For much of his childhood Abel Delgado felt like a nobody. Growing up poor-the son of Mexican immigrants-on the outskirts of an affluent Houston neighborhood, Delgado couldn’t afford the Tommy Hilfiger polo shirts that would help him fit in, wore glasses and excelled at school, making him a prime target for bullies. Trying to join in a playground game with fellow second graders, he was told, “We don’t let your kind play,” recalls Delgado, now 26. “I walked away and cried.”

Then he discovered music. He started piano at 8, then the recorder, mastering complex compositions in a few days. His teachers were so impressed they held a schoolwide assembly featuring his solo performance. “It was the first time I felt special,” Delgado says.

Now the child prodigy is all grown up-and using music to help other kids turn their lives around. As director of Los Angeles’s nonprofit Harmony Project, he provides free instruments and music lessons for 250 kids ages 6 to 18 whose living circumstances range from working poor to homeless. Each week Delgado and his team-aided by private and public donations-give 75 hours of group and private lessons at a church in Hollywood, a community center or in teachers’ homes. “We’re not just in this to create musicians,” he says. “This is all about creating human beings.”

Delgado’s dedication has paid off-helping the Harmony Project win the support of big players like the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which provides free concert tickets for the kids and teacher-training workshops. “He’s a superb teacher,” says Leni Boorstin, the orchestra’s community-affairs director. “He’s had amazing success changing the lives of so many kids.”

One is 13-year-old Paola Cobo–who grew up watching her mother, Monic Uriarte, get beaten by her husband (they’re now divorced) and was painfully withdrawn at age 9, when Delgado helped her get a violin and free lessons. “It changed her completely,” says Uriarte; four months after picking up the fiddle Paola played in a solo recital before an audience of 120. “When I started playing,” Paola says, “I felt anything was possible.”

Just as Delgado himself did. “He’s a minority, so we can relate to him,” says Maela Way, 16, who along with her younger brother Scott, 11, has learned the violin through Delgado’s group. “He shares his experience-and it motivates me.” Adds Way’s mother, Cheryl: “Abel’s brilliant-you want your kids to be like him.”

Delgado’s own drive came from his parents: His father, also Abel, is a roofer, his mother, Maria, cleaned apartments, and while neither finished elementary school, they offered Delgado and his younger brother Fernando, 23, endless encouragement. “My mother would say, ‘Amor, there’s nothing you can’t do,’” Delgado recalls. He took that to heart-switching in middle school from recorder to flute with a $200 used Yamaha from a pawnshop. Today, when he spots exceptional ability, he nurtures it, commuting two hours round trip twice a week to give private flute lessons to two students as well as digging into his own pocket to provide sheet music, CDs and concert tickets for the family. “I couldn’t let such talent go to waste,” he says.

And his help isn’t limited to the musical. “When I see kids looking sad and keeping to themselves,” he says, “I dig in and find out what’s wrong with their lives.” That’s what he did with Paola, who these days is planning on a career as a concert violinist-or surgeon. “I know it’s going to be a struggle,” she says. “But Abel says I need to keep fighting.”
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Rafael’s Story

Rafael Gonzalez, 12, whose parents work at an L.A. community center doing cooking and maintenance, plays flute in the Harmony Project.

About three years ago, Abel came to A Place Called Home, an after-school center near my home in South Central Los Angeles. I just remember I was really excited. He started teaching us flute. That was the first time I ever heard classical music. I liked the rhythm of the music. It reminded me of what it felt like to run around as a little kid playing in my backyard.

I like the Harmony Project for a lot of reasons. It keeps me out of the streets and from using drugs. Abel is a great teacher and makes everyone feel included. He’s taught me patience and responsibility. After our last concert we got a standing ovation. That made me feel so proud. My favorite piece of music is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I can’t describe it. It gives me goose bumps. My dream is to play flute in a professional orchestra.

By: Fields-Meyer, Thomas, Arias, Ron, Marquez, Sandra, People, 8/28/2006

Jutta van der Kuijp had been asking her 82-year-old father, Jan, to write his life story for years. She’d always found it fascinating. Born in what is today Jakarta, he’d spent most of the Second World War in POW camps in Japan, then moved to Holland, met Jutta’s mother, and emigrated to Canada in the late 1960s with three kids in tow. Jutta wanted a record of his life. But her father, a retired sales manager who lives in Guelph, Ont., had never been able to write more than a couple of pages. Then, last month, Jutta, a 46-year-old interior designer, opened a birthday present from her husband. She would be getting her father’s memoirs after all. Her husband had hired Thomas Memoirs, a Toronto-based company specializing in autobiographies-for-anyone. A writer would interview van der Kuijp and craft his story into a book.

Jan van der Kuijp’s life may have been unusual, but the desire to have it documented is anything but these days. And while teens and twentysomethings profile themselves online, their parents are looking for a more traditional record. “This is something you could have for your great-grandchildren and their children,” says Peter O’Brien, president of Thomas Memoirs, which launched in April.

O’Brien, 48, runs a corporate communications firm. He came to the memoirs business by chance. A friend who owns a merchant bank had wanted to get an employee a unique gift for his retirement — something more special than a gold watch or a cruise. He asked O’Brien to write the man’s memoirs. O’Brien agreed. “I started to tell a few people what I was doing, and three out of the next four people I told hired me on the spot,” he recalls. Thomas Memoirs was born. O’Brien chose that name because he wanted something that sounds “personal” and Thomas is a common name around the world. Each of his projects involves 10 to 25 hours of interviews, takes four months to produce and costs a minimum of $10,000. The buyer is presented with a minimum of 25 smartly bound copies of the memoir, complete with text and photos. The title of Jan van der Kuijp’s is Always a New Adventure.

Vancouver-based Echo Memoirs does a similar business. When Samantha Reynolds founded the company in 2001, she ran it out of her apartment and was the only employee. Today, Echo Memoirs has an in-house bindery and a rotating staff of 15 to 20 writers, copy editors, designers, and proofreaders, who help create up to 60 books a year. Reynolds has clients in Florida, New York, Calgary, Toronto and Los Angeles. The company also writes pet histories, travel journals, pregnancy memoirs, corporate histories and a host of other personalized stories.

“You can’t really put a price tag on having these memories for generations to come,” says Reynolds. Companies, of course, do. Echo Memoirs’ projects start at $10,000, though very extensive family histories can run up to $50,000. For the most part, says Reynolds, her clients are “people in their 40s, 50s or 60s who have a parent and really want their stories because they have kids of their own now.”

There are cheaper options, like The Autobiography Box: A Step-by-Step Kit for Examining the Life Worth Living. Its “Owners Manual” offers tips on structure and dramatization, as well as handy cue cards. “Write about a strange family member” reads one. “Describe a moment of pure joy” reads another. “It’s been selling very well,” says Joanne Saul, owner of Type, a Toronto bookstore. Another new company, called Tipsy Quill, specializes in stories of how a couple met. The resulting “Love Notes,” about a page long, are handed out at the couple’s wedding. More private couples probably would not use the service, says Frann Harris, who launched the company with her sister Cindy in 2004. “But we live in an Oprah-ized society where many people let it out more easily,” she says. Love Notes cost a minimum of $1,500.

With four memoirs in development, O’Brien is hiring writers for future projects. He believes personalized memoirs are popular because “everybody wants to leave behind some sort of a record of their accomplishments, struggles, thoughts, challenges, adventures.” Jutta van der Kuijp puts it another way. “I’ve always thought the saddest moments are when I’m at flea markets and I see boxes of old photographs for sale,” she says. “Those were important people to someone and they’ve become anonymous with time. And I think this kind of thing preserves your family line.”

By: McGinn, Dave, Maclean’s

This piece was written Many years ago while I was near death from an illness, reposted for those who suffer chronic pain!

Afflicted

Oh dark and dreary land let me goI yearn for the sun but it avoids me why is pain equated with dark when
it feels so  hot, like white lightning! Nothing makes any sense when the body is under attack, hellish insanity reigns along with all the pains

I read the martyrs who give thanks knowing that they draw closer to Creator when they suffer,but how
about when you feel closer to the one who resides over hell who has brought this nightmare upon me in the first place and who never hesitates to seek my company

Meeting maniacal minions of Satanic madmen along the way,that want only Your divinity and none of Your sanctity I cry for justice when I see them in the
rarified cosmic places,too many dual faces

I pray that they will find their way to that portal where truth will hit them like a runaway train and
shock their brain until they have no choice but to give voice to the Creator who gave life to them. In
whose name they claim miracles  for themselves.

I hate Satan, and his stygian stink  of salacious saliva his foul fiendish fetish  for corrupting souls, his malevolent mind of malediction with malefic intent
with which he  maims mankind,and even more I hate the vileness in me that allows him to do it, and
know if I sought the power to overcome ,I’d be able
to do so, yet the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak

Arise Oh Lord and let your enemies be scattered! They come to steal what they can’t get by grace thinking in self-delusion to see Your face
shattering any hope of reconciliation rather than
give credence to your sovereignty

Sad examples of humanity they wear a mantle of Satan having been decieved into believing they
are equal to You Lord, therefore entitled to whatever gifts You have to offer. They act like they have the
light as if they could fool You, the Creator of both the light, and the darkness in which they have
chosen to abide.

Such options I resent now,because I’d rather not have to make choices at a time when I’m not thinking
straight to begin with, and to add to the misery I’m supposed to remain calm and prayerful when all I want to do is shout and spit out all the worst epithets I ever heard and many times I do

Then I have to go through  added misery of repenting what I felt so the cycle continues ad nauseum when I’m already stretched to the limits with a body that no longer wants to function, but just to scream with pain, rejecting  what ever it has to do

I’ve spoken my piece to whomever heard it I know light and dark are two sides of the same coin,how  it
shows through suffering while I know your grace has never been more kind, nor your love more unconditional as it reaches me through Your spirit of  hope
to assure me that I still have your strength to rely on, and that the suffering is but  a moment in the scheme of times continuum which is forever, and when I see
through the haze of my drugged eyes the final surprise,I know the sight of your light will  surround
and comfort me when I’m in your realms of glory

Eileen Alrisha 

“Those Were the Days,” the Adams-Strouse theme song for the long-running television series All in the Family, has been heard more than any other theme in popular media and also more than any song the pair wrote for Broadway. The material for that song seems to owe a lot to Adams’s background as an Ohioan born in 1924. “Those Were the Days” expresses nostalgia for the Big Band music of Glen Miller; “Kids” (from a show set in fictional Sweet Apple, Ohio) expresses nostalgia for the Big Band music of Sammy Kaye (an Ohioan, like Adams).

Reflecting on all that I learned from this Grace-filled moment in my life, probably the bit of greatest transformational benefit is coming to actively realize that, in my experience at least, Angels have access to directly assisting us proportional to our sincere inclination and/or investment in believing that they can.

At the outset of this unfolding event I had up to that point, not given Angels
a whole lot of thought, or conscious attention. If you were to ask me, I would have said I believed in Angels, but as a generic yes/no proposition, and not much more.

My conscious position in this began to shift in the Spring of ’93. With steadily increasing frequency, it seemed I was encountering images of Angels, on cards and as statues, etc., everywhere I went. The spontaneous increase was doubtless, and had become a wonderment for me, but I didn’t speak of it to anyone. Then, on my 32nd birthday in October of that year, a dear friend gifted me with a Book, “Where Angels Walk.” The entire book is intimately engaging testimonies of everyday people who had the direct experience of relating to Angels in their lives. I was fascinated and enchanted–like I could not put it down.

Right in the middle of this most revealing read I was, on a Tuesday afternoon, on my way to a local laudromat with my weeks laundry. As I dropped it off and turned to leave, I suddenly discovered my wallet was missing! I sifted through my dirty laundry; I combed over my car and my purse. I turned within and inquired of my wallet whether it was within my reach. No. Intuitively, I knew, my wallet had somehow fallen into the abyss of Unknown.

Now, my pulse is racing; my stomach is sinking and my brain is on the verge of a short-circuit–when I began to back out of my parking spot and suddenly stopped. The awareness of Angels broke through and held the impending Fog of Fear at bay. And, I said out loud: “I can panic, or I can pray.” With the conviction at heart of them sitting right next to me, I began repeating out loud, “Somebody please protect my wallet.” All the way home, like a mantra, “Somebody please protect my wallet.”

When I got to my apartment, I flew through the door, leaving it wide open to hastily check everywhere my wallet could possibly be. With resounding emptiness, I sank down next to my phone, put my hand on the receiver and said, “God, this is it; I’ve got to cancel my cards.”

At that precise moment I heard two strange voices on the walk outside. I literally held my breath, thinking, ‘could this be it?’ Two men suddenly rounded the corner onto my porch and stepped decisively through my wide-open door. Before I could register a word, the unknown hand reached across my livingroom and handed me my wallet.

“My God, kind sir,” I declared, “you simply cannot believe the miracle of which you have just been a part!” “Oh, but I can, Ma’m,” he said with a smile beaming, “you said just the right thing.” He was certain that he and his companion heard me say, “Praise the Lord,” in the moment I recall holding my breath.

The briefest recount of the morning from my gracious guests revealed that I had left my wallet on top of my car when I was loading up my laundry. This confirmed in the fact that my new friends had been on their way to work at no less than 45 miles an hour down our main through fare, when he, “spotted something in his rear-view mirror” on the blacktop! Not only did he see my little pocket-sized wallet on the side of the road from behind–he turned around and picked it up. Did he figure to call me on lunch? Did he figure to mail it to my obviously current license address? No. He took the time in that moment to snoop out my address and actual apartment to deliver it into my hands with literally the most perfect timing of anything I have ever heard of, much less actually experienced.

Needless to say, now I invite my Angels into every day. Often, if I am sitting at lunch alone, I will acknowlege them sitting there with me out loud. I try to remember to ask how I might be of assistance to them, in turn. That such relationships could only run one way, does not seem reasonable when I will help them in any way I can. I’m learning to pay attention to how.

A story about my early life in Yorkshire, England.

I was 11 when first introduced to the puppy we named Sandy. Over the years we became great friends building up a close relationship. He was of no particular breeding though some said he was a mixture of collie and corgi, but no one knew for sure. He was small and pretty as a picture with his collie markings and the color of a corgi.

As a farm boy I needed a dog; mother said Sandy would be good company and he would protect me. “Protect me from what?” I wondered. Well, that little dog became my constant companion. Somehow he learned to herd cattle, sheep, chickens and hogs, and became quite an asset to my valley hauling business, and yes, he often thought he was protecting me!

Knowing little about training a dog, looking back, he must have been a bright one for he just seemed to know what I wanted him to do. Farmers used to laugh when I went to collect four hogs from a pen of twenty or more. They had put blue chalk marks on the four selected animals’ backs and would stand back looking on as I set Sandy to work.

When I held the pen door open, Sandy barked happily and ran in amongst those large ungainly animals. Jumping up onto their backs, he ran across them selecting only the ones with the blue chalk marks and quickly herded them to the door. Onlookers never failed to be amazed.

Oh yes, he was smart, of that there was no doubt, but Sandy had a darker side.

Every now and then, when he was probably bored and needed a little excitement, I would see him stalking one of the farm cockerels. He always seemed to pick the one with the largest tail feathers.

Then, when he was all set and had the cockerel in just the right position, he dashed in and chased the bird. Eventually, when he’d finished toying with his victim, he’d grab a mouthful of tail feathers and skid to a halt. Well, you can imagine the wild scream of that cockerel when Sandy was left with its tail feathers in his mouth. You might say that cockerel had been plucked alive!

If dogs could laugh, I’m very sure Sandy was laughing.

May we assume that she favoured his emigration to the Cape and agreed that her funds be so diverted? For she was born Margarita Hendrika Beck, daughter of the wealthy brewer and cattleman Johan Zacharias Beck, born in Langensalza, Saxe-Gotha, who had come to the Cape as a soldier in 1715. His brother Johan Christoffel Beck who followed him to the Cape was the equally successful proprietor of the historic farm Boshof in Newlands where he was visited by the Lammens sisters on their way to the East Indies in 1736, as described in the previous issue of the Quarterly Bulletin.

Of Margarita Hendrika Beck it was said that she married ‘first for wealth. 21 second for gallantry and third for love’. The wealth was provided by Captain Alexander Grant of Shewglie whoni she married ca 1765, He had escaped from the bloody battlefield of Culloden in 1746 where he had fought for ‘the Young Pretender’ Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and later became an officer in the British forces in India, He was one of the small group who escaped the Black Hole of Calcutta in a boat, with the Governor, leaving the civilian prisoners to their terrible fate. He was pardoned, after publishing a pamphlet blaming the Governor, and by being one of the officers who persuaded Clive to attack at Plassey, giving Britain dominance in India, He later made a fortune as an East India merchant in London and died in 1768, aged 43, on his way back to India, leaving everything to his ‘beloved wife, Margaret Henrietta Grant’, his sole executrix.

For gallantry she married in London in 1769 another Scottish soldier, a kinsman of Grant’s, Simon Fraser of Balnain, who was killed at Saratoga as a Brigadier in 1777. She was given a copy of John Graham’s famous painting of Brigadier Simon Fraser’s burial on the field of battle, and inherited his estate too. We hear of her next when, in 1780, she lost a breach of promise case against one Schreiber, a London merchant. The following year she made her marriage ‘for love’ to Sir George Buchan-Hepburn Bt, uncle of John and Charles Buchan-Sydserff., who died in 1815. Margarita Hendrika herself died, thrice widowed and childless, in 1823 and is buried in the Buchan-Hepburn family vault at Prestonkirk. Her portrait by Raeburn remains in the family.

Her nephew, the 1820 settler Charles Sydserff, seems not to have inherited from Margarita Hendrika, He married Elizabeth Rennie, also of the Scottish settler party, and appears to have been a moderately successful farmer. He died in 1885 aged 88 on his farm Lausanne in the Queenstown district, where his son Alexander succeeded him. His earlier farm. Glen Yair, in the original Baviaans River location of the Scottish settlers, had been acquired in 1855 by a German immigrant whose family lived there for well over a century. His name was Joseph Frederick Beck, born in Wurttemberg. Whether he was related in any way to Charles’s aunt, Margarita Hendrika, my sources do not reveal. Her marriages had linked her with India and Scotland and her father’s German origin seems to have been the least part of her inheritance.

The published sources for this account are to be found in Quarterly bulletin of the National Library, 59,4, pp 160-70 (Gerald Groenewald); The history of the Frasers by A,W. Mackenzie (1890), The Scottish settler party of 1820, by J.V.L R.ennie, vol,3 (1991), The Scottish Studies Foundation website, and The Southern African review of books, December 1994 (Randolph Vigne)