Senior News September, 2001 Vol. 20. No.  9

 

Published by the Humboldt Senior Resource Center in Eureka, California. HSRC is a non-profit community-based organization offering services for senior citizens, multi-generational families and caregivers.

Unsung heroes: Bridgeville Lunch Bunch creates a community

Unsung Heroes

Remembering Spirit: Who are your unsung heroes?

Grandparents' Day takes on a different feel

Ask the Nurse

Is there a "brain drain" among California physicians?

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Remembering Spirit
Who are your unsung heroes?
by Barbara Clark

One of the anonymous e-mails that circulated earlier this year asked us to name the five wealthiest people in the world, the last five Heisman trophy or Miss America winners and the last half dozen best actors and actresses given the Academy Awards.

The point, it said, is that none of us remembers yesterday's headliners, even though they are the best in their fields.

Then the writer launched a new set of lists to make-a few teachers who aided your journey through school, three friends who have helped you through a difficult time, five people who have taught you something worthwhile, a few who have made you feel appreciated and special, five people who you enjoy spending time with, half a dozen heroes whose stories have inspired you.

I got it.

As I focus this month's issue on unsung heroes, I think about the people who show up any day, any month, from around corners we least expect to travel, surprising us with their compassion or creativity. I think about how my love of the written word took me away from the computer screen and into a wished-for skill at calligraphy; and, pursuing that, into a creative lettering class taught by Ann Johnson-Stromberg at Scrapbook Getaway in Eureka.

That class gave birth to a new passion-my favorite quotes hand lettered on a page, to make personal greeting cards for friends, to gather in my new book called "Letters."

But that wasn't all. Because the unsung heroes of the North Redwoods Book Arts Guild, which offers a creative book-making workshop every month, also stepped around the corner of my life with an altogether new structure for creative lettering.
Elaine Benjamin, owner of Blue Chair Press in Blue Lake, presented a Book Arts Guild workshop in July in which she taught us how to make book lanterns-four (or more) sided paper structures festooned with what are creatively called "danglies" and which hang from the ceiling and dance in the breezes. They fold and can be mailed like a greeting card.

Since that workshop I've made five lanterns. The first one is in my new office, and it daily calls to me with its John Gray quote about how to meditate: "Oh Great Spirit, my heart is open to you. Come sit in my heart."

I made two which are hanging in the Book Arts Guild's show at the Ink People all this month. One is Emily Dickinson's poem that was printed in the Humboldt Mediation newsletter:

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,
that sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.

The other is a Celtic Prayer that I wrote in a 1998 workshop at Christ Church Episcopal.

Unsung heroes. All of these people and experiences have given me a gift of life, have inspired me with an art form that lets me be bigger than I sometimes feel and gives me a form for the inexpressible within me. I sing those heroes today.

Barbara Clark is editor of the Senior News. Scrapbook Getaway's next creative lettering class will be held Saturday, Sept. 8 at noon. Info: 442-2277.