valeriesbookofme

This is a photo of RCAF airman Jack Forrest, taken around 1943-1944. Jack was born in Montreal on April 5, 1921. He would have been 99 years old in a week if World War 2 hadn't intervened. Jack joined up when he was 18, joining the RCAF in Toronto for "general duties." For the next few years he served in various places in Canada and learned to love the skies. He was shipped over to Northern Ireland, to an RAF Base, RAF Archdale, near the border with the Republic of Ireland. He and his fellow crewmen flew Sunderland seaplanes and Catalinas up what was known as "The Donegal Corridor" into the Atlantic, hunting for German submarines that would surface overnight to charge their batteries. They carried depth charges.  (photo courtesy of Chuck Singer, by email) The Donegal Corridor was named such because, during World War 2, the Republic of Ireland was neutral while Northern Ireland, as a part of the UK, was at war. The RAF needed a way to fly wes...

I had expected, just a few weeks ago, to be getting ready to head for Phoenix today, to take a flight over to Heathrow/Dublin for a three-week holiday. All plans laid, expectations of meeting up with my cousin Kathleen and, later, other cousins that we have never met. And then Coronavirus happened. From a devastating problem in Wuhan, China, it has spread across the world. There is still so much conflicting information about it—how deadly IS it to people with “normal” health? Is it better to get it and get it over with? Or are we condemning thousands, perhaps millions of elderly and fragile people to death if we don’t enact the kind of measures that haven’t been seen since World War 2. A time when most of us were not yet born. I have often thought, as more and more measures are adopted, as the world closes in more and more so that for so many people, the world is their house/apartment/room, that it’s ironic that this comes at a time when those in the Western world (people in Afric...

I usually alternate reading a serious, non-fiction book with a lighter, fiction one. Some people might think my overwhelming tendency to read mysteries for my "fiction" as not necessarily lighter--murder and mayhem?--but I don't read really gory stuff and what I like about mysteries is that at the end the murderer is always caught and justice prevails. Which brings me to what I am currently reading, a non-fiction book called "Just Mercy" by Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson is a lawyer who has worked in the South, mainly Alabama, for decades focusing on justice for death row inmates. He was involved with the infamous Walter McMillian case, a large part of which is what the book is about. Even knowing what the South is like in terms of racism and police brutality, this book shocks and disturbs me. When Stevenson says that 1 in 3 black male babies, across the U.S. , are likely to face prison sometime in their lives, wow. I have tried to find out whether that stat...

I may not still be awake at midnight, to see the New Year in.  Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not.  Thinking about all my New Year's Eves, I remember an exciting one at My Father's Mustache in Montreal when I was 20, when I was in love and happy and everyone seemed to be the same.  A few very tearful ones later as my then-boyfriend and I tried to figure out our future. That was a long, slow, painful breakup.  A solitary New Year's Eve in Capetown, South Africa where someone tried to break into the house. A man died that night. A New Year's Eve spent flying across the Atlantic, back to England from a holiday with my sister and her family. Landing at Heathrow to the aftermath of a huge snowstorm. Laurie's first New Year's Eve, 1979 into 1980, where my English hosts took me along "first footing" to a neighbor's house.   Our last all-family holiday with my dad, stepmom, sister and her family in Kauai with a New Year's...

There was a recent news article about a Millennial MP in New Zealand replying to one of her fellow MPs: "OK Boomer." I admit that I didn't read the whole exchange or understand what it was about. It was just one of the thousands of news bytes that I passed over in my trolling of the Internet. Until a fellow member of one of my book groups brought it up as we were discussing generational attitudes and tastes.  As a Boomer, born in 1952, I am now three generations away from being "with it" I guess. Since the Boomer generation, those of us born between 1946 and 1964, there have been Gen X, born between 1965 and 1976, Millenials or Gen Y, born between 1977-1995 (my daughter's generation) and, currently, Gen Z, iGen, Centennials, born from 1996 to ??? (my grandchildren's generation.) And the generation that preceded us Boomers is lumped into a category that is called Traditionalists or the Silent Generation, 1945 or before. It's an odd lumping because ...

  I watched the movie “Tolkien” on the plane from Dublin to New York today. Very much a Masterpiece Theatre type movie (I like Masterpiece Theatre.) It was similar to many stories that came out of World War I and Oxford, friendship, loss, explanations for where Tolkien received his inspiration for the battles of Middle Earth, love of trees (Ents), his creation of a whole fantastical language. He studied philology at Oxford. His idea of the Fellowship of the Ring came, according to the movie, from his four friends at Oxford, two of whom died at the Somme. I don’t know how factual the film is, I want to read the reviews of it when I am back on earth. I know the Tolkien family has guarded his legacy quite closely.   45 minutes to go until we land. And another voyage is almost over. Have I learned anything new from this one? Hmmm. I have added another city to my list of favorites, Paris. And that was a bit of a surprise because, while I liked it when I was there in May, this tim...

I saw Laurie and Mercy off at about 11:00 a.m. and then headed down to the Luxembourg Gardens. My Paris Pass was used up--I had only purchased the 4-day Pass--so I decided I would do one paid attraction and that would be Musée d’Orsay. Before going there, however, I did want to see the Luxembourg Gardens.  I missed my girls of course. But I never really mind wandering around by myself. The Gardens were lovely and the day was warm. As I walked down from the Gardens toward the d'Orsay I came across a beautiful old church, Saint Sulpice.   Saint Sulpice was built over an original church from the 13th century. The present church was begun in 1636 and finally "finished" in its present state in the late 1700s although something always seemed to be happening, including a fire in March of 2019 that damaged parts of the church and was apparently arson. 2019 wasn't a good year for Paris churches.  What I found most interesting was...