Day 328 Six Thousand More Pages

November 2, 2015

(If we live with an open and grateful attitude, every day will bring a gift. This is one of 365 gifts during the year I turned 70.)

Smiles that embrace life (Photo by David Ettlin)

Often when people divorce, the couple's mutual friends also divorce one of them. I’m happy to say that did not happen to me. It’s a win-win situation. I remain friends with husband number one’s cousins. Husband number two and I even stayed with one of the cousins who lives in Australia. Today, husband number two, my David of 35 years, and I had lunch with an old friend I knew through husband number one, Scott.

Kath goes back to more than 50 years ago when, in my other life, I was introduced to camping and backpacking with her family. She is an adventurous, very smart and fun human being. Since then, her husband has passed away and her family has grown to include great-grandchildren. She is 17 years older than I am and a wonderful role model. We often talk about books and recommend our favorites to one another. She is presently reading Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization and is on volume number four out of eleven. The entire set includes close to 10,000 pages which she expects to complete.

Like most grandmothers and great-grandmothers, she loves and keeps up with her family, laughs with them and cries with them. Unlike many great-grandmothers, she keeps up to date with the technology they use and checks up on them on Facebook. Unlike many people her age, she is not stuck in the past, is a life-long learner, has a positive outlook and holds her end in intellectual conversations.  And quite unlike her peers, she has an informed liberal outlook. It is no wonder that I enjoy spending time with my “young” friend.

My gift today is lunch with a long-time friend.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~­  

Epilogue: January 25, 1928 ~ December 22, 2016.  A little more than a year after I wrote this, Kath passed away. Her funeral was today, December 28. I don't know how many pages she got to read before she died. What I do know is that her family and friends have many more metaphorical pages in our lives, narratives yet to unfold. We can be sure that Kath will live in those pages because we have known and loved her.





> Day 329: Maryjane's Candy

You can find links to my other posts on this project here:
http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2014/12/365-gifts.html

Day 290 Perspicacity

September 25, 2015

(If we live with an open and grateful attitude, every day will bring a gift. This is one of 365 gifts during the year I turned 70.)

It is difficult for me to pronounce the word perspicacity. My tongue becomes twisted, I put the s in the wrong place and I lose track of syllables and accents. Even more difficult for me is to grasp the fact that when I am no longer here, life will continue—just not the one that is my life. 

For each life there is a universe, its own universe. We generate spheres of reality, individual bubbles of existence. Our planet is comprised of billions of spheres of reality, generated by each individual human..." Robert Lanza

Tonight I sit in my favorite restaurant, the Szechuan Café, with my husband David and friend Jeremy. As human beings, we may exist in our own spheres of reality but there are emotional gravitational pulls that bring individual spheres together and I am grateful for that. During these times of connection, I experience the moment, embrace it, savor it and then eventually release it, for I cannot hold elusive time in my hand. Perhaps that is why each day is especially important, each moment a gift. 

I cannot grasp the planet’s future without me but I have the perspicacity to appreciate the confluence of this moment.

My gift today is a confluence of spheres.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~­ 

You can find links to my other posts on this project here:

http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2014/12/365-gifts.html

Day 289 Two Continents

September 24, 2015

(If we live with an open and grateful attitude, every day will bring a gift. This is one of 365 gifts during the year I turned 70.)

Visit from friend Jeremy with humorous t-shirt:

Haikus are easy

But sometimes they don’t make sense

Refrigerator

A couple weeks ago, I received a message from an old friend saying that he was coming to the US for a brief time and were we up for a visitor. The answer was yes, of course. He arrived tonight and it is the first time since David’s surgery that we felt like we were doing something we normally do. So much time has been taken up with medical concerns that it felt good just to have a friend visit.

Jeremy and I met in a mutual class at the University of Baltimore when he was working on his masters and I on my doctorate. At that time, he had a German bride, Maja, who was trying to join her American husband who lived in Baltimore. At each class session, Jeremy would fill us in on the latest frustrations in immigration. Finally, she arrived and it was a joy to see the expression on their faces as they celebrated. And it was wonderful to gain a new friend such as beautiful Maja. 

Since then, they have returned to Germany to live and raise two children. We have had several visits on both continents. As life goes on, some people I meet fade into oblivion while others stay in my heart. Jeremy and his family are the latter. It’s interesting how with certain people, even after a period of time has passed, you can just pick up where you left off a year or so ago. 

My gift today is a visit from an old friend.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~­ 

> Day 290: Perspicacity

You can find links to my other posts on this project here:

http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2014/12/365-gifts.html

Day 172 Soul Food

May 30, 2015

(This is part of a 365 project during my 70^th years where I write and illustrate a blog on each day’s gift.)

Stop the clock. Hang out with friends. Fill a night with silliness.

I took my computer to the shop this morning with what is probably a bad hard drive. Now, that's something that causes stress today but something that had no place in yesterday (as in "long ago"). What can I do? I can sit around and worry but that might waste some precious time. I might hang out with some friends and laugh a lot. Now that sounds like a good idea. And that is what I did.

Stacy, Rayned, Ace (a poodle) new Couch Surfer friend Charles, David, Misty (a cat) and I shared a night with a good home cooked meal by David, interesting conversation and lots of wine. Conversation ranged from good books to good poop and lots of things in between. We set up some photos with Ace pretending to play Scrabble while Misty walked away in disdain. Everyone pitched in to create dog-appropriate Scrabble arrangements which led to words like kittyqat, mongrel, bitch, poodle and paws.

Being a project/creation-driven person, sometimes I forget just to sit around, produce nothing and have plain fun. Tonight it did not matter that I took fuzzy photos with my new long pole selfie stick and remote shutter release. Tonight it did not matter if I finished this blog. What did matter was that I spent time with friends and that we laughed together. This is good for the soul.

My gift today is fun with friends.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You can find links to my other posts on this project here:

http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2014/12/365-gifts.html

Baths, Rain, Hully Gully and Wine

Despite a day of mostly rain, we made the best of it in touring around some scenic spots during our visit with friends/hosts Lena and Peter from the town of Rosbach, Germany. This is the artsy (raindropped) view through a window of Peter's car.

A hillside of grapevines beckons in the view from our window seat in a very nice (and equally expensive) stop for lunch at Johannisberg, where the neighbors include an old and very large home (the type called castles, but the castles as we know castles are called kastels) and a Catholic church dating to around the year 1140. It has held up quite nicely.

This is a street scene in the Rhein River town of Rudesheim. Above the town, on the highest peak, rises an enormous militaristic monument to Prussian might erected around 1870 -- and perhaps only slightly smaller than our Statue of Liberty. (Wonder what the old gal might look like holding a sword....)

Another view of the grape crop at Johannisberg, with the river flowing past. (Did anyone say 'Riesling'? We bought some here. The Riesling cost about $10 for a full-liter bottle.)

There's lots of German towns with the word 'Bad' in front of their names. This shot was taken in Bad Nauheim, but it really wasn't bad in the bad/good kind of way. Here, Bad means 'spa,' and this is part of the spa at Bad Nauheim -- a wall through which the local salt-laden spring water drips, and the salt slowly coats the exterior planted surface, producing a supposedly healing atmosphere for visitors to breath as they sit on benches or stroll by on an elevated walkway. It smelled salty -- a little like the aroma at Utah's Salt Lake, but much less putrid. The water is pumped to the top by an old wooden waterwheel.

Belgium has many a pissing statue. Here in Bad Nauheim, they favor spurting breasts -- but about those legs....

Our group poses for Bonnie in front of the central square fountain in Bad Nauheim. Shown, from left, are Silviu (originally from Romania), his German wife Ute (they first were penpals, and their courtship was by pre-Internet mail); Peter and Lena; friends Elaine and Gene from California (who had arrived a day earlier in a nonstop flight from San Francisco to nearby Frankfurt.

An old marble and tile bathtub in one of the historic spa buildings at Bad Nauheim. There were photographs of the spa's many distinguished visitors, including a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt around 1890. (For seemingly unrelated reasons, he later declared war on Germany.)

Our friends Peter and Lena own an athletic club (including several clay tennis courts, indoor courts, and a couple of spacious rooms packed with high-tech workout equipment), and an indoor playground called Hully Gully where the children's bouncing platforms include this toothy critter whose mouth opens and closes. Kids can climb in, get swallowed up, and come out the back somewhere.

Members of the athletic club meet with a personal trainer to create a workout regimen that is programmed onto a memory card they insert like a key into a slot on each machine, which then operates with precise weights and pressures. At periodic intervals, the patrons have an evaluation by the trainer and their cards are updated with any revisions in their workouts.




The dinner table at the home of Peter and Lena showing, clockwise from left, Bonnie, Silviu, Ute, Lena, Peter, Elaine, Gene and David.

(All photos by Bonnie, with captions by David -- in case you hadn't guessed)