June 2015
Billie Silvey
On Memorial Day, my granddaughter Katyana (left) and her friend rode their boogie boards at the beach.  
This stunning photo, taken near the end of the day, perfectly evokes California life in the summer.
California Dreaming
I’ve been working on my memoir, which I’m publishing over the course of the rest of this year in this website.  
This spring, my publisher, 21st Century Christian, came out with my last book,
The Victory Lap: Growing Old
with God
.  Mike Cope let me have a signing and a class on it at the Pepperdine Lectures.  I was so thrilled.

I knew it would be the last published book of my career, and I was pleased to realize that it was my eighth,
published over the course of a 30-year career--an average of about one every four years.  

If you’ve read it, you know how I feel about retirement—I hate it!  I’m a workaholic.  I’ve always assumed that
the person who came up with the word had been following me around to think of such a thing.

I had to retire when I got sick while I was working at Westchester Healthy Start, so I set out to create my own
job--this website, complete with deadline, the first of each month.

More recently, I began going through photo albums and scrapbooks and other memorabilia with a view
toward writing my memoirs.  I knew no one would want to publish them.  Everybody has a life story, so
beginning last month with the story of my Granny during World War I, and continuing this month with stories
from World War II and the 1940s, I began publishing my own.  

I’ve been working night and day on it.  If I have a problem, I think about it when I go to bed, and often the next
morning the problem will have solved itself.  It was almost as if I were dreaming it out.

Monday night, it was really obvious.  I went to bed, then I had this really vivid dream.  I’d discovered the photo
Kathy had emailed me of Katyana and her friend at the beach.  The dream continued, ending with talk of a
seizure.

The next morning, Frank mentioned that I’d had one.  I thought it was a dream," I said.  

That seizure was my third, which my neurologist says is the definition of epilepsy.  I have seizures when I get
dehydrated, so I need to be especially careful in the summer.  California can be a dream.  Dreaming can
accomplish work.  I'm looking forward to a dream summer, but with care!