Life's Loving Memories

  MIDDLE SCHOOL DANCE CLASS "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars."                                                                                                            --Les Brown When I was in seventh grade, I took a dance class for my PE credit.   Over the semester we divided up into groups and created dances, then shared them with our class. At the end of the semester all the students got to perform a show for the whole student body.   All the students except me and another girl who had a broken arm-we got to sit in the Locker room by ourselves.   For years I thought I had no talent for dancing. Fast forward to college and my theatre degree.   I needed to take tap dancing and ballet.   I was incredibly nervous about taking the classes and held out until my junior year.   Much to my surprise, when I took tap, the teacher taught us step by step.   He taught us to say out loud what our feet were doing, “Shuffle-hop-step-fa-lap.”

  "Remember that a parachute cannot open while you are standing on the ground. But he moment you make that bold jump out of your old comfort zone your parachute will instantly unfurl and  help you to sail along."                          -- Carolyn Renolds, Spiritual Fitness MY PARENTS HISTORY  My mom and dad were both wonderful people.   Their beginnings were greatly different, but they stayed together until my father died at sixty-eight. My mother was born to Methodist Missionaries in India.   She lived in India until she was three-years old. The family returned to the states after her father recovered from malaria.   When they returned to the states in 1919, the flu epidemic claimed my Grandfather Paul’s life.   My Grandmother Harriet was left to raise six children. She raised vegetables in her garden, feed her family rice, and on Sundays they had chicken. It was my mother’s job to bring a chicken home every week from the chicken farm, since live chickens cost less.  

  NOTHING BUT IMAGINATION "That music you hear inside of you urging you to take risks and follow your dreams is your intuitive connection to the purpose in your heart since birth."                                                 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace   --Wayne Dyer All through my childhood, our family never had much money.   I never knew it, because we were always engaged in fun activities: Making paper dolls, playing games, creating all sorts of things with buttons, tissue, and even leaves from the back yard. But most of all, I was given the gift of enjoying reading.   What we lacked in money, we made up for in feeling loved.   Sometimes having less allows you to tap into your mind for what is most important in life, finding happiness in every situation. In my first apartment in college, we used an old wire spool for a table, made bookcases out of cement blocks and flat boards. There was almost no money coming in, but we still went out for an occasional m

                                                                                                                                          JABBERWOCKY "Our starting point is to recognize God at the center of our being, to have faith in this Divine Presence within us, and have an equal faith in the Divine in everyone else."                                                                                               The Science of Mind        --Erenst Holmes I am so thankful for my brother and sisters in my family; they did so much to contribute to who I am today.  My oldest sister use to read Nancy Drew books out loud to me at night; and when she had to memorize something for an English class, she would teach it to me to help her learn it.  Lewis Carrol’s, The Jabberwocky was one of her assignments. “The claws that bite, the claws that catch.”  The poem uses nonsensical words to tell the tale of a young lad who slew a giant beast and joyfully brought the head back to his m

  "One of the most amazing events in the development of man into his present physical form occurred in the early stages of his existence...But through infinite changes and variations a fuller and more perfect expression of it occurred."                   A New Design for Living"                    --Ernest Holmes GOING TO KINDERGARTEN Shyness was one of my noted qualities as a child, so imagine my horror as my mother left me by myself at my first day of kindergarten.   I cried as she started to leave me, and she told me not to worry, she would be right out in the hall. I made it through the day, but I am fairly sure she was not out in the hall all that time just waiting. I guess that was my first lesson in, “Feel the fear but do it anyway”. I started kindergarten in Illinois, and finished it in Michigan, and then did the same thing with first grade.   I traveled with my mom back and forth between the two states, two times, because she was first trying to rent our old h