My Name Is Mildred But I Like Millie
Author: Mildred Sullivan, Helena Columnist
My Name is Mildred but I Like Millie
Mildred Sullivan
Helena Columnist
My Name is Mildred. But I like Millie. It is friendlier sounding.
I am 89 years old and a handicapped stroke victim.
I am a mother of a wonderful family – a grandmother, a great grandmother.
I was a wife of 69 years, until my husband died in 2021.
I was a librarian for 20 years.
I am a writer, a poet and a thinker.
Luckily the stroke did not affect my brain – for I am smart. I remember back to my growing up in sharecropper housing in my Louisiana Red River delta country. I remember the big wars and the other wars up until now. I read and I am always trying to figure out all the reasons to decipher what is happening in our world. I remember Roosevelt’s time when Daddy got work on the WPA program and we had good food at home.
I am alive today because Huey Long built hospitals in Louisiana.
I love to study. I learned that archeologists often find sites of ancient battlefields with swords in and among the bones.
It has never ended.
I know I have a very, very smart, educated family who today celebrate their ‘victories’. They are not smart enough to look behind the hatred, propaganda, to recognize lies and grasp the encroachment of modern media into our thinking and the evil it can spread. But the swords of the ancients are now replaced with incredibly destructive weapons and mostly – the ability to destroy the planet.
There is a race on who can more quickly use these weapons when one of the leaders in our world starts it off over his desire to grab nearby land or enhance his view of himself. This is a daily fact we live with in this precarious time. As we are crying over our shattered view of who we thought we were, we may assure ourselves that wars and this kind of upheaval have happened before so we will accept it better.
Soon my tears will dry and I will be called home.
Because I am old.
You will still be here with the reality.
(Millie Belgard Sullivan lived with her husband Thomas in Townsend for twenty years where they retired to be closer to their children. Millie now lives in Helena.)
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