Re: If you wanted to baby your pancreas...

Thanks, Hanna. Great thoughts about meat. Makes very good sense.

I've allowed myself bits of meat, here and there...thinking what they say about type O blood. That's on top of the eggs and fish I was raised on.

You are fortunate to find ethical growers!

Amazingly, I worked a couple of years for a fellow who was in Buchenwald when he was 16.

Since I was a sweet young 20 year-old when I worked for him, he told me very little of the awful stories...preferring to describe the rural life of his family.

He did tell me that the first liberator into Buchenwald was a big black American. People just climbed him.

Later, when all the names had been registered, and their basic needs had been attended to, people spread out over the valley, walking home.

Uncle told me of the day of truce in Holland...when the Canadians obtained truckloads of food, and the Germans distributed it.

By chance, I met an elderly French woman in a restaurant. She told me of the night she and her son were out pasting up posters. Soldiers came by, and her son grabbed her and kissed her, as though they were lovers. The soldiers didn't bother them.

Maybe it was the day-to-day courageous acts and intentions that got people through, and sustained their sanity.

I've read about 'secrets', too. How survivors told no one what they had seen, particularly not their children...and how the very fact of 'secrets' cast shadows.

It is better, I think, to be so close to a special person or two, that you can tell, and feel safe in the sharing.

I don't think we realize at the time that we are being courageous, or even reasonable, in the face of Trouble, but we come to some point where we feel that we must behave in an honorable way...that, for us, there is no alternative. Our good intentions guide us.

I also think that there is a kind of peace that protects us from the awful. It may happen, but we aren't completely 'there'...it's as though our awareness becomes altered in some way.

In Trouble, we may feel that we will never laugh again, never forget, or be light-hearted...but we do. The reason for that is, I think, that it is impossible for us to cry for very long. To remain sad, we must remind ourselves, repeatedly. Otherwise, the happy moments must return.

That is the true nature of the human animal, I believe...that we must return to the beautiful and the good. That we remember, but we remember the best even better.

I remember reading about a laboratory worker who was in an explosion. As it happened, before a co-worker pulled her out, she said that her only thought was, "So this is what it's like." Not 'ouch' or 'I'm too young'.

I fell on my face a couple of years ago. I went flying over a walker that stopped suddenly, and took the full weight of my moving body on a bent neck and my face, on metal.

To me, I was in slow motion. I felt every part of the impact as though it were separate from every other...chin, teeth, nose jammed upward and split, a little, across the bridge, cheekbones, eyes, and forehead.

I remember there was time to notice that the cheekbones held, didn't break.

Instantly, I was screaming my husband's name. Do you know what I wanted? I wanted his hands on my head...for energy.

I anticipated a terrible headache, but it didn't materialize. Instead I got the patterned mark of the metal doorsill across my forehead. I stopped looking in mirrors for a few weeks.

Our perceptions alter, when they need to. Thank goodness.

My best, Hanna.

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