Page about the Ranger, the old en days when mango reigned It's a poetry page, you old geezers in pickup trucks and faded jeans don't want to go there. Sample: We'd never seen the Ranger in a bad mood He was always making greenhouse jams desserts and when the world was gray and nobody could play we dipped into them Mason Jar Preserves. We'd never seen the Ranger in a bad mood He was always strong enough to laugh everything that life could be he welcomed and he acted like the dry times would all pass. It happened that the Ranger on this hot night came in the depot looking mighty mad he lashed us all with invisible whips,he got that way because of Gypsy and that's the time we seen the Ranger sad. Who could rise above the heights of Ranger? That's the time that everyone was low. We'd brung upon us a should have stayed stranger and that's when we seen the Ranger walking slow. Like doctors, sins have wages, and our bills we'll always owe It cost more than we got for being fooled All that's left is cloudy skies and blue jays that don't sing and a new thing called the Ranger in a bad mood. |
April 22 ,2003 I turned 49 today. I spent the morning trying to get online with several calls to tech support. In the mail I got a book from my old roomie Rudy--Mike Rudasill, who wrote it himself. You can find his entire novel online. http://www.literarylights.com/ult_author.shtm It is about Tampa, published by a Christian publishing house, with a Christian theme , although populated with thugs and creeps and crime and terror.Thanks, Rudy-love ya! Old friends Darlene and Mike Foy came by and we rode around on Dan's new scooter the V.A. gave him today and put on the back of his van for him. he's a lucky man--he found an apartment on the 13th floor of the Baptist towers downtown with 2 walls of windows looking out over the bay, the river, the Taj mahal-like minurets of the University of Tampa, Tampa General Hospital, Mary's school, a yacht basin filled with sailboats , the water tower by my house in Sulphur Springs, the Tampa Tribune right out his window; glorious sunsets, very clean and modren, with a desk clerk, all for $345 a month including electric and water. God is good. My favorite movie came on today for my birthday(The Deep End with Tilda Swinton). The other day we went to an Easter egg hunt at a Methodist church a mile from our house and they were raffling 4 baskets filled with toys amonst over 90 kids and I said toGod, "please let Marina get one so she'll get an Easter basket this year", and then they called her name. That was worth 800 birthday presents to me. Matt was on Seventh Heaven last night--another birthay present. The actor, Barry Watson, is from Traverse City, where my uncle took my grandfather's store, Paul H. Young Co., which became a grocery-marina on Mission Point,and where my cousins live, and I've been there a lot. Barry recently left the show to take treatment for Hodgkin's Disease. He of course barely has hair now, but he had a chubby healthy look to him, and a new mature glow. Like me, he found out one day that there wasn't any time left to do things he'd thought he was going to do "someday". Our old friend the Ranger, who's birthday was yesterday, just finished treatment for lymph cancer (chemo and radiation) and still has a tube in his throat and can't talk . He lost 40 pounds while already rail-thin and rangey.At one point, I'm told, he had a wild look in his eyes. He started therapy in Sept. or Oct and is just gaining ground. he's a fighter, guess I'm scrappy too, anyoway that is what they say of us.Likewise did he find out what Barry, Steve mcQueen, Michael Landon, many people including me found out. It's a very sobering thing to find out. But not as awful as rupturing in a car accident and knowing you're a goner. With terminal disease, you can try. You can say goodbye to a few special people hopefully. I am luckier than millions of rich men and women who never suffered poverty but died last year or last week. My goal was to write childrens' lit--not just fiction, but literature--and raise my girls well and with great joy, and through my writings and also personally help the poor in ways better than they are getting helped now. Hearing I had a year or two left here, the first thing I did was return home, to the Au Sable River an hour's drive from Traverse City , where I spent half my youth in the woods with my late brothers and birder father and fly-fishing grandma. I also took the kids around to 19 states and about 20 state parks, national parks, national forests, national seashores like Zion, Sequoyia, Yellowstone, White Sands, and Picture Rock, giving them a big dose of " we are family" (Sly and the Family Stone tune); then I was given a wonderful year of life on the Pacific in a cottage right in Los Angeles , making my entire life one rich fabric. Then I stayed. I stayed 5 extra years so far.They've been the opposite of the first 2--filled with impoverishment that gets worse by the day.It's hard, to show the kids how to hold up under so much hell. The news columnists are going ballistic about Governor Bush and his legislature closing down the Medically Needy Medicaid program here in Florida, and that they knew they closed it 8 months ago but just told recipients 1 month before they are cut off of their chemo, organ transplant anti-rejection meds, dialysis, and other life-giving meds and therapies.They aren't exactly cut off; they just have to spend all but $450 of their monthly income on meds before they ge them free. Columnists from hereabouts are saying "Try living on $450 a month! Nobody could!" Even as they acknowledge that theMedically Needy program is for those who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. They still haven't thought this all the way through. No one has said, "what the hell do the people who do get Medicaid get a month?" I personally am living off $245 or less a month. When I can't make it--dig this--when I turn to people for help paying my bills or getting food, well, here's what one lady about to become a nurse in Florida did: she called the Department of Children and Families and said I often go without electric, water, and food and my kids should be taken from me. This, knowing I am terminally ill, on chemo,and worried greatly that things will go wrong while I'm on this toxic poison and I'll be one of the 48% of people on it who get depression or pyschosis, because of freeking out over losing my kids or something..my last year alive and I have to live it alone because of the crime of impoverishment. She said I am a lousy mother? She let her own daughter quit school at 15 and moved the teen's boyfriend into the teen's bedroom. My 15 -year- old has never dated and focuses on school and her career as a writer, has her college pre-paid , makes honor roll, and was just honored as the second best 9th grade poet in Hillsborough County by the High School English Department. We scraped up enough for 3 cupcakes for my birthday and Mary found candles and I am fine with myself, my life, my love of life. Sorry upper class but I am not going to just drop dead because you hope we all do. One reason I am so poor is that I preferred the non-lucrative work my husband and father-in-law were doing to being rich: they were making original stained glass church windows. And boy were they good. I loved having a hand in it--it all seemed just what God wanted me doing. I studied the Bibles of 3 Christian denominations and the beliefs of most. I got to design windows for churches!I made a black Jesus. I made a perfect angel (see: http://www.homestead.com/nosmoking/times.html --I designed, drew, and hand-painted on glass the angel on the right). The church we made that window for paid $24,000 for it and immediately insured it for $250,000 and the bishop declared it one of the most important pieces of art in the diocese's collection. Last year, 7 years after we made it, I called that church and told them my electric had been off for weeks and I'd tried everywhere else for help first and could they help us? The lady who answered was very put out with my call. "Aren't there any agencies you can go to?" she said."I'm sure there are. There are plenty of places. In fact, I know for a fact they can't cut your electric off if you're disabled."I told her I'd exhausted every resource and she said "I don't believe it. I know they wouldn't let a disabled woman with small children go without electric.Something's fishy. You're either not managing your money right or--" or on drugs, she meant. --It wasn't that she was trying to be mean and nasty. The church has the wealthiest congregation in the lower half of Florida. They are all so remote from America's poor. They probably give a lot to the poor in Haiti, Africa, etc. and even fly over and donate medical skills and so forth. They pick up Woman's Day, a magazine at the supermarket checkout that your mother and my mother used to pick up, so you think it is in touch with the average woman, but it is filled now with articles about how we are all inproving our "nests"--replete with photos of $50,000 improvements, like 'bring the outside in--surround your home with a natural wood deck with a low railing so the view isn't obstructed." View of what--here, you see hookers plying their trade and a junky car lot. But you can't fault these well-off Christians for not knowing there are miserable people outside their neighborhoods . The newspaper writers said the other day that it is not something you'd know about if it wasn't happening to someone you knew directly. We all really assume there are enough programs taking care of the needs of our disabled, our dying, our families in financial crisis. When you hear that this terminally ill mom with young babies keeps losing her electric and feeds them peanut butter from the jar because there is no bread, you think something doesn't fit here, something is fishy, someone would help her, really, she must be not telling the whole story, she must have a drug habit, she must be a drunk. It must be her fault. There's no way our benevolent government, which has recently promised millions to Africa to prevent AIDS and millions to Iraq to rebuild, is letting its own citizens live in third-world conditions. I live on less than $245 a month. it used to be $545 but I took out a payday loan in October and it went haywire. They had my permission to electronically debit my account on the 3rd of the next month to get their loan and $380% interest. they went in on the 2nd for it (too early!) and my bank bounced it, That made them very nasty, and they went in a few days later for every amount possible--including the $270 they determined I now owed , with their new $20 bounced check fee; $250, $200, $150, $100, $75, $50, $30, and $20--all in the same day, electronically. All were bounced back leaving me owing my bank almost $300 in bounced check fees, $30 a check, which my bank extracted out of the Social Security payment deposited in my account before it allowed me access to the rest. OK, this was bad, my monthly electric bill is $250 because my walls are tarpaper , there's no insulation , and the electrical box with the fuses is from the 1960's and so rusted and old and hanging off the house that it doesn't register usage right.There's all new wiring stopping about 2 feet from the box; to get it to the box you need a county permit and an electrician's John Hancock, which I can't afford. So the new wiring I paid $1000 for is not in use and the old wiring is. The Salvation Army, who picks up $300 worth of utility bills once a year for qualifying poor families, wouldn't pick up mine because the payday loan was not an emergency expense like home repairs or auto repairs, but a choice I made. Of course I didn't choose to pay out $300 a month til I can repay it but being loansharked is not their idea of a genuine emergency.They told me to get real here--I'll never come up with $3000 to side the house, or $700 to get an electrician to sign off on the new wiring, so I need to move--this place is not feasible. Sell it, they said, and get section 8 housing. Section 8 has a 2-year waiting list but also I will lose all medical as soon as I get the sale proceeds. No agency gets the rules of the others down.Furthermore my house isn't worth a house. I couldn't sell it for more than $30,000, as it is up on bricks and so totally uninsurable which means unmortgageable and that nobody can get homeowner's insurance on it for their own protection. The land is worth about $10,000. The cheapest places to rent or own in the newspaper today are priced at $85,000 and $96,000 (there's only two under $100,000 in my county.)Two-bedroom rentals average $700 or more a month. With their Dad in an assisted living facility for over-55 ers, the kids would have a home for one year if I sold this place, (counting the cost of renting a U_Haul); then nowhere. Sure a foster family could take them when I died but would they take my 40 years' of journals, our 100 home movies and 25 photo albums, paintings by their grandfather who's dead, etc? No. I tried to enlist my bank's cooperation in stopping this usury with my account , as it goes on every month now, costing me $300 to $600 in bounced check fees.They explained that since we don't know what dollar amount the payday loan folks are going to ask for, we can't put a stop payment on them. We'd have to put it on every dollar amount we could think of, at $25 each. I tired working out arrangements with the payday lenders--a North Dakota bank--but they dissed our agreement twice, going for $270 where they were suposed to pick up $78. They then told me they aren't bound to any verbal arrangements, just the ones I originally signed to. They said they can only be paid through electronic debit--I cannot mail them a money order. So, monthly they got $300 from my $548 income, until this month, when they got $560. It has escalated---instead of abating. there is nothing I can do. i told them repeatedly that every time they cost me $300 in insufficient fund fees, they leave me without enough left to pay them anything, and that if they let me be just one month, I'd have their $275. But they just keep on trying, leaving me without enough to offer them any kind of payment on my debt at all. I can never get out of this as long as they insist on behaving this way, never. Each month we have less, and more expensive problems derived from having no money the months before. Turn -on fees for the electric and phone are $35 each.The broom broke and I can't buy one.There's no dish soap, laundry soap, bandaids, paper towels, bath soap, shampoo, trash bags, saran wrap---and there will be none, not on the money I get. We've hocked and lost all we could hock already. It's got to end somehow so I pray day and night but God keeps us here or maybe He is simply watching his upper-class Christian flock keep me here and writing their names on the board. I know I made a dumb mistake--although when I took out the loan, I fully believed an old friend was sending me $3000 on December 6, who sent $300 instead, which we needed to have a Christmas at all, and food last December, due to the payday loan people taking $300 from me December 1st. I did not take the loan based on my income bu on that promise I believed in. But, no one cares. they all chew me out, then don't help at all anyway. We are in living hell here. And the well-off won't look. That's their souvenier money when they go to Tijuana--they don't have to give it to some American family , there are charities for that... They express outrage that I am asking for help....or they call me in, say I shouldn't be allowed to raise kids because I can't pay for their basic needs.Scares you out of letting on your kids are hungry to anybody at all, scares you out of seeking help.And for that reason alone this wanna-be nurse is a viscious, vile creature. I had a tooth and post fall out in March and went to the one Medicaid dentist in Tampa, Dr. Childers, who said I should get all 18 teeth pulled and I'd have dentures in 3 weeks and never have to worry about bad teeth compromising my interferon therapy and heart transplant again. He gave me amoxicillin and a referral to an oral surgeon . I then tried to connect with my gastroenterologist to see if I should quit the interferon first, and he didn't return my calls. So on the 7th day of amoxicillin I still had my teeth when a tooth went off like crazy, swelling my face to my eye, causing the awfullest pain. I went to the dentist and all his office did was chide me for not getting them all pulled as ordered and finally offer me amoxicillin. I have that, I said. I have 2 refills on that. That's what I was on for 7 days when this erupted, so it is not specific to my germ.It doesn't work on this germ. Amoxicillin? she said skeptically.But gave me Cipro. Then I called the oral surgeon, who is a 60-minute drive over a bay bridge but the only Medicaid one in three counties. They said I had to have clearance from my pacemaker doctor and cardiologist. That took a few days of waiting to be seen, tests, reluctance on their part because my platelets were too low, and finally they faxed it a week later. By then I was out of antibiotics and back at the Tampa medicaid dentist , Dr. Seldon T. Childers, seeking more. He said I was suposed to have all my teeth out by then and he was not interested in my dental problems anymore as I did not do as told. I said my cardiologist wouldn't clear me for surgury and was still uncertain I could sustain having 18 pulled at once, that degree of trauma. He said, patting me on the back patronizingly,"I know, I know, you want to wait until each tooth goes off painfully and you go through a lot of pain for days each time while waiting for the antibiotics to work and weeks waiting to get each painful tooth pulled while you compromise your systemic problems, and I'll be more than happy to accomodate you. See?" He said, tearing up his orders to pull all my teeth and writing a new one to pull only one tooth. Not the one I first saw him for but the abcessed one only. Then when I got to the oral surgeon, which involved Dan hocking his guitar to get the $10 for gas, they said they had never pulled all someone's teeth without putting them under before, but it cost $180. They refused to put me through it without an IV anesthesia so said we'd pull them one by one, then give me dentures. "The upper plate is $800." "I don't have $800 ,'I said, not having even 800 cents."Well Medicaid does not provide dentures since last year," they said. So there are valid reasons I can't get all my teeth pulled at once like the Tampa dentist was ridiculing me about not doing. They did not even pull the one tooth. Know why? The Tampa dentist's Cipro prescription ran out 12 hours before and they refused to pull it if I wasn't on antibiotics. I called the Tampa dentist that morning and explained I only needed one more Cipro and they said "he refuses to help you. he plain won't do it."I went to the emergancy room to get antibiotics to continue keeping the abcessed tooth at bay and be eligible to have it pulled that day but they said Cipro lasts in your system for several days and the dentist should have no problem about pulling it even though I'd taken my last cipro the night before. However when I told the St. Pete dentist that she shook her head and said "no way.You must be on antibiotics before I'll pull your tooth. Period."So I am on antibiotics again-still, whatever--this time augmentin, which I just got off of after being diagnosed with pnuemonia from Christmas to February 14. I.E., I've been on antibiotics since mid-January. Great judicious use of an over-used neccesity....in fact, part of Dr. Childers' clinic's problem with me was that they had wanted me to stay on amoxicillin the day I went in screaming and crying with pain and a swollen cheek that began after 7 days on amoxicillin. No oneasked me if I'd taken it right (I had) they just seemed mad that I thought I was entitled or something to a different antibiotic and to see the dentist about changing his orders so I could get less than all teeth pulled, something his office told me I hd rto see him to do, and set the day for April 10. I came in with the emergancy pain on March 26 and they said on April 10, you were here a week ago--why didn't you just change the plan then? Why are you here again? You need to stop coming here." Flustered, I said, "I tried to cover today's appointment last week but you guys said Dr. Childers wasn't here and I had to see him for that. Your on-staff dentist was kindly telling me I could have the tooth drained in moments and saved to anchor a partial to , necessitating losing only 3 root tips instead of 10 more whole teeth too for a full upper plate, but after he left the room to get ready to treat me he never came back and 2 women in a flurry finally did and said that my insurance did not pay for the procedure, which had to be listed as a root canal prep. " The American medical field had just learned that doctors were over-prescribing the good , strong antibiotics that still work and it was going to render them useless as it had earlier antibiotics, so they were trying to keep ones like Cipro from being "over-used". When doctor Childers wrote me a scrip for Cipro he said "I'll give you Cipro but you won't be able to fill it" then flounced out of the room. I asked his aides what he meant by that and one ran after him and returned and said soothingly that he just meant that Medicaid does not pay for Cipro and it's very expensive and I was going to have to pay it myself. Wrong! He'd had me on Cipro in November and if he wasn't sure I could get it he should have asked me, or,heck, given me augmentin or something different! That's it--the daily grind of the poor, whom the rich are contemtuous of and rude to, a life unknown to the comfortable, who don't want to think about evening things up so the poor are less poor and they are less rich. Never do they want to face that issue. They'd rather excuse themselves by telling themselves they have programs that meet all our basic needs and those of us not getting by are immoral criminals or something like, not deserving peons in the game of Sil Ender..Remeber Sil Ender? He was a cylinder in a formation , on the bottom, propping up the rich, richer, and richest cylinders, who would fall if he got out of his place. Jay Friss called to say happy birthday at 8. Bob called at midnight to say Happy Birthday. I've got the best friends. I am truly blessed. I really love my friends.They all have integrity. And they care about me. Good people, they are. Why don't they pay off my $270 payday loan, you ask? Jay is carrying around a jug of water cuz the car is over-heating, the girlfriend's car is getting the AC fixed and taking all their dough. He's an assistant coach at a middle school, not wealthy. Bob works 7 days a week to make his mortgage since his wife's paycheck not only walked out, but he then had to send $600 a month to her and hr live-in boyfriend for child support. It's the wealthy who could help and don't. They'll tell you of their own expenses and what they are going without ... Just wished I could have spent the last year putting home video on DVD for posterity but the camcorder's been in hock a year. And we are some of the 30% of Americans without a DVD player or writer. Or CD writer. Hey, hearing my story, you realize your life isn't half so bad as you thought, right? If you want to help poor Americans, go to modestneeds.com, and see who needs what. I'm here, too. Please care, all of you. It's what He wanted. Died in disgrace and considerable pain and thirst for.Hello.... |
my house would look no different than yours--the sinks are always clean and empty, there is no pile of laundry on the floor, there is not a single cockroach. There are computer desks, filing cabinets, dressers, beds, a refrigerator, a microwave, a little cooktop.Dolls, diaries, home-made videos, stories us 3 inveterate writers write all day and night as we feel for our writing wings.There are drawings by the kids on the walls and fridge, paintings and stained glass by their grandfather on the walls and in the windows.There are nice ceiling fans and really nice blinds on each window.I have never gone anywhere and left my kids at home or with a sitter. I am always home or with my kids, always. I have not had a sip of alchohol in over 17 years. No one who drinks or uses illegal drugs has ever been inside our home.I have written many books for my children--now they are writing mangas and stories for me. We all love each other dearly and say it many times a day. We attend Mass together whenever we can get there and our focolare family is helping both girls make their first communion. One was on her school soccer team and one is a Brownie Scout. Both made high honor roll all year. If because I am terminally ill I am not a good mother I do not understand how you America could be so mixed up.I made a mistake--I took a payday loan . I cannot get out of it except pay it back. I cannot pay it back because they take twice the amount owed out of my account monthly, legally, leaving me nothing left to pay them with or pay our own bills with.All someone has to do is help me pay this $270 off and we'd be ok. Instead, they let me go through it for months, then call child welfare anonymously and say I can't keep my utilities on or feed my kids. Nice of people. Wer'e talking about people who have a garage to store things in, calling my house cluttered. People who live alone in a house mine's size, while three people who write a lot, make crafts a lot, own a lot, live in mine. I have lost faith in Christian America. One reason I really want my camcorder out (due today or I loose it) is because my neice, my husband's brother's daughter, is in a championship waterski show Saturday. Natascha skiied at Cypress Gardens until it closed down last weekend. I'd love to film that, add that to what the kids, when grown, will one day be putting on DVDs themselves since I haven't much chance of getting any money in the time I've left on earth. I wish I could do it because there are favorite parts of my life with my kids, of our nation-wide trip, that pleased me, and they will see what I want to see again, and I won't. But I trust God. Who says do I not come through on the little things, will I not come through on the big?"It just means, to me, that a lot of people are in trouble, not solidarity. I don't mean they have to believe in God, but in brotherhood and integrity.Some think they just have to believe Jesus died for them....Catholics, some say, believe in good works, earning paradise; we believe what the Bible says, that we did not deserve, so Christ paid for us.Well the Bible says the rich will be turned on their ear and the poor will be raised, but it's been 2000 years, and...well, finally here's Richard Gephardt from Missouri.....if his ideas saw fruit, parents of small kids could live together again and still get medical. (See the cardio section of my website) |
Barry Watson, third from left. |
Top Bob. His brother is the guitarist for Weird Al. Bottom, Jay, with his mother and his brother .The Bobby Friss.Click photos to see their sites |
Every time somebody like that church lady says, "Don't you have ANYBODY..." I remember I have two brothers dead. But always I also think yes, I have two children who make me rich. |
Page about the Ranger, the old en days when mango reigned It's a poetry page, you old geezers in pickup trucks and faded jeans don't want to go there. Sample: We'd never seen the Ranger in a bad mood He was always making greenhouse jams desserts and when the world was gray and nobody could play we dipped into them Mason Jar Preserves. We'd never seen the Ranger in a bad mood He was always strong enough to laugh everything that life could be he welcomed and he acted like the dry times would all pass. It happened that the Ranger on this hot night came in the depot looking mighty mad he lashed us all with invisible whips,he got that way because of Gypsy and that's the time we seen the Ranger sad. Who could rise above the heights of Ranger? That's the time that everyone was low. We'd brung upon us a should have stayed stranger and that's when we seen the Ranger walking slow. Like doctors, sins have wages, and our bills we'll always owe It cost more than we got for being fooled All that's left is cloudy skies and blue jays that don't sing and a new thing called the Ranger in a bad mood. |
The last page of this site, the next page of this site, 4 good poems by Deanne and Mary, all here, click here for the final last page of this 500- page site. Most of these photos go to sites. |
My friends are average folks in tee-shirts |
There once was a great and kind man who was a Tampa dentist, but he had a stroke in his early 50s. We love you always, Doctor Edenson! |
