Lifestyle

Yes, All Jobs, and That Meant Even COMBAT!

“Smile at me,” says Sofia, 5. I wonder how many of us can imagine God smiling at all?

B Dear Aunt B, Thanksgiving and then Christmas is coming. UGH. I know you have talked about this before, but it still exists for me. I DONT LIKE HOLIDAYS. I really do think there is something wrong with me. Help!!!!!

It was the mid 80s. I was a Junior at Seagoville High School, where a night out on the town meant a slushie at the brand-new Sonic and a nice cruise through the Minyard’s parking lot. We didn’t have a movie theater. We didn’t have a bowling alley. There was no country club, no arcade. When the night fell, we just drove. We cruised. One afternoon, as the school day was ending, I sensed excitement in the air. “Are you going?” a friend asked. “Wanna ride with us?” she said. I answered, “Go where? To Sonic?” “Eww, as if,” was her response. “Don’t you even know? They’re filming a movie. We’re all gonna go watch. It’s Chuck Freaking Norris.” Yes, Chuck was filming right outside of town, smack dab in the gravel pits. Have you ever seen a gravel pit? The pits of my childhood still exist. Right on Malloy Bridge Road, as you’re leaving Seagoville and heading toward Wilmer, massive mountains of gravel stand, ready to be loaded into dump trucks and taken hither and yon. From river rock to road base to crushed limestone to rip rap to pea gravel, these Grand Canyon wannabes stand tall and proud, lining this industrial area for miles on both sides of the road. Heck, most of us learned how to swim in the deep basins of water that gather in between the tall stacks of rocks. Pits are excavated in aquifers, like these gravel pits next to the Trinity River, where groundwater quickly fills them, creating ponds up to 400 ft deep. Sounds heavenly until the first time you spot a den of water moccasins or take a misstep from a 4 ft depth into a neverending hole. You’re probably wondering what drew Chuck Norris to the Seagoville gravel pits. The answer is, duh, the Middle East. As best I can tell, the movie was Delta Force. The plot shows a Lebanon setting, released in 1986, which would line up with production/filming around ’84 or ’85. Though this 5-movie dynasty would earn millions, this first installment was anything but a sure deal. And, why go to the Middle East when you can just come to a gravel pit in a rural Southeast Dallas area that has lots of sand and things that look like pyramids? We sat in a ditch at the edge of the road and watched people stand around all night long. There was a man running around with a kaffiyeh on his head that everyone said was Chuck Norris. Eventually, they blew up some gravel and we all went home. But, they weren’t in the Middle East. They were fooling the audience. And here’s the deal, it happens all the time.

52 Grants Awarded to Forney ISD Teachers Totaling $115,000

Forney ISD Board of Trustees and Forney ISD Superintendent Dr. Justin Terry officially swore in 4 new officers during the October Board of Trustees meeting. These new officers will join the department in an effort to continue to expand the district’s safety and security efforts.

According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer mainly occurs in middle-aged or older women. In fact, the median age at the time of a breast cancer diagnosis is 62. Though it’s possible for women far younger than 62 to be diagnosed with breast cancer, the ACS reports that only a very small number of women younger than 45 are diagnosed with the disease each year. Despite the average age of onset being over 60, breast cancer is highly treatable. The World Health Organization notes that breast cancer treatments routinely achieve survival probabilities of 90 percent or higher. However, those probabilities decline considerably in lower-income countries where access to screening and other medical services is limited. For example, the WHO notes that five-year survival rates for breast cancer routinely surpass 90 percent in high-income countries like the United States and Canada. However, those rates are as low as 40 percent in South Africa, where early detection of the disease is less likely than it is in wealthier nations. That disparity in survival rates underscores the need for greater resource allocation in lower-income countries, but also highlights the effectiveness of screening and other measures in high-income countries where women are taught to report any abnormalities with their breasts.

B Dear Aunt B, How weird is it that I am preoccupied with the Royals? I am embarrassed to admit it and not sure what it says about me. How do I break this addiction?

Our understanding of culture could be best described with the old Virginia Slims slogan. We’ve come a long way, baby. Yet, periodically throughout each of these last several years, I’ve noticed a trend in American vernacular. We love to speak cooler, hipper, and more urban than at any other point in recent times. I am guilty of this action, both in my writing and in my life overall. Maybe it’s the global takeover of social media in our lives. Maybe it’s the inundation of these terms in advertising. Maybe it’s our obsession with staying young, thus speaking young. It infuriates many people, especially when perceived to cross the thin line from recognition to emulation to cultural appropriation. I’ve been working on this idea of a column for some time, combing through a variety of publications that voice opinions on thematter.Fromwebsiteslike oprahdaily.com, sproutsocial. com, babble.com, and Illinois State University’s publication of Rachel Lang’s “Who Said it First: Linguistic Appropriation of Slang Terms within the Popular Lexicon” (2021), I hope to cover a wide range of examples and opinions on the matter. In the end, it may not be that we do or don’t use the phrases. It may center on intent. Worst case scenario, we’ll know where our favorite sayings originate. As with anything in this world, what you do with knowledge rests on you. Today, I will be playing the role of both the judge and the devil’s advocate. Let’s go!

“He loves us and cares about us,” says Karymeh, 7. “He made us and wants to talk to us. He wants to see us and play and have fun.”

B Aunt B, I can’t find contentment. My kids, my family, my job always leave me longing for something else. Most days are spent daydreaming instead of appreciating what I have. How do I find happiness and appreciation in my life?

The first day of school for the 2022-2023 year, August 11, is upon Forney, Texas and there is a palpable feeling of exciting learning in the atmosphere at every school campus. Many new students are calling Forney ISD their new school home this year with over 15,000 for the first day attending classes in 9 elementary schools, 3 intermediate schools, 2 high schools, and a learning academy. The entire FISD staff met on Tuesday, August 2, for convocation – the only time all of the staff is gathered in one location – and the event was uplifting for the new-to-thedistrict teachers as well as the returning staff.

There’s song Texas country artist Walt Wilkins used to do with his band, The Mystiqueros, called It’s Only Rain. The lyrics are haunting in a simple yet stunning sort of way. “Barn storm brewing up in the loft/When she comes down/She falls so soft/ Like rain/It’s only rain….Dust ball farmer/Red dirt clay/Drops his shovel and he kneels to pray/For rain/It’s only rain.” I saw Walt sing, intimately, at a house concert here in town a few years back. He performed some acoustic sets. Think Kris Kristofferson’s face with longer, grayer, shaggier hair. That is Walt. Someone from the audience asked him to sing It’s Only Rain. He gave a speech about the writing of the song and how he’d hoped it would be a chart topper. Then, he refused to sing it. I heard post-concert chatter of fallings out and hard feelings with some of the band members. Granted, until I started writing this article, I thought he was saying dust bowl farmer. I envisioned my grandfather, back in the 30s, trying to grow crops while unable to see through the opaque dust, the ground being where the sky should’ve been. I guess the sentiment is similar. The farmer in the song is literally growing dust balls instead of corn. Still, even though Walt’s wish for a chart-topping mega hit didn’t come to fruition, it’s a heckuva tune, and apropos for this column, since, at the moment in July that I’m writing this, it rained today for the first time in 6 weeks. We laugh about the drought. We roll our eyes, cause, Texas, ya know. It’s always too hot. There’s never enough water. We shout “rememberthesummerof80” like we survived the Alamo or something. Yet, this summer has seemed different. Parts of Royse City actually ran out of water suddenly. The Great Salt Lake is drying up. There’s something involved in this where the salt will kill the algae and turn everything into a form of arsenic that could be blown hither and yon by Utah winds. Local lakefront homeowners are suddenly realizing why they got that sweet deal on their property a few years ago. Boat lifts are dangling watercraft over empty channels that look more like the Sahara than a lake finger. And, as in all other years where we are sorely lacking water, we begin to get nervous. Where is the rain? Can we hunt it down? Can we dance it over? Can we pray it here?