Thanksgiving Thankful

It's been a long time since I've submitted a blog post here! As often happens during the holiday season, I'm revisiting loose ends of my life and trying to catch up on activities I've allowed to languish.

This season, I'm particularly thankful that my breathing has improved with new medication, and I'm now able to travel and visit friends and family with much less fear of becoming sick, as has happened in the past few years.

Freshman class roommate, Sue Wixom (Nielson Coates) on right;

Ruth Sollitt Williamson, good friend and K-Gals organizer!

In October, I drove by car from Charleston, SC, to Kalamazoo, MI, for the 60th class reunion for students who started as freshmen at Kalamazoo College in 1954! It was a great get-together; about 40 of a graduating class of perhaps 120 were there, and we all had a wonderful time! In the motel, I even roomed with my freshman class roommate!

The campus had changed since we were there, with some buildings torn down and others added or remodeled. Still, it had the feel of the lovely quadrangle I remembered. And the "women's dorm" looked the same - on the outside, at least.

The old Mary Trowbridge Hall, where most women lived 

if they weren't married or townies. Now it's mixed, I think.

We spent the day on Saturday with friends: eating, chatting, exploring the campus. There were several activities arranged, but we spent a lot of time together just reminiscing.

At noon, we had a lovely lunch downstairs in the Hicks-Wells complex. We overflowed the table assigned to our class and populated several seats in other tables as well.

With Elizabeth Lindau, a K-College grad, who works in the 

alumni office. We had lunch once when she visited Charleston.

Afterwards, several of us browsed the college bookstore and then got together in the lobby for an informal memory fest.

Dinner at The Park Club. Sally Hunter, Gail Mullen

In the evening, we enjoyed a delicious dinner at The Park Club in downtown Kalamazoo. Ours was the largest 60th reunion group the college had ever had. At dinner, Jorge Gonzales spoke with us about his pathway to the presidency of Kalamazoo College. The following morning, we were all a bit sad to leave and go our separate ways, but glad to have been together, however briefly. It was a wonderful reunion and brought back memories of a wonderful few years in our lives!


Sunday morning, many of us gathered in the breakfast room at the motel, where we continued to share memories and info and promises to keep in touch. I passed out copies of some of the books I have written since retirement. The latest is The Bewildered Patient's Whole-Body Health Guide. It will be available to purchase on Amazon on December 10. The link is below:

The Bewildered Patient's Whole-Body Health Guide.

W-b-N Iowa & Minnesota

It has taken me too long to load this next installment of the West-by-North summer trip. Sorry! No good excuse, just busy with other things since my return--including a two-week trip to Florida to visit former college and high-school classmates.  This has truly been a year on memory lane!

The trip from Iowa City to Rochester, MN, and the stay in Rochester (June 27 – 30), are a bit blurry in my mind, as I now try to reconstruct them in late October/early November.  The Sunday evening after the Writer’s Workshop, I didn’t drive very far north of Iowa City, but found a nice, out-of-the-way campground about halfway to Minnesota, spent a pleasant night there, slept late, cleaned out the RV, and did laundry. The next afternoon, I drove north across lush, green Iowa farmland, passing through Waterloo the day after Michelle Bachman made her triumphant presidential debut there. It’s easy to see why Bachman’s simplistic message appeals to the farm folks in this fertile countryside. North-eastern Iowa seemed as American as apple pie, like a Norman Rockwell painting. Complexity doesn’t strike a chord here,  nor does poverty (at least, not the type seen in large cities). Iowa is not a state with a large manufacturing sector, nor much of an immigrant population.  On the other hand, I did read recently ("Our Daily Meds" by Melody Petersen) that Iowans seem to have an undue affinity for prescription anti-depressants. Perhaps this has inhibited the reasoning required to deal with complex issues.

Once in Rochester, the Wal-Mart parking lot became home base. Marcia Yoder Brown (my sophomore college roommate) picked me up each morning and took me back at night, and I slept in the parked RV.  Marcia lives in a retirement facility (Charter House) at Mayo Clinic, where we ate and talked and visited with her friends. We had a wonderful two or three days wandering through the maze of Mayo’s clinics and hospitals and eating places. Marcia, who has recently suffered the loss of her husband to cancer, and has had a serious bout with cancer, herself, was as cheerful and upbeat as she always was. "She's everybody's cheerleader," said one of the staff members there. She arranged for me to give a talk on my trip to India, which drew a good audience, and—despite some anxiety on my part—went over well.

Marcia was one of two fellow students during my sophomore year at Kalamazoo College who probably saved my sanity when I suffered my first major depression. (The other person, who cheerfully visited me in my lonely basement dorm room, was Gretchen Falk.) I was taking a course overload, worked twenty hours a week, was chronically tired, and was carrying a torch for a former boyfriend. The second semester that year, Marcia invited me to be her roommate (hers had left at the end of the first semester), and her upbeat manner and enthusiasms began to color my melancholic mood a rosier hue; my mind had become so dark, I even contemplated suicide.

The Rochester, Minnesota stopover indeed revived my spirits from the trauma of the week at NJH and the subsequent drive from Denver to Iowa, as well as the frustration of knowing that I will probably have to do a radical re-write on the Korean travel memoir.