They spent much of their time enjoying themselves, hiking, entertaining, traveling, sometimes doing volunteer work.
Tag: dailyprompt
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Daily writing promptIf you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?
which has, twice in my lifetime, resulted in presidentical candidates who lost the popular vote being handed the presidency.
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It was built in the late 19th or early 20th century. It has a large back yard with space for a garden and a secure fence. There is a lot of green around it, but it is still within walking distance of shops and cafes and at least one library and one rep movie house. Internet access is good. The kitchen is big and up to date, with lots of counter & storage space. Two ovens would be nice.
In addition to the kitchen there is a living room, a bedroom, two studies, and two bathrooms. The climate allows for distinct seasons and snow once or twice a year, but the winters are not too harsh. It is close to relatives and friends, and in a highly literate area.
A pleasant, silent, honest, non-judgmental housekeeper comes in every other day to clean.
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Daily writing promptYou get some great, amazingly fantastic news. What’s the first thing you do?
Open the boutique bottle of whiskey we’ve been saving. Make Manhattans.
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Daily writing promptAre there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?
When I was a teenager, I took riding lessons once a week for about a year. This was not one of those upscale places where young ladies wear riding habits and learn to sit very straight on a thoroughbred. I wore my oldest jeans, a plaid shirt, boots, a floppy hat and in cold weather, an ancient overcoat, and it was about saddling the horse and staying on. The stables were owned by a family we knew, and I remember it as a frayed, friendly place. It smelled of horses, hay, and, on especially hot and sunny days, the cotton field nearby. I learned to ride on a black mare who only once ran away with me, and who always came back to nudge me gently with her long, blunt nose when I fell off. One of my favorite memories is from that time, a moment of resting in late dusk, sitting on a fence near the woods at the edge of a field, stroking the mare’s head and hearing church bells in the distance.
Horses are an expensive, elaborate hobby, requiring commitment and equipment. Life went on, and I went on. But I do remember with affection that strange bump in my life where I spent a year riding that horse.
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I also prefer dark to milk chocolate.
In my youth, I could eat anything I wanted to eat and remain slender. I made the most of it, keeping up a steady diet of chocolates, mints, jawbreakers, taffeys, toffees, brickles, Necco Wafers, Lifesavers, Butterfingers, fudge, cordials, etc. It wasn’t until fairly recently that rising cholesterol & blood pressure, not to mention vanity, made me change my diet. I can’t have sweets without guilt anymore, but I figure I am luckier than most.
I have lovely memories of using Milky Way bars as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up.
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I love babies. I love puppies. I love kittens. I love my cat when she tries to endear herself to me by rolling over and looking at me upside down. I will waste hours watching videos of rescued animals restored to health and children saying the darndest things.
The “cuteness” I dislike is the depiction of a human form in which all nuance, all complexity, everything that makes an individual an individual is erased, leaving only an impersonal, blank, prettiness. This has its place, in advertisements, children’s books, stuffed animals, comics, funny cartoons, etc. In that context it can make me smile or even laugh.
In an adult context, however, and online, it’s frequently used as a cover for sheer nastiness. It makes me shudder the same way I gag when I think of licking a spot of sugar residue off a sheet of paper.
Some of the dumbest, most violent and threatening posts I have received have been from people who depict themselves as adorable, big-eyed schoolgirls in academy uniforms.
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One of the most prescient science fiction stories I ever read was written in the second half of the 20th century, well before the internet as we know it existed. In it, a terrorist has given the date and the time when he plans to destroy society. The future-cop protagonist naturally assumes this means some sort of weapon, a massive bomb, perhaps exploded on a subway or the center of a city.
In fact, all the terrorist does is take down the internet – not of course, called the “internet” in the story, but still, the internet. In that futuristic, science fictional vision of the 21st century, you see, everyone carries their own phone and everyone is in constant contact with everybody else. On the time and date predicted, that contact is cut off.
Chaos ensues. Businesses, transportation, government, the judicial system, public services, entertainment, the media, can’t function.
But more important than all that, neither can human beings. For the first time in their lives, people cannot communicate instantly with anyone other than other human beings who are within a few feet or yards from them.The result is not pretty.
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A long walk in the afternoon, stopping at a wine bar or cafe at the end of the day for a glass of rose or a decaf cappuccino. An hour of reading there.
Then the walk home, stopping to talk to a friend or two.
Dinner is leftovers, something delicious I made the day before but don’t have to bother cooking now. For dessert, a single chocolate from a box, something with dark chocolate and cream filling. No coconut or nuts. Nothing nubbly.
A movie or some streaming whodunnit on the sofa with Michael. Then bed.
Simple. Perhaps boring. But you asked.
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Daily writing promptHow do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
I was born more than a decade after the Second World War ended, but it cast such a long shadow that I did not see it as history but as part of the present.
My parents had been children during the war. A great uncle had been interned by the Japanese. We knew veterans who were still vigorous, active, if not quite young. World War II movies seemed less “historical” to me than modern action films. Even books that discussed it as part of the past tended to include its very real and concrete context in the present.
When I was twelve, I read a memoir by a woman who had endured years in a concentration camp. She talked about how some survivors did not speak of their experience, but had tell-tale physical signs resulting from it. Did any of her readers, she asked, know someone who quite suddenly would become tired and have to stop, sit down, in the midst of physical activities like a long walk or a bicycle ride? Did we know someone in their twenties who was unusually short and slender, whose head seemed slightly large in proportion to their body?
I read this in a school library in Northern Louisiana and I imagined someone in that moment, the present –1970 — a fragile, pale young woman, stopping her bicycle on some shady country road in France or Germany. She got off, still holding the handle bars. She did not actually sit down, but she bent, her eyes closed, struggling to catch her breath before going on. Modern light through modern leaves dappled her, the dusty road. She was not history. She was now, someone I might meet and come to know.
Years have passed, and I have watched that era grow smaller, its shadows receding. I’ve seen it fall more and more out of living memory and into “history,” many of its lessons forgotten. The young woman I imagined is now very, very old, if not dead.
And it’s not just that enormous watershed of a war in the midst of the last century. One of my earliest memories is watching President Kennedy’s gray washed funeral on TV, the riderless horse, his little son saluting. I was only six, but my parents made me watch it. “This is history,” they said.
In the late ’90s, that came home to me when I shocked a younger co-worker by mentioning I had gone to high school with someone who, in 1963, had actually been there, in Dallas, watching the motorcade with her parents. “That’s like knowing someone who was in Ford’s theater!” another co-worker laughed.
When I was a child, my grandfather once told me about visiting his grandparents in Chattanooga. “The first thing I would do whenever I got to their house,” he said, “was run upstairs to my grandparents’ bedroom, and look in their closet.”
The Confederate uniform his grandfather had worn when he was a fifteen-year-old runaway still hung alongside all the other clothes. “It would hit the eye right off because of its color,” my grandfather said.
He didn’t say whether he’d actually touch it or not, but I do imagine a little boy reaching up and perhaps stroking one of its sleeves, awed by history made solid, relevant.
It seemed a very strange story to me when I was little. Only later did it occur to me that, by the year I was born, a century had not yet passed since the Civil War. In 1958 I even had a very elderly living relative who, when she was a toddler, had confronted Yankee soldiers rifling the family silver and amused them by shouting at them to stop.
As the Civil War was to me, so the Second World War is to younger people. Just as distant, just as strange.
It will happen to you.
Pam Troy 