Getting older isn't too bad, but I miss the ones who are gone

I have enough short items in my notes to make two or three entries, so here goes the first.  

I was rummaging through a drawer for my address book and found a picture of Grandma Stevens' rocking chair.  I asked the cousin who now has the chair to send me a picture of it.  At the time, I was going to ask an artist if he could work with that picture and a picture of Grandma and manage to paint her sitting in the chair.  Turns out even if he could, I couldn't have afforded it at the time; and it really doesn't sound like an idea that would work anyway.  I have a friend who plays around with photoshop who might think of a cute idea for some sort of picture with the chair, but I don't think anybody could sit Grandma down in it to my satisfaction.

It sits in a vacant house now, so this is as close as I'll get to seeing it again.

Grandma stayed busy all the time, but as she grew older, she spent most of her "busyness" quilting and crocheting.  Summers she'd do garden work in the morning while it was cool, but after dinner (noon), she was in that chair mending, crocheting, or writing letters, unless she was upstairs quilting.  She wrote letters on Sunday evenings sitting in the rocker.  When I spent the night with her, she and I would take turns reading a verse aloud of whatever New Testament book she was on before going to bed; she read a chapter every night.  She never had a TV, but she had a radio near her chair, and she listened to soap operas as she sewed.  I remember One Man's Family quite well.  

I was talking to Cliff about my longtime Internet friends, and how a couple of them unwittingly gave me ideas for naming my email addresses.  I started out on AOL, so a person's email, without the @dot com, was her "screen name", which was your name in the chat room.  I wanted something about Missouri in my SN, but most everything I tried was already taken.  Finally I settled for Mo2773 (the numbers are the last four digits of my phone number at the time.  I was called Mo in the chat room and also at the chat room meets, where many of us from across the country gathered and met face to face.  That is the first nickname I ever had in my life, and I loved it.  But it wasn't my last one.  A lady with the screen name JenFar started chatting with us.  She was so proud of her children!  She had a daughter who is a Christian comedian, Chonda Pierce.  She started typing out "Mosie" as my name, so I had yet another nickname.  I loved that woman.  She's one of the only people I didn't mind talking to on the phone for an hour.  I loved hearing her preface stories with, "Well Honey..." in that southern accent.  See, if you spend time in a Christian Senior chat room, people are bound to start dying like flies at some point.  So many of those dear people are no longer with us.

I got burnt out on chat rooms when troublemakers ruined it all.  AOL was going downhill and doing away with a lot of the chat rooms, and I decided it was time to get out of there.  So I needed a name for my new gmail account, which is the one I still use most:  Mosie1944@gmail.com.  (Feel free to write me, but I won't guarantee I'll write back... no spam, please.  Ha!).  1944 is my birth year.  Jen (Virginia) died quite a while back, and I like the fact that my email address was inspired by her.  

Oh, then I was given another nickname:  A Baptist preacher with a wonderful sense of humor, screen name Westbilt, began calling me Mocephas in the chats, inspired no doubt by Hank Williams Jr's nickname, Bocephas.  At that time I was writing a poem a day, most days, and emailing them to any friends in the chat room who requested them; but I wanted a different email for that.  I chose Yahoo and decided on Mocephas57 (because I was 57 at the time).  Well, Westbilt later died.  So now I have two emails honoring the memories of people who have passed away.       

We were watching our usual Friday night Country's Family Reunion, with highlights back to the very first show they filmed, in the late 90's.  Kitty Wells was one of the performers.  When Cliff and I got married I had quite a few country records and a stereo to play them on.  I guess that was my dowry.  We'd stack up those LP records, start them playing, and go to bed listening to Kitty.  Almost all of her songs only required three chords on the guitar, so hers were the first country songs I learned to chord along to.  As luck would have it, most of the songs were in the key of C, which is the easiest one for me to play in and sing in.  

Oh yeah, need I tell you Kitty Wells is dead?  

And that's how it is when you get to be a senior citizen:  Everybody keeps dying.  It really hits home when you open your address book and find half of the people have died.  I hope I don't sound too gloomy.  After all, it's the circle of life.  By the time you're my age, 74, you've come to terms with the fact you're going to die.  It wouldn't even be scary if you knew for sure you wouldn't suffer long before it happens, so that's a worry; but I can do a pretty good job of turning off that worry switch when I need to.  

Yours truly, Donna