Yes, it’s true. The real me, the Glenda I know and love has been away for quite some time now. I haven’t recognized the old lady living in my house, inhabiting my body in a sad and lonely way.

Even in my 76th year I never felt old until my parts started to wear out.

A faithful exercise walker since I got my first Fitbit and started recording steps in 2014, I was hale and hearty. Only counting the steps during my exercise walks (and sometimes forgetting to wear my current Fitbit) I was proud of my accumulated 4,500 miles. Even though my body has osteoarthritis, by cutting sugar out of my diet, the pain in my fingers vanished. I could even run a bit.

Then it hit. July 5th (how could I forget that date) of 2020 I began having pains in my right hip and rather limped home. This was at the end of my 3 miles. I cut out the walking and made an appointment with my doctor who informed me that the osteoarthritis in my hip would probably require hip replacement surgery and he referred me to an orthopaedist, who referred me to a surgeon.

Now, I’ve managed to go my entire life without having my skin cut into, and I was terrified of the prospect. Who wouldn’t be?

Here I sit today, almost a year since that fateful limping home, trying to decide how much of the comedy of errors/terrors to recount here, and I’ve decided that nobody needs to know the embarrassing details. Suffice it to say: If a doctor wants to send you or your loved ones to a Skilled Nursing Facility or Care Home (Rest Home) unless that person has Dementia, DON’T DO IT! They are hellholes of neglect, even the best of them so do everything possible to give that person in need Home Care.

For a time I was unable to walk. I now have a commode to fit over the regular one, a walker, a wheelchair, and a hospital bed. Currently, I’m in rehab from muscle mass loss, and I’m doing well. This morning I was able to exercise walk 1 mile without pain.

No, I’ve not had anything replaced. Still, no skin on my body has been sliced open and GLENDA HERSELF IS BACK! My new doctor tells me that many people live with hip osteoarthritis without ever needing a hip replacement. This is what I want, and I will work my damndest to make that happen. I want my life back.

Welcome, back, me.

Literary calaveras

Poetry written for the Day of the Dead are known as literary calaveras, and are intended to humorously criticize the living while reminding them of their mortality. Literary calaveras appeared during the second half of the 19th century, when drawings critical of important politicians began to be published in the press. Living personalities were depicted as skeletons exhibiting recognizable traits, making them easily identifiable. Additionally, drawings of dead personalities often contained text elements providing details of the deaths of various individuals.

Once I discovered these existed, I couldn’t stop myself from lodging my tongue in my cheek and writing. Enjoy.

Yes! At last, I’ve made it out of my personal doldrums back into the light.

What a terrible place I found myself and now that I’m up and out of that place, I can see how I got there.

Of course, it all started with the on-going political quagmire we’ve been living through for the past four years. That was followed by the world-wide pandemic which re-wrote our social interactions, maybe forever. The next blow for me came on July 5th when I somehow damaged my hip during my pre-dawn walk. I rely on that walk for many reasons. Using the big weight-bearing bones since I started walking 3 miles every morning, no matter what has added 7.6% to my bone density. That’s a big plus at my age when most women are only losing bone mass.

Walking-no-matter-what does wonders for my mental health. Even if control is only an illusion, it makes me feel better to know I did something positive for myself.

As a side note: I also earn $$ from my Medicare Advantage Plan for the “steps” I take on a daily basis. Those dollars add up to free stuff from Amazon. Yay me!

Lest I digress too far off-topic, suffice it to say that my daily walking is important to my sense of well-being, and being unable to walk without pain only added to my growing sense of despair.

I think the final blow, that struck me hardest and sent me spiraling down happened the evening of August 21st. My dear husband never complains about his health, but on this evening I could tell he was having out of control pain. I drove him to the nearest hospital Emergency Room. He has a heart condition and first was stabilized. Then, however, the doctor said he was having an attack of appendicitis and would require surgery.

Because of Covid-19, I was unable to be with him after I left him in the ER. Eleven hours later he made it into surgery. By that time his appendix had burst and everything became even more complicated, but I didn’t know that because NOBODY from the hospital called to update me. From the time I left the ER that Thursday evening until I picked him up OUTSIDE the hospital the following Sunday afternoon, no doctor called to tell me whether my husband lived or died. My own calls to the switchboard resulted in multiple incidences of ringing phones which were never answered. I was a screaming, raging nervous wreck with nobody to talk to and nobody to turn to.

There have been few times during my long life during which I felt so powerless.

I won’t go into the details of my encounters with doctors about my ensuing depression. Western Medicine only has two trains of thought: Operate or Medicate. I rejected both and my chiropractor and I proceeded to work out a solution that involved neither medicating nor operating.

Last week I dropped my ballot into the box and immediately felt more positive. This morning was the second morning in a row I walked more than two miles in the pre-dawn desert without pain and enjoyed the dome of star-spangled blackness. Again, I could breathe deeper, cooler, cleaner air.

If we look in the right places, we find our personal answers.

I realize I promised a story about my road trip, but it was long ago and is no longer relevant. Honestly, the times we live in now make it increasingly difficult to want to function. Writing can offer escape, but it isn’t enough.

We all make choices every day. That is a given, and as adults, we make the best decisions possible with the information we have. The time we’re living through now is not normal. There’s nothing normal about it. Our Civil Rights are being endangered on a daily basis by our political system. No names. The system is broken for more than half the people living in the United States. The rest are racists, bigots, and ignorant.

What the Pandemic looks like for me is living in almost complete isolation. There’s me, my husband and the dog, living in our little house. We are a fortified island. Nobody enters unless necessary and then wearing a mask.

It’s bad to be old, feeling you have no future. Staring into year after year after year of uselessness. No wonder I choose to watch streaming media most of my day. Wouldn’t you?

One of my writing buddies is in the middle of a road trip, and I’m jealous. I love a road trip. Just me and the endless road stretching ahead. Cooler filled with drinks. Snacks. Why is it that eating junk food in the car is so much fun? Maybe that’s why I enjoy the ride. I’ve made the drive between California and Texas more times than I can count, and now that I live in Las Vegas, I still do the drive occasionally.

Her trip brought to mind one I made in 2005. It changed my perception of men from Texas. Be patient. The story is coming.

Today I received an email from a new resource I recently subscribed to called Authors Publish Magazine. The purpose I intend is to get lists of publishers currently accepting submissions, both online and print.

As it is in the Internet Age, my initial clicking led to more clicking and far afield from what Authors Publish Magazine intended. I always follow where I’m taken. Sometimes I like the trip, sometimes I don’t, but I always learn something new and that’s my lifetime goal; Learn Something New Every Day.*************

This morning’s offering was all about Flash Fiction, from A to Zed. The course offered was way too expensive for an unknown resource, but eventually, I made my way back to Medium, where I found a new writer mentor. His name is August Birch and he seems to know everything. Don’t be fooled, I tell myself. Nobody knows everything, but every bit I can take in that might help me be a better writer is helpful.

Recently I’ve been beating myself up because I don’t write every day. I suppose we all do that. Anyway, he wrote a helpful article recounting how he made writing a habit. I found it helpful and it may help you as well.
https://medium.com/@augustbirch/how-i-finally-developed-the-write-every-day-habit-and-how-you-can-too-21c30bb7d19d

************As far as I know, I adopted this goal before I ever heard of Roy Peter Clark and Murder Your Darlings. He links his goal only to “writing” while I assign mine to apply to all of my life.

I just completed a Creative Writing course this Spring of 2020 at the College of Southern Nevada.

Now, I only know the intimate details of my own trials and tribulations, not those of others. However, I noted that many of us seem to want to write about what happened with our families growing up in order to come to grips with the lies and mistreatment we feel we suffered. This leads me to my philosophical question of the day:

Are we writers because our families forced us to escape them by using our imaginations? Are all writers “damaged” in some way or (in my case) in many ways?

I’ve often thought that without the need to marry in order to get out of the house as soon as I could, I might never have had the opportunity to live in Europe. I might never have learned to speak French and German or have been exposed to haute cuisine. I might never have sung in the opera houses of Europe, or felt the need to go to Culinary Arts school. If I had never been to The Louvre in Paris or the Pergamon in East Berlin, would I have fallen in love with sculpture?

Who would Glenda be today if she hadn’t been brought up in a strictly religious household, not allowed to date and been beaten regularly? If she hadn’t needed to escape, would she have led as mundane a life as some of her classmates? Hmmm. I wonder.

Oh. And yesterday I got another rather impersonal rejection notice for a short, short story I considered one of my best pieces of work. Now you understand why I keep taking classes.

Assignment 4

Choose a color to write about. Use the thesaurus function on your software or a printed thesaurus at least ten times during this exercise. Work to focus your writing and write tight. Make the assignment no more than 250 words.

Some say that I am the reflection of all colors. Neither good nor evil, I can be freshly starched KKK robes or the Universal sign of purity. Blinding when the sun flashes on new snow, I can also be soft as the wise old crone’s crowning glory.
I can be boring as a plain wall and sticky as sushi rice or wild as elephant’s tusks, artistic as scrimshaw; whimsical as vapor trails in an azure sky or the fog snagged like angel hair in the tops of giant Christmas trees racing over the Marin headlands toward the heat.
I am white.

I’ve been using amazon.com to buy and sell since the mid 1990s. This is a most amazing business model and since its beginning, it has continued to change and grow. Now the infrastructure is so powerful that it can offer us absolutely free self publishing.

Over the past few months I have taken advantage of all the tools Amazon makes available, and have been able to create:

• Paperback version of my book available for purchase on Create Space and on Amazon and all other chosen distribution channels
• Kindle version of my book available for purchase on Amazon and in all other chosen distribution channels
• An Author Page on Amazon.com
• Look Inside The Book Feature on Amazon.com

I published my book at no cost to myself – my sole investment was my own sweat equity.

After I finished the process and saw my book on the page, I ordered it. Within 3 days my hard copy arrived at my door.

True, it is a complex process, but it allows you and me, Joe and Josephine Nobody, to publish anything we wish for free. All we have to do is take the time to do it.

Here is a link to my short book which shows you the process:

How to Self Publish Your Book for FREE: Riding the Wave that is AMAZON.

Do it!