Phil is blooming

 Our son Phil had a good friend, Sonja, who was battling breast cancer as he fought glioblastoma. They spent a lot of time talking/texting and she would visit him in his home.  She planted an azaelea tree near her new home when he died, and called it "Phil."  This year Spring is early, and it's throwing out a lot of color. She writes:

“Phil” is coming along…I can’t help but think he may be holding out for Sunday to be in his full glory, which, of course, would bring another round of tears to my eyes, as that will be 4 years since he was called home.

 
Not a single day goes by that I don’t want to share something with him that I saw, heard or experienced, to hear his wisdom, and/or laughter, on whatever it was that I wanted to share…I really miss my dear friend a lot…sigh."

 

Pope Benedict has died December 31, 2022

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was named the 265th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church on April 19, 2005, at the age of 78, and chose the name of Benedict XVI. He was the first German pope in several centuries, the second consecutive non-Italian pope and the oldest pope elected since Clement XII in 1730, according to church records. He retired on February 11, 2013.

https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/the-lasting-legacy-of-pope-benedict-xvi/?

Pope Benedict XVI's Prayer For The Unborn | EWTN

BREAKING: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI dies at age 95 | Catholic News Agency

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/pope-benedict-xvi-has-died-at-the-age-of-95/ar-AA15PRXO?

Sonya Carson has died

From Dr. Ben and Candy Carson:

Today, November 6, 2017 we lost my dear mother, Sonya Carson. Although she came from an impoverished background with very little formal education, she somehow understood how success was achieved in our society. If anyone had a reason to make excuses, it was her, but she absolutely refused to be a victim and would not permit us to develop the victim mentality either. Whenever we made an excuse, she quoted the poem "Yourself to Blame." The poem is included in this post. May she rest in peace.

Yourself to Blame by Mayme White Miller

If things go bad for you
And make you a bit ashamed
Often you will find out that
You have yourself to blame

Swiftly we ran to mischief
And then the bad luck came
Why do we fault others?
We have ourselves to blame

Whatever happens to us,
Here is what we say
"Had it not been for so-and-so
Things wouldn't have gone that way."

And if you are short of friends,
I'll tell you what to do
Make an examination,
You'll find the faults in you...

You are the captain of your ship,
So agree with the same
If you travel downward
You have yourself to blame

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/05/03/ben-carson-to-postpone-first-rally-to-say-goodbye-to-his-ailing-mother/?utm_term=.1b11d1f1ba9c

 

 

We're here on the longest day of the year

This is June 22 sunrise

We got back from Scotland a week-ago, and since we had some obligations in Columbus yesterday,  rather than drive 2.5 hours up on Saturday then 2.5 hours back on Monday, we decided to wait.  Now it is the longest day of the year, so I started my walk about 5:35 a.m.  I walked east on Third (our street) all the way to Poplar Ave. the last north south street inside the gates, then walked north to the lakefront. The sky was a brilliant pink at 6:50 with the sun still hidden, so I paused and watched, maybe 7 minutes.  Then I noticed a piece of sculpture on a rock, so I walked through the grass to get a better look.  It was lovely--realistic, but with movement and grace. I looked at the memorial plaque . . . it was for Katherine Alice Bichsel. Many appropriate flowers and season long plantings surrounded the rock and sculpture.  It was a lovely, peaceful and spiritual moment. I prayed.

The sun popped up very quickly and then went behind a few clouds and I continued on my way, greeting the dog walkers who are always out that time of day.  I decided to look up Ms. Bichsel, assuming I would find a long and useful life with many great grandchildren remembering her fondly.  Years ago I blogged about some of the memorials, taking a notebook with me to jot down the names. It's not easy for me to remember names, numbers or events, so I continued saying her name for the next mile I walked until I got to our cottage, poured myself a cup of coffee, and opened the computer. Not what I had imagined. I did find two Katherine Bichsels who matched my idea, but that was not to be.  This young Lakesider was only 20.

"BICHSEL Katherine Alice "Katie" Bichsel, age 20, of Bexley, died suddenly and unexpectedly Friday, November 7, 2008 in Burlington, Vermont. Katie was born in Cincinnati, OH on July 8, 1988 the oldest daughter of Vivian (Duff) and David Garver Bichsel. Katie graduated summa cum laude from Bexley High School in 2006. She attended the University of Vermont, majoring in Environmental Sciences. Her passions were many and included snowboarding, hiking, WWII history, music, protecting the planet and above all "hanging out" with her many friends. Katie is survived by her parents, Dr. David and Vivian Bichsel; her sisters, Sarah Bichsel and Emily Bichsel; her grandparents, Flora Duff, and The Rev. Dr. Dale and Josephine Bichsel; and a large loving extended family." - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dispatch/obituary.aspx?pid=120045747#sthash.YSvWURAq.dpuf

Her parents are cottage owners here at Lakeside according to our directory, and I know from my own experience they will always miss their child and grieve for what might have been, but I appreciate their sharing her with us in such a beautiful way.

Monday Memories along the Lakefront

I'm gradually increasing my walk time here at Lakeside (bursitis pain), and I like to walk along the lakefront and read all the memorials. It slows me down, but then what's the hurry in Lakeside?  A veteran of WWII born in 1921 who died in 1994--I wonder what he saw; a young child who died at 5 years old--would have children of his own now; a happy 60th anniversary Mom and Dad from the 1980s; a simple dedication to the trees in the park donated by a long time Lakesider. a street lamp  in remembrance of Hazel and Wendell Lutes, Sr. who may have strolled in the moonlight, and of course, the wonderful gazebo, a memorial for the Steeles who died in an auto accident, and now is the site of much happiness and music in the park and many weddings.

 

And although it's not on the lakefront, we have the wonderful Rhein Center serving thousands in the summer, a  wonderful memorial to C. Kirk Rhein, Jr. who lost his life on TWA Flight 800 in 1996.

 

About 8 or 9 years ago I asked if there was a record, but was told "we're working on it."

 

Link to 2007 blog on memorials at Lakeside

 

Other thoughts on memorials, and what might happen to your donation

 

Memorial tree is dying, too

 

Dad's name on a memorial

 

 

U.S. Talibanners try to destroy Confederate history and memory

Wording on the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument at Gettysburg (dedicated 1965). "A memorial to soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy--South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, Virginia, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. Heroic defenders of their country. Their fame shall be an echo and a light unto eternity."

That is until the Democrats try to reinstate the bitterness of the post-war reconstruction era and kill their memories again.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/04/14/confederate-soldiers-are-american-veterans-by-act-of-congress/

Daughters of the Confederacy put this statue on Johnson’s Island prisoner of war cemetery.  Let’s hope the Talibanners don’t come after it.

Barry-cades

What they put around the WWII memorial in Washington, DC to frustrate the veterans who'd had their trip planned for weeks. Thank you Republican representatives who came to their rescue and removed them.  In a number of cases, the National Park Service only supervises parking lots, and local groups pay for and control the memorials. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/1/elderly-veterans-force-entry-wwii-memorial-defianc/

                     

$197 million was raised to build the WWII memorial in DC, a project suggested and promoted by Marcy Kaptur (D) of Ohio for 5 years before it was finally approved. The federal government chipped in $16 million, the rest came from from individuals, veterans groups like the American Legion and VFW, and corporations. I donated. I want it open.

Janice Crouse reports Democrats are hiring protestors to march at WWII and other DC memorials ... paying $15. Homeless and others earning some extra cash.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/shutdown-overreach-more-guards-at-wwii-memorial-than-benghazi-park-service-closes-park-it-doesnt-run/article/2536710

AIDS memorial--Why?

"A design that calls for a grove of trees reflected infinitely by 12-foot-long mirrors was selected today for New York’s first large-scale AIDS memorial."

The AIDS Memorial Park organization, Architectural Record, and Architizer have announced the winner of a competition to design a memorial for victims of AIDS and an education center in Manhattan’s West Village. Studio a+i of Brooklyn, N.Y. won the blind competition with a plan to surround an existing triangular park with mirrored walls and a grove of white birch trees. Architectural Digest, Jan. 30, 2012

Why do we memorialize this particular disease's victims, a disease which is mostly self-inflicted through promiscuous, indiscriminate sex and multiple partners? We don't memorialize death by smoking, drinking or over-eating, or driving too fast, or not exercising. Where is the memorial to those who have died from malaria because environmentalists pulled DDT from the market? Where is the memorial for 50 million dead American babies?

Men who have sex with men--MSM account for nearly half of the approximately 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States (49%, or an estimated 580,000 total persons).

MSM account for more than half of all new HIV infections in the United States each year (61%, or an estimated 29,300 infections).

While CDC estimates that only 4 percent of men in the United States are MSM, the rate of new HIV diagnoses among MSM in the United States is more than 44 times that of other men (range: 522 – 989 per 100,000 MSM vs. 12 per 100,000 other men). CDC Fact Sheet

The dying young maple tree

This morning on my walk along the lakefront at sunrise, I stopped at a memorial tree, about 15 ft tall, dedicated to a young man who had died at age 20, over 20 years ago. Those types of memorial plaques are sad to read and I always think of the parents and siblings, who may still note the special days. "This year he would be 41," or "I wonder if he'd be married and bringing his children to Lakeside."

Unfortunately, the tree was dying too. I think it is a combination of our dry weather this summer, and over mulching. It had the "volcano" mulch style instead of the donut hole, so what little natural watering we've had through rain couldn't get to the roots. This tree still needed gallons and gallons of water each day to survive. It was born and bred in a nursery, not particularly hardy like the "volunteers" I see growing up through the boulders that were brought in to protect the shoreline.

Last Friday classmates from my high school graduation class gathered on the campus (the college closed in 1932, but it is still called the campus) to dedicate a tree to memorialize our deceased class members and friends. Over the years, many of the trees have died, and last summer a terrible wind storm took down many. A few words were spoken about each person and an original poem written for the occasion was read. What a nice idea. I hope to have some photos soon to put on the class blog.

Arlington Cemetery grave offenses

When I heard a story on the news about problems at Arlington Cemetery, I said to my husband, tongue in cheek, "It's probably Bush's fault." And that was the slant. Reporter said that computerization the last 8 years hadn't happened. Apparently paper records sufficed for years, but computer mix-ups (remember Obama wants this for all our health records) are Bush's fault. So I tried to google the story, first finding nothing, and it finally appeared as an "investigative report" on Salon.com, where CBS must have found it. Hmmm. That story, which draws its report from some disgruntled former employees, and the cemetery's long standing rule of cleaning out memorials like photos, flowers, notes (many cemeteries do this) reports:

At the center of the chaos is [Thurman] Higginbotham, [Gina]Gray's former superior and a focus of the Army investigation [Gray was fired and is one source for the story]. While cemetery Superintendent John Metzler is the titular head at Arlington, Higginbotham runs the show, say current and former employees. A tall and imposing man, Higginbotham has worked at the cemetery since 1965. He started as a security guard and worked his way up to deputy supervisor in 1990. In his current position, he has earned a reputation for running the cemetery with an iron fist. (Higginbotham declined to talk to Salon.)

One of Higginbotham's failures, say employees, has been his inability to rectify disturbing discrepancies between burial records and information on headstones. For years, Arlington has struggled to replace paper-and-pen burial records with a satellite-aided system of tracking grave locations. "My goal is to have all the gravesites available online to the public, so people can look up a grave from home and print out a map that will show exactly where the gravesite is," Higginbotham told Government Computer News in April 2006. Such systems are standard at other cemeteries, like the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, nearly identical to Arlington in age and size. Yet an effort begun in 2000 to set up a similar system at Arlington remains unrealized."

Ah, there is it. The magic date. OK, Bush didn't take over until 2001, but basically, it must be his fault. Every failing of Congress, all the WMD misinformation that the Democrats promoted in the 90s, it's all Bush's fault. And Higginbotham's position since 1990? Oh well. Have you ever tried to fire a government employee? You can hardly vote out an elected one.

Do good now, not from the grave

WSJ today reported financially strapped colleges are auctioning the goose that use to lay their golden eggs--their donors' gifts and good will. Link. This is not a new travesty. It's an old sin. One of my first jobs when I returned to work in the late 70s was purchasing for a for a small "subject collection" within a library, which had already lost its physical space and had been folded into another library as a line item in the budget. They did hang the portrait of the donor in that larger library near the classification number of his interest, but I have no idea where it is now (30 years later). Not that it will matter--I think that library is also going to be closed and his heirs probably are deceased.

In general, family fortunes accrue from entrepreneurship or investment of resources in someone else's idea--capitalism, as it were. Some of these guys weren't very nice, either, and after their children, step-children and grandchildren weren't able to run through it all, it is donated for a tax break to a church, college, research organization or museum. Then the liberals take over, and often they are not ethical about meeting the fine print, or the intended mission. Let's say it's an endowed chair from a railroad magnate and the money is shaved a bit to support research in wind energy because the land on which the tracks were laid in the 19th century, is open again. Or there is a fund to support a Christian program, but there's no one around who is familiar with that religion, so it goes into the general pot of "spirituality" so a Methodist pastor who saved every penny is funding the Bahai faith. Or the Cuyp paintings are auctioned to save the Van Dyck because the roof is leaking which might damage them all, so the less popular are sold to save the others. I think their reasoning is, "Well, this was ill-gotten gain anyway, now I'll do some good as pay back."

It wouldn't hurt some of these progressives to only have control of the money for 5 years to use it as it was intended so you can keep an eye on it. No one will do what you wish 50 years from now.

4329

Scrap the Flight 93 Memorial

WorldNet Daily reports: "Two years ago U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo asked the Park Service to revamp a proposed memorial to the heroics of Flight 93 passengers and crew, who died trying to retake their airliner from terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, because of its use of a crescent, an Islamic symbol.

But the crescent remains, and now he's telling officials to scrap the plan and start all over." I can't find the letter on Tancredo's web site, but it is repeated at a number of sources.

The intention of the design doesn't matter. It's the result. It's the message. If it upsets the victims' families, someone needs to take another look.


Joanne Hanley, memorial superintendent, has said all along that people are seeing things that aren't really there. The "thing" I'm seeing is a crescent. I'll bet if it were a cross, someone on her staff would notice.

Veterans' Day

Today is the 89th anniversary of the end of World War I--the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I've told this before, but on that first armistice day the signal in the rural areas of Illinois was the bells ringing. My parents were both little children living on farms in adjacent counties (Lee and Ogle) in Illinois. Both had exactly the same memory--as each farmer heard the bell, he'd start ringing his bell, then the next farm would pick it up, and thus the whole countryside learned the war was officially over. Now it is a memorial for veterans of all wars (Memorial Day in May is for those who died in or as a result of battle).


Google, which often dresses up for other occasions, finally acknowledged it--the helmets are definitely WWI vintage.


When I was in Illinois over the 4th, we found our father's name at the new veterans' memorial in Forreston. We talked about all the surnames we recognized, even from the Civil War era (we're really not that old, but knew the family names).

The U.S. Army in WWI, 1917-1918
Army Art of WWI

My other blogs about this day
Veterans' Day 2006
Uncle Clare
Happy Birthday Marines
Armistice Day, 1918
List of US military conflicts

4050

Memorials at Lakeside

Some light the way with period sensitive street lamps, this one in remembrance of Hazel and Wendell Lutes, Sr. who may have strolled along the lakefront holding hands.

This one preserves flowers found only on our peninsula, the Lakeside Daisy, in memory of Daisy Foster.

The 19th century bell from the old bell tower on the lakefront was taken out of storage and restored in memory of Robert and Olive Pekar a few years back.

We're all enjoying the fine landscaping at the Hoover Auditorium in memory of Marian and Hurst Anderson.


The Steele Memorial allows us wonderful times for evening vespers, Sunday afternoon band concerts and weddings. It was built in 1979 for the memory of Fritz and Karilyn Steele, who died in an auto accident, by his parents with additional upgrading provided by Mary Corbett in 1995.


The Fountain Inn was expanded and beautified by donations by the Warner and Wolf families.

Almost every park bench and tree has a memorial plaque, this one for the Martins.


We can hardly remember what we did for fun before 2000 and the opening of the Rhein Center where families draw, paint rocks, create pottery, make kites, write poetry and knit and crochet and hundreds of other crafts. This building was closed for many years, but was transformed as a wonderful memorial to C. Kirk Rhein, Jr. who lost his life on TWA Flight 800 in 1996.

When I walk by a plaque, I stop and read it--and say thank you.