Portrait

Just found this professionally taken portrait,

done for business purposes, apparently from 2004.

Vaiva in a tree

Vaiva's father planted an orchard on the Durham property. Apple trees mostly, but pears, cherries, even peaches. We built the house next to the orchard, so no fruit trees were harmed. One of the chores with an orchard is pruning, removing limbs that are shooting straight up, to improve the yield and keep the fruit harvestable.



Senelis was in charge of pruning during his life, and Vaiva took over the responsibility after his death. I was the helper. I would remove large limbs with the chainsaw, and otherwise follow directions.



In these photos from 2006, Vaiva had gone outside without me, climbing into one the trees to get started.

A note from Pat Illingworth

Jim,

Here is a poem which I feel gives a brief story about you and Vaiva and the course of your lives.

God hath not promised skies always blue,
Flower strewn pathways all our lives through.
God hath not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow,
Nor peace without pain.

But God hath promised strength for labor,
Light for the way,
Grace for the trials,
Help from above,
Unfailing sympathy and,
Undying love.

Patricia Illingworth
(Meiliunas)
New Haven, CT

What I'm listening to now

Another piece found via Pandora, I Cried For You by Katie Melua.

Partial lyrics:

You're beautiful so silently
It lies beneath a shade of blue
It struck me so violently
When I looked at you

But others pass, they never pause
To feel that magic in your hand
To me you're like a wild rose
They never understand why

I cried for you
When the sky cried for you
And when you went
I became a hopeless drifter
But this life was not for you
Though I learned from you
That beauty need only be a whisper

I'll cross the sea for a different world
With your treasure, a secret for me to hold

In many years they may forget
This love of ours or that we met
They may not know
How much you meant to me

It's a puppy!

We didn't decide to get Spirga, it was just lucky circumstances, and she turned into a wonderful pet. Christmas 2002 brought more such luck--a neighbor in Durham was selling purebred black labs in December, and without asking (!) I decided to get a puppy for Vaiva for Christmas.

Here she is introducing the dogs to each other. Spirga took a few weeks to warm up to the newcomer, but it turned out great. By this time Vaiva's chemo for the first cancer was over, and her hair was growing back.

Thanksgiving 2002--Spirga in the snow

We don't always have a white Christmas in Connecticut, but we have a lot of white Thanksgivings. Lokys, Liepa and I took Spirga for a walk during this one, in 2002.

Spirgele spirgele

Musu meile.

Spirga has died

We've owned four dogs while we've lived in Durham. The first, Sargis, was a mix of German shepherd and Australian sheepdog. Second was Spirga, a purebred yellow lab that we bought on an impulse. Fellow Merrill Andersonian Tom Gerrity had done quite a bit of research to find a reputable breeder of high-quality Labradors in Connecticut, and I jumped on his bandwagon to take the last of a litter.

Lokys just called to say Spirga died today. She has been suffering for some time, from arthritis and hip displasia. Last night she went out to the field and didn't come back, suggesting to us that she was going out to die. However, Lokys went out with a flashlight and found her, and she walked home with him. She took breakfast this morning before I left for work. But she stopped breathing about lunchtime. I think she was about 14 years old, so this is not unexpected or tragic. (Confirmed: The vet reports she was born in 1995, according to his records,)

Vaiva was a major pet person, of course, but she had a special bond with Spirga. During the first bout with cancer, when Vaiva was weakened first with radiation and then with chemo, Spirga seemed to sense something bad going on. She would rest her head on Vaiva's lap and exhibit other new behaviors that seemed intended to comfort Vaiva--or at any rate, they did give Vaiva comfort.

The photo above was taken last summer, with the newest dog, Vover (we also have a black Lab, Puodas). I have earlier photos of Spirga at home that I will post tonight.

Another sad day in the Vebra/Gust household.

Blast from the past

I don't have a date on this one, but it looks like early 90s. There are surprisingly few photos of Vaiva unposed with the children.

Carnac, The Magnificent

[Holds to his forehead the envelope from the mayonnaise jar left on Funk and Wagnall's porch.]

Lethal Weapon, The Fountainhead, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

[Rips open the envelope.]

Name three things that come to Jim's mind when he thinks about a.p.p.l.e.

I post this today so I can refer to it later. I leave connecting the dots as as exercise for the student.

Vaiva loved the ocean

I used this photo for the DVD labels of the Lithuanian funeral.

On the coast of Maine

These were taken as we took a break from the Ateitininkai program.

The Bush compound

Alfonsas gave us a tour of Kennebunkport. Here, he took a photo of Vaiva and me on the street, with the Bush compound in the background.

Alfonsas Dzikas

Alfonsas Dzikas was our host for the event.

Franciscan Guest House

The overnight accommodations were very comfortable.

Ateitininkai Week

Each year, usually in August, Ateitininkai, a Lithuanian Catholic Youth organization, has a retreat at the Franciscan Guest House and Monastery in Kennebunkport, Maine. Vaiva was asked to speak there in 2004, so I went along as her driver. The grounds are wonderful, I took these photos during the day while she was busy. I'll try to dig up the background on the Lithuanian connection for this place, unless someone else has it handy?

Liepa in the flowers

In the comment to the post below, Liepa suggests that there's a photo of her in the lillies also. I don't see that, but this photo was taken of her on the same day. I don't know the name of these flowers.

Vaiva's lillies

In the spring of 2002, while she was on radiation and then chemo for the first breast cancer, Vaiva and I went to White's Flower Farm in Litchfield, CT. We have two flower gardens, one next to the house and another with roses in the yard, near the tree swing. That spring Vaiva undertook a renovation of the second garden, planting an array of lillies from White's.

One year later, Vaiva was back in Lithuania for the summer. I sent her this photo of the lillies so that she would see how well they were doing.

In 2005, the lillies were still doing well. I'll have to attend to them myself this year.

Big Tasks on my Agenda

I made a post to my personal blog just now. Now that I think about it, it's really more appropriate for this blog. It's about how I'm trying to manage taking care of a house I don't live in one weekend a month. I may live there soon, though, so it's upkeep and preparation for a potential move. I won't repost it here, since I wrote it for my own blog's PG-13 style; click here to read it if you wish.

A note from Pat Illingworth

Jim,

I am sending this because of Vaiva and her deep love of gardens....

still following the blog.....hope you are doing well.

Pat

A meditation on friendship, featuring photos from the Bellingrath Gardens. Vaiva was indeed an avid gardener, and I will follow up with some of her flower photos this week.

The Bronx Zoo

In October 2007, after the cancer recurred, Vaiva was on chemo, and it was working. She, Lokys and I spent a day at the Bronx Zoo in New York. First time for Lokys and me, Vaiva had been there as a girl. Even better, her father had taken her many times to the nearby botanical garden, reinforcing her love and deep knowledge of plants.

Vaiva did not have the energy, nor did we have the time, to include the botanical gardens on this trip. We intended to return another time, but did not.

This leopard was pacing or running along the

edge of his cage continuously.

The herd of giraffes was breathtaking. I had

seen live giraffes before, but there's

something quite different about seeing

a herd of them.

We passed through the butterfly pavilion.

The gorillas were also impressive.

Camel ride

Vaiva took this photo of me riding a camel at the Bronx Zoo.

A return to blogging

My dispute with a.p.p.l.e. over the use of my photos and other material from this blog is not yet resolved—indeed I have had no official direct communication from them at all. I left the Intellectual Property post below at the top of the blog for a week, so it would be fully exposed, so that my views are aired.

Because I continue to get traffic to the blog, especially from Lithuania, I've decided to return to blogging, not letting the a.p.p.l.e. misappropriation become a controlling factor for me. However, I will likely be a bit more circumspect.

Three months

Vaiva died three months ago today.

Intellectual property

I have more material to post, but something has come up.

As noted in the post below, the folks at a.p.p.l.e. took material from this blog and republished it in print without my permission. They attempted to have a memorial issue of their newsletter all about Vaiva. Some testimonials they might have gotten elsewhere, perhaps directly from the authors. Others appeared uniquely on this blog, so must have been stolen, and a.p.p.l.e. misappropriated ten of my photos for reprinting as well.

This hurts.

I earn my living as a writer, so when my intellectual property is stolen it's a really big deal for me. At the bottom of this page, and every page that this blog displays, is my copyright notice. What a.p.p.l.e. did cannot be considered "fair use." It can only be called theft.

I was worried that the press might misuse material from this blog, and so search engines are barred from it (the opposite of the usual blog practice). If you google "vaiva vebra" this blog does not show up among your hits. You have to find out about this blog some other way. But my worry was evidently mistargeted; it was those who I thought were friends at a.p.p.l.e. that I really should have been concerned about.

This fact is not widely known, but I produced a.p.p.l.e.'s Report to the Corps for the first dozen or so years. For that matter, I came up with the name and acronym for the organization, and named the newsletter itself. I was Vaiva's hidden resource. And by hidden, I mean fully uncredited; I refused to allow my name to appear in the newsletter. I assembled the articles and photos into the newsletter format, I reviewed, criticized and occasionally corrected the articles, and I arranged for the printing and mailing of the newsletter.

I did it this way because it gave me the two things I wanted: I had final, absolute control over the communication, and Vaiva (or successor editors, notably Katie Hoyle) got all the credit. The a.p.p.l.e. insiders knew of my role, and that was enough.

You might think, as I did, that with this record of service to this organization, and given my status as Vaiva's surviving spouse, that a.p.p.l.e. would have run their memorial issue by me. You would be wrong. As I was.

This also hurts.

I have some experience in this area. I could have helped make it good. I could have helped avoid the rookie mistakes, such as the mislabeled photos, the incoherent layout and the failure to credit Aras for his translations of Lithuanian eulogies. I also was very upset that they excerpted my eulogy to Vaiva. Had I been involved, I would not have relied upon the blog material, but would have pushed for a memorial truly unique to a.p.p.l.e.

But that was the road not traveled for a.p.p.l.e. I will always wonder why.

I can't adequately put into words how deeply pained and angry I was when I discovered the theft of my work crudely reorganized into an inferior print version. If you've read Lonesome Dove, I felt as Captain Call did when he discovered Newt being attacked. I wrote a blistering e-mail that may have captured a tenth of my reaction. I sent it to all the a.p.p.l.e. email addresses I had handy, which I believe included persons currently responsible for a.p.p.l.e.'s governance. I toned it down before I sent it, but I did not conceal my emotion behind diplomacy.

Moreover, I sent it to everyone I could because stealing material from the internet for republication is just wrong, and it reflects badly on the character and integrity of any organization that does it. The theft of my material necessarily means a failure of supervision at the highest levels of the organization.

A few hours after I sent my e-mail, the PDF version of the newsletter was removed from the applequest.org website. The printed newsletter, of course, is already distributed. I have had no other communication from the a.p.p.l.e. leadership.

What should I make of this?

Help! I've been robbed!

People whom I had assumed were friends have stolen material from my blog and republished it without my permission.

Folks, apparently you can't trust anybody these days. Even, as it turns out, A.P.P.L.E.

a.p.p.l.e. news

Irene Ross forwards this link to a new article about a.p.p.l.e. (it's in Lithuanian).

Driving down I95

I'm traveling to Charleston, SC, for week-long visit with my friend and business partner, Sam Heitzman. I decided to take the simplest route, which is to stay on I95 after crossing the G. W. Bridge, ignoring contrary suggestions from the Tom-Tom gps.

It's a familiar road. In September 1975, Vaiva entered Yale grad school and I began a year of service to the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority. At least one weekend each month I drove the 9 hours (each way) between Norfolk and New Haven to visit Vaiva, and usually her parents as well. I usually switched to Route 13 after crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge, however, instead of traveling through Baltimore and D.C, driving down the DelMarVa penninsula.

The last time I was on this road was when we acquired Vover. Vaiva flew to Baltimore, I picked her up at the airport, and we drove to Laurel, MD. Then we drove home through very bad traffic with the new puppy. On our return we drove through Annapolis and up Route 13 to see more of the countryside. Here's another photo of that drive.