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my vote

October 27, 2025

Everybody wants to know, how will I vote?

Democrats write me, Republicans too,

they send surveys I am afraid to answer.

Is this survey for real, or are they trolling?

Every mailing I get, it asks for money.

I grew up being told, my vote is my business.

I vote as a citizen, make my choices in private,

vote on issues that mean the most to me.

It’s none of your business how I plan to vote.

If elections were honest and votes were legit,

you’ll know after I vote, who I voted for.

And no, I have no money for your campaign,

because, have you bought groceries lately?

have you tried to buy steak? LOL LOL.

Lucky to buy hamburger. Hot dogs, maybe.

Maybe a can of soup with too much salt.

Have you looked at what a house costs to rent??

No, I can’t send $$ to your campaign,

you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

Save your money and don’t ask for mine.

Call me on the phone, ask me, how was my day?

What are the issues you’re dealing with?

How can I brighten your day today?

I will vote while I still can, and hope that it counts.

But my vote is my business,

I hope for change.

cfblack, 10-27-25

Posted in hard times, the times we live in, various personal musings | Leave a Comment »

Loss

July 7, 2025

I go to bed to dream of you,

to take away the feeling of your loss,

to lie in the darkness in peace, and think of you.

I don’t dream of you,

awake with first light, hear the birds singing,

imagine it is you, singing in the next world.

The loss returns.

I feel your lovely spirit always with me, wherever I go,

wherever I am. But still, I miss you.

Today I will work on pressing flowers from your funeral,

watch videos about molds and resin, to create momentos

for family members.

It gives me something to do, while I think of you.

cfblack, 7-1-25

Posted in dreams, grief, various personal musings | Leave a Comment »

Treefrogs trill in the trees that enjoyed a sprinkling of rain
from the clouds that last night hid the red moon eclipse,
Pretty black cat joins me on the back porch,
but as I sit, my fingers turn cold as ice from a light breeze blowing;
I return inside, to the warmer air of my daughter’s kitchen,
and await the heat of Summer.
cfblack, 3-14-25, Pi Day

Posted in Family, various personal musings, weather | Leave a Comment »

Zooming

June 17, 2023

I want to write about Zoom calls. This is not a poem. Maybe it will be one some day.

Yesterday, I did a marathon of 6 zoom calls in a day. At the end of it, I was getting depressed. It is being with people, while not being with people.

You are not sitting in a room with people, you are by yourself, in your room, on Zoom. You see a screen full of faces, all looking at you. I think this is why people want to turn off their cameras. If we were all in person, we would be lounging on couches and chairs somewhat in a circle. We would not all be staring at one another as if we were on a stage & they were the audience.

On zoom, people turn off their cameras. They like to hide. It is a privilege, if allowed, on zoom. So you then take away all eyes on you. You can also mute your sound, become muted. Then when you want to speak, you forget to turn it back on and you’re talking to no one but yourself. Sometimes you raise your virtual hand and do this. Sometimes you turn on your camera & then do this. People say, “You’re muted!” Then you have to start all over again.

If we were in person, we would smile, look sideways at some, straight at people only usually when they are talking. It is a different phenomenon. I was born into a non-tech world where all we had was in person conversation, or well, and phone calls. The phone was near the kitchen & another one upstairs. If I was on the phone w/ friends, I knew my parents could silently pick up the other line & listen in. We couldn’t go to a breakout room for privacy. I guess I should write a poem about that.

But for now, back to zooming, I think it depresses people. Or more accurately, it’s a disconnected way of connecting. It’s not WHOLE, it’s partial. Though we like to see one another, like in a family zoom call, it’s sure not the same as being WITH them, with my WHOLE self. I miss my family. Maybe that’s the depression part.

I guess zooming works for getting through a college class. But it’s not the same as in person. More research is needed, as they say in academia.

Posted in Sociology, various personal musings | Leave a Comment »

66 years

August 20, 2019

I have been on this planet 66 years, as of yesterday. Here are a few things that tell me how much I have experienced and what changes have occurred in those years:

When I was a little girl, we had one phone in the house, near the kitchen. I even remember some of our phone numbers. One was HA 31931. Numbers now have 10 numbers to a phone number. Ours had 7.
When we wanted to call someone, we would pick up the receiver and listen. If we heard someone else talking, that was the people sharing our “party line” and we had to hang up until they were done, then make our call.
I remember when calculators first came out. I was starting college. They were expensive.
My first car was a VW bug, original, green, with clutch and shifting gears. I did everything I could do to avoid stopping on a hill. If you shifted and “missed” the next gear, it could just roll backwards into the car behind you.
Certainly, there were no computers, no video games. I remember computers coming into peoples’ homes. I remember some kind of HUGE computer being rolled into Purdue libraries. I remember the taking down and dismantling of the card catalog. I took the 3X5 cards with my dad’s Masters thesis and PhD titles.
For my 15th birthday, I got a polaroid “Swinger” camera.
I used to put curlers in my hair and sleep on them. When I was a little girl, my mom wound my hair into little curls and pinned them to my head with bobby pins. We took them out in the morning.
The Beatles came out when I was about 13 yrs. old. I had a huge picture of Paul McCartney on my bedroom wall. For my 15th birthday, my dad took my sister and I to a Beatles LIVE concert at Kennedy stadium. Thunderstorms threatened all evening and John Lennon pointed his guitar toward the clouds and acted like he was shooting at them. I screamed through most of the concert. My dad was so embarrassed, he moved my sister and himself away from me and another girl who decided to scream together for the duration. We bought their music on “record albums”.
I was sent home from high school one day when some girls and I decided to wear jeans to school, to protest not being able to wear PANTS. Even in the coldest of winter days.
Saturday mornings were the only time we could watch cartoons on TV. We would wake up and camp out in front on the television all morning until lunch-time. The final shows were Sky King and My Friend Flicka.
The Wizard of Oz movie came on TV once a year. There were no home movies, no DVDs.
I was not allowed to see Cleopatra in the theater because it was too adult.
Candy bars were 5 cents. Cokes were 10 cents.
In a drugstore down the street, they sold penny candy. One of the candies was in the shape of a baby, we called them “Tar babies”. They used to be called something else.
Pres. Kennedy was shot when I was in 5th grade. Our teacher came into the class upset and said he had been shot. A little later she returned, saying, “The President has died,” and we were all sent home.

Posted in aging, family tree research, various personal musings | Leave a Comment »

Life of a woman

March 15, 2019

I think of writing about my 11 years as a stay-at-home-mom, the poorest years of our lives, and we had 4 kids. Some people were mad at us for having 4 kids. Said we couldn’t afford it. I hung clothes out on the line, washed cloth diapers, had a kitchen with wooden floors…… and still I refused to “go to work”. These were my babies. Besides, how would working be possible with 4 children? It was not possible. The structure of our society says we can pay for childcare. It says who are we to want assistance? We should figure it out. I played with my kids, had lovely days where time stood still, I made baby food, baked our own crackers. My husband worked sometimes 2 jobs. Once I determined to return to work, I went back part-time, then 30 hours, then finally 40 hrs/week. I had anxiety to be out in public alone, no child in tow. I imagine everyone was staring at me. Eventually, I went back to school, got 3 degrees including the top of the line PhD and became a professor. When I quit my full-time job I had for 15 years in order to finish the PhD, I had just come over the top of earning $21,000 a year. Yes. That’s right, that’s what women do, right? “Support” the family income. I worked to maintain health insurance for all. Fast forward to today, I earn 3X that much and have had a career for a good 11 years now. Life is an amazing journey. I fully remember getting my first car in my own name. It was a Dodge Neon, white. I was over 50 yrs. old. I loved that car. And if I could go back to any one time of my life?? I would give anything to go back to a day with my little ones, in the house with a wooden plank kitchen floor. But each age is different. Yesterday I spent over an hour on the phone with the IRS. Evidently because I had the AUDACITY to list MY NAME FIRST on our tax return, they couldn’t figure out where our money went. We’ve been married for 40+ years. We are one entity. But because I put my name FIRST… they couldn’t find us. I am 65 years old. How dare I put my name first on our joint, married, tax return. This is the end of my story! I’m about to end the Baha’i fast for the day!

Posted in Family, various personal musings | Leave a Comment »

my narcissistic moment

December 14, 2018

In my psychological work over the years, which I no longer engage in, I have come to know a little girl who grew up very protected, quite pure-hearted, nieve, sensitive to others, and who cared for the world. She liked her time alone, often playing with her Barbie dolls, arranging them in her room in various ways over & over for hours. Or setting out all her dolls, of which there were many. She also loved sitting in the backyard driveway amidst thousands or millions of tiny rocks in gravel form, and picking out those she found the most interesting, unique, or beautiful. Her father was a scientist and taught her to discover the world and appreciate the life in it. Even in rocks millions of years old, there are stories. Fossils that speak of creatures who lived eons ago, come to visit us.

Because of various experiences in life, this primal innocence was lost. But it remained a part of her and I think is why, later in life, she was so forever destroyed by the unexpected loss of her father, and problems with her mother. She was in no way prepared for these things. So now, when possible hardships appear on the horizon, she imagines the worst possible scenario, because this is exactly what happened to her when she was 16. So if you imagine the worst thing, anything else is up from there and you know you will make it somehow.

I like to look back and think of this little girl, so unaware of the sufferings of life. I like to see her purity and it is not so much a self-love as an appreciation for who she was, and is, today. I am who I am. My experience is my experience, and if you think I should be more able to enjoy things like horror movies, tainted jokes, or the darker side of life, then you don’t accept who I am. I still cherish my time alone, and not only that, but need it, in order to stay sane. I am very aware of my strengths and weaknesses and needs. I know who I am.

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having a car

November 28, 2018

something to write about later–

Getting my first car in my name,

white Dodge neon, 2006-07, myself 53 yrs old.

when our kids were little, having no car,

resentment toward AL for always taking it,

never understanding my total isolation,

never willing to compromise (ever),

riding the bus for something cheap and fun to do,

the kids choosing where to sit, excited, looking out the windows.

The things you do when you’re poor, home alone, with 4 kids and no car.

The excitement of the Bookmobile

coming to our apts out in the country, not on any bus line.

Sitting on the steps of the apts.,

watching a tractor shake up dirt and dust

as it plowed the corn rows

far across the field from us.

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Our kids don’t know poverty

October 7, 2018

Our kids don’t know poverty.

Not like we did.

When we had our babies,

I stayed home with them.

Besides, by the time we had 3, or 4,

my working was not cost effective anymore.

When we had our babies,

government decided

to downsize middle managers,

so sometimes you were home with us,

and still, somehow, we survived.

When we had babies,

I used cloth diapers,

and hung them out on the line to dry.

One summer, the gas company shut us off,

we had no hot water for weeks.

Our kids don’t know poverty,

Not like we did.

They have nice houses,

new furniture,

They don’t have wealth,

but they don’t go without,

or have to use food stamps

at a local store.

They don’t know the shame

of standing in line

to get that free government cheese,

They don’t know having to take a bus

to go downtown to pay a bill,

and I wonder what they will ever do

if hard times come to call,

or if they will know how to find the joy,

while making it through it all.

cfblack 10-06-2018

Posted in Family, poetry, various personal musings | Leave a Comment »

birthday

August 19, 2017

I was born about 1:10pm on a Wednesday. My mother always said, “I knew the minute you were born!” like that was unusual. I think because from her experience, women were doped up and pretty much unconscious, which is sad, to me. I was the 2nd child and my older brother 8 years older than me. Probably, I took a lot of our parents’ attention that he was used to absorbing. They tried for 2 years to get pregnant for me, & then got the other gender, so I figure I was the center of their world for awhile. Until my sister came along 2 1/2 years later. And then our younger brother 5 years after that! So I was 7 1/2 years from one brother, 8 years from the next. It was my sister & I in the middle.— My dad was a professor and he loved to take 3-4 weeks of his summer and roam around out West. We went to the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, Yosemite and the Redwoods, Canada and Mexico. My birthday usually occurred on a trip. I can’t really remember hardly anything that I really wanted for my birthday, I think because it was celebrated away from home. I remember more, what I wanted for Christmas. Dolls……. Raggedy Ann, Barbie, “Miss Ideal”, Tiny Tears. Nancy Drew mysteries. A stingray bike. One thing I DO remember I really wanted was a transistor radio for my 16th birthday. My dad said they couldn’t find the one I wanted, they’d get it later. We had the birthday dinner, I went to bed, then I heard this loud rock & roll-type music playing…….. went downstairs, there was the RADIO, my radio. My dad liked to play games & tricks like that on us. He died 9 days later at the age of 50, on my mom’s birthday. I have lived 14 more years than he was able to. He never met a grandchild. I have 6. No one ever knows how long they have on this earth, to be with your loved ones. Life is a gift of God. I appreciate all the bounties I have been given to have lived this long. May I enjoy many more.

Posted in Family, vacations, various personal musings | Leave a Comment »

Doctor Grandma