My sister Linda called with news our cousin Louise died--

Louise is Stewart's sister. I was having such a terrible time to write about Stewart's death which occurred when I around 9 or so. Raymond and I were talking about it today and he was asking me questions all about Stewart. I planned to write my memoir entry tomorrow. It is no wonder my feelings of sorrow were so heavy about Stewart who died when he was around twenty two. I didn't know it, but his sister Louise was about to join him in death. She was born in 1927 so she would be 85. That is not really a sad passing as Stewart's was. His sister Roma, 88, is the only one left of 8 children. I want to note Louise's passing and I will go ahead and try to write my memoir entry tomorrow about Stewart.
I told my sister Linda I would spend the evening meditating. In the midst of life there are always people passing to that other realm. When Raymond drove up this morning to pick me up, there were two fire engines and an ambulance out front. They rolled out my neighbor on the 9th floor who looked quite ill, but he is an older man who has been in poor health for quite some time. He will go gentler into the night than younger ones who have hardly begun to live before they are gone.
I don't know if my sister LaRae who passed over 20 years ago will want to speak to me at this time.
LARAE: I do and I have brought Ray and Ravoe with me. 'Bo' (Ravoe) is a dear friend of Mother's and you have been closer to Ray and Park than to any others in the family.
RAY: Hello, Gerry, we are all here. Louise has come to join us. Thank God, Max got her dog Butler operated on, so she would not die of grief.
GERRY: Hello, Ray, how do you like it over there?
RAY: I am ready for reincarnation. Oh, I am only kidding.
GERRY: Ann has just had a visit from Linda who told her our cousin Dan was burned badly in his plane crash. I felt bad, as it always seems like that would be a hard way to go.
RAY: Stewart is okay. But our mother took his death so hard Park and I did not dare die for years. We were afraid it would kill her.
LARAE: Gerry, Dan is following his wife Linda as she goes through Utah and visits his family. He is hoping his sons and daughter will eventually contact Ann.
GERRY: Okay, I will tell her. Ann is the great communicator. She keeps track of all the relatives.
LARAE: Yes, she does. Ravoe and I have become good friends. She feels she missed out by never returning to Boulder to hang out as Ray and Park did. Park is with Louise.
GERRY: I want to talk to Park sometime when he is ready to talk.
LARAE: Some will read your memoirs. Some not. Ravoe is reading them. She says they would upset Roma. Roma is more conventional in her thinking. Ravoe says she likes how you valued her brothers.
GERRY: We who were the children of the alcoholic sons have more in common. We had to love our alcoholic fathers more than our mothers did. Or who else would?
LARAE: Ravoe says she is glad someone loved her father and brothers as she did not think people did. She also says she had a drinking problem at one time. I think Louise may have done, too. Those alcoholic genes! Of course Roma never did.
GERRY: Roma reminds me so much of Aunt Neta and Aunt Nethella.
RAVOE: They were her role models. She spent all those years in Garland. She really took to both of the aunts.
RAY: I loved Aunt Nethella. We could always go back to the ranch and stay with her. She was hospitable to us. She tried to take Grandma King's place.
RAVOE: Mom just had too many kids too fast. She was a nervous wreck. She said it was just too hard being a King.
GERRY: All the King brothers' wives divorced them.
RAVOE: It is no wonder. Dad would come home drunk and terrorize the family. He had a bad temper and was a fright when he drank. I was glad to have him gone.
GERRY: Grandpa King had a bad temper which may be why he vowed never to drink. He knew he would be too mean for sure.
RAVOE: Dad should have taken the vow not to drink, too. Grandma King was lucky. I always wondered why his boys did not follow Grandpa's example.
GERRY: I doubt if you are ready for my theories, but I do think there was a big problem there in Grandma and Grandpa living apart in the winter so the children could go to school in Escalante.
RAVOE: Mom said she hated living in Boulder and Salt Gulch was impossible.
GERRY: But bad things happened to the families that did not stay together.
RAVOE: She always hated it that Dad started running the Salt Gulch ranch, but ranching was all he knew.
GERRY: Mother did not like Salt Gulch either.
RAVOE: Louise said she liked Escalante. She had friends there.
RAY: I got my sexual education in Escalante before I ever left there at seven years old.
RAVOE. Mom was naive. She thought Escalante was a nice town, but the boys found the wildest boys in town to hang out wih.
GERRY: Your brothers were wild tough boys. They were cowboys. I will never forget Stewart on a horse. Tall and slender with that flaming red hair. Looked like he was born on a horse.
RAVOE: I hardly remember. I wish I could remember my brother like that. You see him as this romantic figure. I have heard about Death Holler trail. How Uncle Max was killed in a rodeo and my brothers always aspired to be just like him. I never saw Stewart again until just a few years ago. To think Louise will be reunited with him after so many years of not seeing him. My brother Ward, too, who was your age, who died of pneumonia. He was like a stranger to me when I saw him again but as I talk to him more I see family characteristics. My mother buried two of her sons. That nearly killed her. I think it did kill my dad, that and the disgrace he brought on the family and the upset he caused us with his drinking.
GERRY: Our dad was a very bad drinker, too. He could be mean.
RAVOE: I loved Aunt Irene. She was like a mother to me when I was living in Hawaii. She always laughed. We had so much fun with her. My husband just loved her, too. We thought you had cracked up like Uncle Reed. Ray told us Naw, Gerry is all right. She is not crazy or anything like that. He and Max were buddies until Max got mad at him over some awful thing he did when he was drunk.
RAY: Yeah, I repeated family history. I always drank too much. Max could be crazy when she got mad. I worry about her son Jim now he's got a bad heart. Jim was a good guy.
RAVOE: I intend to spend as much time as I can with Louise the next few months. LaRae has been very good to me. I learned to love LaRae because Aunt Irene talked about her a lot, how good she was to her. You and your mom did not seem to get along as well.
GERRY: No, I was her first born so she was determined to whip me into shape!
RAVOE: I see what you mean. Well, I wasn't her daughter so she could just accept me. We are still good friends.
LARAE: Now we have to go.
RAVOE: Thank you for thinking about us. It is going to be hard for me to read your memoir about my brother Stewart's death. It was a terrible time for our family.
GERRY: Bye now.




Practically the only two photos I have of any of Uncle Glen's family. The top one is Ray, two years older than I am, when he was in the navy. Park is a couple of years younger than Stewart. Stewart was born in 1919 and Park in 1921. He lived on the ranch, joined the navy and then the Merchant Marine and went around the world a number of times. He called himself 'an old salt' kind of like an old cowboy I imagined. Tonight all six of Uncle Glen's children are united with a seventh, Louise. Roma is 88, the last one still alive of Uncle Glen's family but some have left their descendants to carry on.

Son Raymond opening his play, "Bohemian Cowboy" in Los Angeles

Raymond sings songs he wrote for his singing sessions with his dad who lived with him a few months nearly every winter in the last ten years of his life. He writes his thoughts about his dad disappearing into the desert above Los Vegas on the turn off to the Valley of Fire. It has been over 3 years now and his dad has never been seen again, even though at the time, a big search even using dogs was made. Raymond will be talking about his mother, too, and his grandfather who was the great cowboy in his ancestory as was his great grandfather, too, who homesteaded his first ranch in Salt Gulch, a valley below Hell's Backbone. Raymond had dreams of being a working cowboy that did not pan out because performing was in his blood. So he became a bohemian cowboy instead!
The photo above is Hell's Backbone Bridge in the beautiful Utah country where Raymond goes every summer. He and his dad used to meet in Boulder for some real country singing sessions under the stars.
See my blog list for more information on the theater and the tickets.

12 year old girl composes and delivers a speech to her class on abortion

I could not help but be very impressed with this young girl's perceptions and I think you will be, too! A good friend sent me this link. Thank you!

I am going to get a little Christmassy here

I enjoyed so much writing an entry about my daughter Ronda's graduation, that I hate to move on. But here I am in my most Christmassy blouse with a very lit up Westward Ho just like it was decorated for Xmas. This is a photo taken years ago, but isn't it beautiful? I think it was still the hotel at that time I have tons to do before Christmas day, as I am inviting my immediate family to a Christmas Eve supper. We will exchange our gifts then, and then all meet out to my nephew Tano's who is Linda's oldest son at 1pm the Christmas day. He and his wife Debbie and his sister Carissa are doing the Italian dinner. We have so much fun out there. Debbie and Tano are wonderful hosts. Debbie has been ailing from two operations this year but I am glad she feels well enough to tackle a family get together. She didn't last year.
I just talked to my son Raymond in L.A. who says he will try to make it, and I got a hold of my son Gary a little while ago who said he was to the company Christmas party. He talked like he would attend both family events. His two daughters, Kelly and Laura, live in Flagstaff so if he goes there it will be later in the weekend. His adopted daughter Laura lives here. She is the daughter of my xDIL's twin sister who was killed in a gun incident to a party when her kids were 5 and 3. Later on when Gary was ready, Candy went and got them where they were living with a cousin and she and Gary adopted them. They were grateful because this had turned into a bad situation for them. Cindy, their mother, was a pretty fun loving girl. Think how hard it would be to be separated that soon from two small children due to a guy mishandling his Saturday night special at a party that went off and hit her in the aorta, killing her within minutes. People who were close to her did not get over this tragedy for years. Her little son Bobby never did who took his own life when he was barely 30 after his real father had taken his. But Laura is a strong girl and got through all this.
I just went to Connie's blog, Windswept Whispers, where she has posted some beautiful new holiday snags. She is just getting started with graphics comparatively speaking but says few are visiting her graphic blog, so she doesn't know if she should continue. I have taken to Connie because of her sense of humor. It speaks to me.
I am just horrified with what our most popular graphic artist and blogger, Donna, is going through (Hockey Mom) with her health. Sometimes you just have to cut back on what you are doing to attend to health needs. Jeannette who was our Lady of the Blogs on AOL with her Jeannette's Jottings has been given a warning by her doctor that she must cut back her time on the computer to rest and get her exercise, lose weight, etc. He was quite stern with her. The doctors don't seem to get stern with any of us in the states anymore. Maybe they have just given up. They don't turn a hair at any addiction. But I wonder if getting stern is really the answer, although it is good to warn people of what they are faced with if they don't try to change their life style. I have not had a doctor get stern with me in years. My nurse sister does at times, but that has never worked for me from her, as I feel that weight issues are very complex and need a lot of analyses to figure out each individual person's possible causes for their inability to lose. Look at Oprah. She is apologizing and 'embarrassed' for expanding back up to 200 lbs. That is as fat as I am because my bones are bigger, at 216 or thereabouts. I gained from 210, but I have long since quit beating up on myself. I think Oprah just goes to show you that throwing money at the problem sometimes does not solve it. I think there are other things missing in Oprah's life that keep her struggling with weight even if she is a billionaire.
I feel bad for Jeannette. She looks so festive in her pink blouse when I just visited, almost like a lovely ornament herself, but she has had breast cancer, so she worries!
Doc and I made a series of videos this morning about an hour long dealing with our addictions this morning. I discussed my double chins that appear at this weight. But Doc does not berate me, he just analyzes and makes jokes that cause me to laugh, so I like this 'Doc'. He does more for me than anybody with his approach. He is willing to analyze the causes for hours, on camera yet. He is very patient. As he drinks away and I eat away. He says he has still not got to the point he can deny himself anything. What a hedonist he is! I close with another Xmas card to you from him and me, thanks to Connie.