In this attic were the left over relics of the “big house” as the 35-room mansion was informally called. The estate, built by a Dr. Philip Gillette Cole in about 1928 and was sold in the early 1950’s to the Bronfmans, completely furnished, without of course, Dr. Cole’s vast art western art collection including many Remingtons. The attic contained those items the Bronfmans found unsuitable to grace their new home. When my husband and I moved into the historic farmhouse across the street from the estate, we were given some of that furniture which, being of an early American style suited our taste.

On occasion, just for the fun of it, I would go into that attic and see what little treasures I might find. A lamp here, a small table there. One day, way, way back in a dark, dark corner I found this small statue of a very old man. He had this ethereal sense of longing on his face as if he were looking somewhere far away for a special place. An almost, “I’m coming home, I’ll be there soon” countenance. Well, I dragged this old man out and dusted him off. He was holding a very long rifle, and his right hand was held up close to his mouth as if he was about ready to shout to someone, “Hello, I’m coming home.”

Once out in the sunlight and dusted off, I recognized that this statue, about twenty inches high, had to be Rip Van Winkle because here I found him in Rip Van Winkle country. I was so excited to have found him because I had graduated from Irvington High School in New York, the home of Washington Irving, author of Rip Van Winkle and the most famous, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I lived in that region for over 14 years and both of my children were born there. In a sense I felt as if I were holding a piece of local history in my hands.

I dragged Rip downstairs into my in-laws’ apartment and asked them to ask the Bronfmans if I could have this little man. Well, they very willingly said yes, and Rip became a fixture in my home. Now I have to confess that my husband, Bob, was not thrilled. He thought the statue rather ugly and in fact, did not even want me to bring him home. I insisted but, only under the condition that Rip would be put in some out-of-the-way place. Okay, Rip, you can’t be in the living room, but the corner near the fireplace in the family room downstairs should be okay. At least it’s warm. And so began my love affair with this little old man, my Rip as he became known.

Being a stay-at-home wife and mother I enjoyed being with Rip and I would often have long conversations with his as I ironed in front of the fireplace. I kept him dusted and sometimes moved him from one corner to the next just to give him a change of scenery. In the mid 1970’s we had an appraiser come in to appraise our growing collection of fine arts. He commented that Rip was cast at the Roman Bronze Works in New York and had the #20 engraved at the base. (He said this was important because that was where Remington had all his bronzes cast. This didn’t really mean much to me at the time.) At the end of the day the appraiser handed us a bill for $300 and said that he would take the statue of Rip as payment for his fee. Bob was ready and willing and said, “Yes.” I quickly said “No. He’s mine and I’m not letting him go.” The appraiser was not pleased nor was Bob. I, however, was very happy, thank you very much, to keep Rip nearby.

As the years passed I divorced my first husband, hater of Rip, and eventually married my soulmate, Ralph. To my dismay he too was not especially fond of my Rip. He said he was not particularly attractive artistically. He said, “It wasn’t something I could look at every day and say that was a beautiful piece.” Humph, what did he know. Well, Rip wasn’t going anywhere, but he did stay in the family room until we moved a few years later. We moved to a 3-story townhome and Rip was relegated to the third floor loft. Sigh. I didn’t get to see him as often, but I would be sure that every time I went to the third floor I would stop and have a chat with him. Good soul, he never complained.

In the summer of 1989 we went up to Massachusetts for a Tanglewood concert and an “inn weekend” in Stockbridge. With a free afternoon we took a ride in the country and happened upon a museum called “Chesterwood.” We love museums and so it was that we decided to go in and take the tour of this house on the National Register of Historic Places. The house was the summer residence and studio of Daniel Chester French, a sculptor of some renown having done the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial and the Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts. It was a beautiful colonial and very comfortable. After the house tour the docent took us down the path to the artist’s studio. It was a fascinating place where I learned so much about sculpting and casting bronze statues. Many of French’s smaller plaster models were there including a small plaster of the statue of Lincoln.

At the end of the tour we were left to roam about and take our time looking here and there. Ralph wandered over to the other side of the studio and was engaging another docent in conversation. As I looked around there was a large floor to ceiling bookcase full of plaster casts. My gaze went up to the very top shelf near the ceiling and there, to my utter astonishment, was a plaster casting of my Rip. MY RIP, HERE! Oh, my, God. I turned and motioned to Ralph wildly pointing my right hand up at Rip while waving him over with my left hand. I could barely speak as I sputtered out, “Raaa, raall, raaalllph. Coomme heerrre, lllook.” Both Ralph and the docent hustled over to look at the object to which I was pointing. I told the docent that I had a bronze statue just like that. She said, “Oh, you mean like this one here?” as she pointed to another one of my little man sitting on the mantle.

And so it came to be that I learned that my much disdained Rip was actually sculpted by the famous artist, Daniel Chester French. The docent got out the record books of all French’s works and here is what we know of the provenance. Rip was cast in 1927 as a limited edition of 25 or 29 (it was hard to read his handwriting). These miniatures were exact replicas of a bas relief statute including Rip found on a work honoring Washington Irving located at the corner of Sunnyside Lane and Broadway in Irvington, New York and dedicated on June 6, 1927. I saw that bas relief every day as I lived right across the street from it for two years. After I married, I returned to the area and lived one block from it for almost nine years. How could I have not connected the two? I contribute my lack of knowledge to youthful ignorance.

At any rate, the docent informed us that these little statutes were cast in 1927 to be sold as a sort of “party favor” to help fund the bas relief as the sponsers were apparently having financial difficulties raising money. DC French agreed to help out and sold the entire lot at cost to a Jennie Prince Black (Mrs. H.D.V.). Mrs. Black was a major benefactress of the bas relief going back to her considerable efforts in 1909 to have an Irving Memorial erected. Mrs. Black then sold these statues to patrons for $200, (a substantial sum in 1927) which more than likely is how Rip made his way to Dr. Cole and, eventually to the attic. As I inspected the statue of Rip at the studio I discovered that it was signed, while mine was not. I asked the docent about this and she informed us that the original casting of 25-29 were not signed. Some time after French’s death in 1931 his daughter, Margaret French Cresson (d. 1973) had the work recast and signed them with her father’s name as she sometimes did. None of the original 25-29 original castings done before French’s death were signed. Later, we contacted the museum curator, Linda Wesselman Jackson, and received written documentation of what the docent had told us so that we have documented provenance.

Well, when we arrived home after our discovery of Rip’s creator, Ralph marched up to the third floor and brought Rip down to a place of honor on the first floor. He says he hasn’t changed his mind, but now he has more respect for him seeing as how his creator is so famous. Years later when telling this story to friends of ours, one of the women remarked, “There’s a moral to this story, husbands come and husbands go, but Rip stays!” Amen to that I say.

I have had possession of my little man for over forty years now. He sits on the shelf above my desk and I see him every day. I still have little conversations with him. Both Ralph and Bob still think he is ugly, but he’s my little man Rip and that’s the way it’s going to be until I meet my maker. And, I say Amen to that too.

Today I saw two things that pushed my buttons. One was who raised the national debt more? Well, of course, I guessed our most recent Bush, but lo and behold it turned out to be that revered and beloved “Great Communicator,” Ronald Reagan. And, by a whopping 159 percent! Coming second was our beloved Wubya raising the debt 115 percent. Who knew? Funny how no one finds those numbers on the front page of your favorite web news or the whats-left-of-print newspaper. If they did we’d also see that so far, Obama has only raised the national debt by 16 percent. Ya think that might make a difference in the election next year? Huh? Huh?

But the other thing that really pushed my buttons was an article on the Episcopal News Service web page about violent deaths in the revered United States. The Children’s Defense Fund statistics for 2010, based on a 180-day school year, indicated that in the United States, a child or teenager is killed every three hours by a firearm, and a child is killed by abuse or neglect every six hours. Those numbers are staggering. And those are only the ones that are reported as such. Many abused children’s deaths are attributed to something else, like a fall, or an accident. What is so upsetting to me is that I feel completely helpless to do anything about it. I must pray on this because if it causes me to cry, then clearly the Spirit is calling me do something.

I promised short blogs because if we fall asleep during a sermon that is longer than say ten minutes, we probably lose our concentration if a blog goes on forever. But, don’t count me out just yet. Someday, someway, I’ll get around to writing on all those subjects jingling around in my brain that I rant about every day. I promise. You just wait and see.

I can also remember that anytime we made anything at school during arts and crafts I wanted mine to be perfect. It rarely was. On my spelling tests I always wanted that “100%” at the top of the page, or the “A+” on a paper. Well, of course, that only happened from time to time, but it didn’t stop me from trying. The pinnacle of this quest was when I got a 100% on one of my Organic Chemistry tests. WooHoo. Even my professor asked me if I knew of any mistakes I had made because he didn’t like to give out perfect grades! The funny thing is my GPA was always 3.5 or higher, but never, ever 4.0 or I guess 5.0 these days. So, while I didn’t have to settle for mediocrity, I also couldn’t claim perfection.

My first husband’s mother (My MIL) was from Switzerland and she was the perfect housekeeper. She set about making me one too and I actually did achieve that perfection. How do I know? Because one day she showed up at my house (some one hour’s drive away) unannounced and most assuredly unexpected. She was absolutely astounded and amazed that my house was “white-glove” clean. I had earned the Swiss equivalent of a five-star clean house. What she didn’t know was that I had just put the vacuum away after my two-day cleaning routine of upstairs Monday, downstairs Tuesday. There wasn’t a chance in hell that my house wasn’t clean.

The legacy from my MIL is that to this day whenever we have company, my house has to be perfect as if “The Queen” herself were coming for a visit. I know that I drive my family nuts trying to achieve this, but I simply can’t help myself. Although my MIL has been dead for almost 12 years now, my sub-conscious psyche still expects her to show up unexpectedly.

I am now the producer of our church’s bulletins and my quest for perfection rears its ugly head every week. I want to produce that perfect bulletin. Once, I thought I had achieved that lofty goal only to discover two periods at the end of one lousy sentence. One period. Crap.

Then, one Sunday recently, the celebrant (the person leading the service) messed up the order of the readings and read the wrong lesson throwing three people into a tizzie – the organist (what hymn to play next?), the next reader (whose lesson had just been read), and the reader after that (who wondered who would read what and what hymn would be played). Of course, it all worked out in the end (time does go on regardless) but, sitting there I realized that I could produce the perfect bulletin and it could still get screwed up!

I also realized that my MIL was dead, my house was clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy and the Queen wasn’t coming, ever. My friends and family love me for me, not for the cleanliness of my house. I no longer do arts & crafts, take exams, recite poetry onstage, or strive for bulletin perfection. A mistake, error, or typo here or there is not the end of the world, particularly of my world, or anyone else’s for that matter. And, I realize that it is I who am striving for this elusive perfection not anyone else. I will always try to do the best I can, but I finally realized that if I want to be perfect, I’ll have to be dead.

Thus, tonight we ring in a “new” year. Ringing, I guess, came from some medieval practice of ringing church bells at midnight. I find there is some universal fascination with newness. Newness marks the beginning of a fresh start, a clean page, a different perspective, and perhaps something even more hopeful than what was old. We all share in the mystical, magical, mystique of almost anything new. I remember as a child I just loved Easter, not because I understood the resurrection, but because I always got a new pair of Mary Jane shoes and a new dress. I can even remember that the first scuff on those shiny new shoes marked them as “old” and they were no longer special. Even Christmas gifts don’t necessarily fall into the “new” category although they are new, but in the “getting stuff” category. New is in a category all of its own.

Newness doesn’t even have to be really new either. One can buy a pre-owned vehicle, but it is new to the buyer. Or, one may move into a pre-occupied house or apartment and it is new to the dweller. Even things bought in a thrift shop that were once to new to another, will be new in our home or on our bodies. New can also be a new experience, a trip to a place we’ve never seen, or starting a new job or hobby we’ve never tried before. New is many things.

New is also the concept of wiping the slate clean and starting over such as on Yom Kippur when sins are forgiven and Jews everywhere begin life anew. For me, I think that our Chrisitan penitential season of Lent would be a more appropriate liturgical new year. We reflect and repent of our sins, our soul is resurrected into a new beginning and we try ever so hard to live into that perfection that Jesus so desperately wanted us to be. I wonder if he realized that in our human imperfection we would never quite reach that pinnacle he dreamed for us. Lucky for us that we get a chance to try it year after year after year, however.

On New Year’s Eve many make resolutions to start a new way of living. We try to make these new starts better than whatever it was our old self represented. Someone once said that a new year’s resolution was a resolve forgotten a week later. I gave up on those years ago when I realized how unrealistic I was being. Lose 50 pounds by May? Come on! I am better at living into things like trying to find the good in every situation, or smiling more often, or throwing out random acts of kindness.

So, whatever “new” means to you, let us all celebrate the calendar “New Year” and, if nothing else, resolve to be the best human being we can be in 2012! We don’t even have to define it. Just keep asking ourself the question: Does what I am doing, or the decision I am making, make my life or someone else’s life better? Then choose! The happiness in your life will be reflected by the choice you make.

Happy New Year, my friends.

At any rate, the tale of Nurse Rachet can now be told. My R is the most loving, caring, sweet, and helpful human being I have ever known. From day one his main object in our life together has been to love, support, and take care of me. And, I might add, he has done a very admirable job of it. However, as everyone on the planet knows, a good thing can go a bit too far.

On day one home from the hospital R showed up with my meds and proclaimed that “Nurse Rachet” was here to take care of me. Okay, this is not bad, I thought. He brought me my meals, changed the dressing on my incision, plumped up my pillows, changed the TV channel for me, read me magazine articles, walked me to the bathroom, walked me up and down the stairs, helped me get dressed, pulled on my socks, and on and on and on. What a great nurse, right?

Well, for the first couple of days as I was healing and getting out of my drug induced fog, this was wonderful. All I had to do was blink my eyes and some comforting thing was done for me by Nurse Rachet. On about the third day however, Patient Crochety kicked in and all hell broke loose. Left to his own devices Rachet would have turned me into a helpless piece of vegetative flesh unable to do even the tiniest thing for myself. The battle line was drawn. It was Rachet vs. Crochety.

He would try to help, I would get crochety and tell him I could do it myself now. I was getting better I said, and the doctor told me (I even had it in writing) that I could do any of my usual activities so long as there was no pain or obvious sign that it would cause my death. No matter to Rachet, he knew best and for at least the next two weeks he was determined to take care of me. Hrrump! Crochety pouted, plotting how to find a way to sneak in an independent move or two. When Rachet was downstairs making breakfast, Crochety would sneak into the bathroom and take a quick shower. Rachet wouldn’t even leave Crochety alone in the house so this was a bit harder to accomplish because Rachet had also convinced DD2 that Crochety was now not only helpless, but crochety because of the pain I was in. Probably true, but R was relentless in ordering me to bed, to rest, to not lift anything, to not walk too far, to not this and to not that!

Of course, the more Rachet-y he became the more crochet-y I became and for that first week home it was often times not very pretty. Gratefully, I slept a lot and, when I was really in pain I was thankful for the help and attention and the meds. Rachet, patient, loving, kind soul that he is, kept chalking my crochet-y-ness up to my pain and just smiled at me which, of course, made it worse. How we survived is one of those unsolvable mysteries in life, but we did. Somehow, as time went on, he racheted back and I crochet-y-ed less and less until, two weeks later things are pretty much back to our normal personalities. He still won’t let me drive to work, but I think next week he’ll get tired of that and I’ll be back behind the wheel.

But, God bless him, this wonderful man just wanted to make my life easier and my healing faster. And, thanks to his patience and understanding he has reached his goal. Mission accomplished. Patient Crochety has now disappeared into the woodwork taking Nurse Rachet with her!

I discovered “Cyber Monday” and spent the day at the computer buying one bargain after another until I was exhausted and spent. Literally, spent, and spent, and spent. But, oh how good it felt to have all but a handful of gifts ordered, wrapped, and shipped all with the tippity-tap of my keyboard. WooHoo, what a way to shop. No malls, no tired feet, no aching back, no toting heavy bags, to trips to the post office, no pain, but much gain. I was rather smug about all of this early preparedness.

On Friday, December 9th all of this preparedness paid off in a really weird turn of events. As planned I entered the surgery center for a catherization procedure through my right arm down into my right leg to insert a stent. A total blockage prevented the usual through-the-groin approach and the cardiologist thought maybe he could unblock it this way and put in the stent. Didn’t work, slapped on a bandage, and sent me home to recover before another approach or by-pass surgery. Sigh.

Hah! No way Jose or any other guy. The “Crisis before Christmas” had begun and no one saw it coming, least of all the victim. On Saturday, December 10th it was my R’s birthday and we celebrated with dinner at “Le Club” a.k.a. Baywood Greens. All seemed to be going well although my arm did seem to be swelling a bit.

By Sunday afternoon the swelling was worse and so was the pain, but I was determined to go to a clergy Christmas dinner. Not good. Dumb decision. With the first nibble on my appetizer a pain shot up my right arm and I sent R scurrying to the car for pain relief drugs. I managed to get through the dinner, but was not in any champagne sparkly frame of mind and we were among the first to leave. Drat.

By Monday morning we were in full-blown crisis mode and I found myself checking into the ER at our local hospital. I couldn’t even wait to see the doctor in the p.m. the pain was so severe. They wrapped my arm in an ace bandage, loaded me IV drugs (morphine I think) and admitted me. I was bleeding out of an artery into my arm forming a huge blood clot. For three days a new ultrasound was done to see how much the bleeding was progressing. It was not huge, but not small either, and the hard mass and pain was growing.

What was the delay in treatment, I wondered? My Dr. wanted to perform a prothrombin injection to clot the hole in the artery and stop the bleeding on Monday. But, the hospital protocol said he couldn’t do that unless I had been off my Plavix and aspirin for a week. What nonsense is that? After three days of arguing with the powers that be, my Dr. discharged me from the hospital and sent me upstate to a doctor he knew who would perform the procedure without the restriction. Ah, some relief may be on the way, I prayed. By this time I was hoping that either my arm would fall off or I would die, anything to get relief.

By the time I was checked into the ER and whisked off for the injection it was now day six of the ordeal. The injection procedure was done and, guess what, didn’t work. Oh crap. Now what? Surgery, they declared, and off we went at 6pm to cut my arm open and see what was going on in there? Well, if nothing else I was eager to be put under general anesthesia where I knew I would be pain free.

Later that night I was told that a grapefruit sized clot was removed from my arm, another clot removed from the artery itself, and a piece of nearby vein used to repair the hole in my artery where the leaking was occurring. I was put on IV Oxycontin and moved into a really nice private room. The crisis was over. I began to thank God that Thanksgiving was early, that I had discovered Cyber Monday and thanks be to God, I had even wrapped most of the gifts that had arrived before December 9th. All I really had to worry about now was Christmas dinner and I had lots of help with that.

Not quite yet, Miss Rita, giggled the devil as I was sent home on Saturday, December 17th, with a nice stash of Percocet for any residual pain. You see, with a four-inch incision covered by 19 staples there is bound to be a bit more pain in the healing. Yeah, well by Sunday night the arm was coming along, but I was hanging off the ceiling fan, whirring around the room, my joints aching, having chills, then fever and often positing very confusing abstract ideas. At least that is what I have been told. I was not, as one would say, “myself.”

It was my youngest daughter who found the answer – she remembered that I had acted in a similar fashion after back surgery some five years earlier when sent home on Oxycontin. Could we be on to something here? Oh, yes. Off the drugs that very minute, head cleared up by morning and the birds began to sing. Thank you Jesus, it is all downhill from here and all I am coping with is a bruised, swollen arm, and residual pain. I also have an inability to feed myself with my right hand because the swelling prevents my hand from reaching my mouth. I am learning quickly to be ambidextrous!

We still haven’t solved the blockage in my leg and I’m not looking forward to that prospect, but for now I think Christmas day will be joyful occasion. Twas the Crisis before Christmas and I pray that it is over. It was not expected nor welcomed, need I say. But, a big thank you goes to my Rector, boss, and priest who had the wisdom to tell me to stay home from work this week and rest. Being who I am I would have dragged myself into work and probably been a basket case. Thanks, J, you’re the best.

My R, who calls himself “Nurse Ratched” is another blog and with me being “Patient Ms. Crotchety.” it will be some tale to tell!

We are so dependent on Mr. Franklin’s discovery of electricity that without it we are almost reduced to a blithering mass of jelly. Whenever power goes out in our house the first words out of anyone’s mouth is “O my God, we have no power.” It is as if the world were about to end. And, I guess in a way we do lose a big chunk of our everyday world. No TV, no Internet, no light, no washer, dryer, dishwasher, radio, no heat, no gadgets, no chargers revving up our electronic gismos, no stove (unless you have a gas one) no dishwasher, no life. Nothing. Nada. Nil. Dark.

As I sat in the dark I was reminded of Genesis 1:1-4 which says: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And, God said “Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good and separated the light from the darkness. So here in the dark there is nothingness and nothing to do, but then we find light from a candle, a flashlight, or even the glow of a not yet dead smartphone. This strange sense of life springing out of that darkness comes over me. We call it light, day, brightness. No wonder God decided that was the very first thing this planet needed. And, voila, God saw that it was good. I imagine God let out a big WOOHOO, for it is indeed good.

Light gives me life. Without light we have no life and would just sit in darkness forever, not moving, not thinking, not seeing, just being. We, might however, wonder a bit about what comes next. But I imagine we are afraid to move into some unknowing nothingness. It is no wonder that the bad guys always wear black and the good guys always wear white. Did you ever see an angel dressed in black. Did Jesus ever wander the desert in a black robe? Darkness is blackness. Lightness is white. I know that my spirit needs light to exist.

With the light of the day we can grow food, move around, see God’s creation, see other people, be alive. But, before the advent of electricity we were limited to daylight, candles and oil lamps. Just enough to read or sew or clean a gun in the evening. Not enough to run our machines, our toys, and our gadgets. For that we need to generate many kilowatts of electricity and, indeed we do. Just as God liked light, so do we and we gobble up the kilowatts as if they were peanuts that we couldn’t stop eating potato chips where we couldn’t eat just one.

When our family went away for two months and turned off all our appliances and computers I thought we’d save a bundle on our electric bill. Hah, not so. With nothing seemingly drawing any power our electric bill was still $79. Even pulling out all the plugs during another six weeks away our electric bill was $65. Seems all of our appliances, gadgets, computers, DVR’s, and what not have little tiny standby lights and the pulse of electricity goes on even in the darkness.

Guess God knew those sparks were out there just waiting to light up our life. Thus, there I sat in an almost primordial darkness, lit only by the glow of my dimming computer screen as the battery power drained. Yes, God, I’m with you; the first thing I would create would be that wonderful, glowing, blessed light. Let the lights come on I prayed and prayed. Oh, forget it, I’d already missed Harry’s Law and it didn’t look like I’d get to see Revenge either.. I went to bed and hoped that by dawn Delmarva would have the problem fixed. It didn’t, but that’s another story, or rant, for another time.

I am also stuffed with thankfulness. Normally, I don’t save all my “thanks” for one day out of the year, or rather for being thankful only one day. I try to find something each day for which to be thankful and I try really hard to be specific. It’s easy to be thankful for my family, or my friends, or my blessings, or may abundance. It’s harder to find one definitive thing to be thankful for each day and make it different each day.

For example, today I was thankful that I drove home before it got dark. I hate to drive at dusk when the chances of hitting a deer are exponentially greater. Yesterday, I was thankful for Cyber Monday and all the great discounts and bargains I got. The day before that I was thankful that I got to sleep in for the first time in a week. On Friday, I was thankful that the traffic was light as we drove home from Massachusetts. See what I mean?

Sometimes I’m thankful for really tiny weeny things like how great it is to have great smelling shampoo for my hair or that my computer booted faster than normal. Today I was even thankful that my glass of wine was just the perfect temperature. I can also be thankful that someone is home and answers the call when I call. After all, with caller ID they could just ignore my call. There are just so many itsy-bitsy things to be thankful for in this world.

Today a very young woman came into the church office seeking help. She had been staying with a friend who beat her up over the weekend and she was now homeless, without money, and hungry. I wanted to adopt her on the spot, but that is unrealistic as I would have to build a sizable building for all those poor souls I would like to adopt. Rather, people like that make me realize that I have huge, huge reasons to be thankful. Huge like an income, huge like a home, huge like living with someone who doesn’t beat me up, huge like having a family that loves me and to which I could turn in time of need.

Yes, there are so many things for which to be thankful. I pray that I never pass a day without giving thanks for a teeny-weeny thing and a huge things. For by comparison to many of the suffering in this world, I am a very blessed and wealthy woman. I hope that you are too.

When we toured the many national parks recently we were all psyched up about the possibility of seeing a bear. We never saw a one. The closest we came to a bear was one at Sequoia that was chased away by a ranger two minutes before we arrived on the scene. Now here is a list of all the wild animals we did see: marmots, turkeys, elks, prairie dogs, mule deer, chipmunks, bison, a great gray owl, a prong horn antelope, a tarantula, zebras, coyotes, llamas, horses, cats, hawks, pigeons, sheep, eagles, black crows, and Stellar jaybirds. Now, this is not an insignificant number of wild animals and yes, we did take photos of those we could catch on the run, but we were still disappointed that we didn’t see a bear. Sigh, some folks are never pleased.

I have a folder in “My Pictures” on my computer called “Animals.” I don’t have one called “Children,” or “Babies” or “Flowers,” or any number of things that might come under the category of capturing our attention. And, I have noticed that I rarely take photos of tame animals although we have many dogs being walked around here that are really quite attractive. I think the attraction then is that these wild animals (I include birds and aquatic life) are simply that, they are wild and we come upon them at their pleasure, not ours.

I guess it’s like rounding a corner and glimpsing a beautiful sunset or seeing the green flash. It is not planned, totally unexpected, and if you blink you will miss it. If you’re lucky the wild things will hang around for a photo-op, but often they simply bound off into the woods or fields and you have to be satisfied with the glimpse. I think life is often like that, it comes unexpectedly, leaves quickly, and only gives us a glimpse, or a taste of the experience. I’m going to try and savor those moments and, if I’m lucky, I might even get a photo of them!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Enjoy the day, enjoy, the meal, love your family, embrace and be thankful for your moments or glimpses in life. You may never have them again.

You all know who I am talking about; the pharmaceutical vultures, the hospital elephants, and the specialist tigers that trample and eat us alive by charging outrageous amounts of money for a pill that cost pennies and that, by the way would include the research costs. Or that cardio-something that thinks a ten-minute consultation is worth $500, or the hospital that thinks a baby wipe is worth $10 and an aspirin is worth $7.00. Not to mention my latest techno-test MRI that cost $3638! Come on, the test took all of twenty minutes and the time of one person. Even if the equipment cost one million dollars, at that rate it would only take 277 patients to break even. I’ll bet that is accomplished in a year or so.

I am old enough to remember the “better” days of medical care. Whenever we went to the doctor for a visit we paid cash and it was affordable. As late as the 1970’s an office visit cost me $7.00 – in today’s dollar at an average rate of inflation that would now be only $19.12 not the $85 my insurance company is now charged. We also paid cash for our medications and they were rarely more than $10 and that was considered expensive. Our pharmacy even delivered them to our home. The only insurance we had was called major medical and it was to help pay the bill if we had to go to the hospital. By the time I was 30 years old I had been in the hospital to have two children, my appendix removed, and have a hysterectomy. I remember that the hospital bill for my appendectomy was $198 which in today’s dollars would only be $540.92, not thousands upon thousands.

Now I know that many of you will say I am being naïve about the advances in medical care and equipment and the associated costs. Sure, we didn’t have MRI, PET, or CT scans back then, we had X-rays and really good diagnostician MDs. Sure some people died because they couldn’t be diagnosed with a tumor or a clogged artery. People still die today from those things in spite of all of our advanced technology. Doctors today rely on all these new diagnostic tools and for all the lives they lengthen (we all eventually die anyway) that is really good news. In fact, I am the recipient of that very technology and would probably be dead now if not for my stents and pills and ability to find out what is a-whack with my body. For a reality check that $3638 MRI would have cost $1317.76 back in 1970 and we would have been outraged and only the rich would have been able to afford one. In fact, only the rich or the insured can afford them today. Somehow between then and now, between major medical and all-inclusive medical benefit’s insurance, our medical provider system has truly become really screwed up. So screwed up that unless you are privately insured (at outrageous premiums) or on Medicare or Medicaid, you are screwed, medically speaking.

Like our greedy bankers and corporate mavens who pocketed untold billions of dollars off the backs of us 99 percenters, wake up people, the medical industry is doing exactly the same thing. It doesn’t have to cost such unbelievably ridiculous amounts of money. They should all be ashamed of themselves for not putting some of those profits in our pockets so we can support our economy with more disposable income. Greed is a deadly sin and it has surely been deadly for our economy.

I say go you “Occupiers” GO-GO-GO, go after Wall Street, but also go after that medical industry and then you can go after the sporting industry if you want to talk about greed. I mean really, why is some tall guy throwing a ball through a metal hoop worth millions and millions every year when someone sweating away in a factory, standing for hours on end in a retail store, or someone hunched over a computer all day only worth thousands? We should all think about that and then speak up and speak out and maybe, even go and join those occupiers. Maybe I’ll find a group where walkers and scooters won’t get in the way. And, don’t even get me started on our government in Washington!