Final Words of 2006

For our family 2006 was a year of enormous change. Courtney and me moving to Oregon, Maya and Eder having a baby, Aaron living apart from his mom. If the picture below is any indication, we're in for more change in 2007. Yes, Benny is on a roll and we are going to get our exercise in the coming year just trying to keep up with him.



Each time that Aaron returns to us, we see changes in him. We can either keep up or be left behind. This time he's listening to the Beatles (don't you love it!), wanting to help with the cooking and baking, reading voraciously, and of course way ahead of us in the world of modern technology. He and I are hooked on the Gilmore Girls, thanks to Maya, and we've watched the 4th season on DVD's on my laptop over the holidays. I feel quite blessed that both my kids have a very compatible sense of humor to mine.




But not all our holiday time was spent at the laptop. There was plenty of time spent at Maya and Eder's house, opening gifts around their huge, beautiful Christmas tree and sharing family meals. Eder's mom, dad, sister and her baby came from Monterey for Christmas. Eder's nephew is only two months older than Ben and of course all the attention was on the two little new people.



One of Aaron's favorite Christmas gifts was the poker set from his Granny. That got put to use right away. I'm sure it falls under the catagory of good influences. Anyway, it kept the family busy and off the streets.




When Eder wasn't winning at the poker table, he was out gleaning wood with Courtney for our wood stoves. They took Eder's truck, Courtney's chainsaw and an assortment of hand tools and off they went in their lumberjack costumes to provide for the family. With all the downed trees from the last big storm, there was lots to pick from. Each season seems to have its gifts.

I have so much in my heart to say about 2006. For me it was a milestone year--the year of my liberation from many things that were hard on me. Being in the Pacific Northwest feels right to me; living in this house, with Courtney, is an enormous blessing. I cannot say enough about how fortunate I feel. And yet there is this ever-looming hideous backdrop of suffering and cruelty and injustice. In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." Which reminds me of another timely quote, this one by Albert Camus: "In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners."




Tonight we head downtown to the Courthouse for a rally and then march marking the 3000th U.S. soldier killed in the war and occupation in Iraq. (To check the latest count of U.S. soldiers killed or maimed you can go to www.icasualties.org) As one Iraqi journalist noted, these days 3000 is about how many Iraqis die monthly. According to the British medical journal Lancet, more than 655,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion in March 2003. The introduction of the book I'm reading now, In the Belly of the Green Bird, by Nir Rosen, includes this passage:

"According to almost every Iraqi, the Americans came as liberators and now they are occupiers. In Arabic, liberation and occupation have great moral and emotional significance. Occupation means the Crusaders who slaughtered Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians, it means the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the 13th century, it means the British imperialists who divided the spoils of the Ottoman Empire with the French, and it means the Israelis in southern Lebanon and Palestine. It is hard for Americans to understand just how deeply they are hated by ordinary Iraqis."

I'll end with one more quote, and with wishes for all beings to be happy and well, harmonious and peaceful.

"Do not wage war. Love everything that has life." --from the school bag of a Palestinian father killed at a checkpoint by Israeli soldiers.

Full swing into holiday season

Ohmygoodness! How did this happen?!? I started this entry on December 5th, Maya's 25th birthday, by downloading these photos. Now it's the 18th and I'm just now back at it and ready to write. Where have the last two weeks gone? Well, I guess that's the topic, so here goes...


Now you see why I'm not writing. Too busy dressing Ben up in cute little costumes and propping him up in the papasan for yet another photo shoot. We are sooooo lucky he's such a mellow little guy. He'll probably get us back for this when he outweighs us. But, dang!, isn't he cute?!

While it was snowing in late November we decorated for Christmas. I LOVE having all the lights and ornaments strung around the windows and from the wood beams. It's so cheery when the weather and leafless trees don't look so cheery. A good place for celebrating.

For Maya's birthday we took care of Ben while she and Eder went out for dinner. When they returned, we started with a treasure hunt. I had hidden 25 quarters (are you getting the theme here?) wrapped in clues on gold paper and then wrapped in shiny gold foil. I used all the pirate talk I knew: aye, matey! and portside and grub in the galley and out on the poop deck. Needless to say, she needed a little help, but it was really fun. Her birthday gifts were the treasures and then the final clue led her to a box of goodies including pumpkin cheesecake and chocolate mousse, among others. So you can guess what we did next.



The following day Courtney left for a brief trip to Morro Bay. When your dad is 93 you don't want too much time to pass between opportunities to see each other. For me this move to Oregon has been easier. I have family here, and though that's not the same as old friends, it does help. But it's been hard on Courtney to leave his family in California, so it was great that he could slip down there for a few days with his dad and also get to see his sister Nancy in Arroyo Grande. The hard part is the 24-hour train trip each way. But no permanent damage inflicted--nothing that a shower, a meal and a good night's sleep won't cure.



As is always true when Courtney leaves town, I read. This time it was Jimmy Carter's new book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. I'm a major Jimmy Carter fan now. He's incredibly courageous to speak out on this, the most volatile subject of our time and one of the most urgent for us to be looking at. And not just looking at, but doing something about, which is what Carter is trying to jumpstart after six years of indifference (?) on the part of the U.S. government. By bankrolling Israel, vetoing every resolution in the U.N. Security Council against Israel and supporting their acts of aggression, land grabs, the building of an illegal 30 ft wall through Palestinian land which separates Palestinian people from their families, workplace, mosques, orchards and water, the U.S. is undermining any possibility of peace in the Middle East. Anyway, as you can see, I have alot of emotions about this volatile subject myself. Hopefully, lots of people will read Carter's book, and maybe even some members of Congress will. Let's hope.




Last Wednesday night Courtney helped show the new film "The Ground Truth", a riveting and intense documentary of interviews with U.S. soldiers talking about their experiences in Iraq, what made them join the military, what they were told by their recruiters and how reality differed, and how they are coping with life since their return. Many of them are very young, some are amputees, many suffer from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). All I can say about "The Ground Truth" is that if I could ask Americans to watch one film about the Iraq War (which is actually an incorrect term because a war denotes two militaries fighting, and this was an invasion and now is an occupation against a civilian population) this would be the one. At the end, when the credits came up on the screen, nobody moved a hair. There was a heavy silence in the air. And then Leah, the head of the Veterans For Peace, usually a spunky and dynamic speaker, stood up to lead the discussion and paused to catch her breath and then burst into tears. Many of us were too choked up to speak at first. Her husband Bart, who is also a vet, said he'd talked with a doctor at the VA Hospital in Salem and the doctor told him 100% of the soldiers he'd seen return from Iraq were suffering from PTSD. And a scary thing about it is that it's a scar you can't see, sometimes until it's too late. I guess this touches me personally because Maya's dad never recovered from his time in Viet Nam starting when he was 18 years old and it destroyed his life. Somehow we as a society have to quit using the lives of our young people this way. If you're interested in a copy, go to www.thegroundtruth.net and invest $15 for a very worthy cause.

Well, who says that there's no good news anymore! Courtney and I struck a deal this week and we both feel like winners. We were coming home from a meeting to help organize a local event to mark when the 3000th U.S. soldier dies in Iraq, and Courtney said he felt like a slug, like he just couldn't come up with ideas right now and the energy to make things happen. I said that's all I really want to do these days and don't really have the creative energy to cook dinner every night. Soooooooooo, Courtney is the new dinnertime chef du jour and I'm busy trying to save the world. And everybody's happy.

That's the news from our neck of the woods. May your holidays be full of love and good friendship, yummy foods, beauty and lights and blessings. The next entry I'll surely tell the tales of how we over-spent and over-ate.

Thanks as always for caring enough to read all the way to the end.

With much love,

Valori