I feel so inept in this new E-world and Google country and Facebook friends and all the rest crowding my inbox. But I must learn to be fluent in it since my age forces me to rely on them  for telling the world about the five volumes I've created in the last ten years. The younger generations, in their search for instant everything don't know, or care, that I can remember and report the terrible years of the Great Depression that's haunting us now, and the chaotic forties when WW II changed all our lives in so many drastic ways, yet created a united effort that bonded our generation forever and now seems to be lost..

My trilogy of memoirs is filled with stories about the real events of the last century.  But  they are written and published and now must be marketed to find their niche in history. And there are so many people, young and old, who want to hear those stories. I only need to find the right links. My new friends on Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin and Goodreads and Dames of Dialogue and all the yet unknown readers who would love my books are out there in the great global wireless world. The real question is whether I'll live to reach them. How will I find the ways?

Visitors!!!!!! -

September is already here. What happened to summer? It feels like we never had one this year. You turn your attention away for a bit, and when you turn back, it's fall! Between the endless political talk and the Olympics and the US Open, and one thing and another, and the year has gone by with no attention paid to what should be the fun time of the year.  Come Oct I will have some special visits - helping me to note my 98th birthday!!!!

Resurrection of a wayward blogger

Reading my old blogs, I can't believe I haven't posted one since June! Trying to figure out why, I've realized that an unusual phenomenon seems to have developed, actually a combination of things.

First, I think I've just been overwhelmed by the reams of Email that turn up in my inbox, all hollering for comment or reply. Between Facebook and messages of the millions of friends of President Obama, individual personal messages from friends and family and readers of my books are often lost in the shuffle.

Add to this the natural slowing up of my normal mental functions nas i approach my 98th birthday, and the recent development of an uge to concentrate one one project at a time. Unthinkingoy I accepted an urgent request from a fellow member of my writing group, the High Country Writers, to take over as editor-in-chief of an Anthology project of our short prose and poetry. For a month or more I was so focused on its complications that it seemed to fill my hours to the exclusion of  almost everything else.

Happily, that effort is now completed -- at least my role is -- so I can retrn to my own life, and make my peace with all the websites I have so shamefully neglected. As my mobility becomes more unsteady, I am determined to continue my efforts to promote my five published books, three of which form a trilogy of memoirs. My major media for making them known to the reading world must be the electronic ones.

There are not too many of us left to tell the stories of the most critial times of the last century -- the years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, World War II, and the chaotic life in eastern Europe created by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, where I was born nearly a hundred years ago. Though my writing may seem too far behind the younger generations to be of interest to them, my five children and eleven grandchildren have kept me involved in their lives and concerned with the 'sturm und drang' of their times.

It also works the opposite way, and my experiences are of valid worth to young people in many ways. The old warning still holds good: "They who ignore the lessons of history will be forced to repeat them."

LATE BLOOMER: Today I was given a genuine moment of nostalgia. T...

LATE BLOOMER: Today I was given a genuine moment of nostalgia. T...: Today I was given a genuine moment of nostalgia. The new Nat'l Geographic came, and had a story about Russian Summer. It was described on th...

Today I was given a genuine moment of nostalgia. The new Nat'l Geographic came, and had a story about Russian Summer. It was described on the contents page as: "In vacation cottages . . . they brood, plant, party, and restore their souls." And eat watermelon! A great picture showed a family at a dacha, with cut-up chunks of watermelon, big, bright red and luscious, just as I remember it from my early childhood, when my whole family -- parents, grandparents, aunts and cousins -- gathered at a dacha for a month every summer and vacationed together, enjoying the produce of local farmers and the fun of being together -- "restoring our souls" -- as I think Russians still do and always will, no matter what kind of government they suffer under.
Even after all these years my dear lost family comes back, with that wonderful juicy melon that I still love to eat, and still get messy with juice and nostalgia. Watermelon has always meant summer to me, and always will.

It seems to be hard for me to write my blogs regularly. So many things seem to get in the way. Last week and this one have been pretty hectic. Of course the high point was my Book Launch last Saturday. Though my audence was nt very numerous, everyone there seemed to be interested in my new memoir, and a couple were new to my writing and bought all or most of them, which was very gratifying. I am now promoting my three memoirs as a historical trilogy. I'm hoping they will appeal to older people because they remember those times, and to younger people because they know so little about them, and would like to know more.

Then my writers' group, High Country Writers, had our annual Spring Fling yesterday, and it was a lovely party. This year it was hosted by Maggie Bishop, our founder, in her  beatiful new house, which has the most superb view I have yet seen, Even in this High Country, where great views are everywhere you look, I have not found its equal. To help make up for the days when I didn't write a blog, I will share the poem I wrote for the occasion (we're all supposed to write something):

ANOTHER SPRING, ANOTHER FLING
How quaint!
In this chop-chop world
of pleasure NOW!
of moment by moment delight,
 never mind tomorrow
they say it may never come.

The feast is spread.
Sit down to it
before some angry god
jerks off the tablecloth
and sends ther world crashig.

And in this selfsame world
we sit and read our verses
as we have done each year
and plan to do in many years to come,
peaceful in our surety of eternal renewal.

All hail to HCW. I know
our future is safe in your folded hands.

Too much to do to have time to have much to say. Suddenly my book launch is just around the corner, and we have to rush more publiciy about it because of the necessary rearrangement because of the mix-up with the bookstore. I hope the new plan to have it the same morning, June 9th, at the Library has been aired thoroughly enough to get to all those who had planned to come. I know I'm being a bit fussy about this, but it makes such a huge difference in the attendance and the success of the party, that I feel I must try to do all I can to spread the word.

BOOK LAUNCH of "The Whirligig of Time" at the Watauga County Library on Queen Street in Boone, this Saturday, June 9th, from 10 a.m. to noon. Rerfreshments, readings and revelry! discussion, signings, the works.
Hope to see you there!