You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’: The Righteous Brothers
Posted August 31, 2023 by katryCategories: Video
“For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”
Posted August 31, 2023 by katryCategories: Musings
The breeze is strong, even windy, the sun bright and the temperature a bit chilly at 67°. August is leaving. Fall is impatient, chomping at the bit.
This has been a week of lasts. We had our last uke concert on the Hyannis green. My last play is tomorrow night. This weekend, Labor Day weekend, is the last gasp of summer. Next week school starts. The traffic will be heavy only on the weekends, and I won’t curse as much. The tour buses have already started to arrive. The nights are chilly, light blanket chilly. It is almost time for long sleeves and fall jackets, but I welcome fall. It is my favorite season.
When I was a kid, once school started, we had little time to play. I only roamed on weekends, usually on my trusty steed, my bike. I remember finding golf balls across the street from the Bear Hill golf course. My mother told me she had had her senior prom at the Bear Hill Golf Club. She had graduated from St. Patrick’s High School. The building still exists but the school closed long ago. For a while the outside still looked the same. It was a bit gaudy with bright yellow paint. It was where the Knights of Columbus met. On the second floor was a large room for events like bridal showers. I remember going to one and having my mother point out where the classrooms used to be. The building now doesn’t resemble at all what I remember. It is white with a decorative door and is the Boston Korean SDA Church. It seems the building has come to a sort of full circle.
I have put some things in safe places. The places are so safe I can’t find the things I put there. I know I have a box with more checks and a check register, but I don’t know where it is. My first hunt for anything is always where I think I would have put it. Nope. I’ve checked drawers where I was surprised by a few things I did find, but checks weren’t among them. I’m going to order more today, and we all know that once that is done, the checks will surface. I have a lazy Susan from the Peterborough Basket Company. I have two cloth inserts. The current one was for July 4th. It is red, white and blue. I can’t change it. I don’t remember where I put the other one. I checked the obvious places. Nope. My mother used to say pray to St. Anthony, the saint of lost things. Sometimes that actually worked. I’m going to give it a try.
“You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.”
Posted August 29, 2023 by katryCategories: Musings
Tags: Ghana, Peace Corps Ghana, rain
The morning is wet with spitting rain. I can feel the dampness, the thick humidity, in the air and in the house. Showers are predicted. It is in the low 70’s and will stay there all day. I have errands, four of them.
I was going to skip today’s Coffee as I have a lot to do; instead, you’re getting a mishmash.
Sometimes I write a thought or an experience I delete mainly because it doesn’t fit, doesn’t take me anywhere. Some of those I save. Today I am going to post them. They have no connection to one another other than I chose to save them. They are in no specific order. Here they are.
By the time I left Ghana, I had replaced my entire wardrobe. I’d buy cloth in the market and have my seamstress make a dress. I especially loved tie-dye cloth. Some dresses had embroidery on the front. They were my favorites. The only thing I still wore from home were my sandals. They had tire soles put on in the market so they’d last forever.
I have the most annoying neighbor in the house behind me. He plays his music so loud I can’t sit on the deck. Worst of all, it is country music of which I am not a fan. I do like rockabilly and way back classic country music like Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and The Stanley Brothers, but I don’t like contemporary country. When I used to call for Gracie, he would yell and tell me to quiet down. He is the one who thought Gracie was a wolf when she climbed the six foot fence into his yard. That should tell you all you need to know about him.
I have told this story before, but it is one of my favorites if not the favorite story of my day to day life as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana. I had taken the magic pills and traveled to Old Tafo to visit my friends Bill and Peg. They lived on the second floor in a house with no plumbing. Bill hauled water in buckets for the house. Down the stairs were the necessities, a row of single seat outhouses. No longer taking the magic pills meant running down the stairs and staying awhile in one of the outhouses, my own single seater. Now that you have the background, here is my story. I was sitting there in my little house biding my time when I heard a sound behind and underneath me. I stood up and a head appeared below the hole. It was the night soil man whose job it was to empty the buckets. He saw me, gave a little wave and said, “Hello, madam,” as he emptied the bucket. When he was finished, I sat down again.
This one I posted, but it is also one of my favorites. I thought I’d end with it:
It didn’t take long after training to realize the best part of Peace Corps isn’t Peace Corps. It is just living every day because that’s what Peace Corps comes down to, just living your best life in a place you couldn’t imagine. It is living on your own in a village or at a school. It is teaching every day. It is shopping in the market every three days. It is taking joy in speaking the language you learned in training. It is wearing Ghanaian cloth dresses and relegating the clothes you brought with you to the moldy suitcases. It is loving people and a country with all of your heart from breakfast to bed and forever after. Peace Corps doesn’t tell you that part, the loving part, but I expect they know it will be there.
