It's strange how things sometimes go in life, there I was going to write about a friend I met at Menno place a few years ago, and after I had a few paragraphs on paper, thought to start the story when she was a young girl and so invented Helen. As I didn't know anything about my invented happy girl, I followed a different young woman of whom I did know something.

From there on I went from one person or character to another, still trying to make a sensible whole. I made several errors in what real writers may call the plot but will not tell where you can find them, because they are obvious enough and will not correct them either because I am an lazy story teller like my father.

If we as children thought that he went over the believing line and asked 'Is that really true dad?' he would would pretend to think very deeply and say 'Well, maybe not all of it...'

My parents who during the hungry thirties read a newspaper together with two friends, in order to minimize the cost, waited anxiously for the Saturday edition because it featured a feuilleton, a serialized story. I know, because I had to deliver that paper when my parents were through reading it to a family living on the other end of our village, for which I sometimes got a candy.

It would be a grave sin if we held the paper back a few hours because they were just as anxious as my parents were to know what was happening to their feuilleton hero's.

Since there was no news of or about a Trump in those days, (even though there used to be a painter named Hitler who lived all the way in Austria,) the feuilleton with the main characters was besides the bible with its characters all they had to read and thus very important to them.

I will never equal the writers of those (these?) times and that is not the purpose of my effort either. My goodness I can hardly speak my third language (English) and without the google family would never even get a proper sentence on paper, but even without a formal education I do write (and was published) in the Frisian language, write in Dutch, and am published (one time, for which I got paid $75,) in English.

I try to humor my audience with my true and almost true stories, but also to leave something behind for my grand and great grand-children, as my stories are for a great deal about family and family roots, and also I want to share my thanks to the Creator for the beauty I find in all of nature around me here and the love and friendship I experience here and over the earth.

An important reason that I wrestle daily with computers, language, and skill is that I exercise my brain with it, and so do my best to prolong the time that I am reasonably sound of mind, because the evil of Alzheimer is lurking, and trying to destroy.

My father succumbed to it, at least two of his brothers, and my only sister as well. My doctor is confident that I do not have 'it' and I hope he is right.

I received great help from one of the staff members of Menno place and am for ever thankful to her, and to others who may not know my circumstances as well as she does. I have young friends who see me not only as an old man stumbling behind a walker, but share a laugh or smile and I have more than a hundred friends on Facebook all over the world who help me along on my journey.

I do not know where Megan will put this chapter, as Denée calls it, but am going on with Helen and Lolke for a few chapters yet and then I intend to do some characters I am living with in Menno place – such great people.

If I was God I would want them all, and of course he does want them all. Even I, the least in His kingdom, belong to Him.

I will keep you posted.
Keep smiling.
And laughing.