Special Friend Wednesday

I am meeting Gay for lunch today in Cherryvale. She and I have been friends since she was a ninth grader and I was a senior in high school. That's a very long friendship. She was 14 and I was 17. Now I will be 78 in December. So figure it out. She has been through several marriages over the years but has been married to Tony for well over 25 years...perhaps even 30. I was married to my Bob for 57 years. We are very different but in some ways very alike. She looks enough like me to be mistaken for my sister. Bob will be on his own for lunch. I am hoping he will go to see his sister, Betty again. She is 89 and one of the two sisters he has left. But that's his call.

Gay and I meet for lunch about every month or so. We then catch up on our family news. She has two boys and a girl just as I have. Her oldest boy, Paul, is a year younger then my oldest, Keith. Her daughter, Kathy, is a year younger then my Leslie, and her son, Steven, is a year older then my Scott. We used to spend almost every day together when our kids were small. We would sun bathe while our kids napped. It's a wonder she and I don't have skin cancer.

Bob will be over shortly, probably closer to 7:00. We want to see what Mr. Grimmett got done yesterday evening with the carpet laying. Then later, we will go to exercises. We went in yesterday and noted that he had only got the carpet cut to size. Nothing was laid. Perhaps he got something done on it last evening before he had to leave to go to the coty commission meeting. He is the fire chief here.

I slept pretty well last night but awoke at 3:00am. I'm not sure if I got any more sleep after that or not but I got up a little after 4:00am. I will probably need a nap later today after I get home from Cherryvale.

Tonight I will watch Nature and Nova on PBS. Last evening I watched the special on American slavery...only one of our national scandals. Another is the way we treated the Native Americans. We constantly moved them from their land so we could confiscate it. In doing that and in the ensuing wars, we killed millions of them off. The slavery issue was tragic too. We separated families and sold off children from their mothers. White masters raped their female slaves and used them to propagate more slaves. It's a terrible history. Other countries eliminated slavery long before we did. Cotton was king in those days though and American slave masters needed thousands to harvest the cotton crop.

Capitalism is greed driven. It was then and it still is. That's why we have several hundred multi-billionaires and a huge class of poor. The rich are not taxed their fair share and the poor are overtaxed with sales taxes. And our education system, which has the potential of lifting folks out of poverty, has become a disgrace. Teachers are forced to teach the tests. It's Awful! The entire situation is awful. And there's not too much hope of anything changing except for the worst as long as the rich have all the power. They want to give big business all the breaks and ignore and cut programs for the needs of the poor.

Gay had to postpone our lunch. She's had a toothache since the weekend and she has to have a root canal. We will schedule again in early November.