Bride Calls Off Wedding, Feeds Homeless at the Reception

Photo: Sarah Cummins, 25, who called off her wedding and fed the homeless at the $30K reception.

This story was just too good to pass up and not pass along. It's taken (as is the photo) from this msn.com article, which you can access by clicking here. The author of the article is Maureen C. Gilmer.

The nitty-gritty is that Cummins and her mother spent upwards of thirty grand to pay for the wedding and invitation. She worked overtime and long hours for years, she says, to pay for this. One wonders why the groom-to-be isn't said to have done the same thing, which is perhaps indicative of why the wedding was called off to begin with. Unfortunately, she's not saying. And kudos to Cummins for not airing out that dirty laundry once the press and the internet descended upon her, by the way. Many of us have been less than discrete about verbalizing the incidents that have greatly bothered us, and naming the names of those who did them to us. Mine's in the memoir, baby!

So she had a non-refundable contract with the Ritz Charles, which must be near Indianapolis, where this article was first published. Sounds...ritzy. All that food for 170 guests--and kudos to Cummins for sending out reverse RSVPs to those 170 people, and for even knowing 170 people to invite to her reception, I suppose. I'm not sure I even know 170 people. Well, okay, I do, but only about 5 of them would be invited to any reception of mine.

Apparently, this last-second wedding and reception cancellation has happened before. I know this because a) that has to be why this stuff is non-refundable to begin with, because last-second cancellations happen so often that it has to be paid for, period; and b) last year I was told a story about a woman of about this age, in my neck of the woods, who called off her wedding and reception. She and her mother paid over $40,000 for everything, including the reception spot in the Caribbean. But the guy turned out to be slime, which the teller of this story, and her parents, and the bride-to-be's friends, and possibly innocent passersby and concerned motorists--all told this woman that her husband was slime and she'd be better off not being married to him. This woman agreed with them about two weeks before the scheduled wedding and reception. Anyway, they went on the vacation anyway, and everyone who was supposed to go still went (except for the groom-to-be, who was apparently in a jail cell), and they all had a helluva time, as well they should, since the whole thing caused a lifetime of PTSD and stress, and cost over forty grand.

But I digress. What did Sarah Cummins do? Well, she called local homeless shelters and invited 170 homeless people to the ritzy Ritz Charles. They dined on...Well, I'll finally quote the article:

"On the menu are bourbon-glazed meatballs, goat cheese and roasted garlic bruschetta, chicken breast with artichokes and Chardonnay cream sauce and, yes, wedding cake."

Sounds good to me! And the surroundings?

"The dinner will take place in the hotel's garden pavilion because Cummins said she always wanted an outdoor wedding but didn't want to risk the weather...She and her mother will arrive early Saturday to set up the centerpieces they designed themselves — gold Eiffel Tower vases with roses."

And afterwards? What about the honeymoon?

"When it's over, Cummins said she's leaving on her honeymoon Sunday to the Dominican Republic — alone — before returning for classes at Purdue."

What a great idea! I suspect Sarah Cummins will get many more marriage proposals after this. An attractive woman with that much money to spend on a reception who's smart enough and rich enough to go to Purdue? Where in Indianapolis did this happen?

Lana, "the loneliest dog in the world," Needs Our Help

Photo: Lana, from my blog entry in 2015, and from this week's article here.

Okay, let's help the underdog.

Lana, "the loneliest dog in the world," needs help. I've written about her before, so click here if you missed it. The bottom line now is that she's been returned to a shelter, and she only has until May 20th, or she may be put down.

Having read about her twice, and having now written about her twice, it seems to me that she suffers from excessive shyness and mistrust, and she may have been abused in her past. It sounds like she's been in a shelter for so long, so often, that being left alone in a house or apartment for a few hours may give her actual PTSD symptoms. My dog, a greyhound who was put in a cage for two years, gets like that around dog cages, so he can't ever go in one to wait for his turn at the groomer. One hallway at a building I used to work in must remind him of the track, or a shelter, because when he saw it, he reared up on his legs like a horse and actually came out of his harness. Dogs can have PTSD symptoms. Anyway, the article says that, when Lana's not around the people she trusts, she shuts down or becomes more hesitant. Well, hell, so do I. Who doesn't?

From the article:

Nearly two years after Lana the Labrador became known as "the saddest dog in the world," she's looking for a forever home again.

After an image of Lana cowering at an animal shelter went viral in 2015, thousands of applications poured in and she found a new owner.

But this week, animal rescue group "Rescue Dogs Match" shared an update: Lana is back up for adoption...She's now living at a boarding facility, but due to limited space, she only has until May 20 to find another home. After that, she may be euthanized.

The rescue organization says the best home for Lana, now 2, would be a farm where she can spend most of her time outside.

"The best family for her would be a mature couple or person that has the time, patience, determination and commitment to help her become more confident," the rescue group wrote on Facebook.

"She is sweet and silly, that is hard-wired into her character. She is timid, wary of strangers only at first. When she is not around the people she trusts, she has the tendency to shut down or become very hesitant."

If you’re interested in Lana, you can email info@rescuedogsmatch.com to foster or adopt her.

From "Rescue Dogs Match" on Facebook (click to go there):

May 14 is Lana's Birthday ( she will be 3 ) Please help find her a Foster or Forever home. Lana only has until May 20th

Name: Lana Turner
Breed: Lab mix
Gender: Female
Size: Medium
Age: 3 yrs
Cat: NO
Dogs: NO
Kids: None
Fenced in backyard if in the suburb

Lana Turner is looking for a foster or forever home. She has made some improvements but there is still work to be done. The best environment for her would be a horse or hobby farm where she can be outside most of the time “helping” her person with the chores around the property. She LOVES to be outside no matter what the weather. For cold winter days a quality winter coat would keep her cozy. Lana loves to be part of whatever is going on but not in “tight” quarters. The best family for her would be a mature couple or person that has the time, patience, determination and commitment to help her become more confident. A family that would arrange controlled play dates with other dogs, without food or toys around. A family that has a routine she can rely on, and an active lifestyle that would banish the thought of endless hours in concrete bunkers with nothing to do.

She is sweet and silly, that is hard-wired into her character. She is timid, wary of strangers only at first. When she is not around the people she trusts, she has the tendency to shut down or become very hesitant. It is important for her to be in a home where she will continue to be exposed to new situations with lots of positive reinforcement. She is loyal and loving to the people she trusts.

She very much likes to hang out with other dogs. However time, training and patience is required to continue to lessen her possessive issues around food . Every dog learns at their own pace, so best that she be the only pet in the home. No apartments and a fenced in yard is a must if living in a suburb. 

Her rescue team is committed to supporting her next, and hopefully final, adoptive family with training and time, as much as is needed to help her be truly forever home.

Help Lana by sharing her story. Please email info@rescuedogsmatch.com if you are interested in fostering or adopting.

(Me again.) Let's help Lana live beyond May 20th, and look more like the picture below. Please forward this blog, or copy and paste it, to your own blog, and to your friends. Let's pass the word and keep this dog alive. She'll be 3 on May 13th, and she hasn't had a chance to live. If I didn't already have a dog, I would've contacted them already.

Thank you.

March

A book so well-written, it causes envy and jealousy within me. How could I possibly expect to write as well as this? If all published works had to be this well-written, few authors would stand a chance.

I realized while reading this that most of Geraldine Brooks's sentences were detail-in-action. (And certainly not the other way around, which mars many works of good writers.) Her sentences are doing one of two things: they're either description, or they are action. Too much of either one would be boring, even if it's well-written and boring. Therefore most of her sentences are a combination of the two, detail-in-action.

In this, she takes a mostly-absent character from Alcott's Little Women (which, embarrassingly, I have never read, though I have it around here somewhere) and fills in his gaps. Where did March go when he enlisted? What did he do? Well, he did these things.

This book is a masterpiece (and therefore worthy of its Pulitzer) of its time, and of its rendition of the people of its time. Yet like all good works, it makes the reader understand that the people of its time are also the people of this time, and vice-versa. Here you have racism among the Northerners and the Southerners, and neither is treated like a stereotype. And so it is today. March comes home a bitter soldier who has seen and done too much, and who has brought with him a PTSD and a Blakian Experience that will never be undone. And so it is with returning soldiers today.

This is a book of all times, of all wars, of all soldiers and of all victims. Wars in Iraq, Syria, and anywhere else of any time will be similar to Brooks's Civil War rendition here.

The sudden POV shift jarred a little, and the shift back to March disoriented a little (I had to go back  to be sure that it was his turn again), but the reader will see the necessity of the shifts. Brooks could have superficially prepared the reader, perhaps by placing character names at the beginning of each chapter--a la George R. R. Martin in his Song of Ice and Fire books--but such is not her way. You'll be able to bear it and move on.

She does an interesting thing with Grace, who seems to turn up a little bit more coincidentally than maybe she should--but the reader will see the necessity for this as well. Brooks gets away with these two things that would have torpedoed lesser writers (such as myself).

This was a quick, intelligent and gripping read that sounds all too true, and will perhaps leave you a little emotional throughout, and certainly at its end. But you owe it to yourself to read it, if not for the great writing and experience, then perhaps to better understand a returning soldier you happen to know today.

Quick Jots for 5.6.2015

Just a few quick things:

--When a Star Wars geek fan said, "May the fourth be with you," I was automatically urged to respond, "And also with you.  Let's lift up our hearts.  It is right to give thanks and praise..."

--Seriously.  Like, I feel I've been unwittingly programmed.  And I'm as self-aware as anyone I know.  In fact, a lot more.  This is a very uncool, borderline terrifying, feeling for me.

--And I've never heard of "May the fourth be with you," before.  And I've been around my share of that kind of dork geek enthusiastic fan.

--I'm only four chapters or so from finishing my novel manuscript, for those of you who've been keeping track.

--It feels like minor-league summer around here.  To the extent that I feel like I will run over innocent women and children in my hurried attempt to get out of my workplace and go home.  And I usually stick around there a while longer to finish things up and to get things done.

--Despite that, I have two rose plants that I tried to save, but couldn't.  Their stems were snapped by the incredible weight of all the snow that had settled (and been shoveled) upon them.  I taped them, and propped them up, and watered them, and...yeah, well, my landscaper told me I should cut it at the place it snapped, and hope for the best.  Everything above that snap had died.

--This same guy told me the name of a bush I did successfully save last week.  It's the full, thick, green thing that the small purple snappy things come out of.  Begins with H, I think.  [Please leave the name in a comment below if you know it.  People have tired of me calling it "the purple poppy plant, with the little snappies."

--But, anyway, I saved that thing by getting a lot of leaves, detritus, and who-knows-what-else out of it.  The green is now fuller and more lush than it's ever been, and the poppy things are coming out.  Last year those purple snappy things didn't come out until June, and they stayed out for a couple of weeks.  Drove me crazy.  Meanwhile those purple snappy things had sprouted in everyone else's yard for miles around me.

--I just so happened to be watching a little black ant (not big carpenter sized) stroll into a tiny opening between the gutter of my deck extension, and the house.  So I sprayed half an entire container of ant killer in there, with the plunger you pull back and the gun nozzle you can point right in there.  Only twenty or so ants came out, staggering and dying.  (Made me feel bad, but those things aren't staying in a colony there.)  And the whole situation gave me PTSD flashbacks from the time thousands and thousands of ants came down upon me and my real estate agent in a former house.  Long story.

--And I know that there's a lot more than just those 20 up in there.  They just learned to stay further away from the stream of poison coming in.  I'll spray a lot more up there (which I already have, and no more of them have come out) and then seal that hole up.  Hopefully anything left alive in there don't eat their way in.

--I looked into bombing it out, but the hole is way too small, and apparently you only do that in an enclosed room, not in the outside air beneath a TimberTek deck and a gutter.  I also looked into the poison ant food that you place down and they bring it back to the colony, thereby killing the queen and everyone else.  But there's no place to place such a thing.  The deck and gutter are too far away, and the ants don't actually go onto those things, anyway.  They stroll beneath the gutter and into the hole.  They could've been doing so for who-knows-how-many years.  But I checked the deck, the gutter, the closet and washroom, and the office upstairs, and there's no evidence of penetration, sawdust, or anything else.

Any suggestions of what else I can do with that situation, please comment and advise. Thanks!

Weekends at Bellevue--Julie Holland, M.D.

photo: Book cover, from Goodreads

Fascinating book about a woman who had been in charge of deciding who does, and does not, get admitted to a stay at Bellevue.  She did this for nine years.  Obviously the book is about many of the patients, but the coolest thing about the book is the sheer number of other things it's also very much about: admitting you're crisped at your job; branching out; moving on with life; the different forms of mental illness; how we're all mentally ill, in varying degrees.  Having the courage to switch gears in life.  Changing as a person.  Letting down your often necessary defenses--and then realizing that doing so makes you incapable of doing the job you needed the defenses for to begin with.  I saw a lot of myself in here, and a couple of family members and friends--and a few ex-friends.  It helped me to understand all of them better in small, but important, ways.

It's a quick read.  You may grit your teeth at the oddly sudden and thorough instances of her sexual interludes, as I did, though I understood they were meant to underscore her adrenaline addiction.  All of the psychopathy stories are quick snippets, from the unknown patients, to Spalding Gray and the aftereffects of 9/11 on NYC.  She doesn't linger too long on any one person or event, but mentions the big ones long enough to sustain the shock and horror they instilled in her and everyone else.  Many of her patients, for example, saw dozens of professionally attired men jump out of the WTC to their deaths.  She says that, more than any other facet of the attacks, it was this that mostly traumatized and PTSDed her patients--watching the bodies fall.  And land.  Her narrative voice skims and occasionally probes, while at the same time staying far enough away from the patients so the reader doesn't feel like a morbid voyeur, rubber-necking at the psychopathic miseries of others.

I read this because I thought such a character had a place in one of my novels--where else, perhaps, would a possibly real, re-visiting Jesus or Lazarus be sent, after all, but to a place like Bellevue?  I don't know that such a plan would work now, but I liked the experience of reading this to find out.  It took two days to read.  Highly recommended.

The Return of the King--J.R.R. Tolkein

photo: book cover from Goodreads site

There's probably not too much I can say here that you didn't already know or think about for yourself--or read on one of the reviews for the other two books.  These are inescapably linked to the Peter Jackson films, which I became more and more impressed with as I read these.  The series ends as well here as it does in the films, and each ending suited each format.  The destruction of the Shire worked well in the books but would've curtailed the films entirely.  Frankly, there's a heightened feeling of revolt in the films that wouldn't have fit here: the inhabitants of the Shire allowed themselves to be taken over by a rather lame Sauroman and an even more lame Wormtongue--with 50s streetcorner ruffians to boot; no way the characters populating the movies would've allowed that to happen.  Jackson wisely left Sauroman and Wormtongue stuck in the Dark Tower in the movies, which is where Tolkein probably should've kept them, too.  It seems as if Tolkein didn't know quite what to do with him once the War of the Ring ended.  Maybe there was a subconscious (which I say only because Tolkein insisted to the end that he never symbolized any of the wars in his books; I don't believe him) connection to the damage done at home when there's a war abroad; no one is nuetral, perhaps.

But the real ending, where Frodo joins Gandalf, Bilbo and the Elves worked much better in the book than I thought it would; I felt it was too abrupt in the movie.  Here it makes sense, actually; Frodo has what is known today as PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), though actually it may not be called that anymore.  Tolkein would've known it as shellshock.  The injury in Frodo's shoulder clearly is meant to mirror the injury done to his psyche by the ring; this is why none of the other characters--such as Aragorn, who has seen much more battle-time than has Frodo--is as injured, excepting perhaps Bilbo, a ring-bearer himself.  The ring has clearly messed with him as well, though his recent mental feebleness may be expected in one about 130 years of age.  As per the comment above, a soldier is never the same at home as he was before he went off to war; that which was special to him in his native land often is not upon his return.  The only solution, sometimes, to find peace--which Frodo insists he needs and is not getting in the Shire--is to move on, to travel and experience other things.  To explore.  Bilbo is foremost an explorer; perhaps Frodo was, too.

It should also not be forgotten that they are the two writers of the Shire (Samwise is due to carry that on, but he hasn't yet).  As such, when a writer is moribound, the solution is to move on to another work, another experience, as each work, large or small, is a journey.  Stick too long to the same thing and you ground yourself.  Samwise was meant (if you buy the fateful attitude of the works) to do just that, to settle down with Rose Cotton, have a family, and tend to the Shire.  The very long work, surprisingly, ends with him, saying to his wife and family, "Well, I'm back."  A soldier come home to stay--but, then again, he didn't have to bear the burden of the Ring for too long.  As Frodo often said, it was his burden to take, his cross to bear, and, like any soldier, the simple bearing of that burden so that others could live their life of mental, emotional and psychological freedom (not to mention political freedom) is perhaps the soldier's greatest sacrifice.  Frodo did that so that Sam could marry and have a family, and say, "Well, I'm home."