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Mom's
Photo of Steve Schalchlin. Household Hints from A Medieval
Home Companion: If the wine smells of sediment Take a an ounce of powdered sermountain and an equal amount of powdered grains of paradise, put each of these in a little bag, make a hole in it with a stick, and then hang the two little bags inside the cask on strings and plug up the bunghole well. tomorrow: I am a theatre critic OK...so it's a new "career", but if you're interested in reading my reviews, go here Updated 2/11/01 WHAT I'M READING... Christmas gift from my friend, Diane, who felt it was time I learn more about Australia also He, She and It Steve tells me I have to read this book. WHAT I WATCHED... O
Brother, Where Art Thou? THOUGHTS: The KKK scene was one of the funniest things I've seen in awhile, for reasons that you just have to see to understand. That's it for today!
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MID NIGHT MUSINGS 24 February 2001 It is 3:30 a.m. as I write this. I sat down last night to watch "Inside Washington," which was apparently so riveting that it put me to sleep. I woke up at 3 a.m. realizing that I hadn’t written a journal entry. This has happened a lot lately, but tonight I am less focused than usual, so I thought I’d just take snips of thoughts and record them, rather than try to be coherent at this hour. I went to my mother’s yesterday and we had a great lunch (thank you, Momma, for the wonderful cracked crab. Crab is one of my favoritest foods). It was a beautiful drive down. Spring is coming. The hills are green, the trees are starting to burst into blossom, and it was a rare day of sun and beautiful clouds. Frustrating that there was nowhere to pull off and take pictures. My mother and I talked of family stuff. She talked of my great grandmother (on my father’s side), who was an alcoholic, and my grandmother’s brother, who was an alcoholic. I come from a long line of alcoholics on both sides of the family. I’ve been typing psychiatric evaluations on prisoners for over 20 years now and it’s amazing how clear it is that alcoholism is a genetic disease. You rarely find one person in a family who is an alcohoic. Rather it seems to be a real pattern. If you have one, you will almost definitely find at least one another, if not in that generation, then in the previous generation. Alcoholism is definitely a family disease. I haven’t had a lot of personal experience with AA. There was a time when a friend of mine discovered her mother was alcoholic and was having difficulty coping with that knowledge. I took her to meetings of AA. Alanon and ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics), trying to find a support for her. She never went back, but when we went to the ACOA meeting, I felt like I had found "my people." My father was an alcoholic and listening to these people talk, I realized that I very much wanted to participate in the discussion. Unfortunately, the meeting times were not convenient for me at that time, but a year or so later, a woman with whom I worked was trying to get up her nerve to go to the ACOA meeting and I decided to go along with her. It was a different experience the second time around. I found that while I had no compunction in speaking my mind in front of a room full of strangers, the fact that this woman I knew (and didn't like all that much) was sitting next to me made me unwilling to unburden myself. So it never really worked and after a few weeks, I stopped going. I also wasn’t in any sort of crisis at that point. My father had been dead for awhile and was no longer an emotionally threatening presence in my life.
I received a note from some friends inviting me to attend a city council meeting on Tuesday to protest the city’s involvement with the Boy Scouts. My friend Shelly is head of the Human Rights Commission and has been investigating the use of public funds to support Boy Scout activities. While support of an openly discriminatory organization violates public policy, the city has found a way around it by coming to an agreement with the Rotary Club that Rotary will build a building which can be used for Boy Scout activities (among other things) and the city will give them the money, based on some arbitrary city use of the building several years from now. The city representative is on record as saying that this was a way that the city could "get around the Boy Scout problem." So a group is going to show up to protest the underhanded support of discrimination. A woman who learned that the HRC plans to protest this plan, sent a letter to the city council blasting Shelly and saying, "I resent the complete hijacking of this commission by this special interest group. In their zeal in promoting their own special agenda they are guilty of their own special kind harassment." (Since when did "equal rights" become "special agenda"?) The writer ends by saying, "Every man I know, gay or straight, has attested to the value that the Scouting program has had in their lives." I wonder if she means all those gay kids who have been stripped of their Eagle Scout badges, or not permitted to join the scouts because of their sexual orientation. I hate the thought of speaking in public to the city council, but I will. I need to go on record as being supportive of keeping the city from overtly, or covertly, encouraging an organization that prides itself on being excusionary. Yesterday, my mother and I saw "O Brother, where art thou?" It’s a very funny movie, and the funniest scene involves a KKK rally. While I laughed a lot, it was also a chilling reminder of what can happen when one group of people decides that some other group is not acceptable. I won’t be a party to that happening in the town where I live. |
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Some pictures from this journal |
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Created 2/24/01 by Bev Sykes |
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