Posts by June Lemen
But there are communities within communities. Someone of great significance in one community may not be known in others. My community— the non-profit community — lost a very significant person early this month. Her name was Denise Jackson, and I was fortunate enough to be one of her colleagues for the past three years.
The bag is still hanging on in my maple. I am pretty sure I’ll outlast it, but now, instead of just planning on outlasting it, I am researching what I can do about it. I prefer action.
I would have gone to the Centennial even if I was not working at the event. My daughter Lucy went to Mount Pleasant; I was a member of the Mount Pleasant PTO during all the time she was there; and one of the joys of my life was arranging programs for the children at Mount Pleasant. Mount Pleasant is where I got to meet and make connections with my neighbors in the North End. Mt. Pleasant is more than a neighborhood school; it is a community hub made up of the most dedicated and compassionate staff I have ever known.
After all my worries pre-primary, the primary went fine. People were cheery and nice, for the most part, and things went fairly smoothly. I realized that I had been worrying for nothing, until we heard a couple of people talk about how they were going to come and challenge people at the general election.
Sigh.
As children, the Lemen kids ate the food prepared for us: mostly by my mother and my father’s mother. Grammie Lemen made Lithuanian food: potato pancakes and kielbasa and boiled cottage cheese dumplings and cabbage soup and borscht. For dessert we begged for what we called twisters, but were actually Žagarėliai, or angelwings (why my grandmother did not call them angelwings is beyond me), a fried dough covered in powdered sugar.
O P I N I O N LEMENADE By June Lemen I am working the next election, which is the
I needed a jacket the other night when I came out of work. Fall is coming. It was amazing. The
I am enjoying documentaries lately, but it might be a phase that I am going through, because I am not reading fiction, either – I am in the middle of reading “Evicted” and Barbra Streisand’s autobiography. (Yes, at the same time. I frequently do this, particularly if one of the books I am reading is depressing, like “Evicted.”) But, documentaries cover every imaginable subject: from the making of “Tiger King” to what goes on in the minds of dogs. I just finished watching “Rather,” a documentary about reporter and former CBS new anchor Dan Rather.
…Maybe it’s because my father was a civil engineer and I heard so many stories about roads and bridges. But whatever the reason is, if I can get somewhere by highway, but there’s an alternate route, I take the alternate route.
Sometimes the simplest things can make life so much easier. I was having problems with a document at work, and when I was asking a colleague for advice, she showed me how to make my text cursor bigger and a color other than white. Wow! It blew my mind – it was just so much easier to highlight a field in a Google spreadsheet when you actually know what you are pointing to. It has made a huge difference in my daily work life.