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Send Your Cards and Letters


With Mother’s Day approaching I was struck by the impulse to send Will’s mother a grandmother’s card from Katy and some pictures of her. She had asked for pictures in the letter she’d sent me at Christmas time. The one where she all but said she still hated me though the Christian in her could only forgive me. The length of time between her request and my impulse was not influenced by the less than pious tone of her only letter – only form of contact really – with me since the infamous phone call of the fall of 2006. The one where she’d found God and wanted us to exchange forgiveness. That was 9 months after Will died and the only contact she’d made herself. She had preferred to conduct her business with me through emissaries but I had put an end to that at Will’s service and informed all her lapdogs that I wasn’t talking to her “people” anymore as she knew my number and presumably my name as well as being able to dial a phone herself. Have I ever mentioned that she and I don’t quite mesh? Everything is personal with her even when it has nothing to do with her at all. She sees slights and outrages between every line written or uttered and no one has suffered the pangs of neglect and loneliness as she has. She could be my youngest sister’s long lost twin. She is the incarnation of every victim mama I hand-held through their child’s middle school experience when I was a teacher. I have limited patience for such things.

Lately though I have come to the conclusion that it isn’t much of an effort to send her photos every few months. She has been sending cards fairly regularly since Christmas and though Katy hasn’t shown the slightest interest when I have given them to her and explained who they were from (she remembers quite well who her paternal grandmother is and is her mother’s daughter when it comes to shrugging things off). there may come a time when she might want to correspond. Visits at this point are not under active consideration. (Truthfully, Rob can’t even prevail upon me to be much more civil and if he can’t – no one can.)

The card I chose was as generic as they come. Not a word about fond memories or love or affection. Just happy mother’s day grandma. Very matter of fact. Though interestingly warmer than the tour guide chain letter I typed up to describe the pictures events and tell a bit about Katy. Rob noted that there was no greeting or salutation even. I printed a second copy to send to Will’s aunt. No card there though.

“Not signing them even?”

“Do I have to?”

I find my former in-laws to be almost as much a burden as they were during Will’s illness when they could never find time or inclination to help out on the rare occasions I bothered to ask (because the answer was always – “Sorry but we’re busy”). I wish I could neglect them completely but as indifferent as I am to the idea of them, I do think they are interested, a bit anyway, in their deceased brother’s only son’s daughter. A bit.

My mother-in-law is living in a nursing home now. I found this out from my best friend who works for a care service that has been providing in-home care for MIL until recently. Apparently MIL can no longer live on her own due to her health and has no family or friends to help. This can only mean she has finally used up everyone she knows. People only mean as much to her as she can get out of them. I know that Will would be disappointed that I can’t get past the past and help her out, so I will do this photo/update thing to assuage that – not guilt because I truly don’t care about the woman at all – feeling he would be upset with me.

Everything will go into the mail in the morning. It might be there by the weekend. Sending mail from here to there is an imprecise thing.

Happy Shiny People? Not in the United States


Gallup published the findings of its on-going health and well-being survey and discovered that Americans would be happier and healthier if they lived in Denmark. Using the same poll, 83% of Danes are not just happy and healthy, they are thriving. Compare that to the United States were just 49% of people are thriving while nearly as many people are struggling (47%) if not actively suffering (4%).

This probably comes as no news to Americans who are in the middle of a presidential election that likely won’t rid the White House of the Republican menace and enduring yet another slide in home valuations amid economic slow down, sky-rocketing gasoline prices and steadily increasing food prices. Americans know that it sucks to be them, and if they didn’t after Barack Obama set them straight on their “bitterness” problem that manifests in a complusive need to go to church, legally arm themselves and talk smack about immigrants, well now they do.

And if you are thinking that this might be some worthless study that some pointy domed researcher at Harvard will parse into a best-selling self-help tome to secure his tenure and meet Oprah, you would be correct in thinking so as there is plenty of precedent – but still very wrong. The researchers hope that their findings which can be broken down by occupation, commute time and exercise habits, will help employers better understand what they can do to create happier and healthier workers. And if that isn’t enough to give the thinking person nightmare visions of the future, there is the further hope that these same statistics could even be used to compare health and happiness by ZIP code, creating quite a measuring stick for future generations of politicians.

Excuse me? There is happiness to be found as a cog in the great wheel of capitalism while being political pawns of Satan?

And it gets better.

“There’s never been anything quite like it,” said Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences.

“You’re getting details about what it’s like to live in this country,” said Kahneman, a Princeton University professor brought in by Gallup to discuss the potential uses for the data. “What is the experience of the weekend? What is the experience of the weekday for someone who is sick and has to go to work in the morning? We are going to learn a great deal about what are the determinants of actual happiness.”

Determinants of actual happiness? Weekends. They make most people happy whereas having to go to work sick – not so much. They need to break down data to figure this out? Yes. The answer is yes because it’s not about people being happy and healthy and thriving. It’s about corporations making profits for shareholders and politicians manipulating the masses sedated with “happiness”. Kind of Matrix-y, don’t ya think? Find out what people want and plug them into it.

The World Goes Hungry


Well maybe no one in the industrialized world of you and me is facing the prospect of having to eat dirt to quell an empty belly, but there is definitely a problem here as prices rise and by all accounts will continue to do so until 2009 when the actual food shortages that plague developing countries like China and Vietnam begin to hit us closer to our own waistlines.

An interesting article in this week’s Time outlines what seems to be a pretty modest plan for turning this latest global crisis around: a reduction of cash incentives that already have farmers using 17% of their plantable land to grow corn for biofuel and the gas tank instead of human consumption in addition to a call for an international effort to supply farmers in poor countries with high quality seed and fertilizer (a program that has already worked in Malawi).

Time’s plan calls for a modest amount of cooperation, sacrifice and about $10 billion dollars (to be collected from the have nations and give to the really-don’t-have-anything-to-eat nations), but in my opinion it will be the first two criteria rather than the last that will be hardest for some western countries to give. Already the U.S. Congress is ready to chuck the baby with the bath water while farmers protest their innocence, and even though biofuels were never a good idea, it bears noting that our Senators and Representatives adopted the idea with no more thought than they are giving to axing it. Reactionary as usual, the loss of ethanol is going to ding the U.S. economy every bit as much or more than rising food prices, and it won’t correct the short term problem of this year or probably next. Congress can dismantle the ethanol incentives in the blink of an eye, but corn can’t be grown nearly as fast.

Food shortages are not going to go away simply because biofuels can’t feed us. We’ve mismanged our farmlands to the point that we have robbed them of the minerals needed to grow nutritious food. The food we eat is nutritionally void to the point where minerals and vitamins have to be added to those grains that are processed. Fertilizers can make bankrupt soil farmable but they can’t put nutrition into the food that is grown. That comes only from healthy earth and our soil is laden with nothing but man-made chemicals and environmental waste.

My husband thinks it is time we got serious about gardening and learned to can our produce, and with bread over five dollars (CAN) a loaf, breadmaking is in our future as well. Growing some of our own produce and making breads will not solve food shortages in Asia or bring prices down here, but it is something we can do for ourselves and maybe that is a solution after all.