"Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion." Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

My friend Yvette recently lost her job around the same time I volunteered to be terminated. She read my blog about my last day at The Morning Call being quiet and uneventful, with no retirement party, cake or gold watch to go out with. Last Sunday she showed up at my door with a fully cooked dinner of her Puerto Rican specialties, a beautiful chocolate retirement cake and a new gold watch in a gift bag. She said she wanted to make sure I had those things since I'd been forced into early retirement and had in effect given them up. That is a true friend. She forgot all about her own problems in wanting to help me with mine. I can never thank her enough.

Her visit reminded me of the importance of having friends.  It’s like the lesson Jimmy Stewart learns at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life: his guardian angel sends him a message in a book saying “no man is a failure who has friends.”  Friends keep me from falling into that black pit of despair, they share my happiest moments and hold my hand when I can’t get out of bed.  I don’t have a boatload of good friends, but the ones I do have are pearls of great price and I thank God for them.

"I don't honestly know where this lawsuit will lead. And I fear that, like most lawsuits, it will be two, three, four years before we find out, by which time Sam will have looted the pension, driven off or fired the best workers and turned the Tribune Company into a television network featuring Bozo 90210 and a few newsletter-sized newspapers. But I do know who should be outraged. And I know it's not Sam Zell."

tellzell.com/inkstainedretch  September 18, 2008

Gosh, this reminds me so much of the Coffee News.  You only need one person to sell ads, write copy and print the Coffee News! That's what newspapers are coming to! They're not becoming glorified pennysavers! They're becoming the Coffee News! Sam wants us all to become Coffee News newspapers.  Short. sweet. Less filling. More distant. Hits you like a two-by-four. Honestly.

People always say to me, when I get myself into a situation where I’m coddling a problem child, that someone saw me coming, didn’t they? Like Boo. They really saw me coming and they wheedled and cajoled me into taking him from the shelter (I was the only one who could do it, knowing his GI problem and all) and “giving him a loving forever home.” I do love Boo—he’s my first adopted cat after Tom and Jitney—and he really is quite an individualistic animal. I think he sniffed too much catnip when he was young and he's still having hallucinogenic episodes. Sometimes he will stare into the cosmos with that wide-eyed “deer in the headlights” look and you just know he’s picking spaceberries.

I do love him, but I don’t really understand him. He will whine for me to pet his belly, then he’ll turn on me and bite and scratch my hand. I don’t get it. Just be thankful, for crying out loud. Don’t attack me for trying to love you.

That is exactly what our mother did.

Summers were the best of times at the old house, not only for the warm weather and no school but because there would be plenty of people around pretty much all the time to take my mother’s eye and mind off of me for a while.  We had our very own swimming hole just down the road at the Darlings’ house where the boys had dammed up a section of Valley Creek and created a deep pool with a sandy beach and a wooden bench nailed between two trees to sit on.  There was fishing to do, and berry picking, exploring the woods or listening in secret to my mother and Janie Thompson gossiping about everybody they knew or hearing my dad cursing like a trucker as he wrenched his finger working under the hood of a ’56 Chevy wagon.  I learned my best cuss words from him.

But the hands down happiest summer memories for me were the big family picnics.  It seemed like almost every Saturday all the aunts, uncles and cousins would align and converge on our farm. Aunt Jeannie, who worked for a beverage distributor, would bring the beer and soda, Aunt Doris would bring macaroni salad, and so on.  Whoever had would bring it along.

            It wasn’t so much the food I remember—although my mother’s potato salad has since attained legendary status—as it was the sheer spectacle of it all.  It was like being plopped down splat in the middle of a colorful circus, and one where I felt pretty safe to have a good time in. 

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I'm watching United 93.  It's filmed in real time, so you see the chain of events unfold as they happened to the passengers and crew of United Flight 93, the last of the four planes to crash on September 11, 2001, and the only one not to fulfill it's mission.  I am riveted.  I can't begin to articulate my emotions as I watch this film.  I couldn't stomach films about 9/11 before this.  They were too painful, too realistic, too in-your-face, too heartbreaking.  But It's been seven years.  I guess that's long enough for me to start feeling jaded about the whole event.

This is something that can never be forgotten, never be trivialized or downplayed.  9/11 was the defining moment in our American arrogance.  This was our weakest moment, the moment we were caught with our proverbial pants down, defenseless against an enemy we did not know or understand.

That's the most horribly unfathomable thing about the attack--it was unprecedented.  The target was civilians, not the military.  That's what makes terrorism so frightening, so depraved.  The terrorist believes he is acting on God's behalf, that he is fighting a holy war, a cause greater than himself.  He is not afraid to die--in fact, he welcomes death, for in death he is made glorious.  He is invincible as an instrument of God's wrath against the decadence of western culture.  He is the hero of his race.  Like the Kamikaze pilots of WWII, he believes he is furthering the cause of justice against an evil oppressor.

We were fat, we were soft, we were complacent, and they came to our door and attacked us with our own transportation system.  They made a mockery of our defenses.  As the world watched in horror, everyday people jumped to their death from the upper floors of the Twin Towers rather than be burned alive in their offices and cubicles.  The world watched and could do nothing to stop it.

That's what makes United 93 so terribly, incredibly poignant, that those passengers knew what had happened to the other three planes and they took the initiative to do something about it.  It's not the terrorists who are the heroes, it's that unified group of travelers and crew on that fateful airplane who, while knowing they were going to die, made their own deaths into a hopeful beacon for the rest of us.  They died in order to save other lives.  And for that we must never forget.

God is good.  And He don’t like ugly.

  Yes, Virginia, there is life after The Morning Call, and quite a good one, I must say.  According to my friend Ed, I have officially joined The Morning Call Alumni Association.  Membership includes the perk of no longer having to shoot Friday night football, fires, or fatal accidents, and I don't have to drive 80 miles a day looking for a feature of some kid playing on playground equipment--hallelujah!  I'm free!

(Hurricane Hannah is passing through, dropping buckets of rain, as you can see from the photo.)

This blog (what a horrid word that is) is my way of working through the trauma/elation of deciding to quit my job and take an early, early retirement.  I am not retired by any stretch of the imagination.  Feeding content to a website is a lot of work, but the difference is that now I am working for myself.  I no longer have the "evil mother" over my head telling me I'm not good enough and will never be good enough because...well, just because.

The garden is getting a soaker today as Hurricane Hannah passes through northeastern Pennsylvania. As I watched the sky open and sheets of rain slice
across the ground, I noticed the beautiful patterns the raindrops made in the puddles of my next door neighbor's brick patio. Of course, out came the camera and now you can see for yourself. What a joy to take photographs for the pure enjoyment of taking photographs again!

It's been dry for so long, and I know I'm not alone in praying for rain, but seven inches in one day is a little more than I anticipated. It's a good day to curl up with a cupper and watch old Bette Davis movies. Here's hoping the basement doesn't flood...

My garden is a microcosm.  Everything that goes on within it affects something else.  Too many bugs?  The plants die.  Too much heat?  The plants die or produce very little fruit. 

This prolonged dry spell has taken its toll, turning Tomato Land into The Dead Zone.  Even my Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes were not sweet in the least.

But over in Veggie Land, the Blue Lake pole beans are having quite a prolific season.  The Japanese beetles were not nearly as bad this year and the plants sustained little damage.