I have enjoyed writing a number of blogs in my life--Live From Haiti, Requiem for a Neighborhood, The Year of Living Covidly. I decided to write one about things that interest me in my 60's.
2025 Year In Review
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Here is the Christmas card and letter we sent out. Late, but back in the day, the Christmas season went until Candlemas, on February 2. Here's to old traditions!
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, immortalized by the song from Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." It's a haunting song with the haunting verse, "Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?" Certainly in extreme life and death situations like this, we can feel abandoned by God. There are other circumstances where one may wonder "where the love of God goes." Poverty, for one. I've been thinking about poverty, or more to the point, people who are poor, a lot this past week. On Friday, I participated in a Poverty Exercise at the Dream Center in Peoria. The approximately 50 participants were divided into families of 3-5 and given a task of items to accomplish, mainly surrounding paying bills. I was a disabled father-in-law, who was reduced to making suggestions and watching helplessly as my daughter and son-in-law scrambled to cover bills with no...
Franklin enjoying some coconut. I'm in the Dominican Republic with my husband John. He comes here frequently for Haitian Hearts work. I join him every two years or so to see in person some of the work we do. Yesterday we traveled about two hours from Santo Domingo, the capital, to the home of one of John's patients, 13-year-old Franklin, who has a big heart problem. Ten years ago or longer, Franklin got strep throat, which developed into rheumatic fever, which has severely damaged the mitral valve in his heart. I will talk more about Franklin in a future post. John wanted to examine Franklin in his home (you learn a lot about a patient when you see him in his home environment). A driver took us through the city of Santo Domingo out into the country, to the little settlement where Franklin and his family live. Fortunately for us, yesterday was a national holiday, Constitution Day, so while there was traffic, it wasn't nearly as heavy as a typical Monday. Perhaps traffic acc...
I met my friend Jeanie Gorman Bachler freshman year in our homeroom class. I was the first kid in my family to go to high school and awkward and shy to boot. I remember that first day, looking at Jean, several rows over and how her smile took in the entire classroom. She laughed and joked, and everyone was in on it. "This," I thought, "is someone I want to be friends with." And, lucky me, I was for the rest of my life. Our high school years were fun, but when I really got to know Jeanie was after I graduated from college and returned to Peoria. We were roommates for seven years and during that time, I got to appreciate the full impact of Jean's gifts, one being her love of singing. She had a beautiful voice and sang at many weddings and funerals. She seemed to know the words to every song ever written. It was an amazing talent and with her lovely propensity to break out into song at any moment--"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,"-- living wit...
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