COVID STRIKES CLOSE TO HOME

Last week the coronavirus pandemic in the United States claimed another victim. And, this time, the loss was intensely personal to me and my family. My father-in-law, Paul Frelick, age 95, contracted the disease as part of an outbreak in his assisted living center here in North Carolina, despite all the precautions the staff had taken to prevent such a health disaster. He was taken from us in little more than a week. Our only consolation was that, given Paul’s advanced health directives, the fight was brief and the end peaceful.

Paul Frelick, right, in better days with son Graeme.

One of the often-told stories in our family is that I knew my father-in-law long before I ever met my husband. Paul was my faculty advisor at Beloit College in Wisconsin, as part of his duties as professor and head of the World Affairs Center there. He often invited students over to his house just off campus for get-togethers, so I’d met most of his family before I ever met my future husband. Paul always joked that he regretted he never got the chance to play matchmaker for his son and his independent-minded student. We found our way to each other on our own.

As an ordained Presbyterian minister, though, he did serve as pastor at our wedding in 1976, a year after we graduated. He did the same for my daughter Jessie and her husband in 2005 and for lots of other family members in the years in between. He was always glad to perform that service, bringing people together on a joyous occasion.

Before and after his position at Beloit, most of Paul’s work life was spent in a similar kind of service, bringing different groups together in a mutual effort to build social justice. He worked with factory labor in post-WWII Paris; directed the John Knox Ecumenical Conference/Student Center in Geneva; was a local chapter director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews in Louisville, Kentucky; served as a Presbyterian mission educator in Cameroon and Lesotho; and finally as an educator at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.

Even after he had stopped working, he was active in his Black Mountain retirement community, interviewing new residents for articles in the newsletter and meeting with a men’s group. He liked to say—and it was certainly true from my observation—that he had “failed retirement” several times.

Paul leaves behind his beloved wife of 53 years, Ellenor, and three children from an earlier marriage (my husband Graeme, brother Andy and sister Nancy). His family legacy also includes six grandchildren (including our two daughters) and six great-grandchildren (including our three grandchildren). We will all miss him profoundly.

Sadly, Donna

A REPEAT POST: GIVE A BOOK, GIVE THE WORLD

I looked up to my brother from a young age.

When I was nine years old, my much older brother gave me a book for my birthday. It was a big, heavy, hardback copy of the complete works of Lewis Carroll.

This was no watered down kids’ version of Alice in Wonderland, with lots of colorful pictures and a few whimsical words that told Carroll’s story in easy-to-understand form. No, this was the real deal, with the original black-and-white Victorian drawings by John Tenniel and the dense Victorian writing, too. It was WAY beyond my skill level, and included poetry, for God’s sake.

I loved it. I struggled for years to read it. And I’ve carried it with me through all my moves, even here to North Carolina.

A few years later that same brother gave me the complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle. Same thing, though I’ve passed that one on to my daughter who reads.

A gift of a book is like no other gift. It says as much about the giver as it does about the receiver. I’ve always treasured these books not only because they opened wonderful new worlds for me, but also because they meant my brother thought I was smart enough to read them. I worked hard to live up to them, to devine their secrets, because that would help me understand my brother—and his world. He was smart, and I wanted to be like him.

But what he knew, and I eventually discovered, was that the books held their own marvelous appeal. The stories they contained captivated me, swept me away to another place and time. They weren’t my first or necessarily my favorite such fictional worlds, but they were certainly a level up from the Nancy Drew mysteries I was fond of at the time.

Book revelations can come to you in surprising ways. I found Ian Fleming’s James Bond by looking out a high school bathroom window. I was there between classes, hanging out with my friends. I looked out and saw a pink cover (maybe it had once been red—rain had damaged the book) splayed in the grass. I could read the title—Diamonds Are Forever—and knew it for what it was. I suspect someone was reading the juicy parts out loud to a friend when a teacher walked in. Whoops! Out the window it went!

I waited all day to retrieve the abandoned piece of salacious writing, worried the whole time that its owner would go back to get it. But it was still there at the end of the day, pages woefully swollen with damp. I took it home and dried it with a hair dryer—you know, the kind you put over your head like a cap. (The year was about 1966.) Then I devoured it. Wow! James Bond was one sexy guy!

Then I went out and spent all my allowance and babysitting money on others in the series. My mom finally noticed and wanted to call a halt, thinking maybe I was a little young for all this. I convinced her I was “mature” enough by suggesting she read one. (he he!) Since most of the action was implied, she relented. I only gave up my 007 series last year when I moved to NC.

Finally, I have a long grocery store line to thank for my career as a romance writer. I was standing there, bored, having read all the fantastic headlines on the NATIONAL ENQUIRER to my left, when I looked to my right. I found a display of paperbacks, which was unusual in itself. But in that display was a dramatic dark cover highlighting a beefy male biceps with a tattooed circlet. Oooh! I picked it up and checked the back cover. Seems this was a time-travel romance (Kiss of the Highlander) by Karen Marie Moning. Say what? Who knew there was such a thing? I bought it to find out more—what’s it like? Who writes such a thing? Who publishes such a thing?

Once again, the story swept me away. I loved it. I bought the whole series. And the science fiction story that I’d been struggling with suddenly worked as a science fiction romance. The rest, as they say, is history.

Books can come to you from anywhere. Take it as a gift and be grateful to the universe. Or be the agent of change and give a book you love to someone special. They will love you for it forever.

AND, AS FOR THAT BROTHER . . .

I'm very sad to report that my brother Reg just passed away this week, after a brave and prolonged struggle with cancer. He gave me any number of gifts, in addition to those books--a love of learning, an ear for storytelling and a wry sense of humor among them. We will all miss him.

Sadly, Donna

Whoops - I forgot

Me at 3

Sorry, folks. I'm a bit late in posting. You see, I'm messing about with my website from Wordpress.org back to Wordpress.com and then back to WP.org on a different host, and it was all messy and everything. And... let's face it, I forgot.

News this week - Solo: A Star Wars Movie is on in the theatres. No, I won't be going. I'll wait until I either go overseas or it appears in the shops.  Actually, I've done the same with Black Panther ;). But it does look like it will be a fun, action-packed adventure. A lot of people seem to be enjoying it.

I've started reading Ready Player One after all the good vibes from the movie (which I haven't seen). The world-building is interesting. I've alreay encountered a couple of 'hmm' moments. But it's a great dystopian setting. It's also (IMO) a great example of a very successful book which does not start right into the action. It's all about the setting, grounding the reader in that world. YES! (Punches air with fist). And, of course, I'm old enough to catch quite a few of the '80's references. That was the decade I became a compuer programmer.

What with one thing and another I haven't done much fiction writing - although I have been delving into family history. These days, everybody's got a phone that takes pictues and videos. Family history is everywhere. Even on Facebook it's so easy to see what you did ten years ago. But that's not true for my generation. I've been going through creased black and white - or sepia - photo of my mother and father and my siblings. They're few and far. No videos, of course. And unless somebody does something with them, adds names to faces, gives context, they'll just be a bunch of old photos in a chocolate box. All but one of my siblings are dead, and I have a writing skill. So I'm creating a document to give some idea of what life was like for my immediate family, relying mainly on my memories - which have faded over time. It's been interesting looking back. The process becomes all-consuming. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about this incident or that, reliving good times and bad. Good times are a burst of white light and sunshine, the details lost in a happy haze. The bad times are harsh sketches in black and white, details lost in shade and sorrow.

And I shall end with some photos - just because.

TAKING A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

No long post this week. I'm off on a kind of family history tour of the tiny West Virginia community of Squire where my parents were born and raised. My older brother wanted his adult daughter to see the "home place" and get a sense of where we all came from, so I'm tagging along. Since he's the family historian, I expect to learn a few interesting tidbits I haven't heard before.

My kin are a colorful bunch, distantly related to the Hatfields of Hatfield-McCoy feud fame. My second cousin was the Miss Riley who taught the "rocket boys" of OCTOBER SKY. And my grandfather was part of the last armed insurrection against the Federal government of the United States--a union-organized coal strike in McDowell County WV in 1920. (He also delivered moonshine through the mountains during the strike to make ends meet.)

So, though the picture below may or may not have any of my relatives, it is, well, symbolic of my mountain clan.

Devil Anse Hatfield (center) and the boys.

See you next week.

Cheers, Donna