Search Results for: bingo night at the mansion

Thank you for buying out the new Mansion Aides Christmas Wish List in just a few hours. You purchased a score of Christmas toys and gifts and nearly $400 work of Amazon and Visa and Mastercard gift certificates Monday night.

Mellissa, a Mansion aide, and Nancy and Georgianna offered the first thanks this morning, along with Zinnia, who is a joy machine. It seems her therapy work is underway.

Thursday, I plan to get a group photo of as many Mansion aides as possible at the Mansion Christmas Party, they want to thank you for making their Christmas meaningful and joyous.

We’re fixing up a Break Room for them, giving each aide $50 in cash, and purchasing Christmas presents for their children and loved ones. We’ve also bought more than $100 in new LED lights and other decorations for the Christmas tree and Mansion hallways.

This is ninth or tenth Wish List I’ve supported (we supported) for RISSE, The Mansion, and Bishop Maginn High School and every one of them sold out, a testimony to the spirit and staying power of the Army Of Good.

No sunshine soldiers in this army.

I want to be humble, but I believe we are helping to revolutionize non-profit gift giving, using technology and moderation.

The wish lists give some of the power back to where it belongs – people donating their hard-earned money. They are becoming the core of this work, along with the personal support we can provide the students and Mansion residents.

The wish lists enable people to choose the items they want to donate, and the amount they want to spend. The money goes directly to the people who need it, not administrators and middle-men.

This Wish List it will give the hard-pressed Mansion aides support in their lives in a meaningful and important way.  You’ve brought them the spirit of Christmas.

Many of the aides struggle financially, they usually can’t give their children and families the presents they would love to have. This year they can, and thank you, thank you.

On a different scale, I continue to try to fill the holes in the resident’s lives – winter clothes, stamps for Sylvia, books for Tim, prizes for Bingo,  movies for Georgianna and Nancy, puzzles for Peggie and Matt, and shoes, scarves and winter clothes for everybody.

I’m focusing also on Bishop Maginn, and the needs of the refugee students and their families, one young woman from the Middle East came to the school dance Saturday in sleeveless summer clothes, she has no winter clothes.

I plan on bringing her at least $200 so she and Sue Silverstein can go shopping with her for winter clothes. Small acts of great kindness.

We can’t change people’s lives, but we can brighten them up and make them more comfortable.

I’m going to canvas the teachers again to see what they need for the Spring Semester in the way of used textbooks and materials. And we will make certain the kids who need warm shoes this winter will have them.

This week, I’m happy to focus on Christmas. If you wish to support my one-on-one work the refugee students and Mansion residents you can send a contribution via Paypal, [email protected], or by check, Jon Katz, Mansion/Refugee Fund, P.O. Box 20, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.

Thank you all so much. You are a light unto the world, we are fighting back with our own weapons, love, compassion, empathy. And we can bring some joy and hope.

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

I believe that I cannot protect myself from sadness without protecting myself from happiness, because one is the twin of the other, both joined at the hip.

If you can’t be sad, you can’t know what it means to be happy. Just like light follows the darkness.

This path month I have been sad, worn down by hatred and argument, and by my own sometimes fragile soul.

I have to be honest, and admit that the past month knocked me down and brought me to a bad place. Too many things came together all at once – the sad state of our country, the loss of my computer, a  grinding tech ordeal involving my photographs, the sudden inability to write what I wanted when I wanted, my realization that my life as a book author is truly over, and the sadness, death and neediness I see almost every day of my life.

Every day I was distracted and drained by problems I couldn’t solve, damage I couldn’t fix. Nothing is worse for a creative head than that.

I didn’t experience anything that almost everyone reading this experiences from time to time, I am just a human dealing with the life of a human. But it felt -and was – relentless.

The computer photo troubles were somehow especially debilitating. They knocked my confidence and optimism down, the sense I am coping well with my life, doing something meaningful, something that matters.

It went on for so long, and was so frustrating.

My agent and I cooked up a great book idea, but there were no takers. I don’t want to write books any longer, I love writing on my blog, but I guess I wanted it to be my choice, not theirs.

Identity is precious, time for me to embrace this change and learn to love it.

I told Richard that if I couldn’t sell this great idea behind one of the best agents in the country with five New York Times best sellers under my belt, that it was time let go of books and quite happily devote myself my creative work – my writing, my photos – to my blog, which grows both in meaning, audience and intensity.

People visit my blog four million times a year, and there is no way even I can call that failure.

My angels are trying to tell me a great truth, and I am finally open to hearing it.  Change, they say, move forward, the light burns brightly inside of you. You have a lot to offer.

For so much of my life, my identity has been tied to writing books, I am so fortunate to have this new identity, which I love and has led me to good and great work.

I am not one of those people to lament growing older, but it is true that part of growing older is learning when to let go and how to let go.

For awhile, technology stole my identity and my purpose and my confidence, and that felt like a betrayal to me. I was suddenly quite helpless, at the mercy of others, and it brought up old feelings and struggles.

When I look at this photo of my granddaughter heading out for Halloween in a Stegosaurus suit that I bought for her, I am lifted up by life on the other end of the spectrum. Hers is a message of hope and promise, I want to help leave her with a better world.

Sometimes my heart is filled with sorrow at the cruelty, hatred and conflict that is tearing us apart. I truly am helpless there, and most days it inspires me to get busy and do good and sometimes – the past two months – it just brings me down.

Doing good brings me up.

Tonight, I went to the Mansion, Maria and I called the Bingo Game. I had fun teasing the residents, i started singing versus of Amazing Grace while I got boos and lots of ribbing. But lots of laughs. I was just where I should be, doing just what I should be doing.

Today, I began to heal and feel better. I send a box of baseball caps engraved with “Bishop Maginn Mural Mob” to the very gifted mural painters at Bishop Maginn High School. I shipped five boxes of blankets, sweaters, shoes and socks to the school. I was told that every child who needed a sleeping bag or blanket got one.

That is a beautiful thing to know as this cold descends. (Thank you).

At the Mansion, Sylvie told me she missed me when I was gone and  handed me another letter to read. Peggie asked if I could help get her a winter coat so she could go outside. Helen was sitting in a hallway, she said she was cold. I gave her a lap robe that she loved. Tim came over in his wheelchair to thank me for his racing car jigsaw puzzle..

I got a lego set for Tia’s son. Nancy and Bert got the sweaters they needed in this cold weather

And Maria and I helped a sheep, Izzy, to die a humane and merciful death. She was awfully sick.

My new computer is working well for me so far and I am writing freely again.

I am getting my identity back. For much of my life, I have battled different forms of anxiety and depression, but not for some years. I know one is never completely done with those kinds of illnesses, but over the past few weeks I did lose myself a bit, it’s like a deep well is punctured and spews black mud.

People suffer a lot worse than I have, but this hit me in my vulnerable spot, knocked me down again. I’ve been there before, I don’t like it. My eyes are fine, but I worried there was danger.

And frankly, I was just tired. The last few years have been hard and wonderful. But my head needed a break, and my computer co-operated. I’ve got a lot of stuff going all the time, all of it is rewarding, none of it simple.

I am bounding back, otherwise I would not even be writing this. Back to my good and wonderful life, full of love and purpose. Well prepared for another winter. When I was young, my mother told me to eat all of my food because children were starving in other countries.

But fear and sadness don’t work that way. It doesn’t matter what other people feel. We don’t get to give our troubles away.

We feel what we feel. Pain is pain, loss is loss, fear is fear. To live without those feelings is to not be human, and I am proud and grateful to be so very human.

I just felt like sharing all of that as I am putting my life back together.  I am getting my mojo back, feeling less helpless and at the mercy of others. I am filling up again with energy. Maybe it was Chris’s lucky $100 bill, or the arrival of Zinnia, a bright and cheerful creature.

Sadness for me is cleansing, purifying, it flushes out the bad stuff, and leaves room for the light.

I have so much to do, so much to live for. A friend wrote a blog post with began with the words “of course,  nobody likes getting older.”

I messaged her right away. “I like getting older,” I wrote. “Am I anyone?” Yes, I think so. I am.

It’s been a few months since Red died, and I don’t think of him all that often, my life is full and distracting. There are two active and lively dogs here and another coming in less than two weeks, so there is no absence of dogs in my life.

I do miss Red acutely from time to time, and today was one of those times. I was out in the pasture near his grave, and I felt a pang of loss, we did so much good work with sheep together.

I also missed him at the Mansion last night while calling the Bingo game there, he would greet all the players and then lie peacefully by my side for the rest of the game.

I told him Zinnia was coming, and I told him I hope he had entered the life of another human and was going as much good for him as he had done for me.

The first few weeks after Red died, I thought I felt his spirit around the grave. I don’t feel that now, but I’m talking to him more for me now than for him. If his spirit lives, he is fine, because Red was always fine.

He was always with me or near me, and I still feel that something is missing at times. I’m glad we buried him out in the pasture, we spent so much good time out there it’s a way of re-connecting with him, and then moving on with my life.

As I’ve written, I’d rather love a dog than mourn a dog and I have two dogs I love and will soon have another. I think that’s a good place to be.

I doubt I will ever have another dog like Red, but I shouldn’t make any assumptions. I don’t really know. At this point, I’m thinking more about Zinnia, looking forward, not backward.

I’m getting beat up pretty badly over this question of a pink collar for Zinnia. The idea was first offered by my friend Sue Silverstein, the theology and art teacher at Bishop Maginn High School.

She’s volunteered to be a socialization stop for Zinnia, and I agreed.

You can’t do better than to socialize a therapy dog in a high school classroom run by Sue, an over-the-top dog, and animal lover, and a notorious squish.

She started kidding me about getting a pink collar, perhaps with rhinestones, for Zinnia, and I dug in, saying, no working dog, male or female should have a pink color (or bandana, as far as I’m concerned.”

I feel strongly about this, it makes me crazy when groomers put bandanas on my border collies. They don’t need bandannas.

Working dogs are not girls or boys, they are working dogs. They don’t need feminine or masculine colors. I was unanimously outvoted by my readers on the blog and then on Facebook.

The only support I got was tonight at Bingo night when most of the largely female crowd at the Mansion agreed with me, saying a working dog should have a neutral color.

I can’t imagine putting a pink color on Rose, who I often joked was the only real man on the farm, or on Frieda. Maria says my position on the pink color was sexist. Pink, she said, was a strong and proud color and we would be doing Zinnia proud to wear it.

I admit I associated the color with all of those frilly and poofy things people bought for little girls. But things have changed, and that one slipped past me.

“I go for a pink collar without the rhinestones,” said Maria, “pink is a powerful color, a female color. It’s the color of women. It’s been denigrated and seen as something that’s weak and we’re taking it back.”

Okay, I buy that idea for Zinnia. I want her to be a powerful woman.

Sue Silverstein was stricken when I said no pink collar, she couldn’t imagine why I would object. At the Mansion tonight, Peggie supported my position exactly, “don’t get her pink,” she pleaded, “get her something brown.”

But the Mansion women are a bit behind the curve on this one, I think. Only one or two feminists there.

I called Sue tonight that I was surrendering and withdrawing my resistance to a pink collar, but I couldn’t stomach a rhinestone.

She said she was only kidding about the pink collar, it was up to me.

But she added, “pink is the color of little girls. We can be strong and we can be soft, that’s what makes women so awesome.” She said she wasn’t serious about the rhinestone.

Okay, I’m not fighting all that, I somehow missed the evolution of the color from a little girlie thing to a feminist power symbol. I get it. This is a train I’m not standing in front of.

Sue said she’d leave it to me. (BS).

Not so fast, I said, you started this, you are the reason I’m getting beaten up all over the Internet, you can’t weasel out now. So she sent me this image of the collars she had been considering:

Sue has agreed to host Zinnia while I’m at Bishop Maginn teaching my writing class, and she will also buy the pink collar without the rhinestones.

Zinnia will be proud of being a woman.

Deal. Thanks for your input. It was unanimously against my opinion. I know when to quit.

Fate and I drove over to the Mansion Friday afternoon to visit the residents (tonight is the weekly Bingo game) and I found Georgianna, without shirts or sweater, smoking outside and shivering in the cold. She was alone, which is unusual.

I’m sure I got Georgianna a sweater at some point, but she does forget sometimes, and often gives her new clothes away to someone she thinks is needier. I just found this out.

Georgianna is a generous spirit, she loves her friends and worries about them first.

She and I have a thing. I get her cigarettes on Friday so that she has some for the weekend. She calls me her “Guardian Angel,” and for once, I like the label.

She asks me once a week if there was any way to get married, and I say not, I don’t think that would work out with Maria.

She laughs. She says often, “you’re a sweet man,” in the way women who have not known sweet man often speak, mournfully and knowingly.

The woman around her always laugh and nod when the subject of men comes up. I can tell that Georgianna, who grew up in an orphanage, has known some hard times.

One of the Secret Garden members was rushed to the hospital earlier in the day, Georgianna asked me if I had any news of her. I said I don’t get told about things like that.

She will almost certainly come back I said, but the truth is I don’t know for sure. I never lie to anyone at the Mansion. I could see the worry in Georgianna’s eyes.

I’ll make sure she has some cigarettes over the next few days.

I told Georgianna to stay put and called Bev at Caroll’s Trading Post, a consignment shop just around the corner and the source of so many of my clothes for the residents. I asked Bev if she had any good sized winter sweaters, medium to large, and she said she did.

I drove over there and found three lovely and warm sweaters, and bought them and brought them back to the Mansion. I gave Georgianna first dibs and she picked out the one I thought she would like, and then, warm and happy, she posed for me.

She wasn’t shivering any longer. I looked at her bare ankles and asked if she had any warm sox. No, she said, she didn’t have any of those.

She is never sure why I take so many pictures, no matter how many times I tell her, so she has just accepted it.  I went on Amazon and ordered five pairs of warm socks.

I like being a Guardian Angel, it is important and satisfying work.

“I’ll see you at Bingo, I hope,” she said. Georgianna, who never asks for anything except cigarettes, wondered if I might bring a small stuffed animal to keep her company tonight. Sure thing, I said.

I’ve put a big hole in the Mansion/Refugee Fund buying winter clothes for people, at the Mansion and Bishop Maginn. If you want to help out, please send a contribution to me via Paypal, [email protected], or by check, Jon Katz, Mansion Fund, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.