Pamela Foster's Blog, page 6

Bad Day

Statistically, combat veterans use VA facilities over twice as much as qualified non-combat veterans. Combat veterans with post-traumatic stress have anxiety about their health, all the physical challenges associated with their wounds, and they very often have agent orange related symptoms. In Jack’s case, besides the physical after effects of stepping on the landmine, and the debilitating post-traumatic stress, he has a constant body rash and Parkinsons – a disease for which even the VA aut...

Leap Frog

For years I woke up every day with at least one character and story line flowing freely through their brain. A day of not writing left me itchy mentally, angry at what had been lost because I could not make the time to sit in front of a computer and let the words spill across a white computer screen. It’s been over a year since I’ve plunged into my own stream of creativity.

Worse still, like the frog set gently into a pot of water set to boil, I have become accustomed to not writing. Not jus...

Writers’ block, which for years I insisted did not exist...

Writers’ block, which for years I insisted did not exist, has swallowed me whole. In an effort to escape the belly of this cold beast, I volunteered to teach a ten-week writing course at the local senior center. I do, after all, have seven books published. I may not feel like a writer at this moment, but damnit, I AM a writer.

Maybe acting like one, owning that peculiar malady in the presence of a classroom of people would inspire me to fight my way up out of the depths and back into the lig...

UNSHOD

Friday night was dinner and a movie night. Mom worked nights. My sister was usually busy with friends. That left Dad and me to eat at Chins or The Taxi Cab Café and then stroll down the block to Partrick’s Candy for a pound of light chocolates – vanilla, mint, walnut, and maplenut filling only – to share during the show.

Dad always picked the movie and he always chose a western. Secretly, I had a crush on Clint Walker and James Gardner, but John Wayne was perfectly acceptable. I fell in love...

Turtle Dreams

For weeks after receiving Jack’s diagnoses of Parkinson Disease my sleep was haunted by the flash of tiny fish in ever-tightening nets. Or, I dreamed I was a sea turtle flying effortlessly through my domain. In an instant I was entangled in a net, hauled into a small boat where laughing men hacked off my flippers, tossed me unfeeling back into the sea. Even as I fought against the cutting and slicing of my limbs, my means of survival, I understood the men were simply doing what they had to d...

Chewing on Life

I went to sleep before Wheel of Fortune.
At three a.m., precisely three a.m., a flash of light illuminated the room, silhouetted my open laptop on the desk next to the bed. By the time the thunder followed I was awake, staring into the now dark room, wondering, electrical storm or preliminary sign of stroke?
The slap of thunder was, thus, a relief.
There was only the one flash of light, the one rumble of thunder. I decided this was God’s way of telling me to get up and write.
Most of you kno...

Advanced Directive Humor

Those of you who read my books know that humor is my drug of choice. Okay, let me amend that. Humor and caffeine are my drugs of choice.
Many of you also know that my husband, Jack, has a wide variety of health challenges which, over the last couple of years, have come to require more and more care. I love the old Marine, feel blessed each day to have him in my life. Nonetheless, I need a little space to be me – not Jack’s caregiver, not even Jack’s wife, just – me. So, three days a week, Ja...

Candle Power

Originally posted on Pamela Foster:

Dylan Thomas advised that we rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Thomas was writing about aging, of course – the slow, and sometimes not so slow, deterioration of our bodies and, let’s be honest, of our minds. But his sentiment is an attitude, a way of approaching life.
With all due respect, I have come to disagree with the poet.
Oh, I rage. I rage loudly and employ inventive curses against everything from my bad back, to Wall Street thieves, to th...

Veterans Day, 2015

Originally posted on Pamela Foster:

I strive to be a positive person, fall asleep each night reciting the many comforts and the people I am happy to have in my life, take an extra minute each morning before crawling out of bed to say a prayer of thanks.
By noon, I’m frazzled – angry, resentful, frustrated. None of these emotions is productive.
Most of you know my husband is a Vietnam combat vet, a Marine who stepped on a landmine fifty years ago just outside Danang. Jack died that day. Floa...

Humboldt County Norm

Every community displays subtle social clues that separate newcomers from recent arrivals. Of course, recent is a relative term. In general, the more isolated the community, the longer it takes for a new arrival to be assimilated and accepted into the culture.
Here in Humboldt County, we generally define an old-timer as someone whose family has resided in this, the furthest point west in the continental U.S., for a minimum of a century. So, roughly five generations. Minimum. This parochial e...