perspective blogathon!

Oh, yeah, THIS sounds like just my cup of tea! A Juxtaposition Blogathon! I don't consider myself a film connoiseur, but I am assuredly an aficionado and, as such, have been known to enjoy a movie or two on many an occasion. In fact, if you add the word "festival" after "film", I am ALL OVER IT. I just can't help myself and I blame Mama for my love of movies. I tell you, if she had the chance to move us to Los Angeles or New York to be closer to filmdom, she would have.
I've not yet had the pleasure of participating in a blogathon, so this will be another NEW experience. Yeah! Who knows, maybe I might host a blogathon on my own someday - doubtful, that - and this will gain me some modicum of knowledge about such an event. Barring that, it's a great opportunity to share my reviews on TWO OR MORE movies with other fans of cinematic offerings. Also, I very much look forward to reading the offerings of others to see what direction THEY will take the topic.
Perspective, as I have said many times, IS everything. I was recently at the opening talk for this year's Common Read. The speaker opened the topic, providing background on the selected book for those who might have not yet read it. She then brought forth on the stage a panel of twelve and allowed each to state which aspect of the book was the most meaningful (and each gave discourse on why they chose that aspect). Then, when all had a turn and the floor was opened to questions, a member of the audience with yet another viewpoint was invited to join the panel onstage. At the end, including the speaker, there were fourteen members of society who had spoken of the very same book. EVERY ONE OF THESE PEOPLE HAD A DIFFERENT MESSAGE THEY HAD GARNERED. Every single person, with their different knowledge bases, their different life experiences, had read the same words and yet focused on a different central idea. I found the discussion to be extremely interesting and an awesome example of how unique the mind of each person truly is.

Barton: A hero's final flight | savannahnow.com

Barton: A hero's final flight.

"By Tom Barton
Posted Aug 17, 2011 at 1:22 AM

Want to know what sheer terror feels like?
It feels like falling.
It feels like one long blast of cold air rushing against you. It feels like you don’t have a prayer, as the ground that’s thousands of feet below you is coming up fast.
Your only hope of salvation is a tenuous one - a jumbled up wad of nylon and rope. But it’s all you’ve got. So you give it your biggest bear hug possible.
This pile of fabric and string was once a neatly folded parachute, Not anymore.
As you crawled through the fuselage of your crippled B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber, where you served as a ball turret gunner in missions over Germany during World War II, the chute pack had worked itself open. About 20 feet of parachute had unraveled inside the doomed aircraft.
Several of your buddies had already jumped. Now it’s your turn. But you can’t repack your chute. There’s no time.
So you do the next best thing. You gather it up in front of you, much like grabbing a big armful of heavy linen from the ground. But you can’t push yourself through the tornado that’s rushing through the open door. You don’t have extra hands. So you ask one of the last guys on board to give you the boot.
Then you’re falling into the abyss. You’re wondering whether your handful of chute will sprout into angel wings when you finally let go.
“At about 10,000 feet, I decided, let’s have done with it,” Frank Barry said.
“I threw up my hands. It blossomed like a balloon. It was the prettiest thing I ever saw.”
I hadn’t heard Frank’s war story until Tuesday. That’s when I finally listened to the DVD he gave me several months ago. The disk contained interviews that Barry and another World War II vet from Savannah, George DeLoach, a former B-24 pilot, had given at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Pooler as part of its oral history program.
God bless the museum for this project. Stories of bravery, service and sacrifice never grow old. But if you don’t write them down or record them, they’re gone forever. A terrible loss.
I came to know Frank through Blessed Sacrament Church, where he was a member. He always sat in a back pew, usually at the 8 a.m. Sunday Mass. He was small in stature, walked slowly with the aid of a cane and typically was by himself. In the winter, he kept his head warm with a jaunty tam-o’-shanter. A flat-top haircut didn’t do the trick.
We’d occasionally meet for early coffee at the McDonald’s on DeRenne Avenue near his house. We’d talk college football (he was a huge Georgia Tech fan, his only failing), current events (he devoured the newspaper) and family (he knew my daughter through one of his grandsons). But he seldom talked about himself. Or the war. He was that kind of guy. Humble. Unassuming. Gracious.
As it turned out, his dullest stories trumped my best every time.
I did learn from Frank that he was a Depression-era child who grew up in an orphanage in Washington, Ga., then moved to Savannah to live with a sister when he was 14. He joined the Army National Guard in 1939 when he was 17. The few extra dollars were a godsend. After Pearl Harbor, he tried to become a pilot and washed out, but was sent to gunnery school to learn how to shoot from a ball turret. He had the perfect build for that cramped and dangerous quarters.
What I didn’t learn from Frank I picked up Tuesday on the DVD. I learned he shot down a German fighter on his first mission. I learned his own plane was shot down on his third mission after the bomber dropped its payload on Berlin. I learned he landed in a pig pen on a farm somewhere in northern Germany, and angry civilians carrying shotguns, axes and pitch forks captured him.
This may be the scariest part.
I learned he and hundreds of other allied prisoners spent 86 days on a forced march from one prisoner-of-war camp to another during the dead of winter with no food. The only thing they had to eat was what the guards would let them scrounge from roadside farms. Barry said his weight plunged - from 165 pounds to a skeletal 85.
“I was never so cold, so hungry in all my life,” he told his interviewer.
He was liberated from the camps after 15 months. But when his saviors offered him a sandwich, he couldn’t eat it. The same went for cereal. “I was so hungry I was nauseated. I gave it away.”
Like many servicemen who returned after the war, Frank went to college on the G.I. bill. He earned a degree in industrial management at Georgia Tech and went on to a long, successful career at the Union Camp plant in Savannah. He got married and had kids. He retired from his job in 1986.
Last November, Frank attended the dedication ceremony for the World War II monument on River Street. It wasn’t easy for a slow-moving, 89-year-old man with a cane to negotiate the cobblestones. But he had to be there. It was a proud moment.
Francis Ignatius Barry died Saturday. He will be buried with full military honors today in the Greenwich section of Bonaventure Cemetery.
It’s a pretty place. A much better landing than a pig pen. I’m guessing his soul was again snagged by an angel.

Tom Barton is the editorial page editor of the Savannah Morning News and blogs on savannahnow.com. tom.barton@savannahnow.com."

I had heard these stories from Frank's lips, so I know them well.
Still, it's good to see them in print and know that his words, and his voice, will carry on.
A balm to my aching heart, as was the graveside military entourage and salute yesterday.
My gratitude to all.

death and life

Today was my stepdad's last day on Earth. The vessel he left behind will become ashes in the next day or so, then be interred in the plot which holds my mother's ashes and stepsiblings' mother's body. This is how much he loved my mother: he split his side of the plot and agreed to be cremated so she could still be by his side. Even though he is Catholic and, as such, had always intended to have a buried body.
The last few days, we have all spent a lot of time together at the hospital. We have talked of many things, many diverse subjects. Births of children now in their twenties, having children of their own. Weddings in the near future and weddings in the past decade. Favorite movies, favorite ringtones, favorite television shows. Songs we love, songs we hate. Boxers versus briefs versus both simultaneously. Bras and when to wear them and when to shed them.
Along the way, we've regained some of the sense of family we had in the 1980's and 1990's when Mama was alive. She and my stepdad were the heart of the family and we were all expected to enjoy each other's company frequently. For Labor Day, Memorial Day, the Fouth of July, we all descended upon their house for cookouts, bringing spouses, children, side dishes. For Thanksgiving, naught would do but to come to their house for the huge family feast of food and conversation and post-game napping. Christmas Eve, the house was filled with food to nibble and gifts to unwrap and children to be thrilled!
After Mama died in 2001, the family traditions did, too. The bridged family fell into nuclear units (I can just see my stepdad smile and say "I knew you would get some chemistry in there!). Sure, we still all reunited for Christmas Eve, but it was an abbreviated affair. No more of folks coming together all afternoon and mixing and mingling. Now we met at the house at 6 pm, made ouselves some sandwiches and gobbled sweets, quickly opened gifts in a madhouse, then packed up and left.
No more cookouts on the weekends of Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day. We all had our own cookouts and somehow didn't invite the others. We all moved into different and new "family" units with longtime and new friends. Sure, part of that is to be expected as the children grow older, as we ourselves grow older. It's certainly good to have "family" that we have CHOSEN, not been born into. The downside, though, is we have all drifted apart, losing sight of our relationships to each other.
His time in the hospital brought us all to one location for an extended period of time. His few short days led to long discussions and much contact between those he was leaving behind. His death has reunited us as a family.
I know Himself would have been pleased.

well, hell

My stepdad is unconscious. He has been that way since late yesterday afternoon. All because he fell and broke his hip on Friday morning.
In truth, he didn't actually break his hip, but he shattered the head of the femur where it fits into the hip. He had been washing a load of laundry, as he has done many times throughout his 89 years of life. Apparently, he had finished and was taking the clean clothes into the house when he got tripped up and fell in his carport. He finally managed to attract the attention of a neighbor, then spent all day in the emergency room while options were discussed. Finally, a choice was made and he was moved to another hospital to have a partial hip replacement. The plan was to have the surgery Saturday morning, get him up and on the new hip on Sunday, then return him to the initial hospital for two weeks of physical therapy.
Instead, after the surgery he developed a fever three degrees higher than body temperature. The doctors then had to find out where the infection was and determined he had some pneumonia present and had perhaps had it for a while. Throw some antibiotics at it and all would be well. He spent a lot of time sleeping on Saturday, but had good color in his cheeks when I saw him.
On Sunday, when I saw him in the early afternoon, he was fairly chipper. They had, indeed, gotten him up on the new right hip and he had even sat in the chair for a bit before moving back into the bed. The fever was only one degree higher than normal temperature. Progress! We chatted a bit, then he threw me out so he could take a nap.
On Monday, things took a serious turn for the worse. He had been up and walking around and then sat in the chair, same as the day before. This time, however, when it was time to move back into the bed in mid-afternoon, he passed out and scared everybody to death. Good thing he's a man of slight build and the on-duty nurse was a young man who caught him and kept him from breaking any other bones. He was moved into an Intensive Care Unit room for monitoring and tests. A CT scan revealed blood clots in his lungs, so now they would have to determine what new course of action to take.
By the time I saw him late that evening (approaching 9 pm), he was panicked from the oxygen mask covering his face. He reached for my hand as I entered the room and I took it and calmed him while the nurses got his heparin drip going and checked all the tubes going into him. The charge nurse then prepared some ice water to soothe his aching throat (oxygen gas has zero moisture and is quite drying) and she even swapped out his mask for the cannula tubes. Ah, relief! Now he felt so much like Himself that he even joked a bit and flirted with the nurses. Much better! After he was all set for the night and sent me home, I went, feeling much better about the situation than when I had arrived.
Things went straight to hell on Tuesday morning. Because his oxygen levels weren't high enough, the mask was put back on. No one seemed to recall that he was a World War II veteran who had spent two years in his early 20's in a German POW camp and that he was terrified of having his mouth and nose covered. Sigh. When I saw him that morning, he was extremely agitated. Meanwhile, nothing happened while we all waited for the primary vascular surgeon to consult another about the best option. Late that afternoon, they put him under to vacuum his lungs and to place a filter in his femoral artery to block any clots coming from the hip surgery site.
That course of action was apparently not the best for an aged man with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It's Wednesday and he is still unconscious and is lying in the bed, intubated - meaning a tube has been pushed from his nostrils into his lungs to carry oxygen. They are unable to insert a feeding tube because he has a hiatal hernia. This means it is simply a matter of time until his organs begin to fail. Man cannot live on glucose alone.
When I saw him early this afternoon, he looked as pale as a marble statue. I held his hand while I spoke to him and he was completely unresponsive. No hand movement, no eye movement, no movement of any kind. I don't intend to go into that ICU room again. I don't want to remember him that way and I know damn sure he wouldn't want that, either.

wonderworks

I had SUCH fun at this place! It's a hands-on science museaum, in an "upside-down" building. I made this tree on a hill using a huge frame with plastic pushpins. I even managed to get this photo before a kid hit the reset button!

thought by the volcano pool at Cypress Pointe

If you regard palm trees as a Seussian flower, they are rather pretty.