WOW!

Congratulations, Elizabeth. *D* and I are really proud of your "Creating Keepsakes" magazine Hall Of Fame win. It's Party time.

Things in common.
I am just finishing the biography Never Have Your Dog Stuffed and other Things I've Learned by Alan Alda. As with many of the things I read, I heard about it on NPR. I discovered Alan and I have many things in common. We are about the same age. We both experienced an illness around the age of 7 which kept us confined for a considerable length of time. He thinks it made him a little strange. Maybe that is my problem - and never realized it. We both have three daughters. Our other communality is about burying a dog. His dog helped him get through polio, and then died shortly after. He and his father were going to bury the dog, but could not bring themselves to do it. So his father had it stuffed. The result was that it did not look anything like the dog, and ended up scaring people. The moral of the story is sometimes it is time to let something go, and keep the memory in your head. When our old faithful dog Herman died, my mother and I decided to bury him in the back yard. We actually would have, but neither of us had the strength to dig the hole deep enough, so we just buried Herman's blanket and collar. ( I don't remember what we did with Herman.) So there you go, several of the things that movie star Alan Alda and I have in common.

This is a picture of my first cousin Dorothy Marie Bennett Sheppard and myself. We were going to use it for the inside cover of the book we planned to write about the Stewart family. It did not happen because Dorothy passed away last summer. She was a great friend and cousin. We were thinking of her the other day because spring training for the Indians is in full swing in Winter Haven, Florida. Dorothy was one of the biggest Indians fans I ever met. Richard and I went to spring training with her a few years ago. We loved it, and so did she. It makes me wonder if there is some strange baseball loving gene that keep reocurring in my family. Once when Dorothy and I were on one of our many genealogy trips, we met another cousin, Myron Hill, for dinner in Washington D.C. Dorothy and Myron compared World Series games they had seen. I just listened, because I could not contribute. I will try to listen, watch and attend as many Indians games as possible this year.