Sometimes we all get a little tattered, a little weather-worn, especially during the winter.
I rescued the little Valentine Bear from the pile of items from my mother-in-law’s house, which was sold several springs ago. We still have all the rescued stuff on our patio, open to the weather, and the raccoons from the city park across the street.
I suspect he belonged to one of the two nieces who each lived for a time with Grandma. Sarooty Incaboody or Maroody Walladooty. One of them, though not both of them, and I haven’t given you their real names. Grandma had to move to San Antonio where there are more Filipino relatives to protect her from the weather. But less room for a lifetime of stuff that once belonged to her and my long-gone father-in-law. e lWell, she passed away too the winter before last
You can see his right ear is damaged and needs to be resewn with red thread. His fur is a little crusty from the rain this last week and the dirt blown by the cold winds from this week. He’s a mess, and I thought I better bring him in and fix him up before the park fairies do the whole Velveteen Rabbit thing to him. After all, we don’t need a baby polar bear wandering around the Dallas suburbs, do we? And someone once loved him enough to keep him. He deserves to be cared for in retirement as much as I do.
I myself am a bit tattered and weather-worn by this pandemic. Being trapped in the house all day every day deprives me of the physical activity that keeps my heart healthy and my diabetes under control. My mental health is a little ragged around the edges as well. In this house, we tend to get kinda snippy about money woes and unpaid bills. My wife and I now have separate finances. I was bankrupt, and she is counting on Armageddon to overcome her credit-card-debt monsters.
My answer to the crisis continues to revolve around books and writing and movies and documentaries. I retreat into stories and ideas, both in the form of fiction and well-researched nonfiction. I throw myself whole-souled into the promotion of my books by earning the necessary points from Pubby by reading and reviewing the books of others and spending the points on honest reviews from other writers reading my books. I have never reviewed so many books before. Especially new is the number of badly written books that I have to slog through and then review honestly in a way that doesn’t crush the spirit of the slow-learning writing masses. I think, so far, I have only driven one writer to quit the review exchange. And I have only received two cruel and unfair reviews of my work. Which is, of course, less than expected.
The least mind-bending activity I use to repair my psyche is fixing up and playing with dolls, as indicated by the photos I have used in this post.
In these pictures, you see five bargain-bin dolls and toys, two dolls purchased at Goodwill, and cleaned and dressed in a reclamation project. One repurposed aquarium decoration (the skull) and one Pinkie Pie that I bought with Christmas money at the full six-dollar price.
By doing these things, I have managed to avoid getting the flu and generally avoided depression and mental illness.
Catch a Falling Star 