Anne’s Diary (Page 63)

One of the troublesome things about going on a trip is the huge stack of mail that confronts you upon your return. Some of these are bills, some of it is junk mail, but part of this stack, for me, anyway, is a delightful cache of new magazines to read. As soon as I get unpacked and do the laundry, I make myself a cup of tea, get settled in my favorite chair, put my feet up and READ. And in the July 28 issue of the New Yorker, I read an article about something pretty amazing that also, in a small way, happened to me.
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We just came back from a trip drone hunting and going to the California wine country with some good ol’ friends from Texas, who were in California visiting their grandson. One problem with visiting vineyards is that you end up tasting wines in the middle of the day, then you have to get back into your car, when all you really want to do is lie down in the grass under the warm sun, amidst the buzzing bees and passing butterflies, and close your eyes and take a nice nap. (The driver,my husband, didn’t drink, of course.)
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A story in the July 11 New York Times reported that “former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.” He said that he was told not to speak about secondhand smoke, stem cells, global warming or sex. What would make a government want to distort the truth to this extent?
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I recently went to tea with two people–one of the young girls who just lost her mother and the girl’s aunt. The aunt went on and on about how cancer is a choice, which I thought was a particularly inappropriate thing to do in front of someone whose mother had just died from that disease. I’ve heard this sort of thing from so-called “New Age” types before and whenever I do, I wonder if these people have ever KNOWN anyone who has died from–or survived–cancer.
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