Remembering and Learning

Son Clint's family came to spend the weekend.  Sunday, we went to decorate graves of Mary's mother, the grandkids great-grandmother, and Mary's grandparents, the grandkids great-great-grandparents.  From there we went to the Heritage Center to look and learn.  The cannonballs set outside the museum drew their attention.  So much to see and do.

Placing flowers at Some Graves

With Memorial Day soon on us, we wanted to get out to the cemeteries in Sheldon and Helendale and place decorations at my relatives' burial sites. My parents and Dad's parents lie in rest in the Sheldon cemetery and Mother's parents and grandparents are in the Helendale Church cemetery, a few miles south of Leonard. The church and cemetery grounds are beautifully maintained.






When we were in the Sheldon cemetery I took pictures of Sheldon Shafer's gravesite.  His was the first birth in Sheldon , 1884

Hits Close to Home

When Winston Churchill turned 75, he said, "I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter." He also knew he had to be in a hurry if he was going to get anything else done. Uh-oh.

I don't know where the years have gone, but I am now 75.  Churchill did go on to live until 90. Dad made 95 and Ma made 94.  Maybe there's still some time.

In this time of governance by billionaires

In this time of governance by billionaires, some lines of poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley come to mind that were spoken as a rallying cry by the women garment workers of New York City after some of their number burned to death in a factory fire:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth, like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you —

Ye are many; they are few!

Vulgarities

A new book - The Way of the Writer by Charles Johnson - states “that perhaps we should be worried by the coarseness, vulgarity, and at times obscenity that we encounter so often today in American speech. … The problem as I see it, with vulgarity is that it is unexpressive, a failure of the language to reveal things in a fresh way.”  That’s what I’ve been thinking.

He goes on to say, "I brood daily about the debasement of American speech.  (In the last few decades we have mainstreamed many four-letter words in our fiction, standup comedy routines,and daily speech."