Me....Just the way I am....

I'm looking out the sliding glass door of my sun room, out past the beautiful stone back porch, on past my backyard and the backyard of my neighbor, past the greenbelt filled with native trees and medium cropped grass and brush..... and on past that area to the little bit of the golf course the we can see.  The sky is a pale baby blue and the clouds are long whisps of clumped cotton puffs in shades of pail gray. Where the sun is still shining in the west the clouds are reflecting it in hazy shades of white. News is on the TV in my living room....I'm not really listening....the channels are being clicked through...I'm busy watching momma birds carry twigs and pieces of nature fit for making nests....to nest that I can't see, but that must surely be tucked away in the awnings and under the pergolas in my neighborhood.  It's just a quiet normal day in the world of being retired. But I am drawn back to this morning and how even in what would probably be construed by many as just a pleasant little piece of heaven right here on earth..........the littlest thing can stir a memory, cause a sigh of helplessness, loneliness, heartbreak and tears to trickle down one's cheeks.

 It was a simple little Texas orange....you know (if you live in Texas), the kind they sell for 5 for $1.00 in H.E.B grocery stores. I cut one to put in my morning bowl of fruit.  I cut it like my dad used to cut his every morning........and that simple little orange and that simple little cut....cut right into my heart and the floodgates of memories of him came crashing from my heart into my mind and pouring out my eyes.  They say we all grieve in our own way. Some are able to grieve a short while and move on. Some take much longer.  Some know or pretend to know how to veer their thoughts in other directions to shoo away the sadness and the heartache.  But some, I guess like me, just need to let the hurt come out in tears. I try to shoo away the sad thoughts, to not let myself dwell on the loved ones I've lost to death or just lost track of.... I know I'm hard to understand because I can't explain the tears and the sadness....the quiet times. It's just me.  I'm not ashamed of it. 

 I admit it.  I cry....I remember my dad used to says I was  thin skinned and had a really soft heart.  Perhaps I am and perhaps I do.  Heck I cry at Hallmark card commercials and other commercials. I cry every time I see a news story of a dad or mom coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan surprising their kid at school.  I remember, as though it were yesterday, being glued to the TV when troops were coming home from Vietnam.....walking down the stairs of those planes, kissing the ground, running to their families....that's been 45 years ago and just thinking about that, writing about that, puts tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat.

My heart aches for the young friends I knew so briefly in the short assignments my dad had in the military as we followed him from base to base....friends that I probably will never find if I look for the rest of my life....where is Marsha Weaver with her 3rd grade braids in Rantoul, Illinois, where is Ruth who lived in Virginia when I was 11 years old, where is Suzy Potts who hung out with my sister and I when we lived on Wheelus AFB in Tripoli, Libya, North Africa....or Ginger Giles.....how often I think about and never correspond with my dear sweet friend Edwina and my Spanish teacher Norma Trevino...and Pam who I call "my baby sister"....Laughing Bob and even those I never knew but identified with on the days I went for chemo...

I guess all of us in some way or another wear masks to hide, conceal or soften the real people we are....or maybe it's just some of us who do that....maybe those of us that do that are the cryers because we don't let people know who we really are. I feel the person I really am, is the person who writes.  My heart and thoughts flows right down to my fingers and onto the keyboard.....and oh how I wish I could say that happens unfiltered.  But I have to be honest, I peel apart the layers of my thoughts and the words/sentences I write...I guess from fear that I might reveal my inner soul....the girl who struggles with her weight everyday....the girl that can never find the words to stand up for how she feels about a situation, the girl who in some crazy way wishes she wasn't retired but still working, the girl who feels like she never did what it was she really wanted to do with her life, the girl who still wonders what it is she wants to do when she grows up. I'm 64 so why do I reference "girl" instead of woman......I'm glad I'm a woman and don't have the concerns and peer pressure of being a girl today.  I'm proud of my age and chose to grow old gracefully letting the gray gently come into my hair.....but I guess perhaps like every (or many) 64 year old person.....I want to think of myself as a girl because 'woman' ...."64 year old woman" brings thoughts that time keeps on drifting into the future.....and all of a sudden I am in that age group when the ones we love so much...family...friends...people our own age pass from our lives........and unlike when you are a girl and summers seem to last forever and life holds so many years and so much possibility.........now you wonder where all the years went so quickly and why are they flying by now even more quickly.........why do the tears flow as you want to scream...STOP...
PLEASE STOP....please, time, just stand still for a moment or two....or a week...or a month...or a year....and you wish you could turn back the hands of time to make sure you told those people you cared about how you felt, how much they meant to you, how much you loved them.  I think of not only precious family but of friends, classmates, people who came into my life even if for just a brief time....I know that God put them there....them in my life and mine in theirs for a reason....for a lesson...be it for one thought, one message that is a part of who I am today.  

It is heartbreaking to lose a parent even when you know they are in a better place and no longer in pain, when you know they've lived a good long happy life.........and it's heartbreaking to lose a child or a loved one in the flash of a moment when a senseless bomb goes off in a crowd. 

All these thoughts, all this emotion......looking out the sliding glass door of my sun room does bring me to tears, but it also reminds my soft heart that "Everyday you have the ability to say...This is not how the story is going to end" (I think that is a thought or quote by Christine Mason Miller...but not sure). It reminds my soft heart that everyday you should tell those people that are important in your life how you feel about them....we never know what tomorrow brings....we never know what the next hour brings.....so to Marsha Weaver, and Ruth in Virginia, and Suzy Potts wherever you are.....to John (especially John who loves me with all his heart and shows me every day), to Mom, to my Sister and her family, to all my step-children and their children, to Carol Ann who knows my soul and her sweet family, to JoAnn , to all my relative in Louisiana, friends I've made in Maine, San Antonio, McAllen, Corpus, Dallas and all corners of Texas, Oklahoma  Arizona Mississippi, California, Japan, North Africa, Michigan, - and many more places I'm sure are slipping my mind ....I love you.......I cherish each of you in special places in my heart....and I am so glad you came into my life....

I hope that somewhere out there an old friend might be wondering...what ever happened to Peggy Stone...

I'm here....I'm cutting an orange the way my daddy did....and I miss him. But I know as the sun sets and still lights up the western sky in the hill country of Texas that my old dad is looking down and telling me to be tough.....and not so thinned skinned....and that I am what I wanted to be when I grew up.....
.............Me...just the way I am.

Now the sky is turning a million shades of pale purple mixed with baby blue and pale shrimp....the air is still and it is quiet.....the day is ending.........really when I think about it....another day in paradise....

Who knows...maybe tomorrow I'll wake up and remember the saying that "as the corners of your mouth goes....so goes your day"....Maybe tomorrow morning I'll cut the oranges a different way, smile with the treasured memories in my heart..... and feel like this:

Switchy Swatching From One Blog to Another...........

The last few days I've been switchy swatching posts between my three blogs that I write...this one, my fitat99 motivational one and my achillesblog.com/torngoals blog I'm writing in the Achilles Tendon Recovery support communtiy.  A few days ago I wrote one that I thought worked well in my motivational blog and today I think the one I wrote works well in this blog....so rather then rewrite it, I'll send you over there to take a read.  http://achillesblog.com/torngoals is the place.  Lots of other people write blogs in that group and the encouragement and understanding of how we are all going through something so similar is so much help. Perhaps tomorrow I'll come here to Whimseys-Writings-and Thoughts and write something that might work at the other two sites.....Until then, have a wonderful productive day and I'll see you back here in a few days.

Life is a little tough right now....but today I'm in a good place :)

Oh Norma, how you set the stage......for the decades in my life

In my last post, I mentioned I was taking a memoir writing class and that one of our assignments was to do a timeline of our life thus far from birth year to today.  And one of the writing assignments we were given was to write about 'My First Decade'.

When you do a time line on the Internet using websites such as www.ourtimelines.com you can title the search with your name and put the birth year and the current year and when you hit enter, it gives you a timeline of major events that have happened in your life thus far....pretty cool....makes you think......puts things in perspective.

To write a brief autobiography you choose a few major events in each decade and write about how they related to you, where you were, what you were doing when the events happened etc.  Following is my first stab at it......and this is how I started with my outline:

FIRST DECADE 1948-1958

YEAR                 MAJOR EVENT                     CONSEQUENCES

1948           33 1/3 RPM MUSICAL                 LOTS OF MUSIC

                              RECORDINGS

1949          45 RPM MUSICAL                        LOVE OF MUSIC

                              RECORDINGS

1954         RACIAL SEGREGATION RULED   MILITARY UPBRINGING

                          UNCONSTITUTIONAL          DULLED SEGREGATION

1955          POLIO VACCINE AT AGE 7     REMEMBER BRACES/SERIES

 

1957          SPUTNIK LAUNCHED              STARS NEW MEANING

1958         NASA ESTABLISHED               OFF WE GO INTO THE WILD

                                                                   BLUE WONDER

                                                               

1958      STEREO LP RECORDINGS/                MUSIC IN HOME

              FM STEREO BROADCASTS

WRAP UP THE FIRST DECADE.... REVEAL



This is my story......(some names have been left out to protect the innocent......but you know who you are)

It was a hot night in July 1947 at a diner in New Orleans when my Aunt and my Uncle, introduced her sister to his co-worker from the oil fields.  Her sister was divorced and had a 4 month old daughter.  She was not that eager to be on a blind date. But as the music came on the jukebox and Norma Deloris Egstrom purred out a sultry song, their eyes met and as the saying goes it was love at first site and the rest is history. From that first meeting into the depths of each others eyes, they were together everyday after that and were married a short 3 months later in October , 1947. In November of 1948 I came into this world as she delivered another baby girl and the name printed on my birth certificate is Peggy Lee Marie Stone. The first decade, like every decade of my life was filled with music. The year I was born was the start of 33 1/3 RPM recordings. 1949 brought the first 45 RPM recordings and skip forward to 1958, the last year of my first decade, there was the introduction of Stereo LP’s and FM Stereo Radio Broadcasts. Music was always in our home, so it isn’t a surprise that even today music, from Perry Como, Norma Egstrom, Benny Goodman, Jo Stafford and great jazz and big band sounds, is some of my favorite. It’s what I heard in the womb...it what I heard as a young child.

My dad was in the military and shortly after my first birthday, my mother set me in a wicker laundry basket and boarded a train to meet my dad at his new duty station in Indiana...the beginning of what would be many years of following dad from one duty station to another in the United States and overseas.

 

Out of my realm of understanding as a small child, in the first decade of my life, there was racial segregation and turmoil. I was 6 years old in 1954 and living in Japan when racial segregation was declared unconstitutional. But having lived those 6 years on military bases we never thought anything of playing with and going to school with children of other races. As a child I always envied my cousins who lived and still live in southern Louisiana for having roots in one place, since the military transfers did not allow that for my sister and I.  As an adult I don’t envy them that, because of the wonderful places I got to see in our travels, and because I was taught from the time I was very small to accept that people are equal regardless of their race. Children of the south, at that time, were taught the 'ways' of the south, ‘ways’ that took a great deal of adjustment and struggle in their mindset.

In 1955, we saw the invention of the Polio vaccine and as a military brat I was familiar with the multitude of shots that always had to be taken as we traveled across the states and overseas....and I remember well hearing parents discuss the fear of this disease and seeing the pictures of children with braces.... and the “series” of Polio vaccine that children had to take.

The stars took on new meaning and the world became bigger in the last two years of my first decade with the Russian “Sputnik” being launched in 1957 and the United States establishing NASA in 1958. Since my dad was in the United States Air Force....I always felt partial to the expression.... “Off we go into the wild blue yonder!”

When I think back to my first decade not only were the stars  in my parents eyes, but the stars opened up to new worlds yet explored. Even back then new strides were being made in the field of medicine and racial acceptance and peace. The music took on new feeling, recordings took on new size disks and new extremes of broadcasting and magnification even as Norma Deloris Egstrom's sultry song made my dad and mom fall in love.  I'm sure she wasn't aware of how her music affected them or her affect on my life.........Norma Deloris Egstrom was the birth name of the lady with the velvet voice , her agent changed her name to what we knew her as.....Peggy Lee. 

 

I’m told I wasn’t named after her....my dad’s middle name is Lee....but hey it makes for a good story...and it’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Words that say it all....

I am reading a book right now  The Truth About Butterflies
by Nancy Stephan (I'm loving it so far).

  In the beginning of the book she has a quote by an unknown author that says:

     "There are things that we don't want to happen but have to accept,
      things that we don't want to know but have to learn, people we
      can't live without but have to let go"

I've read those words over and over again because right now in what I'm going through and what I've been through in the last 4 or so months, I could not express my feelings any better than to use those words.

Let me take you back a few months to, oh  I guess maybe last August, 2012.  I was for the most part feeling pretty 'on top of the world'.  I had lost 50+ pounds, was more trim, fit and healthy than I think I've ever been in my life.  John and I had just finished out our 1st year of retirement and were loving our neighborhood and neighbors.  Except for the occassional bouts of arthritis my dad was going through and the nagging pain that kept persisting in the Achilles Tendon of my left heel, things were pretty great.  I was having the normal struggles people go through in trying to maintain my weight loss, but even in that area things were not going too bad although I had gained a few pounds back.....so just kept pushing a little harder at the gym and on my power walks....telling myself "no pain-no gain".....  and my heel just kept on aching.... and finally the tendon just demanded to be looked at...so I went to a podiatrist. He put me in an orthodic that inserted into my tennis shoe and that seemed to help somewhat......for a while. My dad was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia *(I think)....you'll realize as we go along here that there were several times he was admitted to the hospital some more serious than others and they kind of all ran together....during those times I went down and stayed with mom and through my own fault found myself not eating very healthy......and not going to a gym or doing much of any kind of workout. As my tendon became more inflammed I was put in a boot and then given cortizone shots.  In December we went on a cruise (in the boot) and for a week I allowed myself to indulge in the culinary delights that were offered....knowing full well when I returned I would have to hit the fitness classes with full force....and that I did. Then dad was hospitalized with gout, with pneumonia (again), with heart problems....Over the weeks that followed I learned very quickly that I ate when I was stressed, when I was bored, when I was sad....my bad eating habits were sneaking their way back in....and "there are things we don't want to happen, but have to accept".  We soon began to realize that dad was not getting any better and in fact was getting worse with each hospital stay, and "there are things we don't want to know but have to learn". All the while, although the swelling had gone down, my heel continued to hurt.  I tried acupuncture which cured a few other ailments I had but didn't do much for the damaged tendon. And once again dad was hospitalized and when I walked in the room of the hospital and he said....in a clear voice...."please just make me comfortable and let me go".....I somehow knew he was speaking from his heart.  We tried everything we could do medically (to the extent that he was willing to do).  At his request he was transferred from a civilian hospital to a military hospital. When they did all they could do, they had him transferred to an Assited living/Rehab facility and we soon realized that we were wanting him to hold on 'for us' and that it was time to grant his wish and let him go, there are "people we can't live without, but have to let go".  And on March 1, 2013 at around 11:30 P.M., he passed peacefully from this world and we are comforted knowing that his heart is beating perfectly, none of his joints hurt, he has two healthy kidneys and he is taking in the crisp clean air of heaven with every breath. 

I was reminded that I eat when I am sad....and so the pounds have packed back on.  And still, in persistance, my Achilleds Tendon kept bugging me with pain.....so I got a second opinion and with the help of x-rays and am MRI, it was decided that 25% of my tendon was torn, I had a fluid filled bursa behind it and a bone spur that was hitting it..........I chose to go ahead and have surgery done....which happened on March 27th. I am now in my 12th day of post-op, plopped in a wheel chair with my left leg/foot elevated on pillows taking medication for any pain and not doing much exercise. But today that is going to change.  I am going to get my weights and bands and at least do some seated upper body work.....and I'm making plans for a full careful, slowly paced, recovery that will get me back to a full workout program.

Perhaps I am just making a correlation when there really isn't one, but I look back to 2002 when my husband passed away in February of that year and the next week I was diagnosed with breast cancer.....I was wisked away to surgery, chemo and radiation and for the next 8 months spent more time trying to stay positive and beat/recover from this cancer that I did not have much time to grieve the loss of my husband...........and now my dad passes away and 26 days later I am in surgery and now trying to stay positive and recover from this surgery........which has taken my mind off painful grieving of the loss of my dad.  I don't know if it means anything, if there is any correlaton, but I do beleive that God works in mysterious ways and that he helps us get through....He never brings us to something without helping us through.  I know that when I am recovered fully from this surgery, I will be back at the gym getting fit and healthy.....because one thing my dad's illnesses taught me is that "if you want to keep moving, you have to keep moving" and that "you have to eat healthy".  I know that is a lot easier said than done, but I see people here in our community that are as old as my dad was, or older, who come to the gym and make every effort to keep their body moving. During the time that my dad was hospitalized I had a friend I went to high school pass away and a neighbor pass away......and it made it ever so clear that you just never know when your "time" may come.  You have to count your blessings and savor each moment of each day.  I can sit here and feel sorry for myself that I am not able to get up, walk around, or exercise.....or I can thank God that I found a good doctor who was able to repair my injury and accept the fact that the recovery will take a great deal of time, but when I am completely recovered, I will be, as I expressed in the beginning of this post, "on top of the world". This is a temporary test of my patience, for right now I have to be still.....and it makes me think of the words of the Lord, "Be still and know that I am God". 

I am a part of a memoir writing group and our assignment for our next meeting is to write something about the first decade of our lives.....so I'm going to work on it and maybe it will become my next post.......in the meantime, have a wonderful day and keep your sunny side up!

Where have all the flowers gone?

It's been a long time since I posted...and a lot of things have happened in my life since I last posted.  I wrote a long long post on another blog site that I have hoping to do a copy and past onto this blog site to share the information with both "following" groups.  But for some strange reason, I cannot get it to copy over here.  So please go to http://fitat99.blogspot.com to see that post.

I'll be back posting here in the next day or two because I need to find an outlet for my frustration (*see the other blog post and you'll understand what I mean).  Writing takes my mind off the situation I am in....writing is a warm blanket....writing is a friend....writing let's me be and express who I am.

See you on here soon....would love comments here and at the other site.

I promise!

I promise I will get back to this blog and write some more.....life's been busy...in the meantime, check out another blog I am working on to motivate people 50-100 and really of any age to get fit and healthy and to be fit and healthy at 99!  You can read it at http://fitat99.blogspot.com

I'll be back here though I promise....2013 is going to be my year of writing!

Oh and by the way have any of you seen the movie "The Words" http://www.amazon.com/The-Words/dp/B00A95Q7SK/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1356738407&sr=1-1&keywords=the+words  

Such a good movie!

Slacking Deluxe! But not really

I'm sure you must be thinking that I am slacking deluxe on writing in my blog....but I've just been busy with living :)  Don't know if I've mentioned but I've been spending a lot of time at the gym trying to get healthy and fit....yes even at 63.  It's a lot of hard work that has to be done 5-6 times a week.  But it is so worth it.   I believe I am in the best fitness I've ever been in my whole life. (Well except maybe for 1996 when I lived in San Antonio and landscaped around my home for 90 days in a row!)

The urge to return to my writing has been tickling my mind lately and so I need to try to work that into my schedule.....the fact hasn't changed that "in order to be a successful writer...you have to write!"

I'm still working on my novel "The Magic Teacup" and I'm considering attending a meeting of the San Gabriel Writers because they are having an open mic night to read poetry.

I will write more.  Have a great day!