Buffalo Gal

Every one of us gets the phone calls….either telemarketers or someone asking for money for a political, religious, or community donation. We got one this morning and it was from the Minnesota Special Olympics…a worthy cause for sure. We have gotten many requests for such donations in the past…from many causes we would like to support….certain political candidates who support the principles we support, MCCL….those who oppose abortions and encourage adoptions, many, many, many causes that are so important. I used to get regular calls from the national humane society after I made a good donation at the time of Hurricane Katrina because to of the left-behind pets in New Orleans. Later I learned that giving to the national humane society (address on Washington DC) is pretty much like pouring sand down a rat-hole. They peppered me with gifts and more requests for money. I wondered how much money from people who donated was being spent on the blankets, the cups, the calendars, the towels, the pencils and all other neat gifts that came for me in the postal mail????
I finally wrote a heart-felt letter to the NHS and told them that I did not want to be showered with any more gifts because henceforth I would be giving to my local humane society and I was sorry I had not donated to the local Louisiana Human Society for the Katrina pets cause. After a few more letters, they quit sending me my “rewards”.
When my mother died,  my sister and I had some cash memorials to deal with so we halved the money and each of us gave to causes we thought Mom would have approved of.   It was a one time donation of about 100 dollars to 3 things for my choices.    I had explained in my letter to the places I sent the money,  that it was a ONE TIME donation but they did not want to understand that…I was peppered once again with many more requests.  

 I once wrote a check to Jamestown College for a choir concert I attended. I still get requests from that college after about 20 years.
This morning the one of us who answered the call for the special olympics in MN explained to the college student who was working for the organization why we could not contribute and why we did not want any bonus magazine subscriptions. It was fairly straightforward. We are in our 70′s and have a very meager fixed income especially since Social Security was “frozen” at a level of two years ago. Especially since my teachers retirement was also “frozen” at a rate that existed two years ago. What has not been “frozen” is our expenses: taxes go up, the cost of groceries goes up; the cost of gas for our car goes up; the cost of EVERYTHING we need goes up……ad infinitum!
So we cannot give to every good cause that comes down the pike.   If we gave to every cause that is called to us, we would not be eating…we would be total paupers and could then go “on the dole”  if giving to causes is grounds for getting welfare payments.
As for welfare, we have NEVER been on it…neither were our parents or our children; we have instead payed all our taxes faithfully so that others can receive welfare payments and we have done it without complaining….except maybe  when I spot a person who is obviously on welfare..food stamps and the whole works….piling steaks and crates of soda pop into a grocery cart at a store!!!!!
So the answer to the callers, is   “No we have to pass on this…..we have paid our way all our lives and are still doing it via our tax payments. We would like to help but we simply cannot….if we want to continue supporting ourselves instead of everyone else.

In the past few days I have realized that there are new readers on Buffalogal. Thanks for joining me!
Here’s a short sketch about me…the BG from Western Minnesota.
I live on a high bluff above the Buffalo River …thereby taking my blog moniker “buffalogal”. It is rural here where I live and so beautiful….on top of a high bluff you can see forever in all directions but I especially love watching the sunsets.
I am in the 7th decade of my life. I was a teacher/librarian in an elementary school in western MN til I retired in 2004. I loved my students! And I still love to meet them in unexpected places.. like meeting Wayne at a McDonalds last weekend.  He was in 8th grade when I started out in 1980.

I have loved to be a gardener for many years—vegetables and flowers.

I also love to ride my bike; I used to do a lot of walking but the aging muscles have stopped the long walks. I do go to a class called “Silver Sneakers” that is wonderful for seniors…cardio, muscle strenth and toning all in one class. I am a lot stronger than I used to be before SS!!
I am married to the SAME husband I started out with 50 years ago!!!    Our 3 sons are grown up , married and have brought us 9 grandchildren. We love our family!!!    Much of what we do outside our home is family-related.
I also love music…especially singing ; I was a choir singer for many years when I was young and sang in a college choir for almost 4 years. I got to see the USA from a Greyhound bus in those years as we toured widely with that choir.
My pleasures are reading, writing, doing crosswords and other word games. I enjoy British drama and keep two libraries busy keeping me in British DVDs!!!
I love my life and I love where I live!! Rural MN is a beautiful place to raise children and even raise “old guys and girls”!
Welcome to the Buffalogal blog site. Some of you who are new have said such kind things about my writing. Thanks a lot…it means much to me.

I have already blogged my views of putting that mosque and “community center” at Ground Zero in NYC. But I have read more recently and I have some additional concerns now.
In an editorial piece written by DeRoy Murdock, a national writer in several on- line newspapers… among other sources.
Mr. Murdock’s piece was titled “It’s Not the Location, It’s the Sharia”. In his op-ed, Murdock writes that the focus of the Islamic center being built in NYC has been the location…at the site of America’s greatest attack and tragedy on 9-11- 2001.   Murdock raises the spectre of Sharia law—-that code that Islamists impose on citizens of countries where they have the power to do so.
Imam Rauf, who is the leader of the ground zero Islamic center being established 600 feet from the site of the hole in the ground that was the result of the 9-11-01 attacks, has expressed some views in the past that are haunting him now.    The Imam has spoken many things at the present time about how this center will be a peaceful place of worship and historical significance. But Rauf has spoken his views clearly on some very troubling subjects that bother DeRoy Murdock and many other Americans.
–just 19 days after September 11..while Ground Zero was still a smoking pile of rubble,  Imam Rauf said on CBS “60 minutes” ,   ”I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”
—in 2005. Imam Rauf said that the United States “has more Muslim blood on its hands than Al-Quaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims.”   Just overlook the millions of Muslims whom America has liberated or at least tried to resuce from tyranny in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Lebanon and Somalia (quote Murdock)
—Rauf has repeatedly refused to identify Hamas as a terrorist group
—”Most worrisome, Rauf embraces Sharia”….that fundamentalistic Islamic set of laws that is responsible for too much of earth’s total barbarism.
Rauf wrote in the Huffington Post (or the Huffing and Puffing Post as some call it) and this is a quote from Rauf:    ”What Muslims want is a judiciary that ensures that the laws are not in conflict with the Quran and the Hadith” Further he has written that he wants to give “religious communities more leeway to judge themselves according to their laws”.  Now how would the American liberals square that with their ferocious stands taken on “separation of church and state” ????  They are devoted to keeping anything church related or spritually related out of our nation’s government—in every part of it.
Sharia law relies on the Koran and the Hadith and other Islamic texts to punish offenders—–punishments  that too often smell of the 7th century. (Murdock)
Here are some of Murdock’s findings about the effects of the Sharia law that Iman Rauf wants to see established in other countries… like this nation.
–A Saudi sharia court is seeking a hospital to enforce its penalty against a man who paralyzed Abdulaziz al-Mutairi in an assault with a meat cleaver. The Saudi  judge who favors Sharia law being carried out, wants to paralyze the attacker by severing his spinal cord. So far, to their credit, Saudi doctors have refused to cooperate in this carnage.
—Since Shari law has been instituted in Nigeria in 2000, twelve people have received death sentences for homosexuality and adultery.
—Once a Muslim, always a Muslim. If a Muslim converts to another faith, Muslim jurists are unanimous that the offender must be punished. The Muslim Brotherhood’s influential leader says that “apostates must be executed”
—Under Iran’s Islamic Sharia law, twelve women and three men face death by stoning for adultery.
—even snacking can be punished under Sharia. In November, 2004,   a 13 year old Iranian boy violated Ramadan fasting and for that he was given 95 lashes. which killed him.

These examples of Sharia law’s punishments and the fact that Imam Rauf of NYC approves of the establishment of Sharia laws,  gives me the creeps about the influence a the mosque at Ground Zero may have on American Islamists.    If Rauf wants to institute Sharia law in the United States what effect will that have in American courts?    It is for Islamists… but what about a takeover of the United States in which every citizen would be subject to this sort of “law and order”.     Considering the punishment for adultery and homosexuality, it  would leave a lot of dead American bodies!
One of Murdock’s concluding statements said this:
“While America battles militant Islam, should a pro-sharia mosque be allowed on our soil?    The First Amendment may permit sharia advocacy,  much as the counseling Marxism-Leninism remained legal even as Americans shivered through the Cold War.    Nevertheless, there is no excuse for leaders like Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama(before his spectacular flip-flop) to applaud a mosque that would enshrine the gross and deadly doctrine of sharia.      Even 5,600 miles away, such a facility would not be far enough from Ground Zero”.

The furor over the Ground Zero mosque in New York City is rising almost daily and last weekend there were thousands of New Yorkers protesting against the building of the mosque so near Ground Zero…which is truly a graveyard for many victims who died in the 9-11-2001 attacks and have never been found or identified, probably because they were incinerated in the attack.
It is early morning but I got the Kitty Alarm really early today..like before 5 a.m….so I have been up for a couple of hours already and it is only 7:15.
Getting up so early gives me time to read news and views on the internet sources. The one I want to quote is by SE Cupp who lives a few blocks from Ground Zero in New York. She writes that she is of Italian extraction and has thus heard many stories from the Old Country from relatives. But the one she related in today’s piece took place in recent times in Padua…the city which was also the setting for Shakespeare’s “The Taming Of The Shrew”.
But more recently in Padua, the citizens of that city did NOT want a mosque built at a site in their city even though permits and every other requirement had been put in order. The ground had been leveled and was all prepared for the beginining construction of the mosque.
Then one devout Catholic citizen took care of the “problem” that so many Paduans had protested against. One night, this person, under the cover cover of the nighttime darkness and stillness, brought a very well trained pig–on a leash—-and led the pig around the site, on which the pig urinated frequently. When the mosque proponents and builders learned about it, the site was immediately abandoned and the citizens of Padua had won their protest against the mosque.
SE Cupp also told of several other “crude” solutions to unwanted mosques in Italian cities….several severed pigs’ heads were put on spikes at the proposed sites for building a mosque.
Even the city governments in Italy (all heavily Catholic Christian) rejected plans for mosque buildings, unhampered by the New York City mentality that this is a constitutional issue in the United States.
Not many mosques are being built in Italy, apparently due to the “Italian Solution” of using pigs, and pig “products” at such proposed sites.
SE Cupp concluded that even New Yorkers are not crude enough to adopt such a solution. She said that she is opposed to the building of the Ground Zero site and lives only a few blocks from that place but she rejected the idea of bringing a trained pig to the mosque building (an old Burlington Factory store) and having it urinate at many places at that particular address.

Another incident in ancient history comes to mind. The Jewish religion is just as strict about the avoidance of pigs , pork, and anything associated with a pig, as are the Islamic believers. But in ancient times, a conqueror of Jerusalem committed the horrendous act of pouring pigs’ blood on the holiest place in the ancient Jewish temple. That would have been an act of supreme violation for the Jews.

In another article I read this morning, the  Ground Zero mosque  developer…one of them at least…has revealed that the mosque within the “Islamic Community Center” as it is being billed, will have enough room in it to seat 1000 worshippers. Which is not exactly  “a small place for prayer” as some others have made it out to be.
Do we have any places of worship that seats 1000 people around this area?

**the temple in Jerusalem was desecrated by a Seleucid ruler, Antiochus Epiphanes in one of the conquests in Jerusalem in ancient times

I am lying on a comfortable lounge chair that is like a nice cot….it is on the deck of my home and I am lying in the summer sunshine. I am partly covered up due to having very fair skin so only my legs and arms are sticking out right now and they are slathered in protective sun lotion. I figured I could use a bit of natural vitamin D while it is so summery and warm; soon we will be inside the houses more and more as the cooler/colder weather comes on. It is hard to believe it will happen after having such hot and humid days just a short while ago. Today is perfect! Clear blue skies and sunshine and a soft breeze blowing over me to cool me off from the intense sunshine…even at this stage of summer…later August.
My face is covered also and my eyes are shut but I can hear summery sounds around me as I lie still on my cot soaking up the sun.
I can hear the faint whistle of one of the NPSF trains as it approaches the town that is 3 miles from where I lie. Each engineer has a distinctive whistle pattern. This is the one that has Looooooooong/ Looooooooooooong/ short short/Looooooooooooooooong! I learned this from a former neighbor who had a friend who was a train engineer who always blew his special whistle when he passed our neighbor’s house which was not far from the tracks. As the train approaches it blows its whistle at every crossing and I can hear it getting closer. It will strain to pull up the long grade northeast of town, and will not level off til it is nearly at the Dale crossing east of the Bluff. I will hear it til it gets another couple of miles east but the sound will have grown fainter with the distance the heavy coal train travels.
For awhile there is only the soft sound of the breeze playing in the leaves of the trees below me….the ashes and oaks each have a different sound when the wind blows through them. Now a car goes by on the gravel township road that is about a half mile below where I lie. It is headed for town but is going rather slowly and its tires sing against the gravel roadbed.
More sounds of silence…then the hum of traffic on Highyway 10 comes to me. I have to concentrate on this sound because it is more than a mile away. Sometimes I can hear a large semi-trailer pulling up the big hill on Highway 32…it is a long hill and the truck has to shift gears; it sounds like it is in pain. It disappears as the truck heads south to Rollag or Pelican Rapids.
Another silence is broken by the sound of jets flying high…..more than one jet. It could be the same 4 fighter jets I saw flying in formation yesterday. It is not the Happy Hooligans unless they have flown south from their new home. We used to see and hear them all the time as they practiced and made their big turns out our way when they were based in Fargo…but that is no more. The jets disappear quickly flying at high speeds high up in the blue canopy. I do not see them, I hear them only.
Tish-Ah, Tish-Ah….the leaves murmer in the wind.
Another jet plane approaches but this one is really high—-it is flying northwest and may be a large liner headed for Seattle or Alaska. I do not know but I think of the folks on board who probably can see the ground on this clear day.  I strain against the sun to see if it is leaving the long white jet trail behind.  I cannot see anything against the brightness of the sun’s disk.
The heat is getting to me. There is so little bird-song these days….I hear no robins or wrens, only the angry sound of a bluejay gang squawking noisily and naught-ily in the woods east of my home. They are probably up to no good but there should be no more marauding of other birds nests…their eggs and babies. Bluejays are cousins to the nasty black crows who also gather and sound like a bad street gang getting ready for a rumble.
Crows are bunching up near corn fields now…I have heard and seen them and I wonder what mischief will be perpetrated by this gang of bird thugs.
I have had enough of the sunshine. I feel like my legs have been deep fried so I know it is time to get up and go inside where it is cool.  I should have enough “ergosterol” in my body for a few days.

First I have to go down the steps and over to the loaded, red, ripe chestnut crabapple tree and eat a few crabs. They are so succulent. I have made several batches of applesauce but they are best picked right off the branch and eaten so fresh that the apple cracks when you bite it.
Summer sounds and summer tastes…both of them exquisite.

I think L.A. has lost its title as an American city with the biggest traffic jams. China is the new champ….traffic has been snarled in Beijing, China since roadwork began on August 13. Some roadways which circle Beijing had to be closed… further complicating traffic flows. The traffic is backed up almost to the border of Inner Mongolia, China’s nearest neighbor to the north. Much of China’s coal supplies come via trucks hauling it from Mongolian coal mines so the big coal trucks are part of the 60 mile traffic jam that could last for many weeks.
It is reported that villagers along the traffic jam route have become entrepeneurs, selling noodles, other food and supplies to the people caught in the jam who do not want to leave their vehicles. The Jam victims are willing to pay the elevated prices that villagers are charging for their wares…desperation time has come.
China’s highways suffer from wear and tear from the huge coal trucks that have to navigate their way around the one and only way to get into Beijing and to the large factories that burn the coal for industrial purposes.
Complicating matters in China, its coal consumption is 1.9 billion tons per year and has been rising for the past five years. Another complication is China’s burgeoning population which is the largest in the entire world with 1, 339, 098 people living in China as of 2009. This compares with a U.S. population of ONLY 310,080!
Chinese citizens used to ride their bikes everywhere but are rapidly changing to driving gas-driven vehicles which cause air pollution on a grand scale. During the Olympics in Beijing, people were forbidden to drive their cars in order to cut back on the thick smog which would have affected the Olympic athletes and given China a bad name as a polluter of the atmosphere. They are already doing that big time with their high coal- burning factories which pump CO2 into the air on a gargantuan scale. Cutting back greenhouse gases in the U.S. and other European countries does not count for much because China and India with their growing populations and the huge increase in industrialization are putting so much coal smoke into the worlds’ atmosphere,  it cancels out the feeble attempts of other countries to reduce carbon emissions.
In an article from “Science News”, Dec. 20, 1997, it is estimated that in 50 years (2047, should the world make it that long) the Chinese people who own cars will jump to 400 million. Picture the traffic jams then!!! The population will also increase in that 50 year period so maybe the prediction for car ownership is way off….it could be higher with China’s increasing prosperity due to its continuing industrialization. Couple that with the belching coal- burning factories and you can imagine a real smog-soup in future years.
A computer simulation (not really reliable as we have seen failed computer models in the global warming dispute) of air currents shows China producing a broad plume of ozone pollution, generated by the nitrogen oxides in car exhaust. “We compute that cars would bathe the entire western Pacific in ozone, which means that Korea and Japan would have ozone levels comparible to those in Los Angeles on a bad summer day.” (Science News article)

I do not know if the computers used to produce the “model” for this prediction were able to predict any kind of statistics on future Chinese traffic jams that might last a lot longer than 9 weeks!!!!
We may yet read about a year-long traffic jam on Chinese highways that will have Chinese drivers packing portable homes, a long-time food supply, portable outhouses, a many- month supply of clean clothing and other necessities to survive the 12 months or longer traffic jams that might “compute” with the rise of automobiles being driven by over 400 million or more new drivers.

Can you imagine children in Chinese schools being asked to write a short essay about “What I Did This Summer”?    The first line might go like this, “My family and I spent the entire summer in a traffic jam outside of Shanghai.   While we were there we learned to wash clothes in a pond next to the highway. We used the pond water in our Super Water Purifier to provide water for drinking, cooking and taking showers in with our portable shower stall complete with soap and shampoo. I met many new people in the traffic jam and learned to speak 4 new dialects of Chinese. We got home the day before school started so I have not seen any of my regular friends yet. It was not a nice vacation like  I had anticipated.”

After reading about the now-nine week traffic jam for 60 miles from the outskirts of Beijing to the border of Mongolia, this might not be such a tall tale after all!!!!

Last Saturday a group of good friends went to  the Garden/Tea qulit show in a beautiful yard of a Victorian home in Lake Park.    It is a yearly event and the number of quilts on display increases each year the quilt show is held.    After  spending a pleasant hour or more looking at the quilts and the beautiful gardens, we decided to have lunch at the local cafe.   As we sat in the small dining area eating the best hamburgers ever…..freshly ground meat each day..nothing frozen…one of the true readers in the group said she had heard that Barnes and Noble was trying to sell out….the whole chain of BN bookstores.   Oh no,  I  thought….please let this not be true!    What will I do if I cannot walk into the BN bookstore near West Acres and not inhale the wonderful aroma of books and Starbucks coffee?     How will I live without the day- long stay at BN….first sitting at the coffee shop looking out over the store…all the books, the customers coming in, the browsing that is going on….the reading….the coffee sipping.   It is MY ambiance….MY special place.   Finding special treasures on the book shelves…..it is too good to let go.

But the news from the reader friend is that BN is not making it….the booksales are not supporting the business.   And why is that?    Probably because so many members of the younger generation do not BUY or READ real books….they are the high-tech generations who do everything online, include their shopping, at the places where they can get the best deal.  They are the ones who are permanently attached to cell phones or texters or i-pods playing into their ears….do they ever read a book?  It doesn’t appear to be important to them.        

   Amazon.com must have cut into bookstores’  profits since it went online for shoppers.  I know this is fine–free enterprise and all that, but it is as sad to see real bookstores closing just like it is sad to see mainstreet businesses closing because of the incursion of the Big Box stores like Wal Mart, etc.  Fargo has already lost one bookstore—B Daltons in West Acres has gone by the wayside.

Another observation at our lunch table was that there is even a “reader” available for people who want to do all their reading from the internet …even books that can be downloaded onto this device…the name of which I do not even know.

I am sad….I love to HOLD a book in my hands, turn its pages, smell the scent of fresh paper and ink….it is like a special friend I am holding in my hands.  I could never do that by reading books downloaded from the internet.

Will book publishers go out of business also?   What will become of libraries?   Will there eventually be no REAL books on the shelves because everything is “online” or “downloaded”????   I cannot bear to think about that kind of world.   

When I was still un-retired and working with students every day in our school library I got into a dispute with one of the Techies on the staff who told me that I could buy a machine that would actually read books to kids.  I blew up…..a machine read books to kids?  Never!  That was one of the best parts of my every day job….sharing stories with children who loved the reading aloud and were inspired to read books because of hearing a book read aloud…sitting close to an adult who cared about them.         If high- tech takes over our libraries, bookstores and other such venues we are more than in the world of the book “1984′…we are well beyond it.        Go ahead, call me a Luddite.   I am, sort of…even though I am sitting at a computer word processing this blog.  But that is enough for me…..I do NOT want to do my reading of books in this way….and not on any high-tech – downloader – thingy.

I do not want to live in a world in which people sit in front of their flickering computer screens, doing everything by computer.   Everyone will forget what the wind sounds like when it blows through spruce trees or willows or oak forests.    Nobody will know what it is like to sit quietly and listen to birds’ songs.    Walks through paths in quiet places will never take place.    People will not know what it is like to sit in a small boat and listen to the waves lapping or suddenly hear a loon cry…or see one diving for fish or carrying its little ones on its back.   Nobody will remember what wild flowers look like–maybe they will never have seen them in the grassy places or the dark glade of a woods.

Life without a bookstore with real books…hard covers and pages in between….real magazines and swishy newspapers gone?    A pleasant coffee shop gone?    All I can say, is “Oh please don’t let this be true.”

Okay, class, take out your papers for yesterday’s WORD GAME/ ANIMAL PUNS. You may check your own papers but do not change your answers….be totally honest!!!
Now get out your red pencil because here are the correct answers:

1. Chocolate Chimp Cooky

2.racingcur

3. pupcakes

4.Days of Swine and Roses

5. ewespaper

6. fleaway

7. tern out

8. the codfather

9. gnu deal

How did you do?     9 correct: You are more briliant than the sun itself.       8 correct: Brilliant but not like the sun.   7 correct:  Extremely bright         6 correct:  excellent    5 correct:  You need to work on your puns and wordplay skills     4 correct:   Have you tried working crossword puzzles?     3 -0  correct:   Forget about it; try the number puzzles instead.

When I was still a teacher/librarian, one of my favorite bulletin boards which I used, was the one titled “So Many Books—So Little Time”.    I got the idea from a catalog for library themes and supplies, etc. and being used to being economical, I used the slogan and made my own bulletin board which included some quotes from well known people about the value of reading. I ordered a cloth book bag from that catalog with the same slogan on it and I still love to carry it and use it.
I am in the situation of having too many books to read and too little time right now. It is NEVER an uncomfortable dilemma for me. I often have 3 books “going” at the same time but this time the number has risen.
After I joined an adult reading group at our local library, I am committed to reading the books chosen by our group so I now find myself reading those books (which I helped select) along with the others I want to read on my own…. often because of recommendations of two special people in my life…my cousin Margaret and my friend, Fran, who are both “readers of excellence”.

So….in my stack of books currently, I am reading eagerly:   LAND IN HER OWN NAME by Fargo author Elaine Lindgren who has been a professor of sociology at NDSU;    WALK TWO MOONS by Sharon Creech, and SARAH’S KEY by Tatiana De Rosnay.

Lindgren’s nonfiction book about women who homesteaded in North Dakota in the early part of the 20th century is the result of long and careful research and personal interviews with many of the women who homesteaded, or with their descendants who remembered well their grandmother’s adventures in western ND.     The personal accounts of the women who homesteaded, and who also,    fortunately, wrote about their experiences, are not only fascinating, but leaves this reader with a “how did they ever do this?”  wonderment.       I love the true accounts of pioneers who were the strong, determined ones who built our states and countries through their personal strength and integrity. LAND IN HER OWN NAME was first published in 1991 and is so worth reading for anyone who has not done so already.

WALK TWO MOONS was one of the novels by Sharon Creech that I remember ordering for our school library. Sharon Creech is an author whose books are directed at young adults but her works are so well crafted that many adults have read the books and used them in reading groups and book clubs. This one has been widely used as a classroom novel for English classes and reading classes in elementary and junior high schools. It is the fictional story of a 13- year old girl whose mother went to Idaho one day and never came back.    The daughter makes a trip with her grandparents in an attempt to find her mother and along the way reveals a long and complicated story of a girl she calls Phoebe Winterbottom.    Another novel well worth reading!

I got way ahead of myself when I got SARAH’S KEY from the library; our librarian orders our books we will read for our adult reading group and sometimes they arrive well ahead of our time for discussion.     SARAH’S KEY is not “due” until our October meeting but out of curiosity I read the first chapter when I got it and then could not “put it down”…as many readers say about books that they read.
This one deals with a historical incident in World War 2 …July 16, 1942, to be specific. That was the day French police, at the bidding of the Vichy French government, at the bidding of the occupying Nazis….went into the neighborhoods of Paris and took Jewish familes out of their homes, brought them to a sports arena where they suffered for several days  without food or water or sanitary facilities or anything necessary for human comfort.    After several days, the Jewish families were separated by men, women ,and children, up to age 12.      The adults were then shipped off to Auschwitz where they were immediately put to death in the gas chambers. The children were held  in unbearable conditions in several “camps” in France. Sarah, one of the main characters, is the child of the Starzynski family.    Sarah, unknowing of the permanent status of being carried off by the French police…. one of whom had been her friend as she went to school….locked her 4 year old brother in a “hidden cupboard” in their home and thought she would be back by nightfall to rescue him.     Of course Sarah was totally mistaken and to her horror, she realizes that her little brother is locked in the closet..never to be released.     She carried the key to the cupboard throughout her captivity, hoping to escape and find her brother. The novel is written in the time sequence of  1941 and the early 2000s , jumping back and forth between the two times.   In 2001, a member of the family that moved into the Starzynski family’s home after the roundup of Jews, seeks to search out Sarah and her family, if any of them are still alive. The novel is stunning in its revelations that unfold over 60 years since the shameful roundup of French Jews on July 16, 1942.

If any reader of this blog is short on reading material this late summer, these books are SO worth adding to one’s reading list.

A recent commenter on my blog regarding the controversy over the proposed plan to build a mosque at Ground Zero in NYC who calls “itself” HAHAHAHAHAHAHA or something to that effect, shot off all  his/her cannons in disagreeing with my naming the Ground Zero project a “mosque” and said it is not a mosque but a cultural center.

But I must correct HA HA as he/she is ignorant about the “cultural center” which he/she claims is all that will be built on that site.

First: from the Old Gray Lady herself: the NY TIMES: headline: “Mosque plan clears hurdle in New York” First sentence: “As New York removed the final hurdle for a controversial mosque , Mayor Michael Bloomberg forcefully defended the project —as a symbol of America’s religious tolerance and sought to reframe the fiery national debate over the project.”

From “Questions and Answers On Proposed Islamic Center” : from the “Washington Post”:
Q. What is included in this project in New York at Ground Zero?

A: The plans are for a {Islamic} cultural center that would include a mosque.

So HAHA…..perhaps you should try googling “questions and answers on proposed Islamic center” and become informed before you shoot off your mouith again. Just my advice!!!

Postscript:  I just looked up the Latin origin of the word “tolerance” (which Mayor Bloomberg used in his statement about the mosque at Ground Zero) and “tolerance” comes from the Latin word “tolero” which means “to endure”.

Interesting!