The Epiphany was less elaborately decorated than this church, but the decorations seemed sufficient and appropriate.
In a number of past posts in Decembers previous, I shared Christmas memories. I had thought of doing another one of those posts this year, but am not sure what to write about. I’ve covered such things as the way we did our wrapping paper, how we bought and decorated the Christmas tree, the idea of progressive decorating, and the candy house. What else is there to write about?
I’m writing this on Sunday evening. Today we had an excellent service, the guest speaker being Dr. Mark Lindstrom, our former pastor and now district superintendent. Then our adult Sunday school class had its annual Christmas party, something we hadn’t had for a couple of years due to the pandemic.
Church growing up in Cranston, Rhode Island, meant services at the Church of the Epiphany, an Episcopal church. Our church was more English Catholic than Protestant. We attended Christmas morning when we were young, but I remember the year we were first old enough to attend Midnight Mass. That would have been when my brother was around 7 or 8 I would guess. I remember it was a normal work night for Dad, so Mom’s parents came from Providence to get us and take us to church.
I remember the church was nicely decorated with garlands, wreathes, and votive candles on the ledge of each stained-glass window down each side of the sanctuary. The decorations were not as lavish as churches put up now, but they seemed appropriate to us. I guess I ought to say to me, as I can no longer ask other family members about it.
The processional was “O Come All Ye Faithful”. That was different than the processional for morning service, which was “Sing, Oh Sing This Blessed Morn”. But that song wouldn’t have been appropriate for a nighttime service.
About 3/4 of the way through the service, we sang a slow version of “Silent Night”. On the second verse, the house lights slowly started to lower. By the third verse they were out completely, and only light was from the candles on the altar and the votive candles. I remember how beautiful it seemed. A few years later, when I was an acolyte at Midnight Mass, I was the one to control the lights, and was quite nervous about doing it right.
When mass was over, many families exchanged presents. I don’t remember us doing that. What I do remember is that Dad was at the back of the church. The Providence Journal let him off early from his shift, and he came straight to the church.
Once we began attending Midnight Mass, Sunday morning became a little different, but that’s a memory for another day.
On Wednesday, we drove to Meade, Kansas, my wife’s home town, to spend a long Thanksgiving weekend with my wife’s cousin and her husband. We had our Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, to accommodate the schedule of another cousin.
Thursday we went through a box of old family photos that we brought from Bella Vista to Meade. How we came to possess this box is a complicated story, not to be recounted here. We sorted the photos by family group and era, and were able to identify almost everyone in them. A few were mysteries, but after the sorting we figured them out. One was a puzzle, a photo of Lynda’s grandmother as a young girl, sitting on a man’s lap. The man’s name was written on the mounting cardboard, but no one in the family knew who he was. I did some quick internet research and discovered he was a neighbor at the old homestead in Finney County. A mystery solved.
I got in a fair amount of walking around town. Most of the streets are wide, there’s not much traffic, and, since the sidewalks are mostly in rough shape or non-existent, it was quite safe to walk on the streets. Still, even with the exercise, I came back almost two pounds heavier than I was when I left. So the crunch time for weight loss begins today. Despite that, my blood sugar readings were mostly good.
We had lots of good conversations, watched some good music performances on TV, though a little too bluegrass for my tastes, ate good food, had a good Sunday school class and church service yesterday. Our son called us from his vacation in Spain a couple of times. I wrote two letters, one to a pen pal by e-mail, and one to a grandson on paper.
I got done a lot of reading, mostly in the biography of David Livingtone. I’m still less than halfway through this 633 page tome. I started on another book, Great Voices of the Reformation, which is close to 600 pages. Trish and Dave gave me two C.S. Lewis books I didn’t have—compilations of essays and stories, though I did have some or the individual items compiled. So I may have come back more encumbered than I went.
Thus, we come to the crunch time, mainly writing. I’m going to try to finish The Key To Time Travel before the grandkids arrive after Christmas. 1000 words a day and I’ll accomplish that, with time to go through it once editing.
The crunch time is here for clean-up. The special projects I’ve talked about in a couple of blog posts now need to be wrapped up and the “residue” put back on shelves. Piles of books need to be returned to shelves. A few Christmas decorations need to replace the few fall decorations. And then we’ll be ready for the family celebration between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Now, I must leave you and see what trouble I got Eddie Wagner into in the future, and how I’m going to get him out. Oops, guess I just gave away some of the plot.
Very late today. We had our Thanksgiving meal today rather than yesterday due to one family member’s schedule. And a good meal it was, including good fellowship.
Back on September 26, I posted about three special projects I was involved in and how they were keeping me from writing. The projects were:
inventorying the Stars and Stripes newspapers before donating them to the University of Rhode Island Library.
Digitizing years of printouts of letters, as a deaccumulation project.
Finishing the Kuwait Letters book and make it available to family members.
These newspapers, on which Dad set type in Africa and Europe during WW2, are on their way to their new home and, hopefully, permanent place of preservation.
I wrote about each of these projects in the previous post and won’t detail them here.
By a strange set of coincidences, all three projects finished on Friday, November 11.
I finished inventorying the Stars and Stripes not too long after I made that post in September. But the newspapers sat waiting on me to make up my mind whether I was going to ship them to the library or not. I hemmed and I hawed. I carried two of the three boxes upstairs. I gave it much thought. Did I really want to trust this precious cargo to a shipping company? At last I made a to-do list of all the things I have to do and included shipping them.
Dad at the truck-mounted mobile unit of the “Stars and Stripes”, putting out the Combat Edition in Italy.
When I saw the large number of tasks I must complete, I decided to go ahead and ship them. I self-scheduled that for Friday afternoon and brought the last of the boxes upstairs from The Dungeon. I loaded them in the car and headed to UPS. I wasn’t impressed with the people there and how they might handle them. They recommended re-packing the newspapers in their boxes, which provides better assurance of safe delivery (and insurance against damage). I decided to go ahead and do it.
I left the boxes there. Due to busyness on UPS’s part, I wasn’t able to hang around and supervise the transfer to new packaging. I’m trusting that they will do it right and, when they are delivered this Thursday, November 17th, the Library will find them undamaged.
See that tall stack of paper? About half of it came out of old correspondence notebooks.
Also on Friday, around 9:00 a.m., I completed scanning the printouts of emails I found in a thick, bulging, 3-ring binder. These were from 2002 to 2005, consisting mainly of e-mails and messages that I sent or received when I was a member of and later moderator/administrator of a couple of poetry critique boards. I wrote a little about that in this post. The letters were arranged more or less chronologically, but were interspersed with printouts of poetry critiques I made during that time. Those critiques, posted at the poetry boards, might be considered correspondence but I chose not to do so. I will deal with the critiques some time in the future.
That one notebook is now devoid or letters. It is full of those critiques, but they are consolidated from two smaller binders and are in an arrangement that I can tackle with less effort sometime in the future.
These are not all the letters I need to digitize, but they represent the lion’s share of them. I have one other notebook that contains letters from about 1990 to 1999, a mix of typed, handwritten, and e-mail letters. I started on them Saturday. But it’s just a 3/4-inch binder and will be short work. I hadn’t even counted them as part of the special project. Why? Because this binder is small enough that I won’t mind if it stays on the shelf for several years. It won’t, but it’s not part of the special project.
The Kuwait Letters book is done. This is the final cover—before the typo was fixed.
The other special project was my book of correspondence, The Kuwait Years In Letters. I’ve blogged about this several times, one of the best of those posts being here. When I wrote that, in June 2022, I had the proof copy in hand. My wife and I were either just starting or well along in the proofreading process. I finished that a couple of weeks ago. But before publishing, I decided to ask the family about the cover and if they wanted changes in that. Yes, they did. I put together four alternate covers, and they chose one as the best.
I uploaded that cover to Amazon, and it was approved with no changes. I again sent it out to the family. My daughter liked it, but found one typo on the back cover. I fixed that on Friday night, and uploaded to Amazon. Since the only difference between that cover and the last one was a single letter on the back cover, I knew it was going to be accepted. I went to bed Friday night knowing it was all over but the ordering. Sure enough, I started Saturday morning by looking at an e-mail from Amazon. The cover was accepted and the book published. I quickly ordered family copies. Once they arrive and are in good condition, I will unpublish the book.
So, in a 14 hour time span, those three special projects that were preventing me from doing much writing came to a close. I will continue to worry about the Stars and Stripes until I hear from the Library. I will continue to scan a handful of letters most days, probably into early December. I will anxiously await the arrival of the Kuwait Letters book and the family’s reception of it after Christmas.
But I think, now, I will feel much better about carving out time to write. When will I start? Maybe as early as today. The Key To Time Travel awaits my attention. Eddie is in trouble, and I need to figure out how to extricate himself from it.
Here it is, late on Friday afternoon, and I’m just now getting to my blog post. I have several posts started, but none close enough to complete to justify spending my currently limited brain capacity on.
I’m writing very little these days. Today is typical of that. I began the day, after devotions and prayer, transcribing and scanning old letters, putting them into Word files so I can get rid of the paper. I’m currently working on my old poetry notebook. I thought this was mostly critiques (which I also need to digitize) but it turns out, so far, to be mostly e-mails and IMs from what I call “the poetry wars” at Poem Kingdom and other places. The years covered are 2003-04-maybe 05. I’m able to “save-out” i.e. digitize close to 20 old emails a day and put those sheets in recycling.
This morning I got that done. I digitized 18 old e-mails. It seems like that’s not many. What I do is, after the scan is complete, I open the scan file in Word, save it as a Word docx to the right folder with the right, descriptive file name, and clean up the text. That means setting margins, eliminating formatting irregularities, changing the font, correcting outright scanner errors. So all this takes a little time, but that makes the file ready to be added to a collected correspondence file whenever I choose to do that—if ever.
I also, this morning, completed the inventory of the Stars and Stripes newspapers. This was specifically of the duplicates, which I am keeping and not donating to URI. Those duplicates are now in a box (a little bigger than necessary) and ready to be distributed to Dad’s descendants or kept by me. This special project is thus almost done. I only have to complete the boxing and decide if I want to ship them to URI soon or delay the donation to a future time, maybe sometime next year.
I also made my weekly run to Wal-Mart this morning, and almost got away without talking to anyone except the pharmacy clerk. Alas, the self-checkout station wouldn’t accept my dollar off coupon, and the cashier hoverer had to help me.
I got some time in the sunroom, most of which went to a nap (after sleeping less than optimally last night). Lynda and I took a walk on one of our easier trails this afternoon. I went 1.64 miles, her less. That was mostly in the shade with a nice breeze, and was pleasant.
The good day will not be marred by my having to go prepare supper. The microwave decided to die after just three years of service, so I am having to cook the old fashioned way and not really enjoying it. Tonight will be simple hamburgers, tomorrow frozen pizza, I guess.
Well, this isn’t much of a post, but it’s all my mind can take right now. Hopefully Monday I’ll complete my three-part book review. I have others lined up in the queue.
Oh, the other good news: Went for labs yesterday, with the result posted today. My A1C was down to 6.1!
I have great hopes that this will be one of my better sellers. Two of my grandchildren, Ezra and Elise, think it will be a best seller. We’ll see.
I interrupt the review of The Control of Nature to just talk. Last weekend we were in Big Spring, Texas, doing the grandparent thing. We drove up on Thursday, had a grandson’s birthday party on Friday with many 6-year-olds and their parents, a grandson’s cross country meet on Saturday, taking or picking up grandkids from school or activities. It was quite enjoyable.
Then, on Saturday, the family drove to western Oklahoma for our son-in-law’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. They boarded the dog, which left Lynda and I alone in the house with the three cats. That lasted only about 30 hours, but it was a good time.
During the days, when the kids were at school, Richard was at work, and Sara was either working at home of going to the office, we had lots of solitude. This was quite enjoyable.
For me, it was like being on a writers’ retreat. I had no special projects to work on, no household chores, no yardwork, just peaceful time. So what did I spend my time on? I got back to work on the sequel to There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel. Titled The Key To Time Travel, I had written a prolog, chapter 1, and most of chapter 2, consisting of around 3,650 words. But I hadn’t done any work on it for close to a month—other than re-read it and edit. I had just been too busy with those special projects and things around the house.
But from the first day, I found time to write in it. About a thousand words a day. The plot flowed easily, the words found their way to pixels on screen. By the end of four days, I had 5,500 words added to the novel, pushing it to 9,200 words, or just under 25 percent of where I think the word count will end up.
I asked our granddaughter, Elise, to read it, which she did (all but the last 500 words or so), and she loved it. She mentioned certain things that made it good, things she liked to see in a book. So I think I’m on the right track.
We drove home on Wednesday. I’m writing this on Sunday. How many words do you think I’ve added since I got home? None, that’s how many. I made progress with my special projects. I finished one book I was working on both before and during our trip. I did a major amount of yardwork on Saturday. Then I had to prepare to teach our adult Sunday school class, a new series that I developed. That took a fair amount of time on Saturday.
Here it is Sunday evening. I’m brain dead. The microwave quit this morning, only a little over three years old. Lynda has a medical appointment tomorrow. Let me rephrase that. She may have a medical appointment tomorrow. She thinks she cancelled it and we’ll have to check first thing Monday.
So I don’t expect to get lots written either tonight or tomorrow. Maybe Tuesday.
The newspapers have taken over my work table, as well as my writing time.
It has now been close to two weeks since I have done any significant writing. Why? Not writer’s block, but three special projects, things I’m doing that are capturing my time and will soon (hopefully) be done, allowing me to go back to putting words on paper.
I wonder if Dad modeled for any of these Bill Mauldin cartoons.
The first is going through my dad’s Stars and Stripes newspapers from World War 2. I’ve posted before about this collection. Dad, a typesetter before the war, was able to get a transfer from the invasion forces to the G.I. newspaper. In Africa, Italy, and southern France, Dad set type in war areas for more than two years. He sent copies of the papers home and his parents kept them. He took them when he came home and kept them till his death in 1997. He had told me they would be mine.
Publication locations of the “Stars and Stripes”, and the editions, changed during the war as US troops advanced.
I kept them for years, hoping to go through them, to learn more about the war and Dad’s part in it. Alas, too many years have passed without doing that. I’ve decided to donate the collection to the University of Rhode Island. They will preserve them, make them available to researchers. I was to do that in August when we were to drive back there but, alas, had to cancel that trip for health reasons. I decided I would inventory the collection (though URI told me I didn’t have to). At least that would give me a better idea of Dad’s movements through the European Theatre of Operations.
Starting with about 30 issues a day, I slowly did more and more. I’m now down to around 100 to 150 newspapers, having inventoried over 900. This has been hard work, but it’s almost done. The good news is I’ve found a fair number of duplicates, maybe 50 to 80 issues that I will be able to keep and distribute some day to Dad’s grandchildren. That is a manageable number to keep. I anticipate finishing this project before the end of September.
The next project is digitizing my letter collection. I’ve been at this for a year, and can see the end of it—sort of. I keep finding more letters to digitize. Two weeks ago I pulled a notebook off a shelf, a notebook I thought included some magazine essays (not mine) I had printed. Not so. They were copies of e-mails from the late 1990s, emails I had printed and saved then deleted the electronic copies. What was I thinking, right?
Now, to reduce possessions, I’m scanning them, saving them in an organized way. The process is slowed because sometimes the scanner doesn’t produce the letters exactly as they are. So I have to check the text to make sure it’s right in my new electronic file. Then, I’m also converting it to better fonts, spacing, and layout on the page, just in case I want to assemble them into books in the future. This project isn’t that close to being done.
I’ll finish with this notebook in about a month or a little longer. Then, I’ll get to start going through copies of handwritten letters. I’m not looking forward to that, and won’t start it right away. Gotta finish and publish at least one book first.
The end is in sight of this special project, proofreading our Kuwait Letters book.
The third project is also related to letters. Lynda and I are proofreading the Kuwait Letters book that I put together over the last two years. I ordered a proof copy of it, and saw a number of places where there were typos. Our son looked at it last month and suggested I add more photos to it. Our grandson Ezra read in it while he was here in July. One letter that his mom had written when she was not quite seven years old, looked wrong. I looked at the original and, sure enough, I had skipped a line when transcribing. How often had that happened?
So Lynda and I are proofreading it. She reads from the original letter, I follow along in the book and mark whatever changes are needed. There are too many changes needed, showing that I’m not the world’s best transcriber. We are a little over halfway through the book, able to do about ten pages in an hour in the evening. Only 14 or 15 more sessions to go.
Once that’s done, I’ll pick more photos, reformat the book, and see what I have. I also added in five lately found letters, including one taking six or seven pages. The current file is 325 pages. More photos will likely expand it to 340. No, we’ve found a couple of letters that need some editing either due to repetition or the nature of the material. Maybe only 337 pages. I see that all coming together around the middle of November.
I hope to do some writing on the sequel to this this week.
It’s Sunday evening as I write this, multi-tasking as we watch the specials about 9/11. I’m looking ahead to tomorrow, and realize I don’t have time to write the type of post I’d hoped to have for Monday. Even Friday is a little iffy for a post that takes a lot of time.
This is a killer week. Not so Monday and Friday, but the other days have a lot of activities and appointments.
First, I have two “gigs” this week. On Tuesday, I will repeat my presentation on the Universal Postal Union to the NW Arkansas Letter Writers Society. I made this presentation in May, but almost everyone who normally attends was gone that day. So I’ll do it again. Fortunately, all I have to do is dust off my PowerPoint and run through it once or twice.
Then, Wednesday morning, I am to be at John Tyson Elementary School in Springdale (40 mile drive), where I will make a presentation of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel to Henry and Izzy, the two students I had Zoom meetings with about a writing project they were doing, then had them be beta readers for my book. They don’t know I’ll be there and giving them the finished book. This will be at 9:00 a.m.
I have several hundred more of these WW2 newspapers to inventory.
Then, at 12:00 noon, I have an appointment with my cardiologist’s P.A. Hopefully I’ll learn how well the cardio rehab program went. Between those two appointments, I’m hoping to meet someone for coffee. We’ll see if that happens.
Then, Wednesday afternoon, Lynda and I have dental appointments. I’ll barely have time to get home after seeing the cardiologist to leave for the dentist. But, unless we head to church that night, that will end appointments on Wednesday.
At noon on Thursday, Lynda will have her MRI to find out what, exactly, caused her sciatica attach in July. That has been twice delayed, not because of us, but because of insurance and provider problems. Then, that evening, is a semi-monthly meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes critique group. I’ll have some preparation time required for that.
In addition to this, I have my normal activities, which at the moment include:
morning 2-mile walks
digitizing a minimum of 10 printed letters a day
inventorying a minimum of 30 issues of the Stars and Stripes
whatever writing I can squeeze in, most likely on The Key To TimeTravel, though I have other projects to work on as well, if I want to do so.
A little bit of yard work, although the work I got done on Saturday puts me a little ahead of where I normally am.
reading for research as well as for pleasure, including a couple of C.S. Lewis writings.
At some point, I need to begin the strength exercise program recommended in the cardio rehab program. I hope to begin that on Monday.
So yes, it will be a busy week. Hopefully I’ll be able to see progress on all my tasks.
If there is anyone who reads this blog regularly, including on days when I don’t make mention of a post on Facebook, they will note that I missed posting last Friday. I can’t think of the last time I totally missed a post. A few times I’ve made a minimal post late in the day. A few other times I did my post a day late. But it’s been a long time since I totally missed one.
Why did I? One reason was our son was here for a week’s visit. A few weeks back, when Lynda’s sciatica came on very strong and debilitating, he was ready to hop on a plan in Chicago and come right down to help out. We advised him not to at that time, and he complied, but he scheduled to come see us at his first opportunity after this. He came last Sunday and left Saturday.
He had to work remotely much of the week—it wasn’t vacation for him. After his workday ended, he helped us in our decluttering process. The main target was the garage. This has become a catchall place for things we wanted to get rid of, but we never seemed to get around to deciding what was trash, what was for donation, and what, if anything, actually needed to go back into the house.
We already had a donation pile. Tuesday we worked around 3 hours, sorting trash from donation vs keepers. We had a full trash barrel and a large donation pile. Wednesday evening early, Charles and I loaded that in the van and took the stuff to Goodwill. Then we worked another three hours. Thursday, I had writing critique group meeting. I worked a little that afternoon on organization, and that evening drove the car into the garage. That hasn’t happened for 15 years.
Friday evening, we drove into Bentonville, took a walk on the Chrystal Bridges Trail, then walked to the square and ate at a somewhat fancy restaurant. At least it was a good restaurant. Then it was walk around a little to find a certain store, then get some ice cream. Saturday, we took Charles to the airport, dropped a few electronic items off at the Benton County recycling facility (for a cost), came home, and relaxed for the rest of the day. I could have written a post then, but I just wanted to read. I also worked on an inside the house project: converting paper files to electronic files. I did that to 10 old letters. This is a long-term project that I do a little on each day, and hope to get done in around a year.
The other reason is that our air conditioner went out. That was last Saturday. We suffered through it until Monday our HVAC guy got here and gave us the bad news: complete replacement, costing in 5 figures. But supply chain issues means we won’t get the replacement for 2 to 4 weeks. Yuck. A man at church loaned us two portable vent-through-the-window unit. On Tuesday our HVAC man loaned us a third, It’s not quite 90 in the house as it was early on Monday, but it’s hotter than normal, and that leads to not feeling like doing much, including things like blog posts.
Now it’s Sunday. I taught Life Group this morning and will head back to the church shortly for a Teams meeting.
Tomorrow, I hope to get back to writing, something I did almost none of last week. Maybe I’ll even take time to write the next couple of posts in my climate change series.
Dad’s headline in the VE edition, Marseilles, France.
Dateline 26 July 2022
The day is surely coming when we will sell this big house and downsize into something smaller. Dis-accumulation is in progress. The next big item to go will be my collection of Stars & Stripes newspapers from World War 2.
It’s a lot of newspapers. Maybe as many as 200-300. I haven’t yet counted them.
The collection is mainly newspapers that my dad, Norman V. Todd, set type on as a G.I. during WW2 in Africa and Europe. Dad gave them to be in 1990 and I brought them home in 1997. There they sat. Twenty-five years and I’ve done nothing with them. I had such plans to read them, research them, and come to a better understanding of that war from the perspective of the men fighting it. Alas, that never happened.
I always thought these would be good to research the “fog of war”. How much printed as the war was in progress would be found to be inaccurate or untrue under the scrutiny of history?
Seven years ago I arranged to donate them to the World War 2 museum in Natick, Massachusetts. My first trip to RI since making that arrangement is coming up next month. I e-mailed the museum to confirm they still wanted them. Not receiving an e-mail in response, I called them this morning. The phone was not in service. A quick check on-line revealed that the museum closed in 2019. Bummer.
A wartime portrait, probably 1944. HIs “Stars & Stripes” insignia shows.
I’ll make this story a short one. Where could I donate them? Or was this a sign I should keep them, do that research that eluded me? I had already checked with the big WW2 museum in New Orleans, and they said they didn’t want any S&S. I checked with the S&S seven years ago, and it seems they didn’t need them.
I thought of three possible places: the University of Rhode Island, which has a special collections center at the university library; the University of Chicago, where our son works; and the Newberry Library in Chicago, an independent research library. This morning I reached out to all three.
The University of Rhode Island got back to me first, and said they would be happy to take the collection. They often have students researching WW2, and this seems to be of value to them.
The trunk is a family heirloom. At least it will stay in the family for another generation, maybe two.
So the deal is complete. Next month these newspapers will find a new home. From 1943 to 1945, they went from Africa, Italy, and France to East Providence, then to Providence. Then in 1950 to Cranston. Then in 1997 to Bentonville Arkansas. Then in 2002 to Bella Vista Arkansas. All this time they have been in a steamer trunk that my grandfather, Oscar Todd, brought with him when he emigrated to the USA in 1910. The trunk will soon be at a different home in a cousin’s family, and the newspapers will be in Kingston RI.
In some ways, this feels like a betrayal, not to keep them in the family. I’m trying to look at it as solidifying Dad’s legacy in a permanent way, but it’s hard to do, and I’ve shed more than a few tears this afternoon on the realization that this piece of Dad will soon be gone.
Ah, well, when Dad first showed me them in 1990 (I had wondered, as a kid, what those trunks in the basement held; I learned then what filled one of them), he said he hadn’t looked at them since that trunk went into the basement in 1950. If they will now be in a place where maybe someone will make good use of them, where they will be protected and preserved, I guess that’s a better outcome. And my children won’t need to make a hard decision one day.
