One Day at a Time, Countdown 1,402 Days

Countdown 1,402 Days to the Next Administration

One day at a time.

One hour at a time.

One second at a time.

The chaos president waxes imperialistic.

He want to annex Canada

He invites Canada to join the low-tax U.S.

Is he ignorant of Canada’s health-care system?

All Canadians are covered

by a single-payer system

supported by taxes.

Health-care costs in Canada per person

are about half U.S. health-care costs per person.

U.S. has the worst health-care system

out of 11 high-income countries.

Canada ranks next, but still far better than U.S.

Why would Canadians want to trade

their health care for U.S. health care?

The chaos president knows nothing of this.

One day at a time.

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I’m participating in the 18th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 19 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

SOLTuesday: Bird Poop

Yesterday I was sitting alongside Riverside Park reading a book. What looked like a thin green leaf fell onto a page, and I brushed it aside. Only it wasn’t a leaf. It smeared green bird poop across the page and onto my finger. Yuck!!! I wiped off my finger and the page, continued reading for another six pages, then thought, I should go home and wash this finger. Thoroughly. Twice. And then rubbed hand sanitizer on it. I hope nothing toxic seeped into my skin in the five or so minutes before I washed it clean. Has anything like this ever happened to you?

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

 

SOLMarch 5: My Life in 50 Objects, a Jewelry Case

  (Blogger's layout features are primitive in the extreme. I was able to get two images in a row yesterday, but accidentally, and can't figure out how to do it today. Plus, there's no white space next to this image, but there is next to the one below. Anyone out there have any ideas?) 

 

  My aunt Nita died in 1997. She died in Vermont while my mother, her sister, was        flying to be with her from Florida. My sister and I arrived the next day. After we         comforted each other, we set to work dividing up Aunt Nita’s belongings.         Miraculously, we didn’t argue over any of her jewelry, our tastes being so different.  

I wanted this jewelry case, but was afraid my sister would want it, too. But still, I was lucky. She had her own way of storing her necklaces. So I now have the case.

Necklaces on one side; rings, bracelets, and other adornments in the drawers. I love this case—and wish I knew where Nita found it.

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I’m participating in the 17th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 5 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

SOLMarch 4: My Life in 50 Objects, Amber from the Baltic

 

 

 

 

 

In the summer of 1999, I traveled to Poland, to Gdansk (Danzig before WWII), to visit Malgorzata “Gosia” Tarasiewicz, the Polish director of the Network of East-West Women. Gosia actually lived in Sopot, a resort town along the Baltic Sea about seven miles up the coast from Gdansk. 

Gdansk was severely damaged when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, but after the war it was largely rebuilt, with old buildings back to medieval times restored based on photographs and other documentation. 

One day we went to the coast, where thin forests went right up to the sea. We collected amber, with chips along the beach and among the trees. The Baltic Sea area is a major source of amber, which was created millions of years ago. 

Here are the flakes of amber I found that summer, in a small pot I also bought in Poland. 

Four days later, after traveling south to Krakow, I discovered I’d picked up a tick in the underbrush along the sea coast. Roma, my Polish friend in Krakow, took me to a clinic, where a doctor, practicing his English, “unscrewed” the tick from my knee and assured me that ticks that carried Lyme disease were only in the far east of Poland, not in the north along the Baltic. 

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I’m participating in the 17th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 4 of the 31-day challenge. It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about. Join in!

SOL March 2: My Life in 50 Objects, #14

In 1991, I was one of several co-founders of the Network of East-West Women, an organization to support women activists in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, where women were rapidly disappearing from public life in what were still, in many cases, patriarchal cultures. A few years later we supported a workshop on women in the region initially based at NYU and now at the City University of New York, where (mostly women) scholars, activists, journalists met monthly to hear reports or analyses of what was happening in the various countries concerning women, feminism, and gender. About 20 years ago one of our speakers was Nurgul Djanaeva, founder of the Forum of Women’s NGOs in Kyrgyzstan. She gave me this little ceramic as a representation of Kyrgyz women.

NEWW still exists, headquartered now in Poland and working with the European Women’s Lobby, among other groups.

SOL March 4: Book Groups

            This afternoon I was in another book group. This group’s book was Apostles of Revolution: Jefferson, Paine, and Monroe and the Struggle Against the Old Order in America and Europe. Yes, it’s detailed history, and fascinating, but it’s long, almost 400 pages. As we met via Zoom, I asked how many had finished the book. No one had. One person hadn’t even started it, but she confessed that this kind of history is not to her taste. Another had read the preface. But another person and I hadn’t been able to read much because we both had other book groups earlier in the week.

            “What was the book in your other group?” I asked.

            “Hamnet,” she replied.

            “No!” I said. “That was my other group’s book, too!”

            What a coincidence. We two spent the next five or so minutes discussing our reactions to that other book, a novel about William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who died from plague at age 11. We both liked it, but had some reservations about the writing style.

            And even though no one had finished our book, Apostles of Revolution, we still had read enough to have a lively discussion.

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I’m participating in the 16th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 4 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

SOL March 1: Taxes

            I met with my H&R Block accountant to get my tax forms filled out and filed today. With multiple 401(k)s, IRAs, pensions (all from having worked at many jobs), as well as continuing some freelance work in my semiretirement, I’d rather have a professional go through my documents, ensure I fill out the right forms, and make sure I get all the deductions I’m entitled to. The man who’d been doing them has now retired himself, but the woman doing my taxes today was not a stranger.

           I’d met D.M. two years ago when I started getting letters from the IRS saying that I owed lots more money than I’d been led to believe on my 2019 return. Remember doing your taxes for 2019 that first year of Covid? It took a bit longer to get all my documents, and we all got automatic extensions. By the time I called H&R Block, J.D., my regular accountant, was no longer in the office. (Turned out he’d had Covid early on and wasn’t available that tax season.) I was assigned a new person, but we couldn’t meet in person (Covid). I left my documents at the office, then got some e-mails asking questions, which I tried to answer. Then I picked up what I needed to pay what I owed and my return was e-mailed. 

            It took two years for the IRS to discover something didn’t add up. I started getting letters in the summer of 2021 about that 2019 return, and J.D. doesn’t work outside of tax season. I e-mailed the person who’d done my 2019 return, but he never responded. So I stopped by the office and said I needed help. Eventually I got an appointment with D.M. She was great!

            It took several weeks and numerous meetings and even phone calls to the companies holding my retirement funds to discover exactly where the mistake had been made. At first it looked like the IRS had made the mistake. D.M. called the IRS, thought she’s straightened it out, but I continued to get harrying letters from the IRS. Finally, we figured out where the mistake actually happened — that substitute person in 2020 filling out my 2019 return saw two documents from the same company with identical amounts of income and just assumed they were duplicates, when they weren’t. Didn’t anyone ever tell him “never assume; it will make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.” An amended return was filed and everything was fixed.

            This year, when I called H&R Block to make my appointment I learned that J.D. was no longer there. But I am so glad I got assigned to D.M. She knows me, she’s organized, she explains everything. Now all I have to do with write a couple of check in mid-April, and my tax season will be over.

 

SOLSC 4: Writing

I was telling a friend today who’s always only written for publication what the Slice of Life Community was like. So I wrote this to explain my relationship to writing, which is quite different from hers.

 

            At some point I realized I have often/always? been writing. There's a scrap of paper I'm having trouble finding right now on which I wrote as a child: "My name is Sonia and I am 5 and a half. There is a boy, his name is Mark and he is 4. The baby is Carla, and she is 2. Mommy is 30 and Mr. Jaffe is 31." (yes, at 5 I wrote about my father as though he was a stranger.)  I remember being 11 or 12, sitting in our car in town while my mother shopped, writing furiously in one of those black and white composition books about who knows what, because rereading it a year or so later, I was disgusted at my younger self and threw the notebook away. Did that a couple more times through high school, always throwing away. In 9th grade i wrote a very derivative short story about a girl who dressed up as a boy so she could do something interesting (this was a Western, she was a cowboy on a ranch; I had been reading Zane Grey). When she's injured, either falling off a horse or trying to rope a calf, the boy who's her co-worker, and who she has a crush on, has to take off her shirt and discovers she's really a girl. I forget whether they fall in love or she's humiliated and runs away.

            Started a diary again in college, which I kept up sporadically for a few years. But made the mistake of showing something I'd written to the young man (Jack) who I eventually married; don't remember what he said to me about it, but I read a letter he wrote to his best friend in which he made snide comments about it, so I stopped writing again. (A few years ago, after he died, I found a packet of letters he'd written to that friend, who'd returned them to Jack a few years earlier. Reading through them, I realized that in that period of his life, he was snide about *everyone* even people I know he liked and considered friends. And I also noticed that there was nothing else in the packet after a letter about having met me. I think he threw out all the later letters with their snide or less flattering comments about me — just the sort of sweet thing he would have done.)

            The summer before I got pregnant, I was reading Anais Nin's diaries and thinking, I want to keep a diary. This time I will really do it, and I won't throw it away if I reread bits and don't like the person I seemed to be at that time. So that's how my 50+ years of writing, sometimes a lot, sometimes not so much, in what's now called a journal came to be. And eventually I became a writer who occasionally gets published.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 4 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!