mermaidcamp

mermaidcamp

Keeping current in wellness, in and out of the water

You can scroll the shelf using ← and → keys

Recipe for Nostalgia

August 29, 2013 — 8 Comments

Take one elementary school class, add 49 years.  Shake; don’t stir.  Meet in the building where you attended elementary school and Jr. high, and sip slowly.

I study history, but my own personal past has not been investigated.  I only have so much time to find all the facts about my ancestors, so biographical content has never crossed my mind.  This week I am digging into it.  I am on a quest to remember/discover my childhood, which was pretty idyllic.  I grew up walking a block and a half to my school, playing in giant gangs of kids in my neighborhood.  We went to swimming pools at country clubs in the summer, but we had a neighborhood of full time sports (wiffle ball) , games, dramatic productions, and parties..not unlike Spanky and Our Gang,  I looked at the hill in my old side yard where we went sledding.  It is much smaller that I could have imagined.. the entire yard has shrunk.  It doesn’t look like it would hold big games of red rover, but I know that it did.  I also had an archery target and a basketball backboard in the back yard.  The prop we used most often was the player piano.

Both my next door neighbors and our family had player pianos in the basement.  Our basement playroom was huge with the piano and a big bar.  My parents partied heavily down there.  Most of the time it was used for my piano practice or my play room.  My mom supplied a giant box of dress up clothing of all kinds behind the bar in the laundry room.  The kids would put on shows for each other, and sometimes for the parents, by dressing in the costumes and singing.  The parents sat down at a lower level in the yard, and we would enter from stage right, behind the house.  We had sort of an Ed Sullivan variety approach, with someone announcing the acts.  One of our favorites (and very popular with the adults) was “Heart of My Heart”.  We had a pantomime that was very corny.  We did it all the time, so I can still do it after more than 50 years.  I called my childhood neighbor, Peggy Jo, and sang it to her on the phone.  It made me cry because the song sums up the whole deal.  “Friends were dearer then”

Felix Hughes, Northern Ireland to Mississippi

August 28, 2013 — 8 Comments

Jefferson College

Jefferson College

Felix Hughes was born in Northern Ireland and died in Mississippi. He was a founder of Jefferson College in Washington, Mississippi, and became the first secretary of the institution.  He served in the upper house of the first territorial legislature in Mississippi.  His father-in-law was a Presbyterian minister, bad ass Revolutionary War hero.  They did mix politics and Presbyterianism, for sure.

Felix Hughes (1751 – 1824)
is my 4th great grandfather
Philip Oscar Hughes (1798 – 1845)
son of Felix Hughes
Sarah E Hughes (1829 – 1911)
daughter of Philip Oscar Hughes
Lucinda Jane Armer (1847 – 1939)
daughter of Sarah E Hughes
George Harvey Taylor (1884 – 1941)
son of Lucinda Jane Armer
Ruby Lee Taylor (1922 – 2008)
daughter of George Harvey Taylor
Pamela Morse
I am the daughter of Ruby Lee Taylor

He also was involved in another local school:

The Franklin Society
Founds
THE FRANKLIN ACADEMY

Jefferson County, Mississippi


FRANKLIN ACADEMY.   “This institution was founded by the Franklin society, named in honor of Doctor Benjamin Franklin, which had its first meeting at Greenville, after the adoption of a constitution, Jan. 4, 1806.  Cato West was president, Thomas Fitzpatrick, vice-president; Daniel Beasley, secretary; Thomas M. Green, treasurer.  Other original members were Thomas Hinds, Henry D. Downs, Robert Cox, John Shaw, John Hopkins, James S. Rollins, Charles B. Howell, David Snodgrass, Thomas and Joseph Calvit, William Thomas.”

“At a meeting June 14, Henry Green and Edward Turner were proposed as new members.  Mr. Hinds, chairman of the committee, reported that Edward Turner offered a house and lot in Greenville as a house of instruction for the Franklin Academy, at a rent of $100 a year if paid in advance, and the Rev. David Snodgrass offered to take charge of the academy for six months at $50 a month, “finding myself.”  At the next meeting, in August, Armstrong Ellis, Robert McCray, William Snodgrass and Feliz Hughes were made members.   The Turner proposition was accepted, Felix Hughes was chosen principal of the academy, and tuition was fixed as follows:  reading, writing and common arithmetic, $20 a year; higher branches, $30.” 

From:  Mississippi Vol. 1 A-K by Dunbar Rowland, 1907, page 742-743.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


From:  ACTS OF THE LEGISLATURE  The Historical Records Survey, Works Progress Administration, Abstrated for Genealogical Purposes page 19 by Ella McCaleb Young.

“Academis
(52) Founding members of the “Franklin Society”:
Cato West, Thomas M. Green, Thomas Fitzpatrick, John Shaw, Daniel Beasley, Charles Howell, William Snodgrass, David Snodgrass, Edward Turner, John Hopkins, Henry D. Downs, James Rollins,  Thomas Calvit, Robert Cox, Henry Green, Felix Hughes, Armstrong Ellis, Jacob Stampley, John Brooks, Thomas Hinds, Wm. Thomas & Robert McCray, January 8, 1807.”

Digital Personas and Delusion

August 27, 2013 — 4 Comments

bloom

bloom

The era of likes with mouse clicks has ushered in various forms of approval that may or may not be sincere.  Approval requires judgement and investigation.  False approval requires nothing but a click on a button.  This false world of endorse, like, share is the nightmare underlying quid pro quo SoMe relationships.  I know people on various platforms with whom I almost always agree, and others with whom I never agree.  This is not so different from daily social life.  Social clicks, clubs and groups in real life at least have the opportunity to see each other engage.  Some avatars and auto retweeters my be the social media equivalent of codependent.  They thrive on false acceptance and deliver the same to others.  They both spend and accept the fake currency of unfounded and insincere mutual praise.

Experience teaches us how to avoid being spammed or interrupted by endless chatter as we learn the ropes in social media.  I openly joke around with my social media image, freely admitting I edit out any content unflattering to me.  Everyone does; nobody uses a personal platform to highlight the worst in themselves.  In the past mad men produced media to sell to consumers.  Today we are all both the consumer and the media producers.  Much ado has been made about the commercial value of this new influence horizon.  I agree that consumers benefit form the vast array of information available to them today.  The social influence and digital bonds of personal branding may be insidiously damaging as well as lucrative.

The unintended consequences of the digital edited public persona create havoc with the self image and the soul.  Being fully present in a community or personal relationship is a high standard to keep.  Making basic decisions today about budgeting time and resources is generally stressful.  Conscious deliberate action will make the difference between finding a happy medium and wasting precious time creating delusions.  It is a brave new world. Caveat emptor.

Dog Days Officially End

August 27, 2013 — 1 Comment

cactus

cactus

This summer the dog membership at the Tucson Botanical Gardens has been a great benefit to our family.  Each Tuesday we enjoy walking early in the morning with other member dogs and their owners in a shady oasis in the middle of town.

cool morning walk

cool morning walk

Today is the last Tuesday of the dog membership.  It rained last night, which is magical here.  The garden was lovely and very fragrant for our last visit of the summer.  Artemisia has always liked to eat sunflowers, which is verboten in a botanical garden, of course.  As a treat and a little rule breaking on her last dog day I let her munch a couple of leaves on the bottom of a sunflower.  She didn’t eat very much.  She hopes to return next summer as a member dog.

I Endorse Marc Zazeela

August 26, 2013 — 3 Comments

My friend Marc and I met in discussions in Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook on LinkedIn about 3 years ago.  We started to tweet about the same time, and then joined Klout at the same time.  We followed some similar digital development paths, learning from friends and mentors along the way.  I invited him to my blogging tribe on Triberr; he accepted.  After a couple of years relating at a distance I finally met Marc in person last September at the TribeUp NYC event. We enjoyed a perfect pre-Sandy day in Manhattan meeting other digital buddies we had never seen in the flesh, and learning about blogging.

I have done business with Marc when I needed to ship my product to Australia and Israel.  He is prompt and professional with customers.  He treated my very small order as if it was the most important thing on his desk.  He has a full knowledge and capability to handle customs as well as shipping all over the world, at the very best price.  I enjoy his sense of humor.  He and I both hang out on twitter with other food enthusiasts at the hashtag #Mmgd. He is a jovial and intellectual friend in any discussion.  Lately we have been joking about the lack of integrity in LinkedIn endorsements.  I wanted to try this video endorsement format.  Marc was willing to help me figure out how to do it.  He is a good sport and a jolly good fellow to volunteer for the very first one.

Emiline P Nicholls, 3rd Great Grandmother

August 25, 2013 — 3 Comments

The grandmothers

The grandmothers

My 3rd great-grandmother was born in Somerset, PA in 1837.  She became the second wife of Thomas Peterson, a widower, in Ohio in 1855.  Her parents had moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio before 1850.  I know her father, Amos, was a teacher, but have no records of the schools, or the times.  After the Civil War she moved with her husband and children to Kansas to homestead. She survived Thomas by many years, and in 1920 was living at the home of her daughter, Harriet.  She is the short one on the right side of this photo.  The age of my Uncle Ernest on the left side tells us this was taken in Ladore, Kansas about 1918.

Emiline P Nicholls (1837 – )
is my 3rd great grandmother
Harriet Peterson (1856 – 1933)
daughter of Emiline P Nicholls
Sarah Helena Byrne (1878 – 1962)
daughter of Harriet Peterson
Olga Fern Scott (1897 – 1968)
daughter of Sarah Helena Byrne
Richard Arden Morse (1920 – 2004)
son of Olga Fern Scott
Pamela Morse
I am the daughter of Richard Arden Morse

Since both Emiline and her mother were born in Somerset I have joined the Somerset Historical Society and have engaged the services of the professional genealogists on the staff.  Next week I will have the chance to visit not only the place, but also have the fun of doing some fully professional investigation.  I expect to learn a lot about the history of the area and what was happening when my family lived there.  If I am lucky I will also find some information on Emiline’s husband, Thomas. Since I have been doing this research for so long I am excited to learn how the pros approach it.

Exorcist Archetype

August 24, 2013 — 5 Comments

What kind of power does an exorcist have?  Technically Catholic priests are in the business of exorcism, but in day to day life some people play the role of the exorcist to friends or family.  I personally do not have much experience with this archetype, but we all recently witnessed a bookkeeper in a school in Georgia display extraordinary ability to drain the evil out of a situation.  Antoinette Tuff  found the strength to talk down a deranged gunman with 500 rounds of ammunition.  Later in an interview she told the 911 dispatcher with whom she had been on the phone that she had been terrified.  She called the courage to act the grace of God.  I imagine that priest or not, it is always the grace of God that provides the purging of evil.  Do you have any experience with exorcist archetypes?

George Harvey Taylor, Suicide Victim

August 23, 2013 — 3 Comments

George Harvey Taylor

George Harvey Taylor

I have found a true treasure today as I prepared to write this post about my grandfather, George Harvey Taylor.  Somebody has placed his photo on Ancestry.com. I instantly knew it was he because he strongly resembles his children, one of my uncles in particular.  This is the first time I have seen his image.  He committed suicide ten years before I was born, and for at least the first ten years of my life he was never mentioned.  I am not sure how old I was when I learned from a cousin that he had killed himself at home at night, his youngest son discovering the body in the morning.  It shocked me out of my wits.  It still does.  The tightly held secret probably had some initial seed of the suicide of one of my cousins in about 1970.

George Harvey Taylor (1884 – 1941)
is my maternal grandfather
Ruby Lee Taylor (1922 – 2008)
daughter of George Harvey Taylor
Pamela Morse
I am the daughter of Ruby Lee Taylor

George Harvey was born in Texas in 1884 to parents who had moved there from Selma, Taledega to be precise, Alabama, after the Civil War.  He met his wife, Hattie May Long, who had been adopted in Mississippi during or shortly after the war.  Her adopted parents, the Longs, brought Hattie May with them to Texas, but seem to have left her brother, Fidel,  back in Mississippi.  After George and Hattie married they moved to Humble, TX, where George was a meter reader for Texaco on a very large oil lease.  He rode a black horse around the lease and read various meters to document production.  They had ten living children;Hattie lost a couple of pregnancies; then Hattie May died in childbirth, along with the baby….at home, in 1932. George Harvey was left to raise ten kids, the youngest being only two years of age.

grave in Waller TX

grave in Waller TX

When my mother was near death and demented I asked about her father’s suicide and how she felt.  She was not in the house that morning, but had gone to Houston to visit her sister.   She said she was very angry at him; the reason given was that the lady next door turned down his proposal of marriage.  He had carried on as a single father for 9 years and was severely depressed, I suppose.  Suicide often leaves the family ashamed like my mother’s religious family.  The taboo subject has strange and subtle effects on those who are left on earth.  I know that it shaped my mother’s view of life.

Please join me in raising awareness and hopefully some funding for IAMalive.org. during suicide prevention week, Sept8-14, 2013.  This 24 hour hot line is created to help people like my grandpa make it through an irrational moment of fear and loathing.  This issue belongs to all of us.  You can find the easy donation bottom here, along with a list of thank you gifts.  My grandpa George and I thank you as well.

Memory Therapy

August 22, 2013 — 3 Comments

forsythia

forsythia

One week from today I will be visiting the town near Pittsburgh where I grew up and went to school through 8th grade.  I have not been there for almost 50 years, so things will be different…and yet the same.  I tune in to the daily tweets of @thomasmooreSoul because I find them to be just the right amount of therapy for a single day.  A long time ago he tweeted that talking about your childhood openly, telling stories you remember, is a great way to make sense of the past.  I have been exchanging pictures and comments with some of the former classmates for about 4 months now, as we prepare to meet in Oakmont, PA for their (I was already gone) high school reunion.  I can say that Tom’s advice about childhood stories is powerful.  Each one of us remembers different parts of our class  story;  I am sure being physically in our old school will spark some memories we have not discovered.  There is something unaltered about all our personalities that I can’t put into words, but next week maybe I will.

Before we all get hauled off to the memory wing of some care home we have the opportunity to get together to reminisce about our seriously good old days.  A few of us are already gone, naturally.  Such is life.  It ends.  I look forward to stirring up some memory/emotions from my childhood with the classmates with whom I shared them.  I have travelled the world, but this is time travel in a sense.  I am not sure what kind of deeper meaning will be revealed, but I expect it will be more helpful to my psyche than years of analysis might be  (I am too thrifty to find out).  Buckle up, gentle readers, and prepare to time travel with me to the ‘Burgh next week…back to the future.

Suicide Prevention

August 22, 2013 — 4 Comments

Everything I know about suicide prevention I learned as a volunteer at the VA.  We were given training in order to spot and prevent suicidal tendencies.  The powerpoint included many graphs that drew a grim picture of the rise in military suicide.  The number killing themselves had already surpassed the number killed in battle, and the line was hyperbolic.  They also showed us the most at risk groups by state, age, and other demographics.  They showed us how many Vets had committed suicide within days of a visit to a VA facility.  They showed us in scientific and very graphic terms how seriously they were failing to prevent suicide.  At the end of the factual part of the presentation they told us the solution for all involved was trust the VA.  They said if we reported the suicidal patient to the VA they would make sure it would be handled professionally.  They saw no irony in showing us how miserably they were failing, and then asking us to trust them.  I had worked with them for years, and had not seen them execute reasonable care for the patients I visited.  My guys were frustrated and unhappy with VA services.  I was unhappy too because it was impossible to upgrade any of them.

My last Vet had been not only vocally suicidal for a long time, but had been allowed to go alone out in traffic with his electric scooter on a busy street.  Demographically, he was in the top percentile of the group most likely to kill themselves.   He lived in a care home, care being the obvious missing feature.  He had problems too numerous to mention that were never solved by his visiting VA social worker who was dispatched to help his with his day to day issues.  My experience trying to help him from within a wasteful, non functional  system funded by my tax dollars made me feel angry and hopeless.  They asked us to report problems with the Vet’s care, but then did nothing to remedy the problems.  I had to eventually resign from the program because it made me feel much worse knowing how the Vets are really treated.  To say it left a bitter taste in my mouth is an understatement.  I need to remedy that.

It is never a good idea to go around with a bitterness. Some bloggers I admire and want to emulate are promoting a fund raising effort for Suicide Prevention Week, Sept 8-14, 2013.  Funds raised in this campaign will be used to keep the IamAlive hotline open 24 hours a day.  I am proud to support this effort.  Suicide is not a personal problem as much as society’s issue, especially when our retired and active duty service members are so much at risk.  This simple fundraiser benefits any and everyone who may be in a moment of terror.  That could be anyone, any time.