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thoskel1 66, Male, Ireland - 80 entries

Feb 2012
2:19 PM IST

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Got the weanling nose-ringed after a bit of hassle.

Yesterday was quiet.That chef down in Ballybane.(married to Barney Costello's son) gave me a lift to mass.She thought it was on at 11 am.I took the lift anyway because of it �would impolite to refuse.
I went for a walk around the block after the rugby match.It was an exciting match.Scotland gave France a run for their money but the Gallic flair came to the fore in the ends.

I will probably go to the Business class this evening.Don't know when I will take a lot �at that trailer.I wonder if Austin waiting?

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RonPrice 80, Male, Canada - 60 entries

Feb 2012
4:28 AM AEST

FOOTY and BASEBALL

On the ninth day of spring, just yesterday, I attended the first footy game in a big stadium in Australia-at York Park in Launceston.� I had lived in Australia for 36 years and two months--nearly 60 per cent of my life; I had watched parts of several games on small ovals across Australia and, of course, seen dozens of parts of games on TV.� But I don’t think I had ever watched an entire game.� I was married to a big football fan and having a son and two step-daughters who also enjoyed the game, it was difficult to escape its regular sound in our home for six months of the year, especially at the weekend.� Given the centrality of this game to the Aussie ethos, I felt my attendance and what it involved deserved a prose-poem to mark the occasion even though I only watched part of the game and even though it was only for the under 14s.� But the game was a grand final in the NTJFL, the northern Tasmania Junior Football League, my 14 year old step-grandson, Tobias Wells, was playing and my wife saw that it was an essential part of my grandfatherly role to attend.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 10 September 2007.
�
Back in what many saw as the quiet fifties, my attention, my spiritual and physical resources, my curiosity, was channelled into sport, school and an emerging interest in the opposite sex.� The energies of this young child and adolescent who had just begun the long race of life were, indeed, stretched to the full during those halcyon days by activities having little to no connection with any organized religion.� Organized religion in any form has not been a popular activity in Australia and Canada, at least in the places where I have lived all my life, although certain evangelical-fundamentalist groups did attracted large followings.
�
The following poem tells a little about one of the sports, baseball, its context in my life, in modern history and this new Faith whose connection with my life was a largely peripheral one during the years of my childhood and early to mid-adolescence.�� I wrote the following poem six weeks before leaving the classroom and retiring from employment as a teacher at the age of 55 in 1999.� So often in life I felt strongly that I just could not stay any longer in a place—a town or a city--in a work situation, in a marriage or in any one of the multitude of other relationships one can have in life. For one reason or another I just had to go, had to split, as we used to say colloquially. Sometimes the reason was obvious; sometimes it was inexplicable; sometimes the choice was not mine.
�
In 1953/4 I felt strongly that I had to leave softball for hardball and third base for the mound, the role of pitcher. In 1950 I had to leave our house in RR#1 Burlington. The former was my choice; the latter had nothing to do with me. Such is part of the nature of fate, determinism and free will. In August 1962, at the age of 18, I played my last game of hardball in the juvenile league for the Burlington All-Stars.� I pitched a full nine innings in that game and in the bottom of the ninth I was hit for three runs and we lost the game 3 to 1. The next week my family moved to another town and the next summer I worked for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company to make money to go to university and did not play another game of baseball until I was 39 and lived in Katherine, Northern Territory, where is was so hot that after a few innings in one game I gave it up with an excess of sweat on my brow as a lost cause.
�
When a series of programs about baseball, a series called The Big Picture, began to unfold on television, I quickly came to realize the remarkable similarity between the story of baseball and the story of the Baha’i Faith, both of which grew up in the modern age. The game of baseball was born in America in the 1840s as a new activity for sporting fraternities and a new way for communities to develop a more defined identity.¹�� Indeed, there are many organizations, activities, interests which were born and developed in this modern age, say, since the French and the American revolutions.� The points of comparison and contrast between the great charismatic Force which gave birth to the Baha’i Faith and its progressive institutionalization on the one hand, and the origin and development of other movements and organizations on the other, is interesting to observe. I wrote the poem which follows about seven weeks before teaching my last class as a full-time Tafe teacher in Australia. -Ron Price with thanks to Ken Burns, “The Big Picture: Part Two,”� ABC TV, 18 February 1999; and ¹John Nagy, “The Survival of Professional Baseball in Lynchburg Virginia: 1950s-1990s,” Rethinking History, Vol.37.
�
They both grew slowly
through forces and processes,
events and realities
in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries:
baseball and the Baha’i Faith
along their stony and tortuous paths,
the latter out of the Shaykhi School
of the Ithna’Ashariyyih Sect
of Shi’ah Islam.
�
And it would be many years
before the Baha’i Faith would climb�
to the heights of popularity
that baseball had achieved
quite early in its history.
�
Baseball was a game
whose time had come,
a hybrid invention,
a growth out of diverse roots,
the fields and sandlots of America,
as American as apple pie.
�
And the Baha’i Faith was an idea
whose time had come, would come,
slowly, it would seem, quite slowly
in the fields, the lounge rooms,
the minds and hearts
of a burgeoning humanity
caught, as it was, as we all were,
in the tentacles of a tempest
that threatened to blow it--
and us--apart.
�
Ron Price
17 February 1999
�
A second poem about baseball, written about a year after retiring from full-time teaching to Tasmania, where I lived in its oldest town, George Town---also conveys something of the flavour of those ‘warm-up days until I was 18 when my curiosity about this new religion was exceeded by curiosity about other things.
�
A BASEBALL-CRAZY KID
�
In October 1956 Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitched the only perfect game in post-season baseball. Yogi Berra was the catcher.¹� That same month and year R. Rabbani advised Mariette Bolton of Orange Australia, in the extended PS of her letter, that it was “much better for the friends to give up saying “Amen.”²� The following year Shoghi Effendi died and Jackie Robinson, the first Negro to play professional baseball, retired.� I was completing grades 7 and 8 when all of this took place and, even at this early age, was in love with at least three girls and possibly four in my class: Carol Ingham, Judy Simpson, Karen Jackson and Susan Gregory.� I found them all so very beautiful.� Karen was the first girl I kissed.³� -Ron Price with appreciation to:¹"The Opening of the World Series: 2000," ABC TV; ²Messages to the Antipodes, Shoghi Effendi, editor, Graham Hassall, Baha’i Publications Australia, 1997, p.419; and ³Ron Price, Journal: Canada: To 1971: 1.1, Photograph Number 102.
�
I was just starting grade seven
and still saying amen
occasionally when I went
to that Anglican Church
on the Guelph Line
in Burlington Ontario
with my mother and father
and saying grace
just as occasionally.
�
I watched the World Series,
a highlight of autumn
for a twelve year old
baseball-crazy kid, back then.
And I passed the half-way point
of my pre-youth days¹
when I was the only kid
with any connection
with this new world Faith
in these, the very early days
of the growth of a Cause
in the Dominion of Canada,²
a Cause that contained the seed
for a future world civilization.
�
^1� 1953 to 1959: my pre-youth days.
² In 1956 there were only about 600 Baha’is in Canada.� The 400 Baha’is that started the Ten Year Crusade in 1953 in Canada became 800 by the time I became a Baha’i in 1959. In southern Ontario, from, say, Oakville to Niagara Falls and Windsor, to several points north of Lakes Ontario and Erie in 1956 I was the only pre-youth whom I then knew, or later came to know.� There may have been other pre-youth but at this early stage of the growth of the Cause in Canada, year fifty-eight of its history, I was not aware of them.—See Canada’s Six Year Plan: 1986-1992, NSA of the Baha’is of Canada, 1987, p.46.
�
Ron Price
23 October 2000
_________________________

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thoskel1 66, Male, Ireland - 80 entries

Feb 2012
6:57 AM BST

get it over with

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Can't make up my mind about doing things.I wish there was a way to always make the correct choice.Like today.I don't know whether to stay at home and watch the rugby or go to Ryehill and feed cattle then tuam Tuam and look at the trailer.
Or is there such a thing as a correct decision?

I was in Diamonds after getting up.�
I met an old workmate Tommy Fahy.He came ove and aske me how long it was since we worked in Crown?.Thirty years to the day

Then I had another bout of indecision.Would I buy the Independent or the Mail (buying it all week)
The Independent had an Intersting supplement about famous I rish murder .It appeals to the subconscious I think.
I opted for the mail because it is better value for money.
The Barnadearg lady was talking about Jedward being picked again for the Eurovision.

I feel we are getting closer to something.It is just the atmosphere

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KathrynL922 40, Female, Georgia, USA - 4 entries

Feb 2012
10:09 PM CDT

I wonder...

The whole reason I'm writing on here is so Joshua can look back and read it one day.� I wish I was better about writing everyday, but sometimes life just happens and I forget or just don't have time.� I would much rather spend time with him than write in this! :)
Anyways, I often wonder at his age if he truly understands how much I love.� I'm pretty sure he understands though.� It's so funny how children have these emotions already yet they've never had the opportunity to learn them.� They just know.� I guess as humans it's just a natural thing of who we are.� Well, I love this kid more than anything in the world.� I would not trade my time with him for anything in this world.� I am so lucky that God gave me MY little boy.� I know every pary feels this way about their child, but he's just amazing!� Seriously... He's just so sweet and caring.� He's smart and funny... Just an all around amazing child.� He has so much of Tyler in him, and of course he never seizes to amaze me either.� I expect great things out of Joshua... I really do.� I just pray to God everyday that he helps us in raising a good person so he is able to do those amazing things I feel he has been put on this Earth to do.

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thoskel1 66, Male, Ireland - 80 entries

Feb 2012
2:24 PM IST

Petty tyrannies

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Again time and fatigue defeated me with this journal.

I got on ok at the Art class but I wonder should I have gone to the Teagasc thing in Athenry �about beef production.
Nobody else was at it when I inquired with the lads in the morning.

Picked up Gerry in Skehana but he was nearly half an hour late.He is easy going whether it is laziness or not.He takes his time about things.One is better off in some cases.
We got through the day ok.I had trouble with the indicator fuse since Wednesday night going to the class.There seems to be a bit of an omen around Briar hill with the speeding fine last week.There was a bit about speed cameras on TV this evening.The AA man said that some are placed in bad spots and don't do anything to help road safety.I would agree.Anyway, I eventually got it fixed after Mickey, Walsh and myself went looking in the wrong place for the culprit.It was under the dashboard.I had to pay ��€š�5 in Abbey tyres to find that out at lunchtime.

Those petit tyrannies of life can easily bring you down

Today was another ok day.We finished off the inside plastering.
Forgot to bring teabags so I had to borrow one from Austin

I went to Ryans for a small box of teabags

Kathleen didn't come till after 3.

Mickey and Austin went off about 3.30 and Vincent and I stayed a bit longer.I killed the time by hoovering out the car and talking to John Gerard.He is pretty easy to get along with but Vincent says he won't lift a finger to help anybody.I always got along with the Turlough but they can be thick sometimes.They seem all the same.
I threw out a bale on the way home.The weanling is a heifer I think so I might as well keep her for breeding.

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RonPrice 80, Male, Canada - 60 entries

Feb 2012
4:16 AM AEST

THE SUMMER OF ‘37: MY LIFE IS MY WORK

About ten weeks after I joined the Baha’i Faith the film Suddenly Last Summer was released. It was just at the start of the Christmas holidays. I was in the middle of grade 10 in a small town in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. I won’t tell you about the town, about that part of Ontario where I lived until my early 20s, or about the film since you can easily research all of this with a little effort in cyberspace.

One of the lines, the quotations, from the film, though, was: “Strictly speaking, his life was his occupation. Yes, yes, Sebastian was a poet. That's what I meant when I said his life was his work because the work of a poet is the life of a poet, and vice versa, the life of a poet is the work of a poet. I mean, you can't separate them. I mean, a poet's life is his work, and his work is his life in a special sense.”¹

I would not have appreciated those lines back in 1959 immersed as I was back then: in sport, in my studies, in the more accessible beauties than the ones in the film,² in the small world of my family and friends and in the new religion my family had become involved with by the late 1950s.² -Ron Price with thanks to ¹IMDb Website and Wikipedia; ²Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn starred in this film and won Oscars for their acting, 24/2/’12.

You were so very successful,
Tennessee,¹ but what a grim
life you had; I’ve had quite an
easy trot compared to yours.
�
Set in the summer of 1937 at
the start of the Baha’i Seven
Year Plan…..little did anyone
know back then or even now.²
�
With the world getting ready
for another war…..they were
grim times for that grim story.³
�
Those words about a poet have
certainly come true for me now
in the evening of my life: my life
is my work & my work is my life.

¹Theatre scholar Charlotte Canning of the University of Texas at Austin, where Williams' archives are located, has said, "There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams. He inspired future generations of writers, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."
²1937-1944: the first organized teaching plan of the Baha’is of North America.
³ Michael D. Klemm,“Who's Afraid Of Sebastian Venable?” in CinemaQueer.com, December 2008.

Ron Price
24/2/’12

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RonPrice 80, Male, Canada - 60 entries

Feb 2012
4:30 AM AEST

EDWARD WOODWARD: “Between Two Eternities”

Edward Woodward(1930-2009) died today.� He was born in Croydon, Surrey which, in 1965, became a part of Greater London. �It is the town where my grandfather was born in 1872. �We both had working-class parents. But it is there that a comparison between Woodward and me ends. He became one of England’s finest actors in the last half of the twentieth century. He was also a singer with a dozen albums and an author.� His 300 page memoir, One Brief Interval,(1) makes a good read. I, on the other-hand, became famous in micro-worlds, in classrooms across two continents, as a teacher.� I also became a Bah�'�.
�
Woodward started his acting career at the age of 16 in 1946.� At 16 I was in grade 11.� In his teens he aspired to being a professional footballer.� I aspired at that young age to being a professional baseball player. I won’t summarize the many highlights and achievements of Woodward’s career which readers can easily read about at Wikipedia(2), the online encyclopedia; nor will I summarize my life since the age of 16 in 1956.� This prose-poem will serve as a quasi-eulogy, a reminiscence, a reflection on a life, a life that existed beside mine in the world of celebrity, a world which exists beside all of us in the West, we who live with print and electronic media and their many and variegated forms. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2005; and (2) Wikipedia, 16 November 2009.
�
It’s been quite a ride, eh Edward?
World War 2 starting when you
were only 9 and many more wars
since, eh? You seemed to weather-
it-all pretty well, Edward, as you
enriched the lives of millions with
your talents: your cool tenor voice.
�
There’s more to celebrity than just a name;
that’s for sure, eh Edward? I wish you well
wherever you are now: be it in oblivion----
a pretty safe place; or in your incarnated---
role wherever that may be; or in the world
beyond, that Undiscovered Country, between
two eternities, as you called it, Land of Lights,
as some call it.� They will be different lights
than the ones you enjoyed on the stage and
screen here on this earthly plane, Edward....
�
May you now enjoy days of blissful joy and of
heavenly delight in some garden of happiness,
beholding new splendours on lofty mounts that
the pen cannot tell nor the heart recount to us
who still labour in this petty pace from day to
day to the last syllable of our recorded time....
�
Your candle has gone out, Edward. No more
strutting and fretting your hours. You will be
heard no more—here.� But this tale, your life,
is not a story told by an idiot, full of sound &
fury, signifying nothing. What say you now,
Edward, what say you now in the language of
THERE?
�
Ron Price
17 November 2009
�
PS (1)There are many excellent lines from Woodward’s memoir, lines like:
�‘Childhood is measured out by the sounds and smells and sights before the dark of reason grows.’(p.3)
(2) ‘Leaving aside God and heaven, there is still much good teaching in religion, whether it is Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Aboriginal or any other’. The last chapter of Woodward’s memoir returns to the idea of life as “a brief interval between two eternities.”
�

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keonyama96 31, Female, Kansas, USA - 191 entries

Feb 2012
11:10 PM

I suck at Journals even if the visit my e-mail every day:)

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MickeyMouse202 57, Female, Rhode Island, USA - 112 entries

Feb 2012
10:10 AM CDT

Course, there is email, and...well... so it does contain credit card offers, but I'm actually looking for the actual money, You know what I mean, Checks, cash, cards, etc. So far, those aren't in actuality arriving in the email, that I can remember...

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thoskel1 66, Male, Ireland - 80 entries

Feb 2012
12:59 PM BST

Time

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Am a bit tied for time.
We had a union meeting today.
We spent the rest of the day in Brookelodge.
I got the brakes checked.They were ok for another while.
Moght go see the trailer with Austin Friday or Saturday.
I have to go to the Art class now.
Wil be bringing Gerry O brien to Brookelode tomorrow.Meet in Garbally

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