This is a different kind of life story. My husband and I married right after college, and when he was diagnosed with cancer, I eventually found it hard to know what to say or do to chase the clouds away. With mortality staring me in the face, I realized there were things I wanted to share about us and the family before it was too late. So I dived into writing about what stood out in memory. Things that defined us. Things that defined me. The ultimate result was "Plato and Potato Chips."
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June Inc. Luvisi. Plato and Potato Chips
Prologue
Just Starting
Discovering Mozart
Just Sayin’
Need for improved schools and Morning Joe
Truth and Beauty
Socrates and me
Plato, Mozart, and me
Gracious Japan
Dog Days
China and Grandma June
Wheels of Steel
The Organic Egg and I
Wordsworth, poetry, and me
Potato chips, the girl down the block and WWII
Keats and me and anonymous
Strawberries and my mom
Piano lessons
The breath of autumn
Dickens and me
Home birth
Riverview and me
Emily and the world
Nature speaks
Soup for the soul
Miss Sandholm and me
The social worker
Peonies next door
The Sound of Music
Streetcars
Corner drugstore
Radio days and “The Singing Lady”
Edna May Oliver, Shirley Temple, and me
Grandma June’s Huckwheat Pancakes
Mud Sculpture
The Cosmos and me
Painting day
Motoring in southern France
Christmas Card painting at the printers!
Oh, Xmas tree!
Full of Beans!
Bringing Up Baby
My Dad’s Hat
Pops on the Corner
Winter in Chicago
Gray skies and stew
More tests
Filtered sunshine
Stage fright, Act 1
Stage fright, Act 2
Stage fright Act 3
My husband’s legs
John and his grill
Mountains
Lady Gaga and Mozart
Hot New Babymoons!
Addict?
Blondes Have More Fun!
Chicago’s Wondrous Weather!
Grandma, a Geek!
Chopin’s Golden Years
Shocking Red Lipstick!
Coffee, Cream and Me
I'm "Dancing with the Stars!"
Dear Mom, Now I Know
Mother in the Garden
Be My Love!
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I married John, my college sweet heart, and when he died last year, we had been married almost 59 years. He was ill for years. Having had two hip operations, one back operation and having been diagnosed with prostate cancer, worry had been a familiar figure at our house. When in school, I had taken a lot of psychology courses, and thought I knew something about worry and stress and how to handle them, but I found theory and reality are two different things.
Eventually the atmosphere turned very bleak, and I sometimes ran out of things to say to cheer up my husband who had to deal with daily pain. And I began to worry that both of us might sink into depression.
.....
Now I listen in rapture to our own family sopranos. And somehow the exquisite fragility of soprano singing seems to me to find its most fertile ground in the music of the supreme master, Mozart. Even when it’s not an opera, he makes the instruments sing. And my soul, too.
Though I loved the beautiful movie Amadeus, I feel many have concluded that Mozart was a kind of clown as a result of seeing the film. They fail to consider the political scene in which he had to live and to understand that playing the buffoon sometimes deflected the social, paternal, and professional animosities with which he had to deal.
