To all!

Son Colin Cudmore and I drove 30 minutes to the Abe Martin Lodge in beautiful, wooded Brown County State Park, on the list for their 11 AM buffet feast. Waiting with others (all of us with reservations) in a big woodsy room with plush seats for 30 minutes (they expected 1100 diners, for three sittings), both Colin and I were entranced by an Amish group — probably 30 of them — sitting together, waiting, like the rest of us, many of them young fathers and mothers with beautiful babies and little children. They seemed as if they came from another world, a untroubled, loving world where people in community still felt automatically connected. Colin told me that he once asked some Amish teenagers what they did for fun. They told him they got to trick out their horse-drawn buggies and, on Wednesday evenings, said one of the girls, excitedly, “We get to sing together.” Can you believe? All of them looked healthy, happy, and whole.

So many of the others waiting to line up sat bored, on their screens, overweight and/or otherwise very “out of shape,” many barely acknowledging even those with whom they arrived. On the other hand, from their manner, Colin and I agreed that the crowd was mostly rural, couples and mostly grown up extended intergenerational families from the countryside around here, very unlike what appear as self-centered, yet lonely academics in Bloomington. So in that sense, we appreciated the crowd.

Colin asked one of the Amish women if they had any old remedies for a bum knee (which he has been nursing for months); she went up to her room (they had stayed overnight) to fetch some salve that she had brought with her for him. Refused to let him pay for it.

We found out who Abe Martin was, the pseudonym of another man, who wrote cartoons for the then Indianapolis paper for many years, that quickly syndicated to over 200 newspapers across the country.

The dinner itself? The salads were all fresh and tasty. The cooked vegetables were all canned . . . I had some sweet potatoes. But the turkey (actually, that pan had been emptied of its contents by the time I got to that part of the line-up) was, I hope, good, and the desserts (I had coconut cream pie) were to die for. 

Since I rarely eat sugar, I really noticed how down I felt afterwards. When we got home, I fed the worm bins, and then decided to take an extra walk, one half mile to the Dollar store (actually now $1.25), open from 10 to 4 on Thanksgiving! —  needing to get treats for puppy Shadow and — thank goodness I remembered — dental floss, before deeper-than-usual cleaning the bathroom. 

On the way back I saw a young man pushing an old Volkswagon down busy 3rd St. It kept rolling slowly after he stopped; I noticed that he watched and waited to make sure its motor  actually caught hold before continuing on his way.

At the Dollar store the female clerk told me she had worked there for 16 years, different Dollar stores in the area, and has been a manager since 2016. I asked if she liked it, and she giggled yes, that she’s such a people person that she just keeps saying hello to everybody who comes in.

Life in late November 2022, two days past the 59th anniversary of the Kennedy Assasination, which started so many of us now very old ones on an internal path we couldn’t have imagined beforehand. BTW: I looked it up: Saturn is returning for the second time to where it was when our glorious president was shot, twice?, in the head with spattering blood, a public ritual sacrifice we saw over and over again, mesmerized, glued to the screen, much like on 911 — a shocking sight meant to demoralize, a typical programmed cultural MK Ultra ritual event, as those of us who have been educating ourselves on what has been “ruling” us ever since, have learned to recognize. The second Saturn Return for that event. Hmmm . . what has changed?

Well, a hell of a lot has changed, especially lately. Even Clif High now says We Are Winning the extended war between the globalists and localists, between good and evil, even though, says Clif, it will take the better part of a decade to actually start over whole. Meanwhile, we will be busy sorting through all the lies and educating ourselves as to our real history, so that we may end up with a common ground to stand upon, and thus rise as a people united, from the root. 

As usual, an incredible amount of “news” keeps dropping via alternative sources, with twitter ramping up dramatically — and I have really grown to appreciate the many dedicated anons who make it their life’s work to inform the rest of us “conspiracy theorists” of all sorts of items, “dots,” guessing as to how they are connected in all sorts of ways, weaving a complex co-arising multidimensional web none of which, even without my yet sugar-addled state, can I ever hope to actually mentally or emotionally encompass. 

In any case, I say thank you, thank you.