Visions of Green

 In the bleak midwinter, amid cloudy, snowy, skies, I share some visions of green and St. Patrick's Day to give us all hope.

Happy Valentine's Day!

 

We had an interesting week; weather had a diabolical mind of its own.  One day was cold, damp, slushy, slippery yuck!  Made it hard to get from Point A to Point B.  No sun for what seemed like weeks, and now it is going to be 52 and sunny, low humidity, finally.

 

                                                    My portrait of a penny doll.

                                                Wonderful Valentine Tea and Tree by my friend Bebe

        

I’ve asked God to forgive me today; I stayed home from Church and choir; exhausted and all kinds of “ouchies.”  It doesn’t help when you trip and fall on your guitar case as I did a couple weeks ago, when my guitar gently wept.

 

Valentine’s Day is imminent, I remind everyone that it is the feast day of St. Valentine, a martyr.  As a prisoner, he taught his jailor’s daughter, no small task, since she was blind.  There was no Braille or talking books or anything else.  The night before he was executed, the saint left her a note, I guess to be read to her, and he signed, “your Valentine.”  The miracle associated with Valentine is that after he was martyred, the little girl was able to see.  My college age students had tears in their eyes when they read the life of Valentine.  My , best Valentine’s Days were with my family  and with my class mates, when we exchanged cards through the Valentine Box.

 

Today, I am cooking, making Panna Cotta, and my mom’s avgolemono soup again (egg lemon).  Panna Cotta is my first go round.  I’ll let you know.  Having new projects, cooking, all inform my art and my writing.

 

Also inspired by a show on  Acorn, Stitch in Time.  Narrator demonstrated how no scrap of material went unused in a suit made for Charles II.  I thought of later 17^th and 18^th century dolls, commonly called Queen Anne, where the dresses are often made of strips of different materials sewn together.

 

Also, my book Toying with Death is now being typeset.  The good end is near!  Be safe this week and always.  Spring is nigh!!

 

 

We had an interesting week; weather had a diabolical mind of its own.  One day was cold, damp, slushy, slippery yuck!  Made it hard to get from Point A to Point B.  No sun for what seemed like weeks, and now it is going to be 52 and sunny, low humidity, finally.

 

I’ve asked God to forgive me today; I stayed home from Church and choir; exhausted and all kinds of “ouchies.”  It doesn’t help when you trip and fall on your guitar case as I did a couple weeks ago, when my guitar gently wept.

 

Valentine’s Day is imminent, I remind everyone that it is the feast day of St. Valentine, a martyr.  As a prisoner, he taught his jailor’s daughter, no small task, since she was blind.  There was no Braille or talking books or anything else.  The night before he was executed, the saint left her a note, I guess to be read to her, and he signed, “your Valentine.”  The miracle associated with Valentine is that after he was martyred, the little girl was able to see.  My college age students had tears in their eyes when they read the life of Valentine.  My , best Valentine’s Days were with my family  and with my class mates, when we exchanged cards through the Valentine Box.

 

Today, I am cooking, making Panna Cotta, and my mom’s avgolemono soup again (egg lemon).  Panna Cotta is my first go round.  I’ll let you know.  Having new projects, cooking, all inform my art and my writing.

 

Also inspired by a show on  Acorn, Stitch in Time. https://acorn.tv/stitchintime. Narrator demonstrated how no scrap of material went unused in a suit made for Charles II.  I thought of later 17^th and 18^th century dolls, commonly called Queen Anne, where the dresses are often made of strips of different materials sewn together.

 

My book Toying with Death is now being typeset.  The good end is near!  Be safe this week and always.  Spring is nigh!!

 

 

                                                                Public Domain Image

 

Writers Beginnings

 

With 2023 comfortably entrenching itself into everyone’s lives, I find myself reminiscing about what made me begin writing. Two things used to happen that influenced me.  My uncle Jim read to me from a big book of children’s Bible stories.  I still have it, with its beautiful illustrations and large print.  It i from the late forties/early fifties, and had belonged to his baby brother, George.  Well, three things happened, because George told me stories when I was around four, of Tudor history and Renaissance wars.  He also took me to libraries and book stores.   The third thing that happened was my Dad making up bedtime stories about the mouse police, and village inhabited by bunnies, squirrels, birds, and other animals that I liked.

 

Books were always number one in my house, and my mother signed me up for a child’s book of the month club.  Later, I was part of the Great Books after school program, sort of a grade school book club.    I was first in line at the Scholastic book sales, and sales of used books our teachers had once in a while.  Reading naturally leads to writing, with lots of ideas running through one’s head, percolating with imagination.

 

I liked writing stories in school, as well as little poems.  I also enjoyed making stories up for my cousins, and my classmates.  By age ten, I was part of a writers group, where three of us wrote stories and shared them with each other. 

 

By junior high, I was doing my own “books”, reports on different topics illustrated with Xeroxed pictures, or illustrations my Mom and I found in old textbooks from Kresge’s and Woolworth’s.  They always had a bibliography, and I always got As on them.  They may have been homework, but I liked compiling them.  Before I learned to type, I wrote the text by hand, laboring to make my handwriting, if not pretty, legible.

 

Since then, I’ve written, compiled, edited, almost nonstop.  I jot notes wherever I can, and have a whole library of journals with ideas, perhaps more than I’ll live to write. I’m still at it, in short.

 

Saturday, a friend connected with our local writing center brought me some books on dolls, but also some albums her own mother had compiled, full of photos and information on dolls and figurines.  I was over the moon.  This was a woman who was a kindred spirit.  She even used the same albums we had used to create scrapbooks of our family photos and mementos.  This urge to compile and conserve has dictated my professional life, and also my museum.  I have a book showing my business plan with sketches and ideas.  I also have research files and notes, and of course, a very big library.  My family is full of artists, teachers, and writers.  My grandmother was poor, and only went to school till she was eleven.  She and my other grandmother studied to be seamstresses.  Yet, my mother’s mother clipped out poems, and held them together with safety pins, making little chapbooks of her own.  I have them now, with her quilts, lace doilies, and doll clothes. I’m like one of her quilts, all these pieces of my life sewn together with a pen, and my memories, compiled into books, poems, essays, and more.

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Where have all the Christmas Trees gone?

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Where have all the Christmas Trees gone?:   Where have all the Christmas Trees gone?   On this tenth day of Christmas, I must note something was missing this season.   There were...

From our Guest Blogger, Dr. David Levy, a Beautiful Tribute to his late Wife, Wendee

 Skyward

 

November 2022

 

   Goodbye, Wendee.

 

   Dear readers,

What follows is the most difficult article I have ever written.  On Friday, September 23,  2022, my wife Wendee died.  She had been suffering from metastatic breast cancer for over a decade, but this past summer she was truly and clearly suffering.  We had an oncologist who was good clinically but who had no bedside manner, and a nurse practitioner who was very good, but a bit of a pollyanna.  Therefore, when Wendee began to destabilize by the hour near the end of September, I was just not prepared for it.  

            Wendee and I were together for more than thirty years, and we were married for the last 25 of them.    We got together as the result of a fix-up.  When Wendee’s Mom, Annette Wallach,  and my Mom, Edith Pailet Levy, resumed their childhood friendship in 1985, my father has just died from Alzheimer’s Disease.  They got together  in Montreal and immediately shared stories about their children.  Wendee, it turned out, had just separated from her first husband and I was long since divcorced from my “practice wife.”  They decided to try to bring us together.  Wendee was the first to reject the idea:  “I am a dog person; he is a cat person,” she said; “I am an athlete, and he is a couch potato.” (I could say that over time I became a dog person and Wendee became a couch potato, but I won’t.)

 I just ignored my Mom’s suggestion.  Every year, or two, Mom would repeat her idea.  After seven years, Mom asked again, and when I still had not done anything, she annoyingly chastised me and said, “forget the whole thing.  Forget I ever asked you.”  That was a challenge.  On March 23, 1992 (one year to the day before I took the two photographs that led to the discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 that would strike Jupiter in 1994)  I typed out a post card to her in Las Cruces.  She replied and we finally met that summer.  After lunch and a conversation with her and her two sisters, I returned to Clyde and Patsy Tombaugh’s house,where I was staying.  When Patsy answered the door she asked  ”Well, how did your date go?”  I looked at her and replied,  “Patsy, I have just spent time with the three most beautiful women I have ever met!”

            Early in our relationship, we were driving near Las Cruces.  It was a clear dark night and we got out of the car.  Wendee looked up and asked me,  “What star is that?” 

“That bright star,” I answered her, “is Vega.”  Just then Wendee recalled that her first husband, long since divorced, had warned her that he would never answer her questions more than once.  Wendee then inquired of me,  “David, if I were to ask you every night, looking at that same star,  the same question, ‘What star is that?’  what would you do?”

“I would explain to you, every night,” I replied, “that star is Vega.  “And I would never, ever, tire of it.” 

 On another evening I was driving Clyde and Patsy Tombaugh back from a dinner engagement.”  Clyde was sitting up front with me, and Wendee was in the back seat with Patsy.  “Clyde, I am going to take you home first and then I will take Wendee home.”

“David,” why not just drop Wendee off on the way?  It would be faster.”

“Clyde I may want to hug her and give her a big kiss.”

“That’s okay.  We’ll wait!”

The group in the car got silent.  I looked back towards Wendee, then to Clyde, and I said, “Clyde, I am taking you and Patsy home first.”  As Wendee and Patsy giggled in the back seat,  Clyde said, “OK.  Now that you explain it!”

Wendee And I were married in the Flandrau Science Center on March 23 (that magic date again) 1997.  The reception at our home featured Comet Hale-Bopp and a lunar eclipse.  Our first few months were difficult.  Gene Shoemaker was killed in a car accident in Australia that July, and I had two cancer surgeries (prostate and right kidney) later that year.    But as I recovered, our marriage became fun and interesting.  We travelled everywhere.  Possibly her favorite trip was to the outback near Alice Springs, where we observed over two thousand meteors on a single night in November 2001.   Because for a short period we saw one meteor per second, I considered the Leonids that year a meteor storm.

We took three trips to Israel together, the last two of which were part of my doctoral work at the Hebrew University on the night sky in Shakespeare’s time.  I loved that particular period in my life, and Wendee and I had a lot of fun navigating the multitude of rules and regulations that the University appeared to make up as we went along.  Near the end of that process, I wrote a routine question about the dimensions of the European paper I needed to use.    The next morning I found Wendee looking at her email.  “I need for you to read this message now,” she said.  “Is it good news?”

“I do think so.”  The letter was from the Hebrew University, announcing that the University Senate had just awarded my Ph. D. and that they hoped we would come to Israel to receive the degree in person.  We spent the remainder of that happy day making flight arrangements. 

Wendee served as director of our Jarnac Observatory, and I served as her assistant.  I used it every clear night.  During the 26 years we lived in our Vail home,  I discovered only one comet, in 2006.  The comet was confirmed by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams just as we returned home from the Yom Kippur services.  I was so overwhelmed by the message that I printed it, and then without a word, cried as I walked back to the house and showed it to Wendee.   

Wendee’s greatest joy was not so much me, but our daughter Nanette and our grandchildren Summer and Matthew.  One night, when she was a college student, our granddaughter Summer contacted us to inquire of a bright red star she noticed high in the southern sky.  What followed was a wonderful conversation about Mars, Percival Lowell, and the possibilities of life somewhere on that distant world.   Our grandson Matthew provided us with golden opportunities to show how, when he looks at the stars, he can escape the chatter of the nightly news and appreciate the big picture of the night sky and the Universe at our doorstep.

Our marriage gave me an opening to write some books, but my favorite book began when one morning I found Wendee reading intently. “You never told me you wrote a book about your dog when you were ten years old.”   She found that crazy old book the most delightful she had seen, and she wanted me to revise it.

By this time, around 2013, she had received her diagnosis of breast cancer.  For years she did very well, until the end of last summer when she needed surgery to remove her ovaries.  After that she began chemotherapy, which worked for a few months.

By the spring of 2022 all the treatments stopped working.  Wendee insisted that I go to this year’s Adirondack Astronomy Retreat, but she was obviously suffering.  We made a 911 call in mid September, and a second one two weeks later.  In between  I presented her with the first copy of Clipper, my new book for children.  She was able briefly to hold it up and examine the front and back covers.  With that second 911,  I was pretty certain she would never be coming home.  Wendee died on Friday evening, September 23.  She was 73 years old.

The night before her funeral, our son-in-law Mark, our grandson Matthew, and I were enjoying an evening in the observatory.  Matthew saw a bright meteor, and as I  questioned him on its direction, I saw a faint one.  Mark saw a third meteor.  I like to think that this minor outburst of the October Cygnid meteor shower – three meteors within a period of about 5 minutes – were Wendee’s goodbye.  Rest in peace, my sweet Wendee.

 

 

American Doll and Toy Museum: This is Halloween!

American Doll and Toy Museum: This is Halloween!:  Enjoy!

This is Halloween!

 Enjoy!