Janet's Blog

I always considered Shorty to be my dad's friend. I don't know if Dad knew him before he came to stay at the Hotel Mary-Etta, where my family lived, or if they became acquainted because Shorty returned once or twice a year, staying for a few weeks each time. Anyway, Dad enjoyed spending time with him, and we all grew accustomed to seeing Shorty around, especially in the summer, when it was easier for him to travel from place to place. Shorty wasn't his given name, of course, but that's what everyone called him, probably at his request. He undoubtedly signed his legal name on the hotel register when he checked in, but I didn't know what it was. As a child, it seemed logical for me to call him Shorty because he was, well, short . You see, Shorty was a double amputee who walked on his well-padded stumps. He may have been injured in a railroad accident, or perhaps his disability came about in World War II. Whatever the cause, both legs had been removed just above his kn...

On Friday, Bill and I, along with our middle daughter, Meagan, and her husband, Andy, made a whirlwind, overnight trip to Doane University in Crete, Nebraska, where Meagan was honored by her induction into the Sports Hall of Fame. (The kids stayed with Grandma Deb and Grandpa Stan, which was an adventure in itself.) When Meagan was first notified of her selection a couple of months ago, she didn't want to go. I wasn't surprised that she was being honored in this way, nor was I shocked when she said she would rather stay home.  Meagan was a member of eight GPAC championship teams, and a seven-time NAIA All American, winning six individual Great Plains Athletic Conference (GPAC) pole vault titles. In 2008, she won the NAIA national outdoor championship. She was also a two-time CoSIDA Academic All-American and NAIA Scholar-Athlete. Until February of this year, Meagan held the school record for indoor pole vault (3.96 meters/12 feet 11.75 inches) and is still tied for the top spot ...

I think Mom sort of fell into her collection of candelabras. She certainly didn't plan to amass so many of them, as well as numerous single candlesticks and pairs, but her laundry room cupboard was filled with them long before she moved to her final home at Gardenside. It all started when we moved to the Hotel Mary-Etta in Fairbury. The warren of basement rooms included numerous storerooms, but one, in particular, contained boxes and boxes of household items that had been left at the hotel by previous tenants, including a former manager whose family was Jewish. Mom and Dad worked long hours in that basement room in their attempt to clean out the clutter. They checked each box, ultimately throwing some stuff in the trash, while donating much of it to charity. In true "waste not, want not" fashion, they re-boxed some things they thought might be useful someday, keeping a few of the best items for themselves. That included several candlesticks and one or two beautiful candel...

Are filing cabinets becoming obsolete? I still have one next to my desk, but I wonder if such filing cabinets will be necessary in the digital age to come. I suppose everything we need could be filed away on the cloud, or looked up online, but I will always be most comfortable having hard copies of some things. I guess my age is showing. Sometimes I think my brain resembles an elaborate mega-computer, with a little IT guy inside, working around the clock to make sure everything keeps operating as it should. There are programs that keep my body functioning as it is designed to: my brain keeps my heart beating and my lungs breathing, without pausing, for seven or eight decades, or more. Other programs oversee digestion of the food I eat, and interpretation of my senses of touch and smell. It must take a complex program to decode what my eyes see, turning every moving image right-side-up in a split second and making sense of every bit of data, while my mind determines how my body will rea...

To begin with, let me just say that Mr. Hill was one of the two or three teachers at Fairbury High School who scared me. The main reason I was scared of him was because he liked to put students on the spot, suddenly, without warning. I was still pretty shy at that point, so I was worried that I would be his next victim. For the most part, my concerns were unfounded, but it took decades until I was able to say that Mr. Hill was one of the best teachers I ever had. The building we called Fairbury High School still exists, living on as an upscale apartment building. Mr. Hill's class met in the southwest corner room on the third floor, on the far right side of this photo. Mr. Hill taught Senior Honors English. Students were assigned to his class based on grades and recommendations from other teachers. I knew most of my classmates quite well, since we had taken numerous other classes together since Junior High. Most of my best friends were in the same class, so that fact alone helped ca...

I walk two or three miles nearly every day, as long as the temperature is above 20 degrees and the wind isn't blowing a gale. That means I haven't been able to walk outside much in the last week, due to the frigid temperatures and sometimes ferocious wind. But yesterday, the freezing weather moved on, and the west breeze was tolerable, so I pulled on my down jacket and mid-calf snow boots and ventured out into the sunshine. Our eight inches of snow was rapidly melting into mounds of slush and widening puddles in the streets and on the sidewalks that homeowners hadn't bothered to shovel. It was the first time I had walked outside in several days, so I enjoyed the sunny afternoon, even when I had to make my way gingerly across the sloppy streets and expanses of un-scooped walks.  Walking outdoors in God's beautiful creation is so much better than walking laps indoors or using my strider in the basement. I was almost home when I came to a corner that seemed impassable. A c...