valeriesbookofme

More than halfway through the year, a year that has been so very brutal. The virus, which brought an economic recession, and a president who is completely inadequate to deal with anything that isn't booming good news. Who is so thoroughly untrustworthy that I fear that he will "win" in this November's election. How anyone with any shred of decency could vote for him makes me despair of what we have come to morally and ethically. Some people say that the virus is God's judgement on the world. I don't really think that God works like that. The virus is judgement on a world where money means more than humans, where we have globalized our markets but not our concern for others, where even in the midst of COVID, a billionaire spent an obscene amount of money to launch a rocket to send "civilians" to the space station.  As if that space station has done any good for humanity in all the years it has been orbiting. At almost the very same time that the Sp...

Could we have solved world hunger, achieved world peace, if someone, usually unsung and  unheard but with the perspective of truly caring for the world, had felt confident enough to speak publicly? Had been respected enough to be listened to? I was listening to my audiobook, "The Equivalents," this morning as I walked the dog. In the book the author describes a passionate lecture given by Tillie Olsen about how creativity--the act of creating something--takes time, energy, money, education. Something that the poor and so many women (who are disproportionately the poor and enslaved,) don't have. Virginia Woolf argued the same in 1928 in her essay "A Room of One's Own." I think this paragraph sums Woolf's argument up beautifully: "Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. Indeed if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; v...

What do you say about an epidemic that has changed so much of life? I look back to two and a half months ago and at the time it seemed that the virus was like a flu. A bad flu, yes. But was it going to affect our lives? I didn't have a clue about how much.  On March 18th I wrote about how my trip to Ireland had been cancelled and there was a shortage of toilet paper and ground beef in the stores. But we hadn't yet been given the "stay at home" order and many businesses were still open. That changed on March 31st when Governor Ducey said that only essential businesses would be able to stay open. There was some confusion at first as to what an "essential" business was but it eventually came down to groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores and doctor's offices of course. The big hardware stores like Lowes and Home Depot were allowed to remain open which meant that their garden centers could remain open. Something that proved a boon for Richard as he plan...

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...