Shingles Update: I am still around. This whole shingles nightmare has thrown me for a loop. When the doctor told me that this could last up to six weeks, I really didn’t believe it. Now I do. I have turned a corner though, but it is a slow moving turn. I have been very fatigued which through reading up on shingles is something very normal. I am going home to upstate NY at the end of next week to see my mother. Hopefully I will be much better by then.
I discovered this video when reading a fellow blogger’s post. I have probably watched the video at least 5 times already. It speaks to me on so many levels. When I really begin to think about all of the damage that the felon-in-chief is doing to our country and the world, I find myself falling off a cliff into a pit of despair. Somehow this video gives me some hope.
“Oh, peace train take this country. Come take me home again.”
And “Peace Train” has been made into a picture book! When my kids were little, I used to love reading to them from picture books. I would have voices for all the characters and they would beg me every night to read to them. There is something precious about the innocence of children.
Miss Shirley has a new toy! She has been the best medicine throughout all of this!
I haven’t been reading blogs. This shingles crap has totally upended my life and my joie de vivre. Wow, the pain is unbelievable. Not like a kidney stone (as I’ve had my share of those), but it is really miserable. Thank you for all of your kind words from my last post. If you haven’t had the shingles vaccine, GET IT. Maybe I should create a public service announcement on that. I was thinking that I was being a big baby, but as I’ve read about shingles pain, I have realized that it is something definitive and real.
However, I am still managing to walk Miss Shirley everyday as she needs the exercise and I do feel better if I’ve moved some. She has been by my side the whole time. She’s not used to seeing me listless and inactive. Sometimes when I am just sitting at the table (it is hard to recline with this), I can feel someone staring at me. It is Shirley with her big brown eyes. Gosh, I love her so.
To top it off, we lost power yesterday. It went out at 4:00 AM, and we didn’t get it back until 5:00 PM. We have been having horrible thunderstorms every afternoon and overnight. Yesterday it was hot and humid and not having AC just about did me in, but I am here to tell the tale. I go to the dermatologist next Tuesday for a check on my removed cyst. I am going to ask the doctor when I can get the shingles vaccine after having it.
The photo below is behind our house. I was sitting on the sofa and heard chain saws. I went out to the back deck to investigate and saw these men working on restoring power. I was watching an episode of the first season of “The Gilded Age” the other night, and in this episode the characters were marveling at Thomas Edison harnessing electricity. They were wondering how this new technological advance would change future generations. I have no idea how it works, but I am grateful for it.
Activism
Since I’ve been out of commission with life’s daily tasks, I have been watching a bit of tv, and I have also been watching videos on youtube. It’s amazing that once you watch one type of video, then similar ones pop up. Usually, for me, I am getting anti-tRump videos, both serious and political, and some quite funny. I did watch one on kindness, called “Kindness 101”. I have watched a bunch of them, and because of that, they keep cropping up in my watch list. This is a good thing as I need to be reminded that there is good in the world.
The one below is about a fifth grade class. When I began my teaching career, I taught in elementary school, most of it in fifth grade. I ended my career in middle school, but I still look back fondly at those elementary kids. In my final year in elementary school, I had a class that wasn’t very strong academically. The principal believed in grouping them by ability. I usually had the “top” class, but this year, the principal decided to switch things up. I remember the six fifth grade teachers were called into his office during teacher workweek so that he could give us our class folders. I remember vividly that my class had two filing cabinet drawers for folders, whereas the other five teachers had just one.
As he gave us our folders I knew by the size of the pile that I had the class with needs. I remember looking through them getting ready for the following week. I had 28 students. Twenty of the students had notes from their fourth grade teacher that they needed to be seated in the front. They had all kinds of learning problems. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I thought to myself that I would make things work. It was rough. Some of them couldn’t really read. They had no idea about geography or grammar. The good news is that they were sweet kids. They were caring. They were honest. They were wonderful. I grew to love them. When it got close to the holidays, I told them that I wanted us to do something good for the community. I had seen in the local newspaper that the children’s cancer center was doing a drive for video tapes of movies for the children to watch. Yes, this dates me…video tapes.
I told the class that I wanted to do a video tape drive. I gave them the background about the cancer center and how we could help. They were all very enthusiastic even as I tried to temper their excitement with the work ahead. I divided the class up. Some wrote letters to teachers asking for donations, some wrote to people in the community. As you can imagine, the letters were filled with grammatical errors and misspellings. I worked with them at perfecting the letters as best as I could. I told them that it was always good when writing a business letter to make it look as professional as possible.
The letters went out, the collection boxes went out, and we wrote to the hospital telling them of our plan and when we’d deliver the videos. The class transformed into a factory. We made cards for the sick kids and we also wrote thank you notes to all of the people who donated. I can remember one girl distinctly. She was such a weak student, but this somehow transformed her. I can still see the freckles on her face and the bow she always wore in her hair. I have no idea what she ever did with her life, but I hope she remembers this project as much as I do.
I hadn’t planned to write about that 5th grade class from many, many years ago. I was just going to post this video with a quip about tRump and how he needed to watch these kindness videos. But then I remembered that class and the videos and I just wrote.
I am not talking about the shingle that goes on a roof. I have got shingles! I woke up on Monday and when I put a t-shirt on, my chest felt odd. I guess you could say it was a bit tender. There was nothing on my chest, no bumps, no bruises. My ribs ached too, so I figured that I probably slept in a weird position. As the day progressed, a tingling sensation began that actually hurt. But there was no sign of any physical rash on my body. Last night it really began to hurt, and I noticed a bunch of red bumps on my torso, that initially looked like bug bites. I got on the internet and literally googled my symptoms word for word and shingles came up.
I put a note into my doctor’s portal as I couldn’t get an appointment with him. He was booked out until mid-July. Someone from the office called me this morning and booked me with another doctor. The minute she looked at me she said…”shingles”. Amazingly, I got right in at my appointment time, and I didn’t wait to see the doctor. Usually at this practice this isn’t the case. I am on two different medications to help with the symptoms. It is going to be a long couple of weeks.
On another note, it is so depressing to see that the GOP passed the “Big Awful Bill”. I was still hoping that someone would grow a conscience and stand up to the Felon, but I was wrong. It makes me heartsick.
I am going to close with two photos I have taken over the last week, as they help to put me in a better mood. The first one is last weekend when we visited a winery about an hour from our house, and the second one is flowers that I noticed on my walk with Miss Shirley on Monday. They were at the edge of the park where we usually walk. I had never noticed them before!
The other day I came across a youtube channel from a public elementary school chorus on Staten Island in NYC. I watched some of the videos and was intrigued as to how a choral director could get this level out of 4th and 5th graders. As I did my internet dive (retirement is indeed great), I discovered that some famous music artists have performed at the school with the students. This teacher is truly an unsung (no pun intended) hero!
I found this article about the choral director. I am sure that he’ll be a teacher that these students will remember for the rest of their lives. Do you have a teacher that sparked something in you that you still remember to this day? For me, it was my high school French teacher. She was eccentric and a bit off the wall. I remember on the first day of class in French I, she literally ate a piece of chalk. She said, “Je mange la craie”. She held the chalk in her hands and munched on it much like a rabbit would chew on a carrot. I figured out right away what she meant. She would always do things like that in class, and she instilled a love of the French language in me that I have still to this day.
As I have mentioned before, I went to a really small high school in a very rural area. By the time French III rolled around, there were only five of us left in the class. Everyone else had dropped out. One day in the winter, she asked us if we’d like to go as a class to France over spring break. Of course, we all chorused, YES! She told us to go home and talk to our parents. Sadly, my father said no. There was no way that my parents could have afforded a trip like that, and my father was usually one to say “no” anyway.
I was the only one who wouldn’t be going. She called my father the next night after I had relayed to Madame that my dad had said “no”. She called him and talked him into letting me go. I don’t know what she said to him, but she must have worked some magic as my father was extremely stubborn. That was my first trip abroad, other than Canada. The trip changed me forever and instilled a love of travel and of cultures other than my own. She paid for everyone to go from the whole class. She was a rich widow who didn’t have children and she wanted to spend her money on things before she passed.
And I don’t remember her because she paid for our trip to France! I remember her for instilling in me a love of learning, and a selfless desire to show her students in a little tiny town in upstate NY that there was a whole different world out there to explore and to experience.
Here are two videos about the choir. The first one is from a talk show, and the second one is one of their most recent videos. If you have time, take a look! The first video mentions that they performed at Obama’s inauguration. As Cher sings, “If I could turn back time…”
I mentioned in my last post that I was stung by yellow jackets. It turned out to be five stings, and my index finger swelled so much that I couldn’t bend it much. It is much better now, but I am sure quite leery when I am outside now!
I am more than disgusted as to what is happening in the US right now. It’s like we are living in an alternate reality where the bad guys continue to win. It is depressing, but I am not going to “give in.” I will continue to protest and speak up.
“When you get to know a lot of people, you make a great discovery. You find that no one group has a monopoly on looks, brains, goodness or anything else. It takes all the people – black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants – to make up America.” ~Judy Garland
I love this quote. It speaks to the America that I used to know. When I taught, I always did a unit on immigration with a culminating activity where the students played the parts of immigrants or processors on Ellis Island. They all had roles to play and I gave them leeway to put into their character what they wanted to. I always chose the more theatrical of the students to play the more dramatic characters. These so called characters were real immigrants during the early 1900s, so I think that the unit for them was indeed more authentic. One year, one of my students got the role of a pregnant immigrant from Poland. She asked me if she could “have the baby” during our reenactment. I told her that she’d have to do research and find out the specifics of how many children were born on Ellis Island, what were the medical issues at the time, etc. Each student researched their character and learned a lot as they had a written report to turn in at the end of the unit.
On the day of the reenactment, I would invite other classes to come and watch. Every year my class would resist the thought of having spectators, but I told them that they had to have an audience to help teach others about the immigrant experience. The girl that I mentioned before told me after doing her research that she wanted to have the baby. I told her that it would be fine, but that she should keep what she was going to do to herself because it would be more authentic if she did suddenly go into labor with no one expecting that to happen. Each student had to learn a bit of their “foreign language” to simulate the language barriers that existed. They couldn’t communicate in English unless their character was deemed educated enough to have learned English in college. Most of the immigrants that we were doing were illiterate in their own language. They always did such great costumes too. We would research the clothing of the day and I think that they had fun.
This class was a huge class of 35, so the reenactment took a long time and she was one of the last immigrants to get processed. I had forgotten about her impending labor! As I was watching another student going through one of the checkpoints, I heard this scream coming from the front of the classroom. She had gone into labor! She fell to the floor (yes, she took some dramatic license here) and clutched her stomach. (which was padded). The thing that happened next was magic to me. The two students who were playing the role of the medical doctors on Ellis Island rushed over to her and began to treat her. The room got very quiet as they quickly delivered a plastic doll baby. I will never forget that moment. After the viewing class left, we had a debriefing. I can remember talking to the students and I just started laughing. In the end we were all laughing. I will never forget that day. I don’t think that they will either.
I would always tell them about my immigrant roots. My mother’s family came from England. My sister has done research on that side of the family and it turns out that I am related to one of the Pilgrims. My dad’s side came from Canada in the 1850s. Originally the clan came from Scotland. They entered the United States to work in the saw mills.
As Judy Garland stated, we are a nation of immigrants that make up the fabric of what is America. Here’s a clip below from the Jimmy Kimmel Show, oh how far we have fallen. The ending says it all.
Another Judy Garland classic sung by students 12 years ago in Newton, Connecticut where the horrific school shooting took place. The innocence of childhood.
It is still very hot here, but not quite as bad. It is “only” 95 F here today. I got three yellow jacket wasp stings today as I was walking to my car. Ouch! One of them is on my index finger and it hurts a lot, but I can still type!
Shirley has turned out to be such a great addition to my life. I know I have said this on numerous occasions on this blog, but with each and every day I come to appreciate her more. She has a way of lifting my spirits and helping me to see joy in the simple things.
I know that dogs like routine, (as well as kids), so I try really hard to stick to a daily schedule with her. Now that it is starting to get hot, we go and do our walks earlier to beat the heat of the afternoon. I listen to music as I walk her, and I enjoy watching her sniff and happily walk along next to me. Today on our walk I was stopped by an older couple. I had my AirPods in, so I didn’t initially hear what they were saying to me. Basically the gist was what a beautiful dog she is and how well behaved too. I always tell people who stop and talk about Shirley the story of how I got her at the SPCA. I know I am very lucky to have her.
Every night when I get ready for bed, I perform my nightly ritual of washing my face, brushing and flossing, etc. The literal second that Shirley hears the electric toothbrush come on, she comes to my bathroom door with a toy or a ball in her mouth. She wants me to chase her. And so I do. With the electric toothbrush going and me running down the hall, I am sure it is quite a sight. I can never film these events as I am brushing my teeth! I did manage to get a couple of photos of her as I was just beginning to brush. There have been times where I’ve forgotten to chase her. As I am brushing my teeth and looking into the mirror, I get a sensation of someone watching me. It is Shirley by the door with a toy in her mouth, wagging her tail.
I took some photos during our walk this morning. The magnolias are in full bloom, and the scent of them gently wafts through the air. If I didn’t have Miss Shirley, I don’t think that I’d spend as much time outside. I try and find new places to walk every day, and for that, I am even more grateful for my wonder dog.
It has been very hot here! A “feels like” temperature of 112 today. My walks with Shirley are getting earlier and earlier. Thank God for air conditioning.
I went to the “No Kings” demonstration on Saturday afternoon/evening. It was exhilarating to be around like minded people! Though it rained at the end, it didn’t dampen the event. Of the three protests that I’ve attended so far, this one had the most people, which is encouraging.
The police were present, but were friendly and smiling. I fear for my country and the path it has started traveling down, but I will not sit back. I can’t.
The title above is a direct quote from Eugene Levy, one of the creators of the Canadian TV show “Schitt’s Creek”. I found the show one night about five years ago on a channel that I don’t even remember. I watched the first episode and thought, “This is pretty good.” But I wasn’t hooked. A week or so later, I watched the second episode. I started getting drawn into the characters and the stories. Then I watched the third episode a couple of days later. As I got to know the characters in this fictional town, I started to fall in love with the show. I never watch something more than once, but I have watched this show from beginning to end three times. And I will probably watch all six seasons again.
Eugene Levy, who plays the father in the show (to his own real-life son Dan Levy) was honored at the 2025 Nancy Pelosi Equality Ally Award at Equality PAC’s National Pride Gala. If you have a chance, read the article from the Advocate to learn more about his family’s story.
Here’s a youtube clip of some of the memorable scenes from the show’s six season run.
I saw the video below on youtube the other day. When I saw Viva La Vida in the title of the video, I decided to listen to it. I love Coldplay and I wanted to hear another rendition of the song. For some odd reason, I found myself getting emotional watching it. Maybe it was the proud mother in the video, maybe it was because I looked at that young man’s innocence and his relationship with his mother, maybe it was something else. I don’t know.
My cyst appointment went as I expected. They drained the infection, I am on antibiotics, and have to go in six weeks to see if the swelling is down. If it is, they will schedule an out patient surgery to remove it.
I had to unplug myself a bit this weekend from everything as I find that what is happening in my country distresses me to a very high degree of angst. So I am catching up on blog reading today (Monday) and trying to keep myself busy. Michael told me that when I am eating breakfast, he frequently hears me mutter quietly, “Oh God”. He knows I am reading the news again.
This morning Shirley and I went on a long walk by the river in a new place that I had not been before. And…we got lost. Luckily I had my phone with me and I plotted out my return. How did we ever manage before smart phones? I guess we did somehow, but they sure help today!
And finally, thanks for all of the kind comments on my last post. That post was one I almost didn’t publish. I am glad I did.
I am not sure if this title is quite the right one or not. But I have been thinking about the orange felon in the White House today, maybe more than usual. If I hear his name I seethe. He brings out the absolute worst in me. Even though there are infinite reasons to despise that man, I wondered why he triggers me so much. So I started thinking about my life. Sometimes I don’t like thinking about my childhood because it was not a good time for me. I do know it could have been a lot worse, but it is the only life I know.
As I’ve written on this blog before, my father was distant with me. I actually think I disappointed him in a lot of ways. I wasn’t athletic, I hated hunting, I couldn’t hammer a nail without it being crooked. (no straight nails for me). My brother was all the things that I wasn’t. I never felt my father’s approval. But somehow, I managed. When I got to high school, the bullying started. I grew up in a rural community with not a lot of options for alternative friend groups, so I became somewhat of a loner.
I felt different, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I was a good student, in fact I was the only male in my high school class to go to a four year college. So I stood out. I was on the soccer team, but I wasn’t that good. I did excel in school, which wasn’t something that was really celebrated by most of my male classmates. The bullying began slowly, then took on a life of its own. I couldn’t walk to class without getting shoved against a locker. I stopped eating lunch, and I didn’t go to the bathroom all day. On a spring day as I was walking to class, one of the guys who routinely bullied me kicked me in the groin with the intent to really hurt me. I had had enough, so with all of my might I shoved him. He went against the lockers and I made my exit to my final class of the day.
At dismissal, I got on the bus to go home. As the bus was traveling through the little village where I grew up, I noticed a posse of the bullies looking at the bus as it chugged down the street. Fear gripped me. I knew that they were all going to go after me. When the bus got to my stop, I hurriedly got off and turned my head to look up the hill. There they were and they spotted me. My house was not that far from the bus stop, but I knew I wouldn’t make it before they caught up to me. Instinctively I ran (more like tore) down a side street towards the river that runs through the town. I veered onto another street which was parallel to the street that my house was on. From that vantage point I could get a view of my house. And there they were, waiting for me. I didn’t know what else to do but to wait them out. My mother was still at work, and my brother and sister weren’t there. Eventually they began to disperse, so I quietly started walking across a neighbor’s lawn towards the house.
I was spotted by one of them who was still lingering. He yelled to the others. I took off running towards the river. I can still remember the burn in my lungs and the burn in my legs. I frequented the land down by the river, and I knew of many hiding spots and places where I could go. Fortunately for me, all of those boys were smokers and they couldn’t keep up and eventually I lost them. I guess that’s where my life long love of running began, even though my knees are paying for it now. Sometimes when I run, I do think of that sprint to the river.
The wooded area is where I sought refuge.
When I got home, I was alone. I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. I remember looking into my parent’s medicine chest thinking that I wanted to kill myself with a concoction of pills. Of course I didn’t, but the thought was there. I never told my parents about any of this. When my mother got home from work, I hid what happened. Maybe she had an inkling that something was off. I will never know.
The bullying continued, and I found myself falling into a deep depression. But somehow, someway, I managed to survive it all. I remember I chose a high school graduation photo for the yearbook where I wasn’t smiling. One of my classmates said to me, “You look so sad.” I just shrugged my shoulders, but I wanted to say, “Well, I was sad.” I have no idea where that yearbook is now.
After finishing college, I became a teacher. My mission was to help those kids who felt like they were on the outside looking in. I think I succeeded in doing just that. I never talked down to them, and I would always listen. When bullying happened in the classroom, we’d talk about it. I was hyper aware of those kids who felt that their differences were an embarrassment. I always tried to celebrate everyone’s uniqueness.
When planning last October for my mother’s 90th birthday party, I found that I had to go to Facebook a lot to find people that I knew would want to attend the party. That’s when I spied a Facebook page of one of my former tormentors. I went down the proverbial rabbit hole of looking at all of their pages. I discovered to no surprise that they were all Trumpers, and some even had Confederate flags on their home page. Imagine Confederate flags in a little town a couple of miles from the Canadian border, miles and miles away from the South.
When our “felon in chief” bullies people with his rude and hurtful comments and “executive orders” it dishes up some very unpleasant memories. I know what it is like to be bullied. I know what it is like to feel less than. I know what it is like to feel like I don’t belong. I read this substack about Pride Month this morning. It’s called “When Is It Straight Pride Month?” It’s a quick read and worth the time if you have it.
So violà, I have unloaded. I have never told this piece of my story to anyone. But somehow it has helped me sort out in my head one of the multitude of reasons why I despise the man in the White House. I am going to continue marching against Felon 47, but not only against him, but all of the miserable, unqualified, uneducated and repulsive morons that he surrounds himself with. My next protest March is June 14, and I cannot wait.
You always have to remember – no matter what you’re told – that God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway. ~ Cyndi Lauper
For me, there is something refreshingly innocent when hearing children sing.
My Secret Journey 