Long Ago and Far Away

I'm reading another book about Mary Magdalene, one of several I've read lately that are similar to the DaVinci Code. That book has been so contraversial but I can't help wondering if parts of it could be true.

I've taken a lot of flak from family and friends about my interest in other possibilities, like the idea that Christ didn't die on the cross, but was aided by Pontius Pilate and some apostles in faking his death, rescued from the tomb and continued his married life with Mary Magdalene, had children and lived for a long time. We do know that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute, this idea was refuted by the Catholic Churce in 1960. They admitted that this was a lie, a story made up by certain Pope's to discredit women in the early life of the Christian church.

Everything else is just a guess. I've read extensively about the lifestyle of the Jews at the time of Christ, their religious beliefs and their moral standards. I don't believe they would have allowed a grown man to teach children unless he was a married man. A boy was not considered 'born' into his family and religious group until he had his Bar Mitsvah at the age of 13, so if he spent 12 years studying in the Temple, he would have been 24 at the time he spoke to the money lenders in the Temple not a boy of 12. It seems that many other customs would have been followed as well.

There was a time period after a man and woman were betrothed before they would actually have the marriage ceremony. No matter what they did before the actual ceremony a woman was considered a virgin until the actual ceremony. Could it be possible that Mary and Joseph had sex during this time and she became pregnant and at the time of her marriage she would have still be considered a virgin, hence, the virgin birth?

Does anyone else think about these things? Is this considered blasphemy just thinking about this?

I was brought up in the Catholic Church and partook of all the sacraments but I don't know if I actually believed any of the things they taught. I knew I felt good going to church and as years went by I didn't attend church anymore. It wasn't until I read a book about the Holy Grail that I started to think about the possibility that Christ was an ordinary man who had a family but wanted to preach goodness and peace among men in his lifetime and that Mary was his wife and the mother of his children. He never intended to found a new religion but worshipped God as his spiritual father, not his biological father.

I've started a new book called "The Expected One" by Kathleen McGowan. It's a novel and takes place in modern day times, is not as intriguing as the Da Vinci Code and others so I'll only know if it inspires in me more heavy thinking after I finish it. I do want to still read the Thomas Gospels and the Gnostic Gospels although I may get more feedback from my family than I want unless I keep my ideas to myself.

I do still consider myself a Christian but I'm trying to figure out why beyond pure faith. I'm the kind of person that wants to see something for myself or have someone prove it to me before I believe. Is this a bad thing? I know I'll still have my own opinions whether I express them or not.

Reunion!

I am going to my high school class reunion. I've made plane reservations, rented a car and made hotel reservations and all I have to do is lose 30 lbs. in 3 weeks! That is if I want to show up like the last reunion which I went to as a size 6!

I don't think it's going to be possible given that I waited until the last minute to make the decision to go. Now I have to get around the fact that all the other people won't seem as old to me. I'll be one of them, one of the old people. It will be fifty (50) in case you didn't read that correctly, years since I graduated from high school. I felt like 10 years ago I was young, I didn't recognize anyone. Who were these people? I thought I went to the wrong event! This year I'm going to fit right in unless I starve myself for the next 3 weeks and maybe lose a couple of pounds. Or maybe I'll be the only one who has gained weight and people won't know who I am. I'll definitely need that label they give you to stick on your dress.

I grew up in a small town in Connecticut, lived almost across the street from the grammar school and went to the same school through 6th grade. Almost everyone that I started kindergarten with went through all the grades with me, right up until high school. There were 2 grammar schools, one was Broad Street School where I went and Linden Street School across town. In Junior High School we all gathered together in 7th grade and went on through high school together.

This photo is my 4th grade class with Mrs. Smith. I was madly in love with the boy in the second row on the left as were all the other girls. The girl in the top row second from left had the inside track all through grammar school.

  

I think some of these people will be at the reunion. I've been emailing the girl sitting on my right, Beverly, and it seems amazing to me that we can email like it hasn't been 30 years or more since we've communicated with each other.

The picture below is my 3rd grade class with Miss Tomasso. Most of the same kids but the girl in the 2nd row on the left side was my best friend and I noticed this is the last photo of her in my class. She lived on my street and her name was Audrey. She moved away after 3rd grade but we were friends from kindergarten till then. I remember a time when I was at her house playing and we went inside and her mother was running around in the kitchen with water collecting at an alarming rate all over the floor. The flood was coming from the bathroom just off the kitchen and the toilet had stopped up and she was running around looking for a plunger. It frightened me so much that after I went home I was afraid to flush the toilet for about a year. Audrey moved to Maine and after that I played with the boys on the street, playing baseball, riding bikes, playing cowboys and Indians, marbles and after dark playing hide and seek.

  

You probably won't recognize me, I hardly recognize myself. In the first picture I'm the 3rd from the right in the 2nd row. In the second picture I'm 4th from the right in the first row. I hope you noticed that the boy I had a crush on is standing next to his 'girlfriend' in the 3rd grade picture. That 'relationship' lasted until 7th grade or 8th grade when I got lucky and he let me wear his watch for two weeks until someone else started wearing it and I was heartbroken. I wonder if this guy is still a ladykiller!

Yesterday

I had a wonderful day yesterday going over old family pictures with my daughter Kathy. I want to scan all of the old pictures even though we don't know a lot of the people.

My mothers side of the family came from Waterbury, CT. At that time Waterbury was a very large thriving city with lots of different manufacturing companies one of which was Scovill Mfg. They made brass buttons and metal snaps and such. I think they still make metal snaps for western wear.

My mother was born in 1901 in Waterbury, CT. Here is a picture of her at around six months.



This family group was inseparable at least for picture taking. On the left is my great grandmother Mary Bates Thackeray Dunworth and clockwise is her younger daughter Bessie M. Thackeray Wheeler, her older daughter (my grandmother) Mae Thackeray Beckerhouse and in the middle my mother Anna Mae Beckerhouse around the age of three. My great grandmother was married first to a Harry Thackeray and we have traced him to Ohio sometime after 1892 but Mary stayed in Waterbury. We think he relocated and they were divorced although we haven't found that evidence. She later married Ezra Dunworth and thereafter became known as Grandma Dunworth to my mother.

  

My grandmother and grandfather were still married at this time when my mother went to have her picture taken at a photo studio in a 'balloon basket'. She was about eight years old in this picture. The original is an old tin type.

  

I think a lot happened in the household during the years between the eight year old picture and this one taken in 1920 when my mother was 19 years old. The Thackerays were divorced in a particularly ugly divorce, my grandmother claiming physical and mental abuse and my grandfather claiming adultery. My mother lived with Grandma Dunworth for several years during the upheaval and she always hated it. They lived upstairs over a tavern that my great grandmother and her second husband (the Dunworths) ran in Waterbury. She saw a lot of sights that made her a teetotaler all her life.

  


She met my father a year later and they were married in 1923.

  

Of course there is more to the story...both before and after!

I've Gotta Tell You Something, Mom

  

The year was 1988 a few days after the 4th of July when my son came home and said, "I've gotta tell you something, Mom". My heart sank but I sat and listened to the son who never did anything wrong. He had always watched and listened to what everyone else was doing and managed to keep himself out of the doghouse by just getting out of the way. He'd gotten good marks all through school and never caused a problem. "I think I burned a house down" was his next statement.

He and his friend John had found some fireworks that were left over from the July 4th celebration and decided to set them off in John's backyard. After the bottle rockets blew they couldn't find the remnants so they left to do something else. When they got back fire engines and police cars were lined up in front of John's next door neighbor's house. They readily told the police that they had set off bottle rockets and didn't know where they had gone.

The next day the paper announced that two boys (unnamed) had set off fireworks and that they were responsible for the burning of the house. I called John's Mom in a panic and she said not to worry about it right then it would take a while for the investigation. Eleven or twelve firemen had been taken to the hospital with toxic smoke poisoning and the investigators were going to find out why.

About two months later Dave was called to a lawyer's office to give a deposition and he told the attorneys for the insurance companies they had set off fireworks and hadn't found where they had landed and they didn't know if they had caused a fire or not.

We never heard anything more about it directly but the paper published a story about the house and a lawsuit the firemen had started against the insurance companies.

It wasn't until a few years later that we heard the house had faulty wiring and some weird kind of insulation in the attic and that the investigators thought the fire had been caused when the wiring had sparked and started a fire that eventually ignited the wood shingled roof and then the house before anyone saw the flames.

Does this look like a "firestarter"? His sweet innocent face looked the same at three years old as it did in high school in 1988 and still does to this day.

Mike's Birthday

Today is my son Michael's 47th birthday. Here is a picture of him when he was about 2-1/2 years old with his older sister Kathy who was about 3-1/2 years old. Mike was a great little kid until he decided to climb out of the playpen and after that he was just gone. He was the one who decided what he was going to do, where he was going to go and when. No matter how often he got in trouble he was determined to do what he wanted.

I had to keep him tied to the clothesline. He had a harness and he could run the length of the yard which was very large but he couldn't run in front of the house and into the street. Of course that's where he wanted to go and he figured out how to get out of the harness and the first place he ran to was the street. After that I had to keep him in the house unless I was going outside too, that was a good idea until he thought to bring a chair to the door, unlock the latch, get down, put the chair back, open the door and go out the front into the street!

He is still a lot like that, will figure out how NOT to do something or to do something he shouldn't do when it would be easier for everyone if he just did the right thing the first time. Maybe in the next 20 years he'll mellow out!

Victoria's Secret

I received a clothing catalog in the mail today - Victoria's Secret. I wonder what my mother would have thought about the pictures in it. The most risque catalog I ever remember her reading was the Sears Catalog. From everything I heard about my grandmother though, she wouldn't have been shocked and neither would one of my great grandmothers, my mother's mother's mother. They were both divorced in a time that divorce was not ever considered. I didn't even know divorce was an option back then. My grandmother was born in 1883 and was married at 18. My great grandmother was born in 1860 and was divorced from my grandmother's father whose name was Thackeray and married another man named Dunworth. They all lived in Waterbury, CT and Mr. Dunworth lived with his first wife a few houses down from the Thackerys. What does this suggest? More than friendly neighbors? Maybe a secret but not Victoria's.

The woman on the left is my grandmother but you can't really see her face very well. She was about 23 in this picture. On the right is my grandmother's mother and at the time of the picture already Mrs. Dunworth. My real grandfather is in front of my grandmother and Mr. Dunworth is in front of my great grandmother. She doesn't look very old but he looks ancient and mean. My mother is in the middle. My grandmother and grandfather had another child, my Uncle Carl after this picture was taken. My mother went to live with her grandmother after the divorce. I don't know where my uncle was, maybe still with my grandmother. I think she must have seen a lot going on in those years because she was always very ladylike and a real goody-goody the opposite of my grandmother. My great grandmother owned a tavern and they lived upstairs. My mother never drank or smoked or looked at any other man except my father. She said it was from all those years of seeing those drunks from the window upstairs. Those years must have had a profound effect on her psyche. There is more to the story of course.

Awake or dreaming

The other night I dreamed that my dog ran away and she didn't have her collar on. I whistled and called for her to come back but she was hell bent on catching a cat on the other side of the street. I woke up with Tinker licking my face anxiously. Did I whistle in my sleep or call her name? I've often woken up from a dead sleep crying with tears running down my face. My pet's reaction the other night leads me to believe that I must be acting out my dreams out loud.

I've dreamed before that I was in a submarine and couldn't breathe. I fought to open a window to let in some air and finally woke myself up in a cold sweat. The next morning I found that the painting over my bed was hanging askew and I remember in my dream that I had ripped off the window to get some air and then put it back. It must have been the picture I ripped off the wall and then put back on the picture hanger and not getting it on straight.

Does this mean I might walk in my sleep or walk outside and come back in and go back to bed or do I restrict myself to doing things only in my room. I don't take sleeping pills or anything to help me sleep. Is this phenomenon a normal thing? I have often wondered what dreams mean and have even read books about it but they all sound silly to me. Are dreams our subconscious minds acting out things we would or wouldn't do during our waking hours?

I have very colorful dreams during times of stress but they don't seem to have anything to do with the condition causing the stress. Sometimes these dreams can be very interesting and I don't want to wake up until the dream is over. Especially the shopping dreams where I try on new clothes endlessly - I'm always wondering what I'll finally pick out.

Some people tell me that they don't dream at all. That seems unlikely to me, I think they just don't remember them or they never get into the REM sleep stage where dreams appear.

My big question is do dreams help us get through our days because we are releasing tensions that occur during the day that we can't get rid of during the day. I wonder if people who do yoga or biofeedback have these colorful, interesting dreams or are their daily tensions already released and they have nothing to dream about?