sister Ann would have been in high school.  Mother died in 2004 and Ann died in 2016, so these are very special to me.

Remembering Mom

Today is my mother's 101st birthday.  I took this picture of her in 1987, when we moved into my first parsonage after seminary.  The bishop wanted to know the people living in parsonages in Holston Conference, so I had her stand at the end of the driveway on Avalon Circle with that beautiful old oak tree over her shoulder.  It's my favorite photo of her, framed and given to me by my best friend Donna when mother died in 2004 at the age of 87.

One hundred years ago today

My dad was born on October 9, 1918.  That's one hundred years ago today.  This photo was probably taken in 1945 or late 1944, when he was drafted because of World War Two, even though he already had two children (me and my brother Billy) and my sister Ann was born three months after he left.  He served in the Philippines and in Japan.  No, really, he SERVED.  What he served was food.  The Army made him a cook because he owned a grocery store, which means food, which equated with being a cook in someone's mind.  Happy Birthday, Dad!

Sunday Salon ~ books, labyrinths, family, purricane

BOOKS

Two weeks ago, Jürgen Moltmann wrote these words for a book about his theology by Stephen D. Morrison:

I have endeavored to follow up scholarly theological books with shorter, generally accessible works.  I have kept myself accountable to the injunction:  “That which cannot be said simply is perhaps not worth saying at all.”  As such, I followed up Theology of Hope (1967) with the popular-level work, In the End — The Beginning (2004); my Christology, The Way of Jesus Christ (1990), with Jesus Christ for Today’s World (1994); and The Spirit of Life (1992) with The Source of Life (1997).

I have five of these six books, but somehow I missed In the End — The Beginning.  I'll have to remedy that oversight!  I hadn't realized these (smaller) books were more accessible versions of his theological tomes, but the "easier" ones are definitely shorter:

(342 pages) Theology of Hope

In the End — The Beginning (192 pages)

(388 pages) The Way of Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ for Today’s World (152 pages)

(358 pages) The Spirit of Life

The Source of Life (148 pages)

Now I guess I'd better read (or re-read) all six books as I compare their contents.  I've had these since the 1990s, except Theology of Hope, which I bought in 1987.  That one is so old, the pages are falling out, so I got a later edition in 2012.  I can't throw away the old one yet, though, because of all my marginalia and underlining in it.

LABYRINTHS

Donna and I walked the labyrinth at the Mercy Center with Kevin on Thursday.  Click to enlarge the photo to see both of them meditating near the tree in the center.

Wanting to share labyrinth photos with a couple of friends, I went looking through my blog posts ... and couldn't find what I wanted.  Ha!  It's because I posted it on another of my blogs:  Book Buddies.  Here's the photo I was thinking about, one of Mary and Donna in the center of a smaller labyrinth at a church in Ooltewah.

Here's a labyrinth that Donna and I walked in Hixson, six years ago, when she took this photo of me.  There's a similarity among these outdoor labyrinths, but they are also different:  one is outlined with stones, one with bricks, and one with grass between wood-chip paths.

FAMILY

My youngest granddaughter has been pictured with her best friends in CityScope Magazine after their graduation from high school.  She is now a college freshman.

PURRICANE

Let's end with a gentle "cat-egory 3 purricane," hoping to bring a smile in a week of devastating weather in our world.

More Sunday Salon posts are on Facebook.

Sunday Salon ~ friends, family, and books

FRIENDS

This is "my" usual table when I eat dinner here at the Crown Center.  I wasn't there when they celebrated Cardinals Night.  Left to right are Gail, Susan, Sheila, Mickey, Adeline, and Donna.

FAMILY

My youngest grandchild graduated from high school yesterday.  Congratulations, Cady!  She'll be starting university life in the fall.

BOOKS

The library loot I wrote about last week hasn't been as difficult to get through as I had expected.  I've already completed three of the seven books...

• Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer ~ by Barbara Ehrenreich, 2018, sociology, 9/10
• The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of a Tale ~ by Carmen Agra Deedy, illustrated by Randall Wright, 2011, children's chapter book, 7/10
• Solving the Puzzle Under the Sea: Marie Tharp Maps the Ocean Floor ~ by Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Raul Colon, 2016, children's picture book, 8/10

...and have gotten well into a fourth library book.

• Counting by 7s ~ by Holly Goldberg Sloan, 2013, YA fiction

These are quotes I want to remember from Ehrenreich's book, Natural Causes:

"Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life. ... As for medical care: I will seek help for an urgent problem, but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me. Ideally, the determination of when one is old enough to die should be a personal decision, based on a judgment of the likely benefits, if any, of medical care and — just as important at a certain age — how we choose to spend the time that remains to us" (p. 3).

"Not only do I reject the torment of a medicalized death, but I refuse to accept a medicalized life, and my determination only deepens with age. As the time that remains to me shrinks, each month and day becomes too precious to spend in windowless waiting rooms and under the cold scrutiny of machines. Being old enough to die is an achievement, not a defeat, and the freedom it brings is worth celebrating" (pp. 12-13).

Quoting physician John M. Mandrola: "The default should be: I am well. The way to stay that way is to keep making good choices — not to have my doctor look for problems" (p. 9).

More Sunday Salon posts can be found on Facebook

Sunday Salon ~ April foolishness, a tent, and books

April foolishness

This is a crazy, mixed-up weekend, with yesterday being the first day of Passover and today being both Easter and April Fools' Day.

A Tent

Movie night for some of my great-grandchildren

Books

Last night, I made the "mistake" of stopping at Half-Price Books after eating at Denny's with my friend Donna.  I found these books on clearance for only a buck or two, and bought some to add to the Crown Center's small library, a couple for friends, and a few I'll read before donating them to our little library.

1.  Carpool Diem ~ by Nancy Star, 2008, fiction
2.  Two by Two ~ by Nicholas Sparks, 2016, fiction
3.  The Secret Chord ~ by Geraldine Brooks, 2015, fiction
4.  Still Life with Bread Crumbs ~ by Anna Quindlen, 2014, fiction
5.  Secrets of Eden ~ by Chris Bohjalian, 2010, fiction
6.  The Oversoul Seven Trilogy ~ by Jane Roberts, 1995, fiction

• The Education of Oversoul Seven, 1973
• The Further Education of Oversoul Seven, 1979
• Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time, 1984

7.  The Discomfort Zone ~ by Jonathan Franzen, 2006, memoir
8.  Front Porch Tales ~ by Philip Gulley, 1997, stories
9.  The Red Tent ~ by Anita Diamant, 1997, fiction

More Sunday Salon posts are on Facebook.

Sunday Salon ~ books, shirt, and family

Stephen Hawking:  "Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."  I'm trying to finish a couple of library books due back this week (see below), so I haven't been reading Hawking's book as I'd hoped.

Books:  I'm halfway through Friday's book, which is due back on Thursday.  Someone has requested it and it's new, so I cannot renew it from the library.  What's next for me to read?  There's no way I can finish the other book also due on Thursday, but I plan to at least skim it — and buy a copy for myself, so I can mark it up.  Here's the book, the latest by Bishop Spong:

Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today ~ by John Shelby Spong, 2018

Five hundred years after Martin Luther and his 95 theses ushered in the Reformation, Spong delivers 12 forward-thinking theses to spark a new reformation to reinvigorate Christianity and ensure its future.  At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Christianity was in crisis — a state of conflict that gave birth to the Reformation in 1517.  Enduring for more than 200 years, Luther’s movement was then followed by a "revolutionary time of human knowledge."  Yet these advances in our thinking had little impact on Christians’ adherence to doctrine — which has led the faith to a critical point once again.

Spong contends that there is mounting pressure among Christians for a radically new kind of Christianity — a faith deeply connected to the human experience instead of outdated dogma.  To keep Christianity vital, he urges modern Christians to update their faith in light of these advances in our knowledge, and to challenge the rigid and problematic Church teachings that emerged with the Reformation.  There is a disconnect, he argues, between the language of traditional worship and the language of the twenty-first century.  Bridging this divide requires us to rethink and reformulate our basic understanding of God.

With its revolutionary resistance to the authority of the Church in the sixteenth century, Spong sees in Luther’s movement a model for today’s discontented Christians.  In fact, the questions they raise resonate with those contemplated by our ancestors.  Does the idea of God still have meaning?  Can we still follow historic creeds with integrity?  Are not such claims as an infallible Pope or an inerrant Bible ridiculous in today’s world?  In this book, Spong outlines twelve "theses" to help today’s believers more deeply contemplate and reshape their faith.  In this, his final book, he offers a revisionist approach that can strengthen Christianity.

Family:  This is my great-grandson.  His mother wrote on Facebook:  "Don’t they know this boy can’t sit still for 2 hours?!"

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