Crystal Barrow, ~ 1919

For my mother
born in Martindale, Texas, 1917
In all her seventy-five years, she never grew old.

*

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into the grave!-
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

]]> http://kathywaller1.com/2013/05/13/crystal/feed/ 5 crystal portrait with blocks Kathy Crystal Barrow, ~ 1919 http://kathywaller1.com/2013/05/01/billie/ http://kathywaller1.com/2013/05/01/billie/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 03:08:38 +0000 Kathy http://kathywaller1.com/?p=18938 Continue reading »]]>

Billie Waller, 5 years old, 1920

My father would have been ninety-eight years old today.

In September, he’ll have been gone for thirty years.

It’s easier to imagine him as the child in this picture

than to imagine him at ninety-eight.

Of two things, however, I’m certain:

If here were here today,

his blue eyes would still be twinkling,

and

 he would still be making us laugh.

]]> http://kathywaller1.com/2013/05/01/billie/feed/ 7 bill at 5 yrs 001 Kathy bill at 5 yrs 001 http://kathywaller1.com/2013/05/01/when-the-music-stops/ http://kathywaller1.com/2013/05/01/when-the-music-stops/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 22:27:57 +0000 Kathy http://kathywaller1.com/?p=18921 ]]> What happens when the music stops?

~The song lives on in our hearts.

guitar fingers by Bombardier – (CC BY 2.0) – via flickr

To the memory of

Tom Brown Webb III

Tom Brown Webb IV

Suzanne Rader

Marlene Waller Linaweaver

Nell Hubbard Waller

Robert Vance Waller

Yesterday evening we had the pleasure of attending a celebration of our friend Judith Rosenberg’s seventieth birthday.

We first met Judith several years ago when she joined the 15 Minutes of Fame writing practice group. Through both her writing and our conversations over lunch, we’ve learned that she hails from New York, that she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, that she sings and plays the guitar, that she writes poetry, that she likes Indian cuisine, that she has thought of writing fiction based on her doctoral dissertation.

Now. Reading over the preceding paragraph, I’m struck by its inadequacy. I should have taken notes during the open mic segment of the party, when people who have known her for many years, worked with her, traveled with her to the Texas-Mexican border reminisced about their friendships, using words such as dedication, service, tirelessness, brazenness, and spirit of anarchy. 

In fact, brazenness and spirit of anarchy make me wish I’d both taken notes and asked questions. I believe I missed some interesting stories.

The Judith story I’ll share will seem trivial compared to what others have told, but it relates to something in her personality and character that I have personal knowledge of, and that appeals to me: Judith likes dogs. Not long after we met her, she adopted Chucho (Chuchi to his friends).

According to my research, chucho means dog, mutt, or mongrel. Depending on where in Latin America you happen to be, it can also mean long-eared owl, sweetheart, rawhide whip, jail, shiver and shake, gossipy, tamale, and custard-filled doughnut. It can mean something else, too, but I won’t go into that. It’s enough to say that Judith’s Chuchi is a sweetheart. There’s a bit of custard about him, too.

When Chuchi became part of Judith’s family, our writing group was meeting in the large back room of a small but popular coffee shop. We arrived early on Saturdays and took over a far corner, moved tables together to accommodate the usual six or seven people, and settled in for the next two or three–or four–hours. Because the City of Austin allows dogs on decks and patios of eating establishments, Judith brought Chuchi along. He was blessed with the enthusiasm of (large teenage) puppyhood, but he behaved admirably, especially when Judith was with him. When she went inside the main room to order breakfast, leaving David to act as dogsitter, Chuchi loosened up, danced around a bit, greeted strangers. David is not a strict disciplinarian.

While we breakfasted, wrote, and read, Chuchi lay on the floor beside Judith’s chair. Occasionally he took a stroll, bumping legs, poking his nose out from under the table, reminding us he was there, willing to accept all morsels that came his way, probably wondering why none ever did. Chuchi wasn’t allowed people food.

This pattern continued for the better part of a year, until one day a man with an air of authority about him approached Judith and kindly told her that Chuchi was violating a city ordinance: dogs are allowed on decks and patios outside. The room we met in had once been outside, but since the gaps in its concrete block walls and its partial roof had been closed, and it had been gussied up with paneling and A/C and a heater, it was now inside. He was sorry, but Chuchi could not return.

We were sad, but soon afterward we moved our meetings to a library, where dogs don’t even think about entering. So Chuchi wouldn’t have been able to stay much longer anyway. And since libraries don’t serve food, he probably didn’t regret his banishment. He enjoyed our society, but the aroma of sausage seemed to be the real draw.

We couldn’t get a picture of Chuchi last night because instead of attending the party, he went to a sleep-over.

All right. End of Chuchi story and back to his owner.

Judith’s passion is social justice. She is board president of Austin tan Cerca de la Frontera, an organization that seeks to address conditions of social and economic injustice along the Texas/Mexico border particularly as they affect women and communities of color, and to find community-driven alternatives through transnational solidarity and fair trade. She’s also involved in Women on the Border, the Texas Fair Trade Coalition, and Fuerza Unida. She organizes delegations to travel to Mexico to meet with maquiladora workers in communities along the border.

You can read more about Judith and Austin tan Cerca’s activities at the ATCF website. Judith may show up again here as well. There’s still research to be done on that spirit of anarchy thing.

Happy birthday, Judith.

Elizabethan Museum, Totnes. The Victorian nursery, with a courtyard through the window. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I dragged through yesterday because I’d stayed up late the night before, finishing Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black.  I’d planned to get to bed at a decent hour but made the mistake of turning one page too many and, as so often happens in cases such as this,  all was lost. I couldn’t stop reading until I’d turned the last page.

*

Image by Derek Harper [CC-BY-SA-2.0]

I first heard of The Woman in Black from Kate Shrewsday, who said in a blog post,

“Susan Hill, a masterly ghost story teller, uses the nursery as the very epicentre of her masterly tale. An old house has unhappy history with tragic death at its centre. And those who died had lives which circulated about the nursery.”

The description sounded promising, so–after nearly six months of alternately remembering and forgetting–I got my hands on the book. It’s masterly, all right, a ghost story whose horror increases after the book has been returned to the shelf.

Now I’ll drag through tomorrow because of an inconvenient compulsion to post tonight. I’m probably already in hot water, because I have to be up and out before daylight, and my cousin Mary Veazey, the bossy one–you might remember her as the one who fell asleep while I was reading aloud the latest installment of my novel–well, anyway, she told me three hours ago to pack my suitcase and go to bed. I said I would but I didn’t.

Well, it’s too late to do anything about that now. Pun intended.

Before I get to the suitcase part, however, I’ll take a couple of minutes to link to a video of a little girl talking to a 911 operator about her father, who is having a heart attack. It has a happy ending. You may have seen it already–I’m usually the last one to discover such things–but if you haven’t, enjoy.

Related Articles

• The Woman In Black (mnorth52.wordpress.com)
• Shadow Chasing Shadow (kathywaller1.com)
• The Vows of Silence (prayerwalkerwiththee.wordpress.com)

clouds (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today there were no clouds at all, but I could well imagine how magnificently the huge, brooding area of sky would look with gray, scudding rain and storm clouds lowering over the estuary, how it would be here in the floods of February time when the marshes turned to iron-gray and the sky seeped down into them, and in the high winds of March, when the light rippled, shadow chasing shadow across the ploughed fields.

~Susan Hill, The Woman in Black

Clouds by Ted Garvin (Own work) CC-BY-SA-2.5  

Deutsch: “Kopfschmerzen”. Die wohl berühmteste – stark von James Gillray beeinflußte – Arbeit in einer Reihe von sechs Blättern “medizinischer” Karikaturen, in denen Cruikshank Krankheiten als Teufelswerk brandmarkt. Erstmalig publiziert: 12. Februar 1819. Originalgröße: 210 x 255 mm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)  George Cruikshank [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, PD-Art

Today, talking about treatments for migraines, one of my brilliant critique partners took a bottle of peppermint oil from her purse and passed it around. At the first whiff, I said, “Molly carries peppermint oil in her purse! She’ll use it to revive Dominica.”

In one fell swoop, I both saddled Molly with migraines and solved a knotty problem.

That is why I go to critique group.

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• 12 things not to say to a migraineur (sarahberardi.com)
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• Peppermint oil! (nourishment3.com)

Blue vacuum cleaner (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This afternoon, I shall present myself at the ophthalmologist’s office, where I will be measured, Valiumed up, awakened from a peaceful sleep on the waiting room sofa, cattle-prodded down the hall to the operating room, punctured, divested of a cataract, invested with a shiny new lens, wobbled back to the waiting room, and driven home, thence to crash on the sofa until further notice.

Isn’t that a lovely sentence? I wish the writer who told me to stop composing sentences requiring semicolons could see it. Not a semicolon in sight.

My critic said readers wouldn’t understand semicolons. I countered (mentally) that I hoped for readers who could unravel more than a simple declarative sentence, and if I couldn’t get them, I would give up writing and instead take conversational Spanish or annoy another voice teacher. But I have cut down on semicolons.

She also told me not to digress. One out of two isn’t bad.

Anyway. That was the procedure with LASIK, except for the puncture, the cataract, and the new lens. This time the doctor will use a vacuum cleaner. Doesn’t sound appetizing. The trade-off is that I won’t be disturbed by the smell of burning flesh–mine–from the laser. I’m to wear warm clothes because the operating room is cold. In the midst of this 75-degree winter, cold will be a relief. Friends have told me there will be heated blankets, but the doctor didn’t mention those, so I will take a sweater. I’ll have to take off my shoes, so I’ve also set aside a pair of socks the cats haven’t gnawed holes in.

Although by the time the Valium has taken hold, I won’t be able to read a compound-complex sentence, and I won’t care what the cats have done.

*

Note: A friend told me my impending surgery was announced on Facebook yesterday afternoon. I didn’t intend to announce it, and I don’t remember announcing it. Well, whatever. Since the story was already bouncing around in cyberspace, I thought I might as well make a post out of it. This evening, I might not think it so amusing.

Related Articles

• Semicolon tattoo (danielasmithfernandez.com)
• Punctuation Addiction (maasmith.com)

Mayan Exhibit (Photo credit: Chasqui (Luis Tamayo))

“. . . after sacred Mayan ballgames, the losing team was sometimes sacrificed.”

***

Image by Chasqui (Luis Tamayo) via Flickr, CC By-SA 2.0 

The Melody Maids of Prairie Lea High School
Rotary International Christmas Luncheon
San Marcos, Texas, December 1967

Names have been deleted to protect the innocent.

The ballerina celebrates a birthday this week.
Happy Birthday, KJP

]]> http://kathywaller1.com/2013/01/23/melody-maids-1967-the-ballerinas-birthday/feed/ 10 Melody Maids Rotary - no names - final Kathy Melody Maids Rotary - no names - final