Today is my birthday.   Eighty-six years young.  It is a wonderful thing to have a long life.  You get to welcome your great-grandchildren into the world.  Halley and Hailey spent Saturday with me.  They are eleven and eight years old.  It was fun !! They are wonderful girls.  I have ten grandchildren and ten or eleven great-grandchildren.  ( I need to count them again.)

The only bad thing is that all of your friends are leaving you behind as they go to meet our God.  I guess that explains the old saying that you are “The last leaf on the tree.”  That’s what I am.  But it gives you time to see a lot of prayers answered.  I always tell God to answer me “Now.”  But sometimes He has other times in mind.  And what a blessing it is to live long enough to see your prayers answered for your loved ones.

My plan is to do nothing else all day.

All of my determination to reform and blog every day have gone by the wayside.  I am really sick.  All I can do at this point is try to get well, and it isn’t working.

Pray for me.  Please.  In five days I will be 86.  I would like to get there in good health...and it is possible.  The medical community can’t figure out what is wrong with me.  Maybe a good prayer would be for them to have wisdom.

Jeanette told me that a little boy said, “My mama always kisses the toilet paper before she throws it away.”  We were talking about funny things children say.  Of course his mama was blotting her lipstick.

Learning a language is always a trial and error kind of thing.  We start a little one off with Mama, or Dada, and add words one at a time.  But sentences are another thing altogether. 

The Bradford pear trees have been blooming in all of their glory for the last two weeks, but today the blooms are losing their white petals and they look like snow piling up along the curbs of the roads and like snow flakes flying through the air.  And then they will be gone...they do their once a year thing--like the daffodils.   

It is time for the redbuds.   They are always in bloom on my birthday.  People start calling me to wish me a Happy Birthday when the first blooms appear. This year they are early. But I’ll take a “Happy Birthday” whenever I get it.

My yard person is coming this afternoon to get the flower beds in order for spring.  He will trim back all the shaggy branches of the shrubs, mulch and top off the Crepe Myrtles.  And I will plant parsley.  That will be the extent of my gardening this year.  Just enough to keep me in Tabouli greens.  If Lowes gets asparagus in, I’ll plant some of that as well.  But it takes three years of growing before you can pick it.  It’s an insurance policy--that I’ll be around in three years!!! 

My speech is over.  Thank goodness.  My biggest critic (Me) thought I did okay.   I had worked myself up into a frenzy.  And when I got to the downtown Tulsa Hyatt Regency and walked into the lobby and my picture was on an overhead film feed, and my picture was on ten foot high posters throughout the building, my nerves took another turn South.  I knew it was a big deal, but not that big a deal.  I knew that my book “The Letter” had been chosen by the Okla. Library Association, but had no idea how many people were involved.  

At this point, the book is in the hands of God, and in the hands of all of you out there who recommend it to a friend to read.  Word of mouth determines most of this kind of thing.  And all of you have been overly gracious to me.

The publisher picked up two other books that I have written.  One about Ken, (The Corsair) and another about my grandmother (The Jersey Cow).  It gives me a reason to take care of my health--I hope to see them in print.

My posting has been erratic--I know.  And I used to do it first thing every day.  But somehow with all of this sickness I’ve had, I am out of whack.  I am trying to get back on whack.  Maybe when today and tomorrow are done, I will be back to my old self.

Today is a meeting of all the librarians in Oklahoma and I am supposed to meet them in Tulsa and “get acquainted.”  Tomorrow, I will be speaking to them about my first book, why I wrote it, what it is about etc. etc.  It is “up” for some kind of an award.

I don’t like things “out there” on my calendar.  I feel like I have a ball and chain around my neck.  People tell me that this is just a symptom of old age.  Maybe...but I know this...I like peace and quiet. A visitor every now and then is nice, but I tire out really quick.

After I speak to all of the Oklahoma librarians tomorrow, I’m going to do nothing for a while.  Maybe I’ll get back to writing.  My granddad, my father’s dad, was murdered.  Someone shot him and they never found out who...or why.  That might make an interesting book????

I have made myself a wreck of nerves over next Thursday...I am supposed to go to Tulsa and speak to all of Oklahoma’s librarians.  They chose my book as the “big deal” of the year and want to hear what I have to say about it.  My publisher asked, “Why did you write it?”  Like I would know.  I don’t have a clue.  I just started writing.

The only answer I could come up with was that Americans were spitting on our servicemen as they came home from Vietnam--calling them every bad word imaginable, and cursing them as if they had something to do with America’s policies.  Poor guys got drafted.  They went to war.  Or left the country to get away from it.

I was thinking about the children that they left at home.... and since Ken had nineteen years in the Marines, he got sent.  I was thinking about our children.  How awful it must have felt that their country was blaming him for the war when he had nothing to do with it.  In WWII and Korea, we had parades for our servicemen.  In Vietnam, they got spit on.  All three wars at the mercy of the draft.  We don’t have the draft anymore.