Around the Town: Loretta Having Fun

10422509_10203070460184236_4706640719943842385_nBy Loretta Humble/Around the Town

My friend John Walker came to visit this last week. It’s been a while since he has been down. He has been busy with some changes in his own situation while I have been so puny down here, I haven’t felt like going out and finding fun things to do like we used to.

But John is about to go on a big trip and be gone for a while, so we wanted to be sure and visit one more time before he leaves. He is headed for Chile, to spend nearly a month with his son, a successful businessman there. Then when he gets back to the States, he is going to turn right around and head for Seattle to spend Christmas with his daughter who lives there.

We had such a good time this weekend, I now feel inspired to go out and do more fun things. But I’ll have to do them without John till January.

We went to the Greg Piccolo concert at the Arboretum. It was absolutely excellent. And free. Way too good to be free. Piccolo – a leader, singer and saxophonist for the multi-Grammy Award nominated band Roomful of Blues for 25 years – was making his third appearance in Athens. He has performed with the biggest names in the business—Eric Clapton,Jimmie Vaughn, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Pat Benatar, Etta James, and on and on. He is world-class, and did I mention he was free? There was a fairly nice crowd, but not nearly as large as it would have been if everybody had known how great it was going to be. If he comes back next year, please try to make it.

The fun thing we did Monday was visit two of our favorite artists at the Gallery 211 in Athens. The Gallery’s stated opening times are Thursday, Friday and Saturday, but Christi Barrett and Cheryl Hicks are often there working, and we were lucky to find them there. There have been a lot of changes at the gallery since I’ve been out of commission. They have several new artists, and are nearly out of room for new ones. Christi and Cheryl work hard, are always coming up new creations, and they sell lots of art. They love what they are doing and it shows. It is a great fun to hang out with them and see what surprising new things they are up to. The biggest—and I do mean biggest– surprising new thing is Christi’s new work—which is all over the side of their building, running down the alley, and now reaching across to Sweet Pea’s building. A humongous garden of gigantic fantastic flowers and bugs and birds. It’s well worth a trip to Athens just to admire it.

In other news, I have two different gentlemen telling me they can help get the work done on the Bartlett House with the amount of money we raised with the “O’Keeffe!” events. One of them will be available in early December. The other one has promised to call me again soon. I’m not holding my breath, or counting on it too much, but I do have some hope we might get something done. I’ll let you know if it begins to pan out.

Down at Cedar Lake Nursing Home, we are learning some great stuff that comes under the title of “Culture Change.” It is all about new ways of making life better for our residents, at whatever level they are. I am particularly interested in things we can do for the people we serve who have memory loss. We haven’t put a lot of it into practice yet, at this point we are just learning about it. When we get it going, we could sure use some volunteers to help us. If you think you might be interested, talk to me. There is some very interesting information to learn.

In the meantime, if you have a bag full of tangled yarn, please save it for us. We want to recycle it. We’ll even give it back to you in neat balls if you want it, or if you never want to see it again, we’ll give it to Juanita Rochas so she can crochet more caps for cancer patients who have lost their hair. Untangling all that yarn gives us good exercise to keep our fingers flexible, plus, it gives us something useful to do. And it will help you clear out some clutter.