Friday, November 28, 2008

The man in the bow tie

Today, I saw, like never before the faith of our father's passing down from generation to generation. Dad Walker's uniform daily, in sickness and in health was a white shirt and bow tie and he walked and greeted everyone. I had the privilege of trying to serve him (though he, cantankerously resisted any real care of his needs). Learning about him and trying to make sure that he wasn't too sick to be alone in the house, was really my job.
Daily and on holidays when he wore that white shirt and that bow tie he was stating to the world and to my neighbors that he was a MAN OF GOD. Men need and we all need reminders of this sometimes. In the world and dealing with the world but not of the world. He is a reminder of putting on the whole armor of God to me today. He is a reminder that although we believe in the providence of God and we are struggling to keep body and soul together and have responsibility for 7 other souls and bodies than our own; the God of glory loves us and takes care of us and we can trust him. He kept reminding me and himself that it was God who laid it on my heart to serve him and so I should take no glory in it and that was true; but as much as I cried about the difference in our perspectives and the sense of loss of self that I was feeling with him in our home, was as much as I carry the lessons that his faith was to teach his son and his grandchildren, hopefully for generations to come. They who sow in tears shall reap in joy. The memory of the soldier of the Lord who changed my life will go with me to my grave and teach me to fight the good fight of faith.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Today was the day 39 years ago



That we introduced the precious "BOY" to the Great Grands. We woke up in the morning and said, Good morning,"boy". Kissed and hugged him profusely and adoringly.
Can you all believe we got a boy from God? was the question that we kept asking each other. His name is Tony, everyone kept telling us.
We were truly Thankful to God that year except for the couple of us who hadn't prayed in unison with us for this boy. Amy was cutesy and had a raspy voice and Jo was sweet as a button, but now we had "BOY". An amazing wonderful day.
It was only months before that we were begging Grandma Ruth not to send our first boy cousin away to adoption. Can we have him, please? We cried and cried. She said you all are crazy. We were.





When we went to Grandma Delaphena and Auntie we said, " We want you to meet "The Boy". Don't cry, boy, she's our grandma, don't cry. Grandma said you girls stop calling him boy or he will be 40 years old and you will still be calling him boy.
God heard our prayers and gave us a BOY. I love you Tony "Boy".
My children tease me and say that "when you get old, mommy, we are going to come and visit you and you are going to say, is that you Tony, boy?" I act like he's the only baby I know
XXOOO

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am thankful to God for a happy life with my husband and children. A relatively quiet life of labor and love and struggles and hopes and fears and real life. I am thankful for my husband of 25 years putting up with me and my shenanagans. (I burned the chicken again:) My children's happy and unhappy faces through their seasons and dear friends, new and old to enjoy and love upon. God has given us an aweful lot of love in our lives. I am thankful for my mommy and my brothers and sisters and good memories of them all with my daddy. I am thankful for the lessons from schools and churches which have gotten me to this point in my life. I am thankful that we are blessed with an invitation to go out to dinner tomorrow and I don't have to run around doing everything, I have many hands around here...
I have much to thank God for!

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Last Night I dreamed about the days

when we used to go to the park with Uncle Frank and Aunt Helen. I was back at Flushing Meadow and learning to crochet and knit and I was nearly crying when I woke up. What a beautiful day it was to go to the park and see little Jacqueline run all the way around the lake with Dad. I better get moving now that my blood pressure is getting in control. I was dreaming of jogging. I can't jog, but I can walk. BRRR, it's cold out there, maybe tomorrow. :)

Monday, November 24, 2008

My Doctor's appt went well!

Bessie and the girls have been staying away from the coffee truck. I saw them this morning for the first time in a long time. More about them on my "Robin Blog"...My Doctor is fabulous. She keeps me looking to my health and as a mother of 4 herself she is an inspiration to me to try to be healthy for them. My pressure has been the lowest in the longest time.116/60+ I am so grateful to God for this so that I can try to add to my work out routine. My weight has not followed suit and I haven't found a way to keep my weight with a sit down job. That is the next hurdle. The beauty of the autumn breezes over the reservoir were reminding me of the reason that I am grateful to be down here in NC. The views are breathtaking and I never have my camera when I am seeing things. My work schedule allows me the morning to exercise and get my house together.
Saturday, I had every intention of spending my, afterwork hours re or decorating my bathroom. I thought of painting my bathroom and hanging some artwork, but a bout with vertigo and a touch of an inner ear infection felled me into my bed for the rest of the day. My living room is clean and the floor somewhat shampooed. But my bath is a sore to me. I am dreaming of painting and allowing my muralist to paint me some artwork for my bathing enjoyment. All of my dreams must be voted for by the family design team, this crushes alot of my ideas because I have a house full of interior designers who each have their own personal design styles. Mine comes last.
Beauty begets beauty and the whole house are children of Peter Cooper and I am just a servant in Peter Cooper's house.
Next is the business prowess going to work for the good of the whole, this is the launching pad. Help me, Lord to juggle the launch pads.

Friday, November 21, 2008

I came home to a letter from Mommy!

Thanksgiving is coming. And my mommy wrote me a letter. There is not a day that I don't think about her and pray for her comfort. I realize that one of the things that I want to tell young women during the mothering years is "Don't look down!" It is staggering and there are no comrades with you when you have alot of children to raise. You talk and people can't see where you are coming from. Each child takes you a little further up the mountain climbing effort in human relations.
It reminds me of when Ben talks about walking up the Matterhorn Mountain. He thought he had a good pace and was going up the mountain and he had climbed and was getting to the top and these old ladies walked past him at about double his clip and when he got to where he could see his way up, he was just at the foot of the mountain. Motherhood is like that. You are using all of your effort and the midwife says, "its going to get worse, before it gets better!" Amen. Love you Mommy! No girls in the house anymore, only ladies!

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

I am Thankful for a vision of

the next generation growing and beautiful and blessed by God with a passion for peace. They want to know how to avoid the mistakes we've made. They want to know how to beat us in goodness and grace and hope.
It was encouraging to me to spend some time with some young men at the MALES Place, yesterday. God is good and has a wonderful plan for their lives. It is up to us to help these children find the wonderful plan for their lives early in life and not give themselves to the plans that they have in their minds for foolishness.
There are good men who are giving themselves to wrestling the foolishness out of these boys, who are not their children. I am thankful to have had the opportunity to meet these children and to fit them into my schedule; between the 6 young minds that I have the privilege of wrestling with.
"When is God going to come through for me with the family that I've been put into?"
They all seemed to say. God is above the family that He has placed us in. God has a plan for my life and He is able to use me and make me amidst any kind of mess.
I wanted to tell them about Daniel, who was alone on this earth. Snatched from a loving family and placed into a wicked, wicked world power. He had no earthly advocate. He had no earthly confidant that could deliver him from the King. I wanted to tell these boys to start a prayer meeting, like Daniel did with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigo. See what God does with the prayers of young people. Their mommas were young enough to be my children and they were all about my Enoch's age. Keep Hope Alive, is what I wanted to say.

Monday, November 17, 2008

What AM I Thankful For?

Halloween Elyse and I dressed up and went to Ezra's class to entertain the children with our silliness. We were silly! and we had a fabulous time There is much this year to be thankful for!






Today I am thankful for Good children with good and descent grades and behavior. A happy family. Loving memories. Wonderful friends and a good church where Christ is preached and His name is revered and with a wonderful choir. My mommy being out of the convent :) So maybe she can come and visit me... A visit from my sister and some of my inlaws. I am grateful for a live in NANNY, who, even though she hasn't been able to get back into school yet, takes great pleasure in serving her mother, father and siblings with love and care. My children being friends of mine as well as loves, A loving husband. A really big and happy house and the ability to go to work in a car that we are enjoying. The grounds on my job which are the setting for alot of my stories that I am compiling. Time and love and a heart that cries missing everybody.




In the old days we went to the beach...Now we go to the mountains because the beach is too far. We live near a park called Beaver Dam park and Even though we miss the cousins we have great friends down here and lots of love with one another.



Saturday, November 15, 2008

Grandma Delaphena, Uncle Roy, Where is Auntie? It was her birthday too, this month.


I am also in awe of the many women who inspired the stereotype of Aunt Jemima. It was aweinspiring that women of such obvious grace and ability condescended to serve and influence generations of Americans to love and serve the God of Glory. I think it no accident that the name of Jemima was placed upon her. She is truly a picture of humble obedience to the God of all creation. Respected in the world, she may not have been, but exalted by God to have had real relationships and true influence by rocking other women's cradles for them. The further we get away from God the further we get away from Uncle Remus and Aunt Jemima.

My Auntie, on the other hand, was also a stereo-type of the educated woman of the early 1900's. She would have been 100+ on her birthday this month. She is played in the movies by the likes of Barbara Stanwyck as in Christmas in Connecticut. She taught us without a word and when she spoke a word, it meant business. I remember a story from Aunt Joanne, who was an understudy to Auntie earlier in life. Jo was skimming through a magazine one day in front of Auntie and Auntie gently took it from her and without a word proceeded to show Jo-Jo the proper procedure to reading: front to back. Lessons that women do not know that young women need taught to them. Not a village, because a village has connectedness and disconnectedness, a family where there is stock in the future lessons which are given. Auntie took stock and is a legacy because of it.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Zip a dee do Da!

Uncle Remus and the Song of the South. What a beautiful example to me, that is of the places we have come from, in terms respect for the African American Man in America. What an honorable man was that example of acceptance and leadership, amidst untold dishonoring and dehumanising circumstances. He learned to glorify God and he learned to teach and use his leadership to build the future generations in wisdom and truth. We lose much when we throw the baby out with the bath water in terms of the stereotype. The stereotype was beautiful and to me it was a picture of how God exalts the humble. Thank God we are not living in that day and God help us to honor our President with the honor which belongs to him.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Unto Thee, I pledge my Troth?

Veteran's day is the day that we celebrate the troth of trust that we share as a nation. The trust of our children's blood and the troth of our children's minds having been given to the defense of this nation. We are one, because we share the defense of one land and one government. It is not a unity of color or of philosophy, necessarily; it is a unity of the troth's of our parents' and grandparents' trusts in one another. Uncle's and Aunt's, Grandma's and Grandpa's, from the revolution to Iraq. If we can't trust one another with our troth's, we have no nation.
Honor to the veteran's. All of our family members who have devoted themselves to the conflicts in one way or another. All of the mothers' who walk around looking for a boy they cannot see, because his soul is dearly departed. A grief that only God can fill, is owned by Him in comfort. When we lose the ministry of comfort to those dear ones, we have lost our nation. Let us continue to pledge allegiance and to give ourselves to paying our part of the troth by training young minds to trust in God and love their country.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Miriam Makeba was one of Dad's favorites

It said in the news that she died recently, at 76 years old. It always amazes me how those people were able to sing amidst the civil riots and obvious degradation that people spoke of them in the 60's. Her voice to me brings back memories of a hope that one day we would see an African American President. Beyond imagination in those days. Just give us the right to vote and to eat in the ice cream parlors in the south and such things like that. Appartheid's voice heard here and there were beautiful and there is little sound more beautiful to me than the voice of a song in the night season. She was that voice in South Africa and America. The Grace of God allows for peace in the heart which can sing even in the sadness of inequality and injustice. Love of country and love of peace can bring hope above the sad situations which we may live in at any one time or another. There is much to rejoice in, in that our foreparents such as Miriam Makeba lived to see the turn around of appartheid in South Africa and political oppressions in the US.
Perhaps her music was a part of the change. "Faith, Hope, Love, these three, but the greatest of these is..."

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Birthday Woman 22



Grandma Monica would be proud of her little woman. She baked her own cake and invited her ladies to tea. I am so pleased that she has such nice friends and such a happy, beautiful day.
22 years old!

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Grandma's Hands






I used to wonder what the mommies and daddies would do when they woke up in the morning from a bad dream. I think I asked my mommy this one day. She brushed it off and I assumed that mommy and daddy didn't have bad dreams. She could have said that they hug one another. It would have been true. I guess my mommy didn't know what I meant, because she always lived very close to her mommy and daddy and that was why we went over there so often. Because she had had a bad dream and needed a hug.
Grandma Monica would hug me like that. Whatever hard thing I was going through was forgotten when she hugged me.
I have dreamt about her hug one time since she's been gone. Then she left me and I know that God works in mysterious ways...like through Grandma's hugs or hands (as the song says)

Friday, November 7, 2008

Passing the Newspapers...

It is awesome that there is somebody on the cover that makes me look twice. Can you just believe it? Everytime I pass the Newspaper I want to pinch myself. I pray for our new President and the new generation of children growing up believing that they can be an effective part of the governing process. Dream?

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Whoda Thunk It?

"I have a dream..."said Martin Luther King. I know I couldn't imagine a Black President before now. Well, here we are. Overcome! What do we do now?

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Today is a Presidential Election , a civilized conflict!

I remember watching my parents go out to vote. We grew up in the civil rights time and there were always some emotional issues on the table that polarized the nation. The right to vote, the right to represent, the right to eat where you want and live where you can and hope and grow and elect and be elected are not new concepts. They are now and always, what is symbolized on election day.
Whoever is in office, at the end of the day, has the enormous task of unifying the perspectives that were elucidated in the campaign into one nation. "One nation under God, indivisible..." What is indivisible? Indivisible in perspective?, No! We have our own perspectives and they remain, long after the ballots are cast. We have our own identities, but we unify in that we engage in the conflict to maintain unity of perspective, in the midst of varied and various perspectives.
The ideas come to the surface in the election and as adults we are to take those perspectives and weave them into the minds of the children that are in our influence. We are above the conflict and we are above the divisions. The divisions are just clarifying the issues to be dealt with; which are a part of the pattern of the history of our nation. Fighting not against eachother, but with eachother to blend the perspectives into what we call ONE NATION!

Monday, November 3, 2008

I remember breaking down in the car

With Dad and Mom on my first or second sports night at Fontbonne. We climbed up a steep overpass over the highway at Fort Hamilton and took the train home. The excitement and the challenge were probably on the order of mountain climbing. It was about 3 am when we got home and then Mom and Dad had to borrow 100 from Aunt Iva and Uncle Larry to get the car out of the tow yard, the next day.
Things are still the same for us, as they were for them. The struggle to rear the next generation is still like mountain climbing and everytime I looked into my father's eyes he saw the same frustration that was in his own. We knew that we both knew the struggle and were determined to engage in it. Why? We did believe in life! We did believe that God blesses when you don't kill, when you could kill. The inconveniences of life conform you to strive for your own comfort. He always said, I never judge people who choose abortion, because I can understand that choice when you look at the difficulty of raising children. I didn't choose that way, because I know that I will have to answer to God for that choice. I wouldn't live that way, if I am in my right senses and I wouldn't vote that way were I in my right senses. But the difficulty of the economy allows people to think that they are choosing the right way and that abortion is not an issue.
The economy is abortion and abortion is the choice of those who vote themselves a raise and the rest of the world a decrease in pay. Young people can't start and maintain families and they are icily treading up the overpass at Fort Hamilton with Mommy and Daddy and me and I slid back down that icy overpass 100 times in my mind. Dad said hang on Jayne we can make it. Hang on family, we can make it, by the grace of God. And good choices at the poles.

Title- The Studious One!

Title-  The Studious One!
artwork by Elyse

Of biscuits and syrup

Of biscuits and syrup
tasty treats

Happy Saturday!

Happy Saturday!
a day at the Raptor Center.

Widdle Emmie in outer space school

Emmie jumped on the bus and off it flew out into the atmosphere. There was a set of clouds with turbulence right above the house and it took a few minutes for my Emmie to buckle her seatbelt. They hit the bump hard and it knocked my Emmie out of her seat and she bumped her head. The video camera came on and the monitor looked through and stated, Ms. Emmie, where are you? You are not in your seat. Where are you? I am alright I fell because I hadn’t buckled correctly. Well jump up Emmie we have a long way to go and you have to be buckled there is entirely too much turbulence in the stratosphere for you to unbuckle now. As soon as we are through this weather system there will be straight sailing but right now you must buckle. Emmie scrambled into the seat with intensity and purpose now. She watched every cloud pass her window and her nose was pressed to the window trying to see the top of the house as it drifted slowly out of sight. Soon they were not only out of sight of the house, the sun came out brightly and just as quickly they were putting on the atmospherical breathing apparatus and the outerspherical lights. The ABA and the OL. These precautions were to make them appear to be satellites to the radar as they were out in the ionosphere. Emmie knew all about this now. She had gone to the orientation and had a good breakfast and it took them 20 minutes for her to get out past the atmospherical pull and to feel the zero gravity. It would be 15 minutes before the gravity simulators would take effect, a glitch in the system which was being worked on. Until then, they enjoyed the couple of minutes of floatation, while being connected to the seats by belt. The first thing they saw everyday was the strataflotsam. The items which had been dumped into the atmosphere by earlier generations. What would their generation do about this ecological waste area that remained floating above their heads? This was a question for the generations. For now it was the area that they had to guide through on the way to school.

Midnight at the OASIS

Midnight at the OASIS
Sunset in Huntersville

My little Emmie

ran to the bus on the first day of the last year of school. 2 buns on the side of her head. She kissed me and ran at dawn to the bus. She was starting the adventure of a lifetime. I would never see that little girl again, she was going to woman school!

My Father and I 1989

My Father and I 1989

to the tune of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

A VISIT TO PAPA











Are you going to Mary Immaculate?

Apricots, Chocolate Cherries and Pie,



Remember me to the one who lived there,



He once was a true love of mine,



Tell him to buy me an acre of land,



Apricots, Chocolate Cherries and Pie,



Between the muddy Hudson in Jamaica Bay,



Then, He’ll be a true love of mine,

Tell him to sow in it seeds of pure cream,



Apricots, Chocolate Cherries and Pie,



And build Ice cream mountains and buildings of whipped cream,

Then, He’ll be a true love of mine,



Tell him to reap them with sickles of M&M’s,



Apricots, Chocolate Cherries and Pie,



And chew bubble gum and eat till we’re done,



Then, He’ll be a true love of mine.



Tell him to run it off down the motor parkway,



Apricots, Chocolate Cherries and Pie,



After your done 50 pushups



and jog down the West Side Highway,



Then he’ll be a true love of mine…

(Don’t wait for me today dad, The kids are sick again, My tummy’s bulging again, My heart is aching again, And now there’s no love there…)





He once was, a true love of mine….So, Girls, I do beg you don't miss your Daddy,Apricots, Chocolate cherries and Pie,You have one short chance to see him on this side, Go visit him and let your light shine.