We took the hungry dragon to the mall to trick or treat. Okay, he didn't really trick or treat, he just played and watched all the people. Our mall has a kids area and he got to play with several other little kids.
Do you believe in ghosts? In the western world we don’t believe in all the creatures that go bump in the night that we used to. Our ancestors once believed strongly in vampires, werewolves, ghouls zombies, and other dwellers in the darkness. Now of days, though many people do believe in angels and demons, the belief in most other creatures has gone away.
In fact, a local morning radio station, Q100, is planning on spending tomorrow night taping an entire four hour show in an undisclosed location that is supposedly the site of tremendous paranormal activity. They will run that in place of their live show on Friday morning. All this week, they have been featuring “evidence” collected by the Atlanta Ghost Hunters. Scroll down on this page, to listen to some of the EVP’s they’ve collected. Or go here. You have to hear the “He panicked” one. There were no women on their investigation that night.
All you have to do is go trick or treating. Yep, it's that simple. Visit each of the authors' houses on our "street" and select one item from our goodie bags. Email the author with your choice and winners will be drawn from all the entries. Then click on the trick or treat icon on each page and move on to the next house.
Did you realize the term “gypsy” was a pejorative term? In many languages it was synonymous with the term thief, demon, or whore. Millions of people were tortured, enslaved and killed because of the connotations of that word. To many of the Romani, or Roma, it is as offensive as the “n” word is to an African-American.
My great-grandmother immigrated to the United States in 1908. She was 8 years old. Her family came here for two reasons. First was to seek treatment for her older sister who had accidentally ingested a mixture of lye and water thinking it was milk. A bit of the mixture was inhaled as she coughed and gasped. The doctors in Hungary told my great-great-grandfather to take her on a sea voyage and the sea air would help her lungs. (The second reason had to do with the rumors of pogroms spreading across Eastern Europe-a place that had just, within the last 30 years, outlawed slavery for those known as “gypsies”.)
So my grandpa Karl, a widower with six small children, did the only thing he knew. He sold everything they had and booked passage for his family to join family members in America. There were several complications, one of which led to my great-grandmother Anna staying behind for a year with her oldest brother Josef (later Anglicanized to Joseph at Ellis Island) and her grandmother Maria. When Anna arrived in the United States she found her sister healthy and her family living a secret.
No one knew they were Romani. What people call gypsies. But in 1908 the United States and the people of that country weren’t thrilled to welcome “gypsies” into their midst. So they hid who they were. They became simple Hungarians, active in the Hungarian community. I found out later while researching, that this isn’t uncommon. The Romani who entered the country at the previous turn of the century either clung doggedly to their traditions, or shamefully hid them.
My great-grandmother took her secret to her grave. We only found out because her sister did not keep her secret. She told her children. At my great-grandmother’s funeral, her nephew told our branch of the family the truth. They had never spoken of it to any of us out of respect.
What causes someone to be so afraid of who they are that they would hide it for their entire lives?
*Rumors were spread in medieval times that the Roma were
descended from a sexual encounter between a Roma woman and Satan.
*Another belief was that Roma forged the nails used in Christ's
crucifixion.
*The Christian genocide against Witches during the late
Middle Ages and Renaissance was also directed against the Roma. The courts seized and imprisoned them in Witches' prisons, often without even bothering to record their names.
*The Diet of Augsburg ruled that Christians could legally kill Roma. Meanwhile, the courts were closed to Roma who were injured by
Christians
*In 1721, Emperor Karl VI of what is now Germany ordered total
genocide of the Roma. "Gypsy Hunts" were organized to track down and exterminate them.
*Roma were rounded up and imprisoned in Spain during 1749. They
were considered a danger to society.
*In 1792, 45 Roma were tortured and executed for the murder of some Hungarians, who were in fact alive and who observed the executions.
*During the 17th century many gypsies were forced to become slaves in Hungary and Romania, where their final liberation did not take place until 1855. It is believed that as much as half of the Roma in Europe were enslaved, from the 14th century until Romani slavery was abolished in the mid-19th century. In some parts of Europe it took even longer for slavery to be forbidden.
*In many places Christianity closed its doors completely to the Romani. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches refused to baptize “gypsy” infants.
Though it was after the fact, let us not forget that the oppression didn't end in the 19th century. Two million of the Nazi Holocaust victims were “gypsies” including these child victims. They were considered even lower on the hierarchy of hate than the Jews and the criminally insane.
The Romani or Roma are still considered one of the most oppressed people in the world. With these stories in her ears and fear for her family, a frightened little girl hid the truth of her identity to the day she died.
I ask that you consider this the next time you toss about the term gypsy, incorporate it in a title or use the term to make your heroine or hero seem more mysterious.
Yesterday evening I finished Dan Brown's latest, The Lost Symbol. (A couple of minor -and cryptic-spoilers follow, so read on at your peril) It was a perfectly respectable read that seemed to take me forever. Not because of it's length or complexity, or even because of quality. I would just set it down and find something else I needed to do and forget to come back to it. Well, I finally finished it, tucked up in bed with my cold medicine and it was good. I still think Angels and Demons was his best effort. The Lost Symbol continues the rather preachy tone that really reved itself in The Da Vinci Code. The lead character in this trilogy, Robert Langdon keeps getting bitch-slapped with Christianity. First he goes along with a church cover-up in A&D, then he ends up kneeling at the tomb of the "Holy Grail" after saving Jesus' great, great, great (on and on great) granddaughter, and now he ends up nearly dead because someone buried a bible in the corner stone of a building in Washington, D.C.
The second book I read today. I started it this afternoon and read straight through, even as my son used me for a jungle gym. He didn't mind, it seemed my only needed participation in the game was to sit still and not complain too much when he used my hair to pull himself up. This absolute page turner was Cindy Spencer Pape's Crazy for the Cowboy. And quite frankly folks, I enjoyed it a lot more than the above. 
K and I went to one of our favorite places in Atlanta, Little Five Points. This intersection of Euclid, McClendon and Moreland is Atlanta’s mini version of New York’s Village. It’s filled with dozens of fascinating shops and little restaurants and eateries that are amazing. There are several vintage clothing shops, some edgy little boutiques, tattoo parlors, piercing places, used book stores, the oldest feminist book store it the South, new age shops and lots of shops with hand crafted jewelry, vintage and hard to find music, and a farmer’s co-op with organic and hard to find raw and bulk foods.
After lunch we took a walks around. We stopped at Wax-n-Facts. This little hole in the wall sells records. Yes, records. They have some second hand cd’s as well, but the focus is that you can buy almost any vintage record album you might be searching for by any artist.
We spent sometime in Crystal Blue, the new age store. I love to browse the crystals, stones, incense and beautiful jewelry on display. They sell reference books, spell kits, meditation aids and all things relaxing and enlightening. After roaming about we headed to Charis book store, the oldest feminist book store in the South. The lavender colored house has been converted to a book store dedicated to the feminine. Books by women and for women adorn the wall and the Charis Circle community holds workshops and events intended to empower women.
Then back to the car past the Vortex where the smell of grilling burgers teases even a full stomach. The Vortex, whose grinning skull entrance turns heads and whose menu bears the words “If it ain’t on the menu, you can’t have it.”
