Fall, indeed, has fell.
01 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
PROCLAMATION:
Be it known that on this 29th day of September, in the year 2015, I did don a sweatshirt for the first time since storing it last winter.
Because while out running errands, in thin t-shirt, floppy shorts, and flip-flops, I came this close to freezing my buns off. Pretty sure the temp was only in the high 60s, so … And the breeze was chilly on the balcony, in the shade, so hey, sweatshirt weather, fall is here!
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Halfway up the block I had to peel out of it, but it happened! It’s official, my favorite season is gracing us with its presence. I’ll shed the flip-flops by first snow.
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The wagon, in its autumn sweetness, was a part of my farm for as long as I lived there and many years before. I don’t know where it is now, other than in my heart, but I still love it.
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Various and sundry nonsense … everything about the season brings it to the surface …
Longevity rocks …
07 Sep 2015 2 Comments
Yesterday was nice. I slept through sunrise, thereby assuring myself that it still functions well without my supervision. Kim made ranch-bean omelets and we shared massive quantities of coffee and a soak in the spa tub. We gave Madison a bath and watched her turn into a fluff-ball again while she careened zoomie-dog-style through the house. Laundry was done and favorite pieces made ready to wear in mere seconds on the balcony — it was one of those hot windy days that signal a change of seasons, which will add to our appreciation for cooler temps later in the week.
And it was my birthday! Not a five- or ten-year milestone, but it means more to me than any since my 30th, which I nearly missed thanks to an inconvenient cerebral hemorrhage at 29. Far too many people I loved left this life far too soon, including my brother at 29, my first husband at 58, and so many others. I was born when my mom was just short of 20, and sharing a birth month with her I always felt there was a ribbon that connected us in some indestructible way. When she died suddenly at 67 a little trapdoor clicked open inside me and closed just as quickly. Shut up in there for the past twenty years was the unanswerable question of whether I would outlive her. Yesterday I celebrated 68 — and now we know.
Both of my grandmothers lived past 95 and kept their minds intact, so that’s my goal, free and clear, now that I’ve crossed the Rubicon. Not that I actively contribute much — walking our tiny dog three times a day is the extent of my exercise program and most of the time I eat what I want, although a recent not-good metabolic workup is forcing me to rethink that approach. Basically, in lieu of hard work on my part, I’m banking on great genes and a positive outlook. Happiness determines about 99% of life, so a Zen attitude and an abundance of good juju are my weapons of choice. And all these numbers … ages, blood pressures, cholesterol counts, calories … are just that — numbers. It takes so much more to measure the weight of a life, and our control over any of it is mostly imaginary .
Okay, I have to go, my husband’s running the spa tub full of hot water and therapeutic salts again for heading into another year of doing it right and seeing what happens.
P.S. The greatest of ironies would be if I’d gotten fried in my tracks on any one of my trips out to the balcony tonight to watch the lightning. Hitting the mark is no sort of guarantee, but I’m optimistic.
When was the last time you thought you knew everything?
01 Sep 2015 2 Comments
If it’s ME you’re asking, that was another lifetime. Kim and I met twelve-plus years ago, we’ve been married eleven, and if you know him it’s no surprise that I’ve learned a lot from him. I wasn’t a rookie, I knew things … just not necessarily THESE things, not for sure. So from the always beguiling viewpoint of my toothsome mentor …
LIFE LESSON #1: It’s okay to be happy — you have to give yourself permission.
LIFE LESSON #2: Just because someone looks like that guy your mother warned you about doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fall in love with him, get married, and live happily ever after.
LIFE LESSON #3: Knowing when to be satisfied is the key to life. {Spoiler Alert: It’s when The GOOD arrives, not just the Good Enough. Knowing the difference between GOOD and PERFECT is central to the equation.}
LIFE LESSON #4: With proper motivation old dogs can learn new tricks. {Madison affirms that truth.}
LIFE LESSON #5: Work is not the only honorable use of time, and is, in fact, an insult to the universe if not matched with an equitable amount of not-work.
LIFE LESSON #6: The best way to get a job used to be a) say you know how to do it b) go home and read the manual/book/instructions/recipe, and c) show up and do it. Even though the world doesn’t much work that way anymore, the basic principle still applies in some way to most of life.
LIFE LESSON #7: You won’t necessarily stay in command of your limbs and faculties right up until you die, so in case your heart/lung apparatus keeps performing longer than your motor skills and your brain stays on the job until lights out, you’ll need things to think about, so start deliberately cataloguing scenes in your head … memories of EVERYTHING. The way the air smelled, the voices, all the sensations. Every part of every face you ever loved … and the taste of kisses, all of them. Because someday if you aren’t exactly independent anymore, and the hours get long and you’re going out of your freaking gourd, you can stop chasing nurses up and down the halls in your throttled-back Jazzy and take some time to remember the good shit. Once you crawl into your empty box, snag a memory from the archives and get settled, you won’t even remember where you parked your carcass. You won’t hear anybody, you won’t see anybody, they’ll assume you’ve come unhinged, which is perfect because they just might walk away and leave your wrinkled old ass alone until it’s time to ladle out the evening pudding.
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There are more, but I’ve been pleasantly hung up on #7 since last week, and I’m preoccupied with storing details in the database. The weather triggered all of this — our early transition from hot-and-humid to autumn-is-at-the-door. The air has changed, the leaves are turning, the students are back in town — it’s ridiculously easy now to memorize the feel of the mornings and evenings and what happens in between.
Last night I asked Kim to wake me up early enough to see the sunrise this morning, and by golly if that didn’t stick in his drowsy mind. 6:15am he’s standing right there, on the job, already dressed (I peeked), his smile threatening to blind me, so without actually opening my eyes I slid into my jammies and felt my way to the balcony (because he’d sweetly provided a hint). The view that greeted me when I finally raised my eyelids was totally worth waking up for. First of all, my husband — still smiling — and in front of him on the table two steaming mugs of coffee. And the SKY, seemingly ALL of it, splatter-painted every shade of blue and pink. We sipped our beans and listened to the city waking up while the big orange sun floated out of the trees in nearly the same spot the big orange moon did last night. The air was clean, the sounds were a sampling of everything, those wafty little food-smells from up the street were insinuating themselves past the railing and making us consider our bellies, the sky was growing ever lighter, brighter, and more childrens’-movie-like, with its panoramic rays and white fluffy clouds and sheer natural drama until it all became so overwhelming I had to come back in and lie down. I did better than Maddie — she was back in bed in five minutes.
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We aren’t really solidifying plans to end our days as wards of the medical system, I mean, who DOES that. But if
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Plan A) to get really ridiculously old but also miraculously in shape and just gradually eat less and less until we fade away right where we are
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… doesn’t work out, and
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Plan B) to spend the last of our cash on a fabulous trip around the world and then drive off a cliff together in a brand new Porsche
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… has to be cancelled for lack of discipline and foresight
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WE’D BETTER HAVE SOME GOOD STUFF TO THINK ABOUT.
Well, THIS sucks …
24 Aug 2015 10 Comments
A post from the archives.
We didn’t win the lottery AGAIN, which is crushing because PLANS — I was on a quest to revolutionize my wardrobe by way of that venerated institution, the Sundance catalog. Please don’t sue me, Robert Redford, for naming names — I obviously can’t afford that since we STILL DIDN’T WIN THE LOTTERY.
It’s all so disappointing because my first new outfit as a gazillionaire was going to be killer, starting with the jeans, which are $108 and still have PIECES OF ACTUAL DENIM clinging to each other! There’s a sweet top, a twee rumpled creation weighing less than an ounce and going for a very reasonable $198. There’s a distressed-leather peacoat that looks fab with the little top — it’s only $548. The shortie boots in the same shade as the jacket, complete with fringe and studs, are a must — they retail for $575. To nail the look I’ll need the slouch bag for $368 and a cool nubbly belt at $120. Then we get to the fun stuff — the jewelry. Three necklaces, layered, at $1190, $3400, and $1300 respectively; eight stacked wrist cuffs totaling $4800; seven rings for $1603; and the earrings, $285. And a perfectly darling may-or-may-not-keep-time watch for chump change of $98. The surgery to add 10″ to my height is probably going to run into actual money.
So for just the debut ensemble, not counting height-enhancement because who knows, I’m looking at approximately $15,000 with shipping. And realistically I couldn’t wear the outfit every day because it isn’t wedding and funeral appropriate, so it’s imperative that I buy out the catalog in its entirety, including the furniture. My dreams are all-encompassing.
Way to ruin my life, Powerball — Bob and I were going to be besties.
Plan B: Snag this $98 vintage bandanna scarf and accessorize my overalls.
Fixing myself on my own …
02 Aug 2015 2 Comments
No part of my world seems to be coming undone today, but in past days, weeks, months when it has been, writing it down has saved me. If I can tell myself what happened, life loses its power to put me under. When you’re broken, it’s good to know where the glue is.
Getting Schooled
28 Jul 2015 6 Comments
Once upon a time there was a little red schoolhouse that was in fact a biggish red-brick edifice. Until it was built sometime before 1920, at considerable cost for the times, the children of the local farming community attended classes in a drafty wood-frame building that kept the mothers stewing over its shortcomings. Farming was booming, there was a homestead on nearly every quarter-section of land, and families were still moving into the area. A bigger, safer, warmer, more forward-looking school was needed, and my grandmother, a teacher — although not in this building, which was three-quarters of a mile from our farm — was one of the motivating forces behind the cause.
The funds were raised and the school built. Double-walled, with both facing and interior brick; a kitchen; wood flooring; full cement basement with a stage. My siblings and I, in one of its later iterations, roller-skated in the basement, daring each other to take artistic leaps from the stage to the smooth cement floor three feet below. My brain still knows whether or not anyone did, but the database is unfortunately down at present.
My dad went from first through eighth grades here before attending high school in the small town six miles southwest. My grandma took him, via horse and buggy, to his first day of first grade, and turned around a couple of hours later to find him standing in her kitchen. The teacher had let the kids out for recess and my dad, having all he wanted of this “school stuff,” simply made a break for home. He was bitterly disappointed to learn that attendance wasn’t optional, and despite being a thoroughly intelligent guy, formal education never became a favorite.
As Murphy’s Law #11 states, “You get the most of what you need the least.” So about the time the beautiful schoolhouse was nearing completion, the farming boom was starting to go bust. The air was turning to dust, Wall Street was headed for instability, to put it lightly, and families stopped streaming into the neighborhood while others gave up the struggle and packed it in. By the time the little six-year-old up there finished eighth grade in 1935, the student population had thinned considerably, finally making it impractical to keep the doors open, at which point the building became a community center, a polling place, the location for township meetings, and an ongoing setting for the Grange’s poetry readings, plays, and other literary endeavors, which sounds so quaint and genteel I can hardly stand it.
In my lifetime it was the site of community Thanksgivings … mostly in the late 1950s, which were nearly as devastating as the Dirty ’30s and left people feeling tapped out at holiday time so they pooled their resources. We also held big carry-in dinners for extended family, where all the old men brought fiddles and harmonicas and assorted other instruments for Frontier Karaoke while my grandma “chorded along” on the old upright piano.
I haven’t seen that corner for a while so I don’t know what if anything is still standing. Those few acres became part of the family farm, and my dad told the friends and neighbors who inquired that they could have what they needed. He and my brother had started taking the building apart and cleaning all the brick, a project that came to an end following my brother’s unfortunate death, and after that I’m pretty sure my dad didn’t care who did what with any of it. He did, with tears in his eyes, bring me a load of brick my brother had cleaned so that I could have a cozy hearth built in my newly-remodeled farmhouse … meaning we still don’t know the end of the story. An entirely different family, in another county, will keep it going forward.
It’s clear that bricks know the secret to longevity.
I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date!!!
25 Jul 2015 4 Comments
First post on my Facebook feed this morning was a Happy Anniversary wish from our son John. It’s our 11th … and both of us spaced it off completely, a first in that number of years. We are, joyfully and officially, The Old Married Couple. We’ve been cutting Hallmark short since about year five, our favorite flowers ever were the ones at our wedding, and neither of us needs chocolates, so nothing lost — it rained a bit ago and cooled off the oven that’s been raging outside our door, so we’ll probably walk the half-block to Cielito’s, our home away from home, and celebrate on their big patio with the best margaritas in town.
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Eleven years ago today, we got married after the close of the morning church service, and then our pastor and friends served lunch to about 300 people. Simple, beautiful, memorable, sweet, and fun.
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Happy. So happy.
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Our glamour photo shoot — a gift from Kim for my birthday not long after our wedding.
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Yeah. This guy.
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The newlyweds today. A lot of changes can happen in eleven years’ time, but the basics stay the same, and that’s so cool.
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Still savoring stories …
13 Jul 2015 3 Comments
Remember this photo from the other day? My Great-aunt Nora, my grandmother, and my Great-aunt Ruth in the middle dressed in white. Christmas 1917.
Now we have this — taken same day, same location, when Ruth’s daughter Myrl was around two years old and my Uncle Ed maybe seven or eight and already missing his right eye. Until my dad came along several years later, they would be the only children of their family generation. There were eleven years between the two brothers, so they didn’t become friends until they were adults.
Ruth’s life took twists and turns from early on, and at no time did she adopt the quiet lifestyle of her two sisters. She instead embraced the 1920s, transitioning quickly from the chaste white dress to flapper gear more suited to The Party, wherever it happened to be. 
A happy Ruth …
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My grandma, who lived past 95, told me endless stories about life in the late 1800s and on, but I don’t remember her going into detail about why Myrl was raised by her Aunt Nora instead of her mother. There are bits and pieces we could combine in formulating answers, but as in all things there are nuances to be taken into account. Fortunately I have an inside track and a fact or two at my disposal. 1) As far as I could discern, not having really known them until they were what I thought of as old, my grandma and Great-aunt Nora, having been raised in challenging circumstances brought about primarily by their alcoholic father, were straight-laced to the max. 2) I heard mention of drinking when Grandma did talk about Aunt Ruth’s life, which would probably have required the equivalent of endless come-to-Jesus talks, but their objections to her lifestyle tell us nothing about Ruth’s feelings or her capacity for maternalism. My guess is that Grandma and Aunt Nora offered to keep Myrl at every opportunity and gradually made that a permanent arrangement, Nora thus getting the child she never had despite two marriages (more stories, kids), and Ruth getting what she, maybe, wanted in the first place, which was simply the freedom to be. That’s the trouble with photographs … they can tell us only so much. Ruth was the baby, spoiled and indulged by her older sisters, and she came along just as social mores were evolving ahead of the more devil-may-care attitudes of the Roaring 20s. The comparative drudgery and boredom of her growing-up years no doubt quickly lost out and fell away in the face of NEW, FUN, HAPPY, EXCITING! By the time I was conscious that I had a Great-aunt Ruth, she was older, ill, married to the last of a series of hard-drinking men, although Uncle Erv did treat her like she was made of glass. Her laugh, which she never lost, sounded like that same glass breaking, and I instinctively loved her. Life ended up costing her dearly … but that’s a story for another day.
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Mesa, Arizona, in the late 1990s. Me holding Merle’s dog Su-Ming, my dad, and feisty Merle, who at some point shed the old Myrl and moved on under her own terms. She was a party girl like her mama, but smarter about it, turning the discovery that her husband was a serial cheater into a flush retirement. By this time Uncle Ed had passed away, so Daddy and Merle were the only remaining direct connections to my grandparents and their era. Merle loved to laugh, she loved people, she loved family, she loved her little dog … and everything was “Oh, kid!” followed by delighted laughter. My favorite story was about the times a neighbor would pick her up from Aunt Nora’s house and then go get her mother. As Aunt Ruth was walking to the car, dark-haired little Myrl would giggle and shout at her “You tan’t fit, Roofie, you got too big a BUTT!!”
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There are a million ways to make life work and it’s a bonus to come from hardy people who knew about some of those ways. I’m in their debt but that isn’t how they saw it — they were simply surviving, in the end doing as well as anybody at that and hanging onto a healthy sense of humor through it all. They’d be genuinely happy to know they left a mark.
Old women are merely little girls with wrinkles …
09 Jul 2015 2 Comments
The recent photo sorting with my sisters has yielded much treasure, all of which I appreciate infinitely more than the first time I saw those pictures. Some I’d never laid eyes on before, and I do a little dance over each one. We’ve tossed bags full of bad pics — exceptionally bad pics of blurry armpits and floors and the back end of a cat — that nobody ever bothered to weed out, but we’ve glommed onto anything of interest, everything that sparks memories and smiles. Today’s little collection has been making me smile all morning, so I’m sharing …
My great-grandmother, Caroline Fuhrman Dierking (looking outward), and her sister Emma.
On the back, in my grandmother’s handwriting: “Caroline Fuhrman, my mother, was born in Germany. The family emigrated to America in 1872, with eight sons and two daughters, my mother being one of them. Aunt Emma was born in Atchison County, Kansas after they came to America. My mother and her sister loved each other very much. This is at Aunt Emma’s Camp Creek home in Atchison County, sometime around 1920.”
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Caroline Fuhrman married Louis Dierking and after living northeast of Emporia for a time, they moved to this dugout northwest of Bushong in 1894. Several sons were lost at birth or in childhood, but daughters Nora and Clara (my grandmother) survived, and after the move to the dugout, Ruth was born in 1896.
This photo was taken when my dad, brother and grandmother went to a Camp Creek family reunion in 1966, and shows the house my great-grandfather Louis Dierking built onto the front of the dugout. Pretty sure the horses, and whatever other livestock they had, lived in the lower part made from rock.
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The daughters of Louis & Caroline Dierking, Nora, Ruth & Clara, Christmas, 1917
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Ruth Dierking Cox in 1920 — clearly things had changed a bit in three years’ time,
although my grandmother’s comment was
“I believe her car was a Studebaker. Always breaking down or out of fix.”
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And now we’re back to sweet Great-Great-Aunt Emma, with pretty little Colleen, who was in some way my cousin, and 2-year-old me with my naked doll and a scowl. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1949. Life is both long and unbelievably short.
Rainy days and holidays …
05 Jul 2015 Leave a comment
The rain … on the plain … leads cruelly to pain … (think Bob Dylan) … but I’m fatally attracted, I’ll never not love rain. We’ve had buckets of it this spring and summer and our rivers are flowing full and beyond. The trees are glorious! Everything’s green and blooming and couldn’t feel more conducive to smiling and laughing and cavorting outside and taking naps. What is it about an accidental, or entirely on purpose, nap on a soft sunny day that tells us we’ve been kind to ourselves and it’s more than okay?
Yesterday was full of family, food, and fireworks. Oh, yours too? And did you have the feeling all day that you could easily nod off and not miss a thing because it would all go right on swirling around you and soaking into your DNA for yet another year? Yeah, works every time. All that rain did its thing and produced a perfect day here — blue skies, quiet beauty, and peace, other than the astounding amount of ordnance being detonated all around us especially after dark. Like true American warriors, we assimilated the audio into our psyches and marched on … through a mountain of burgers and brats, potato salad, baked beans, pasta salad, deviled eggs, guac & chips, an array of cold liquids, and homemade Butterfinger ice cream. (Not a complete list.)
Little girls lighting pastel-colored smoke bombs with Papa, sets of sisters in three generations being goofy together, bros bro-ing, beer chilling before swilling, everything easy-going and sweet-feeling. Turns out the America we grew up in … and were pretty sure we remembered … still exists and is way worth saving. The friends who friend us, the family who love us, the times spent just being together, are still the real stuff, and there are days when you know you’d lay down your life for it.
Happy July 4th, America. Thank you for your patience and long-suffering while we try to solve the puzzle of being human. You’re a Good Girl.
Forget throwbacks …
29 May 2015 1 Comment
Throwback Thursday offends my sense of independence so here’s one for Friday — the house where my paternal grandpa was born, near Corydon, Indiana. In the picture are my great-grandparents George and Salome (Sally) Wagner, my grandpa John, his sister Annie and brother Otto, and their half-sister Teena (always called Teenie, although she never was). I’d heard stories about the house “all my life,” and when I was in college I drove my grandma there as part of a road trip to visit relatives in several states. Grandpa had died several years earlier, and on her own after more than 60 years married, Grandma was in want of an adventure. On the Indiana leg of our trip we took our time locating the house, and found it beautifully cared for by its current owners, much to my grandma’s relief. The descriptions and tales from my relatives made the yard and outbuildings feel sweetly familiar to me, and the cistern at the bottom of the slope out front where my Wagner kindred stored their perishables was still being fed by the same ice-cold spring.
We humans are so connected to our roots. Whether we understand it or not, there’s a longing for where and what we came from. Other than not having Grandpa in the car with us, the trip with my grandma was a full-circle experience. And driving her cross-country broadened my knowledge of her, her life, and her family relationships. This was highly beneficial for a college girl who didn’t know quite everything yet.
This is getting ridiculous …
13 May 2015 4 Comments
I can’t write, I might as well face it and move on.
It isn’t that I can’t write, I know how, but the words have all gone somewhere else. Things come to me but I don’t make it to the end of the first sentence and the orphaned drafts are starting to rack up bandwidth. I have pressure behind my eyes from needing to write something that doesn’t suck, but I sit here every day and do nothing but procrastinate.
Yes, I would like some brie with that whine, be right back …
Wrote that a week ago, walked away from it, looked through some old photos that same afternoon and wrote this. On Facebook. Just like that, shazott. Learned something about myself that’s been knocking around in my head all week, and when it settles into a shape and forms sentences, I’ll share.
So from a week ago …
Did you get the memo saying PLEASE, NO THROWBACK HUMPDAY PHOTOS?? Neither did I.
This one has layers. Start with where the truck is parked. The blue spruce snuggled up to the passenger side was brought from Colorado, by my grandparents, as a seedling back in ought-whenever because that was perfectly legal then. It grew to many, many feet tall and almost as many feet wide at the base until one day in a storm it simply came out of the ground and assumed a horizontal position, landing on and against the house but wreaking minimal havoc. (Back-story: My grandparents’ house is to the right, where we see part of a roof.)
Then there’s the truck, a fixture of my childhood. It was gray and pretty wonderful, and when my dad drove it to town with the first cutting of wheat to test for moisture content, the gray-dust-covered elevator guys motioned him to drive the front wheels onto the lift, because of course there were no hydraulics under the bed … and then they raised the front of the truck high enough for the wheat to pour out the open tailgate in the back. Which was pretty freaking high to a seven-year-old and he only let me stay in the cab with him once, but not because I cried. I’m pretty sure he decided Mother wouldn’t approve.
Which brings us to the watermelons. Big, dark green, full of luscious red fruit, and juice that ran down our chins and made everything stick to our hands. Every summer, a truckload like this and far more came from my grandpa’s big patch in the middle of a section, next to an irrigation engine. The melon patch was raided one night by a couple of carloads of high school kids — the four girls dropped the four guys off and drove around the section (a square mile), stopping to let their boyfriends stash gunny sacks full of melons in the car trunks. My dad, Grandpa, and a couple of the neighbors, alerted by the sudden rash of traffic in the middle of nowhere, ambushed them in mid-haul, blinded them with spotlights, and panic ensued. The girls drove off, the boys lost their shoes in a field covered in Texas Tacks, and the whole thing ended up in court. My grandpa didn’t mind a melon going missing once in a while, but he held a big feed for the whole township every year and it made him mad that these guys had stolen more than thirty of his prize watermelons and deliberately destroyed a goodly number of the rest just for the hell of it. But it infuriated him even more when he asked the ringleader’s name and the kid said “John Wagner.” That was my grandpa’s name and he thought he had a bona fide smart-ass in front of him. True story, though, and Big Daddy was an attorney — with the same name. I understand it got fairly comical during the hearing but my grandpa never cracked a smile. Fun and games. Told you. Layers.
Oh, look, another TBT …
02 Apr 2015 9 Comments
in My Thoughts, Photos
Bit of a rocky week here, but who has time for that, so suffice it to say I had a sinfully delicious one-hour pedi today administered by a new young friend who makes me extra glad I’m alive. I’m now wearing My Chihuahua Bites on my toes and you can’t touch this.
And after lunch, which I had no time to eat, I saw my surgeon. As in eye surgeon. As in he’s finishing the graft on the 22nd, YAY! And if I celebrate more right now I’ll cry. Again. Some more. But from relief and happiness in this case.
So, not a bad day — which none of them are if you wake up breathing and make it through to the night-time bedgasm. Not being naughty, it just feels so amazing to lie down on cool sheets and drift off while Kim rubs my back and spins goofy stories. Even when life feels like it’s crushing the life out of you it’s pretty damn good.
And it’s Throwback Thursday, so here’s Baby Me before all the blistering sunburns which no doubt fomented the nasty little carcinoma. And don’t we all, when we feel like crying till we can’t cry anymore, wish we could see our moms again and hug it out? It isn’t about cancer, nor about looking wonky for at least three more weeks, not at all. Small potatoes. For the bigger spuds the week unearthed, my mom’s cool hands and soft voice and pillowy lips would help heal a lot of hurts. So if your mom’s within hugging distance don’t waste opportunities, please.
I have to tell you that my grandparents would not appreciate seeing their house-in-need-of-paint preserved for posterity. But life will rip your shorts off if you’re not paying attention, so we’ll call that one small potatoes, too.
When Easter feels like the pagan festival it is …
01 Apr 2015 3 Comments
in Citizenship, My Thoughts Tags: be real, life, love
The world is a cruel place for dreamers — we tend to be motivated by beauty, kindness, and justice, the biggest pipe-dream of all, and then when the world turns ugly and vicious, as it so frequently does, we don’t even know who to talk to about it. I mean, I’m as ecumenical as the next person — bunnies and eggs and chocolate and death and whee! so fun how we’ve cleverly combined it all into a little something for everyone! But when Easter Week coincides with the spectacle of its celebrants disenfranchising an entire chunk of society — people their religion requires them to at least proselytize* if not love — I’m finding it far more honorable to go full-on reality and identify with the original pagans. I won’t slow you down with the details, so Google is your friend on this one. I just think those guys didn’t line up good PR, because they actually did a ton of cool stuff and didn’t seem to hate anybody in the process.
So, now I’m seeing “Don’t worry, the Supreme Court will fix it.” THIS Supreme Court? You’ve observed them in operation, right? We’ll leave that right there for now.
And filed under Things That Make Me Go WTF?! Well, today it’s knowing that a Teabilly with three teeth, one of which is just a baby tooth stuck back in there for luck, who voluntarily smells like a rhinoceros and sleeps with his sister has, as of this week, the legal right to discriminate against, disrespect, disparage, and disgust an intentionally unprotected class of people with whom said Teabilly could not intelligently converse if his or her peapickin’ sorry little life hung by a thread on the success of that very task. And statistically it’s a given that there are gay people within the Tea Party fortress, God help them. I’m pushing away a thought that maybe they drown them all.
And here’s something we can all file under Things That Count. Every lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender person covered under this legislation is somebody’s lovey. Because if I say somebody’s son or daughter you’ll be all “Yeah, yeah, me too, so what?” No, you heartless jerk, every person on earth deserves to have his or her sweet guts loved out by somebody even if that somebody ends up being solely his or her self. And more often than sometimes those somebodies are beaten to a pulp and half dead inside, a lot of it self-inflicted, before it’s real that they can love themselves that completely, and if you make a double entendre out of that you officially suck. This whole thing is so heartbreaking — and so unnecessary for anyone to suffer through. Once we emerged from the Dark Ages, the question of sexuality should have been a non-issue, so how do we, a supposedly intelligent, enlightened people, find ourselves still looking like frothing idiots? Never mind, rhetorical.
One more for the Things That Count file. A bloodbath doesn’t happen overnight, so write this down … homosexuals were among the very first to be harassed in Germany for their “inferiority,” and thousands eventually died in the camps after brutal torture ordered specifically for them.
This one’s a freebie: If you don’t know what fascism is and you have only so much time, look it up instead of the pagans — they’ll keep.
“If fascism comes, it will not be identified with any ‘shirt’ movement, nor with an insignia, but it will probably be wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution.”
James Waterman Wise, 1936 issue of The Christian Century
*Because if you’re gay you can’t be a Christian, you know.
Playing for Time 
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