I guess with my place in life right now my kids’s artwork and pictures with them are my most treasured possessions. I always tell my husband if something has to happen I want each one of their bins taken out and our computer with all our pictures on it because we don’t print our pictures anymore.
A lady gave me a picture frame, and on it was printed, “You are an amazing person.” I met her through an acting and improvisation class at the Senior Center here. I acted out improvisations, and I have it hanging on my wall. And I bet when people come in they say, “What’s that? Is she saying that she’s an amazing person?” But no, this lady gave it to me and she had it printed on there. But I’ll always…
Well, I have a collection of bottles that was my mother’s. And she acquired it during the thirties and the forties. And they’re bottles about this high and each of them is a beautiful colored glass, some of them decorated as well as being colored glass. She acquired most of them in small barber shops in small towns throughout the state of Iowa. And this was during the time I was growing up and I usually would go into the…
I have an oil lamp that was my grandmother’s when she was young, and she said her father would leave it on, lit for her, when she was out on dates with the man who became my grandfather. So she always could come home and find that lamp. And it just made me think about how much technology changed during her lifetime. Because by the end of her life she had this email printer thing that I could email her…
My prized possession is my apple peeler. I don’t really remember the moment of buying it, but I think I got it at Wilson’s Orchard about twenty years ago. But it’s almost identical to the one that my mom had growing up. And so we peeled a lot of apples and cut a lot of apples, and I still do.
When I was in kindergarten I was in Boston, Massachusetts. And I don’t have a lot of stuff from that time, but I do have a box that my best friend from kindergarten gave me when she went to India. It was a little marble box. It’s really pretty and I’ve never seen her since I was in kindergarten in Boston, so it’s nice because I can see that and remember all my Boston friends. [It’s a way to remember right? A…
Okay, continuing with the musical theme, my treasured possession is my first guitar. I’ve always loved music. I was about fourteen years old and I worked summers, and then after school as a bus boy in Davenport at a local hotel-restaurant. And I saved my tips, sometimes that was as little as twenty five cents a day and later I earned more when I was a room service waiter. But I saved tips in a big glass jar. So I,…
I have often thought that the most precious gift my parents passed on to me was not a physical thing, but their love for music. They were not musicians, but they often had the record player or they had the radio. My mother loved musicals and jazz, but also enjoyed some of the music my sisters and I enjoyed. Music has become, for me, a way to express who I am and my deep sense of spirituality in a way…
1. It’s so fun to be in a group and not have everyone looking down, and they’re talking to each other. 2. I’m so grateful that we’ve had this time together because we’ve been singing together for quite a while, and singing, we’re at our best a lot of the times. It’s just such a great bonding that we have, singing together, and now we get to know each other on a more intimate basis by having these little times…
I feel like humanity is just so beautiful when you take time to actually just listen to people talk about the most important things. Life seems like a really rich experience even if it’s been hard. It seems also more amusing—that perspective I appreciated in this group too. The beautiful thing about aging is that if you think about it, looking back, all of the things that were hard or that you were sad about—it was your own creation, you…