Vicarious Voyage

Media Bias

2010-08-18T15:54:00.002-04:00

It's getting old. The more I read, the more I see the bias in what people write. For instance, just this morning as I was going through a stack of accumulated newspapers, I read the following sentence, which stopped me in my proverbial tracks:

“Coleslaw doesn't have to be a mayonnaise-laden mess of shredded cabbage and carrots.”

It's not as though I found this unkind comment on some undisciplined blog either. The comment appeared a week or so ago in the Island Packet in an AP article by one Alison Ladman. Regardless of the writer’s experience with coleslaw, characterizing the mayonnaise-dressed version as a "mess" is wrong, wrong, wrong if one expects to maintain an appearance of objectivity. Whatever her personal feelings about her salad history, a credible writer would in my opinion not indulge them.

Imagine if the writer had said “Those with erectile dysfunction don’t have to be lecherous old fools.” Would no one take offense? This article appeared in the Packet, where everyone takes offense (and where some readers support government subsidized Viagra but not government-subsidized lunch), so of course someone would take offense. Therefore, I am puzzled at the lack of outrage with regard to coleslaw defamation. Media-bias brainwash, I believe.

So having used a journalistic hatchet instead of a suitably sharpened culinary blade, at least Alison Ladman continued with a presentation of three tempting recipes for what she says are better alternatives to the slaw she so disdains. Actually, they sound pretty good. I have no idea why I couldn't find a link to the Packet's article and had to go with one from California. Maybe the Packet saw the bias and rejected continued association with this particular offering of the Associated Press. Doubtful.

For those who wonder, the slaw recipes are for "Fennel, Pea Shoot and Green Grape Slaw," "Apple and Celeriac Slaw," and "Beet Slaw."

Note: As I reread the Beet Slaw recipe, I think I'll try using fresh instead of canned beets. Very thinly sliced raw root vegetables offer a resistance in the mouth that I prefer. On the other hand, they can be hard to digest. So we'll see.

House of Revenge

2010-05-31T11:21:00.001-04:00

I don't think this all started last night. More likely, these feuds are ongoing, with only occasional noticeable engagements.

What happened last night is that I saw a large, really large, "palmetto bug" crawling up the wall beside my back door, which I had inadvertently left open a crack. It quickly scuttled behind a mirror, and even though I was grateful to be alerted that the door was open when I'm usually careful to deadbolt it 24/7, my gratitude did not extend to coexistence with such a large intruder. At the next commercial, I got my spray tank and shot the door jamb and all nearby corners, baseboards, etc. Sadly, the pb succumbed. But wait, there was another one ON MY KITCHEN COUNTER! EWWW! So the next thing was to remove all the countertop items and spray all the wall-backsplash-countertop joints. More death. Now I realize that it's been a while since I sprayed the whole house, so I head for my bathroom, and of course found another one. This one was kind of sickly, as pb's are supposed to be in a well-sprayed house, but I gave it a dispatching shot and did that whole room too. Back to the tv.

So this morning, I'm thinking I'll have a swim and as I usually do, I get my pole skimmer to remove the night's accumulation of toad and frog carcasses, but suddenly I realize that there are a couple of those little guys who are alive and trying very hard to evade my reach. As I chase them, I suddenly start to feel like a powerful tyrant cleansing my world of "the other". Hitler comes to mind, and I remind myself of Godwin's law about the overuse of Hitler references. Anyway, I am relieved to see the froggies hop away after I dump the skimmer thing. And I'm thinking that I'm on the side of Good after all. Didn't I check on the crazy wren who crashed into my sliding door yesterday? Yes, I did.

But apparently some little body disagrees and has decided not to live peaceably in my queendom because as I walk around my pool, I see that all my portulaca blossoms are gone and so are my green pepper blossoms. The last time this happened, I blamed it on deer, but now I'm thinking it's whoever dug the holes in the same area. Deer I more or less tolerate because they come and go, but critters who take up residence will rue the day. They may try to avenge all the critters whom I have dispatched, but it'll cost them. I am plotting retaliation as I type this. St. Francis, please look the other way.

"Where's my honeymoon?"

2010-05-22T15:14:00.013-04:00

"What happened to my honeymoon? Aren't I supposed to be getting one from you media guys?" With these nonsensical questions as he tries to clean up after his May 19th appearance on Rachel Maddow's show, Dr. Rand Paul reveals a smudge on his pure individualist principles. Although both Drs. Ron and Rand Paul have whiny singsong voices, I've never heard the dad complain like this. Does reason really require media acclaim? If you're right, you're right. No need for affirmation.

Dude! You stepped in it. You voluntarily came to a national cable-tv interview. You were asked a direct question and you couldn't come up with an answer that would satisfy the masses who vote and yet be consistent with your extreme libertarian views. Welcome to the world that exists outside of theory, where we find that human beings do not behave as theoreticians desire. Ayn Rand's mental gymnastics are interesting but her thinking was often wrong. Her own life proved it. So does the recent life of fellow traveler Gov Mark Sanford, by the way. Life on the planet Earth requires more imagination than simply labelling people as "productive" and "other". Human beings are messy and complicated and while some people soothe themselves by denying the fact that they themselves are messy and complicated, anyone who desires to govern human beings had better prepare himself to have his mellow harshed at times.

Listen, Dr. Rand, I happened to see the Rachel Maddow interview and then watched it again the same night and I tweeted a reply to one of your disciples too, who had already tweeted to a #FreedomFighter, "unfortunately I don't think they'll EVER let him avoid it. This isn't good." I believe she was referring to a #FreedomFighter who had said "Dems are gonna use that transcript to target Dr. Paul. He needs to avoid this civil rights issue from now on."

Our world being what it is, the May 19th Maddow-Paul event took place at the same time that American Idol was airing, and so for "#FreedomFighters" there was the need to comment on both, so that shortly following the above exchange the #Freedom Fighter said, "Crystal is safe! Yay! Go Crystal! (Damn she's hot!)"

Seldom do I agree with Sen. Jon Kyl, but I believe he was exactly right to characterize the nineteen-minute interview as "a debate like you had at 2 a.m. in the morning when you're going to college" which is IMO a wonderful thing when you are young and just learning about the world, not so terrific when you are selling your potential to be one of one hundred Senators who make decisions for 300 million Americans.

Grownups who'd like to read a brief and lighthearted commentary on libertariansm might enjoy the Guardian's Michael Tomasky. He says that libertarianism is kookoo. To Rand Paul's civil rights quandary, I like what he says in another blog post:

"And by the way, that's very nice, isn't it? Segregated facilities are just the price of a free society. It's free as long as you're not on the receiving end, which is maybe one reason why roughly 99% of Libertarians happen to be white.

For @anniecm and @TonyHaul, and their freedom-fighting (for or against, one wonders) followers, I offer the Ayn Rand Institute Q&A on her own views of libertarianism. Something to chew on between episodes of American Idol and other freedom-fighting events. Or maybe you could peruse it this Sunday morning, now that Dr Rand Paul, Kentucky's Republican Candidate for the United States Senate, has declared himself too exhausted to appear on Meet the Press.

Everybody should have a Dad like Stan Wright

2010-05-19T23:22:00.006-04:00

Everybody should have a dad like Stan Wright, but he is apparently the exact right person to be Chely Wright's dad. They both appeared on Oprah today and he struck me as a model of strong solid silence, what we often think typifies men but doesn't really. His silence masked love and support for his child as she told him she is gay and has since shared her truth with the world. How sad that she ever doubted that he would be there for her, but I can understand why. How beautiful that she finally dared to risk finding out who loves her and who doesn't understand love at all. How telling that only two of her peer country singers have contacted her. I guess it's easier to write songs and sing about love than it is to give love.

The Wrights reminded me of the many times I've sat in church and heard homosexuality denounced and wondered how it would feel to be a parent of a beloved gay child and hear such judgment seemingly coming from Almighty God. The Wrights came up believing the preaching to homosexuals that says "the way you are is sinful...God wants you to be some other way...your desires and behavior are disgusting...you are disgusting." And yet, the power of Stan's love overcame all this indoctrination and allowed him to hear his daughter above all that noise.

From Oprah's web site:

Chely's lifelong secret also affected her relationship with her family. "When one lives a closeted life, there's a compartmentalization that happens. That's my experience," she says. "I became a skilled liar, and I lived two different lives."

Then, one day, Chely received a phone call from her father, Stan. "He said: 'Chel, what have I done? Are you mad at me? Is there something wrong? Why aren't we close?'" she says. Soon after, Chely found the courage to tell her father the truth.

After a concert in Missouri, Chely sat with her father and faced her fears. "[I said]: 'I have to tell you something I've needed to tell you my whole life. I've been afraid, though, to tell you because I'm afraid you won't love me, and I'm afraid you'll be ashamed of me. ... I'm gay,'" she says.

At first, Stan didn't say a word. "I grabbed her, and I put my arms around her," he says. "I told her it was all right. It would be fine."

Stan says he was raised to believe that homosexuality was wrong and sinful, but he found out quickly that was not true. "I knew her heart. I knew her mind. I knew her soul," he says. "You hear a lot of times unconditional love. Well, in this old man's world, it's true."

Before passing judgment on others, Stan offers one piece of advice to people in the same situation. "The simplest thing I can tell anyone is, do not close the door," he says. "Open the heart."

Dancing with the Starz

2010-05-18T00:49:00.006-04:00

The first couple on the dance floor were obviously enjoying themselves and were fun to watch. He was mustachioed, spry and dapper, wearing a long-sleeved white guayabera and tan pants. She was older-looking but still game, wearing a pretty black cocktail dress and black stockings. I really couldn't see their shoes because the ballroom of the retirement community was full, but I'm guessing hers were flats. Anyway, they moved and twirled and soon some other couples joined them. A few in the audience, including me, were dancing in our chairs.

Hilton Head Island is blessed with many good entertainers, but none are better or more versatile than Reggie Deas and the Guyz. This night there were seven Guyz on stage and they obviously were selecting carefully from their repertoire so that dancing was a possibility for people who might not move too quickly. One solo dancer moved unsupported to the music but then used a cane on her way out of the room. Deas-Guyz played on and on and on, for nearly two hours without a break and then returned for another set. They shagged a little, rocked a little, jazzed a little and mostly played and sang music that every American born since 1950 knows. Bless their hearts, there was no homage to Ronnie James Dio, late of Black Sabbath and mourned even on NPR. I love Deas-Guyz no matter what they play.

This was an evening meant to showcase the retirement community in its best light, and certainly it was pleasurable. Nice-looking people enjoying themselves, great music, wonderful food, but something bothered me and it is the same thing that has bothered me for the 20-plus years I've lived on Hilton Head Island: The people enjoying themselves all appeared to be white, and the people creating the enjoyment were mostly brown-skinned. Deas-Guyz is almost all African-American, the servers were African-American, the bus persons were African-American, the visible kitchen staff were African-American, and yet not one single African-American was among the dancers or the other guests.

No matter how nice, how elegant, how safe the community is, there is something distasteful about perpetuating such an obviously skewed division of the spoils. The fact that people like Reggie Deas continue to smile and share their gifts brings tears to my eyes. To suggest that they are victims of an unjust society belies their dignity, and yet something doesn't sit well. May God smile on them and on all the starz who quietly and generously work to provide some modern Tara moments.

Priorities, People. Priorities

2010-05-13T22:36:00.004-04:00

As though I weren't already far behind in what I'm supposed to be doing, I see that the people I am voluntarily following on Twitter have tweeted up a storm while I put 700 miles on my car today. Maybe I'm not in the greatest of moods because I was too chicken to pass up the West Virginia gas prices in hopes of a better deal in Ohio, and paid $2.959 only to see a Pilot offering gas at $2.859 a few miles down the road. In Ohio I've been seeing $2.699, only now my tank is three-fourths full. So I'm grouchy.

I was not surprised to read US Senator Jim De Mint's three or four tweets about his border fence bill, as though it had a chance of passing and as though it wasn't completely at odds with his shrunken government philosophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, some people think that securing the borders is one of very few legitimate government functions, but then again, some people think that the best immigration policy is no immigration policy. The thing is though, Senator, futile tilting at the border windmill might not really be the best use of your time. (I heard on my car radio that Senator Robert Byrd had secured a buncha millions for Homeland Security in West Virginia, which also doesn't fit with your philosophy, but maybe South Carolina could use some securing too if you're spending for a fence someplace in the Southwest? I'm just saying.) And pardon my nitpicking, but would "completing" your 700-mile section really do it for a 2,000 miles of border? According to Whoopi Goldberg, who seems to be as knowledgeable as anyone on this topic, including you, a fence with an end just invites people to walk around it.

But SC Senator Tom Davis' latest tweet tells me all I need to know about why, of all government entities everywhere, the SC State Legislature ranks high on uselessness. Here it is:

"senatortomdavis Compromise bill just passed in the Senate -- the code requirement that all new residences have sprinklers is suspended until January 2014. "

Sprinkler code requirement. Compromise. Suspended. For four years yet. Not even worth a tweet, IMO. OTOH, at least it's fewer than 140 characters, unlike this blog post.

PS...to one of my favorite Tweeters: Toots, why are you, an esteemed journalist, fixating on Matt Lauer's rumored infidelity? Isn't there a yo-yo man somewhere to be interviewed?

An(other) Unfortunate Incident

2010-05-04T07:50:00.004-04:00

If I lived anywhere near the Gulf Coast, and I saw the potential for massive damage to my lifestyle and livelihood, I don't think I'd use a phrase like "unfortunate incident" to describe the ongoing volcano of oil that is erupting underwater following the April 20th explosion of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon off of Louisiana.

American Petroleum Institute Jack Gerard, however, is saying those very words this morning on tv, while an estimated 200,000 gallons of oil is fouling the Gulf of Mexico every day that the spill continues. Yesterday BP Group CEO Tony Hayward appeared, saying that while his company is responsible for the cleanup, the original oil rig explosion was not their fault because BP only leased the rig from a company called Transocean

I am thinking about the hundreds of plays of the BP commercials that tell us "we have the can do, we have the capability" and all we have to do is "find the [energy] solutions here" and I am wondering what it all means. Steven D at Booman Tribune provides some liberal commentary that is interesting, but in the end outrage at the way America is managing its resources to provide needed energy is futile, as are plans formulated by PR firms and lobbyists and politicians. What is needed is thought, serious thought, about what the "can do" and the "capability" of America's energy resources really are. What is not needed is a public so fixated on comfort and ease that we accept the rationalizations and spin and outright deception on the part of those who wish to exploit common resources for private gain.

And, oh yes, another eleven energy workers lost their lives in the explosion of the oil rig. April was a very bad month for those who work to provide the energy that runs America.

Miners Light the World

2010-04-25T17:55:00.003-04:00

"Mining is a way of life in West Virginia"...Senator Jay Rockefeller, 4/25/10

It's all been said, and not enough has been done. Twenty-nine proud Americans died in a mountain in WV, doing the best work that was available to them, work that benefitted every American who ever flips a light switch. I will remember them every time I travel past Beckley, and I will try to remember the words of the Vince Gill song that was sung at their memorial today:

Go rest high on that mountain

Son your work on earth is done

Go to heaven a shoutin'

Love for the Father and the Son.

April 20, 2010

2010-04-20T15:50:00.005-04:00

The last time I saw my Barbara Mary, she was crying. That was four months after I said to her "Nothing worse will ever happen to you," as I tried to comfort her loss of her 29-day-old firstborn, Christian. Last week I visited their graves and was upset that the flowers I placed there on my last visit were gone. It was raining, and I had to go to the bathroom, and the flowers were gone. I stuck the new ones I had brought in the permanent vase and left. In the grand scheme of loss and misery, missing artificial flowers is bearable, maybe even a gift to distract from the actual reason for being in a cemetery.

Today is the 17th anniversary of my firstborn's death at 31 years old, just seven months after her firstborn died. I'm having a hard time, harder than usual. As I type this, I am soaking wet from working in my garden in an effort to soothe myself with planting flowers, and I have given in to the pain and disappointment. My first child was beautiful and smart, as are the three still living. The promise of a future was there in her bassinet, at her First Communion, at the spelling bees she won, at her high school graduation, but along the way her dreams for herself faded.

Not all of the memories I have of her are as adorable as the one where she said "delissa pie, Mommy" or as sweet as the note she left me on my washer the night her baby brother was born: "I hope you go to the hospital soon and you bring home a boy baby." There was also the time she screamed "Bitch!" at me in the street when I tried to stop the drug activity that was taking place where she was then living. Had she lived longer, she would probably have learned that mothering is a mixed bag.

We didn't always like each other, but we always loved, and I am so sad for everything she missed and is missing. She should be here to watch her son become a man, and to compare notes about life and parents with her sisters and brother. She should have the satisfaction of overcoming mistakes and rising above bad decisions. She should not be lying in the ground, sharing a plot with her own baby son, nearly forgotten by the world and mostly forgotten by those who said they loved her when they were really loving how she made them feel temporarily.

In the end, though, I am grateful to the child who first made me a mother, one of the things I love most about my life. I remember the feeling of running down the subway steps, knowing that I was no longer alone in my body. I hope Barbara had some moments like that too, and I hope she and Christian are somewhere at peace, maybe with my mother and father and brother and all the rest of the family who have passed on and are waiting for me.

The Cruellest Month

2010-04-09T17:22:00.006-04:00

It is of course a cliché to resurrect in April the often quoted line from Part I of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, "APRIL is the cruellest month," but I swear April really is the cruellest month. For me a beautiful sight like the peaceful May River yesterday, with signs of new life everywhere, and the suggestion that God is indeed in His heaven, contrasted with disturbing personal memories of other Aprils, where death was very present, is sometimes too much to contain. And then there is Waco. And Oklahoma City. And now there is Montcoal WV.

I have been looking forward to my first Spring road trip this year and the "almost heaven" feeling of driving through the Appalachians in April, but next week as I pass through the area south of Charleston WV, I will be thinking more about what is inside those mountains than the life that is emerging on the hillsides. I can hardly stop thinking of the horror in the hidden mines now. The Scotch-Irish faces of the miners and mourners remind me of my own origins and clan. I remember that I am the daughter of a working man, a proud and dignified man, but a man who carried a lunchbox, a man who understood how his union empowered him. I wonder what I am doing behind gates on a resort island that does not really celebrate workers. I do not feel peacefully at home. Ah, cruelty. I relate to Eliot's despair.

Part V of The Waste Land is titled "WHAT THE THUNDER SAID" and it alludes to mountains and death, although more cryptographic types than I am might dismiss that simple statement in favor of Eliot's more complicated messages. For me, today, it's about mountains and death in the cruellest month.

AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.

Fashion Friday

2010-01-29T08:03:00.008-05:00

Popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is wearing the same jacket on "Morning Joe" that she wore on "Jon Stewart" last night. I like that about her, and I like the jacket. That's why I noticed its repeat appearance. The jacket is reddish and tweedy and fitted and kind of short.

It's not only the jacket that is making a repeat appearance, though. So are Professor Goodwin's remarks about the delaying tactic known as "filibuster": (paraphrased) "They can't even go to the bathroom... Strom Thurmond took a steam bath to get rid of liquids, but he finally had to end his filibuster by going to the bathroom." I guess there's not a lot of entertaining material about the filibuster, although the word itself has an interesting history. I'm kind of not listening to her anymore anyway because I'm trying to get a better look at the jacket. Maybe it's a suit? I hope I'm not going to feel driven to watch Jon Stewart on line to see whether there's a shot of her there that gives me more information about the jacket. Aha! She is standing, and I see that the jacket is just a jacket, not as short as I thought, and that Professor Goodwin is wearing it over a black top and black pants. A very attractive look: practical, stylish but not too stylish, colorful for tv. What's not to like?

Somehow the word "filibuster" reminds me of the character "Phineas T Bluster" who was one of Howdy Doody's Doodyville TX friends on Buffalo Bob Smith's tv show from the 1950's, my formative years. In those days, my fashion interest was expressed through paper dolls, but that's another blog.

Coming up on The View, the real place for "Fashion Friday" is Oscar de la Renta and his fabulous, feminine creations. I'm more of a Professor-Goodwin's-jacket type, but that's just a matter of lifestyle. Fashion! Friday! Yea!

In the Unlikely Event

2010-01-24T02:16:00.007-05:00

In the unlikely event that someone in the vast universe stumbles upon this blog, may I say right now that I am in no way affiliated with, a supporter of, or more than an occasional (one hour per week on Sunday) viewer of Fox News. I make that disclaimer because the way search engines work, it is possible that a query about Fox could bring an unsuspecting soul to this blog, probably bazillionth on any list of results, but heck, a hasty click could happen. Reading further will only reinforce my lack of association with Fox News anyway, but I am in a "let me make this perfectly clear" soap box mood.

That wordy statement made, I wish to make known my dismay about Fox's lack of participation in Friday night's Hope for Haiti TV Global Telethon two-hour telethon. Dozens of media outlets and networks, including CBS, ABC, NBC, CW, FOX, TNT, Weather Channel, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, HBO, Showtime, Major League Baseball Network, Style Network, E! Entertainment Network, ReelzChannel, TNT, Comedy Central, Oxygen, Soap Opera channel, Bravo, National Geographic Channel, Sleuth, G4, CMT, TV1, BET, MTV, MTV2, VH1, GMC,FUSE, Current, PBS. And there was live streaming on Oprah.com and IMDb, Hulu and YouTube and lots of other sites. All these corporations showed their human concern by pre-empting their regular programming to air a show that included music and on-the-scene-in-Haiti reports.

Stars like Alicia Keyes and Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen and Anderson Cooper performed and pleaded, and IMO it would be a cold, cold heart that was not moved. Some of those cold, cold hearts were watching Bill O'Reilly anyway and absorbing even more of his crowing that Fox News Channel is a premier news source, based on high ratings and compared with the collapse of Air America.

Personally, I'm glad I watched the telethon. Because I believe that on a spiritual level we are all connected, I am grateful to all those who give of themselves and their wealth to reach out to those in need. Whether outreach should be personal or civic is another discussion, but destruction that takes more than 100,000 lives and leaves people dehydrated and starving for days is worth at least two hours of attention.

So Fox News, you can take your high ratings and your profits and spend them in hell.

Cold enough for ya?

2010-01-22T00:36:00.003-05:00

Coldish weather. Mostly, I like it. Maybe thirteen days in a row of sub-freezing temps is not exactly what I've come to expect of winter in lowcountry of SC, but mostly, I prefer it to August heat. I love the dry, fresh air. And the winter light. And the thinner foliage. And the sparsely populated windswept beach, where the low tides reveal all kinds of interesting stuff and lots of space to see it. This week there has been an abundance of live sand dollars and starfish.

On the other hand, what puts me off every single winter is that soon after the holidays, my fingernails go all to hell. Lotion, olive oil, rubber gloves for chores...it doesn't matter, my nails still go all to hell: drying, splitting, breaking, tearing. I specifically recall gluing on some fakes last March to help me through some social thing or another, but by Thanksgiving I once again had ten lovely naturally long nails of my own.

However, now I am once again sporting an assortment of lengths, all short, some shorter, and it may be time to do the gluing thing again. The problem about the gluing thing is that the chemicals make my fingernails dry out even more and so it's a dilemma and a vicious cycle. What cures the whole thing is summer, where I end up worrying more about my toenails than my fingernails and beach sand becomes an automatic smoothing treatment.

But I still like coldish weather.

Thoughts on a line

2010-01-14T20:09:00.005-05:00

The last day for payment without penalty of Beaufort County SC property taxes for 2009 is tomorrow, January 15, 2010, and in typical procrastinator fashion, I presented myself at the Treasurer's office yesterday, check in hand. There were six people in the line ahead of me, not counting the two who were being served by the lone clerk. The complaining began almost immediately, with the woman in front of me getting out of line to see whether there wasn't a drop box or some option besides waiting. She and the woman ahead of her discussed the inefficiency of the situation. The word "terrible" was used. Maybe five minutes had passed since I arrived.

PEOPLE! THIS IS THE DAY AFTER HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF HAITIANS SUDDENLY FOUND THEIR LIVES CHANGED FOREVER!

As the wait continued while it seemed that the first two were accomplishing multiple transactions, the complaining continued too, and the two women ahead of me decided to leave and submit their payments electronically. But by now a man had joined the line and stood behind me, humming nervously before he too found his complaining voice. I think I had been there about ten minutes by then.

PEOPLE! THIS IS THE DAY AFTER HUNDREDS OF THOUSAND OF HAITIANS BEGAN SUFFERING AT A LEVEL EVEN WORSE THAN THEIR USUAL.

Two people who were not complaining were the young Latina now directly in front of me and the infant she carried in her arms, along with a huge tote bag. They cooed and clucked to each other, although I would imagine the woman's arms were tired and maybe her high heeled boots were painful, and just waited.

And a third person who said nothing was the bowlegged African-American in front of her. Again, he just waited. Of course, I don't really know what the quiet ones were thinking, but I do know that I was thinking I'd rather be with them than the spoiled, privileged people who were more likely in my demographic and who definitely had different expectations about the procrastinator payment experience.

So often we hear people describe Hilton Head Island and its environs as "paradise". That would be when we are not complaining about something petty yet "terrible".

PEOPLE, WE COULD LOSE IT ALL IN AN INSTANT! LET'S TRY TO REMEMBER THAT.

"Less space, less things, more life"

2010-01-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

Maybe I will move to Denmark...if I ever get shed of all the stuff I have accumulated. I don't need it, and I don't really want it any more. At least that's what I tell myself. However...there is a certain comfort that comes from knowing that if I feel like reading, I have books, tons of books, and magazines too. If I want to cook, I have plenty of food and equipment and dishes and utensils to do a lovely meal. If I want to wear red or purple or black or white or almost any color, I have clothes that will work for me. And shoes. And handbags. And costume jewelry. Ditto so many possible "wants" that can easily be accommodated with material goods.

But one "want" that is incompatible with all that stuff is the one that envies the near sterile order of Scandinavian homes. On a recent show, Oprah presented a view of life in Copenhagen, and was embarrassingly wowed by the lack of space that is the norm in Danish life. The husband and father in one of the homes she visited responded "Less space, less things, more life."

The American way of life is undoubtedly wasteful. We waste space, we waste natural resources, we waste people and we waste a lot of time. It is highly unlikely that succeeding generations will be able to consume and waste as much. But maybe there is an upside to being forced to rethink and relearn. After all, the Danes are considered by some to be the happiest people on earth.

"Mr Jalopy"!

2010-01-03T09:03:00.001-05:00

"Mr Jalopy"! Now this is a man I could love and admire. This is a man who could save the world. Quietly, without a whole lot of public acclaim, he fights a system of consumption that is filling local dumps as it empties personal coffers.

Mr Jalopy, whose real name is Peter "Something" repurposes things and makes things. A central tenet of the "Maker Movement" he leads is that if you can't open something, you don't own it. I take that to mean that if an object you purchase is sealed and/or needs special tools to examine its innards, IT owns YOU because it has control of the situation.

Now it's pretty well known that I have some kind of a VCR fixation. I bought my first VHS player/recorder when the price came down to $400, somewhere in the 1980s I think. It had a remote, but the remote was actually on a cord that plugged into the main box. In the past twenty years or so I've worn out a bunch of VCRs, but haven't given up on any of them without taking them apart and making a decent repair effort. I've also taken apart a couple of sewing machines, and yesterday I fixed a broken screen door latch. My most impressive fix-it of late has been an appropriate jiggle and wiggle of my vehicle hatch back lock after my son-in-law, an accomplished fixer, had given up on it. But there are a whole bunch of "new and improved" things around my house that I guess I do not own because I can't open them to fix them, and yet I'm somehow not willing to take them to the "convenience center" landfill.

I wish Mr Jalopy didn't live in California.

Flash Forward to ...

2009-09-27T09:36:00.000-04:00

Flash Forward to...."I have asthma!"

During the first segment of the new drama series "Flash Forward" there was, indeed, a lot of drama. Some would call it melodrama. There was noise and smoke and fire and blood and wreckage, and the segment ended with "our hero" (played by Joseph Fiennes) standing firmly with legs planted apart, surveying downtown Los Angeles in alarming disarray, with intense music playing. But the next words I heard were "I have asthma!" What? Is that part of the drama, along with the other weird things we're supposed to notice? No. It's a commercial, and it made me laugh out loud. How am I supposed to maintain an attitude of concern for the entire planet and all who live on it in the face of asthma (which to be sure is no laughing matter, but still...)?

But I continued watching, and I probably will watch the show for a while, despite the feeling that this show is SILLY. For one thing, the Mysterious Date of April 29, 2010 is a big birthday for me, and maybe they'll all be celebrating ME at some point! Why not? It could happen. If the entire planet could suffer a 137-minute blackout and clean itself up in a couple of days, why not have a party?

Suddenly...

2009-09-21T08:14:00.000-04:00

Cliff Monahan was a friend of my daughter, Andrea. For a reason that I can't explain he always intrigued me. It could have been his intelligence, his humor, his abhorrence of tv, his dedication to causes. Something. He was taken by a brain aneurysm while he was in his backyard, and although he died in a way that many of us would envy, he was only 55 years old, and it's hard to be philosophcal about the loss of such a positive force in the world. Godspeed, Cliff. By now you know whether God is benevolent or not.

Clifton Michael Monahan
(February 12, 1954 - September 15, 2009)
Dr. Clifton Michael Monahan died suddenly on September 15, 2009. He is survived by his mother Ellen Crowley Monahan, his sisters Leigh (John) Monahan-Fullbrook and Leslie (Mark) Peterson, brothers Russell (Kathy Semak) Monahan, Tim (Bill) Monahan and John (Barb Mailloux) Monahan, neice Colleen Monahan and nephews Jeff and Greg Monahan, and his especially his close friend Barb Bloetscher. Cliff was born on February 12, 1954, and grew up in the Detroit area. After two years at the University of Michigan, he spent a few years skiing and working in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where he began to develop his interest in animals. After studying horseshoeing at the Hillcroft School of Ferrier Science, he enrolled at Colorado State University, graduating as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. Never one to follow a standard route to happiness, Cliff signed up for service in the Peace Corps, working in Africa in eastern Zaire for over two years, assisting people with their cattle herds, other animals and basic needs. On top of providing much needed humanitarian assistance, he also accumulated enough stories to entertain people for years to come. After experiencing first-hand the conditions in Africa, Cliff returned to the USA, and began working on his post-doctorate studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and later in Shreveport, specializing in parasitology and epidemiology. It was in the Veterinary School at the Ohio State University in Columbus where he really connected with students and became known for his sometimes off-beat style and road trips that provided up close and first hand knowledge of working with different kinds of animals. Improving the lives of people in Africa remained a great a passion for Cliff. He supplied laptops, PDAs, hard drives and other computer and internet equipment, delivering them personally to villages in Rwanda. He also loved working on the wonderfully terraced gardens he built around his house. His collection of orchids and other exotic plants decorated his front porch and backyard and filled the interior of his home in the winter. The family will receive friends from 5-8pm on Friday, September 18 at the Deyo-Davis Funeral Home at 1578 W. First Avenue in Grandview Heights where a memorial service will be held at noon on Saturday, September 19. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Columbus Zoo or WOSU.

Once Upon A Time There Was A Guiding Light

2009-09-16T07:44:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite short prayers -- Catholics used to call them "ejaculations" --is "Dear Lord, guide me and guard me." That's about it for me and guidance now. I don't do horoscopes, and I don't read self-help books any more. But there was a time when I watched daytime serial dramas, for me "the soaps", for some "my stories", for guidance in how to be a housewife. That sounds truly ridiculous to me now, but I was 20 years old and had no idea about to run a home, what products to use, how to behave as an executive wife (which wasn't quite my real status) etc. Then I got hooked on the characters and the clothes until, for some reason I've forgotten, I was no longer hooked on Guiding Light or any other soap. I used to say that I stopped watching the soaps when my own life became one, but what that boils down to is that I was a single mother of four who found a job that interfered with my daytime viewing schedule. If only I had foreseen that there would be a market for publications about the "stories," I could have logged a lot more time on the couch and gotten paid for it.

One of the stories that I watched every day was "Guiding Light." Actually, I started listening to it on the radio when I was a child because my mother did. Now I have no idea about the Reva and Josh story lines and even though I've met their players, Kim Zimmer and Robert Newman, a number of times at the Hilton Head Celebrity Golf Tournament, I don't feel any current attraction. That's a good thing for me because the Guiding Light is coming to its conclusion.

Sixty Minutes did a segment last Sunday that reminded me of some things about the show and told me some things I never knew. I was very familiar with the early Bauer clan, whose generations lasted through the decades I watched, but I didn't know that "The original focus was inspirational, featuring a minister whose Guiding Light attracted the down and out, the lonely and the troubled." Was he a Bauer? I will probably never know and I will soon forget to wonder. But I will always smile at the recollection of conversations with friends of the day where we spoke about soap characters as though they were our friends too.

And as a fond final thought about the soaps, here's a memory that is about "Another World," a late-comer in 1964 to the money machine known as daytime drama. Somewhere in the 1970s, my father, who was then about the age I am now, was retired and sitting at his dining room table with his Scotch-laced coffee and calling out to the console tv in the living room: "Don't do it, Iris." This man who had emigrated from Scotland, made a good life for his wife and children, led a union local, and even survived death threats, was giving serious advice to a fictional character. I wonder now whether that was advice he really wanted to give me. Another thing I will not wonder about for long.

Farewell, Guiding Light. No one folded diapers better than I did when I was watching you.

Juneteenth 2009

2009-06-20T16:03:00.000-04:00

Days of watching American politicians and pundits debate about how to handle the unrest in Iran and then I stumble across what I need, which is the feeling of connection to the people of Iran whose lives are at stake. The video of the rooftop communication, where people call out in the darkness to one another and to God, repeating "Allah-o Akbar", and where the narrator seems at times to be on the verge of tears as she fears for her country and shares her thoughts, is more than enough to make me care. I have been so wearied by the complicated names and the history and the blaming and the opportunism that I forgot about the people. And they are young people, mostly. I've heard several estimates about the unusually high number of those under thirty who populate Iran, and I wondered how that happened but didn't really think about how it would feel to be so young and in such straits. I found a Slate article about how that happened, and it's interesting, but now it's less important to me than the cries on the rooftops and the feeling of destiny that these young people have.

The video starts with a declaration of the date, June 19th 2009, and that reminded me of our own American Juneteenth, and for me the hook was in. I thought about last night's Hardball show, where Chris Matthews went off on a legislator (Rep Steve Cohen D-TN) who co-sponsored a fairly meaningless apology for slavery and other racial inhumanities and was so caught up in his own bluster (Matthews' bluster that is) that he ignored the date: June 19th, which isn't that obscure in its significance, especially considering the topic he was discussing and Matthews' own self-professed humanitarianism. It would have been nice if Rep James Clyburn D-SC had put in a reminder, but, of course, there was almost no time for him to comment at all, plus he had to get in his thought about health care. The past is prologue, not priority.

Anyway, Juneteenth 1865 is worth remembering and parallels what is going on in Teheran in 2009 because it's about FREEDOM. What's so very, very different is that in the 1860's news traveled so slowly that slaves in Texas weren't informed about their freedom until June 19, 1865, two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in January of 1863. Freedom isn't so easily denied in 2009. You can close the borders, expel the media, threaten freedom seekers with death and still they find ways to communicate with each other and the outside world. Allah-o Akbar! God IS Great. And He made the human spirit.

I Didn't Ask To Be Born

2009-06-05T22:26:00.001-04:00

"I didn't ask to be born!" I don't think I ever said that to my parents, but I KNOW I thought it, and I know I've heard it from my progeny. Kids get away with a lot more disrespect than that these days, but that's not really my point.

Last Sunday's Wall Street Journal page in the now combined Beaufort Gazette Island Packet carried an intergenerational article about personal finance that is one of a series written by a father and son, the Yoders. Often I don't read them, but this one interested me. Isaac, the son, is musing about how he should deal with the good fortune of having successful, hard-working parents. He is wondering about what moral obligations might attach. He says that there are "two basic ways to approach this issue".

"The first way to look at it is that we kids have an obligation to take full advantage of the opportunities given to us because of our parents' hard work. This would mean immersing ourselves in the education provided, going on to get a good job and living life in a way our parents find acceptable. This choice seems like the natural answer, but it also seems to mean that privileged children have to live indebted to our parents, always with something to pay them back for. In other words, we'll always live our lives according to their standards. That doesn't feel quite right.

"The second approach would be to say we kids have the right to basically ignore our parents' expectations. It wasn't our choice to be born. If we follow this argument, we could claim full moral freedom to go in any direction in our lives without feeling like we had to make decisions that our parents would be happy with. There would be no shackles and no indebtedness. This approach feels even further from the truth."

No one has ever asked me for advice on this question, but if they had, I think I might have said something like what Isaac's father, Steve, said, which was maybe not so much about obligation but more about recognition of how his son's good fortune was achieved. He said, "Your debt, like my debt and your mother's, is to the generation before us who passed blessings down to us. And it's to the countless others in the world today who are not as blessed."

I say "recognition" rather than "obligation" because the former sits lighter with me. Obligation is constant and feels less free to me than recognition, which I may choose or not. But with that small distinction and not much difference, Steve Yoder is describing what is for me a way of life. Long ago I was taught about the "haves" and the "have-nots" with a sense that I should always care about social justice. But as an adult, I have chosen to live intentionally, every day, with gratitude. It's true that there are days when what I am grateful for is that things are not worse, but even on those days, I am aware of the blessings in my life, and I thank God for His company.

So whether I asked to be born is irrelevant. I'm here and I live in a world with billions of other souls. I don't feel guilt for my comforts, but I DO appreciate them, and I DO wonder why I have them. And I wish for others every measure of peace and ease that has been given to me and more. I wish for young people who are just starting out the wisdom to see their own way, to not be burdened by unfair expectations, but also to be free to make use of their own special gifts. This is not a particularly easy time to be young. The pace of living is fast and the choices are many as are the temptations to waste precious time. But life goes so quickly. You wake up and you're nearly seventy years old. If you're so blessed as to get that far.

"For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." Luke 12:48

I DO have a guilty pleasure.

2009-05-27T20:10:00.000-04:00

OK, OK, OK...I do have a guilty pleasure. In fact, I have a lot of them. It has taken me all month to decide which I dared divulge, and finally I've made up my mind. And it is couch-related. Maybe admitting I have this problem will help me conquer it, or at least help me WANT to conquer it.

Months ago, thanks to Paul the Pool Guy, I discovered the Real Housewives of Atlanta. Nothing housewifey about them, and I think their homes are outside of Atlanta, but for me it become like the soaps I used to watch while folding diapers. My "baby" just turned forty-one, so it's been a while. These women appalled me, but they also fascinated me in a weird way. And so I graduated to the Real Housewives of Orange County, and watched several seasons of them on a BRAVO marathon. I am so glad not to know these women or any that even come close to their superficiality. That's really saying something when you consider that some people consider Hilton Head Island a plastic fantasy island. On to the Real Housewives of New York. (By the way, I never saw any of these women use a Swiffer or buy a cleanser of any type. Nor was there any cooking or laundering or clipping of coupons.)

The New York women interested me the most, and there were a couple of them that I might enjoy but they probably wouldn't enjoy me. Plus, I would end up hating them as I stressed over what to wear when I met them. At least two of them are former models, and one of them is a Countess (and will remain a Countess now that she is about to become a single housewife). But I like Jill and Bethenny, and can take Alex. The others, not really.

So when the New York reunion show was over, I thought, well that's the end of it. I wasn't attracted by the promos for the Real Housewives of New Jersey. It seemed as though it would be some kind of a Sopranos knockoff, and truthfully, I didn't like the Sopranos, even though I grew up in that part of NJ. Anyway, and I can't explain why, I watched the first show of the RH of NJ and my eyes bugged out as I realized that two of the women are sisters and are married to brothers (not their own brothers) who own The Brownstone in Paterson, NJ. I immediately related. I guess it doesn't take much.

What probably got to me was a memory of family drama that took place at The Brownstone when I was maybe seven or eight. My mother was from a huge family and one of the cousins was holding a wedding reception there, and my maternal grandmother showed up, unexpected, and my brother and I were ushered into the bar area to say hello to her since my mother and she weren't speaking. Welcome to my childhood, which had more than its share of real housewives of New Jersey since my grandmother was one of seven sisters, who cooked and cleaned and catered to the menfolk.

I will keep watching, guiltily. This week's episode is coming on in eleven minutes. And I hear they are casting the Real Housewives of Chicago.

Jhenya морская звезда

2009-05-24T12:55:00.000-04:00

We're expecting! Yes, we're expecting another grandchild in our family. He's 2-1/2 and he lives in Siberia. He has a beautiful round face and blue eyes and blond hair and a sturdy little body.

Well, we WERE expecting. And he DID live in Chita, Siberia. This was the start of a blog I tried to write a while ago. And now, after weeks turning into months of waiting, and after two stays in Atlanta to care for the grandson I already have while my daughter and her husband went to Russia, Jhenya is at home with his American parents and his big brother Nicholas and Daisy the dog, ("sobaka" in Russian; "wocka" in Jhenya baby-talk). We have all learned to say "nyet, nyet, nyet" as little Jhenya explores his new surroundings. That's a word he knows and says frequently. He is, after all, two.

My daughter said she thought he hadn't been out of his orphanage to play since last fall and that it's unlikely he has ever felt grass under his feet. Now he has front and back yards and a playset and a driveway and an electric play car ("machina" in Russian) and a tricycle and rubber balls and tons of books and toys. But his favorite new belongings are his shoes. We think that shoes must have been prized at the "baby house" ("orphanage" in Euphemism).

May God smile on this child and both his families, old and new. I am so proud of my daughter (and my son-in-law) for having done so much to save this little starfish* (морская звезда in Russian) . May Jhenya one day come to know his Russian heritage as well as his American one, and may he always, always, from now on feel cherished and protected and loved for the very one he is.

*There is a story about a boy walking along the beach and, seeing hundreds of starfish stranded far up on the beach after the high tide, takes a few, one by one, and throws them into the sea. A man approaches and says, “What difference can you make when there are hundreds and hundreds stuck so far from the water?” The boy gives the stranger a quick glance, throws another starfish into the sea and says, ‘It made a difference to that one.”

Ipod Writing Assignment

2009-02-03T15:05:00.000-05:00

Oh, MH, I'm sorry that I have been remiss about posting. The problem is mechanical or ergonomic or something that has to do with equipment and environment. I'm down to using my desktop and it's in a room that's cold and my chair gives me a stiff neck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whose fault is that? Oh well.

Anyway, I do not have an actual Ipod, but I do have and love a Sony Walkman MP3. I chose it because I wanted something with an FM tuner. It holds only 3.5 gigs, even though it's sold as having a 4-gig capacity, but for me that's not a problem.

What's on it TODAY is a playlist I call "mood alterers", which includes some inspirational things and some miscellaneous tracks that always get to me in some way. A few make me weepy, and a few make me move. A weepy one would be "I Believe" sung by Barbra Streisand, and a mover would be "Walkin' in Memphis" by Marc Cohn. Thanks to Mycokerewards, I have recently downloaded a whole album called "Don't Quit" by Jake the body guy, but I haven't really listened to it yet. I'm thinking it's mostly high energy tracks that will motivate me to really, really move. If someone finds me collapsed on a leisure trail, blame it on Jake.

Elections have consequences.

2009-01-11T08:24:00.000-05:00

Elections have consequences. How many times have we in the USA heard that about our own ballot box choices? And now in Gaza we see the bloody reality of the Palestinian elevation of Hamas several years ago. Of course the suffering and loss are terrible. To say that is to understate the destruction and the waste. Of course western countries, who are not getting the full effect of what the Arab street is seeing on all-carnage-all-the-time-blame-the-godless-dirty-Jew-infidels-and-their-Western-friends Al Jazeera, don't know the extent of the suffering. However, even the brief comments I've heard from English Al Jazeera on NPR are enough to convince me that what is happening is horrific.

This morning I heard a plea for context, and it included an abbreviated chronology of the provocations and responses from both Israel and Palestine since Israel was formed in the 1940's. It really didn't help. Yes, the carnage is beyond disturbing and tragic, especially among the youngest victims, babies and children. And my heart goes out to any mother who has to hold a dead infant in her arms. I have done that, and it was in a safe amd quiet funeral home, not a rubbled and noisy street. It was still enough to threaten my will to go on.

But who is giving Hamas the power to use their children and elderly as shields against the Israelis who have seen carnage too? Who thinks that the elimination of an entire ethnic group will somehow benefit them? The Bush administration was dismayed when Hamas was chosen by the Palestinian people over Fatah in January 2006. The ensuing Bush plan seems to have been to choke off Hamas in Gaza by making life ever more difficult with checkpoints and border closings to show the Palestinians the error of their "free and democratic" choice. And now we see Middle East "democracy" evolving with behind-the-scenes nudging from Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the USA. And Iran. With Chinese-made weapons.

However, This is what my hero Alexander Hamilton and other founders of the USA feared: That uneducated and poorly informed rabble would too easily be led to choose demagogic leadership even over their own self-interest. We cannot have security and order in the absence of an educated public and free access to information. There is no point to playing at democracy without those game chips. Let that be a lesson to all who think that politics isn't their thing.

Groovin'

2009-01-09T12:31:00.000-05:00

The other day a person named Scott, whom I don't know but who is on a list-serv I follow, asked "How do you people stay so positive?" This particular list-serv involves some pretty heavy and uphill issues that are part of many of the participants' personal lives. Anyway, I hardly ever respond to this group but did this time and was happy that some others did too. Given the probable numbers of human beings involved though, it's a little like seeing a flower growing in an interstate asphalt crack. But maybe more people are thinking about responding than actually did. That's an optimistic possibility that I can live with.

How did I become an optimist? It's not in my nature. I am a dark brooding Celt, and I have many real things to brood about, like almost everybody I know. This hasn't been a very successful week, and I could write about that, but my camellias are in bloom and there have been a lot of blue skies and beautiful views from the bridges to the mainland, and I'd rather think about those things than about how to express the missteps and disappointments.

I feel as though I may have found a groove that works for me, where I'm comfortable just being me and where setbacks are tolerable and met with a sort of Desiderata-like understanding of the path I'm walking. Possibly the sense of inner comfort is coming from the knowledge that I have more time behind me than ahead. It's sort of along the lines that even if I'm on a wrong path, I won't have long to walk it.

My father was a late-groover too, I think. Somehow I always knew that he was concerned about the security of our family, but I don't think I realized that he might be making choices based on what he saw as his responsibilities. After my brother and I were grown is when he intensified activities that were probably always part of who he was. He was elected President of UAW Local 153 in Teterboro, NJ, not known for automotive plants, but for aviation plants. There were death threats. Unions can be tough. My father used to carry on such loud dialogues with his shaving mirror that my mother worried what the neighbors were thinking. My father stood his ground. It was as though no one could do anything to him that would be worse than losing faith in what he understood as his path.

I understand that faith. Maybe that's why I'm a late-groovin' optimist.

How is this all going to work out?

2009-01-01T18:53:00.000-05:00

How is this all going to work out? After we're dead, I mean. Really. Like everybody else I've heard the claims that we (Christians) will have new bodies and will see Jesus face-to-face and will have eternity with our loved ones. And many of us even believe we'll be escorted across the Rainbow Bridge by the beloved pets who wait for us.

But honestly, I'm having doubts. I haven't really wanted to dwell on the logistics of heaven, and I kind of liked the way the young murder victim in The Lovely Bones experienced it. She had some interaction with other embodied souls but the way I remember it is that it was her choice as to whether she wanted to be with someone or not.

What has brought me to this place NOW, and I truly mean no disrespect to the deceased is that someone who peripherally touched my life years ago died on Christmas Day. I read her obituary and was angry. Not listed among those having preceded her in death was a grandchild who died in 1992, a grandchild who carries her last name. I know this because I am the child's other grandmother and the mother of his mother, also deceased. I read about the deceased's eleven loving grandchildren and her daughters and her son, who fathered my second grandson and who has gone on with his new life and his new wife Phonita despite having left a trail of wreckage and sorrow in his drunken past. So I'm wondering how this family reunion will play out. Notice I'm assuming that all will be welcomed into heaven and that this woman is up there with my daughter and my grandson.

And since I believe I come from one of the world's most dysfunctional families, going way back, I'm thinking that I might prefer a cloistered spot in heaven to making nice with people who have been destructive to put it mildly. I wish them no ill, but I'd prefer to avoid them in heaven just as I have reserved the right to absent myself from them in this life. On the other hand, if this is one of those grand cosmic dilemmas where one has to choose between getting along with everyone and going to hell, well, kicking and screaming, I'll be nice to the other grandmother, God rest her soul.

Anthem for 2008

2008-12-31T18:27:00.001-05:00

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word.
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own.
I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemies' eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing
"Now the old king is dead! Long live the King!"
One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand.
I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field.
For some reason I can't explain
Once you'd gone, there was never, never an honest word
That was when I ruled the world.
(Ohhh)
It was the wicked and wild wind
Blew down the doors to let me in
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
People couldn't believe what I'd become.
Revolutionaries wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh who would ever want to be King?
I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing.
Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can't explain
I know Saint Peter won't call my name
Never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world.
(Ohhhh Ohhh Ohhh)
Hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can't explain
I know Saint Peter won't call my name.
Never an honest word
But that was when I ruled the world.
(Ooooh)
--"Viva La Vida", Coldplay (2008)

Forever, I believe, I will think of 2008 when I hear Coldplay's "Viva La Vida." It's not only that I heard it in so many places at so many memorable times after it was released this year, it's also that to me the lyrics say so much about the will-o'-the-wisp, fleeting nature of success, which seemed to me to be a theme for the past twelve months, although really for longer. Honestly, I saw it coming when the equities entertainment sector was a leading success in early 2007. I suspicioned then that there were too many people playing and too few working, that a lot of the wealth we enjoyed was in our heads, that the U.S. might not be invincible. But I didn't envision the global wreckage. My worst case scenario was that the U.S. dollar would end up like early 2000's Argentinian scrip, and I soothed myself by saying "Well, smarter and richer people than I will never let that happen." Well, we came way too close! And we're not anywhere near home-free yet. In the end, what's true is that nothing is guaranteed, that the mighty fall, that anything can happen, that no one is so smart or so rich that they can outrun "death and all his friends."

So yesterday while I was in the frozen food aisle at Publix I found myself tearing up when "Viva La Vida" came on. I weep for my country and for how far we've fallen and for fear that we may not make the climb back up, that my grandchildren and their children might not know what we were for a while. While most of us never even dreamed of ruling the world, we enjoyed shouting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" and being seen around the world as winners. But things change. And they have always changed. Some around the world are desperately praying for change that rescues them. May what is needed to benefit them, benefit us too.

For some people, the reference to a leader's downfall is all about George W. Bush and his cronies, but for me it's bigger and smaller too. Big fish in the biggest pond and little fish in a bowl have all felt the shift underfoot, some proportionate to the risks they took and some not. I think that's the point. Life comes with no guarantees. May we recover and be a more hopeful, grateful people, less identified with our stuff and our power, and more concerned with our effects on the world.

"Just because [we're] losing, doesn't mean [we're] lost". More lyrics from Coldplay. Maybe an anthem for 2009.

Good morning, Joe!

2008-12-30T12:43:00.000-05:00

"You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you." Another Morning Joe moment where I sit straight up. This time it's Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski giving Joe Scarborough an assessment of his analysis about what is happening today in Gaza and what preceded it. While I am interested in the discussion because I myself have only superficial knowledge of this subject, I am distracted by the interpersonal stuff that I imagine is fueling the smoking moment and by what seems to me to be an unusual skirmish between unequals. Sitting beside Scarborough and across from her father was Mika Brzezinski, who frequently is talked over and interrupted by Scarborough. Was this really about Israel and Hamas, or was it about a father who knew he had the power to deliver a small but very public comeuppance to someone who regularly disses his daughter and anyone else he feels like dissing? Who knows.

It would be nice to think that all in powerful positions, regardless of the situation, would be big enough to avoid putting others down on purpose. When pigs apply their own lipstick! Personally, I was happy to see someone, anyone, call Scarborough on the dearth of actual information that is hidden behind what I see as his big-mouth dominance. On the other hand, I think that Mika Brzezkinski was a bit diminished by her father's interventon in her conflict with Morning Joe, if that is what in fact was going on. Whatever was really happening, I wasn't at all surprised to see Scarborough change Dr Zbig's statement to a more personal assessment, along the lines of "you are superficial" rather than "your knowledge is superficial" as he reacted (and did so more than once). When Dr. Zbig said later that Scarborough should not be so thin-skinned, perhaps he was telling us something about why Scarborough left his politician position and became a sideline commentator.

Anyway, it was a moment and to me it was more significant than whatever the interpersonal dynamics might have been. It was a bigger statement about the level of information that is available on cable news, whether it favors the left or the right. "Superficial" describes the snapshot sound-bite reporting and ensuing analysis which many of us consume far too regularly and which I have already spent far to much time bemoaning on this and other blogs.

I do like "Morning Joe" though, and it woke me up today.

Made it!

2008-12-27T10:12:00.000-05:00

So now it's Saturday morning, two days after Christmas 2008, and I am thanking God that He answered my prayer to help me remain sane throughout the festivities. I did really well, if I do say so myself. And I enjoyed a lovely Christmas Day at home as well as some time beforehand in Atlanta, with my little Czar Nicholas aka Saint Nicholas aka my treasured grandson, who turned four on December 21. The older I grow, the more I have in common with him. There are times when in each of our cases a nap is clearly needed. I find too that my feelings are more transparent than they used to be, and of course his have always been right out there. We are both easily distracted, although I may be regressing at a pace incompatible with his development, because this year one of my favorite gifts was some handpainted wrapping paper by Artist Nicholas, where he now appreciates more what's inside the wrapping. I, however, do not run around the house, crashing and banging, and I am never threatened with a time-out. And I am allowed to drink alcohol.

To all who didn't quite make it through without making a scene or witnessing one, may I say "turn the page, fuhgeddaboudit, and you're only human." Also "to forgive is divine."

To all who tried really hard to make a contribution to a wonderful Christmas, whether they were successful or not, may I offer appreciation and gratitude. The world needs you, at least you showed up, and I cherish every person who makes an effort.

Another Tradition: The Holiday Meltdown

2008-12-11T16:11:00.000-05:00

When are we ever going to get it all right? Never mind getting it right, are we even going to get it all DONE? What we have made of Christmas, or really, “The Holiday Season” isn’t working, and truth be told, it has never worked in my family. Maybe it’s the combination of dour Celts and convivial Slavs and aristocratic Europeans and distant Chinese, not to mention the come-ya in-laws that WE DON’T KNOW and the expectations each person brings to this time of year, or maybe it’s just expectations in general that seem to pile up in this delightful time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, when we have several birthdays to celebrate along with Jesus Christ’s and when daylight is less and hibernation appeals more.

I cannot believe there are only two weeks left. During December, my unfavorite sensation, that of being late and/or falling behind, usually arrives about now, and this year I thought I had a handle on things when I did a lot of shopping before Thanksgiving. I even wrote my holiday tradition blog before Thanksgiving. So how is it that today I find myself in beginning meltdown mode, where I do not dare to speak to any of my loved ones? Thank you Dear God for texting and e-mails and for hundreds of miles between our homes. Honestly, I feel I have made a tactical error in allowing my passport to expire. With better planning, I could be out of the country by nightfall. Maybe on the high seas and out of satellite range in the Bermuda triangle.

This morning one of my nearest and dearest called me first thing to ask that I talk her into visiting another of the nearest and dearest. I’m glad I let the machine get that call. I heard the phone but just didn't care. She called back. Again, the machine got it for me. So having had some coffee and hoping that the two messages I knew were there were from people on whose machines I left messages earlier in the week (another holiday issue: people are not at their desks, so business slows down A LOT), I hear the plaintive tones of a grown woman who needs me. I text her back thusly: “Put on your big girl panties and go...or don’t go...I’m not talking anybody into anything.” The response was another message on the machine: “All of my panties are big girl’s because I have gained sixty pounds and I also have a head cold and am depressed.” Now she’s channeling Rosanne Rosannadanna, but I don’t feel like laughing this morning and anyway I can hear the edge of disapproval that I have not met her expectations.

But wait, wasn’t I already heading down this miserable road? Wasn’t I unhappy about the dunning e-mail with a "wish list" that arrived yesterday from someone who is married to one of my nearest and dearest? We don’t do wish lists in my family. Maybe that's a tradition in the come-ya's family, but it isn't in mine, or wasn't. Rather than rebuke this person, or respond with an over-the-top wish list of my own (I’ve been pining for a bauble like the Hope diamond), I decided to just ignore the offending message as though it were a bad smell. MY expectation is that I will have a family whose traditions involve lovingly handmade gifts and heifer certificates and other charitable things rather than making requests for personal gifts that we all can afford to give ourselves. No doubt that expectation of mine has some of the family wrinkling their noses. Oh well.

My favorite meltdown memory is from 1962, when my second daughter was just three weeks old, and my mother, on Christmas Eve, came to our apartment and dumped, and I do mean “dumped,” her and my poor father’s gifts at the top of our stairs. She wanted to make plain her displeasure about her feeling that I had disrespected my father a few days earlier in not allowing him to buy our 14-month-old a jacket. Typical of how those things go, the issue was about my tone of voice rather than anything I actually said. In my defense, I had just given birth, was probably hormonal (although in 1962 that word wasn't used), had a toddler and was doing my best to make the cookies and deck the halls with no money but with a sense that my husband needed the gift of knowing that I thought he was providing for us just fine. And oh, yes, the diapers were freezing on the clothesline. I can't say for sure that my principles wouldn't have disappeared at the offer of a dryer instead of a cute extra jacket, size 24 mos. Tone of voice. So I burst into tears and my mother said she hoped I would get psychiatric help and left in a huff, not to be seen again for several months, when I in fact apologized insincerely but ceremonially. She was probably hormonal herself, at 50-ish, and anyway she was a great babysitter.

Dear God, if I were you, I’d have cancelled Christmas right on the spot of the Valley Stream WalMart stampede on Black Friday. I almost wish you had. Some of us just can’t handle celebration, especially celebration that goes on for weeks and brings out every anxiety and insecurity that lurks within us, that we conceal and forget until the Winter Solstice draws near. Please, dear God, be merciful and help me to remain firmly rooted in the here and now as we go through these next three weeks. I feel a little melty around the edges.

For each new morning with its light, ...

2008-11-25T11:15:00.000-05:00

The USA holiday where we gather together to eat turkey is uniquely American, although Canada and other countries have thanksgiving holidays too. In the USA we celebrate the very beginning of the community of our nation, although of course the official documents didn't come until much later. Along the way came contention about exactly where the first thanksgiving feast was held and considerable mythology about what happened where and why. The people who attended the first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, Pilgrims and Wampanoag, celebrated a harvest and survival. They joined as a community of human beings with different ethnicities and different beliefs and different values to acknowledge their dependence and their interdependence. Independence wasn't really an issue then.

The act of expressing thanks, of acknowledging gifts, however, is not unique to any country or people. Sometimes I like to think about the lives of people who are very different from me, and often the Tarahumara of Mexico come to mind. There was a day in November, only a few years ago and just a few days before El Dia de Dar Gracias in los Estados Unidos, when a friend and I had taken the train on a spectacular trip through the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains to see the Copper Canyons. Near the end of our journey, we could see colorfully dressed, dark-skinned women and children selling their handmade crafts at some of the stations. A walk through a market set up by some others like them took us from the train to a lodge that was perched on the very edge of the canyons. Not only were we within walking distance of the market, but also we were within walking distance of the homes of some of the Tarahumara. Many of them live at the bottom of the canyons, but some also live in cliffside dugouts and in primitive wood cabins. One family, whose business included making violins, and whose home had animal pelts hanging from the low ceiling, invited us into the dirt-floored one-room main cabin of their home.

Among my fellow travelers there were varying reactions to what we saw. Some I felt were insulting in their judgement but in the time since I've often thought about that day and about my own reactions. Sometimes I find it difficult to choose the best lens for the perspective I need on a situation that seems so different from what I'm used to and yet so right for the ones who are in it and who may actually have chosen it. What seems clear though is that the indigenous people of the Copper Canyons are grateful for their homes and families, for food and for tourist dollars. Their gratitude may be mixed with misgivings about the introduction of new ideas and new values into a way of living that goes back for centuries, but they accept what they think will work for them and are friendly as they do so. I wonder how different they are at heart from the native Americans of the 16th and 17th centuries who must also have had misgivings about the people with whom they broke bread.

People ARE different. We are different within families, within neighborhoods, within countries. We value different things and therefore are grateful for different gifts, but the one thing we all share is that we are alive at this very time. May we all, Americans and Tarahumara and so many others, be grateful for life, the lives we have and the lives we've shared. We don't have to agree about what life is or what it should be or when it starts, but we can agree that we're glad to have it. Not ALL of us WILL agree about that of course, but the rest of us can make our gratitude and love present to those who dissent, and that will be a better grace than any we can say at a bountiful table.

Thanksgiving

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food,
For love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Christmas Cookies, a Tradition!

2008-11-19T20:03:00.000-05:00

Christmas Cookies! That's a tradition from my childhood until now. When my baby brother Sammy and I were still very small, our mother started us off as holiday bakers. Sometimes the sugar cookie dough we rolled and formed got a little grey as we overworked it and maybe weren't too concerned about hygiene, but it didn't seem to matter to any of us. Oh, how we loved the cookie press! My mother did amazing things from a completely inefficient kitchen, where there was so little room that Sammy and I were set up in the adjacent dining room, which was also tiny. And my mother also did amazing things with her WWII sugar ration and the oleo packet dye. Counter space? It was the sink draining board in my childhood kitchen, but to have a proper baking set-up was so important that when my late lovey and I bought the house I now live in, I thought, "Ah, yards of space to make and cool cookies."

Through most of the Christmases of my life, I have done some baking, but as a young wife nearly fifty years ago, I went at it with enthusiasm that could perhaps be called frenzy. First I considered my mother's recipes, but soon I found some to try on my own, and I actually still use a couple of the favorites from a very early Pillsbury Bake-off leaflet that was in the flour package. We had very little money then, so I chose carefully among recipes that called for expensive ingredients, like pecans and apricots. This was New Jersey, remember, and there were lots of maple trees and oaks, but no pecan trees. Going through every magazine and cookbook I could find, I made lists of possibilities, trying to balance cost and variety and color and flavor.

And at this time of year, I still get that urge. How can one help it? Every magazine at every grocer's check-out has cookies on the cover. So I'm already working on this year's list. The number one favorite cookie in my family, and the one that everybody expects at Christmas, is a sort of bar called "Chocolate Flip Strips." I've been asked for the recipe dozens of times, by family and by friends and by people I don't even know who claimed to love them at holiday cookie exchanges. The thing is that even though the cookies themselves are easy to make, the recipe looks long. I would imagine that only a very few people ever actually made the recipe after they looked at it. First you make a butterscotch dough and then you make a chocolate and nut filling and then you form them together into a long turnover and bake. Then you ice them, cool them, and slice them. Easy, but not a last-minute project, what with the chilling and the melting and the cooling and the firming up.

Other favorites are two-tone molasses cookies, peppermint candycane cookies, lemon squares, gingerbread men and whatever I didn't make for whatever year it is. There are so, so many I've tried over the so, so many holidays. And there will be so, so many that I consider for this year. I already bought some dates. And some chocolate chips. And some pecans from BUMMs because now I can afford what I like and anyway, they benefit a local cause and are fairly cheap, considering. I'm checking my flavorings and my decorating stuff. And I'm checking my cookie cutters too. Some of them were my mother's.

So please don't bother me while I leaf through the years of clippings and stained cards and then through magazines old and new, and then of course the basic cookbooks I learned from. I am planning for these 2008 holidays, but I'm also remembering those long past, when babies cried and pandemonium reigned. This is a quieter time in my life and that's a good thing because I am no longer used to chaos.

My mother is gone, my brother is gone, my oldest daughter and helper is gone, my late lovey and taster is gone, but I still have a grandson who loves to bake with me and an ex-husband for whom my cookies will be a welcome surprise. What the heck! It's Christmas!

And I'm doing candy this year too. Maybe even my mother's stollen.

"Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc"

2008-11-10T10:31:00.000-05:00

"Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" happens to be the title of the second episode of the first season of "West Wing," one of my all-time favorite TV shows. No surprise there, I bet. Translated into English, the Latin phrase means "after this, therefore because of this", and so is a rather inaccurate way of explaining the relationship between two events. Cause and effect taken to a fanciful level.

Thinking about that today, my wandering mind fell on "prayer." I believe in answered prayers, and I believe that the answer is sometimes along the lines of "what you want is not in my plan". But there are those times when I pray for something and I see what I think are results. I've had a few of those lately. I try not to pray for specific outcomes, mostly sticking to the 12-Step qualification of "seeking only to know His will." My spiritual thinking, though, is that it is always within God's will for someone to relate to Him, and so I feel comfortable asking for the sick or the scared or the despairing or the bereaved to feel the companionship of a Supreme Being, especially through dark times, but really always. And since I believe that prayer is positive energy, I always pray for people while I'm in the shower because I seem to have a lot of it then. After I give thanks for an abundance of hot water and for sweet-smelling soap, I ask that someone somewhere be refreshed in the same way, and that's about sending my positive energy to wherever there's a lack. We don't know how energy travels from spirit to spirit, and whether God is directing that traffic or not, I'm sending energy. I send it at various times during the day and night, but most often when water is around me. I can't explain that, except that to me water is life-giving and life-affirming.

Today in the shower I thought of the people in Haiti who are digging, with their bare hands, for bodies. And then I thought of the people who are living under bridges in the U.S., or walking the interstates, something I've seen more of this year. And THEN, my mind went to the people whom I know are disappointed with the results of last week's election, and it focused on a particular person, whose name is Bruce. As I thought about the disappointed people, Bruce's being occurred to me because, and I have heard this only second-hand, he is beside himself with fear about what he thinks may happen to the USA with Democrats in charge.

I have met Bruce only a few times, and he doesn't live in the Lowcountry. I know him because he is engaged in a years-long affair with a young woman whom I also know. He is a physician, married, with three teen-age children, and he has many problems. That he has sought to relieve those problems in the ways he has does not endear him to me, but as I have said before, it's not my place to judge anyone. What occurred to me in the shower is that I have fallen short by only deciding not to judge him. I should also have been praying for him all this time. So I am adding his name to my prayer list here as a reminder, but when I pray for him I will also be praying for many others who are fearful or angry or whatever because that is a group that I think has grown in the past week. "Bruce" will be their proxy.

Will my prayers for anyone or anything cause an effect? I will never know for sure, but in recent times I've seen and felt some changes in some situations where I've prayed, so I'm encouraged. I know that when I joined my prayers with many others in a sort of "from our keyboards to God's ears" kind of way, there was an outcome I hoped for. But did the outcome have anything to do with the prayer, which was "Thy will be done"? It would be more arrogant even than I am to claim that. And anyway, many people were praying for something else at the same time.

But in the end, whether we know that "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" applies, "oremus". ("Let us pray" to you non-Latinists.)

Hope? Fear?

2008-11-05T08:13:00.000-05:00

NBC pollster Peter Hart, said last night that voters chose hope over fear in their election of Barack Obama to be the President of the United States. I agree. I have been saying to myself for days that whether or not John McCain won, part of his service to the country should be a sustained effort to erase the fear that his campaign wrote on the souls of those vulnerable to it. That's what a true hero would do.

To me, one of the major differences between Republicans and Democrats in this just-ended campaign, but also very noticeably since September 11,2001 is the use of fear to win elections. There have been strategic releases of intelligence, there have been unexplained color code alerts, there have been insinuations about people's background, associations and motives.

So when Joe Scarborough in the 6 a.m. hour of his show today says he was "offended" by suggestions such as Hart's, my posture on the couch gets a little stiffer. Also, I take note of the expressions on the other faces around the table. I saw discomfort. Then, in the 7 a.m. hour, Tom Brokaw comes along and positively quotes Hart. So there you have it. Media bias meets media bias. Or maybe personal bias meets corporate bias.

Scarborough's original point was about tolerance for views other than one's own, and to that point he just happens to have written an op-ed in the Pensacola News Journal on that very topic. He pontificates that people who hold one opinion discount the merits of other opinions and are often unfair in their characterizations of opponents. Everyone but him. In his lecture this morning, he compares the passion and commitment seen in this election, especially by African-Americans, to what he saw when evangelicals were similarly committed in an earlier election.

What I think is different is that this years crop of zealots is committed to a positive concept, that of hope. What I have seen of evangelicals is that in their politics they are committed to something less positive. The word "God-fearing" carries some revealing truth, and the politics of this group, an important part of the Republican base if you will, is very much about emphasizing fear of others. Love them, of course, but fear them. Love their sins, but fear what those sins mean for the American way of life. Love them to death if necessary, especially if they wear burkas or have a name like "Hussein." Standing on line to vote for the hope of a change that invites everyone's participation is a far cry from standing on line to vote for change that casts out imaginary demons.

So, Joe, I know that your mother in Pensacola is terrified of what is in store, but you and Senator McCain and all the other fearmongers can help her with that. Do it.

We the people.

2008-11-01T09:31:00.000-04:00

What a great day I had yesterday! I started out early in the morning with an errand and then got to Hilton Head's Town Hall around 9:30 a.m., hoping to vote and not have to wait too long. Well, I did get to vote, but the whole process took about two hours. I am not complaining though. It was all very well organized and there were even cookies and discount coupons for a Wexford restaurant. There were chairs too. But for me the best part was the sight and company of so many people of different ages and heritages and economic classes waiting to cast their votes. I don't think it was what the Founders feared when they constructed a system that would prevent "mob rule."

Two hours is a long time, and for some it really amounts to a poll tax, as they give up time from a job, or pay a baby-sitter. However, I saw only one instance of impatience, a cranky older person who looked to me like the type of person who complains about every situation. Maybe his back was hurting, or his feet, or something. I saw children behaving well, and I saw an infant sleeping, while his/her mother schlepped the carrier and the diaper bag and whatever else. I wanted to give her my take-a-number, because I had plenty of time and I'm quite sure she didn't, but that wasn't really allowed. I saw pride in the faces of some African-Americans, and while it's a mistake to assume anything about any voter, I can imagine why they might be proud.

It might very well be true that I wouldn't have had to wait long at my usual polling place come Tuesday. However, watching orderly, well-heeled voters, overwhelmingly white, isn't usually all that interesting, and I'm glad I spent the time, and I'm grateful for the conversation I had with the white woman who waited next to me, and for the one she had with the black younger woman on her other side, which I overheard. Both confided their support for Senator Obama and talked about others they knew who felt the same. This isn't the same South Carolina it once was. That much I know for sure.

So, buoyed by my voting experience, I made some phone calls to senior voters in Western Pennsylvania, and was further uplifted. Only one person refused the call, saying "We don't need anything." Not that terrible a rejection. One woman told me about the prayer service her church is holding on election evening, before the returns come in, just thanking God for the fact that an African-American has gotten as far as Senator Obama has. Another woman told me that she didn't intend to vote at all, because of her disgust with all politicians and the state of the country and the world. So we talked a little, and I told her that I am more optimistic and that I believe that if the country pulls together we can go forward on a much more constructive path than the one we have lately followed. We ended up talking about our grandchildren and our hopes for their futures and we remembered earlier times when things have looked bleak and Americans have come through. I hope she votes, no matter for whom she votes.

And then in the evening, I was talking with my Ohio daughter and she said her neighbor was upset with her mother in Tiffin (OH) because she had decided to vote for Senator McCain on the basis of a phone call from Pat Boone. You can laugh or cry. Or you can head down to Jacksonville to help get out the vote there.

"If mommy is a commie...."

2008-10-30T15:05:00.000-04:00

"If mommy is a commie, then you gotta turn her in."

Maybe it's just my brain defragging and bringing bits and pieces of old files together, but lately I find myself remembering "The John Birch Society." Not only the1962 Chad Mitchell Trio song, but also the extremist idea that there is an enemy, a socialist, Marxist, communist enemy, lying in wait to take over the country. Could be anybody. Could even be your mommy.

"He keeps on preaching brotherhood, but we know what he means." ;>)

The irony of course is that in an attempt to free a nation from subversive radicals, we turn that very nation into what we fear. A visit to Cuba would show you that. Oh wait! I forgot that the US government doesn't permit the liberty of travel to Cuba. We are punishing them for being communist. That may be an oversimplification, but the end result is that we help to perpetuate a system where there are informers and the kind of suspicion that John Birchers think is prudent. The circle of life.

I visited Cuba in 2000, when Elian Gonzalez was in Miami, and couldn't help but feel for the sad, decaying beauty of the country. As I walked through crumbling Havana, I was several times taken for French because few Americans were seen on those streets even then. Havana, remember, is as close to our shores as Charleston is to Hilton Head. To have children there approach me and rub their forearms with their hands, a sort of sign language request for soap, and to have them also make a scribbling gesture request for pencils is unforgettable.

The point is that we should be careful about throwing around words like "radical", because certainly our Founders were radical, and "communist", because we often don't know what we are talking about. Life for some in Cuba was no picnic before their revolution or there wouldn't have been one. Life in Cuba after the fall of the USSR has been no picnic either. The danger, in my opinion, is ideology taken to an extreme in either direction. Social justice is not a leftist value. It's a human value. And it was a mainstream value in 1962.

This is why:

2008-10-27T12:55:00.000-04:00

"We can do this. Americans have done this before. Some of us had grandparents or parents who said maybe I can't go to college but my child can; maybe I can't have my own business but my child can. I may have to rent, but maybe my children will have a home they can call their own. I may not have a lot of money but maybe my child will run for Senate. I might live in a small village but maybe someday my son can be president of the United States of America.

Now it falls to us. Together, we cannot fail. And I need you to make it happen. If you want the next four years looking like the last eight, then I am not your candidate. But if you want real change – if you want an economy that rewards work, and that works for Main Street and Wall Street; if you want tax relief for the middle class and millions of new jobs; if you want health care you can afford and education that helps your kids compete; then I ask you to knock on some doors, make some calls, talk to your neighbors, and give me your vote. In Colorado, you can vote early right here, and right now. To find out how, just go to voteforchange.com. And if you stand with me in nine days, I promise you – we will win Colorado, we will win this election, and then you and I – together – will change this country and change this world." -- Senator Barack Obama, Denver, Colorado October 26, 2008

That's what Barack Obama said to 100,000 people who went to listen to him yesterday. If only a fraction left that rally feeling called to working toward a better America, then no one's time was wasted. There are so many reasons why not, but this is why: Because it's absolutely true that we are all Americans and that we rise and fall together. The politics of division, "us" versus "them", have not served us well. It's way past the time to try something else.

And it's why I'm making phone calls to seniors today and probably will every day for the next week. I have a LOT of cell phone roll-overs.

****************

Added October 28...From now on comments will not be shown. I repeat: I am not interested in arguing on this blog. Nor am I interested in being lectured. If you don't like what I say, make a mental note not to read what I write, imagine an "L" on my forehead and move on.

It's over.

2008-10-24T09:36:00.000-04:00

It’s over.

Yesterday was the last time this year or ever that the Bluffton Farmers Market will happen in the “park” next to the Old Oyster Factory. I went there about an hour early, taking as I often do a mini-vacation to scenic Bluffton. It was such a nice afternoon, coolish early fall temps with only a few high clouds. If you saw me there, you may also have seen me parked by the Church of the Cross, drinking a Coke and reading the local papers.

The Church has become quite an attraction, and this week has offered tours with box lunches. In the time I sat there, I saw license plates from probably a dozen different states. I like the Church too, but, honestly, in accordance with my frequent signature line, “I liked it better the way it was.” It’s very nicely manicured these days, with what looks like a carefully chosen and applied paint job. I guess that’s a good thing, as Calhoun Street properties like Seven Oaks set a higher tone. But one of the things that attracts me to old Bluffton streets is its random and sometimes ramshackle sights. Many of the newer, and more carefully assembled neighborhoods just don’t do it for me. And, then, of course there are the trees and Spanish Moss and overgrown plantings that I love. No accounting for taste.

My plan was to go to the market and maybe buy an Arts and Seafood Festival tee-shirt. I’m pretty well stocked on the other things that might be for sale in late October. And I’d already had lunch so the wonderful prepared food didn’t have its usual appeal. But for whatever emotional reason (now there’s a contradiction in terms), I just didn’t feel like hanging there, even as I enjoyed the smells and the sights and the people setting up. It has been a wonderful season at the Market, even when for a few weeks, it seemed to start showering every Thursday afternoon around three o’clock. I may never forget the welcome offered on one of those rainy days by a group of women in bright orange hats who seemed to be directing the parking. And I hope I never forget the lovely public thank you letter that was written just a few weeks ago by a young people’s group for the way they had been treated as volunteers at the Market.

I understand the reasons why the Bluffton Farmers Market has to find another location: the unprecedented numbers who came, the parking, etc. But it will be hard to replicate the charm that is part of the draw, along with the wares. I’ll be back next year though, and I will wish the effort success. I will hope for those moments when I bump into someone I haven’t seen in a while, and when I spot a must-have plant or cookbook or whatever among the local produce that originally brought me there. Thank you to everyone who gave me those moments this summer.

Prophets

2008-10-20T07:17:00.000-04:00

Years ago I worked for Professor Albert Shapero, who occupied an endowed chair in the School of Business at The Ohio State University. He taught and researched small business, and his position was unique in that he didn't have a PhD in a business-related discipline. His degree was actually a Master's in Mechanical Engineering. He didn't have a PhD, but he did have a corner office overlooking the oval and his own assistant (me). That would be a feature of academia: "professors" who bring in money get perks.

Anyway, one day Professor Shapero said something to me that has resonated and has never seemed more true than it does today. He said that MBAs would ruin the world. Keep in mind that he saw aspiring MBAs every day. This was back around 1980, when a business education was what many students wanted, and an MBA seemed to be a guarantee of future success. To this day, liberal arts undergraduate degrees and the breadth of their scope are often denigrated.

Why what Professor Shapero said that day resonates, and I honestly am not sure if he meant it the way I am now understanding it, is that as I look around at the wreckage of a world economy, I see nothing more than an over-emphasis on narrow expertise that fails to see the bigger picture. And then there is also the emphasis on profits, paper profits. Whatever widget is being made, its quality and reason for existence are less important than what profit can be squeezed from it. Whatever the facts of a balance sheet, accounting machinations become more important than what the numbers truly reveal. From the early 1980s we easily move through two decades of mathematical models and paradigms so that in the end what is being sold doesn't even exist: credit default swaps among other derivatives of mortgage-backed securities and God knows what else that hasn't yet been discovered.

Two years ago another professor, Nouriel Roubini, was dismissed by his peers as too pessimistic when he predicted the economic collapse to which we all are witness:

"On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

What Professors Shapero and Roubini have in common is that both were basically outsiders. (I'm using the present tense here, but Professor Shapero died some time ago.) Shapero earned his position by doing innovative against-the-grain research that demonstrated the importance of small enterprise to capitalism. Roubini had a peripatetic youth and therefore brought an outsider perspective to his studies at Harvard and later to his research. What else they share is the use of subjective, non-technical ideas as they reach whatever conclusions they do. In other words, along with their understanding of innovative data-based ways of seeing the world, they also trust their gut. I bet that's characteristic of prophets.

"Us" and "Them"

2008-10-11T14:11:00.000-04:00

Us and Them

So, analyzing the way I think, which is based on what I believe I see, sometimes from this couch, sometimes out in the world, I notice that one big thing that gets to me is intentional, self-protective division, not "dissent", "division." It seems to me quite primitive to lump people into categories based on what we think we know of them. For some people, fear of others reaches such a level that anyone who does not fit into a very narrow definition of "us" is relegated to the category of "them," and is therefore suspect.

Long ago I realized that the concept of "judgment" as in judging other people and their choices and their lives doesn't work for me. It follows then that neither does the concept of "blame." My contention about both of those is that we can never know enough or go back far enough to establish cause to be absolutely sure that we are right. Oh, we may THINK we are right, and I have certainly been there, but years of looking back at situations with new information have shown me that I didn't know what I didn't know. Try doing a jigsaw puzzle that has no shape and no picture so you really don't know what pieces are missing.

If I'm not going to judge people and/or blame them, how am I going to get through a day that cries out for both of those just to make me feel comfortable? I can judge a situation, maybe, and I can hold people responsible, maybe, but even those are flawed endeavors. Sometimes, though, common sense demands that you judge risk and the likelihood that someone might put you at risk. However, I can live with those compromises for safety's sake.

I can't live with putting people in categories because they look a certain way or because some spinmeister makes a case or even because I see someone doing something I wouldn't. I don't know these people's hearts. I leave that to God. I don't know at all where they fit into His plan. One example that comes to mind is the hated atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, whom I know only from her writing and tv appearances, many times on Phil Donahue's show. (OMG, I still have the couch from those days too. Please don't judge me for having old stuff.) Anyway, I often thought that there was a possibility that O'Hair was walking a path that God had chosen for her, despite her rejection of Him and anyone's ideas about Him. He's a pretty clever deity. I wouldn't put it past Him to set up a sort of Devil's Advocate, love her cooperation in His set-up, and welcome her to heaven at the end. Who's to say? And that's my point. Who's to say?. But in certain circles, she definitely fell into the "them" category. I didn't like her personality, but so what?

As to blame, well, for some people there is no difference between guilt and responsibility. To me, the differences include intention and mental ability and physical condition and some others that we don't yet have the science to know. Do I think George W Bush and his administration are responsible for a lot of what the USA looks like now? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean I blame him. "We're tired of the blame game." Okay...no blaming, but what about responsibility? He didn't have the capacity to do a good job, maybe, but he chose to do it. In my mind he's not blameworthy for not knowing what he didn't know, but he is responsible for whatever conscious decisions he made. Had it all turned out better, the concept under discussion would be "praise" rather than "blame", but in either case he would be responsible.

Someone I know very well is serving time. He probably doesn't care whether he is blamed, and I think he probably wouldn't argue with those who call him whatever "them" name, but he does care about taking responsibility for what he did and trying to redeem himself. It's part of his faith walk. I get that. It's also part of his humanity.

If we are going to get along with each other in a world where many different interests must be served, we really need to figure out what concepts help us be our best selves, when someone is watching and when no one is. I vote we abandon judgment and blame and don't argue with the people who say we are practicing those. Lots of people don't think. "We" and "they" are easier for them. Maybe that's part of the plan for them.

I'm thinking of going negative.

2008-10-10T08:20:00.001-04:00

I'm thinking of going negative. Reading all this stuff about McCain's negative advertising, which is now 100% of his advertising, compared to Obama's maybe 35%, I see that the mistake I have made on the BT blogs is to not call attention to the facelifts and weight problems of many of my opponents there. It doesn't matter that I don't really know what they look like. What matters is that I knock them off message.

I heard Gov Sarah Palin, say "It's not negativity. It's truthfulness. And American voters deserve to know." She didn't say what it is that American voters need to know, just kind of left it open to question, planted that seed of doubt so to speak.

However, I'm not concerned with what American voters need to know anyway. I am not involved in a high-stakes political campaign. I live in a "red" state, which will pretty much give its electoral votes to John McCain no matter what I say. What I am concerned about is shaking people up so that they question their own sanity and hate my guts.

I know I swore off blogging at BT, but things change. "Big" people start pickin' on "little" people, and I can't take it. I think I've seen a couple of other sworn-offers there too. If that's the case, and if I offend you with my aggression, well, please understand: It's not negativity. It's truthfulness.

I feel like a ghost.

2008-09-29T02:08:00.000-04:00

I feel like a ghost. Maybe it's because of the fact that I was listening to "The Lovely Bones" through thirteen states, and so I've had the afterlife on my mind. But more likely it's because in all those places I have a history as a different person in a different body. I guess that's true of everybody every day, but somehow when you flit around and are in the early autumn Berkshires in the morning and at the still summer Jersey Shore by nightfall, the memories and sensations are not all in sync. So I feel a little off balance and out of my body. I feel as though I'm watching myself from somewhere not here.

Reunions, like the one that brought me North, bring up a lot of things. One of the nicest things that was said to me is also one of the things that has not meshed. Phil D remembered that when we walked down the aisle at our ninth grade graduation, I wore flats because I was a lot taller than he was, although he remembered it as his being a lot shorter than I was. I guess whoever is doing the remembering gets to make it about himself or herself. He remembered me as being kind for choosing the flats. Maybe. But knowing myself as I do, I'm thinking that at fifteen I was more concerned with not looking like a stringbean geek. The thing is that he's now taller than I am, and is in fact one of the best looking 68-year-olds I've seen. What's weird, though, is that in my mind he's still short. We get these ideas in our heads and they don't always go quietly.

And then there's me sitting at The Fireplace, so happy that it's still there and that the burgers are as good as they always were and that the music is familiar, and I am completely forgetting that I did not drive there in my father's 1950 Chrysler. I am oblivious of the fact that I am not wearing 22" waist Bermuda shorts and that the old lady hands that are playing with my soda straw are wrinkled.

And along the way there was me driving past the apartment I brought my firstborn home to and me taking the same route I took with my late lovey and people asking me about my brother and my parents and all these loved ones are gone. Except that they're really not gone because I remember them and they're with me as I travel around. So with their spirits close by and my sense of a self that doesn't really fit this time and place, I feel as though I am every age and free to roam the world untethered to it. It's not a bad feeling, being a ghost.

50 years later

2008-09-19T23:38:00.000-04:00

Today my "couch" has been the leather seat of my car as I traveled to Round One of a three-day 50th high school reunion. Since I am skipping Rounds Two, Three, Four, and Five, which involve two different country clubs and a football game and some formalities at the school, tonight will have to do it for me. And it was just enough. I left happy for the chance to make contact, probably for the last time, with people who really knew me when. I got to tell a few people I loved them then and still do.

What I had not expected was the almost masquerade quality of the beginning interactions. "Who are you?" isn't far from the "Who are you supposed to be?" we asked at annual Hallowe'en parades during our school years. It's probably better not to get too far into the weeds about existential identities or costumed identities, but when you know what people looked like at five and twelve and fifteen and eighteen, their seventh decade appearance seems like a disguise. In some you see something familiar in the eyes, or in a particular facial expression, but in others there's just nothing recognizable.

The name tags help, but the reality is that most of us need big print at this age, so now we're leaning toward someone's chest to read the name rather than ask it. And of course there are the ringers, the ones who never were in our class but who married into it or are just dating it (yes, even at nearly 70).

For me, the evening started when I hit the Garden State Parkway around the Oranges and caught that chemical whiff that I remembered from many trips home from the Jersey Shore. A few minutes later, and I was no longer driving. When I saw the Bloomfield-Belleville Exit (150?) in my mind I gave the wheel to my 1958 model boyfriend, Eddie B. I met Eddie at the shore the week after graduation and we raced up and down the GSP for most of the summer until he left for Great Lakes Naval Base and eventually Viet Nam. If my parents knew.... But Eddie had a '54 Ford convertible with a '57 TBird engine and it was made to race.

Later I checked into my hotel, which happens to be a very short distance from the memorial park where my parents and grandparents are buried. A good thing, because if I get creamed on Butcher Boulevard Route 17 (called that even in the 1950s and much more exciting today), they can just toss my remains over the fence. Seriously, if people think that 278 has its moments and that Atlanta's Spaghetti Junction is a challenge, they need to try getting to something necessary, like their hotel, by crossing a lane of cars streaming off the GSP at some ridiculous speed and 2 feet apart. I am too old for this. The nerves may not be the first to go, but they're high on the list.

A View

2008-09-13T19:00:00.001-04:00

Okay...this blog is A view not The View, so what I say represents MY view of the world, mostly from my beloved couch. I don't answer to Disney or anybody. I don't have to say anything to keep my job. What I say is what I think.

But I am not an oracle. I don't know everything, and most importantly I DON'T KNOW WHAT I DON'T KNOW. Too bad The View-er so many love to hate, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, hasn't learned that yet. Too bad she will have to live with an archive of know-it-all remarks that remind me of myself in my twenties. It's immaturity aka lack of experience talking. Not that every young person is immature. Not at all. But there are some who have no idea that they are looking at the big, wide world through a pinhole and making judgments accordingly. What's that old adage, something like "better to keep quiet and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and relieve all doubt"?

Hasselbeck is a beautiful fresh-faced young woman and she has parlayed that into a career that encourages her to speak when she would be better served to just sit and smile and wear the clothes. Instead, she takes firm positions on complicated social and political issues and gets all knitty-browed and fast-talking if, say, logic or facts are introduced. What usually gets to me is the attitude rather than the statement. I want to tell her to go to her room. If an aggressive attitude doesn't work to win the skirmish, then next comes the victim role, and we have poor widdle Bessy whining that others get more time to speak. Hello! There are often four people in opposition to what she's trying to sell. For good reason.

Furthermore, I don't accept the maternal authority of a woman who has been in that role for less than four years. You are not an authority on mothering until you have gone through more stages than colic and potty-training. If you're going to start a sentence with the phrase "as a mother," please make clear that you are speaking for yourself and not necessarily for all mothers.

There is no maternal global view. There are successful mothers and unsuccessful ones. There are involved mothers and uninvolved ones. There are sick mothers and healthy ones. There are rich mothers and poor ones. It goes on and on. I would say the same about fathers. Love your family, do the best you can to be a good parent, live and let live.

'Twas ever thus

2008-09-13T10:17:00.000-04:00

Long before my bottom wore this couch threadbare, it sat at a desk every day. One of those days began with a sobbing phone call from my third daughter: “Mooooooooooooooooommmy! I only got three raisins in my cereal!” Recognizing that the immediate problem was with the raisin bran people, the mommy part of me knew that there was a child at home who needed not an explanation of how products shift in boxes but reassurance of how much her mother cared about her even though she wasn’t there that very minute. And that’s a snapshot of the life of a working mother in a job where maybe there’s not much flexibility. Working on an assembly line, say, or in a retail job wouldn’t have allowed even the kind of response I gave. Now, for good or ill, we see clerks and bus drivers handling family stuff on their cell phones, but in 1974 only the bigwigs had mobile phones.

There was another memorable moment at that same job. It was when a man wearing gore-stained overalls entered my fancy office to collect the $5 he grudgingly agreed to accept for the removal of the carcass of a horse that was dear to my family. The backstory is that my young teen second daughter was given a horse by her father, my ex, and she stabled it a couple of miles from our suburban house. One of her friends took the horse for a ride, without permission or notice, and rode it where she shouldn’t have and they were struck by a car. The friend suffered an ankle injury, but the horse was done-for. Called to the scene, we watched Dusty die where he fell. One, but only one, of the horrors of this event was that his remains were visible from the road and the schoolbus passed them the next morning. Determined to rectify that situation before the afternoon trip of the schoolbus, I sat at my desk making phone calls and finally got this guy from a rendering company to agree to remove poor Dusty that day. “I reckon it’s gonna cost you an extra $5,” he said. Relieved, I said, “Fine.” “Leave it on the horse,” he said. And then I begged. So that’s why he brought his own carcass into my office for the $5.

This was me running my family from my desk. Four kids in three different schools, one only half-day. It was an intricate schedule, but I had been a stay-at-home mom for thirteen years, and I could type only 43 words a minute, and I was lucky to be hired at all. Thank God they thought a "housewife" might be able to keep the coffee pot clean and filled as needed. Thank God they thought I had receptionist looks.

So I can see the problems of having a job and a family but ‘twas ever thus. Not long ago I read a journal of a midwife, Martha Ballard, who battled life and institutionalized sexism in 18th century Maine. She herself gave birth to nine children and buried three of them. She coped with aging and loneliness and deteriorating family relationships as her husband was imprisoned for not being able to collect local taxes.

We should not underestimate nor especially applaud the capabilities of women. Without its women, this country would likely not have been settled as it was. And yet discrimination against women still exists. I may not like Governor Sarah Palin or her politics or her mouth, but I say to her, “You go, girl. You have every right to fulfill any dream you’re willing to work toward.” If it takes having a running mate hide behind your skirts, well it’s nothing new for a man to do that.

Remembering

2008-09-11T13:37:00.001-04:00

This is a day for remembering. Of course, when you get near seventy like me, your calendar has many dates that are for remembering. But this is one of the ones that people talk about. Where were you? How did you feel?

I watched a lot of September 11, 2001 on tv, from this very couch. I remember walking over to the beach and on the way talking with one of the golf rangers whom I already knew and who is now gone himself. He had not yet heard the news. I remember my concern for my Atlanta daughter, Valerie, who had been at the Jersey shore and whose schedule I didn't know. Would she have been flying out of Newark that day? In those first hours, there was so much confusion about missing planes and where they were from and where they had been headed. And videos of the towers kept playing and replaying all day.

It turned out that my child and her sister, whom I knew would not be flying, were watching the Manhattan smoke from a New Jersey beach. Valerie started doing interviews via her cell phone from there, and later was sent into the city to cover whatever Atlanta connections there might be. She stayed there for over a week, and I am still concerned about what she might have breathed in during that time, although no symptoms have appeared.

I remember the steady stream of names and obituaries, some from the town where I grew up, in the NYTimes and the Record during the weeks and months that followed, and my own trip to Manhattan to do the only thing I could do other than pray: spend money in NYC. There were impromptu memorials everywhere. From my hotel room, I could see one at the Engine Company near Madison Square Garden.

Watching a replay of 9/11 videos today, I was even more horrified than I was the first time I saw them, less shocked but more horrified. Seeing how the events of that day have been used to justify yet more killing, I say, "Dear God, forgive us our unwillingness to love each other." And I say, "Rest in peace and freedom all of you who died as a result of such irrational and godless willfulness. All of you."

Lizards of Satan

2008-09-09T22:50:00.000-04:00

Along with several other partisans, Karen Hughes, former Bushie spokesperson (as opposed to spokesmodel...meeeow!) is valiantly trying to defend Governor Sarah Palin’s experience as a small-town mayor. Now really! If we were talking about a Democrat would Hughes be so enthusiastic about the myriad duties involved in holding that office? I don’t think so. I can hear it now. She would find some way to disparage, denigrate, diminish the very thing that she is now veeeerrrrry seriously calling “the most demanding job there is.” How many of those are there, I wonder. Most demanding jobs, I mean. Naturally motherhood is one of them, when a politician is appealing to mothers. Likewise schoolteaching, when a politician is appealing to education enthusiasts.

Spokespersons are often rewarded for speaking. Consequently they will say ANYthing.
Experience matters except when it doesn’t. Personal attacks are off-limits except when they aren’t. Principled stands are important except when they’re not. It’s a bi-partisan game. Guns for hire.

What really gets to me is the sanctimony that goes with some of the positive spin. There’s often a hint of “eeeeeeew” at people like me who might be open to ideas like gay marriage or abortion rights or any of a panoply of notions that do not fit “the cultural conservative agenda.” The sanctimonious types are always dressed very carefully, with hair and concealer and bright smiles in place. They say things like “I’m troubled” to indicate something negative about an opponent. They wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouthful of it. And yet these people are willing to send our best and bravest off to hell-holes of prisons and battlefields, where there is plenty of shit and blood and really “eeeeeeew-y” matter. These are the same people who want someone ELSE to watch over a family member on a ventilator for decades if need be. Will these morality types be changing any of the associated dirty linen? Of course not. Eeeeeeew!

How much does it pay to be one of these career spokespersons, I wonder. I heard the other day that a good speechwriter can make about $175,000 a year, so I’m thinking that a good talker could probably do pretty well too.

No way to tell what a blogger like TUBOB can make inventing “facts” like his “Lizards of Satan” spoof, but I’m guessing it’s less. I don't see a big difference between his contribution and Hughes' though.

Stop me before I blog again! Somebody! Please!

2008-09-05T12:53:00.000-04:00

Hi, my name is Pea B. and I'm a blogaholic. This past week I've had a major slip, followed by a minor one this morning.

I've been working on a project that involves a bunch of spreadsheets and other docs and I found myself taking breaks by visiting the BT website. Last Friday, the day just got out of control, and late in the day I found myself in the bathing suit I had put on in the morning, long before my 8:55 a.m. post here, never having swum or eaten, surrounded by paper and other litter. Something about the party conventions and the nomination of Sarah Palin unleashed an interest in arguing that I haven't felt for a while, and at this moment I remember hardly any of it. I can't say what exactly got to me. Coulda been the moon phase or anxiety about weather uncertainty. In my rational moments I see the futility of these back-and-forths. Maybe it was different in the early days of BT when many more people seemed to be reading, but now it's like howling at the wind. And no one hears the howls because they're howling themselves. It's a complete waste of time. I see that.

So yesterday I took the results of my spreadsheet project to a meeting and of course discovered a rather embarrassing and obvious error AT THE MEETING. Chastening myself for mindlessly ordering my priorities, I vowed to get a grip. Maybe I could just lurk. But I didn't even plug in the computer yesterday just to be safe. After my meeting I went shopping and to the library. Got the car washed. Took the recyling. Acted normal.

This morning, however, I'm reading and recognizing the virtue of my decision not to log in, when up pops a post from JoePofKP from India, and I couldn't ignore it because after all he was agreeing with me and that doesn't happen too often (on the BT boards anyway). My response to him was the minor slip after an entire week of major slippage. Please, please, please if anyone reads this and happens to spot me or one of my sockpuppets on the BT site, please, please, please embarrass me publicly by calling me on it. Unless of course you don't dare log in either.

Uranus

2008-08-30T12:49:00.000-04:00

I really have to do something about my hearing. I’ve always thought it was great but lately there have been signs of trouble. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I saw a tv commercial and I could have sworn they said the bagged product was an “incredible nut sack.” I couldn’t believe it. And I shouldn’t have, because shortly thereafter I saw the same product advertised in a magazine and I very clearly read the words “incredible nut snack.” Oops. Thank You Lord for the gift of patience with the world so that I didn’t get too undone with the degradation of society and the media and standards and everything.

And now, I’m innocently listening to NPR, and I hear a caller-in introduced as Anal Stopper. What? Were his parents intentionally abusive? Oops, again. His name is Emil Stopper.

Apparently aging attacks not only one’s physical senses, but it messes with your mind so that you’re hearing things at about 4th grade amusement level. Lettuce, turnip and pea.

Did I tell ya to stay tuned?

2008-08-30T09:23:00.001-04:00

Did I tell ya to stay tuned. Geez. I had no idea what I was saying. As my mother often predicted, I am laughing on the other side of my face. Talk about shaking things up. I have so many thoughts about the Sarah Palin nomination for VP that I don't know where to start, and I don't think I can articulate them anyway.

Obviously, she is an attractive candidate. She looks good. Her life looks good. She handles adversity and opposition. She may turn out to be a superstar in an Annie Oakley cum Phyllis Schlafly kind of way. But what a shocker!

We have this huge country, home to 300 million people of all persuasions, ethnicities and situations, and we choose a leader whose experience and education are very narrow at best? It could work if she keeps things simple, which is the only way it WILL work if she ultimately becomes President. Reduce problems to the shortest statement, reduce government to bare bones, entertain no fancy innovation or strategy or goal. Just say "yes" or "no" and that will be that. It could work. It's just not what we were thinking.

There is still some hilarity though. Watching the tv talkers actually have to deal with a different scenario than the ones they have been debating is fun, although I do feel for their discomfort. Well, not ALL of their discomfort. Some discomfort I am enjoying.

I'm gonna have to let this play out a little before I decide what I really think. I had sworn off the Sunday talk shows, but you know I will be on the couch tomorrow for most of the day. Don't call me.

O, the hilarity!

2008-08-29T09:17:00.000-04:00

So it’s 8:55 a.m. and I’m thinking “I have to get off this couch and get busy,” and anyway next up on MSNBC is Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter and commentator of whom I am not fond. Among those who waste as much time as I do paying attention to the political scene, she is often remembered as the author of the George H.W. Bush line: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” God, she’s looking old, and we know the makeup people worked on her because the unkind floor director gave us a shot of her in the beauty chair.

Noonan goes into her predictable but not wrong IMO critique of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech last night, and then Andrea Mitchell (everyone knows she’s married to Alan Greenspan, right?) disagrees a little. So Noonan backs off a little but then she describes her notion of what the speech was not. She says it was not the usual litany of woes of a person who was not born with a silver spoon (or foot, if we want to recall old convention speeches) in his mouth. Her description is along the lines of “He was born with two heads and one of them was used for bowling......” and then something about a mother whose foot exploded and so on. And I'm thinking, Damn, she’s good when she’s unleashed and not trying to play some role and not simpering and flirting. But both Mika (Brzezinski) and Joe (Scarborough) are by this time face down on the table and laughing uproariously. They, like me, are probably sleep deprived and, worse for them, they are still in Denver, broadcasting from a train station and they started two hours before I even woke up.

It was a great break from the endless speculation about who will be the Republican pick for Vice President. Stay tuned.

Who's In, Who's Out

2008-08-28T10:45:00.000-04:00

Who eats, who starves.

One of the metamessages of the coverage of the Democratic National Convention is the rearranging of the pecking order among politicians and those who make money off them. Of course, the media campaigns about blame and power have raged for months in both parties, but this week a lot has been made of the passing of the torch, the changing of the guard, the transfer of the gavel from Clinton people to Obama people. There are some generational and racial aspects to all of this, but in the main it's just what happens in politics.

Among the visible journalists there have been some handoffs and some fading stars too. Oblivion awaits some, and not a moment too soon in my opinion. I will not miss Tucker Carlson, the rich kid know-it-all magpie who was told, accurately in my opinion, by Jon Stewart that he and other Crossfire-ites were hurting the country. On Fox, new old names, fading names it appears, are Karl Rove, Lanny Davis and Howard Wolfson. None of them has a reason to advocate for better governance. As losers in the game of politics, they mostly have reasons to advocate for anything that will put food on their own tables. Rising stars are beautiful young black women, especially those with unpredictable political opinions. The media's idea of diversity and a nod to change.

We should not be confused by the talking points and the ideology. The drama is not about making a better country or about democracy or liberty. As often as “the American people” are referenced in political discourse, they really are an afterthought. They are extras in the drama that is about who decides what. Did we not see that play out in the tragedy of Katrina?

Partisan politics involves picking a side and staying with it and lying your ass off if necessary to make sure your side isn’t blamed or bested in the public square. Participants may start with ideals and scruples, but few maintain them in the rough and tumble of back-scratching and deal-making. That’s why “values politics” so often goes awry. The very idea of trying to adhere to any religious ideal while dealing for the power to promote those ideals is unworkable. The result is some deliberate obfuscation where even negative things are framed in positive terms. The term “pro-life” signifies no reverence for any life except the unborn. There is nothing wrong with that position, but the naming is untruthful and there goes the idealism. Much more accurate would be to call a position that is obviously against abortion while it may be in favor of killing enemies and criminals “anti-abortion”, but that wouldn’t sell.

And it’s all about sell. If nothing is sold, no one eats.

Maybe it's not that bad

2008-08-27T10:35:00.000-04:00

I think it was Monday when a bag of DOVE® Silky Smooth Dark Chocolate Promises (with almonds) got into my house. Now it's Wednesday morning, and I'm looking at the Nutrition Facts label on the empty bag. It says that a serving size is 5 pieces and that there are 6 servings per container for a total of 210 calories per serving. Well, I'm already a bit relieved. I thought there were way more than 30 pieces in the bag. Already I'm seeing the benefits of inflation as all good things are coming in smaller and smaller packages. It's not particularly good news that 120 calories of the 210 are fat calories, but then again my post-menopausal experience is that they ALL end up as fat anyway.

So I guess the fact to be faced is that within maybe 36 hours I have consumed an extra 1260 calories, which means about 15 extra miles of walking, ideally not up and down the aisles of a supermarket, where I got into trouble in the first place. "Buy one, get one free" is not always your friend.

But maybe it's not so bad. After all, the chocolate was the dark kind, full of heart healthy nutrients, and it contained almonds, a bonus in the health department. And because every piece was wrapped in lovely foil with an inspirational message on the inside, I have the start of a nostalgic tin-foil ball.

In random order (because I ate them in random order) for anyone who wants guilt-free and pleasure-free inspiration, here are the messages:

*Enjoy every day as though it was a spa day. (two of these)
*Take an extra deep breath whenever you need it. (two of these)
*Share a chocolate moment with a friend.
*Let your mind wander and dream. (four of these)
*Be a dark chocolate diva just for a moment.
*Take a moment just for yourself today. (two of these)
*Start a good habit today.
*Share our similarities, celebrate our differences. (three of these)
*A family that laughs together stays together. (three of these)
*Be good to yourself today.
*Do a little more each day than you think you possibly can. (three of these)
*Love is not getting but giving.
*Believe the best in others.
*Think of something that makes you laugh.
*Find little ways to make part of your day like a day off. (two of these)
*Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness. (two of these)
*Share your DOVE® Dark with someone you love.
(Really, that was the last one I randomly flattened and typed. I know. It seems like a cheesey product placement ad kind of thing, but maybe it's a message from the Universe.)

Oh dear! I got chocolate on my keyboard.

In Memory of Susan B

2008-08-26T12:08:00.000-04:00

The glass ceiling has another tiny ding in it. A week or so ago, my daughter was the only female to drive in a figure-eight schoolbus race at Columbus Motor Speedway in Ohio. Honestly, I didn't know about the figure-eight part, which of course means collisions, but I wasn't crazy about the whole idea anyway. However, when our "children" reach forty, I think it's time to let them make their own decisions. She wasn't the first one eliminated from the race and lasted a decent (I guess it's decent...what do I know about these things?) two minutes and came home unburned and unbloodied having had more fun than she has had in a while. And oh, yeah, it turns out that she is the first female EVER to have driven in those races, at least if we can trust the memories of those who frequent such events. I doubt she has set a trend though. The whole thing does raise a question in my mind about why there have been so few female race car drivers and why my child's desire to participate in last Saturday's event was so unusual.

Most people know I'm a feminist, and I define feminism as the belief that females experience the world differently than males and that their experiences and views are worth noting, not as "other" but as "equal." Today, August 26, some will celebrate Women's Equality Day. Fine. But there's still a ways to go.

In a local newspaper, "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2" was recently reviewed thusly: "I've sat through plenty of chick flicks and I have actually liked some of them. But this movie, my friends, is poorly constructed and beyond any positive comments. It's an estrogen fest, which made it painful for me to watch. Only a female could appreciate this movie. Let's just leave it at that." Please know that I have no opinion about this movie or the original "Pants" movie, but I do find these remarks to be condescending toward chicks, estrogen producers, and females, especially considering the preponderance of testosterone-oriented entertainment that saturates the culture.

It’s a downhill and progressively dirty slide from the place where we find "the little woman" on her pedestal to the dark place where human female parts are used for whatever purpose or gratification is desired. Decried by President Bush, sex tourism in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, is still attracting males from all over the world, including the USA, and still involves children, many of whom come from desperately poor families. Rape as a weapon of intimidation is still common in war. Penises and other objects are currently being used to intimidate, degrade, and violate females of all ages, in the Congolese battle for power and natural resources.

Along the way there are attitudes like the one expressed in the movie review, that somehow women have different (and less worthy) standards than men. The less malign of attitudes and behaviors tend to be found in Western societies, but by no means is the United States of America a leader among Western countries. The USA was later than many countries in allowing women the vote, which of course means that all decisions made before that time, including those that claimed "states rights" did not necessarily represent the views of at least half the population. Eight-eight years after women gained suffrage, we still are outnumbered by men at all levels of government. At the present time, the right of a woman to make medical and ethical decisions about her body is in question.

It is a sad fact that no limitation on women's ability to fully express their gifts and desires could happen without the cooperation of other women. When we derive our power from males, when we judge each other, when we sell each other out, we are part of the problem, not part of the solution that our daughters and sisters are seeking and that the whole world needs.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Susan B. Anthony was born February 15, 1820 in Adams Massachusetts. She was brought up in a Quaker family with long activist traditions. Early in her life she developed a sense of justice and moral zeal.

In 1869, the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Anthony, was formed to agitate for an amendment to the Constitution. This amendment was presented by Anthony and her successors to forty consecutive sessions of Congress. It repeatedly failed to pass. National attention and support came to the movement when Anthony was arrested and tried for voting in the 1872 Presidential election.

After Anthony's death in 1906, a phrase from her last suffrage speech, "Failure is Impossible," became the motto of young suffragists. Fourteen years later, in 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified. Women had won the right to vote.

It was nice

2008-08-25T10:25:00.001-04:00

It was nice while it lasted.

I am on vacation!

2008-08-05T13:05:00.001-04:00

I am on vacation! It's August, and I am on vacation. Of course, that statement made out loud invites the question "How could anyone tell? You're retired." OK, that's fair. But here's the thing: The United States Congress is on vacation, so there's less coverage of its shenanigans. The View is on vacation, so there are obviously no "hot topics" for me to consider. No sensible people are playing golf, so any guarding of my territory would involve confrontation with a crazy person, which I try to avoid. My job of keeping up with things from my couch is therefore less demanding. Ergo, I am on vacation.

What that means is that I wear bathing suits instead of underwear and read books instead of newsletters, junk mail and anything that really has no appeal. Because I haven't bothered to replace my dead answering machine, I will respond only to urgent family messages left on my cell phone and may or may not answer my land line. I will avoid anything that smacks of "getting things done," including making appointments or dealing with maintenance issues...unless the A/C or fridge breaks down.

I may thumb through magazines, but I won't read diet articles or celebrity nonsense. I have no need to "keep up" this month. I may not even do my daily Sudoku. I will swim and ride my bike, but to heck with the weeding and cleaning. I will eat out. I like the new Panera's, and I may go there every day for lunch, unless I eat at the Beach Club or don't bother to eat at all. My MP3 will provide a nicely portable soundtrack for my vacation. If I need to slow the pace, I may zone out with Turner Movie Channel, which I did last August, when it was added to our cable line-up. Last night they featured Marie Dressler, and I really got into the simple cinema of the 1930's.

I am on vacation.

Curb? What curb?

2008-08-04T10:37:00.000-04:00

Can we talk? I have noticed a delicacy in some people's speech that I think really needs to be addressed. You hear a lot of this caution about offensive speech on call-in information-type shows on NPR, particularly if the shows concern animals or gardens. We're not talking Howard Stern here. You get the sense that some people don't want to admit the existence of bodily waste, not only with respect to animals, but definitely with respect to human life. I'm thinking that in some segments of society there's a real reluctance to admit how bodies work, even with the constant reminders we all naturally receive. Maybe this is why prunes are now known as "dried plums."

And yet a significant amount of attention and speculation was given the recent problem with "the facilities" on the Space Shuttle, not to mention the many ads on tv and elsewhere about bathroom emergencies and how to prevent them. There's definitely societal ambivalence around this topic. Some people are very concerned with being judged "not nice" if they speak even appropriate truths, while at the other end of the continuum are those who seize on the possible shock value of anything to do with excrement. And I just suddenly remembered an internal cleansing infomercial that was shown on WTOC the other day. Those men had no compunctions about going all the way there in description and discussion. I was horribly fascinated by their daring until I found the remote.

But the following is mostly for the NPR-info-call-in-type people: It is very, very rare for dogs and cats to "use the rest room". They take care of their needs in places that they choose, and few are instinctively drawn to tile and chrome. Many just relieve themselves out in the open in front of God and everybody. We all know what is being discussed, and in this age of graphic sex tapes and all kinds of out-there description, why can't we just admit that our pets need to urinate or defecate? Or take the "nice" way and say they need to relieve themselves? Curbing one's dog means guiding Rover to the edge of the street so he can do what he's called to do and one can clean up after him and no hallowed grass or tree is threatened. If we are talking about doggy relief, the curbing part doesn't work in a sentence like, "Please don't curb your dog on the beach" for the simple reason that streets and curbs aren't typical beach features. In fact, if you consider that the verb "to curb" by itself is synonymous with "to limit", there is every reason to curb one's dog on the beach.

Rumble, rumble, toil and trouble

2008-08-01T13:04:00.000-04:00

The neighborhood I live was "settled" in the early 1970's. I think it's going to be really nice if we ever get it finished. Once again I'm feeling the much-too-familiar rumble and vibration of heavy equipment. There is the sound of big stuff happening. I have no idea what is left to re-do, except my house of course and a few others that are too far away to be a disturbance. I am an update hold-out, as are only a few other people farther down the street who have also lived in the neighborhood for a long time. Yesterday, I spoke briefly with one, and I saw my future. She was in her robe at 2:00 p.m., and getting her mail with difficulty and a cane. When I asked her how she was, she said, "I'm ninety, you know."

For over four years, during boom times, my front view was of pickup trucks and dumpsters and, naturally, port-a-pottys. The lot across the street from me, which had always been a buffer in that it was intended to screen a large house on an adjoining lot, now has been developed. Oh, well. Divorce happens. Property is sold. Mcmansions are built (and abandoned as the bubble starts losing air). No one did anything that isn't within their rights. I'm clear on that. But updated codes being what they are, this large and elevated new house and its construction constituted a daily infringement on my right to privacy and peaceable enjoyment. Of course, one house didn't take four-years-plus to build. There was also the renovation, once, of the house next door to me, and before that there was the renovation, twice, of the house next door to that. There were others. And at least two swimming pools were dug. So we had dirt and dust and crashing and vibration. And, oh yes, the sound of AM talk radio against the rhythms of Latino dance music.

During much of this time I have been plotting my own revenge renovation. It started with a much-needed redesign of my "master suite." That design has taken a while, and as I contemplate the possibilities, the scope has grown. My house is one of those older, low-to-the-ground slab sprawlers. Why not go up, I say? Don't I need more storage? Why not a loft in the living room, just for books? In fact, why not use that loft as access to an expanded attic over the bedrooms. So now I'm drawing a new facade, which then takes me to the design of a breezeway to my new two-car-plus garage. The old enclosed carport would make a great poolhouse with a workout room and bath. Who will disagree? Did I mention the outdoor kitchen, where I probably won't cook any more than I do in the indoor one, but while we're making noise and raising dust, let's go for it.

Considering the pace at which I accomplish anything to do with home improvement, unless I can do it myself with simple tools, this is a pretty ambitious revenge plan, but it makes me feel good for a while. So humor me. And I might get it done. I'm quite a ways from ninety.

We all scream

2008-07-30T14:41:00.000-04:00

Amazon Valley Chocolate.....Fleur De Sel Caramel.....Toasted Coconut Sesame Brittle.....Brazilian Acai Berry Sorbet.....Hawaiian Lehua Honey & Sweet Cream.....Pomegranate Chip.....Pomegranate & Dark Chocolate Bars (3 count).

We're talking ice cream of course. This morning's Harris-Teeter ad features a full page of pictures and description of Häagen-Dazs pints. "Explore the World One Pint At A Time." I'm not a particular fan of Häagen-Dazs. It's a made-up name, it's a little too rich for my taste, it's a little too pricey to be worth the cost to me when there are others I enjoy just as much. If I'm going for "super premium," I'm probably going for Ben & Jerry or Dove. But even with all that, I wouldn't bet that I won't find some in my grocery cart tomorrow.

Thursday, after all, IS Senior Discount Day at H-T, so that means that the advertised price of $3.99 a pint, which they say will save me "at least 70 cents", will be discounted another 5 per cent.

But it's not only about the money. The sugar, the fat, the calories! I could pass on my nightly glass of wine in favor of a light beer and save about 70 calories or I could go for a vodka and soda and save even a few more. Probably, though, I'd have to go on the wagon for at least a week before those sacrificed calories would equate the ones in the pint of ice cream. But pomegranate chip! Maybe I'll just do the bars.

How come the berries that are a much better deal just don't speak to me the way ice cream in July does?

1919

2008-07-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

On Sunday night, CBS reran a Cold Case episode that was set in 1919 and involved women who were struggling to change their lives by meeting and organizing. Since by that year, the USA was well into the battle for women's suffrage, the emphasis on that part of the story seemed a little fanciful, but then Cold Case has never impressed me with its writing. There's something about the mood that I like though.

Anyway, my mind was kind of wandering, and as the episode unfolded and the characters of a maid and her daughter emerged, I started to think about my mother, who was born in 1913 and her mother, who was born about twenty years earlier in Germany. I don't remember ever having spoken with either of them about the right to vote and what it meant to them. My mother was very political, and so I guess I just took her voting for granted. My grandmother, though, wasn't like that. As I think about it, I realize that she may never have become a citizen. My Scottish father was naturalized and voted, but I can imagine that for my grandma citizenship and voting might not have happened.

Whatever her political situation and views, in 1919 my grandma had other problems. She was divorced with a child to support. To hear my mother tell it, the two of them bounced around living with other family members and somehow managing. That can be daunting in these more modern times, but nearly a hundred years ago, and in a world torn by war, it really must have taken some guts. At least my grandma had a trade. She was a weaver, and at that time textile factories were big in NJ, which hasn't been true for decades.

So she was a young mother facing all kinds of challenges, and I'm thinking that marching for suffrage wasn't a priority. I'm hoping she at least approved of the women who made it a priority, but maybe not. I wish, wish, wish that I could sit down with my grandma and her six sisters and talk it all out. The lone male sibling, Uncle Augie, wouldn't need to be there, but likely his domineering wife, Emma, would have something to say. I thought I knew them all so well, but as time passes, the pieces of their lives fit together differently. In fact, somewhere in the recent past it came to me that Aunt Gert probably had more than a platonic friendship with her friend Margie. It's obvious now, but for all those years, nothing was ever said.

In the end, my grandma and mother were rescued by a kind man I always knew as my grandfather. What's interesting to me is that all throughout my mother's family, women were strong and did things. And that was true even after being "rescued." There was no sitting around and being pampered. Maybe that's a hallmark and a benefit of being working class. Yes, there are tough times and challenges, but few hot house flowers emerge. Nothing builds self-esteem like overcoming adversity.

In an attempt to fight the anti-suffragists with humor, in 1915 Alice Duer Miller, writer, poet and suffragette wrote Why We Don't Want Men to Vote.
* Because man's place is in the army.
* Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.
* Because if men should adopt peaceable methods women will no longer look up to them.
* Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms, and drums.
* Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them unfit for government.

On August 26, 1920, American women joined many female voters around the world when a constitutional amendment was adopted upon ratification by state of Tennessee, granting full woman suffrage in all states of the United States.

Nicholas

2008-07-25T23:38:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I have company on my couch, and my favorite companion is my grandson, Nicholas, who sits beside me, sucking his thumb, all entangled with his "Puppy", a sort of stuffed animal security blanket. If Nicholas is wearing his Bob the Builder toolbelt, a little padding makes things more comfy. He hardly ever gets to watch tv, so sitting next to his Mama-aw and watching Noggin is a treat for him, but it's an even bigger treat for me, especially now that we're well past The Wiggles. We might discuss what we see, but we might just sit there quietly and enjoy the relaxation of it.

Nicholas is my third grandson, but the only one I've gotten to spend time with. My first one was placed for adoption, which was a right and courageous decision for his mother, my youngest daughter, to make. My second grandson died at twenty-nine days, and I will never, ever forget what it felt like to have his tiny lifeless body placed in my arms by his mother, my eldest daughter. I said to her then, "Nothing worse will ever happen to you," and I found out the truth of that when she herself died the next year. So sitting quietly and enjoying the precious gift of three-and-a-half-year-old Nicholas is indescribable pleasure for me. I had all but given up the possibility and then there was his perfect miracle birth to my forty-two-year-old second daughter and her husband of less than a year.

And he is funny, as most kids are. His view of the world is quirky. A couple of days ago, after taking a twenty-minute nap, he decided that he had rested enough. My daughter said to him, "Well, Nicholas, that nap wasn't long enough," to which he replied, "But I started it yesterday, so it's really very long." How do you argue with that? But then again, I don't have to argue with him or discipline him or do anything but sit beside him and love him while he sucks his thumb.

Oy, gevald!

2008-07-24T10:26:00.000-04:00

It's a bad sign when I start cursing in Yiddish. I'm not even Jewish. I've worked for a lot of Jews though, everything from a Presbyterian minister to a Seventh Avenue schmate (rag, meaning fashion in this case) company with a nuclear physicist and a business professor in between. I don't remember where I learned the word "facocta", and I don't know whether that's the way it's supposed to be spelled. I just know that I heard myself muttering last night and going on and on in pseudo-Yiddish with a "schmietnik" thrown in from time to time. I just learned that last one from an ESL student. It's Polish for "garbage."

This tsuris (trouble, pain) is all about the state of the financial system in this country and actually in the world. I am grateful, however, for the nick-of-time reminder that indeed one has to look out for one's self; that no one, even if they're paid to do it, is as good at looking out for me as I am. That is scary because I'm not that smart and I am having more and more trouble keeping up with the increasing complications of daily life. But I didn't lose $8.9 Billion... Billion!... as Wachovia just reported they did. So take that, you facocta idiots! I can learn to understand the TEDspread global credit risk indicators. True, I'd rather be thinking about a new BEDspread, but I'm a grown up, and so I'll work with what we have, which is a facocta globalized credit mess, which affects everyone, young and old, rich and poor, interested or bored.

Unfortunately, the financial advice that's out there for the average DIY person isn't that great. It's all "Keep a three-month stash (of money) handy for emergencies;" "Try to negotiate better terms with your lenders;" "Cut up your credit cards," etc. Now they're adding some boilerplate commentary about the FDIC to quell the panicky feelings some have and to avoid any more IndyBank runs, but the utility of the advice for people who have enough money to be concerned with the FDIC limits isn't impressive.

If you are looking at foreclosure and bankruptcy, that three-month rainy day fund is probably gone or at least not happening now. Since it took me four transfers with lovely classical music on Hold to DEPOSIT money in a bank yesterday, I wonder how much patience it takes to find the one person who has not been layed off at Wachovia who might help you with your credit issue. And at a certain point, cutting up the cards is a meaningless gesture, because these days even American Express is imposing limits and lowering them if they feel the need.

I DID hear some useful advice this morning. Useful because it was direct and clear, not because I can use it. When Jean Chatzky, the financial guru who is cute but who has never told me anything I didn't already know, was pressed on "Morning Joe," she said that people should NOT deplete their 401Ks to forestall foreclosure or bankruptcy. Walk away from the house. And if you need to go bankrupt, at least know that retirement accounts, like IRAs and 401Ks, are exempt from bankruptcy claims.

That it's come to this. Facocta!

Of talking couches

2008-07-22T11:41:00.000-04:00

Oh, if this couch could talk. Let the word go forth that I will no longer be accepting phone calls late at night. "Yeah, right", sayeth the couch eyeing its dented cushion with the cordless next to it. The couch taketh this attitude because it knoweth that I am a total pushover, and some people would translate that word to mean "codependent." The fact that I am aware doesn't always keep me from indulging in habitual behavior. I like the feeling of being needed. That's the honest truth, and sometimes I go there when I shouldn't.

At one time in my life I knew so many alcoholics that I was sure I must be a carrier. And anyway it's only by God's grace that I am not one myself. I just don't have whatever the thing is that makes people crave a drink or forget how many they've had. I like a drink or two, but then I get sleepy. However, there is alcoholism in my birth family and my poor kids have it on both sides. Imagine Scottish, German and French forebears joined to Irish and Russians. The offspring should have been enrolled in some program at birth.

But if we're going wth the disease concept, and not everybody does, I do have the companion-to disease known as condependency. Not counting my first marriage, it started with my friend Sylvia, back in the late 70s. We had been friends for years and it took me a while to notice that the discussion of life issues, which we both had, was getting later and later at night, taking longer and longer, and becoming less and less comprehensible. I never wanted to hang up because it just seemed so cold to cut off the conversation. And after Sylvia there was Shirley, whose alcoholism was obvious to me almost from the beginning, but who had some life-threatening stuff going on. What it took me a while to "get" is that neither of these women, and they're only two of the ones who have had my ear, remembered much of what we had talked about anyway and that I was the one sitting at my desk at work emotionally and physically exhausted.

And now I'm doing it again. Geez, it's depressing to be this old and still doing the same unproductive stuff.

Fantasy Cooking

2008-07-19T14:05:00.000-04:00

Today on the couch I'm reading recipes, which I find is sometimes a good substitute for actually cooking. I used to be a decent cook, and I enjoy it, and I'm very pleased that all my kids are foodies. But I don't cook a lot any more because mostly I just don't feel like it and I don't have to. I don't consider grilling a piece of fish and making a salad to be "cooking." And I eat pretty well, considering. Right now, though, all I feel like eating is nachos made with Target's organic blue corn tortilla chips, the ones with flax seed, and some Paul Newman's peach salsa and some shredded cheese. Oh, yes, I indulge myself with the fatty cheese because the no-fat ones turn into a repulsive gum when they melt. See, I care. Add some nice fresh grapes or berries, and I consider myself fed.

The problem I have is that I am still clipping recipes. There is a kind of disconnect here because I know that the number of meals in my future isn't infinite and is probably less than 20,000, and it's obvious to me that almost none of the clipped recipes will ever be used. After all I have dozens of cookbooks, and unless I am baking I seldom follow a recipe anyway even when I do cook. I like the ideas, and the new ways of using ingredients and seasonings.

The other day in Harris-Teeter I heard a woman ask for Waverly crackers, saying that her recipe called for them specifically and wondering why that would be. Possibly because the Waverly people sponsored the recipe? I have never really been that kind of cook. I am horrified to hear that there are people who try to use olive oil with a boxed brownie mix, but I often get creative with appropriate substitutions, my idea of "appropriate" anyway. For me, it's never been worth a separate trip to the store to get that certain thing. Yes, there's a difference between bread crumbs and panko, but I can work with it.

Whatever is the reality, I still have to have a kitchen to house my cooking equipment and all its good karma. There is my lucky brownie pan, that is aluminum and that I have been using since it was my mother's and I was a teenager. Now it has a couple of pin holes in it, but, again, I can work with it. There is also my original newlywed (the first time) Tupperware measure and mix pitcher bowl. It too leaks, but it's good for dry ingredients. Et cetera, except that one newer thing, from a Pampered Chef party, where I just felt pressured to buy SOMEthing, has become essential. It's a 1-quart plastic pan with a handle and a vented lid and it's great for heating a meal for one person. That's what the reality of cooking is for me these days, but I'm never giving up on fantasy cooking.

I like Ohioans

2008-07-16T12:04:00.000-04:00

I like Ohioans, but I like them better when they are IN Ohio. The other day an ugly blue vannish kind of vehicle with a license plate surround that said something about Elyria was in front of me long enough for me to study it. I bet I even had time to check its tire pressures. Where are interesting bumper stickers when you need something to read? Nowhere in sight this time. We were both trying to turn left from Office Park (at the corner by Marley's) heading into Sea Pines. I had just come from Harris-Teeter and of course I had gelato on board. Since this huge thing was in front of me I couldn't gauge when or whether I would ever get across to the entrance lanes. We waited. We inched a little. We waited. And waited. Finally, nerve and inspiration moved these visiting Ohioans into, of course, the "residents" lane, which then caused yet another delay as the big, blue behemoth was sent across the "visitors" lane and into the Welcome Center. Big exhaling sigh.

I'm steaming as I finally see road space in front of me, and I'm reminding myself that we are all God's children and that we can't all live at the beach and that it's really silly to let stuff like that get to me and that anyway I'm not stuck behind them speeding along at 15 mph with my gelato turning to soup while they gawk at whatever. But multiply it by a bazillion times in summer after summer, and it gets old. And then of course there's the realization that this huge vehicle will be parking at the Beach Club, and that huge vehicles like that are the reason the parking lot was redone this past winter, wasting trees and also wasting a couple of months of easy access to the ocean. There's also the idea that an enormous vehicle can carry a lot of people who need a lot of food and so I know will see that thing again, or one like it, at Publix if I am foolish enough to go there on Saturday afternoon. I will be behind them in line, and with any luck they will have only one overflowing cart.

The thing is that Ohioans IN Ohio are much easier to get along with. I was there last week and feeling very happy for them about how high the corn was and how green the soy fields were and how nice some of the old-time architecture was. I even shopped among them with no issues. My youngest daughter and I had a wonderful al fresco dinner in Columbus' University area, surrounded by Central Ohioans who seemed to belong right where they were. We had cucumber martinis and some great small plates and we chatted with the people around us. Very enjoyable.

So how come these people seem so different once they get on the West Virginia Turnpike and start flying south, making time, oblivious to anything that resembles consideration?

Don't say much

2008-07-16T11:03:00.000-04:00

"Speak low, speak slow, don't say much. And don't wear suede shoes." Advice from The Duke. Michael Caine says that John Wayne conveyed those words of wisdom to him. The first part is totally in John Wayne character as we remember it, but the second sentence reveals a very practical side. The idea is that if a famous man is found standing at a urinal, the guy next to him forgets what he's doing and pees on the star's shoes. So suede is a mistake. Since Pat Boone of white buck shoe fame is scheduled to participate in this year's Celebrity Golf Tournament on Hilton Head, I'm hoping to get to ask him about what his experience has been. I'll let y'all know. We may never know about Elvis and the blue suedes. Probably they were dark blue though.

In other, much more disturbing, film news we learn that Senator Phil Gramm, the same Phil Gramm who is (or was) associated with the McCain for President team, tried unsuccessfully to invest in a movie called "Truck Stop Women" that carried the slogan "No Rig Was Too Big For Them To Handle." Uh-huh! However, all was not lost. Gramm DID later get to invest in something called "White House Madness" that included a portrayal of an unhinged and nude President Richard M Nixon. I need a shower.

OK, those are both from days of yore, but how about this: Yesterday, on The View there was an actress named Diane Farr, about whom I know (make that knew) nothing, who shared with us that her husband's Korean family and her Irish and Italian family don't have a lot in common. What she said about her in-laws is that Koreans tend to be insular, something about small countries thinking they could get their butt kicked by other countries, but that when her husband was thirty-five he got to make his own decision and anyway the in-laws were pleased that she had a working vagina. What? I'm thinking that maybe they'll forgive her because she IS pregnant with twins and that pregnancy apparently happened when their first child, who was conceived on their honeymoon, was ten months old. Man, I needed to know all that.

Nothing against old people

2008-07-15T10:12:00.000-04:00

Nothing against old people...because, after all, I are one...but let's be honest: Along with the wisdom gained from living a long time and going through some stuff, there can also be some mental drawbacks. Already this morning, I have forgiven myself for leaving a pair of shoes behind on my trip last week and have spent some time in a panic about my cell phone charger, which I found exactly where I knew it was. The way I get around a lot of the age-related absentmindedness is to work harder about being organized. I make more lists than I ever have. I make piles and place them where I can't possibly ignore them. OK, it didn't work that well to have my pile of A-priority items in the bathtub, but stuff happens, right? And everyone says that a good place to stow stuff in case of flood is in something waterproof like the dishwasher.

The stubbornness, though...well, all you have to do is read the BT blogs, also Vox, and you get an idea of how that goes. Yes, I am stubborn, and it shows up in all kinds of ways. Forget the fact that I have a lot of years of being right behind me because that only feeds the lifelong tendency that I, a Taurus, have toward digging in. Today it's only about my answering machine. After a call to Hargray about my non-functioning phones, I learned that the problem was somewhere in whatever connects to the outside phone line. I deduced that it was my answering machine and disconnected it. All was well. But the stubbornness that never gives up on anybody or anything got into me and I just had to see if I couldn't make it work. The upshot, another long stretch where people got a frustrating busy signal. I think it's curtains for the answering machine...except that it has on it the voices of my children and an adorable message from my grandson that sounds like "Tanka winka wah," (translation: "Thank you for the Lincoln Logs.") which is irreplaceable because he now speaks much more clearly.

When I see John McCain, and I hear certain things, like confusion between Sunni and Shia and the latest failure to recognize that Czechoslovakia went away a good fifteen years ago, I'm thinking that his past hero-self is, well, heroic, but that his present old-guy-self, is Sun City material.

The Macs, and I don't mean Bernie and Apple

2008-07-14T16:19:00.000-04:00

Back on the couch after a lovely road trip. All right, not lovely, but bearable. And now it's time to contemplate dysfunction in the world and in my life. I am SO pissed about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and their ugly stepchild, IndyMac. I could do a whole Old Lady Rant just on that topic and on my irritation with the notion that probably NO ONE WILL PAY FOR THIS. People all along the way built this house of cards that we call a real estate/mortgage/securities market, and most got fat salaries and bonuses out the ying yang. But not people like me who have no debt and who are honorable investors and who now don't know what to do with their assets, WHICH I might add, are losing value with every key stroke.

Because I have been paying attention for a long time, I'm not surprised. After I saw the first quarter earnings for 2007, I made some moves, but even so, I feel at risk, and I know I'm in a lot better shape than a bunch of retirees. Keep in mind that retirees will not be earning their way back to prosperity. That's what the concept of "fixed income" is about. So lots of us have followed the advice of supposedly much smarter people to invest and diversify and rebalance and go for safe instruments and yadda yadda yadda. What I am most grateful for is my frugality. I don't have to have the latest and the best, and it's true that I haven't contributed much on the consumption side of the economy, but damn I'm glad for my paid-for car and my paid-for house and my old countertops and, oh yeah, my health.

For the last little bit I've been throwing a little money around, trying to help the workers who I know are hurting. I've been eating out more and tipping more and donating more and in general trying to do my part without buying more clutter. I know that a lot of middle class workers got suckered into the shop, shop, shop mode that has propped up the US economy for too long. I'm not mad at them. I'm mad at the high-rollers, the livin' large show-offs, who by the way ought to consider the wisdom of a very good book, The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko.

According to Wikipedia, the main points of the book are:

**Spend Less Than You Earn
If you are always spending up to or above what you earn, you will never increase your net worth no matter how much you make. The author discusses being prugal: prudent and frugal.

**Avoid Buying Status Objects or Leading a Status Lifestyle
Buying expensive imported vehicles is poor value and you will constantly need to buy the newest model. Buying status objects such as branded consumer goods is a never-ending cycle of depreciating assets. Living in a status neighbourhood is not only poor value, but you will feel the need to keep buying status objects to keep up with your neighbours, who are mostly Under Accumulators of Wealth (UAWs).

**Prodigious Accumulaors of Wealth (PAWs)Are Willing to Take Financial Risk if it is Worth the Reward
PAWs are not misers who put every penny under their mattress. They invest their money for good returns, and will consider riskier investments if they're worth the reward. Many put money not in the stock market, but invest in private businesses and venture capital. They do not gamble or speculate on long-odds stocks.

**Economic Outpatient Care
The authors also make the interesting observation that PAWs tend to have children who require an influx of their parents' money in order to afford the lifestyle that they expect for themselves, and that they are less likely to have been taught about money, budgeting and investing by their parents.

See, it's that last part that I see all around me especially in Gated Community World. It reminds me of the very wise comment of a wealthy woman I once knew. She said, "I have done untold damage to the people I've helped." Yes, it feels good to indulge the ones we love, but doing that teaches dependence on someone else's efforts and assets and in the end it isn't really a kindness. Sorry, kids.

I Did It My Way (Sorta)

2008-07-07T09:25:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was Sunday and as usual I started the day with "The Racket", which really doesn't take much time unless I get into the Sudoku. The Sunday Sudoku is usually rated "hard" and so it can take a while and a lot of erasing. I did today's in pen. Anyway, yesterday's Island Packet Lowcountry Life section which contains the Sudoku also contains an article about six-word memoirs. A man named Larry Smith has written a book and started a web-site where short and pithy life commentaries are listed. "Not Quite What I Was Planning," an example of a six-word memoir, is the main title of the book.

Naturally I was distracted from any other serious mental exercise while I thought of what I would say with limited space. Here's what I came up with:

If I had only ONE word: Fuhgeddaboudit.
If I had TWO words: Told ya.
If I had THREE words: Gimme a break.
If I had FOUR words: I wasn't even there.
If I had FIVE words: This will end in tears.
And my SIX-word memoir: I did it my way (sorta).

I really wanted to tweak people with "John David Rose Is A God," but chose not to go to the dark side. See, I'm not all bad.

But if I had EIGHT words, I could make my signature statement: "I liked it better the way it was." Oh well. We live, we change, we grow. OMG! That's another six-worder. Stop me somebody.

WTH, General Cornwallis?

2008-07-04T22:13:00.000-04:00

Today is of course the day when patriotic Americans celebrate the birth of our country in 1776. July 4th is the day when the Continental Congress ordered that the Declaration of Independence be authenticated and printed. Things were rocky for those early patriots. There was by no means unanimity about what they were doing, and in fact, the Revolutionary War had started the year before and wasn't going all that well in 1776.

It continued to not go that well for five more years, which brings me to wondering what the heck the British General Charles Cornwallis was thinking that January day in 1781 when he found himself in North Carolina building a bonfire and burning all his stuff, including personal baggage, tents, books, silverware, and ordering his men to do the same. One can only guess how they felt about throwing casks of rum into the flames. Historians say that Cornwallis was trying to create a lighter, more nimble fighting force so as to pursue the half of the American army that was led by General Nathanael Green. Some also say that the bonfire was somehow symbolic of Cornwallis' determination to defeat the Americans whatever it took. So the plan was to live off the land in the North Carolina mountains in late Winter? Hmmmm. Well, I don't know much about military strategy and the symbolism is a little much for me too, but I DO know about "stuff."

As a bit of a pack rat myself, I can imagine accumulating a lot of stuff in one's travels. I usually do, and it's mostly printed stuff. But the gatherer in me would have a very difficult time setting it all on fire, especially if I didn't know what to expect from the coming days. I mean what if between skirmishes I felt like reading a complimentary copy of USA Today? And then there are the free supplies that I pick up at hotels, like pads and pencils and shampoo and tea bags and apples and bananas. There is, after all, no guarantee that the next hotel will have that stuff. Now if it were near the end of a trip, I might jettison some clothing that wasn't working for me and that someone else could use. But throwing useful stuff into a fire? Not an option. Could be that's why I'm not a General.

Fortunately for us Americans, and not so fortunately for the Crown and the Loyalists, the minor bonfire event became part of a chain of more significant events that culminated in surrender at Yorktown to General George Washington within the year. May God continue to bless America as we continue our improbable history.

Keep your eye on the ball

2008-07-01T17:12:00.001-04:00

My idea of playing golf is to watch other people doing it. True, I did play a round at Pirate's Island last week and scored well, but that was just because I wanted to impress my three-year-old grandson. Anyway, for over twenty-four hours my game has been about seeing what happens with a ball I heard land yesterday. It's too far off the course to attract much attention, and close enough to my house to allow me to surveil it. Yep, it's still there. It's a nice new "TIT-lee-ist" with a green Young Life logo. (I learned to say TIT-lee-ist as a captive viewer of a Beavis and Butthead Moronathon. A story for another day.)

After the foursome that I think sent it there passed on by, I was guessing that it wouldn't be long before some tacky unentitled person who didn't hit THAT ball wandered into my "natural area" to retrieve it. This would be par for the course, so to speak. It's not even that long ago that I had a conversation through my bedroom window, where a guy said that he and his daughter were in my yard specifically seeking golf balls. I saw no daughter and called Security, but really people do take a lot of liberties. Oddly enough, when they think they might have hit the house, golfers usually go wheeling on by as though there is no dwelling there. It's only when they've hit a pathetic stroke, no doubt one of many, that they seek their ball as though it were the Hope Diamond. Once in a while, they ask permission, but usually not. And once in a while, in a magnanimous mood, I give found balls to whoever passes unless they act like jerks, in which case I am tempted to say something like, "Nice shot, Alice and you're trespassing."

Since I have hundreds of balls saved up, I don't care about accumulating any more of them, but I am a teensy bit territorial and don't like just any ol' person wandering around my yard. So it's with perverse interest that I keep watch on the occasional ball to see just who is going to irritate me by violating my invisible boundary. It's just a matter of time.

"His name is Love"

2008-07-01T16:04:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you get to see a real life fairy tale. A while ago when Britain's Paul Potts sang a few bars of "Nessun Dorma" on the British version of American Idol, he brought the audience to their feet and to tears. The judges, including Simon Cowell, seemed spellbound. Since then, Potts's ensuing CD, aptly named "One Chance" has sold a million copies and of course been subject to sneering criticism from those who just can't allow an ordinary person to suddenly shine. Potts however has become a YouTube star and has also appeared on Oprah.

"Nessun Dorma" (translated "Noone Must Sleep")is perhaps the best known aria from Puccini's last opera, "Turandot," which is a fantasy romance about a Chinese princess named Turandot whose many suitors have been executed, basically for not meeting her standards. The aria is sung by her final suitor, the Unknown Prince, as he bets his life that his name will not be known by Turandot before morning. If she learns his name, which is Calaf, she will be released from her engagement to him and he will die. After a night of drama and tragedy, the ice princess has thawed and ends up in Calaf's arms where she declares his name is "Love."

So this operatic sleepless night where the stakes are as high as can be is the setting about which Paul Potts sings and which takes him from a life of mobile phone sales to international fame. I cannot listen to him without feeling chills. I cannot watch him without feeling love. Potts is such an unimposing figure and yet his own love of the music and of his supportive wife make him heroic. His diffident yet hopeful figure tells us so much about his struggle and his generosity of spirit. He seems even to redeem the unkindness sometmes exhibited by Simon Cowell, as we see softness and pleasure and recognition in Cowell's face. Potts could certainly sell me more than a cell phone.

I really wonder how many truly gifted people there are in the world who never find an audience, and I suspect they are legion. All the more reason to be grateful for the discovery of each improbable gem in each unexpected place, be it river bed or muddy road or sandy beach or the impossibly crowded 'net.

***

As a footnote, I have to say something about Giacomo Puccini, whose life ended before he could actually finish the final act of "Turandot." His love for his art produced ten or so operas and many, many other musical works. Born into a family with five generations of musicians, his gift was somewhat expected, but nevertheless a true gift.

Worse than irony

2008-05-24T12:11:00.000-04:00

It was recently reported that the SC Dept of Prisons is now spending $1.43 per prisoner per day for food. That would be an increase of 15 cents over what they were spending last year. My usual meal at McDonald's is a Snack Wrap ($1.29) and a medium Diet Coke ($1.39). The amount I spend on one small and relatively cheap lunch would nearly feed two adult inmates in SC for a whole day. When I was a child, I was often warned that the food in jail would be bread and water. I believed it then, but I'm horrified to learn how close to the truth that warning turns out to be, especially in a state where ostentatious religion is a "value". SC is, after all, in the Bible Belt. Did Jesus not say that whatever was done to the least of our brethren, He would consider as having been done to Him? Did he not specifically mention concern for prisoners?

So it seems particularly ironic to me that the same legislature that has budgeted so little for inmate food, let alone the whole prison system, including rehabilitation and education programs, has zealously permitted a new "Christian" license plate design. Of course, a license plate with stained glass art and a cross may not make it past the ACLU and may go the way of the "Choose Life" license plate design. That one resulted in a lawsuit where $150,000 of public money was forked over to Planned Parenthood for legal fees.

Can it be that SC legislators are so cynical as to believe that voting for anything with a religious theme AND defending it in court is a winning proposition no matter its actual cost? Can it be that they really don't believe at all in a God who can do math and Who means what He says?

Life en masse

2008-05-14T15:56:00.000-04:00

So I left the couch for a while. I guess everybody has to move some time. I took a nice four-tanks-full drive through five states, and it was lovely. At certain times of the year the colors in the Appalachians are kaleidoscopic, and as I drove I saw trees blooming in every pastel color. America the Beautiful for sure, and a blessing. I'm into counting my blessings, or as Oprah recommends, "keeping a gratitude journal."

Some days I begin my list of five things to appreciate intentionally by being grateful that things aren't even worse. Actually, those days have been rare of late. And as I grow older, I can easily list five just by naming the senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling and touching, since those are all still working for me. But there are those interesting days when I find something new to think about, and that discovery in itself prompts gratitude. Yesterday, back on the couch and once again watching Oprah, I was caught up in the idea of "past life regression." That's not an idea that is new of course. Shirley MacLaine years ago brought to our attention the belief that she was aware of having lived before.

The experts on yesterday's Oprah were compelling though. One was Dr. Mehmet Oz, the heart surgeon who has done a lot to provide practical information about the care and feeding of the human physical body. Another was Dr. Brian Weiss, a psychiatrist who has made PLR a special interest. These are not quacks. Maybe they're here to teach us something. (Let's hope, though, that they don't go the way of Dr. Phil, also introduced by Oprah, who originally had some good ideas but now seems to have turned himself into a $90 million-a-year marketing machine of schlock and sensationalism.)

Anyway, the economy of life recycled has long appealed to me and has given me comfort when I see horror or injustice in this one. I'm not at all bothered by the fact that most Western religious thought eschews reincarnation. It hasn't always. I think it was about 500 years after Christ's crucifixion that the powers that were at that time took us that way.

For me, the hook in all this is not learning about what past life I might have had but rather a sort of encouragement of my feeling that all humans, and maybe all life, are connected in ways that are about energy. If we could really accept the fact that we are nothing more than masses of energy, as individual as snow flakes until we blend into a Greater Energy the way snowflakes form a drift and then a river and then an ocean, perhaps we could get over our conceits about who we are in this life. Does it really matter which is the best snow flake or ice cube or hailstone once they're all absorbed into groundwater and then on their way?

P.S. Here's an interesting link about reincarnation and the early Christian Church.

Bears!

2008-04-24T12:20:00.000-04:00

Bears on the loose! The #1 threat to America! Where is Stephen Colbert?

Today the scene from the couch includes black bears prowling through Paramus, NJ. For a lot of people, NJ is a maze of concrete, and Paramus, if they've heard of it at all, is the birthplace of shopping malls. For me, it's where my parents are buried and where I planned to rest my bones one day. Maybe not.

Now we see Jack Hanna of zoo fame telling us about bear behavior: "You'd be hungry too if you hadn't eaten in four months." I feel as though my whole life is coming together in this story. Before I fled to the Lowcountry, I was exiled in Columbus, OH, which is where Hanna drew attention as the director of its zoo. I could digress into a tale about a woman I know who fostered a chimpanzee from the zoo nursery and how she and I went to a psychic together, but I guess I'll save that and try to get back to today's drama, which I'm taking personally because before I was dragged to Columbus, I spent thirty years in towns near Paramus.

I KNEW that area. There were no bears there then. WTH has happened? I can hear my father saying now, "The whole world has gone ape-shit." When he really said that was years and years ago. What would he say now about the fact that I live where an alligator might invade my kitchen? Maybe "Lass, at least you escaped the bears."

Ahem!

2008-04-23T17:36:00.000-04:00

So I've been in touch with our friend MadHatter and he seems to think the world needs another observer/commenter and thus my existence is justified. The fact is that I have worn out the middle cushion on my couch as I watch the world go by. My recent guest blog on "There Goes The Neighborhood" is a clue as to how I spend a lot of Saturday nights, and you know what? It's OK. I've participated in life a lot, and now I'm happy just to read about it or to see it on tv or to watch it roll by my house in a golf cart. Then again, I may change my mind if I hear of an interesting journey on a ship, my favorite way to travel. But right now, I'm feeling kind of lazy.

I'm not going to bore people with tales of where I've been. That's what the Travel Channel is for. Actually one of the trips I love to take is back in time, and that's what the History Channel is for. We live in a wonderful time where we can learn about life anywhere that interests us, and that would include the bedrooms of the famous-for-being-famous. With YouTube we can go everywhere.

The sign of a true vicarious voyager is that she (or he) can be transported off her couch and into another reality. Today I believe that I was present at last night's victory celebration for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. I'm thinking that I was seated right next to one of the sourpuss media people who can hardly stand that her presidential candidacy is still alive. I'm there with those men and women, and I can smell their anxiety that THEY MIGHT BE WRONG...AGAIN. This morning I notice that they are thanking God for the New York Times editorial that blames everything negative and vapid and whatever on Senator Clinton and the bonus column by the oh-so-delightful Maureen Dowd, who goes off on President Clinton...again.

I believe I will lift my sights and watch the squirrels.