Happy Birthday, BonBon!

Wednesday evening was much like any other at Bates and Fourth in Dayton's Bluff...that means anything can happen. Bonni and I were on the porch, talking about the upcoming Neighborhood Night Out on Tuesday. She brought out her face-painting pencils and twisty balloons for animals. As she was practicing, I was working on the banner several of us started the previous day. Cesar stopped by and we learned that he knew how to make balloon figures. Also, he had done face-painting.
Soon a little girl, who had stopped on Tuesday, came again...she was fundraising for new school instruments. Carrying her keyboard under her arm, she would play a song for 25 cents. She had learned quite a bit in a matter of 24 hours!!
Soon, Cesar and Bonni had company in two other kids, all making balloon swords, sheathes, hats, and animals. Lara then stopped by with two young friends - they had heard of our screeching slingshot monkeys. They stayed and worked on the banner. Bonni and I had thought we were pretty much done; obviously not, since it now has several little drawings, speckles, and signatures...truly a community project.
I love that the kids come and visit. Their smiles and shy humor really lighten the day. I'm trying to get the projector for a Tuesday movie, which we'll do in the parking area for the night out.  (From 2009 posting: Porch....)

Library Thing Early Reviewers Book Review: In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler

I just received this early reviewer book this afternoon, was home with a bad headache and read Ensler's book in a matter of a few hours. It cast light on my own family relations beyond all else this book does. Contrary to its subject matter, it is not a depressing book.

Relationships, communicating with one’s body, facing life and death, defining love in its many forms, giving to the earth and its people more than one takes away. This is, in summary, what Eve Ensler expresses in her book, ‘In the Body of the World’. Ensler talks about her experience, her relationship, with cancer and chemo with wry wit, and candor.

In exploring and courageously sharing her raw and life changing experience of surgeries, ports, chemo, and all their emotional and physical side effects, Ensler emboldens others to find their own way, but encourages us to be bold enough to feel, to love, to name, to cry, and to believe that others are there for us. Ensler carries us through with beautiful metaphors and honesty about the facing and fearing death. At one point, her mother, also ill, tells Eve that “I dreamed they are came to take our hearts. They didn’t want mine. They wanted yours the most”...The next morning they move my mother to the cardiac unit because her heart has now become the problem. It is where we do not live that the dying comes.”

sh 4/201

Library Thing Early Reviewers Book Review: 'A Slave in the White House - Paul Jennings and the Madisons'

Though I would have appreciated better organization of the historic material and events, once I took the mindset of 'listening to an elder reminisce', I was able to enjoy 'A Slave in the White House'. The author has definitely done far-reaching research into material not before shared in the history of slavery. I am grateful for the truths and facts Elizabeth Dowling Taylor puts before the reader; some clear up myths, some opened my eyes to the deeper relationships between white and Black, and owner and slave, and a reminder of how much and how deeply whites' selfish desire slashed lives and families of those they chose to own.

I hope that history classes will teach the truth of our founding fathers and that we all question whether our leaders have the courage and the will to live what they preach; live by the laws they enact. I knew much of the background, but Taylor, through research, especially of James Madison's slave, Paul Jennings, added the personal. It's the personal that makes history come alive for me. Though much of the 'fill-in' bits of slavery and how whites justified owning other humans left me gagging, I appreciated that Taylor included the conflict between heart, soul, mind, and law, also.   (sh 4/2013, noted in LibraryThing.com, Walkonmyearth