Old So What

  Buried inside a smothering plastic pot, and wrapped in suffocating plastic tape, the “Little Plant That Could” somehow survived. I freed it! Well, my cousin and I did. It’s thriving. I add a little water and tons of love and affectionate words every day. However, I think it may be time to transplant the little guy to soil.   My “Lucky Bamboo.” Although “Lucky” is not beautiful, but as with many things that are not, the enthusiasm and positive feeling that he elicits are just as important, really more so. “Lucky” affects all who see him in a positive way! I guess he’s just lucky. 

  Bashar al-Assad was a very bad boy. Well, he was very bad…period. He and his wife, “The Rose in the Desert, (now known as “the first lady of hell”), lived a life of luxury and plenty. How many Hermes scarves can you wear at one time (?), while his people lived lives of hunger, despair and desperation. How do you do that?   How do you live with yourself and do that? How do you go to a family pot roast on a Sunday when you’ve tortured, exploited and starved your fellow Syrians on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday through Saturday. I won’t even talk about the torture prisons and the graves where hundreds of thousands were flung in an effort to dispose of their bodies.   Apparently, these were mostly average citizens grabbed off the streets and checkpoints never to be heard from again. Disposing of human beings. After a while you must become inured to it. All of it. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, Bashar decided to sell his people and the world, the Captagon (a highly ad...

  What is the voice of reason? It’s that little voice inside our heads and those of others, that speaks to us with logic, fairness, good judgment, using evidence…to convince ourselves to act in a sensible, civilized way. We seem to have lost this little voice of hope along the way of today’s not-so-nice, not-so-safe world. (In other words:   a world out of control, and often malignant.) If we could reinstate “kindness” it would greatly aid the little voice of reason.

On a February day in 2024, in Athens, Georgia, Laken Reilly was brutally struck down for no reason by a monster.  Laken was a nursing student. We will never know now how many patients she would have helped had she been allowed simply to live her life. She has left us too soon at 22 years of age. She has left us with just a glimpse of her promising future. She has left us with her middle name:  Hope. Laken Hope Reilly.

  Are here and aren’t they lovely and hopeful? They come to us while it’s still chilly almost as if they’re saying, “We can’t wait, we want life now!” If spring is hopeful, then surely cherry blossoms are their cheerleaders.   We love these exquisite visions of happiness.

  At this season of the year between Christmas and New Year’s Day…I wasn’t feeling too hopeful being old, mostly alone, and fast going through the little retirement money I had left. I was making my (and my cat’s bed—we share, or really, she allows me to sleep in my own bed on whichever side of it she is not occupying at the moment). I was right in the middle of thinking that things were on a sure track to get worse…. When I heard a sound seldom heard in the house, uttered by a creature who didn’t like humanity very much or so I thought. (Somewhere before we met, she must have had an unpleasant experience with someone.) Then I put a name to the little creature, and a name to the sound. My cat was purring. A very hopeful sign, don’t you think?