More pieces to the puzzle...

This blog was born out of a desire to share my family history with my children--lately, I'm afraid it's become more of a bully pulpit from which I've grumbled, griped, moaned, groaned, and generally bitched about everything from my cell phone provider to my thesis with just a smattering of family history thrown in for good measure.

But the past two weeks have produced two remarkable breakthroughs in my quest for information on my ancestors and so it's with a great deal of pleasure that I steer this "bully pulpit" away from the snarky and focus again on the sublime.

The gentleman whose photo is at the top of this post is William Bridgart Bower, my father's paternal grandfather. That I have this photograph is remarkable given the attrition that naturally occurs when you've lived in sixteen different places in thirty-three years. But perhaps more remarkable is the fact that I know his name. You'd think his last name would be my maiden name since last names in our society are generally passed down from father to child. But William Bridgart Bower's child, my grandfather, changed his name from Arthur Hoeft Bower to Jackson Hardy. Why he did this is probably the biggest mystery I've had to contend with as I've researched my family history. The story we were always told was that Arthur Hoeft Bower ran away from home at age 12 and changed his name. WHY he picked Jackson Hardy was never part of the story. Nobody ever really talked about it. My mother always said she'd heard he was involved in some type of romantic scandal with a cousin and that's why he did it. My father almost never talked about his father. At any rate, I never found out and since all my sources of information are dead now, it didn't seem likely that I would ever find out.

When my mother died, I inherited all the family papers and photographs and of all the photos that seemed to belong to Jackson, this one of his father is one of the few that were identified. Over the years, with a little help from census records and a few papers from that branch of the family, I found that William Bridgart Bower was born in Brooklyn in 1860 and married Dorothea Hoeft, the daughter of a prominent Brooklyn merchant, sometime around 1885.

Between 1886 and 1902 they brought eight children into the world. Camille died when she was 6, Marguerite died at age 5, Ruth at age 3, David at age 6. Evelyn survived to adulthood, but one morning in November of 1938, she calmly reported for work on the 25th floor of the French Building on Fifth Avenue, removed a ventilating panel from a rear window of the office, and jumped out. She was 41.

A number of years ago, we visited Brooklyn to try to gather more information on the family and after a visit to the local LDS Family History Center, I was able to locate the cemetery where the family were buried. The All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, New York, is overwhelmingly huge. But they keep good records in that neck of the woods, and I paid $35 to get all the burial records for the family plot. The results were staggering--children I never knew existed and information about so many family members came from that document. It was well worth the $35--AND the bill for back taxes on the plot that I received once they realized I might be the only heir they'd ever find! THAT's what I get for digging up my ancestors! :-)

ANYway--I plugged what I thought was all the info from that cemetery record into my family tree and moved on to other lines. Years and years passed. Just a few weeks ago, I took a day off and ran down to the National Archives in Morrow, hoping that my grandfather's World War I draft registration card might shed light on that mysterious name change. It didn't. What it did do is pique my curiosity yet again about William Bridgart Bower. On the draft card, my grandfather stated that he was responsible for providing at least 50% of the income for his mother. Why, I wondered, did she need her son's help? What had happened to William?

I ran all the names again through the census records at Ancestry.com and things got curiouser and curiouser. In the 1910 census, William was listed as a "boarder" in another household--NOT with his wife and children. In the 1920 census, Dorothea is listed as a widow. Hmmmm...

I took another look at that cemetery record I've had for about a decade and BAM, there it was. Have NO idea how I missed it!! Down at the bottom was an entry for: William B. Bower, age 80 years 8 days, place of death Suffolk County, NY, interred May 11, 1940. I ran his name through the 1930 census for Suffolk County, and there he was--listed as an inmate at the Kings Park State Hospital. WOW.

A quick Google search led me to a website with a ton of info and a few old photographs of the institution. There will be a postscript to this post, I hope, as I've been in contact with the Suffolk County Historical Society and I hope to squeeze a few more details out of this story if I'm lucky enough to score any patient records or photographs.

SO. Lots of puzzle pieces filled in, but I'm still left wondering about William. What was the diagnosis that placed him in a mental institution? Could it have been something simple, something that a modern day mental health professional could have treated? How was he treated in that day and age? What was his life like? How did his wife and children handle such a tragedy? A single woman with children, in that day and age--of course she would have claimed to be a widow. And maybe--just maybe--my grandfather changed his name to distance himself from his father. What is certain is that Arthur Hoeft Bower--aka Jackson Hardy--certainly had a complicated relationship with his own son--my father. But that's another story...

A breath of fresh aire....

How do you like my new look?

I've been wanting to come up with a permanent picture for my blog title for ages, but this smashing new look was created exclusively for me by my brilliant daughter, Annike--THANK YOU SWEETIE!! She managed to crank the whole thing out while sitting on her couch, watching some of the shows she TiVo'd while she was busy showing me the time of my life. Two glorious weeks in England spent in a perfect blend of activities. We drove down country roads peppered with grazing sheep, stone cottages, and patchworked fields. We toured historic homes with wavy glass windows, creaky floorboards, and flowers on every windowsill. We shopped in quirky antique stores, ate Polish food and Cornish pasties. We even spent four hours in a small fishing boat on incredibly choppy seas off the coast of Plymouth, while "Colin" and "Bob" showed us the finer points of casting for mackerel and Dover sole. About three days into the trip, Patrick, my darling son-in-law, looked at me and said, "So this is what you look like when you're not hopelessly stressed!"

He was right. It's been my sad experience that I spend way too much time hopelessly stressing and not nearly enough time eating Cornish pasties and driving down country roads. And the funny (or sad, depending on how you want to look at it) thing about it is, I've realized this before but have never been brave enough (or smart enough) to do something about it. I nearly stressed myself into an ulcer as a young wife and mother worrying about money, housecleaning, working, and how to raise our first three children and then Megan (our fourth) came along. I spent the first twelve months of her life following her around with a video camera--to hell with the puddle of Kool-Aid on the kitchen floor and the unopened bills on the dresser. I had a little girl to watch! I'm ashamed that Annike, Bryan, and Benjamin couldn't have enjoyed that kind of a mother. I don't suppose I was a bad mother or a worse mother for them--I was just a more relaxed mother with Megan. Randy was much better at "rolling with the punches." He understood what was important in life. One of those lessons I learned much too late since Megan was our last.

A year and a half ago, I spent a glorious ten days in Hawaii. Up to that point, I'd never taken a vacation that so completely relaxed me. I came home planning to change my ways and slow down a bit, but apparently--based on Patrick's observations--I didn't change a thing.

So this time, I'm determined. The older I get, the more I realize that there's a helluva lot of fluff in my life--things that demand center stage but should never have gotten past the first audition. Money. Worry. Perfectionism. Toxic people. They all elbow their way into my life, crowding out what's really important. Faith. Family. Friends. Maybe it's because I can still smell the salt in the air and hear the seagulls cry, or maybe it's because I can still see rays of sunshine lighting up those emerald green hillsides while the tulips nod in the breeze.


At any rate, I needed that breath of fresh aire...and I intend to make it last.

Redneck radiology....

One day soon, I'm going to devote an entire post to what comedian Jeff Foxworthy refers to as a "glorious absence of sophistication." In other words: redneck. Whenever I think of that particular term, I'm taken back to our first Christmas in Georgia and the Christmas letter Randy penned that described our neighborhood as looking like it was populated by "the casting pool for the movie 'Deliverance.'"



But of all the stereotypes that "redneck" brings to mind, I suppose the most ubiquitous would be the trailer park. Now don't get me wrong, there are trailer parks and then there are trailer parks. My parents lived in a trailer park in Southern California that could only be described as elegant. It was a gated, quiet community composed entirely of retirees living in immaculate mobile homes tastefully landscaped and impeccably kept. There wasn't a bloodhound, a pink flamingo, a Skoal container, or a beer bottle within miles of the place. Trailer parks in Georgia are generally, shall we say, less refined.


So it was with some trepidation and not a little amusement that I found myself eyeing the trailer in which I was to have my very first MRI last week. It was a semi-trailer like the kind you see all over the interstate hauling everything from soup to nuts but this one was placed unceremoniously in a parking lot in Newnan, Georgia. The sign outside read "Newnan MRI."


It didn't take long for my imagination to start coming up with far more creative names for such a delightfully absurd business location given the fact that we are, after all, here in the South. It wasn't until AFTER the MRI while I was sharing the whole experience with my son BJ, though, that we really got the giggles. We decided "Earl's MRI, Taxidermy, and Bait Shop" would just about do it...I can hear the voice-over radio announcer now...."This week's special: 15% off your full body scan with the purchase of a dozen of our newest twister tail jigs GUARANTEED to land that crappie you've been after! Possums stuffed while u wait...."

Jaundiced January...

January sucks. Seriously. Sucks. It's not just the bitter, cold, cheerless, grayness of it or the fact that it follows on the heels of the (generally) Happy Holidays. January exists solely to remind me how little my current life resembles the comparatively blissful life I used to have.

Over the past few years I've noticed that as soon as the Christmas tree ends up Tango Uniform in the back yard, I am almost immediately possessed by an almost irresistible urge. Sometimes it's all I can do to resist the impulse to toss the essentials (toothbrush, drugs, and laptop) into the back of the car and point 'er West. Where? Doesn't matter--ANYwhere west of Kansas will do. Screw the house, screw the job, screw the sort of half-life that I live these days and just keep driving until I can actually see the sun dip below the horizon. I want to see sagebrush, cactus, dirt roads that are BROWN, not RED, ski racks, surfboards, and blue skies that are really blue, not so full of humidity that they look like nonfat milk.

So this got me to thinking about where I grew up and spent my "formative" years and why the West still has such a hold on me.

I was actually born a Yankee--in Lansing, Michigan, on April 1, 19... whatever. Anyway, we moved to Canoga Park, California, when I was a baby so SoCal is really all I ever knew. The picture above is of our house on Baltar Street and my Dad's beloved 1964 Impala. I lived in Beaver Cleaver's neighborhood--well, it might as well have been. I had a German Shepherd named Duchess, two big brothers I idolized (and annoyed the hell out of), and a street full of mulberry trees that I loved to climb. There was an empty house across the street from my elementary school that we all thought was haunted but it never stopped us from peering in the windows, hoping to see something awful. I LOVED horses and actually belonged to the "California Cavalry Command," which was sort of a quasi-western cavalry for little girls that taught me how to ride and take care of a horse. My brothers used to build forts, put me in them, and then throw rocks to see if the fort held up. Sometimes it did. When it didn't, they bribed me with army men to keep me from telling on them. I LOVED army men....but my most traumatic childhood event was when I was accused of pouring glue all over the school typewriter when I was in the 3rd grade. I didn't, of course--the girl who accused me was actually the culprit but they believed her for awhile and it was my teacher who stood by me and championed my innocence. We had all thought Mrs. Daneker was the meanest thing on the planet so it was a good lesson for me to learn in the 3rd grade that people are not always what they seem to be.

Mother and Daddy (well, especially Mother) had a passion for Native American culture, so we three kids were dragged to every single Native American historical site in the entire state of Arizona. Naturally, our trips took place most often during the summer when we were out of school so they travelled with three kids in the back of the Impala with no air conditioning and vinyl seats in 125 degree weather. Modern day moms and dads who travel in air conditioned minivans with built-in DVD players, coolers, Pampers and box drinks are just weenies. But I digress.....we also checked out other places...including Tijuana....I'm wonderin' if they painted that donkey to look like a zebra....

We moved to a bigger house further west in Canoga Park when I was in the 5th grade and my best friend there had her own horse. I thought I'd died & gone to Nirvana and was completely appalled when my folks announced that we'd be moving yet again when I was in the 9th grade. This time, though, it was to the desert near Palm Springs--where my Dad grew up. They promised me another German Shepherd (Duchess was long gone by then) and I agreed to make the move with only token sulking. This was my back yard--with my ADORABLE niece, Jennie, and my new German Shepherd, Mona.

Palm Desert turned out to be an excellent move for a million different reasons. Here are two of them with me in Laguna Beach, circa 1977. On the left is one of my oldest and dearest friends, Peggy Johnson (Wagner) who saw me through those gawd-awful high school years and introduced me to the faith that I follow to this day. On the right is my BYU London Semester Abroad room-mate, Melanie Mendenhall (Roundy) who saw me through my first "real" love, a hopelessly sexy Welshman I met in London, and who did not laugh at me when I thought I was suffering from appendicitis only to have the young, attractive English doctor who examined me reveal that it was gas.

But the biggest blessing of that move came when I came home from semester abroad in December of 1975. My old boyfriend, Jared Fenstermaker's brother Mark, introduced me to this obnoxious, sarcastic, wise-cracking jerk by the name of Randy VerHoef. I thought he was the biggest turd on the planet. Ten months later we were inseparable, hopelessly in love, and engaged to be married.

On January 22, 1977, I married my best friend and the love of my life in Santa Monica, California. Twenty-five years and six and a half hours later he left me alone on a bitter, cold, cheerless, gray January day in Atlanta, Georgia.

Which sort of explains why I hate January. But it also sort of explains why I want to head West every year at this time. There's something deeply comforting about those places I lived when the best of my life was still ahead of me. I am still blessed, to be sure, with perfect children and perfect grandchildren, meaningful work, and most of life's essentials. But there is also no doubt that my life is colder, grayer, sadder, and not a little bit scarier without that wise-cracking jerk.

Grandma offsides. Five yard penalty.

I LOVE the fall. I love the cool weather, the changing colors of the leaves, the Halloween decorations, the big fat harvest moons. It's always been my favorite season of the year and I confess that fall is especially fun in the South. Having grown up a Southern California city girl, I just can't resist driving by all the local farms with their corn mazes, pumpkin patches, and pick-your-own apple orchards. It's everything fall should be.


But there's another side to autumn in the South that I'm afraid I just don't get. Football. Now, for those of you west of the Mississippi or north of the Mason-Dixon line, you might be thinking, "What's to get about football? It's just football, right?" No, no, my young friends. Football in the South isn't just football. It isn't a sport. It isn't a multi-bazillion dollar industry. It's a RELIGION.

As Bryan pointed out in an old blog post of his, there is no football "season." True, from September through February corporate absenteeism and domestic violence reports spike on fall Mondays, and everything from the family car to the family dog is decked out in team colors. Heaven help the poor bride who schedules her wedding during this most sacred of times. Heaven help the poor baby who unwittingly makes his or her entrance during this most sacred of times. Heaven help the poor slob who dies during this most sacred of times. Folks attending weddings, funerals and birthings can often be seen surreptitously checking the score via text message and/or discreetly placed ear buds and I'm quite sure that an audible "GO DAWGS" has occasionally broken the reverent silence expected at such events. But as Bob Bell, a former NFL defensive lineman once said, "In the South there are three seasons: football season, recruiting season, and spring practice."


Now, as I've said, I don't get it. While I can appreciate a spectacular touchdown pass, a tight end's tight end, and some of the goofy end zone dances I've seen, the rest of it just leaves me cold. I wouldn't know a line of scrimmage if it bit me in the armpit and frankly, my dear, I really don't give a damn. Until one of my grandbabies gets involved.


While Bryan and Jacey and Cole were out West this past week, I had the wonderful privilege of caring for Hailey, Nathan, and Connor, including making sure that Nathan attended his football team's practice on Tuesday night. 5:30-7:00 at the local elementary school. I found it cute to watch him put on those funky pants with the laces in front. Hailey helped him get his shoulder pads and jersey on along with the helmet that looked impossibly big. There he stood, looking for all the world like a miniature Joe Namath. Too. Too. Cute! Off he went to join his team mates, all similarly dressed. They were just adorable!! Until the coaches got on the field.


Mind you, these boys are six years old--seven tops. Four years ago they were all still using sippy cups for crying out loud! All their lives they've been taught to be polite and play nice. Until now. I stood there, dumbstruck, and watched while three or four coaches circulated among these little guys SCREAMING at them. One little guy had somehow fumbled a tackle or a grab or whatever the hell he was supposed to do and the coach followed him around the field screaming "YOU CAN'T TACKLE SOMEBODY WHEN YER DOIN' THIS!!!" (wiggling his fingers in front of him) 'YOU LOOK LIKE YER GONNA TICKLE 'IM!!" "PUT THOSE SHOULDER PADS IN THERE--GIT HIM! GIT HIM!!! GIT HIM!!!!!!!!" This guy actually grabbed the boy's face mask and shoved him to the side, all the while bawling in the boy's face "GIT OVER THERE--IN LINE, BOY!!"


Well. He was lucky that he wasn't speaking to MY grandson. If he had been, I'm afraid I would have had no choice but to hobble onto the field and separate the man from his testicles. Luckily, the only time he screamed at Nathan was to tell him, "GOOD JOB, BOY!" while pounding him on top of his helmet. Even that made my skin crawl.


Well, Nathan was, of course, completely brilliant--what follows are several additional shots all taken by Hailey (EXCELLENT photographer that she is!) Nathan's the one in the white pants/black jersey. In the last shot, you can only see Nathan's fingers, though. They're wrapped around the waist of the boy in yellow--a spectacular end zone tackle if I do say so myself! I guess I don't really have to get football. It's enough for me to know that Nathan clearly has talent and clearly loves the game. The coaches, however, are a different story. Be nice to my baby, boys. Otherwise, I know exactly where to put MY shoulder pads.

When worlds collide...

I've blogged about my job before, but on the off chance that any of my three faithful readers didn't catch that particular post, I work in the archives of the Atlanta History Center. Generally speaking, I love my job--although lately I've been re-evaluating my career path. My particular position, Reference Manager, experiences an extremely high rate of burnout (I'm the third person to take this postion in as many years). The lion's share of the job requires working with the patrons who use our archives, but my boss is anxious to expand our outreach programs and, frankly, I'm barely keeping my head above water just keeping up with the patrons who come to us. The fact that the pay rate for my position sucks doesn't help. But I can't deny that helping people conduct research can be really rewarding. Our patrons generally fall into three major groups--those conducting family history research, those conducting research into their historic home or neighborhood, and faculty and students conducting academic research.

I was helping a couple research their historic home a week or so ago and I suggested they check out the subject files in our very large, very elderly card catalog. They were sure their home had been owned by a local business owner and I thought we might have a business file on this particular merchant. So I'm flipping through the cards, looking for this retailer, and suddenly a card pops out at me bearing the following legend: "Amoroso, Arnold D.--Personality Subject File." Completely forgetting about the two guys I was helping, I stammered out loud "....th th that's m m my great UNCLE!!!!! OMIGOSH, THAT'S MY GREAT UNCLE!!" It was all I could do to drag my attention back to the guys I was helping. It turned out we didn't have any files on the business they were looking for, so I managed to cough up another suggestion or two for them to work with on their own. As soon as I possibly could, I beat feet downstairs to the stacks and pulled the box that contained the file on Ami. There I sat, on the hard concrete floor, hands shaking, while I opened the folder. It was an amazing moment for me.

So let me back up just a tad and explain. My grandfather, Colonel Logan Osburn Shutt, was one of ten children. One of his sisters, Ellen, married a man by the name of Arnold Dante Amoroso in 1934. Colonel was close to all his siblings and I can remember as a child that our visits to Maryland almost always included time spent with the families of his brothers and sisters. I only vaguely remember Ellen and Ami (as Arnold was called), but he was legendary. I had always been told that he was a Bataan Death March survivor and the reverence with which he was discussed was palpable. He died in 1978, just 7 years after my grandmother, so I don't remember him well and I was, of course, too young and stupid to have asked enough questions of my grandfather while he was alive. That's the problem with family history--by the time you're old enough to care, all your sources of information are dead! I had done a little research on Ami and found that he may not have been on the Death March, but that he was, indeed, captured at Corregidor and spent a good deal of time in a couple of Japanese POW camps.

So I was completely stunned to find this file on him at work. I had no idea that he had any Atlanta connections so it was a total surprise to find a March 5, 1967 newspaper article all about him. I went from the newspaper article to our other reference sources and found his death record and obituary also in our collection. The newspaper article, though, was the real gold mine.

Colonel Amoroso had been chief of anti-aircraft defenses in Manila harbor when Japan began its conquest of the "Greater East Asia Co-Propserity Sphere" in early 1941. When General Wainwright surrended the island of Corregidor in May, the Japanese let the survivors have the run of the island--for awhile. When the Japanese began cracking down during their occupation, they sent Ami to Old Bilibid Prison, and later to Camp Cabanatuan. From there, he was sent to Davao, to Mindanao, back to Bilibid, back to Cabanatuan again and then once more to Bilibid before being taken to Japan. It appears that he was on the ship Oryoku Maru that was sunk by American bombers, killing 300 American prisoners. The survivors who made it ashore were rounded up and put on two other Japanese ships to complete their journey to Japan. The ship Ami was on was hit again by American bombers--this time Ami was one of only 88 men to survive.

Ami describes his treatment as sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the weather, food, water, and guards. When the camps were liberated in September of 1945, Ami was transported back to the States in a hospital ship, weighing just 88 pounds. He had been overseas for six years and, on his first trolley ride in San Francisco, on the way to the hospital he visited daily during his recuperation, he handed the driver what he thought was a dime. Turns out it was actually a penny. He didn't know the difference.

After the war, Ami served in Hawaii and Panama, and became an ROTC instructor at Georgia Tech in 1950. After his retirement from Tech and the Army, he worked in Atlanta in real estate. He died on March 13, 1978, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

My job can truly suck at times. I guess everybody's can. But how often can you stumble on a piece of unexpected treasure like this while you're working? Even if this is the only time my family history and working worlds collide, it'll be worth it.

Here are two photos of Ami taken in 1971...the first is Ami and Ellen, the second, Colonel and Ami....

My spool is beginning to unravel...again.

Okay, so I know I've posted about losing my grip before, but this is my blog and I'll whine if I wanna, right? I also apologize in advance for making my first post in two months a total bitchfest but I know my gentle readers (all three of them) will understand when they realize that I left this yesterday morning:



to come home yesterday afternoon to this:



Yes, it sucks, doesn't it?


I really did have an amazing time in Southern California--the trip was worth every penny and every "paid time off" day that it took. I flew in Thursday morning, had lunch in Laguna Beach, wandered around the Mission San Juan Capistrano for a few hours, and had dinner in Pacific Beach with Annike and Patrick. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were family reunion days and they couldn't have been more pleasant. Randy's sister Heidi did an amazing job of organizing everything and it was such a treat to spend time eating, visiting, hanging out at the beach and at home, reminiscing over old photographs and catching up with each others' lives. We need to do it more often.


Sunday evening, Annike, Patrick, Megan, and I headed down to Palm Springs and I spent the next couple of days leisurely driving down memory lane and hanging out in graveyards--another passion of mine that I've blogged about here.


I couldn't have asked for a better trip. Any thoughts of Georgia--and my white elephant house that I can't sell, my day job that pays too little and stresses too much, my night job (teaching freshman history) that sucks up every spare moment of my "free" time--were steadfastly squashed. It worked pretty well. Until I left my American Express card on the hood of the rental car and drove off without it. That should have been my warning. I called immediately and AmEx made arrangements to get me a temporary card so it wasn't a big deal, really, but it made it harder to shove the unpleasant things ahead of me into the back of my mind.


To be honest, none of the things that are pissing me off are big deals. The flight home, for instance. I didn't even flinch when the no-nonsense, middle aged, heavy-set African American stewardess responded to my request to take away my leftover Diet Coke with an immediate "I ain't got no place ta put dat!" I didn't groan when we circled Birmingham for over an hour while the thunderstorms in Atlanta cleared--I wouldn't voluntarily spend an hour in Birmingham on purpose EVEN AT 40,000 feet. Getting home almost two hours late and transferring luggage into the car in a driving rainstorm didn't bother me.


The property tax bill I got today that's more than last year's bill even though the county agreed the house is worth almost 40,000 LESS didn't faze me. When I tried to have a little retail therapy this afternoon and realized I was missing yet another credit card, I took it in stride. It torpedoed the rest of my afternoon since I had to drive all over creation to get it back, but I did get it.


My kids and grandkids are healthy, I am reasonably healthy and fully employed so what am I bitching about, right? Beats the snot out of me! I think I'm just tired of worrying about things over which I have no control, but that significantly impact my life. I'm tired of slogging my guts out at a job that doesn't bring in enough money to make ends meet and having to spend what precious little time off I do have working a second job. I busted my ass to get my master's degree and cannot understand why people in my field are forced to take the proverbial vow of poverty in order to work. I love my job--at least I think I still do--but I'm getting older with every passing minute and wish I could slow down just a little.
SO. I wish I could slow down, but I can't. I wish I could curl up with the In-N-Out burger and animal style fries pictured above, but I can't. I really wish my job paid me adequately given my education and abilities, but it doesn't. I wish Clayton County wasn't so screwed up, but it is. I wish I wasn't so weighed down with worries of every kind that I leave my credit cards lying all over two states, but I am. My mom used to say "if wishes were horses then beggars would ride." I think I like Burgess Meredith's quote even better--"you can wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which gets filled first!"


Well, enough of this blah blah blah--I think it's time for chocolate chip cookies and National Lampoon's Vacation, don't you?