Browsing Archive: October, 2011

My Brother Died Smoking

Posted by Edith Cook on Monday, October 31, 2011, In : Reading Life

My brother Karl, two years younger than I, is twenty years into the grave. He succumbed to pancreatic cancer, which essentially condemned him to dying a slow, torturous death by starvation. The cancer, originating elsewhere in his body, was almost certainly due to his lifelong smoking. In California Karl tried EST, primal scream, self-hypnosis. He could not kick the addiction.

Two years after my his death, having completed coursework for master’s degree at University of California at Davi...

My Garden

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, October 23, 2011, In : Reading Life

I love my vegetable garden, and I love to share its bounty.

"Your blue potatoes taste good," a child at a school function said and hugged me.

"I am glad you like them," I said. "They are from my garden." I had brought the potatoes to a school lunch, microwaved them in the kitchen, peeled and cut them into chunks and offered them with a bit of butter and salt.

My garden is my friend in times of stress, my physical therapist when I ache, my outlet for sharing joy. Recently, when the first nigh...
Continue reading ...

Exchange Oct 16, 2011

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, October 16, 2011, In : Events

Dear Professor Burke,

Your Letter-to-the-Editor comments on my recent WTE column are both interesting and welcomed. What follows may serve as clarification of my professional stance.

I am not a journalist. In my most recent career, from which I have since retired, I trained as English professor and taught a variety of literature and writing courses. For fifteen years before that, I helped my late husband establish and maintain his Calif. law office. Prior to immigrating to the U.S., I w...

Questions and Memories

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, October 9, 2011, In : Reading Life

I was teaching in a California two-year college when I read a student essay on global warming. It distressed him, said the writer, that most people dismissed the problem. “We are like frogs in a pot that’s put on simmer. Because the heat happens gradually, the frogs don’t do anything. If the frogs were dumped into already-hot water, they’d all try to jump out.” The year was 1994, three years before the Kyoto Accord would attempt to reach agreement among nations on how to control gre...
Continue reading ...

At Altitude

Posted by Edith Cook on Sunday, October 2, 2011, In : Reading Life

It's lovely to visit the mountains. But do you want to live there? I thought I did.

Laramie and Cheyenne have been touted as small cities that are good places to retire. What the retirement literature doesn’t say: these cities lie at or above 6000 feet elevation. If you have lived at sea level all your life—say you retire from the fast lanes of San Francisco or Chicago—altitude will be a problem. As we age, our bodies do not acclimate as they did in youth. Someone born at altitude or wh...
Continue reading ...