My First Flight

Most Americans have fascinating stories to tell about their first flight ever and the experiences associated with that flight. The stories form a large ball of yarn added to the oral history of humanity, unwritten stories that sometimes are told to friends, strangers, family, and whoever is willing to listen.

One hundred years ago, very few people could have even envisioned that humans would fly on a regular basis inside a metal tube propelled by jet fuel and would be able to reach all corners of the world, not just a small world around their homes, in the city, the village, the dessert, on an island, or a hut in the jungle.

My first airplane flight was in 1978. I was leaving my country of birth which was tightly controlled by the Communist Party with fists, arms, soldiers, agents, policemen, informers, and the military.

I was in a daze, leaving my family behind forever and everything I’ve ever loved and known, moving to the shining city on the hill, across the Atlantic, the mythical America, the land of the free and of the brave. Part of me wanted to go and part of me wanted to stay.

I was happy to escape tyranny, but did I really know what was awaiting me? I was accompanied by my husband and mother-in-law who was just a stranger who smiled a lot and spoke English with a lilting southern accent. Everybody loved her because she was so pretty and sweet.

Would I be able to understand my new home and its people? Would they understand me? Would they accept me, the suspicious foreigner from a communist country? Would they treat me with kindness, would they welcome me in their midst? Would the customs and religion be alien to me? Would I like the food? Would I like where my fresh husband would take me? What would my life be like?

After hiccups at the airport where angry men with Russian guns threatened to take away my tiny gold wedding ring because it was Romanian gold and could not be exported and after my mother-in-law took it off my finger and put it on hers, I sat quietly in my assigned seat, a shaking storm of present and future fear raging in my heart and mind and watched the airplane door. When will it close?  

When no frightening agent came to yank me off the flight, the door finally closed, and the plane started rolling on the tarmac towards alleged freedom, I breathed a deep sigh of relief and started crying quietly.  It was a sad cry of loss, of pain, of inner suffering, of terminal good-byes, and of fear of the unknown. It was not a cry of joy.

After a long flight, we landed in New York on a cold January the 13^th day. I was relieved, bewildered, did not have a dime in my pocket, and the only picture I have from JFK shows a happy, smiling me. But I was not smiling on the inside, I was sad because of fear, apprehension, misery, and loss. On the upside, I thought I was finally free to be me and to speak my mind.

The next leg of the flight carried me south and then, after landing, we took a long drive in the darkness, to the isolated farm where I would spend the next two years of my life.

Knowing what I know today and the experiences I’ve had since my first flight 45 years ago, would I do it again, would I take such a huge life-altering chance and climb the steps onto that Delta airplane bound for America? The answer is a resounding NO.

Florida, the Verdant Paradise

Florida is a verdant, emerald-blue water paradise and a white sand sink hole, an accident waiting to happen. Thought to be part of northwest Africa ages ago, it was based on the theory that North America was part of the enormous super continent that absorbed Africa.

At the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago, Paleo-hunters arrived. The Floridian climate was dry and cold, a kind of artic tundra, as revealed by deep soil samples. Archeologists can make inferences based on dug up layers and layers of soil, strata which can reveal chemical compositions, human habitation, animal remains, plants, rocks, certain chemicals, and other materials. A soil midden holds the domestic refuse, i.e. animal bones and artifacts of prior inhabitants of the land. In south-west Florida, shell middens were preserved at the museum of the Spanish Point.

It is speculated that Florida was fifty miles wider than today due to the frozen surface water into huge glaciers which lowered the sea levels. The remains of the ancient Floridian inhabitants were covered by water when the glaciers melted. Evidence of their existence has been found off the west coast at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and beneath certain springs.

Communities were found as early as 500 B.C. Early tribes built mounds along rivers and coasts: the Ais, Timucua, Mayaca, Jeaga, Tequesta, Calusa, and Jororo. The Seminoles, part of the Creek Nation, did not arrive in Florida until the early 1700s, after the first Europeans.

Mel Fisher’s discovery of the galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha (Our Lady of Atocha) which sunk in a hurricane off the Florida Keys in 1622, is evidence of the prior arrival of Europeans before the Seminoles. This sunken galleon was laden with copper, silver, gold, tobacco, gems, and indigo.

The second largest body of water within the borders of the United States, Lake Okeechobee covers 730 square miles of South Florida and parts of five counties. In Seminole, Lake Okeechobee means “big water.” The Calusa Indians called it ‘Mayaimi,” which is probably where the name Miami originated.

Early pioneers of this part of Florida reported finding human skeletons in the shallows of the southern end of the lake and old fishermen stories told that nets caught human skulls from time to time.

Some speculated that they were Indian bones, others that they were victims of an ancient hurricane. The two thousand dead people who perished in the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928 have been recovered and buried in mass graves on mainland. Before 1900, less people lived around Lake Okeechobee, not enough to explain the thousands of skeletons and remains found at the bottom of the lake. Could it have been a place where sacrifices were made, and the bones added up over the millennia?

The Seminoles had only one conflict, the Battle of Okeechobee, in 1837, but only 30 people were killed. The age of the bones predates the first Spanish period by thousands of years. Could it have been an ancient village killed off by some disease? No artifacts or pottery were found though. Is it a mythical lost tribe? To whom did Florida belong?

Russia's Gas and Oil Pipelines

Each country is a "prisoner of its own geography," and that geography dictates what kind of resources it has. Whatever resources countries have, they are the most powerful weapons.

Russia's most powerful weapons right now are gas and oil, with nuclear missiles coming in second.

Why are gas and oil powerful weapons?

Because 25 percent of Europe's gas and oil supplies come from Russia. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland, and Estonia are 100 percent dependent on Russian gas; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Lithuania are 80 percent dependent; Greece, Austria, and Hungary 60 percent. Half of Germany's gas supply comes from Russia.

Major pipelines run east to west out of Russia, some oil, some gas.

Via the Baltic Sea in the North there is the Nord Stream route (which the Ukrainians blew up this year) which connects with Germany.

Below that, cutting through Belarus, is the Yamal pipeline which connects to Poland and Germany.

In the South is the Blue Stream which takes gas to Turkey via the Black Sea.

There was a planned South Stream to go into Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Italy but it was scuttled because EU countries put pressure on these countries and Bulgaria pulled the plug by saying that the pipelines could not come across its territory.

Putin reached out to Turkey with a new proposal, the Turk Stream. The Turk Stream proposal would have circumvented Ukraine.

To prevent Kremlin from turning the gas off, Americans strategized and came up with a plan to liquefy natural gas (the gas that Americans will be banned from using in gas stoves and heating) and ship it to European coastlines where the LNG (liquefied natural gas) will be turned back into gas.

Europe has to build more LNG terminals; Poland and Lithuania are already building terminals and the Czech Republic is building pipelines connecting to those terminals.

The problem is that piped gas is cheaper than LNG gas.

Russia is responding by planning pipelines going southeast to China in hopes of selling gas to them.

In the case of oil, for each one dollar drop in the price of crude per barrel, Russia loses $2 billion in revenue and its economy can take a hit.

Another terrible issue Russia faces is demographics, population decline. Losing men in battle does not help the situation.

The average life expectancy for a Russian male is 65 and, excluding Crimea, there are now 144 million Russians even though its territory is so vast, stretching over 11 time zones. Of the 193 U.N. member states, Russia is in the bottom half in terms of average life span.

Most western states are experiencing a population decline as well.

(data from Prisoner of Geography by Tim Marshall, 2015)

The Nursing Home Lockdowns Debacle

Reporting on incompetent care and abusive treatment of the elderly in nursing homes was always necessary but more so during the Covid-19 lockdowns. 

During the three years of the pandemic (March 14, 2020 -June 9, 2022) while my mother was in the Manor Care Nursing facility in Fairfax, Virginia, I have seen and reported abuses and neglect to the nursing administrator and to the Virginia Ombudsman. 

I had my mom’s best interest at heart and the interest of all the other patients locked up 24/7 away from the world and their loved ones who wished to visit them.

Visitors were not allowed, only staff members, yet the patients kept getting sick with Covid and some had died despite vaccinations.

The first attempt of the nursing home to give families a glimpse of their locked-up loved ones consisted of masked patients lined up on the sidewalk in their respective wheelchairs, while their families drove around in a circle to wave at them and say hello.

Someone had made a large sign praising the working staff for their “heroism.” I personally have quite a different view and definition of “heroism” and it does not involve medical staff that knowingly forced a harmful injection on innocent elderly patients who did not understand what was being done to them and were not allowed to give consent. And most families contacted were just as ignorant when they did give consent.

After weeks of continued lockdown, I negotiated 10 minutes a week of Facetime with my mom. It did not work too well, since she had dementia, she thought I was someone on TV and her attention wondered.

Next the administrator allowed me to speak to my mom through the thick window in the lobby. She made 15-minute appointments per week, my mom was brought in the lobby, she sat in her wheelchair on the other side of the glass and I stood outside in the blazing sun or in the snow, depending on the season. We talked through smart phones because the sound did not carry well through the glass.

Finally, after much negotiating and mild threatening on my part, the administrator allowed my mom to be brought outside on the patio for 30 minutes in the sunshine and fresh air, but I had to keep my six feet distance with a mask on and mom had to be masked as well. When the weather turned cold, I was allowed with her in the conference room in the lobby, both masked up.

When Manor Care eventually opened up patients' rooms to visits, the squalor and filth I found shocked me. All her possessions and clothes were piled up in a corner of the room.

When the owners had descended on the nursing home at the first lockdown, they had hurriedly moved all patients in one day, two by two, sick ones together and healthy ones together.

They hastily and carelessly removed everyone’s personal possessions and threw them in a corner on the floor. The move became a huge and unnecessary infectious wave as the rooms previously occupied by sick patients now infected the healthy ones moved into sickly rooms improperly sanitized and sterilized. 

They did not care, they just wanted the optics, to appear that they were doing something helpful. So, mom was moved into such a room previously occupied by her friend Maria who was terribly sick at that moment with Covid, and I knew it.

When I was finally allowed in mom’s room, I spent endless hours cleaning it, disposing of trash, putting all her clothes in proper order, discarding the shards of broken glass and plastic possessions, and making sure everything was properly laundered. Most of her valuable possessions were gone.

Was she properly fed? Based on the amount of weight she lost during the lockdown, they must’ve just put the plate in front of her but dementia patients forget to eat, they have to be fed. Was she given enough water? Did she remember to drink the large glass per day she received?

Mom survived the Covid only to be killed by uncaring CNAs and nurses who did not give her life saving antibiotics for an ordinary UTI which turned septic. I learned that lives in a nursing home are not valued much by the staff. And the more a family member held them to account, the worse they treated their loved ones left behind after the family visit ended.

Was it a good idea to isolate the elderly to such a degree that in some places families could not even attend their funerals? Was it ethical to mistreat dementia patients because they did not like being held to task by family? Of course not, but it happened to my mom.

Joseph Hickey and Dennis G. Rancourt looked at policies typically addressing “vulnerable individuals concentrated in centralized care facilities and entail limiting social contacts with visitors, staff members, and other care home residents” in a recent study published on October 30, 2023,  titled, Predictions from standard epidemiological models of consequences of segregating and isolating vulnerable people into care facilities.

“Across a large range of possible model parameters including degrees of segregation versus intermingling of vulnerable and robust individuals, we find that concentrating the most vulnerable into centralized care facilities virtually always increases the infectious disease attack rate in the vulnerable group, without significant benefit to the robust group.” Predictions from standard epidemiological models of consequences of segregating and isolating vulnerable people into care facilities | PLOS ONE

Common sense dictates that such isolation is not good for human beings for many reasons, including the lack of fresh air, sunshine, limited human contact, lack of proper care and nutrition in the absence of inspection, and a filthy environment in their isolated rooms where cleaning and sanitation were seldom done, citing a reduced staff.

Hickey and Rancourt’s study concluded that “isolated care homes of vulnerable residents are predicted to be the worse possible mixing circumstances for reducing harm in epidemic or pandemic conditions.”

At the end of the day, I knew that there was no science behind the Covid lockdowns, we were being used in a huge and failed experiment. And President Trump gave Drs. Fauci and Brix an endless platform to terrorize the population into compliance. The only silver lining was that the authoritarian government had not welded shut apartment complex doors like they did in China. Yet we were forced to wear masks outdoors in large state parks with no other humans in sight. As someone aptly wrote, "we were guinea pigs in a failed experiment."

Mary's Fur Baby

The beautiful puppy died before his time due to a heart defect nobody knew he had. Mary’s fur baby was buried in her yard and a bronze plaque marks his resting place. His soul is probably running happy and healthy with all the other dogs and cats past the Rainbow Bridge.

Dante stayed in his bed in the store with Mary and kept her company as he became weaker and weaker and could no longer play. His sad eyes followed her around and occasionally he would bark at a customer he did not like.

Before he got so weak, Dante’s favorite spot was in the middle glass window from where he watched the local pedestrians and the tourists who were so happy to see such a beautiful dog watching them from behind the glass.

When he finally passed, it broke Mary’s heart. She wanted him with her in the store so she framed a large portrait of Dante and placed it in the same window from whence he had watched the world go by daily from his comfortable seat.

A couple of years later, one very late evening, almost at closing time, a very elderly couple came in to ask her if they could buy the portrait in the window. The husband and wife were walking with canes and looked so frail; they could hardly afford to stroll with the purpose to shop. They did not ask for any piece of jewelry on display in Mary’s store, they wanted that framed picture. It was their daughter’s fortieth anniversary and they wanted to give her something special and memorable.

Mary told them that the framed picture was not for sale, it was the photo of her beloved Dante. The couple looked dejected and, after insisting a few times, they turned around to leave. But Mary’s generosity was legendary. She felt sorry for them, so old, frail, barely able to walk, it was late in the evening, she told them yes, she would sell it to them for $50, the price of the frame. She wrapped it nicely, tied the package with a blue velvet bow, and walked them to their car.

Mary ordered later a metallic photo of Dante, easier to resist sun damage, and never regretted selling the original framed photo to this lovely couple. She described the encounter to me and I could feel the pain welling behind her voice. Nevertheless, she was generous in her offer to make the couple happy.

The story reminded me of the song that goes, “How much is that doggy in the window?” Even in death, Dante managed to please some total strangers who happened to walk into Mary’s store late one evening.