Shapes

We have the sort of garden that produces a lot of plants that are natural abstracts.  This is a very spiky agave. I love this particular one for the  shape of its leaves, but also for the fact that all agaves are filled with water and provide living fire protection.

I had a really interesting, and fun, Zoom meeting with my friend Ann Hyde. She is a historian  and I think I have mentioned before that we have had discussions in the past about the importance of keeping old letters and documents. Years ago she told me that the internet (at that time) wasn't particularly useful for historical research because anyone could post old letters on the internet and claim that they were written by their great-grandparents during the Civil War.

Things have changed a lot since then. Documentation is both more and less accessible. Following on a recent conversation we had about questions I had about my  parents that I could no longer ask them, she said why didn't we get together in a month's time and she would show me how to sort out the reliable documentation from the unreliable on Ancestry.com. She was calling from her home in Colorado and had signed me up. 

She learned something about me just by signing me up. She had always assumed that I was born in California but when I didn't show up in the records she delved around a bit and discovered that I was born in Oahu. And I for no more reason than quirky memory remembered that I was born in Kapiolani Hospital (which is still there) and was delivered by Dr. Wah Kai Tong.  Clearly she loves doing this kind of research and we delved around in the family history looking for reliable documents such as birth and death certificates, but also military casualty records, hand written census documents and even grave registration records. In some cases I knew some facts about something, but had the details wrong. After a lot of poking around, we discovered that my mother's older sister, Alberta, died in 1919, at the age of 27, not of the Spanish influenza as I had always thought, but of TB because she was a  nurse and worked in a TB Hospital. My mother, the youngest of 6 children, was 9 at the time of her death.

We made a date to get together again in a month and I feel sure that before then she will do a bit more digging. I know that there are a few skeletons in the family closet and will be interested in finding out a little more about them! 

And I briefly met her dog, Pippin, a beagle of stature!

I'm going to refrain from saying much about current news because I am having a news free day. I'm horrified by what is happening in LosAngeles and can only say that, while I haven't always been a total fan, Gavin Newsom is currently my hero. He is among the few politicians with the guts to stand up to the madman and warn people in a fiery speech that what is happening here could and will happen anywhere, and urge them to 'take to the streets'. Many already have and I hope many more will.