Joyce Parker Hyde
There are 9 windows on my side of the house. Long ones, medium ones and smaller one.
Every time I am asked to write a one page BIO it feels very much like deciding which window do I want to look into. Look into any one at various times of day and you will get an entirely different impression of what kind of person lives there.
Most of the rooms are a complete mess; looking from the outside in; from the inside it's more like controlled chaos. Living a life within the borders of my other lives.
These days I get my philosophy lessons from opening and closing scenes of television shows. Criminal minds quotes two on each episode-gives you something to think about other than the deranged people who live among us. My favorite is "The lives of the dead are deposited into the memory of the living" Plato-I think.
There is a reason that death and the dead live in the forefront of my mind. I've been in very close proximity to way too much of it for as long as I can remember-at least for 20 years. Reminded that death takes ordinary people who are doing ordinary things at unexpected times. I was in Los Angeles when people sleeping prepared to celebrate a holiday. I was tumbled out of bed at 4:31 in the morning January 17, 1994- and hustled out to the parking lot just in case the building crumbled-it did not.
The damage from that quake covered 85 miles, all surrounding the spot where I had lay sleeping. 61 people died. New words were added to my vocabuluary like epicenter, magnitude, ground acceleration-coccidioidomycosis.
Coccidioidomycosis is a fungal disease caused by Coccidioides immitis or C.posadasii. (Valley Fever), a respiratory disease caused by inhaling airborne spores. The number of cases (203) in Ventura County, California was roughly 10 times the normal rate in the eight weeks following the earthquake and three people died. It is thought that the spores were carried in large clouds of dust created by seismically
triggered landslides. Most of the cases occurred immediately downwind of the landslides...
I really could have done without learning that one.
I was in New York, on a perfectly normal day, September 11,2001; doing perfectly normal things a few years later, when 2,753 people-right across the Hudson River-I was on Staten Island at the time- were just evaporated-gone-no trace other than dust left of them. I think this is when I became fascinated by forensic science.
I was back home in New Orleans -August 29, 2005 , when the levees broke, which required me to be rowed down streets I had walked happily as a child. Rowed past the floating bodies of those unfortunate departed souls who for whatever reason got swept into the water.The numbers given out of the dead and the loss has been under reported.
Then there was the explosion last summer of that started the BP disaster. That began April 20, 2010. Forgotten -almost immediately was the fact that 11 people were killed that day. I don't know the number who died from the stress of seeing hundred year old family livelihoods wiped out.
So rather than spew out a lot of boring drivel about how I spend my days, today I just want to pay tribute to those who have been lost and remembered by no one. "The lives of the dead are deposited into the memory of the living". I remember you.
I thank those who remember as well.
I don't have too much patience to follow most of the programs running online so I pick a few to try on for as long as I like them.
http://shortquik.com/10levelriches/