Something on our Minds (a book review)

  Something on our Minds
        An Anthology to Benefit the National Multiple Sclerosis Society
Edited by Tracy A Todd & Sean J Mahoney

available at https://www.createspace.com/4217529  285pgs

  also at Amazon  and soon Kindle


   What is life, living with MS, or caring for someone who is diagnosed with MS.

  Is there someone in your life struggling with life after being diagnosed with MS.

  Or are you just curious, to discover that these people are like everyone else, with the same hopes, dreams, fears and needs.

  All will not, be revealed in this tome, it is a glimpse of life through the eyes and minds of more than thirty volunteers who in this labor of love, share their thoughts and experiences for the benefit of others. Their emotions , joys and sorrows the primal visceral feelings of collective man's journey as he walks through life and as travelling with an unwelcome companion.

  Yet the flavor of the pages is a blend of chocolate and vanilla sprinkled with a hint of mint from the strength of the forest of the giant oak of optimism,  depression growth here too has shortened, melded with a dose of acceptance, a tolerance of mice and the value of nothing.
 
  A heaviness of self pity is whitewashed with waves of knowledge, the backbone of the arsenal of weapons needed to cope with this still as yet unknown foe.

  The Anthology is the brain child of Tracy A Todd as a way for people with MS, their friends and caregivers to raise funds for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, to continue their work to find a cause and cure for MS and to make available to everyone the resources and information the Society has funded and acquired about MS.

  The group Ms Todd founded for the project: We Write For The Fight has given a great first volume  with contributions by more than thirty individuals.
The work of a second anthology has begun.  

This is a true story

Two months after I found my partner(whom I adored) dead on the living room floor, I was financially forced to go back to work. Then I was freelance, no vacations, no benefits, no medical, just money.

I supervised the last face to face shareholder counter for Ma Bell (AT&T). We were helping the shareholders fill out the paperwork for their choices of new companies with the breakup of AT&T.

A portable counter was set up for us on the main floor of the AT&T corporate office building at Broadway in downtown New York City. Marble columns, marble floors and walls with glass windows looking out at Manhattan. It was a cold snowy February.

We let one of the women keep a bottle of perfume a Texan, dressed with cowboy belt boots, hat and tie, and suit jacket too. She reminded him of his fiancé, who was a telephone operator, who died before they were married, a long time ago. He was maybe eighty if not  older.

To my station appeared a gentleman, about six feet four or five, thin and fair skinned.  He looked me in the eye and began to speak. "When I was in Buchenwald," he said, "there were ten thousand men. Of the ten thousand men they chose two hundred, and of the two hundred they chose twenty. I was one of the twenty, that they allowed to live."