Ruth passed away peacefully this morning at 4:30. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. Jennifer will send out a notice with the date and time of Ruth's memorial.
Ruth's Blog
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Ruth's new book is published!
This is Jennifer Mackley writing to let you know that I have published Ruth's final book: The Peshtigo Greenhorn. This is her fourth book, and is dedicated to Doug.
I say "I have published" to take responsibility for the editing. The work is hers, any editing errors are mine ... so let me know if you notice something.
It is available for purchase, but if you want to wait until they remove the extra dot on the cover (to the right of Ruth's name) that should be corrected within 2 weeks.
The Peshtigo Greenhorn Authored by Ruth H. Maxwell
List Price:
$9.95
6" x 9"
(15.24 x 22.86 cm)
Black & White on White paper
182 pages
Black & White on White paper
182 pages
ISBN-13:
978-1490446844
ISBN-10: 1490446842
BISAC: Juvenile Fiction / Historical / United States / 19th Century
ISBN-10: 1490446842
BISAC: Juvenile Fiction / Historical / United States / 19th Century
To purchase go to CreateSpace eStore:
https://www.createspace.com/4324931
Friday, June 7, 2013
Library Books
I love the library. Free books! I merely have to go online
and place my order. And within days or weeks, an email arrives telling me the
book is there to be picked up at the location of my choice. Awesome.
While growing up, I frequented the library. “Always has a
book in her hands,” Mother said. She worried I’d get too serious. In Chippewa
Falls, the library was an Andrew Carnegie Free Public Library. My local library
looks like it in that it has steps leading up to the bit double doors. It’s an
old library and I like its warm charm. The books are often well worn; the pages
soft and often smudged or dog eared. Others have read this book before me and
some have left their trails littered.
Items found in library books
- Old shopping list: butter, 2 AA batteries, Tims cookies, 1 green veg, tr snacks?
- Brochure for Mariners
- Movie ticket stub
- Bookmark: United States GOV’T BOOKSTORE
- Hand-written note: copy stuff onto floppy disk
- Library due date notice
- Book hold: MAUR RIC xxxxx0529 3/8/2012
- Business card: Painting contractor
- Torn ToDo list: call MT, return (smudged), email to joy
- Torn end of energy bar package
They are like cairns saying, “I’ve been here. It’s safe.”
This is my last blog. To all my loyal followers, and you
come from all over the world—THANK YOU. I have loved your comments and emails.
My very best wishes to all of you and good luck with all your ventures. I’ll
miss you.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Boxed In
It was
during the 60s and I was invited to a meeting of people interested in civil
rights. The moderator asked us to sit in a large circle and then introduce
ourselves. One after the other, I heard people say their names and then tell
what they did. I saw myself categorizing them as they said their professions
and wondered how they would categorize me. My career was as a wife and
mother—housewife, and I knew how that looked on a resume. So when it came my turn,
I said my name and turned to the individual beside me to allow him to introduce
himself. There was a long pause and then he collected himself and said his name
and profession. Later, during a break, people came up to me and asked what I
did. I could see they needed more information so they knew what box I could fit
in.
While
working as an educational therapist, I saw the value of categories. You
couldn’t get services for children without those labels, and so I don’t want to
throw out the idea of categories, but the labels can be limiting as judgments
are made. Determining intelligence is a complicated matter, and labeling can be
a simple matter, too simple. We have no trouble with the label “left handed.”
However, saying someone is “lower middle class” can be a different story.
Numerous
studies have been made regarding labeling. Two graduate students, Robert
Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, set out to show that the recipe for academic
achievement requires more than raw intellect and lots of schooling. They kept
the details of their plan a secret and told teachers that the test they
administered was designed to identify which students would improve academically
over the coming year. They called these students “academic bloomers.” The test
was really an IQ measure with separate versions for each school grade and had
nothing to do with academic blooming. Rosenthal and Jacobson recorded all the
scores and then chose a random sampling of children and labeled them “academic
bloomers.”
The “academic
bloomers” in reality should not have had any more success than the other
students. But the results at the end of the year showed that they did. They
outperformed their peers by a 10 to 15 IQ points. Four of every five bloomers
experienced at least a 10-point improvement, but only half the non-bloomers
improved their score by 10 points or more. Teachers admitted that during the
year, they praised the bloomers for their successes, over looked their
failures, and devoted plenty of time and energy to ensuring they would fulfill
that label of blooming.
There are
some lessons in here, I’m sure. Are you allowing yourself to be a “bloomer”?
Friday, May 24, 2013
The Spider's Web
It was a typical early summer morning in West Seattle. A
container ship foghorn woke me about 4:50 with its low bass “Who-o-o-o-.” I
didn’t mind and waited for the Ferryboat’s able reply. Three short blasts.
I thought about the movement that had originated the sound.
How that action coursed through the air and was then received by my eardrums.
We are amazing creatures!
It’s like the spider’s web on mute. That spider spins an
intricate web (you could write a book—books—about the process) and waits for
the message. She’s really smart for she can recognize who’s calling. The breeze
jiggles the web. No response. But the moment a meal appears, she acts.
Our bodies are constantly bombarded with messages and we
long ago learned to sort through them, ignoring most and paying attention to
the important ones. At least I hope that’s what I’m doing. For I live in a web,
fine invisible lines connected to every part of my life. I call them energy
fields. (I have to call them something. Try not naming things. Just
try!) As the spider’s web is necessary to survive, so is ours. And here I have
to drop the analogy as it’s getting thin.
Friday, May 17, 2013
High School
I recently read an article in The Week (April 26, 2013) which suggested we’re still stuck in high
school. When I think of traffic snarls and the TV news, I’m not surprised. When
I think about high school, I’m convinced. High school does something to us,
it’s our first real template for adult action.
Most studies of personal growth focus on the early years,
zero to three. Those are the years when our sensory systems of seeing and
hearing are developing and many believed that all functions developed in the
same manner. But that’s not the way in which the more sophisticated functions
work in executive function and emotional regulation. Laurence Steinberg, a
developmental psychologist, says if you’re interested in how people become who
they are, so much is going on in adolescent years. (And those of you with
adolescents are saying, “Tell me about it…”) Steinberg says our self-image from
those years is adhesive, so too our preferences. Why at 60, he wonders, is he
still listening to the Allman Brothers?
It’s all about our brains, really. Just before adolescence,
the prefrontal cortex—that part of the brain that governs our ability to
reason, grasp abstractions, control impulses, and self-reflect—gets very busy.
This activity allows young adults the intellectual capacity to identify a
notion of a self. However, at the same time, that prefrontal cortex hasn’t
finished developing. It’s still working, adding myelin (a substance that speeds
up and improves neural connections), and until it completes that wiring—in our
mid-twenties—the more primitive, emotional parts of the brain have the greater
influence. That’s when we’re all in high school. Now we know why adolescents
have problems self-regulating and are so dramatic. Everything is more intense.
There is more dopamine activity going on at that time than at any other time in
the human cycle.
If all of this is true, and the scientists would have us
believe it is, Jennifer Senior, the author of the article, claims most American
high schools are sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents. Robert
Faris, a sociologist, says it’s like putting people in a large box without any
clear predetermined way of sorting status. And status is what it’s all about.
Who am I? Where do I fit? Do I belong? Kids create the hierarchies and too
often from the crudest common denominator kind of stuff like looks, clothes,
and sports abilities. Brene Brown of the University of Houston says most of us
opt for one of three possible strategies for the pain. One, we move away and
hide. Two, we move toward it and become “people pleasers.” Three, we move
against it by using shame and aggression. She believes that whichever method
you chose, it becomes your modus operandi
for life.
In our adolescence, we were quite sure we knew what reality
was. I know I did, but the truth is I didn’t have a clue, was blind and didn’t
know I was. What I really had was a story I told myself.
Maybe we can be grateful for all that adolescent angst. We
did learn to cope. And perhaps some of the worst of adult America looks like a
replay of high school because it’s populated by people who formed their
identities in American high schools. Makes it possible to have a little
compassion for those so damaged by their experience they’ve not been able to
leave it behind or to write a new story and move on. And by the way, have you
gone to your high school reunions?
Friday, May 10, 2013
The Handyman
If it weren’t for the people who are actually IN my life, I’d have a twisted view of humankind that’s for sure. “Breaking news,” they gleefully tell me and then bring up obscure pictures of a crime happening somewhere. It’s often not even in my locality. There are probably any numbers of shootings or robberies, but this happens to be either the one that’s handy and the TV truck could get to before the broadcast, or it’s a very exciting one—who cares from where. That’s not news. That’s gossip as far as I’m concerned. I come away depressed at the condition of the world.
And then my handyman comes to make a repair. Or a stranger
on the street catches my elbow as I stumble over a broken piece of sidewalk.
What if the news broadcasters were required to present a fair picture of what
is really happening in the world? At least one good report for every
bad. That might get us closer to the truth. Only just closer, for I believe
that for every “baddie” there are at least ten, maybe twenty “goodies” out
there. I know my handyman is one of them.
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