A Few More Good Things That Happened  

•  Reading, EVERYTHING
• Valley Center
• Making ice cream from fresh cream separated the day the cow was milked
•  Learning to garden with Grama and later, Mom
• Living at Rancho Lilac
• Meeting Eleanor Roosevelt

Socrates was asked once why it was that Alcibiades, who was so brilliant, was so unhappy.

Socrates replied, “Because wherever he goes, Alcibiades takes himself with him.” This is still very profound for each of us today.

Have you ever tried to move to a new place, to start over, only to find the same situations following you from place to place?  This certainly happened throughout my childhood, the issues of poverty following us from place to place as my mother lied to one landlord after another, changed jobs and clung to survival as tenaciously as is possible.  The deeper, and more personal issues followed me into my adulthood for resolution.

I changed schools about 27 times, counting the schools at Hillcrest Receiving Home and the high school classes at San Diego County Juvenile Hall.  I counted that out about 25 years ago, now some of it is a blur of forgotten names and circling back to schools I had left already.

I have been thinking of what I am grateful for. It is quite ordinary to be so loved and so appreciative. My gratitude extends to everything about my life these days and particularly to very ordinary things. I am grateful for the kindness, encouragement and intelligence of my husband with whom I live in a consistent state of Love. We live comfortably without any particular excess. I am grateful for the wisdom to live simply and to live trusting that our needs will be met.  With all the shortcomings my family may have had, I am grateful that I was raised to take good care of what I am given, preserving it and honoring the privilege of my abundance. For that I say “Yea and Amen!” to Grama Cavanagh with affection.

I know that outside the window where I sit there is a colorful garden that represents in microcosm the entire basis for my deep appreciation of nature and all its gifts to human life. I am grateful to those who have been so generous in my life and I am amazed as I discover the depths of that well of generosity out of which we take our gifts for one another. I believe that we live lives infinite in the means whereby our gifts are created and dispensed. We are avenues of Spirit’s self-givingness and grow in that capacity as we open to the possibility of endless gifts.  We are meant to be generous and responsible for how we use the lives we are given.

MEETING ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

When I was a little girl, I had the privilege of meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, who was visiting Rancho Lilac, in Valley Center, California, where I lived as the daughter of the ranch cook.  Interestingly, Colonel Irving Solomon, who owned the ranch with his wife Celeste, had served with Roosevelt at the UN.  During her visit to Rancho Lilac he had apparently told her that there was a little girl who wanted very much to meet her.  When the school bus stopped at the gate to drop me off, there she was waiting to meet me!  Imagine such a generous and wonderful surprise!  It was a short visit, only a few minutes at best. But they meant a great deal to me in the years to come.  Because I met her, all my life thereafter I have been inspired by what I learned of her as I grew up.

As I got older I  felt driven  to find out more and more about her, she was the most important public figure I had met,  and I was inspired to discover in her qualities that I could later find in myself.  Eleanor Roosevelt was a woman who stood up when others sat down on their rights.  She was a self-defined woman who decided who to be in her life no matter what the challenges she faced.  She was a champion for civil and women’s rights.  She didn’t worry about being liked as much as being an effective force for good.  In 1948, when the following Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed without dissent by the General Assembly of the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt served as the chair on the Commission on Human Rights, which brought the Declaration to the Assembly for approval.  What a fine legacy the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was to leave the world!

On a more personal level, I wonder what would happen if we each took the time on a daily basis to think, “Today, how could I spend a few minutes acknowledging someone, a child, an elder or a colleague so that they would be changed or even, that they would remember the precious gesture decades later?”

“Rancho Lilac was the site of the smallest post office in the United States. The post office, which still exists, was not much bigger than a phone booth. It functioned until about 1912. The property changed hands many times and eventually was purchased by Col. Irving Solomon in 1945, who raised Hereford cattle. Solomon was instrumental in the formation of the United Nations.” [1]

I played post office on the site of this tiny post office without knowing its history until recently.  I simply came upon it while playing in the yard in front of Col. Solomon’s ranch house.  I didn’t know as a child that Col. Solomon had worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the formation of the UN.   I did know that his cattle were prize winners and that he was a really nice man.  I have no memories of his wife and family at all.  I am indebted to him for his kindness to me on that one day when he could have left Mrs. Roosevelt to enjoy a rest beside the pool, but instead asked her to greet me.

“Sometimes the days they can be very busy, so I like to stop and think now and then.  I think of the reasons I have to be happy, and that makes me happy all over again.”

From the Broadway musical “A Year With Frog and Toad”

[1]  http://orangebook.com/directory_valley_pauma_california_history.htm (This page has since been taken down)