Personal Story

You just call out my name and you know where ever I am
Anyway old Carol King song use to love it
This is about telephone calling people
What are the rules
What is the etiquette on phone calling people
How do you feel about it
A friend of mine says Bob
You don’t call back that day
Call immediately
Another friend says I call
when I get the chance
When I can get to it
I don’t call back if it is important they will call me again
Or what about those internet emails that you get

Is age just a number
Is the number of years that you are young
Telling of your vitality, your energy, your philosophy
How you live your life
I went with my friend the other day to visit a friend of hers
Her name is Celeste
And it was an amazing experience
Because Celeste is 100 years young
She is from France
She has been living in the US actually locally in Litchfield County for quite some time
My friend was there to buy a boxwood a miniature boxwood that you don’t have to trim

Garden life began for me at the age of 12. When my mother worried she was so busy she might not get her dahlias planted, I volunteered for the job. I seldom volunteered for chores on our busy family farm, but, even then, the magic of these flowering plants had me under their spell. Dahlias grow from thick, elongated roots called tubers that we dug each fall and stored for the winter. By springtime the gnarly clumps were like shriveled starfish, testing one’s faith any life could be left in those dusty, wrinkled remains.

It is amazing how our subconscious can change what we actually see.

I remember reading about a person, who when hypnotized could not see another person. Their mind was able to completely eliminate that other person from anything they were looking at. Their mind would fill in the background so the person looked invisible.

What does this say about us?

You know who often teaches me
How to live life
Is my dog Missy
My shi tzu
I have to tell you
She really shows me how to embrace the day so often
When I get up no matter what time
What the weather is, whatever the conditions are
She just jumps up and is ready to the greet the day
She eyes me as I move around my home
She looks at what I do
And if she sees me put on my shoes and socks
Immediately she is ready to go
She has no clue where I am going
It could be somewhere not even fun that I am going

One day I went outside and saw mushrooms everywhere. Not only was the yard absolutely full of mushrooms, but they were all so different from each other. It’s like elves and fairies were celebrating there in the night before.

Some were large and off-white. Some were small and orange. Some were dark, dark brown, thin and tall. Some were white with an orange ring at their edge. Some were tiny and delicate, the size of a dime. Colony upon colony of each kind.

There was a huge 8 inch mushroom. There were colonies of bright yellow sprouts, just stems forming, of young mushrooms.

I’m in a concert
I’m being serenaded
I walked out
Listen to this
It’s amazing
The sounds of summer
The warm weather is here
And I am up in New Preston
I was just leaving a great event with friends and I said
Listen, listen to this
Wow you can be entertained anytime during the day by nature
You just walk out and there it is
I love the sound of the serenade
Encore, encore
There is all kinds of music out there
But the music of these peepers, frogs and nature

When I was a child, my father told me, I don’t know if it was in grade school, or high school, he said, “Son, never cheat. Again, you shouldn’t cheat in school. I know, I’ve seen people do it, and they do it in college.
But if you start cheating, later you could cheat on your wife, your family, your children, your friends, your boss, your coworkers, your customers, or business associates – where does it end?”

Dogs before the 19th century were largely functional, such as hunting, guard, and watch dogs. The Oxford Dictionary, in the oldest quotes in the oldest Proverbs and phrases, dogs were rarely depicted as faithful or as man’s best friend, but as vicious and aggressive hunting dogs.

This is the story of how I learned about Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who had a jungle hospital in Equatorial Africa. The reverence for life for all animals, he created this idea when he was in Africa in 1913, when he first went to the hospital in the jungle.

The reverence for life came to me when my mother passed away. I was stationed in Germany. I came home to New York, and my father said, “I want you to meet this woman”. She was a Jewish refugee from Vienna. She won the 1958 Oscar for a documentary on Albert Schweitzer, who I’d heard of.