My Sister's Passing

 My sister, Patty Ruth Andrews, passed away on Christmas Day - December 25^th, 2023. 

She was the strongest, bravest, and most loyal human being  I have ever known.  I knew her all her life, birth to death – 83 years.  We were close friends all that time.

We grew up together, initially in Detroit Michigan and then we came across the country in a post WW-II migration to California, by car along Route 66. 

We settled in Willow Glen – always at the same   Willow Glen schools: Elementary, Junior High and High School, where she became the High School President.

 

Pat even joined me at the Univ of Arizona for a year where I introduced her to my old roommate, Nard Taiz.

As teens, we both worked at our father’s business, Industrial Tool in San Jose.  We had our separate lives through our marriages, but holidays were always a clarion call back to Willow Glen, quite often at Pat’s house.

Her strength shone through the travails she endured through her early life: divorce, loss of a child, and striving to forge a career in teaching winding up at West Valley College.  She always kept her family #1 through these roadblocks.

I remember a time when I “dropped” in on her at Hummingbird Lane, with half a dozen chess players from San Francisco, saying we just needed a place to crash before a big competition in Los Gatos.  She made us food and joined us with her son Christopher at the big meeting.

 She was brave because of her steadfast commitment to American Democracy.  It’s always easy to cave into consensus, but she had a set of principles that never gave an inch.  They served her well throughout her life.

When our parents had become successful with their business, they rented an apartment up on Nob Hill, which became a meeting place for us to visit SF together.

We often attended our High School reunions – she and I always the other’s date for the occasion.

Pat and I both traveled a great deal, and she often visited me in England while I worked there, as well as San Francisco, when I worked there.  Then her thing became gambling cruises as her retired life enjoyment.  I never joined in those activities, but we would meet at casinos whenever we needed to see each other and so we had breakfast all over the Bay Area.

As we aged, we relied on both telephone and the internet.  We spoke a dozen times a week these past twenty years. 

Loyalty to Family and Country were big with her. She always stood up with positives about her friends, family and always stood on the right-side of America’s experiment with Democracy.  Everyone who knew her, may well, at times in the future, ask, “What would Pat do,” when considering ethics, relationships, or the future.

The Henna Artist

 

This was night and day from an earlier month’s  novel debacle, “The Thursday Muder Club”, an aimless story.  

“The Henna Artist” is a flowing, lyrical narrative  - well-organized with a theme, and plots. 

Author Joshi has focused her novel on creating a fictional memoir of her mother. 

Joshi was successful at weaving little vignettes to advance plot lines.  The author had a greater overall theme and has turned this into a trilogy.

Henna is readable at three levels:

a)             Each vignette is a joy to read because of the poetically descriptive language, but also prosaically written because of the meanings and moral of each mini story

b)           On a thematic level, each adventure reassures us, that Lakshmi will persevere – she has the strength of seven oxen – and that these morals are lessons of life.

c)     One can read the love, devotion, and respect that the daughter pays to the mother through this book. We read the open-hearted questions on a myriad of life’s lessons, such as:

1)   Yes baby – No baby                          2) Son Baby – Daughter baby

3)   healthy baby                                       4) Aborted baby

 

No one sits in judgement on these issues, certainly not Lakshmi nor Medical Doctors.  She simply provides alternative medicines and procedures.

All these thoughts are still today’s issues.

Joshi’s writing is exquisite – crafted by a professional, taking her time with each sentence, each paragraph, and each exploit.  She also has a well-thought-out theme, and plots that flow like a river.

I particularly enjoyed her depiction of the palace when she moved up a notch and was invited to display her abilities.  We share her impressions of the wealthy and frivolous characters, but also the reality that we are all alike – there are no natural schisms. 

Her caste distinctions are no different than the British or European class distinctions; and religious hatred has been here in the West forever; the USA has especial focus on racial separatism.

I thought it was uniquely introspective of the author to have Lakshmi lose track of her younger sister in all the hubbub of dozens of business activities, while the sister grew from a young 13 to a sophisticated 14.  This is so very typical of modern-day families – kids grow up fast.

Alka Joshi is a likeable, loveable person as shown in her U-Tube video podcasts on cooking, et al.

Small Things Like These

A well-crafted short story – a poetic style, which the author maintains throughout. She captures this simple person, Bill Furlong, with such depth that we readers could doodle out a decent sketch of him. The plot line is that Furlong carves out a legacy for himself, as a man with a deep soul and belief in the humanity of man. The theme, skirted by the author ala Johnathan Swift, is the scheme of the organized Catholic Church of taking advantage of unwed young women as slave labour. The story is just shy of being a polemic on the Church. Author Keegan has depicted Bill Furlong as an unschooled workman, who doesn’t need to understand the larger picture, but knows right from wrong, and is willing to act when confronted by evil. The author also deftly lets the readers see that it is his father who raised him; without Bill himself fully understanding that fact.