Yeah...and so, anyway...

I was going to enter NPR's 3 minute short story contest, but I got mixed up on the deadline--I was supposed to submit the story by 11:59 September 23, not the 24th. The story had to have a protagonist who is an American president, either a fictional one of a real one. Of course, I chose a fictional one. I think there's been enough fiction written about many of the former (and present) presidents.  I wrote a 600 word version that I wanted to enter  in the contest, and an over 1,200 word version that I will save for future contest entries. I haven't written anything here on Blogger for such a long time that I decided to post the short version of the story here. A note to Baha'is: Does anything seem vaguely familiar in this story? It might not be so obvious in the short version, but it's definitely there in the longer one. And the name of both stories is May 27, 2045. The walk from the Oval Office to the North Lawn was faster than Candace would have liked. She was ...

(Note: I was going to write something specifically about my mother, but I found that I needed to take some more time to do that. I've read Isabel Wilkerson's phenomenal book, The Warmth of Other Suns , and it has given me new insights into the life my mother had to live in Leesburg, Lake County, Florida. I need more time put my thoughts together about all this.) I had been having Braxton Hicks contractions since the beginning of April. They were pretty uncomfortable, but not debilitating. I kept doing the breath exercises I had learned in Lamaze classes. The baby was due June 1, 1981, but I had been to the hospital three times, thinking I was going into labor. I walked around the grounds of the University of California at Davis Hospital, breathing and wondering how I could tell "real" labor from "false" labor. "No, Mother, it's too early," the RN told me. "You're only 2 centimeters dilated".  I was sent hom...

Well, I did it. After living in Sacramento for 38 years (and the closely surrounding areas of Fair Oaks and Rancho Cordova for a total of seven years), I moved 92 miles southwest to Oakland.  The reason? Well, my daughters and my grandson live in the East Bay area. I missed being close to my them.  Right now, I'm temporarily living with my oldest daughter until the current tenant of the "mother-in-law" cottage behind her house moves out, hopefully on the first of February. Until then, I am grateful that my daughter and grandson are sharing their small two-bedroom, one bath house with me.  It hasn't been easy for any of us.  I have habits that I've developed over the years that are not conducive to living with other people. There are these awful periods of embarrassingly persistent obsessive behaviors, specifically, isolating in my room where I get lost in writing, reading or watching movies/documentaries for hours and sometimes days while eating stuff that I know ...