Donna Marie 1954-2005

My younger sister died of cancer at 51 years young.
Long may her spirit live on.................
Dec.18th, 2005


My remembrance of you
will never be altered
no matter how long
I'm left here alone
I'm left here alone
to live out my days
still full of your grace
and my remembrance of you
Time fades a picture
and changes a season
never to pass
the same way again
the same way again
until the day when
I meet you in heaven
my beautiful friend

Lyrics be Diana Jones

Dear Huck, do we over protect our kids today?

After watching Ken Burn’s PBS special on Sam Clemmons life, writings and his insights.
I wonder what would happen in today’s world to the characters.
Would Huck’s parents be put in jail for child neglect, would Huck by put into a foster home, and Jim arrested for kidnapping and blamed for who knows what else?
My childhood memories included some fun, adventurous and sometime dangerous times, my brother and I and our BB guns explored the wild south Texas landscape.
Skinny dippin in crawdad ponds, sometimes we would have to take turns because one needed to keep an eye out for water moccasins.
Do we over protect for the common good?
Yet we allow our children to use a violent video games for their adventure.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It was also one of the first major American novels ever written using Local Color Realism or the vernacular, or common speech, being told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer (hero of three other Mark Twain books). The book was first published in 1884.
The book is noted for its innocent young protagonist, its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River, and its sober and often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism, of the time. The drifting journey of Huckleberry Finn and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature.