Category: Uncategorized
Prologue
For those of you who have read my memoir, Behind The Magic Mirror, you are familiar with the story of my life up to and until the year 2002.
I grew up in Steubenville, a gloomy Ohio Valley steel town on the banks of the Ohio River and as a young woman realized my dream of leaving the industrial grime and smoke that I grew to hate.
Attending college far away from home was not only a way out, but also during my years at school, life afforded me a break. I was asked to audition for Bert Claster, the creator of a popular children’s television show, Romper Room, syndicated throughout the world.  This occurrence changed my life forever and I began on a whirlwind of life-changing events that caused me to eventually lead a double life. My public persona was that of a successful anchorwoman, but my private life was one of personal pain and constant terror.
My mind was occupied with a stalker that had threatened my life and in searching for the truth, I discovered that it was my husband, who eventually was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1980 he disappeared from the face of the Earth, never to be heard from again.
It took me eleven years to sort out the mystery of my husband’s disappearance and to also sort out my feelings when I discovered the truth.
When the ball dropped in New York’s Times Square on the Millennium and we all survived while entering the next century, I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to tell my story.
My initial plan was to combine a journal that I kept traveling the Nile River in 1984 with the story of my life and the investigation I started thereafter involving Jennings’ disappearance.
I wasn’t too sure that anyone but me would be interested in my emotional evolution during that prior journey to Egypt, so I gave my journal to several of my family and good friends to read. They encouraged me to go ahead and begin telling my story using my journal, but I decided to put it aside and just start telling my story right from the beginning as it was lived.
After years of trying not to think about my life with my husband and his death, Â I thought that if and when I made the decision to validate my pain and let go of the anger that there would be a great emotional healing that would release me. That there would be a great catharsis that would set me free.
So then why was I sitting there trying to fight back not tears of joy, but of emptiness. Why was there no feeling of an end for me? An end to my life with him, a severing of the cord for once and for all. He was gone and now I could get on with my life.
But as I sat there I knew there would be no end for me, and no end for my children. How could I not have seen it before? Knowledge gives us power, but it would never give us complete closure. We can never erase the days and years he was a part of our lives. Those memories we will carry forever.
So I have traveled this long journey to discover that in the end to find answers is just part of the closure. And it is not the most important in the trilogy  of finding peace within. It is the confronting of truths and the forgiveness of  trespasses against us that brings final peace and closure.
So that is my story. That is part of who I am. The answers I had looking for closure had released me to another journey that begins for me everyday my feet hit the floor. I can’t wait to see what is around the next bend in my after-fifty road. And I thank all of you who are willing to travel with me as I experience life and living here on this planet we all are lucky enough to share together.
♥♥♥♥♥
Conundrum
What words plea
Upon the page
 To tell my tale
Expose my soul
 So I can feelÂ
 So you can see
What I know?Â
Me. Â Â Â
♥♥♥♥♥
 ©Sandra Hart 2012
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Curiosity and Life in General
NASA mission to Mars: Rover Curiosity touches down
Congratulations to NASA. A new mission begins that will give us knowledge about what is going on way up there in Mars. It really is hard to believe that so much has happened my my lifetime.
Where is my safe little world of yesterday? I have been around long enough to see the world become smaller and smaller and life become more and more complicated. Men on the moon. Â Senseless mass murders in public places of safety. Impossible packaging on all things bought because some unhinged or evil person decided to taint Tylenol. Cell phones, the internet, advances in medicine.
Everything seems to be changing too quickly for me. Each time I get a new Mac or iPhone, Apple soon comes out with a better and newer version making mine obsolete. Xboxes, Wii’s for everything! STOP. Let me breathe just a little. I am not ready to get off, please just slow down! Â I don’t want to live in a world all about “things.”
The greatest “thing” that made my day when I started kindergarten in Wintersville, Ohio was
the mega-box of Crayolas that my mother bought for me to bring with me on my very first day of school. I was the luckiest person in the whole wide world. Reds, greens, blues, so many colors I could use to make rainbows and houses and skies and pictures of my dog. I coveted those crayons like nobodies business and couldn’t wait to show them off to my soon-to-be new friends.
Until, that is, the world of other little people’s stuff entered into my life. My soon-to-be new friend Donna had a baton. Shiny silver-colored with a nice white ball on the end. Uummmm….. I soon found the ability to covet more than one thing at the same time.
By the end of the week, although I still loved my new crayons and my friend was happy with her baton, I keep eying Donna’s baton and she kept wanting to use my crayons. Here is where the World of Barter was born in my un-evolved little brain. Donna and I decided to switch (just for the weekend) our coveted treasures. She took home my Crayolas and I got her baton.
How much fun I had with that baton all weekend and I lovingly took care of that baton, so when Monday morning came and we had to give back our bartered items, mine came back to me (you’re right) mostly broken(just as much as my heart was when I looked at my well-used coveted gift from my mother).
That was my first painful lesson in trusting that others will treat your “things” as you do.
So good luck on Mars. Let us begin to love and tolerate our differences more. Let us be grateful for what we have and not covet more than we need. Let’s slow down and smell the roses.
©Sandra Hart 2012
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Time Travel
Snow was so high that year. I remember that. I also remember my older brother’s friend chasing me and putting snow balls down my back. What did I know. I stayed out in our backyard with my brother for hours enjoying the snow in freezing temperatures in wet clothes.
They say you can’t get sick by getting cold, but I did. I had influenza and double pneumonia at the same time. My fever spiked to 106 and in the miraculous days when doctors made house calls, I had two doctors sitting by my side through the night for two days. One doctor, Dr. Sink, had delivered my mother in 1907 and the other, Dr. Healy, called him in to help. They both practiced homeopathy.
I only remember being in my room and seeing these men sitting in high back chairs near my bed and not really caring about much except being hot and wanting to sleep.
How long I was that way, I don’t know, but I do remember hearing the loud unfamiliar sound of tick, tick, tick when I finally opened my eyes. I looked. There on my small side table was a little clock made of green glass. Bright green glass with gold riming the hands of the clock. I closed my eyes again and went back to sleep with the tick, tick, tick soothing my fevered dreams.
Thank you Aunt Thelma where ever you are. Sorry I never told you how much I loved the clock. Or maybe I did and in my over-fifty state don’t remember. But do know I found that clock again today and it is wound, polished and set to 2012 time ready to sooth my dreams tonight. Tick, tick, tick. And life goes on.
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Tuesdays Are For Traveling
Mountain can be seen beyond the city along the beautiful beaches
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Tablecloth effect on Table Mountain in Cape Town South Africa
Wall of Castle of Good Hope
©Sandra Hart 2012
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OOPS! CAN WE REDO THAT SCENE?
What a pro Queen Elizabeth is and a good sport, too. Danny Boyle said that she quickly got her role in the James Bond spoof during the opening ceremony of the Olympics and it only took a couple of hours to shoot the whole scene.
“Just marvelous, darling.” as Fernando Lamas used to say. She is a great example of debunking the fact that the British are too ‘stiff upper-lipped’. As a matter of fact, I thought the whole opening was entertaining and quite a feat to execute. Bravo to the Brits!
Again all this talk about London takes me back ( okay, over-fifty’s sometimes live in the past) to a visit I had there several years ago.
As an actress I always enjoy those impromptu moments, you know, when I have to listen to my fellow actors and then react by my gut or fly by the seat of my pants emotionally and verbally. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it is fun.
Unfortunately though, once off the stage, I admit my skills in real life are not that great. Hasn’t this happened to you? I always think of what I should have or could have said long after the encounter has happened. I create this ‘after-play’ in my head that is just great.
Well, the first day of a trip to London I headed for Bond Street, with its very picturesque road winding along and creating a narrow pathway for some of the most magnificent shops in London. It is among one of my favorite streets in the world, but you must walk almost touching shoulders with other shoppers along the narrow way. As I walked from our flat at Wimpole Street, all the while savoring visions swirling in my head of the wonderful credit card opportunities that lay ahead of me, I tried to ignore the man who had popped from an art gallery and insisted walking at my pace and getting into my ‘personal space’.
Annoyed at his arrogance, I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t even glance his way. “What a creep”, I though to myself as I finally decided to give him a less than friendly stare as I quickly crossed the street to get rid of him. Our eyes met.
Well, if there had been a manhole available, I would have dived right in. Tall, tan and gorgeous, there he was receiving my ‘ugly American’ scowl-the actor and self-styled celebrity, George Hamilton!
I was so embarrassed that I almost humiliated myself more by tripping as I ran across the small street to escape from my stupidity. I couldn’t get away from George and Bond Street fast enough.
A few days later, forgiving myself for being such an idiot and my humiliating experience slowly fading, my desire to shop and satisfy my credit card addiction on Bond Street won. I returned to the scene of my crime.
After visiting several stores, I stopped by the Maud Frizon window to look at the shoe display.
Suddenly I was aware of a presence behind me checking to see what was capturing my attention. My heart almost stopped. I couldn’t believe the reflection I saw in the window. Lightening had struck twice! The reflection had a familiar name attached to it. It belonged to the one and only George Hamilton.
“We have to stop meeting like this”, he said with his white perfect teeth glistening within his perfectly tanned smile.
“Husband?”
My mind went blank, and the following events are a little hazy in my memory, but I think I do remember turning toward him and giving a slight idiotic embarrassed giggle with my ‘should I lie, but I can’t’ honest…. “Yes.”
Then what seemed an eternity (was probably no more than a few mille-seconds), “Too bad,” he replied with a wink that crinkled the skin around his perfect eyes.
And he was off to continue his journey down Bond Street and I was left to think of what I should have, could have said, or wanted to say to George Hamilton.
As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the
almost-right word and the right word is really a large
matter-it’s the difference between lightning and the
lightening.”
©Sandra Hart 2012
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My Berlin Post Script
As for my Berlin connection, my daughter and grandson and I visited Berlin in 2008 during Octoberfest. We stayed at The Upstalsbloom Hotel in East Germany close to the rail lines that took us to Alexanderplatz and access to all points in Berlin. We took the Hop-On-Hop-Off Bus around the city and saw the best of Berlin. It is the easiest way to independently tour the city highlights.
Berlin is such a beautiful city that has been reenergized in the best architectural way. Â They even have left a few WWII buildings in their bombed condition for remembrance of what humanity can do to one another. The Holocaust Museum is free to all visitors and is a moving testament to the past history of what can easily happen in a society driven by a mad man.
So I leave my memories of Ursula with this posting and have to move on to today. But I will never again forget  and set aside my letters from Ursula. Back in the Balfour box they go again, but this time not forgotten. I promise.
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Alverterzane Ursula
Ursula and I continued to write back and forth until right before I went to college. Through the years we exchanged gifts of a small nature, birthday cards, scarves, cedar boxes and her things from Germany, chocolates and flower pressings.
In 1955 she wrote:
In the last war by the bomben are falling our Opera, Unter den Linden. Now it is standing up. A wonderful house with the best orchester and the best singers and musicers from Germany. Unter den Linden is the name for this great street, what is a sign of Berlin.
Now dear Sandy I have a great request. Upi know I live in east berlin, where we have the russians. All textiles and clothes have many high prices. When you can send me some or a winter clothes, what you have worn and have not your great now, or have other therefore, then I were very gratefully. When you not can that, please are not evil and excuse me.
Your german friend,
Ursel
I remember I sent her some warm things, after all in Ohio we did have strong winters and I could manage with less in spite of that fact. I guess it was the beginning of how deprived the East Berliners were going to be before and after the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, about four years after we stopped communicating.
As I read her letters now I can see that she is less cheerful and it is though the heart and lightness that came through her writing as her inner voice had gone out of her.
Then her letters came to me with segments cut out of them. The Soviets must have been editing all mail that went from their sector to the other side, and especially to the United States. Big patches of her letters had been carefully sliced out.
That fact made me wonder if my letters also were opened, read and edited. I became a bit paranoid that I was going to say something that I shouldn’t, either for her sake or for the sake of my country. The summer of 1956 was the last I heard from her.
Evidently Ursula and her family lived behind that wall until it was torn down in November of 1989. By my count she would have been 53 years old. She spend her youth behind that wall. She probably got married and had babies behind that wall.
There probably will never be closure with my friendship with Ursula. I have tried to find her via  the internet, but the one that I found had her father die in 1965. Facts don’t match. I just have to believe that she is still alive and living a contented life without a wall separating her from her extended family.
©Sandra Hart 2012
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Letters From Berlin
Having lived in the same house for forty years one can just imagine how many memory-attached things I have. And bizarre as it may seem to you, I even have my mother’s purse I brought home from the hospital when she died with all her precious personal items still tucked inside. A real Grandma purse, a piece of her and who she was, with short handles and a snap closure that is still tucked away on my closet shelf. I even wrote a whole essay about that purse in Read Between My Lines.
All of this brings me to my efforts today to finally begin eliminating some ‘stuff’ among my personal things my mother, the guardian of her children’s memories, had saved for me.
In an old Balfour box (from my college jewelry days) I found a group of long-forgotten time weathered envelops addressed to me in Ohio and posted from Berlin, Germany. Letters that took me back into a world that was about to change, way beyond the innocent exchanges of my new pen pal, Ursula Thie and I. We became pen pals through a program at our Methodist Church.
The beginning year of our childhood correspondence was 1953. I had just turned 14 and was enjoying the freedoms of Junior High and life in a thriving Ohio Valley Steel town.
Berlin, den 27.2.1953
Dear Sandra,
I thank you for your letter. You have it write in the december and I have became it now in february. With your letter together I have become three table of chocolate, about these I was very glad. My name is Ursula Thie.
We girls here in Germany are not how you Y-tem. Our name is young community of evangelist church. In our group we are girls between 14th and 20 years. I self am 17 years old…..
I live in Berlin with my mother and my brother. My father was falling in the contention 1945.
I am 1,70m great, have blond hairs and blue eyes. When you have a photo from you please send it me.
In the winter I am going several times into a teatre, In the summer I travel out of Berlin.
Please write me in your next letter many things from you and your live. I please you, to excuse my base english. The name of the flower at this letter is bell-flower-glickenblume.
Sincerely yours,
Ursula Thie
Berlin
In my world, we had just elected a new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower and my family in January was glued to our television set watching I Love Lucy give birth. In February our president refuses clemency for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and Walt Disney’s 14th animated film, Peter Pan, arrived at our local movie theater.
In Ursula’s world, she was learning English, going to festivals where she was singing jolly songs and eating pancake, enjoying her girl’s group where they visited various denominational churches including the Russian Orthodox and the Naumburger Dom and planning ahead for a summer away from Berlin.
Little did we both know that on June 17 of that year things would change for her in East Germany.
Blogs and my correspondence with Ursula to be continued……
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Google Me A Frog Please
Ok. I think I am really loosing it. At least that is what my 18 year old grandson chided when I told him of my latest animal- bonding adventure. You see, we have a frog in our pond. Just one. Where he came from beats me. He just is . Maybe came in with the plants or maybe some kind of amphibian immaculate conception. Anyway he is. He just is. Every day and night this guitar plunk of a sound, (if guitar strings were made of rubber bands), emits from our fish pond. Plunk. Plunk. Plunk.
For weeks now I have tried to find him without success. Looking under ledges. lifting vining plants, poking everywhere. No luck. Then yesterday I heard him as I was limping past the pond. Heard him inside the lavender flowering pond plant.
His croak is loud and I was amazed that he was so small, this tiny green pond frog with such a strong sound.
Immediately, upon seeing his tiny form and sweet face, I felt his loneliness inside that big plant. Calling day after day into emptiness.
I quickly put my iPhone and Google to work, found a good green pond frog sound bite and held it up to the lavender pond plant. The rest is history.
We now have a happier frog who believes there is someone out there just like him to talk to. At least until I can find him a friend. Other than Sofi.
Sandra's Hart My Over 60 Lifestyle Journey 