I have enjoyed reading from eating glass to the complex poetry which is way harder to write than just free hand which is about my speed these days.  You are also very artistic which makes me feel a little envious, for I can write a book, but I cannot draw a stick figure that would impress anyone.   I have ET, no joke, an abbreviation for Essential Tremor, but it is relatively controlled with proper medication.  Without the meds, I would speak more similarly to Katherine Hepburn in her later years;  What a great woman and terrific actress!

Yes, one can get all sorts of opinions on Xanga, and with some, I do bother to respond, but you are correct;  We are all different, and no matter what anyone says, people my age usually are adaptable in many ways, but in others, we have minimal tolerance, and with no apologies, because many of us were raised in strict homes and were very value conscious, and I freely admit that, “Anything goes,” is not fully acceptable in or from a Judeo/Christian background.  We cannot make ourselves rewrite almost six milleniums of sacred script.  I mean that took some doing to get all of those chapters and verse on goat skin, and few have appreciation for how much the scholars have gone through to interpret all of this in to what became a guide for some of us to live by.

We are not prudish, but we get that some danger and very serious thought and risk of death got these books out to us, and I would be certain people feel as passionately about the Quran, and I am embarrassed to say that I do not know what The Budda left us as written word, but in most cultures, there are glasses which are not to be broken.

I am very sad to tell you that I have had patients who did eat glass by accident, and it is terribly painful, dangerous, and usually winds up in GI bleed, for it cannot just past through the digestive system as smooth or shaped small objects can.  Our former secretary of state, Madeline Albright, to my memory wound up hospitalized once and crushed glass had accidentally gotten in some meal which, I believe, she ate on an airplane.

I did want to share with you, I must have made myself unclear, I wrote a book using Xanga, but I did not write a book about Xanga, and there was really a spirit of generosity as I would make the entries, and then when the book  was published;  I had to go back and delete all but bits of it from Xanga.  “Pinkhoneysuckle,”  has brought me two awards, and the first in Hollywood was the exciting one.  I will be doing a book show before I leave San Francisco, just down the hillls from us in our area which widely is known as Noe Valley, but of the micro climates we have here;  Our hill is as good as it gets for San Francisco.  I had planned to come on in to Ohio, but this is a neighborhood group of writers, one I met in Hollywood will probably be there, so I do not expect to make a lot of sales, but it is good to get the message out about the Appalachian Diaspora of mid-century.  West of the Rocky Mountain people seem to know less about our East and mid-Atlantic states and what went on there.  California, like Texas, tends more to function like a country within a country as far as getting history out there.  That is how I view things with a bird’s eye view of both areas as well as having lived in Washington, D.C..  I just wanted to not confuse you and to tell you that you have special gifts.

Blessings, Barbara Everett Heintz