Dear Jeff Bezos

 

Dear Jeff:

Bezos announced that the Washington Post opinion stories will serve the “pillars of personal liberties and free markets,” and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” He also said that the current type of opinion pieces were outdated.

Er Jeff...no it is not outdated. Many of the people who have already left because of your point-of-view and censorship made me want to cancel my subscription, but it was the opinion pieces, which you think are "outdated," was why I hung on. Fortunately they appear on Substack and other places so I have lost nothing but I have gained the monthly subscription fee back in my pocket. I will miss the old Washington Post and what it stands for.

May I suggest you change the "Democracy dies in darkness" from the newspaper's head. Democracy is growing darker thanks to the Washington Post.

I hope everyone who cares about the country and those that don't believe in your garbage fight you with everything they have. 

D-L Nelson

 

 

Free Write -- What is it?

This was extra fun. When Rick printed out the photo in France that Julia sent from Switzerland, The printer produced pink and yellow stripes running the length of the board. I thought ? was attached by a screw. We discussed the possibility of a letter opener before we started writing. Only when Julia sent her free write did it corroborate our suspicions were correct. It was a letter opener.

Julia's Free Write

There it lay: how many years? How many stories?

·         “And then she went on to tell him to get lost…”

·         “Here, the weather is actually sunny for once.”

·         “Then I saw him barreling down the slope, out of control, and about to plunge into a child…”

·         “Today the doctors are going to try and bring her out of the coma.”

·         “Dear family, good news, it’s twins, one of each.”

·         “Dear John, I’m sorry, but you know that we have drifted apart.”

·         “Dear Daisy, You are the light of our lives, we are so happy to be your parents.”

·         “Dear Madam, Dear Sir, this letter comes to remind you that you have not yet fulfilled your duty…”

·         “Pauline: we were besties once, no longer.”

·         “My eyesight is worse.”

·         “Dear Mom and Dad, this is to warn you that you might not like my report card.”

·         “We had a little snow last week.”

And so it is, that this humble letter opener has seen the world, its’ joys and sorrows a.

All without moving from its’ desk.

 Julia has written and taken photos all and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/

D-L's Free Write

Lisa felt Greta's eyes watching her open the birthday gift Greta had brought. She prepared her face to look pleased. Greta gave weird gifts.

The wood board painted with yellow and pink stripes and had a ? in the middle. What is ?, she thought.

"When I saw it at the gallery, I knew you would love it." 

Which gallery, Lisa thought. She could go and ask what it was.

The green spike had her baffled. If ? hadn't been screwed into the wood, she thought it might be a weapon, although the blade was too dull to do much damage. "I have nothing like it."

Greta glowed. "Do you know where to hang it?"

"Maybe my office." Lisa though she could hold a contest. Her staff could guess what it was. 

"The colors match your bedroom," Greta said.

"That they do." She noticed again the screw fastening the ? to the board. If she unscrewed maybe, just maybe, it could be a letter opener. "I really want to thank you." What she didn't add was but I find it hard to say thanks for this monstrosity. 

"I do have to run," "Greta said. "I didn't want to wait until your party tonight to give it to you."

Lisa was grateful for small favors. 

D-L has had 17 fiction and non fiction books published. Check out her website at:. https://dlnelsonwriter.com     

Rick's Free Write

Justine heard the footsteps on the landing, which was unusual for her third-floor flat in the Carouge section of Genève. As she approached the door, expecting a knock, an envelope was slid under the door with such force that it flew three feet into the room.

She stopped in her tracks, wondering, then walked over and picked up the special delivery envelope.

Carrying it to her small antique desk, she grabbed an old, worn, wooden-handled letter opener. With one quick flick of the wrist, she sliced the envelope open and took out the single sheet of paper.

“Dearest Justine,

“Please excuse this impolite way of delivering bad news but I thought it better than a text or email.

“I cannot go on like this. It is tearing me apart. And if my wife finds out, her parents will insist on divorce and I will lose access to their fortune forever.

“I will stop by this morning to pick up my things from your apartment.

“I will always love you.

“Desolée. M”

Justine stood stunned, dropping the envelope to the floor. There were no tears.

A short time later, a knock on the door. It was Matthieu.

“Come in,” she beckoned, realizing she was still clutching the letter opener, the same one her grandmother had used to stab her grandfather for cheating on her with a prostitute.

As Matthieu opened his mouth and started to apologize, Justine plunged the blade into his neck.

As he slumped to the floor, she carried the letter opener across the room and placed it on her grandmother’s desk.

 Rick Adams is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices.

Feb. 28. No buy day

 

One Day Easy, 2009 I did a No Buy Year

 What can you do to stop the destruction of America? Some are doing it already by:

• Calling Congress
• Writing Congress
• Flooding Town Halls

However: as individuals it is hard to stop wars, closing of departments and ending vital services. More needs to be done. Now there's a plan to economically boycott those who support that people are losing rights and necessary programs such as:

• Cancer research
• Health information
• Health care
• Consumer information/fraud protection
• Safety in the work place
• Much much more
  

These and other agencies are being accused for fraud and mismanagement. So what if a family is hungry. Jeff Bezos with his networth of over $230 billion will be able to choose which of his 25 bathrooms in his New York mansion he can use to go potty while limiting potty breaks for his employees and fighting against a union. Musk will have less regulations to hamper his wealth growth.

Feb. 28 will be a No Buy day of anything that is not essential. Hitting the donors to this travesty of a government is a good place to start. It's a modern Boston Tea Party, only no need to dress as Indians. We know the long term result of that demonstration.

A day of buying only essentials shouldn't be that hard. I did it for all of 2009.

My motives weren't political. I wanted to declutter and not reclutter.

I prepared. I made sure I had all the paper, printer ink, underwear, socks, cosmetics I would need for 12 months. I even made sure I had enough red hair dye. 

How was it?

• Wow!!! It made life easier. Take the red hair dye. No longer did I have to hold my breath to not be overwhelmed with the odors walking through the perfume department to the hair coloring part of the store.
• I had more time to curl up and read. Thank goodness for the library since I didn't buy books or magazines. I read newspapers on line from several different countries.
• There was more time to walk along the lake. I learned how many colors the lake could be going from brown, through green, through light blue to navy blue. I watched white caps and guessed at their varying heights. 
• I saw families of ducks and swans go from baby birds to toddling to their first swim.
• Because I worked for home, I didn't need any special outfits. Most in my closet were seldom worn anyway. I emptied my closet of things I wouldn't wear again giving the clothes to charity shops.
• I didn't have to fight other people to rummage through racks of clothes in a store that held no interest of me.  
• I could wander in museums, historical sites, and enjoy just looking at things I might not have seen had I been shopping.

I did buy bus and train tickets since I didn't need to buy gas for a non-existent car.

Admission: I did buy two things during the year, one necessary and one emotional.

1. A mop. Mine broke in early September, and I had no intention of washing tile floors on hands and knees for another four months.

2. A poster, a very special poster of an Underwood typewriter. I passed it in a street marché. My father had a franchise when I was a child and spending time at his company held special memories. I did wait until 2010 to have it framed. I get great pleasure out of it 14 years later every time I look at it.

I didn't regret any thing I didn't buy. 

I had more money in my pocket and had put less money in the pockets of others who didn't need my contribution.

At the end of 2009 my buying habits were different. I would think do I really, really, really need that.

I developed three criteria for a purchase:

1. Is it useful?
2. Is it beautiful?
3. Does it have a memory?

My not shopping on February 28, there's a third category...fighting the destruction of my birth country. Please join us.

 

 

 

 

 

Snail Tales and more

 

Every family has its stories that are retold over get togethers decades after they happened. Our two favorite ones:

The Snails

At the French marché in 2013, I bought a small bucket of snails shells. I thought they would look beautiful in the two stone dishes on our patio and in the planters flanking our front door. Our village house went back 400+ years and faced the tiny street that once held livestock. There was barely space for an American-sized car.

I was right. The shells looked beautiful.

"Donna-Lane come here," Rick called the next morning. I finished dressing and went to the door.

Seems the shells weren't empty at all and at least 30 snails were climbing our glass door.

Although I'd eaten snails, like them, my body did not. "Let's take them to the river. Give them a chance at life," I said. We plied them off the glass on the front door and the patio and released them.

What we didn't realize that we missed some and for years we would discover a snail on the patio.

Snails became a joke in our family. Some friends took up the story and would provide us with snail gifts.

2024 was a snail free year, but this past week Rick called me to look at baby snail on the patio. It was not the size of half my baby fingernail. When I was telling our femme de menage the story, she spotted three more. 

Our patio is enclosed, so I have no idea where or how they came to our home. What I do know, it is another chapter in the family stories shared around a dinner table or in front of a fire on a cold winter night.

 Twinkle, Twinkle Little...

My daughter was three. We were about to drive back from Syracuse where we were visiting friends to Waltham, Massachusetts. I called my housemate to tell her what time approximately to expect us. She asked to speak to Llara.

"I love you, too," Llara said before hanging up.

In the car, Llara chatted about her day care friends, what she and Lynnore did during our visit. Then she switched to reciting nursery rhymes, especially "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" over and over, over and over, over and over and... Suggestions she might like to nap were ignored. She did lower her voice a bit.

I had visions of gagging her. 

At the New York-Massachusetts border, when we stopped for lunch and a potty break, I thought she would be quiet for the remainder of the trip. She had eaten saying barely a word or a twinkle. 

Once back on the Mass Turnpike, it started. The damned star was twinkling all the way to Waltham, more than two hours. 

We pulled up in front of the house. My housemate came out to greet us as I staggered out of the car exhausted by the nursery rhyme on constant replay.

"I did it, I did it," Llara said to my housemate. "Just like you told me to. I kept Mummy awake the whole way."

A couple of decades later Llara and I were on the way to Chamonix, France from where we were then living in Geneva. She had finished university and was staying with me to job hunt.

We were traveling in companionable silence admiring the beauty of the mountains, when Llara started, "Twinkle, twinkle, little..." No longer worried about damaging her little psyche I told her to shut up as we laughed.

At least once every trip we relive that moment even to the point when Llara and my husband were driving to the Toulouse airport in the middle of the night and she began with "twinkle..." He knew the story of the Syracuse-Waltham trip but even better...she totally had accepted him into our family.

Note: As I watch my birth country being destroyed, I find I need the light-hearted parts of my life more and more. It doesn't negate the seriousness of what is happening, but it does increase my coping.

 

 

 

You can tell a lot from a refrigerator

 

You can tell a lot about a family by their refrigerator doors. 

Go into a house with school children and their papers or report cards will be displayed. Others may have schedules and agendas such as Jason Little League Try Outs under March 25. Mary Dentist in the April 7th box.

A friend, a writer, had one of those magnetic word sets that were on the fridge door. She would arrange them in sentences and when she was really ambitious, she'd do a haiku.

Rick and I married late. He is an aviation journalist. I specialized in financial cooperatives.  I also have 17 books to my credit. We traveled a lot. Our trips took us around Europe and sometimes to Canada and the United States. Some were for articles we were writing others were research for my books. Exploring for fun included museums and just things that caught our fancy. Our fancy was easily caught.

I don't remember why we started buying a magnet whereever we went. It was early on. A dozen years later our fridge is covered. The photo is the front, but the sides are also covered. We had so many magnets that Rick used the front of our two stairs leading from the kitchen to the bathroom by cutting metal plates to match the stair, covering the strip with magnets and gluing the strip onto the stair.

We have our favorites. Mine will always be from the now defunct Newseum in Washington, D.C. It says "Not tonight, I'm on deadline." We have one bought in Edinburgh of a kilted Scotsman. When you push the plaid bag, it plays a few notes.

What does it tell you about our couple? That we like museums and not the ordinary ones like the Pig Museum.  www.schweinemuseum.de/museum-enm in Stuttgart. We deliberately look for the unusual museums. We like the houses of writers. Duh. We're writers. Galleries and homes of artists. 

But there was also a life size tulip magnet, a reminder of our trip to Amsterdam. There we had a BnB on a houseboat. We have visited battlefields and historic sites.

When we look at our fridge we can be swamped with memories all good ones. With today's catastrophic wars, the coming apart of the U.S. Government and the world order, there is a certain comfort from a refrigerator that reminds us of the good and simple things in life.

Check out D-L's website https:dlnelsonwriter.com

 

They Must be Crazy Going after the National Park Service

 

Musk, et. al. have to be crazy going after the National Park Service.

Founded in 1916 today it has:

• 63 parks
• 20,000 employees at least for the moment
• 279,000 volunteers -- maybe maybe not

 The NPS is charged with:

• Preserving the ecological and historical integrity of the places entrusted to its management 
• Making them available for public use and enjoyment.  

I haven't visited them all, but those that I have are staffed with incredible people who give information to American citizens and to foreign visitors alike. They are the best of the best.

Minute Man National Park is the national park I know best. I couldn't visit it when I was in grade school, because my over protective (paranoid?) mother was convinced I wouldn't be safe under the guidance of school teachers during the class trip. The teachers did return all children safely and they were smarter about their country.

Over the years, I've visited the site of the beginning of the American Revolution many times. Standing in front of the unknown British soldiers grave, walking the Old North Bridge, thinking what it must have been like that day. The NPS staff with their different programs make it seem like yesterday. 

I always wondered about the family of the soldier not knowing what happened to the man. I asked about DNA and found the grave couldn't be disturbed by law. I then decided to give the soldier a life.

When I was writing my novel Lexington: Anatomy of a Novel one of the park rangers was invaluable. He kept me posted on programs I could tune in on from Switzerland. When he didn't know the answer, he put me in touch with the right historian. 

After the book was published and during a trip to the U.S. we went to Lexington. I had a book to give to the ranger. I'd dedicated the book to him. Without his help, the book would never have been written. I also left flowers in front of the grave.

That ranger was more than an employee. Years ago he started as a volunteer, something the Muskites want to eliminate and finally became a regular employee. To say he loved his job, was an understatement. The day we were there, he'd jut finished training that year's batch of volunteers. This wasn't a job, but a way of life.

Some people go to work in business suits, other in casual clothes, but many of the park staff are dressed as if it were still 1776 adding to the atmosphere. It's a trip back in time.

The one thing I couldn't find, nor could any of the historians I talked with was the name of the ship that my British soldier and his 43 Regiment of Foot sailed on on the their trip from England to Boston. They could supply the type of ship and I used that description writing around the ship's name.

A complete list of the 63 National Parks. Whether they will still exist for you vacation is unknown.

My book can be ordered from www.alibris.com or www.barnesandnoble.com.

 

 

 

Thank you-- yes or no

 

An interesting subject came up on my Facebook. Should brides send thank you notes for gifts. 

Some people felt that a picture of the bride and groom with a pre-printed thank you was a bit tacky. Several complained that there was no recognition of the gift at all including receipt.

One bride said people were busy and as for her she didn't have time to write 300 thank yous. 300 people who probably were "busy" found time to buy, spend and send her a gift. If it were me, that would be the last gift she would receive from me, including even paying for a cup of coffee. Come to think of it, I doubt if I would waste my precious time on someone with her attitude.

Some people said hand written thank yous were passé. But there's other ways. 

Maybe I'm a COW, Cranky Old Woman, but I think showing appreciation should not be outdated. It could be a phone call, an email or a private message on social media. 

As a child, thank you notes were obligatory starting with doing a drawing before I could write. For those who think it's passé, when I loaned my home to a couple for a few days, their two sons, both under six, left drawings and their mother added the words thank you.

I had an aunt who loved sending me handkerchiefs every Christmas, which I never used, but my activities were limited until those damned notes were written. At least one year, the handkerchiefs were trimmed with pink lace, which I remember mentioning before having my grandmother check my spelling and letting me go out to play. 

Moving to Switzerland where things were more formal, my then Swiss gentleman friend, told me thank you notes were obligatory after a dinner given by any of his friend. He checked my French. In the more relaxed international committee, a quick phone call or an email will do.

My husband, a successful communicator, always sent a thank you note after an interviewer. I think I got a job because I did that. Maybe it was shock value.

On a private level, my husband brings me tea in bed every morning. I always thank him. We share cooking and thank the other for the effort. 

A thank you (merci, gracias, danke, tak, shukran) is a reaffirmation of our humanness and caring.

 

Typewriters to Laptops

 

When I was 16 I my mother told me that I was going to learn to type. No argument allowed. She said I would always find work as a typist, even if it were only temporary until I found something more interesting.  

She was right. At 16 I was hired as a cub reporter for the Lawrence Eagle Tribune and more than once when I was between jobs, I  temped.

The typewriter at the paper and in my mother's home office was what would now be called a clunker. My father at one period had an Underwood franchise in Bluefield, West Virginia. His office and the repair shop were on the second floor in mid city. I remember his bathroom sink had Lava Soap which was black and gritty, nothing like the Ivory soap we had at home. 

In the early 2000s when I went to the Christmas Market in Stuttgart, I was at the end of my NO-Buy year. There was a man selling posters of the typewriter featuring my father's former franchise. For 15 Euros, I bought it, NO-Buy year or not. It hangs on the wall of my Nest in the South of France.

A high school graduation present was an Olivetti portable. I studied (revised if you're a Brit) for exams by typing my notes from all my lectures. 

 

It worked.

 

My grades were As and Bs and unlike many of my classmates, I finished early enough to get a good nights sleep. When I moved to Switzerland, I often passed the Olivetti factory, then deserted in Yverdon, when I trained from Payerne to Geneva.

My model appeared in the film The Godfather. 

My first - after getting my degree - job was producing monthly newsletters about new businesses in six areas of the U.S. The IBM Selectric had proportional spacing. A little whisker helped line up the copy for corrections. Typing was like caressing silk in comparison to the Underwoods, which was more like pushing tanks up hill.

I interviewed for a job and they told me I needed three years to learn proportional spacing. I ended the interview. If they were that stupid, it would have been a bad match.

Living in Boston, my housemate and I started a typing service for professors who wrote their articles on yellow legal pads. There were at least seven colleges and universities in walking distance of our house and over 40 in the city. We rented an IBM Selectric and invested in golf balls to give our clients a wide choice of fonts.

All was well until the rental company demanded the typewriter back. Although they would have replaced it with a new model where our golf balls wouldn't fit. It got nasty when we refused.

I wrote IBM's president explaining our situation. 

Within a week we went to our front door to find two IBM VPs standing there offering to help. They'd flown in from New York. A call to the rental service and we were given the old model. As they left, one presented his card. "Please, please, please if you have another problem, call us directly. Don't write the CEO. 

We promised and imagined the conversation they must have had on the flight back.

What they missed, seconds after they unlocked their rental car, was our Japanese Chin Albert running down the stairs with a used tampon in his mouth.

Typewriters have long been replaced with a series of computers from humongous machines sitting on my desk to lightweight laptops that I tote between countries and cafés. 

I am grateful to my mother for the early lessons. I am even more grateful not to worry about fitting in footnotes, using Tipp-Ex to paint over typos then lining up everything so the typo was history.

Editing and rewriting my fiction is so easy, although I did learn Find/Replace had to be carefully checked. When I changed a character's name from Lou to Gino my manuscript had a state named Ginouisiana. Blouses became BGinouses. 

Over the years, I learned a number of word processing programs. A good friend, who knew three as well as she knew her own kids, made the comment, "Word processing programs are basically like men's sex organs. There are just minor differences." 

 

 

 

Free Write- The Joys of Dog Walking

For the two writers in France, our favorite café was closed for repairs, but the alternative La Bronzette provided great chocolatine (pain au chocolate) as we prepared our pens and notewbooks. Rick's prompt was the joy of dog walking. Like Rick, Julia in Switzerland wrote a memoir. D-L did a fiction piece. The joys of three free writes is there can be great similarities of great differences.

Rick's Free Write

The legendary golfer Walter Hagen advised, “Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.”

When I take Sherlock for a walk, it’s not flowers he’s smelling.

Typically, it’s urine-drenched weeds, bushes, poles, the sides and corners of buildings, pretty much anything vertical against which he can lift his leg.

He has a world-class three-legged stance, ambidextrous, and often stretches the loose leg higher than his little body.

I’ve read that male dogs try to spray as high as they can to make it seem – to other dogs who come along later – that they are bigger than their reality.

Whenever Sherlock encounters another dog in person, he feels compelled to leave a ‘p-mail’ message almost immediately after.

The streets of our village can be a merde minefield, one reason we rarely walk at night. In Switzerland, there are more farm fields to traverse. In addition to dog droppings, we need to watch for horse and cow plop.

Sherlock almost never goes the same route twice in a row. If yesterday was the ‘Nellie’ route (past his girlfriend’s house), today will be the ‘Nelson’ route (a friend’s French bulldog). The worst, for me, is the long pull up the hill to the parc mairie in Vandoeuvres – easily his favorite.

The walks are not only necessary, they’re good for him, and if I must admit good for me as well. The joy is in his eagerness to put on his harness, and his anticipation of treats on our return.

Amazingly, I’ve never stepped in shit in either place. (Now I’ve probably jinxed that.)

Rick Adams is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices.

D-L's Free Write

Walk ten steps, stop, wait, walk twelve steps, stop, wait, walk five steps, st...

 Zorro was especially slow this morning. His sniffs took longer, his pees definitely so, and he must be waiting for the park to dump.

Despite the sun, the wind felt cold, damned cold.

Getting Zorro at the shelter seemed like such a good idea during Covid. Those eyes, peeking through the bars, had trapped him. The dog had been such good company while he was isolated.

Now he worked hybrid going into the office three days a week. Those boring walks before work were never fast enough and he was often late for work.

He thought about taking Zorro back to the shelter, but the dog loved him, and he had to admit he loved the dog, but those walks...

They arrived at the park. He unleashed the  dog. Zorro bounded off in search of his four-footed buddies.

He sat on a bench waiting the 20 minutes for Zorro to exercise. The wind nibbled at his cheeks. Mentally he ran over the day's presentation.

"They are having fun," a woman with beautiful blue eyes sat down beside him. She owned a golden lab. He'd seen her many mornings, wanted to say hello, but always something stopped him.

He looked into her eyes and thought back to the day he'd met Zorro. He was a sucker for eyes.

"I've seen you here a lot," she said. "I'm going for coffee after. Do you and your dog want to join me?"

Bless Zorro, he thought.

D-L has had 17 fiction and non fiction books published. Check out her website at:. https://dlnelsonwriter.com     

Julia's Free Write

Opening the door, my mother pronounces “out you go.”.Cindy, our lovely, unexpected “gift” hastens to comply. But then we were in a house with multiple gardens. Cindy loved nothing more than stealing our rare ice cream from behind our backs.

Change of lives – and another inherited pet: Dash.  He really wasn’t much into dashing and went more reluctantly into the garden.

A period of time – and several moves later – Teddy entered my parent’s lives: chosen this time, he was much babied. Still, out into the garden though.

A university student, I moved into half a house and have no clue as to how my housemate and I ended up with Marla. But even there, there was a quiet street and a mini, enclosed, garden: the joys of walking the dog passed me by entirely.

Julia has written and taken photos all and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/