Summer Reading

Update from last July - 

This summer sizzles and scintillates and " ... easy, breezy..."  is a keyword for me, so as not to get overheated!  

A huge stall and hiatus in things has passed and progress in business and personal life abound!   A few years ago, they said "wheelchair" and "end of things" and it's been exactly the opposite, with a bit of application. Praise for all who helped and have been patient and fun!

Summer reading this summer?  White papers to support and update the work during the week, and almost-forgotten romances for weekends - especially those that respond to the growing number of later-in-life romances ! 

The largest-growing age group is those over 100 years old !   Creative?   Dreaming of better than ever artwork keeps me in prayerful thank yous at the easel.  And making my own stories of the new options and possibilities is fun for me this summer - making notes . I will be sure to include the biographies of others who are doing neat things for the world and for themselves later in life.  Yes.

At "upper midlife" one gets out early and late and avoids the noonday sun when heat advisories go up , so that leaves time for books and notes and writings WHILE being senior-smart.

What are you reading this summer?   Comment below and be confident that your ideas will be respected.  The feedback is always a vitamin. 

elle

Last year's Summer Reading ( July 13, 2017 )  entry follows here:

July and we may duck indoors to escape heat, it's plenty of outdoors time,  at the pool, lake or beach or breezing about for business or pleasure!  We are happy escapees from winter's confinements in America's Northeast Connecticut - two blizzards this year!  More;  a fix on both feet found me wildly bursting OUT OUT OUT, when the weather and the feets finally allowed.  

Thanks to technology, wait times en route are never boring - audiobook and kindles on my ipad iphone let me engage with my summer reading choices:  Some white papers,  learning and technology for workdays/workhours;  some religious , some women's things, and health and diet things, and stories - fact and fiction, they make the time fly and fill the spirit.

But this is about biographies - a huge thank you!    Since girlhood I seem to reach for biographical reading whenever I am "in a brown study" over things, wanting a job or project, grieving, sluggish for emotional or physical reasons, in flux and lost.  Somehow Biographies do the trick, when I must be still,  my heroes swashbuckle for me - reading of the challenges and triumphs of the subject, I am entertained, informed and almost always inspired before long,...even empowered from within ... to get up and get at it once more, with new insights and inspirations.

As a girl, Lives of Women in Holiness, Red Cross, Nursing, Medicine and Arts of all sorts seemed to find the top of my list. Achievers of either gender in patriotism and science and wonderful inventions and business really lit me up, and still do!

This Summer?
-  Woman Transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller - do not always approve, but am impressed.  --  Innovators of the new Millennium - just finished one about Elon Musk and was just plain thrilled - did you know you can get a used Tesla for under 50 thousand USD?   wow!  I was hurt in the spine and thought I'd never drive again, so I sold the car to pay the medical bills a bit.....then of all things - I  healed!   instead of a wheelchair, it was the Manchester Road Race / Walkers.  Instead of death, life and plenty of it back at my work including one that went to the White House.
- For the Fourth of July, "John Adams" and his famous lady Abigail

The list goes on  Elizabeth Vigée LeBrun and her important portraiture and much more. Czeslaw Miłosc. the Polish poet, Elie Weisel, and last summer, Edna Gladney.  Somehow reading biography really helps me because it focuses like other media do not and so the results are better.   My Nancy Drew Collection, while not exactly biography to some folk , is very real to me and her immortal fans of her immortal , never changing , ever evolving self. 

What are YOU reading this summer?  I am not being silly, I am interested in your comments about it:  where does summer reading take you??? 

Labor Day 1953

Note: featuring the happy stories about Mother for the next few days - this is her week - she passed in her sleep before Monday morning12/11/17, at just shy of 92....she is free to be our angel always. I love you, Mother!

Life was very very good for the Smith Clan of Fairfield after WWII - all the sons who served, home and decorated for their heroism for Army Engineers in the Battle of the Bulge, Army Communications, Marines, Army Infantry,  Army MPs, and our Dad Pioneer Army Air Corps "Smitty the Flight Mechanic" .  All home and married to their sweethearts who served on the home front and all grateful and joyfully working at grand new jobs and raising families. 

Photoshop needed here - but it's Father's fun with new camera day and all three of us with Mother at one time. Rare to get us all to stand still together that long.

Exuberant Gram and Gramps so proud and nearing their 50th wedding anniversary, and fit for it, joined the annual Labor Day Picnic - a patriotic work song celebration - and this  year it was at Auntie Em's big homestead, to save Gram the work for a change at their "Little White House".

Mother was tall and lovely and expecting her third child very soon and fidgeted that morning, wondering if it was wise to join seven Irish sons and a daughter and their respective families at the blowout event of the year.   She had experienced a false labor, a trip to hospital to deliver, but home again, and NOT deflated enough -  so it could be any time now.  But the All-American Smith Family day found her doing her part with the women, setting up the table and presenting the feast, as the men talked over their game of horseshoes and the children helped with chores and played running and swinging games at the fine large place under the trees and in the field with the sheep and one good donkey.

NOT without caprice, Mother thought it might help things along to overdo the watermelon-eating and did.  Sure enough !     The second trip the hospital soon followed, and blushing, back to face the crowd at the picnic in an hour,  from a second false labor.  Father and the others making jokes about my Mother's desire to "go have this baby" on Labor Day made for a LOT of extra fun that day, for everyone but our Mother and the baby! 

But she was NOT wrong to feel like getting things going - when our sister Lori was born on September 18th, she was not fat, but a very long baby weighing in at 9 pounds 3 ounces!  No wonder she felt it MIGHT be time!  Third millennium medicine would have been able to image it out and let Mother deliver earlier, but back then, no.    And...Since Lori soon developed normally in size, it WAS surely just a long pregnancy resulting in high birth weight.  This one remains a family favorite LORISTORY , all these years later!   Hope you enjoyed it! 

And always a quick prayer and a wish that all who ARE in labor on this American Labor Day, enjoy a celebration of life of it all - today and always! 

The Murder of the Part-Time Wardrobe - a holiday fun mystery in 500 words!

Four Art shows!  Count'em - four!   And no sales from this venue of the previous five years!  A lifetime first- no sales. Alone now, and thrilled to be running around and doing life in full health after a disability that could have been fatal, the need to recover the MONEY to full health was now the key.

And so it was easy to slip the charge into the back of the large gold frame that enhanced my entry in the largest of the shows!  

My art had won prizes since girlhood, church and state, all the way to the White House, and so the zero sales were NOT okay.

 For five years, the huge gallery had been "home" - so much time there, setting up, screening, doing drop-offs and pickups and receptions, promotions  and related side-shows!   The place had become a wardrobe of a sort - the contents inserted and removed as needed - changed all the time,  but not entirely,  and provided a magic portal to world-class events, thanks to the very hard work of all involved.  A Part-Time Wardrobe, Indeed!

No sales directly associated with the place - NONE. A lifetime first- NOT ONE SALE!

Life had been good, then tragic , then redeemed, but not really unless the money would redeem as well.

NO sales? No sales meant NO redemption in this real world.f

I am a redcrosslady and non-violent, but gee!  So poison charges in the frame would do the trick - nothing deadly,  and triggered at pickup, the art would be fine and no one hurt -  but fogged enough to stink the place up, to high heaven, till Spring! 

YES....

I got busy helping with the take-down, and enjoyed the “wardrobe” one more time - taking in all the art, as the artists collected them at show’s end. Then as I took hold of my own “part of the art” I released the stink bomb capsule into a corner not visible to anyone who did not already know it was there.

Bye Bye - Happy Holiday! So good to see you all again - was quite sincere- they had been good and kind and great fun and restored the dead to life with their art and its related work for five years with me as a respected member!  Bye bye- and hit the “on “ switch to my stinkbomb , then the “off”switch to my “Tempoary Wardrobe” and danced happily off to fine family holiday reunions.

Leaving art events smiling , with me, usually means that people liked the work and bought some - even a little.   

I left smiling - and let them think so…….

This story fun to pass on from a facebook game begun by actor Benedict Cumberbach - click to join, if it is still there...if not, here, at least, is a screenshot to help you understand "what on earth?" 

Purpose

Also named  "A Splendid Torch"  or, "Purpose" -  this is A New Years Inspiration for everyone!  A vitamin of a sort,  from George Bernard Shaw, one of my least favorite persons, but most favorite storytellers.  It is reprinted everywhere under several titles.   I hope you enjoy the easy read!  Elle

This is the true joy in life,

the being used for a purpose

recognized by yourself as a mighty one;

the being a force of nature

instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of

ailments and grievances

complaining that the world will not

devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that

my life belongs

to the whole community,

and as long as I live

it is my privilege

to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die,

for the harder I work the more I live.

I rejoice in life for its own sake.

Life is no “brief candle” for me.

It is a sort of splendid torch

which I have got hold of

for the moment,

and I want to

make it burn as brightly as possible

before handing it on to future generations.