We did it!

Deciding whether to move to Gainesville was easier when our daughter decided to have a baby; that was a true deal breaker.  Then our son, who is now in Dubai as the director of a new royal project, "Deep Dive Dubai," decided to sweeten the deal by purchasing a piece of rental property that he wanted us to live in - a red ranch house on five acres of land in High Springs, about six to seven minutes from our daughter and her husband and the new baby.  He was born on July 31, and as he grows and changes daily, I cannot imagine not being here.  When we go "home" for a week to catch up on people there (Ed's mother is 102 and in a nursing home there), I am amazed that he has changed so much when we come back.  And now, what is "home?" Is it here or is it there?  South Florida, I suppose, will always feel like home to me, but this place in the woods is so homey and comfortable and lovely.  There is quiet, and solitude and birds and trees and an owl family and cows next door and it is beginning to get cool and there is a front porch with a swing to die for.  I love it here and I love being near the baby and his mommy.  My daughter and I are getting closer; I think it helps that her consciousness has been raised by becoming a mother.  One can never know love like the love of a mother for her child until one has a child, so now she knows how I felt about her brother and her.  If I could earn some money, if I could be inspired to write regularly, if I had just a couple of peers here to hang out with and be "Pat" instead of "Mom," all would be perfect.  Maybe in time.

And I will get to "the rest of the story" with my friend's death, I promise.  I think about her every day.

Death of a friend Part I

January 20, 2015
Chapter One of Caroline's Story

A friend of mine took her life last week. Our lives had intertwined when my now 46 year old boy child was not quite three years old. It was 1971, and my husband and I had sold our home and purchased a mobile home in a lovely mobile home park because we had plans to travel to Europe and live there for a while (three to six months) and wanted a place we could close up and leave easily. Jamaica Bay had all the amenities, including a communal pool. My little one had been swimming before he could talk, so we went to the pool - a lot. One day as we entered the pool, there was another tow-head nearby but outside the pool area playing in the sand box who looked to be perhaps a year younger than my boy. We said hello, and he looked up and gave us the sweetest grin. He was completely dressed, including socks and shoes, something not terribly common in south Florida. We went in and saw a woman doing graceful laps up and down the pool.  I settled onto a deck chair and my little one went into the water. The woman noticed him and how young he was (everyone did) and they struck up a conversation, as much as a child his age was able to.  I heard him tell her his name - Jarrod. She seemed enchanted by his skill in the water and asked him lots of questions. I tuned them out, and eventually she got out of the water and plopped herself down next to me and sprinkled water on the magazine I was reading. When I looked up (not without annoyance) she asked, "What does one do for intellectual stimulation around here?" With more than a little coolness, I haughtily replied, "I go to school." Undeterred by my disdain, in fact probably amused by it, she laughed, easily and musically. In fact, her voice when speaking was quite melodic - a ringing soprano voice in a largish woman with long, black hair and clear turquoise eyes. 

Over the years from that auspicious beginning grew a deep and complex love/hate relationship that at times defined me, at times infuriated me, and certainly at times kept me honest - with myself. 

She was from New York - an Italian by heritage, married to a man who was working to finish up a job in New York in preparation for a position as a project manager for a large construction project nearby. He was gone for weeks at a time, then "home" with his family for some brief time, but nearly ready to move down permanently. She had another boy besides Kevin, the sandbox dweller, who was in in Kindergarten half days, whose name was Chris. I learned that the fully-dressed imp with the sweet smile, Kevin, was terrified of the water, thus he would not come with his mother to the pool unless she agreed to dress him completely. His logic was that he would never be expected to enter the water without a bathing suit. He was still in diapers under all that clothing and stubbornly clung to the idea that they too protected him from having to swim. Over time, as he and my son became childhood friends, he gradually became something of a swimmer in order to play with Jarrod, but he never learned to love it. He did learn to love me, though, and thought of me as a second mother, a role I was proud to claim. That sweet toddler grew into a very, very bright young man with a secure self concept, an ability to laugh at himself, and a skill with writing software that led him into a fine paying position and the respect of his peers. He took good care of his mother - his real mother - until he was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident at the age of 40. From that moment, her decline began.

To be continued...

Coming Soon!                                                                                                     

Pat has written a book!

Briefly, here’s what it’s about:

A young woman, after graduating from a nearby university with her master's in English Lit, moves back home to her little South Carolina mill town, gets engaged to her high school sweetheart and goes to work in the local museum. And then she gets dumped by her fiancée. And then her father dies of a heart attack. It’s a lot, right?

The book opens at her father’s funeral, and the reader gets the hint that in addition to these two awful-enough experiences, she has endured as-yet-revealed family tragedy as a child. Consequently, she wants to move away to avoid being the town’s “poor thing” any longer.

She moves to Asheville to start over. It gets lighter then; she finds a cool place to live, and she makes friends - a woman with a cop stalker and a gay barista. Both of them are co-workers she meets when she gets a job in a café-bookstore. She has romance, she runs into some danger, and she contracts with a true crime writer who wants her to read his first effort at crime fiction. He emails her some pages and she begins to get the eerie feeling that he knows what happened to her family when she was a child. There are diverse characters in the work, including a motorcycle riding, Cherokee roommate and a cat named Stuart.

Ø  Does anyone want more? Tell me what you would like to see included in my book.

Ø  One of my readers has a favorite scene:

She was invited by the kind man to say her last goodbyes, but she declined saying she wanted to remember her father striding out to his truck with an ever-present toothpick in his the side of his mouth. She surprised herself with the sentiment, and as soon as she said it, she knew it was true. Only then would she permit herself to cry real tears, which gave the funeral director permission to do what he did best – comfort her.

I will keep you informed, and I definitely appreciate support and feedback: patjab40@gmail.com

After a short break...

Okay, so it's been a couple of years since I've visited my blog; clearly I'm bad at this. I need to think of it as a journal and share my pondering more often, but I suppose natural modesty creeps in and forces me to think, "Who the heck cares what you have to say?" Well, that's hardly an attitude for a budding author to have, right? 

So, in the last couple of years, I took my writing a little more seriously and finished up the one I have been living with for many, many years, Background Music. It was a tribute to several people: my college roommate, Marsha Rae, who died of stomach cancer just before her sixtieth birthday, my tireless mama, Sis, who surrendered to breast cancer, way, way too young, Patrick my BFF (male-type), and then the final kick in the pants, Judith Lee Ann (Lee to me), whose irreverent voice I hear every day. We always thought we would have more time. Background Music is about the strength of female friendships. Next, because I wasn't sure anyone would want to read that one, I just got busy and wrote a suspenseful story - Carved In Stone - about a young woman with a lifetime of tragedy who got tired of being "you poor thing," and moved away from her small town to start a new life in Asheville. Her adventures as a barista, a manuscript reader, and a solver of family secrets were fun to reveal - to me as well as to readers. I wrote another one, Separate Ways about a couple of hard-driven professionals experiencing empty nest and career choice dissatisfaction at a critical point in their marriage. It's being edited as I speak, and I look forward to adding it to the Kindle and Create Space library. I'm not thinking I'll have a third career as a well-read author; I'm just having fun doing what I love. If anyone enjoys what I've created, so much the better. 

If anyone reads this, please, please, please start a conversation with me. Ask a question, make a comment, share your opinion, anything!

A Thought!


So, I'm so bad at this that I wrote a lengthy new post trying to bring anyone up to date who happens to stumble upon this blog by accident. I'm only half kidding. It was chatty and filled with wry wisdom and observations made on the fly (whatever that means) and somehow I lost it! And along with losing that post, I lost my energy to post anything then or for the next few days. But here's the thing: my friends tell me I have to promote myself. If I want anyone to read my books - two now and the third before Christmas, I'm hoping, I have to let people "out there" know I'm here and that I've written a couple of stories that might, just might, speak to some "contemporary woman" or maybe even a man. I'm having a crisis of confidence right now and honestly don't think I have any skill at all for this, but I'm forced to carry on because I want to tell stories! It's not for nothing that I've lived all these years loving to watch and absorb and then to think about what I've seen and heard and want to make sense of it. I've read so many good books! I've read some that I just couldn't finish because they were not engaging - at least for me - and I don't think either of mine fall into that category, but I can't be sure.

So, here's the thing: if you are a new writer and are willing to give me some feedback, I'd love to hear from you. And if you want me to read what you've written, I'll be happy to do so. I think manuscript swapping is the way to go, as long as the writer's ego isn't dangerously frail. If so, maybe that's not the way to go. 

Retiree's Dilemma

Retiree’s Dilemma: To Move or Not to Move (closer to the kids)

       We’re renting a cute little house in the middle of Gainesville for the summer. I know, I know, the worse time to live in Gainesville, Florida. Even though it is really, really hot in south Florida, at least we have those Atlantic breezes. Not here. And it hasn’t even started to get brutally hot yet. But the purpose of coming up here wasn’t to experience the weather; it was to see how it feels to live near our grown, busy children. The assured us that they would love to have us closer, and so far, after over a month, they have done nothing to make us think otherwise. In fact, they seem quite pleased that we are here. They stop by on their ways to various places and they arrange to meet up with us for meals, movies, etc. And we have a good time.

         Good times aside, an unexpected side effect of this move has made me more introspective than usual. (See the above post). Not having a job that demanded my creative efforts to engage and entertain bored remedial college students probably has something to do with it, but also just breaking out of the routine and waking up somewhere else every day contributes to my relentless inner murmurings. So far this blog thing has proved above my skill set; I haven’t gotten it “out there” because I don’t know how, really. I haven’t posted pictures, videos, or even made it very dynamic. Maybe I’ll learn that – later. For now, it’s just the inner musings going on.

       I have a lot less time to roam this planet than I already spent here, and even though I know that at every level, I don’t think too much about what I want to do with the time I have left. Mostly I was putting one foot in front of the other, happy to have a job that kept my brain alive and to be able to interact with people I respected and enjoyed, for the most part. There are even some notable students that have made what I do seem worth it. (Here’s to you Jimmy, wherever you are.) It’s easy to stick with what you know.

      So here’s the question: If you have made a major move in your golden years – one that brought you closer to your loved ones rather than farther away from them – how did that work out for you? If you gave up a job that at least made you feel…useful/productive, do you miss it? Did you find something else that was able to challenge you and keep your brain from rotting in your skull? Did your relationships with said loved ones blossom or wither? Did you find out things you’d rather have not known, or do you feel grateful to have added insight into the personalities of the people they became? Were you able to resist the impulse to interfere in their lives or not so much? What do you think?

informal poll

It all started with an offhand, sympathetically intended comment that was responded to defensively. I decided to poll my "contact list" and to post it on Facebook to see what kinds of reactions I would get. I got 17 responses, varying in content, and two suggestions that I "start a blog." So, here goes.


The comment was, "You look tired." My less-than-gracious response was, "How does that help anything?" 


My poll asked:
HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN SOMEONE (A FRIEND, A LOVED ONE, A PARTNER, PERHAPS) SAYS TO YOU, “YOU LOOK TIRED”?


And here are the results:


Suzanne: Depends on my mood and why I am tired - if something unpleasant is going on in my life and this person is concerned, then I am okay.  Other than that they should just keep their mouth shut

Connie: My first response would be, "Thanks a lot" and then I would wonder why someone felt the need to tell me how bad I look.

Marcie G.: I feel like I should BE tired---or sick….especially if I am NOT tired!!!!If I am tired, I am disappointed that it shows! I hate to hear that!!!!

Denise B.: I feel like I must have bags and dark circles under my eyes and would rather not have it pointed out to me, thank you.

Judith: I am immediately alerted to the fact that whoever really thinks I look like shit, but is trying to be polite.  It usually irritates me. 

Laurie S.: Well, since I am tired, I just say so. Doesn't bother me.

Charlene: Most likely I do

Allison: "Usually they're right: I am tired." (My note: this woman hikes, climbs, and cycles all over the Pacific Northwest outdoors; she’s probably usually tired!)

Gary: "I try to pay attention because they're probably right."

Joal: I would wish I didn't look tired & that it wasn't so noticeable, but would think the person was concerned about me to mention it.

Roberta:  I guess it would depend upon how I was feeling at the time. If I was actually feeling tired, and if it was followed by a statement like, "Can I take care of something(s) for you so you can rest?" - I might take it as a kindness or thoughtful gesture. Otherwise...

Lois: It means you don't look good, which could be because you do look tired or just don't look involved, or…

Katherine: When someone tells me I look tired I guess I think they're probably right. Then again it's just their opinion or it's time for some lipstick.

Rhonda: I just read somewhere you shouldn't tell someone they look tired; by doing so, you are more or less criticizing their appearance; however, I have made that remark to friends on occasion out of concern.

Krista: Not my favorite, especially when you put some time into your appearance that day. Serious let down

Bonnie M.: “Am I looking tired…or old?” J

Bonnie W.: I don't feel bad when someone says that. I think people say it because they care. 

Bonnie B.: That I look tired, maybe a little haggard, dark circles under the eyes.

Honestly, in the overall scheme of things, this is a minor issue, but it brought up some male-female differences I found interesting. Are we fragile creatures who need not to have our flaws commented upon? Or are the folks making the comments clueless? Are those not bothered by such a comment really just more secure than those of us that got pissed off? 

What do you think?

(Then we'll move on to something a little heavier, maybe)