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Thanksgiving for My Parent’s 67th Anniversary

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My parents, Elmer and Jean, are 90 and 91 years-old respectively and this coming Saturday, they will celebrate their 67th wedding anniversary. Until she became blind, my mother faithfully took photographs with her much-loved Brownie camera and kept them in scrapbooks for our family. She and my father also had their picture taken on each of their wedding anniversaries  — often with that same old camera. 

I will be taking their photograph this week and adding it to their ongoing wedding album. To me, these 66 photographs show more than the aging of a couple. They mark events in their lives and in mine.

My parents left their wedding in a car that my dad had bought for $150. They couldn’t drive at night because the headlights didn’t work. They were headed West from their family homes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in 1943 with no jobs and no real idea of where they might settle. Click to continue…

Will Portugal Copy Our Mistakes?

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 The advocacy group Encontrar+SE invited me to Porto, Portugal recently to speak about the closing of our state mental hospitals here in the U.S. This was my third overseas trip, having gone to Iceland and Brazil last year.  

Founded in 2006, Encontrar+SE   is the creation of Filipa Palha, a psychologist, university professor, and determined mental health activist who is trying to make Portuguese health officials accountable.

The government there has announced plans to close all of the nation’s mental hospitals, but it has not allocated any money nor taken any steps to create community-based mental health services.

Sound familiar?

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