Ba
ck when I was in high school my mother encountered a man who had once lived across the street from her family home. He and his brother had rented rooms there. Mama said that she had developed a crush on this man’s brother mostly because he was a student at Rice University and she always had a thing for highly intelligent men. Nothing ever came of her fantasies and she moved on into adulthood only to one day have a chance meeting with the old neighbor. She learned that the man was a widower, having lost his wife to cancer. He was lonely and raising children much like Mama. I suppose it was inevitable that he would eventually ask her out on a date. It seemed as though they had much in common but nothing might have been further from the truth.
After their first outing together my mom came home and insisted that she was never going to see this guy again. He was totally not her type even though he was quite handsome. He had not been particularly successful in life, never even attending college and constantly moving from one dead end job to another. Mama saw no future for them and that seemed to be the end of that. Unfortunately the man was quite persistent and my mama was far too kind to keep putting him off. Before she was even able to explain what had happened he had become a constant fixture around our house and not a particularly welcome one. In fact, I disliked him intensely mostly because of his politics. Continue reading “The Alternative Right”
I’m sitting in a waiting room at Methodist Hospital while Mike has some minor surgery. He tends to get cysts in his back that grow until they are pressing on nerves and they sometimes get infected opening the possibility of MRSA. He’s had a couple of the culprits removed over the years so it is a somewhat routine procedure but as we all know anything can happen whenever someone receives an anesthetic and goes under the knife. I suspect that we’ll be headed home in a few hours but I don’t take the process lightly given the seriousness of the pre-operative paperwork and preparation involved. 
There are a great number of people complaining about the state of the world these days and admittedly we have a mess or two on our hands but in the grand scheme of things our fate is actually less difficult than that which mankind has endured in the past. A brief look at the history of the world confirms my grandfather’s favorite witticism that “these are the good old days.” We sometimes forget about the hardships and discriminations that people who came before us bore. We talk of a war on women but even the worst chauvinist pigs can’t compare with the treatment of our grandmothers and great grandmothers, not to mention a sizable number of ladies in other parts of the world even in modern times. It wasn’t that long ago that African Americans were slaves or that their children were prohibited from staying in hotels or eating in restaurants that were open to those of us lucky enough to have white skin. I’m Sharron Burnett rather than Sharron Gonzalez because when my father-in-law adopted my husband he insisted that Mike keep the name with which he was born lest he encounter prejudice. We still have much to improve but in general the world and our country in particular is a far better place than it was when I was still a young girl.
Anna Marie Duke, AKA Patty Duke, was one of my all time favorite people. It wasn’t so much her acting career that intrigued me as her passionate efforts for mental health. Patty as the world knew her was a highly successful child star from an incredibly dysfunctional home. Her father was an abusive alcoholic and her mother suffered from bouts of deep dark depression. When Patty was still quite young her mother turned over the full time care of her daughter to agents who literally told the child that Anna Marie was dead and that she would forevermore be known as Patty. The husband and wife team certainly helped the young girl to launch her career but life in their home was loveless and Patty was miserable and confused. 
