George's Worst Fears May Have Come True

I subscribe to Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.  Today's issue had an article about George Washington's farewell address, which follows.  Wish the Nation's newspapers would carry this now and every day until election day, then every election year thereafter.  We need to be reminded of the intent of our founders.  (Of course, I should read the entire address before making such a proclamation, but I am taken with what I've read here.)

http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20160919/

On this day in 1796, President George Washington's farewell address was printed in the Daily American Advertiser as an open letter to American citizens. The most famous of all his "speeches," it was never actually spoken; a week after its publication in this Philadelphia newspaper, it was reprinted in papers all over the country.

The address was a collaborative effort that took Washington months to finalize, incorporating the notes that James Madison had prepared four years prior when Washington intended to retire after his first term, as well as numerous edits from Alexander Hamilton and a critique from John Jay. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were accustomed to writing collectively; together they had published the Federalist Papers, 85 newspaper articles published throughout the 13 states to introduce and explain their proposal for a Constitution.

Now only eight years old, the Constitution was in danger, Washington feared, of falling prey to the whims of popular sentiment. In 6,086 words, his address seeks to encourage the nation to respect and maintain the Constitution, warning that a party system — not yet the governmental standard operating procedure — would reduce the nation to infighting. He urged Americans to relinquish their personal or geographical interests for the good of the national interest, warning that "designing men" would try to distract them from their larger common views by highlighting their smaller, local differences. "You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection," he wrote.

Washington also feared interference by foreign governments, and as such extolled the benefits of a stable public credit to be used sparingly, recommending avoiding debt by "cultivating peace" and "by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned." Although he conceded that "the execution of these maxims" — or, in layman's terms, balancing the budget — was the responsibility of the government, Washington wagged a finger at individual citizens too, reminding them that "it is essential that you should practically bear in mind that towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant ..."

http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20160919/

 

Let's Make This the Year of the Write-In Election

I have always voted my conscience, whether the candidate of my choice was on the ballots or not.  Since 1968, the first time I was eligible to vote, I've voted the party ticket only five times: twice for Obama, once for Clinton (the first time he ran, then I wised up), for Carter and for Humphrey (would have voted for Bobby had he lived).

My other votes went to people I knew wouldn't make it or wouldn't even be considered or want to run - one who was dead: Andrew Young, Barbara Jordan, Betty Friedan (ERA), Ann Richards, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carl Sagan.

With the choices before us this year, I've decided to vote for candidates who best expressed my hopes for our country, for the future I'd want for my grandson and all those who come after I'm gone.  I want leaders who will guide us back to the dream that our nation was founded on (only better): liberty, equality, justice and  fraternity - that state or feeling of friendship and mutual support.  Honesty, integrity, diversity.  Peace and economic stability, adequate healthcare, education for all who seek it, no hunger or homelessness.  Consensus-building, harmony and community.  This might be the last election I get to participate in, so I want my vote to count, to mean something more than party affiliation or flipping a coin.  I want it to reflect my values, my hopes, my love for this world and what I think America could be.

I recently read a post by Frank Conway in which he declares he doesn't want any of the candidates; he wants George Washington.  That's why I thought, why not write in our candidates based upon our values and hopes.  Of course, it could be argued that that's what the current candidates already represent...but not for me, and, it seems, not for a lot of other voters out there.  

So, here are my candidates, with links to why I'd vote for them.  Otherwise, I'm not voting this year.  I will be in mourning for what we are becoming, or have become.

 President of the United States: 

Barbara Jordan

(Skip to time mark 2:46 for the beginning of her address.)

Vice-President of the United States:

Shirley Chisholm

Wikipedia has articles on both women, for those of you who don't know or remember them.

I'm sorry, thought the PBS link led to the video.  It doesn't.  I'll try to find it and repost.

POST-OP POST

(WARNING: Graphic surgical wound images ahead.)

Night before surgery

Last Monday's surgery went better than I worried it might, even though the cancer was more extensive than my doctor thought it was initially.  She kept asking me when I first noticed the cancer, which I thought meant the red spot on the end of my nose.  That was last summer.  Then I told her about the change in my nose contour, very slight, that I noticed the year before.  On the roundest part of my nose tip, the skin seemed to go flat - ever so slightly - and didn't reflect light like the rest of my nose did.

"Ah, yes.  Of course," she said.  "That is likeliest when it began."  Dr. B is from Russia, by way of West Germany, then to Pennsylvania, where she has lived and practiced medicine for the last 30 years.  She speaks English beautifully (better than I do) with the most charming accent.  (I thought she was from Ukraine.)

She had to cut slices from my nose three times before pathology gave her the all clear to proceed with the graft.  I will post some photos my daughter and I took.  I wasn't allowed to have Karie in the room with me, so some of these were after I had been bandaged between slices, and the next day.

The final cut before graft.

Daughter, whose sense of humor about such things is as twisted as mine, said the wound above reminded her of a slice of Italian sausage on pizza.  My face was swollen from the several injections of anesthetic, and from being tugged this-way-and-that by tissue forceps.  Took almost four days for it to return to normal.  My upper lip looked as if it had been cosmetically enhanced.

 My behind-the-ear lift, graft skin source.  Used 4-0 braided something - nylon?  Feels like a toothbrush back there.  

When Dr. B pulled one suture through, it sounded like a guitar string.  Did you know that most of the ear parts are located behind your ears, inside your skull?  Had a hearing test at Lebanon VA hospital last Saturday and the audiologist tested back there.  (I have perfect hearing, turns out.  Went there because of tinnitus - sounds like my head is full of crickets, tree-frogs and cicadas, all singing at once and at full volume.  Turns out the culprit is amlodipine - Norvasc.)

Headed home, with first nose cone.  Puffy-faced, hard to smile because mid-face was still numb

.

Call me Cyrano.  

Tuesday, we went out for coffee, mostly so I could get used to being out in public with my nose cone.  Karie suggested I put orange and white strips of duct tape on the dressing like a safety cone.  I get no respect.

After second bandage.  Swelling down quite a bit.  

Still not allowed to take photos at doc's office.  I said to heck with that and took it off last night to see what was underneath.  That yellow thing on top of the graft is called a bolster.  It is stitched down onto my nose, through the graft, to help hold everything in place.  It's loaded with some sort of petroleum-jelly-like stuff, which melted and soaked through the first dressing, loosening the tape holding the dressing in place.  I figured I could replace it myself.  Well, of course I can!

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

 Okay, maybe not.  I didn't have the proper materials on hand.  The paper tape doesn't stick to my skin and I kept adding more on top of the other, which also didn't stick.  I called Karie.  She said my nose looked like those baby vultures in some Disney movie she watched.  Or maybe a baby eagle's beak.

I get no respect.  Did I say that already?  Well, let me say it again...NO RESPECT!

New bandage, with Karie's help.

It helps to have an extra pair of hands to replace the bandages.  Grandson said it looks like strips of Silly Putty...just like his mother.  I give up.  

This will do until I can have my nurse redress the wound on Tuesday.  I just hope I didn't introduce any bacteria which will cause the graft to rot off.  I was very careful.

I had a great team who took the best of care.  I especially liked my nurse, who did a good bit of the work and answered my questions.  Her name is Katie.  She's about half my age and a no-nonsense professional, very patient-oriented in her care.  All in all, everything went well.  

But then I knew it probably would because I went in wearing a cloak of kind thoughts and good wishes, plus I had on my magical, lucky socks!

(PS: Please wear sunscreen with as high a SPF-value you can find, and limit your exposure to only a few minutes at a time during early morning or late afternoon hours.  Have your doctor check your skin at least once a year and learn what to look for when you check yourself.  My cancer likely started 50 years ago when I fell asleep on the beach in Gulfport, Mississippi.  I was face down for almost two hours during the worst time of day.  Had sheets of blisters on everything that wasn't covered by bathing suit.  Had sun-poisoning (radiation?), had to stay in bed for almost a week, was sick as a dog.

But it doesn't take something like that to cause skin cancers, so please be careful.)

If I Only Had...

http://www.darkrealmfox.com/film_reviews/wp-content/images/wizard_oz_pics/wizard_oz_11.jpg

Tomorrow I will have the tip of my nose (or a large portion thereof) cut off.  Not to spite my face (yes, I've heard that so many times in the last month!) but because of skin cancer; basal cell carcinoma, thank goodness.

This thing started last summer as a crusty spot on the end of my nose, very tiny, like an errant dandruff flake that fell from my head.  I brushed it off and thought no more about it.  Until the next one, which was more difficult to brush away.  When it grew slightly larger and turned bright pink, I thought it was perhaps a mosquito bite.  When I finally realized this just might be cancer, the pink bump had become a slight depression surrounded by a raised rim.  This was in September.  

My PCP (primary care provider) at the VA clinic confirmed my suspicion and began the process of getting a referral to a civilian dermatologist.  This was in late September.  The earliest appointment I could find in two counties was for February.  A biopsy ruled out squamous cell carcinoma (thank you, Universe!) and surgery was scheduled for a month later.

I was doing well, emotionally, with this idea of having my nose lopped off and the Mohs procedure which will cause my face to be sliced in a wonky zig-zag fashion to cut a circle of skin to cover the hole at the end of my nose, then stitch all that back together again...like Humpty Dumpty, maybe.

But as the hour draws nearer, I feel more like the Cowardly Lion than Pollyanna.  Oh, I'll be okay when morning comes, and I'm a big girl now and won't cry and all that, but somewhere inside me there is a little girl who feared getting injections so much that she screamed all the way to the doctor's office - even when she was just going in for a check-up.  (Mama, I am so very sorry about that.)

I do wish I had a wizard who would give me a medal for courage to make it all better, though.

(Hope this isn't too gross-looking for the Internet.)

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Dreams

We've all had them, those weird, unsettling dreams that wake you from deep sleep, putting you in a state of confusion and dismay.  Those dreams that when you first waken you think your real world is the dream and nothing seems right, that you need to go back to sleep - quick! - so your life will be okay again?  I call them whiskey-tango-foxtrot dreams.

I woke at 0315 today from such a dream about attending a veterans' reunion supposedly in the desert somewhere in the Middle East.  I was a corpsman assigned to a prison camp for American and European civilian "traitors", a good many of whom were Quakers doing field service work with refugees in the area.  Mixed in with the Quakers were, though, an equal number of people who had switched teams, so to speak; they'd joined the enemy.  (I'm tapdancing around what to call these political prisoners because it is difficult to see them as enemies.)

The reunion was for those of us who had served, gone home and presumably reclaimed our civilian, pre-war lives.  We were meeting in a huge mess tent that looked like a seafood restaurant I once went to somewhere along the South Carolina coast.  Above the entrance was a sign like the one above.  The civilians I was with, including my long deceased mother, couldn't understand the sign.  I told Mom it said "Welcome home."

"Why is it backwards?" my mother asked.

"So you can read it in the rearview mirrors as you are leaving camp,"  I said, "except the ones when we left to go home read Farewell."

"That makes no sense," she said.  "No sense at all.  Why would anyone look back when leaving such hell?"

Maybe to make sure it wasn't gaining on us, my brother, Mac (Viet Nam vet), told her.

None of this makes any sense.

When I was awake enough to understand that my stumbling around in the dark of my house to find the latrine was not real, old feelings of sadness and grief and anger swept in and took my down.  Will this stuff never end, I whimpered to myself, then felt really chicken---t for feeling sorry for myself.  I mean, for crying out loud, I wasn't there!  I didn't go through any of the stuff in the dream, ever.  What is wrong with me?!

Maybe I'm going november-uniform-tango-sierra.

Weathering the Storm

(Yes, those are my eyes, the only thing you could see were I to walk outdoors right now.)

Greetings, Bloglandia, from Outer Slobovia, Pennsylvania, formerly known as Hanover!  We're being visited by Winter Storm Jonas who is bringing snow by the ship-load...so far 26 inches of the white stuff, though it is piled higher in some spots because of the near-20-mph winds.  With forecasts of up to 3-inches more per hour until around midnight (another twelve hours as I type this), it's easy to see why the town is shut down except for emergency and protective services.

I've spent the morning chinking drafts around windows and doors.  Had no idea just how drafty the house normally is, nor how easily the drafts can be reduced by a bit of cloth over the sills and at the tops of windows and doors - amazing!

My attire would make a fashionista pale in shock or disgust, but do I care?  I have two pairs of socks on my feet, which are inside fake-fur lined slippers.  Beneath my slightly-too-large jeans, I am wearing long-johns and flannel pajama bottoms.  My torso is encased in a cotton-wool tank top, an oversized T-shirt (short sleeved), a heavy-weight long-sleeved T-shirt and a heavy-duty sweatshirt.  I can't move worth crap, but - by god! - I am warm and cozy.  If it gets colder by bedtime, I might add a sweater and a watch cap, maybe throw another blankie on the bed.

(Bison in Yellowstone National Park)

I receive photos from a national park site and the one above is today's picture.  Bison have very strong neck muscles and put their faces in the snow to plow a path through it.  According to the info accompanying the picture, they even take turns, which explains the turn-outs from the main path.  We could use a couple of them on my street today!

Had an e-mail from a local friend, Ann, who said she was snuggled in with books, chocolate bars and brownies, ending with, "What more could I ask for?"

Just so happens that when I made a last-minute-before-Jonas dash for some groceries last night, I bought the fixings for homemade hot chocolate mix, plus a few staple items such as milk, butter and eggs.  (Already have toilet paper, which is good because there wasn't much left on the shelves.  Do shoppers really think they're going to use that much of the stuff in a couple of days time?!  I digress.)

As soon as I post this, I'm going to make brownies and hot chocolate.  Then I'll get back to that book I started just after Christmas - "In the Heart of the Sea."  I might not surface for a couple of days, except to make more of my Jonas-survival goodies.

Stay safe and warm, y'all!

For Susan (Phantsythat) and Fresca (l'astronave)

Kareema, on our way to PA from California in 1973, in our VW camper.  She was almost three years old here.

Martha, at about the same age, Durham , NC