Somebody's Got Some 'Splainin' To Do

So tell me Jock Girl- what's up with this:

I had a weekend. The sort of weekend where any sort of healthy consciousness I might have was so frightened by the amount of bad food and partying I did that it was forced into hiding under the bed, trembling in fear.

Honey, I consumed the holy trinity of badness:
Bacon
Ice Cream
Tequila.

And you know what? I feel better today, both physically and mentally, than I've felt in weeks.

I'm serious.

And as a disclaimer I have to say the bacon was consumed in a sandwich on whole grain bread with tomatoes from the garden and the tequila was consumed in a very small amount but the ice cream?
Let's just say I've had my dairy for the week.

And I don't usually even care about ice cream that much.

But last night? I cared. Oh baby, I cared a lot.

And I did not sleep well last night. But I got up early and Jock Girl stood there with her hands on her hips and said, "Get your fat, lazy, ice-cream-eatin' ass out that door right this second, Ms. Chubette and I mean it!" and I did and it was a great walk.

Except for the part where I saw bear tracks. Big ones. Bigger than my foot, for sure. That was weird. I wasn't sure what they were at first but then I did a bit of cogitating and realized there was nothing they could be but bear and I have to tell you that even though I am quite aware that Florida black bears do not attack humans for no reason, if I saw one you'd hear me screaming all the way to Tallahassee. I mean, I'm sort of startled when I see a rabbit. Bears are one of those things I admire and think are really cool in theory, but in up-close reality I just can't handle. Not when I'm all by myself in the woods, carrying nothing to defend myself with but a nice linen napkin which I keep in my pocket and use to wipe the sweat out of my eyes.

But there you have it. I feel incredibly good, I didn't see a bear, I've got my clothes hanging on the line, I went to yoga, and life is strangely great.

And my son, Mr. Downtown Guy, has a lovely post up about Dog Island with a haiku by Billy and even a picture of Billy and if you haven't see it already, go there.

And Juancho has a picture of bacon! And if you click on the title, you will find bacon recipes!

It's such a good day.

The Mythological Good Man

I desperately want to write a post about my husband (whose name shall be revealed here now- it is- are you ready for this? Mr. Moon!) because it's Father's Day tomorrow, but for some reason I'm having a terribly hard time with it.
It's really no wonder that I am. I grew up with first a father who was a drunk of such persistence that after he threatened to kill my mother, my brother and I, my mother had to leave him, and then a step-father who was a child molester and a psychological terrorist.
So I never really had what you'd call a father (or at least what I'd call a father) and because of that, I was probably drawn to men who were, for the most part, charismatic bad boys whom I figured I could fix with my love, attention, and devotion.
Yeah. That didn't work out so well.
And when Mr. Moon came a courtin', he was so off the mark as to the sort of man I'd be attracted to (see above) that my immediate reaction was to show him the door but something inside of me, some wise and aware part of me, cautioned me not to do that, but instead to open it wide, let him come in and plight his troth.
Which he did. And then managed somehow to move in with me after about fifteen minutes.
The first thing I noticed about Mr. Moon and the first thing every one notices about him, is his height. He's almost seven feet tall.
Everywhere I go with him and everywhere I have ever gone with him, his height has attracted attention. Especially from women.
"How tall ARE you?" they ask him, eyes wide and head tilted to the side, the better to take in all of the glorified goodness which is Mr. Moon.
"Did you play basketball?" they ask.
And he treats every one as if they were the first person ever, ever to comment on his height. With courtesy and with humor, and that was one of the first things I ever noticed about him. That and the way he walked and held himself, which was as if he was taking advantage of every single bit of height he had, proud to be a giant among men, born happy to be born special, and smiling all the time.
He smiled so much I wondered if there was something wrong with him. Honestly. I did.
And then when he fell in love with me, I was certain there was something wrong with him, but I figured that if I married him quick he'd not have time to notice how crazy I was, how needy, how very ill prepared to be the wife of a man like him.
He says he fell in love with me because the sweater I was wearing kept falling off my shoulder and because I made biscuits the way his grandmother did. I say it's because of the way I could shovel horse shit off the back of a pick-up truck for the garden.
Whatever. Whichever.
We got married.
I've realized since then that the man has a need to take on a challenge and I suppose I presented a huge one. I was obviously "not right" as we say around here. I had so much pent-up anger and hurt and bad stuff in me that it's a wonder I didn't have a bio-hazard sign tattooed on my forehead. But because he's got a heart so big that God had to give him a body the size of a giant to fit it in, he ignored all that crazy stuff and just saw a woman who needed a good man and two kids who needed a good dad and figured he could make it all alright.
He went from being a fairly casual house-painter to being a business owner who worked twelve hours a day, six days a week in a matter of months after we were married because he knew that what a husband and a father does is support his family.
He supported us, he was there. He gave everything he had to being the father and the husband he was raised to think a man should be. Although he didn't tread on the boundaries of my oldest two's biodad, he did everything a daddy would do for them. He went to school conferences and concerts and plays and recitals and karate events and he supported them in every way possible.
And he took care of the mama.
He gave me such a net of safety and love that I was able to admit and get help for all the hurt and anger and fear the fathers had instilled in me and he supported me as I did that. Sometimes I raged at him, even though he was innocent, because I couldn't rage at the men who'd damaged me. And he let me. He let me cry, he let me scream, he let me go through all the shit I had to go through to become if not quite whole, at least a lot less broken.
He couldn't do it for me, but he made it possible for me to do it myself by always, always being there.
He gave me two more babies and I doubt any one of my children would say they could have a better father than Mr. Moon. My two oldest children have two dads- but both men are their fathers. And both have given them very special and distinct gifts but I don't think that in their minds they have any doubt that at any time, their stepfather wouldn't do anything in his power to help them if they needed that. No questions asked.
In fact, he's proven that more than once.
On the worst day of my life, when one of my children got hit by a car and was taken to the hospital, I called him, right after I hung up from that call that no parent wants to get. I was in hysterics, crying and he said, "I'll meet you at the hospital." I was about five blocks from that hospital. He was about five miles. He beat me there. And he was the one to put his head in the ambulance to see our girl because I could not do it out of fear, out of terror. He sat there in that tiny cubicle in the emergency room, right beside her, even though he passes out at the sight of blood. He was there.
He's been there. He's the daddy.
He's the husband.
We're so different, in so many ways I can't begin to list them, but when you get right down to it, when you get to the core of the heart of the matter, we agree. The family is what's important. The children are what's important.
Our love is what it's all based on.
We love the water, we love the porch. We love to travel together, we love to sit home and eat dinner in front of the TV. We love to garden.
We love each other.
Twenty-four years after meeting him, and after twenty-three years of marriage, I love him more than ever. That sounds like a cliche but it's just the damn truth. We're both getting deaf, we're growing more and more eccentric, we're not the spry and cute young chickens we once were, but dammit, all that stuff is just...stuff.
And he's still almost seven feet tall and his heart is as big as ever.
All I can say is that I sure am glad I was wearing that sweater that night. And that I can make good biscuits and don't mind shoveling horse shit.
And that he loves me.
And not just because he is my comfort and joy but because he loves our babies. Each and every one for who and what they are. No buts about it, no questions asked.
I may not have had a father, but I found one for my kids and I did a damn good job.
And in doing so, I achieved what I had never even dreamed I could ever do, which was to create the sort of family I never had, but always wanted.
So thank you, Mr. Moon for always being here.
Don't stop. Don't you ever stop.

Ms. Moon Puts On Her Silver

Since the cake-baker/sanity-maker was in town last night under the guise of her real profession which is being a kick-ass musician, the daughter and I went down to the Legion Hall to hear the music. The husband couldn't go because he's fishing a tournament so it was just me and the youngest.

We had a good time, lots of good music, and at one point she said, "Let's dance."

Well, there was no dancing going on and most of the dance floor was covered with chairs but the disco mirror ball was rotating gently and I remembered all the dancing I've done under that disco ball over the years and I bit the lime and said, "Okay."

And we did.

We were the only two people who danced the entire evening until the very last song whereupon maybe ten people got up and shook a little bootie.

Sometimes you just have to dance. You put on your silver jewelry and your shiny eyeshadow and your daughter says let's dance and all that music is going to waste with everyone just sitting there watching when in fact, music was invented so that people could dance. Throw in a disco ball and it's just going to happen.

If you have the DNA I do, anyway, which my daughter does.

It was a fine evening.

Bloggoty, bloggoty, blog

Doesn't that make your mouth feel good when you say that title? Oh. It does mine. But that's not what I wanted to talk about.
What I wanted to talk about is that I'm having issues.
Blog issues.
Oh, not my own so much, but other people's.
I have spoken about blog addiction before and it's worth a revisit just for the picture. You don't need to read it because I'm going to tell you what I said in it right here. What I said was that I had become addicted (and not in a good way) to a certain blog which I refused to name, but now freely admit (and this is without therapy!) was the blog of the Dooce.
God Bless the Dooce, who is right this very second just a few counties over from me, vacationing in Destin, Florida. I know this from...her blog, which I still read although not obsessively.
And no, I am not going to go stalk her, although part of me wants to and I did discuss the issue with my daughter, May, who understands because she once went to LaConner, Washington to see if she could just "run into" Tom Robbins.
Unfortunately, she didn't run into him, or perhaps fortunately, but like I say, she understood.
But no, my stalking days are over.
But this has me thinking, isn't reading other people's blogs just a little bit stalkery?
(Feel free to read that line out loud doing your best Sarah-Jessica-Parker-playing-Carrie-Bradshaw voice.)
No matter how hard I try not to, I keep finding and bookmarking new-to-me blogs and putting them in my Google Reader. I can see how if this keeps up I will soon be either blogging or reading blogs approximately 22 hours a day.
And let's face it- there is nothing on earth worth doing 22 hours a day unless you're performing healing miracles on the dying. Or giving me free foot massages, but even then, that might be excessive. I can't imagine saying, oh, that's enough free foot massaging for me, thank-you, and really meaning it, but I suppose it could happen.
So why am I doing this? Reading these blogs? And how do I find them?
Sometimes I read them because the authors read and comment on my blog. And that feels like the polite thing to do, doesn't it? I mean, I'm southern. We're polite. If you bring us some cookies then we feel obligated to bake you a cake. Then you make us a roast suckling pig dinner and then we buy you a chain of restaurants.
That's how it works here.
So I read my commenters' blogs and then sometimes they talk about other people's blogs and so I go check that out and sometimes THOSE people have like THREE blogs and next damn thing you know, my eyes won't focus, the laundry needs taking off the line and all the okra in the garden has gotten as big and hard as the Jolly Green Giant's...wooden leg! and no matter how long you cook it, it's never going to be edible and you might as well fish it out of the pot and dry it off and paint it red and white and give it to someone for a Christmas ornament but I don't have time for that because I'm reading blogs!
So I don't know. I might just have to go cold turkey on this whole blog thing.
But darn it! I want to know what's going on in people's lives! I want to know what they're thinking and what their children are up to and what their dogs are getting into and what they're wearing and....
See what I mean about the stalkery thing?
It's like observing someone's every action without being really involved and it's a bit damn weird when you think about it, even though those people are standing in front of a metaphorical window with the lights on, taking their clothes off and begging you to watch.
Which really, when you think about it, is what blogging is.
So not only is reading other people's blogs weird, but writing one is too.
I'm doubly damned.
I think I better post this shit and go out and pick some okra. Or blackberries.
At least I'll have something to blog about besides blogs.

One Good Reason (Out Of Thousands) It's A Good Idea To Be Friends With Your Ex

Last night after we had my son's birthday supper at a pizza place, my ex, the bio-dad, and I shared a really, really good hug and I said, "Well, that was some day, thirty-two years ago, wasn't it?"

And he allowed as how it had been. "It had its stressful moments," he said.

"Yeah. Longest day of my life," I said. "But we got 'er done."

He laughed. "Yep. We did. We got 'er done."

And then I said, "Do you remember how I had that stupid Martin Mull song stuck in my head the entire 28 hours?"

And we both laughed and recited together, "I've slept with thousands of girls, please be one of them./I remember all of their names and I don't make fun of them."

Which were the lyrics to that song, so incredibly inappropriate to have had in my head while in labor. I remember thinking what an IDIOT Martin Mull was and being tormented, thinking to myself that if anyone knew how horribly painful the end-results of sex could be, they would never, ever joke about sex. Ever. Again.

Or even have it, which I was definitely planning never to do.

And which I planned never to do again during each of my labors.

All four.

Sigh.

But it was just so sweet last night, that hug, that shared memory and I am so grateful that he and I have the sort of relationship now where we can have those moments because there's no one else in the world who shares those same exact memories with me.

And having that person to hug and share with, all these years later after all the Sturm und Drang and bitterness and anger of separation and divorce and custody and child support issues is just...well, a damn blessing.

Work that shit out, folks. Work it out. And not just for your kids, even though that's the best reason to do it, but for yourself because when you do you're left with a sort of joy that no amount of self-satisfied, smug righteous indignation could ever leave you with.

I promise.

The First Best Day Of My Life, Thirty-Two Years Ago

Keep your attention in the here-and-now. Don't past-trip. Putting your attention in the past means that here-and-now is continuing on without you.
Stephen Gaskin.

Every morning I wake up dissatisfied and at least slightly despairing. It is my way. On the best days I shake these feelings off quickly and move on but some days they linger, as if they'd taken root in my bones, my heart, my blood.

Today seems to be one of those days.

I keep thinking about how thirty-two years ago today I was holding my first just-born baby in my arms.

I was twenty-one years old, barely a woman, and a just-born mother, so frighteningly full of love for the baby I was holding that the universe was hardly big enough to contain it and indeed, as I looked into that baby's eyes, held that baby's body to mine, my thoughts did race outward to the celestial.

I thought of stars in space as I looked into the infinite depths of my baby's eyes.

And today I think back on myself, holding that baby and I am still in wonder at the magnificent way our hearts have evolved to love another that much. I still think that it is somehow the force that holds this whole thing together- that sort of love. It is that powerful. It can bend light, it can cause gravity to loosen its hold, it can affect the spin of the planets in their orbits.

And yet here I am today, thirty-two years later, looking back, and my heart is heavy.

I am, as Stephen Gaskin says, past-tripping.

I think of that girl, that just-born mother and how her heart trembled on the verge of jumping out of her chest with the jolting joy of her baby's new life. I remember how she pressed her mouth to her baby's ear and made every sort of promise to that baby in a breathy whisper. The moon, the stars, a life filled with more sweetness and light than any human being's life has ever held.

And of course, I was not able to fulfill those promises. I was only human, tethered to earth with all its myriad complications, its rules of physics, its laws of gravity, perhaps loosened for a moment with the hugeness of my love, but which soon settled back into its normal unyielding demands, its heaviness of reality.

And my heart fills now, thinking of this.

Perhaps it is a strange form of bi-polar disorder, stretched out over the course of three decades. Or perhaps it is just the complete and utterly disorienting realization that thirty-two years have passed since that day and where am I? What am I doing?

Young hippie mother in love with her first baby to old hippie mother still in love with that baby, but weary now. So weary some days of the millions of minutes made up of the minutiae of my life.

The dishes need washing.
The laundry needs doing.
The dogs need feeding.
We're out of cereal, the pump is broken, the garden needs watering, the books need writing, the floors need sweeping, the heart needs mending, the spirit needs tending, the thousand tiny cuts need binding.

How did I get from that holy room, holding that holy child, my holy heart so full of light that I'm sure it registered in the mind of God to being so old and worn out?

It has happened so fast. At the speed of unbent light. No. Faster than that.

And I can't go back. I can't whisper warnings in that young mother's ear about this choice, or that. I can't tell her to trust herself more, to stand up for what she knew was right, to open her eyes to blinding truths, to be wary, to be stronger, to be aware that time, even as she held that baby, her milk not even come in yet, was flowing so fast that it would drown her if she let it.

I can't go back and change anything, nor would I. It doesn't work that way, nor should it. I would not interfere with that woman's hopes and dreams and innocence for anything in the world. That was a perfect moment, just as it was.

I am here. That baby is here. He is grown up. He is a man. He is someone I am prouder of than I could ever have imagined thirty-two years ago. His path has been a hard one but he has strong shoulders and strong legs and he is confident as he walks.

He taught me about love, that first second of his life.

He teaches me about strength, every second of his life.

He is here, he is now, he is perfect.

And if there are regrets in my heart about anything, anything at all, none of it has to do with him. Or with his sisters, either, except for this:
I wish, oh babies, I wish- I could have done better by you sometimes. I do.

I wish I could have done better by me sometimes, too.

But here we are.

And it's time to pull myself away from the past and get on with the here-and-now. It needs my attention. While I am here, I have to give it. That's the deal we make when we're born, when we give birth.

There is the holy light of love and there are the diapers that need changing.
There is the magnificent tsunami of joy and there are the endless nights of colic and weeping.
There is the perfect plan of life and there are the regrets.
They are all part of it, aren't they?

We continue on.

We celebrate.

Happy birthday, Son.
Thank-you for the lessons. Thank-you for being my here-and-now for all these years.

I still think of the stars when I think of you.

And my heart lightens and rises up and I go on.

What's It All Mean, Mr. Natural, Part II (Or, Letting R. Crumb Do the Work For Me)

Some days are just big fat write-offs, aren't they? Today was one of those days for me. I couldn't even get a blog post out, no matter how hard I tried. In fact, the harder I tried, the more it got all weird and stupid and boring.
And so, in the spirit of what I think I was trying to write about, which was the old hippie days, I will just give you this, which sort of sums it all up perfectly.



For me, anyway. And which in any case, is good, solid wisdom from one of my favorite gurus.

Thanks, Mr. Natural!

P.S. I discovered, while doing a google-image search for this very cartoon, that if you search for What's It All Mean, Mr. Natural, you will find ME! Ms. Moon, on the very first line of the very first page of hits. This would explain why my What's It All Mean, Mr. Natural post is one of my most consistently hit pages. And I thought it was because it was so great and maybe making the rounds of word-of-mouthedness or something. Ha! But it was funny to find me on the World Wide InterWeb, I tell you. Shocking. Not quite as shocking as what I found on the THIRD page of hits (Oh Lord, child, cover your eyes!) but still shocking.

Sucks In The City

It's hot here, y'all. Hotter than hot! hot! hot! Brangelina sex and you know that is some hot sex.
Because I have four dogs whom I have never trained very well, I choose to leave the air conditioner off during the day so I don't have to spend my entire waking hours opening the door for them to go in and out at their will. If the door is closed for the AC, they will scratch at it until it's a mere scraped-out thing instead of the one-hundred-and-fifty year old door it is, so I just do without artificial cooling during the days and leave the damn door open.
This means that the outside here is always part of the inside, including the occasional bird who flies in through the porch dog door. I am constantly finding bird poop in unexpected places like on the newel post or on the floor in the library.
But I like it like that. I have realized lately that for me, sanity lies in being where I can see what's going on outside and being outside as much as possible. I've spent a lot of time in the yard this weekend, planting some blueberry bushes and watering and weeding. I also went blackberry picking with daughter Lily, which was a bit premature in that they aren't really ripe, but we got enough for this morning's pancakes, which we ate outside under the Bradford pears.
Anyway, all of this is hot work. And for some reason, I don't mind that. I move slowly, I get whatever done that gets done and then when evening comes, we turn on the AC and shut the doors and try to convince the dogs to leave the damn door alone.
Twice this weekend, though, I went out. I ventured beyond the village limits on Friday night to go see Sex In The City and as God is my witness, I will never go to another Friday night movie in my life unless one of my books is made into a movie and there is a premier that I must attend.
And a red carpet better be involved.
I won't go into the many, many reasons that the movie going was such a painful experience but I will say this- it wasn't worth putting a bra on for. Between the unruly crowds and the fact that you have to watch TV commercials before a movie starts these days (when did THAT happen?) and the fact that the movie really wasn't that good, it was just not worth the effort. There were hardly even any movie star bosoms.
And then last night I went to a gathering of people whom I really like to the point of adoration and yet, I found myself so uncomfortable, being inside a very lovely home and chatting with a plate of yummy food on my lap that I almost wept with joy when the woman I'd come with said, "You ready to go?"
Oh yes. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.
I'd already been accused, in a humorous way, of being loaded when in fact, I'd had one beer. My behavior was a bit strange, I admit, but it was only through nervousness, not drunkenness.
The sad fact these days is that you can dress me up but you cannot take me out.
Really.
Don't even try it.
So my friend and I made our good-byes and everyone had to make a big deal about us leaving. The party really had sort of just begun, but we gathered our bowls and purses and took our leave and one man said, "You're going to be halfway home and wish you'd stayed!"
Ha, I thought. I'm just leaving and wish I was halfway home.
I took my friend to her house and when we got there, which is in a woodsy area, with its beautiful flowers and trees and vegetables and chickens and dogs and cats, I looked around and said, "Wow. Why wouldn't anyone rather be here than inside some place making polite conversation?"
And she knew exactly what I meant.
I drove the long way home through fields and woods and the sun was setting and when I got home I said to my husband, "Please don't make me go out again. Ever."
He laughed, but I was serious.
I took off the dreaded bra and put on my linen overalls and went outside to water my blueberries. An owl landed a few feet from me and scooped some unfortunate creature up and took him into a tree to leisurely enjoy while the night crickets and frogs started their singing and fiddling, their every-night jubilee. A white magnolia blossom, cupped and folded for the night gleamed in the twilight and I pulled it down to breathe in its holy fragrance as the night came in fully.
I looked back up at my house, its white walls rising in the darkness, light spilling from the windows, and I thought, no, really, why would I leave?
And of course, I did go to Publix today and that was fine but it's just been such a joy to work in the yard, hang the clothes outside, pick some peas from the garden, make a bean salad and herb bread for our supper of grilled eggplant sandwiches.

It's hot, y'all, but I have porches. I've sat on two of them so far today; I'm sitting on one of them right now. And perhaps my husband and I will go sit on the third in a little while. I can hear the birds, some traffic, a goat wailing from next door. The donkey starts his sequence of hee-haws. Thunder is rumbling off in the distance, although from where I sit I can't even see a cloud.
I have an entire Sunday New York Times to read, we're going to eat the veggie porn eggplant on my home-made bread soon, I am not wearing a bra, and if a magic genie appeared right this second and said, "I'll take you anywhere in the entire world you want to go," I'd have to say, "Thank you kindly, sir, but I'm fine right here."

Yes sir. I am fine. Right here.

Things I've Learned This Week

A few random bits of wisdom, gleaned from my life right here in Lloyd, Florida, the land that time forgot but that I certainly never will:

According to Esquire Magazine, a poll done by the Pew Research Center says that Americans would be less likely to support a candidate if he or she were:
Black: 6%
Catholic: 7%
Jewish: 11%
A Woman: 12%
Hispanic: 15%
Evangelical Christian: 16%
Mormon: 25%
Muslim: 45%
and the highest percentage of all goes to
Atheist: 61%
To me, this says that Americans are far more apt to vote for a candidate who believes in magical underwear (Mormon) than one who does not believe in God. As are Americans far more apt to vote for someone who's faith decrees that their infant sons' penises must be mutilated right after birth to please God (Jewish) than one who doesn't believe in that God.
Thank you very much and we certainly know who will not ever be running for president.
Me.

Moving on.

It makes men very, very happy to have an old car to work on.

Men will happily eat tofu if it is an ingredient in an egg roll and served up with plenty of duck sauce.

Especially if they know they're going to go work on their old car as soon as supper is over.

Jock Girl? She knows what she's talking about. I got up early this morning and walked before yoga and I feel so much better in every way for having done that.

Writing fiction can surprise you even more than reading it. I am sure that some authors can control their characters but I am not one of them. Perhaps this is because I am not a real author.

Knocked Up may be a low-brow comedy that certainly doesn't pander to my demographic and it may not portray childbirth, life, or love in a very truthful way but DAMMIT! it's funny as shit.

The expression funny as shit is one that I don't quite understand but I use it a lot.

Bodies remember anniversaries of all sorts, even if minds don't.

The sins of the father are visited yea, unto at least the next generation.

Old rock and roll is the BEST rock and roll.

The high cost of fuel is going to change a lot of things for every single one of us. Not all of these things will be negative.

A husband who OFFERS to take you to see the Sex and the City movie is not a husband who is worried about his manhood.

And one who should not be taken for granted.

And who probably thinks he's going to get to see a few movie-star bosoms.

Eggplants can certainly grow themselves into some interesting shapes. I mean really. Please.


Don't even try to tell me that's a nose. Or a.. chin cleft?

One of the coolest things in the eat-UP-with-cool county of Wakulla is the XLERATOR hand dryer in the restroom of the Kangaroo convenience store. You have never seen anything like this. Go now. It's worth the gas money. They have decent coffee at the Kangaroo, too. And while you're rambling around the county, might as well check out the lighthouse, Ouzt's II, the River Side cafe, Just Fruits and Exotics nursery, and the woman who sells boiled peanuts who will show you pictures of her grandchildren. But don't skip the XLERATOR. Really. It's the best.

The person who instituted the policy at Old Navy wherein all employees must walk around the store with an Old Navy canvas bag slung over their shoulder should be taken out and shot. Not only does it look ridiculous, especially on the men because it just screams, "Big old dork!" but also because none of the employees can get their work done due to the fact that they have to keep adjusting the strap to keep the bag from falling off.
This is just wrong.
Not going-to-war-in-Iraq wrong, but wrong nonetheless.

And last but not least, it has come to my attention that many, many blog commenters use the phrase, "You made me pee in my pants a little," or "That story made me throw up in my mouth a little," or some other thing a little, which is getting to be annoying a little, and which makes the commenters who use these phrases sound ridiculous a lot.

And that's about all I've learned this week.

I am so happy to have intelligent commenters on my blog who leave intelligent comments which do not involve the phrase "I peed in my pants a little". And honored. I wish we could all meet up in Medart to dry our hands with the XLERATOR together and then go to Ouzt's for a beer and discuss these and many other things.

Wouldn't that be fun?

Jock Girl VS Chubette.

I was a fat kid. I also wore glasses and and was a dorky nerd before the words "dork" and "nerd" had been invented. You can only imagine the teasing I got, although teasing is too tame a word. Unmercifully and cruelly taunted would be a better description for what happened.

Fatty, four eyes, teacher's pet.

These are but a few of the witty names thrown my way in grades one through five.

Good times, good times.

It wasn't until I reached the sixth grade that I lost a bunch of weight and no longer had to buy my clothes in the Chubette department. And yes, that is what they actually called it- The Chubette Department. The way I lost weight was somewhat unique. Being a southern child, I got a sort of hookworm parasite in my foot called ground itch, or, to be more medical about it, cutaneous larva migrans. I would show you a picture but you don't want to see it. For some reason, my ground itch did not get successfully treated and spread all over my foot causing agonizing itching, a bacterial infection which oozed pus and serum, and the need to get from one place to another by hopping on the unaffected foot.

The combination of these things resulted in a rather large weight loss, which of course made it all worthwhile.

I spent my high school years doing every thing I could not to become fat again and mostly, I succeeded. This involved flirting with (although never entirely falling into) eating disorders because in those days, that's what a girl had to work with. I don't think the concept of fitness had really been invented back in those days and only athletes were expected to play sports and girls were definitely not supposed to be athletes.

It wasn't until my twenties and I was trying to lose baby weight that I started independently doing anything physical beyond digging ditches and chopping down trees. I read Jim Fixx's book on running, which was a huge revolutionary book in those days, and began to force myself to run three miles a day. I hated it, so it was good for me.

After a while, though, I realized that hating something wasn't exactly a great reason to do it, so I started walking instead of running and I have been walking ever since. I walk fast and I do it regularly, which works for me.

It's harder to enjoy walking in the summer than it is in the winter, I have to admit. Summer has found us and it feels like she's squatting over us with her powerful hot thighs, so walking has become more of a test of my endurance than of anything else, but I am glad, at the age of fifty-three, to be able to endure it.

I am not, let's face it, an athlete, although besides walking I lift some weights, do some exercises, and go to yoga three times a week.

And I do these things religiously. Not only because if I didn't, I would be as big as, well, someone who has to shop in the Chubette Department, but also because when I was in my forties, I realized that inside of this body there lives a jock girl.

Yep. That's what I call her.

Jock Girl.

She looks a little like me and a lot like Jackie Warner (see above) and instead of groaning when it's time to lift those weights, she cheers. When it's time to go walk, she's so happy. And when I finally learned that I could do real, big boy push-ups, she was ecstatic. She wishes I could do more, but that's another story.

The funny thing is, is that I feel like Jock Girl has been inside of me my entire life. I've always known I had a strong body, especially after giving birth to my babies without the aid of drugs or medical interventions, even the one who weighed over ten pounds. And it feels right to appreciate it by pushing it some, by letting it be strong.

I will never have a body like Jackie Warner's and I grieve that.

But it's okay. I may not even look as good as I could, but I take Jock Girl out for exercise regularly and I know she's making sure I don't get osteoporosis, she's watching my cholesterol and weight, she's helping me keep on a more even keel, emotionally, and she's keeping me as strong and flexible as I need to be.

I think that I'm actually going to have to get up and go walk a lot earlier now that it's so hot and I hope I have the self-discipline to do that because it can't be healthy to turn as red and sweat as much as I do, walking in the heat of the mid-morning. Honestly, sometimes I'm so hot I'm not even aware of having a hot flash except for the fact that instead of the sweat dripping off my face, it begins to run in rivulets.

I don't really want to get up earlier and I really don't want to have to stop wasting a bunch of time before I walk by reading the paper and checking out any new blogs that might have appeared overnight, but Jock Girl says I must.

And what I've learned is that when Jock Girl makes demands, I should listen because her demands are far less cruel than being called fatty.

And because I never, ever want to have to buy my clothes in any department resembling the Chubette section again in my entire life. I'll always wear glasses, I'll always be a dorky nerd, but dammit, I refuse, I simply and absolutely refuse to be a Chubette.

Truth be told, there's still one of those who lives inside me too, right alongside Jock Girl. She tells me to eat more peanut better, she tells me to go lie on the couch and read, and she always tells me that I don't have to walk today; I can do it tomorrow.

I'll never entirely get rid of her, that Chubette Girl. But I don't have to listen to her. Not if I don't want to.

And I don't. It's as simple as that.

I don't.

The Jitterbug!

Okay. This is so damn uncool that I almost really want one.

I mean, an iPhone can make anyone look cool, but you'd have to be REALLY cool to pop this baby out of your pocket and make a call.

Wait! How DO you make a call on the Jitterbug? Where are the numbers?

I bet I could figure it out because I'm sure it comes with really, really good instructions. Written in English. In seriously big letters. That I could read.

And you know, I do have a birthday coming up.....

Is there a Jitterbug in my future?

Nah. I ain't that cool.

Writing This Was So Much Harder Than Writing About Falling On My Ass

When my son got me started on this blog thing, I went into it with a pure heart and but one purpose: to write.
Elementary school, for me, was nothing but a means to an end- to learn to read the magic letters, to learn to write the magic letters, the ones written perfectly on the green strip of cardboard that ran above the chalkboard- the ones in all the books.
They gave us those fat pencils to write with and why? Little hands and fat pencils have never made sense to me but we struggled with our fat pencils, our tongue-tips firmly between our loose front teeth, to write the big A's and B's and C's on the thin paper that had the dotted line in between the solid lines to show us where the bumps and humps should rest. We sharpened our fat pencils, we erased until the paper dissolved, we learned.
I learned the letters fast and I learned the sounds they made and next thing, quick! before you knew it! I was reading everything I could get my grubby little hands on. My school had no library and the only thing even remotely like a library within miles and miles of where we lived was in the Roseland Garden Club (still there, but now it's the Roseland Community Center), only open on Tuesday night for library purposes, a few shelves filled with donated books and Mrs. Mockeridge with her little stamper with tiny, geared wheels that changed the date so you would know when your books were due to be returned, although it never took me a week to read the books I got. Days, maybe. Usually minutes and then what? Panting for more, that's what, and soon I'd read every book in the Roseland Garden Club Mrs. Mockeridge deemed appropriate.
I started writing too. I wrote poems, I wrote little songs. I wrote stories.
We moved to a bigger place and there were real libraries and I wrote more stories and poems and speeches and I won prizes for those speeches. Whoo-boy, could I write a patriotic speech and deliver it with panache!
You bet!
Life, life, life happened. Bad things. A lot of bad things. A few good, of course. But no matter what happened, what fresh horror life delivered me in the form of a stepfather, responsibilities and worries that permanently bowed my spine, there were books. I went from trash to treasure, didn't matter. War And Peace one week, some sort of Georgette Heyer the next. Gone With The Wind, David Copperfield, The Catcher in the Rye, The Yearling. There were finally enough books.
And inside of me, there was such a yearning to write my own.
More life. Some college, some babies, a husband, some gardens, more college, a different husband, some more babies.
When the oldest two were still toddlers, I finally started writing a novel. It was about a waitress in Aplachicola- a place that begged on bended knee to be written about- and soon, my waitress stole my heart. Over the course of years and years, she told me her story, her voice was so strong. I learned to write by writing her story.
Miraculously I found an agent. "Oh yeah, I'll sell this book," she promised. I never could believe her. How could such a dream come true?
I was right, she was wrong. She never sold it. Do you know the courage it takes to send an unsolicited manuscript out? Do you? You're supposed to go to writing school, make connections, get published in university journals, then go from there.
I came from nowhere.
I went nowhere.
For a year I was a community columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat. I wrote about Tallahassee, my kids, gardens, Wakulla Springs, gay rights, all the things that mattered to me. I loved that year. I got so many letters. People, actual real people, were reading what I wrote.
I started other novels. I struggled with the knowledge that I was going nowhere, but I kept writing. Only, of course, after all the laundry was done, the floors were swept, the kids were taken care of, the dinner planned and started. Minutes here, hours there, too long between sitting-downs and doing it.
But I did it because I had to. Hours and hours of gloriously lonely work, always feeling guilty because...what was it for? No money from it, no acclaim, no heavy-weight of book in hand, with a cover, pages littered front and back with the magic letters. So why was I doing it?
Because it felt so damn good. Because I had to.
And then came the blog. The simplest thing became possible. I wrote, people read.
Now it's a huge part of my life. I read other people's blogs and sometimes they're dreck and sometimes they're so good my soul grows green with envy and they get interviews on TV and in the Wall Street Journal and then...they get book deals. Someone wants to take their words (their magic words!) off the ethereal almost-real internet and put them down on pages of paper, bind them up with covers with pictures and send them out into the world where people can hold them in their hands.
I can only imagine.
I can't imagine.
I'm getting old. Book-publishing is a business whose light is growing fainter and fainter. No one reads anymore, they tell us. Trees being slaughtered for books to languish and then be remaindered?
People don't want to take the time to create the pictures in their minds anymore. There are movies, videos, youtube. Why bother?
My hope, like the light of the publishing business, fades until it's hardly a tiny pinpoint of brightness in the vast darkness of the womb where unpublished authors float, waiting for that miraculous day when something might get born.
But what can I do? I can only keep writing.
Another novel grows and although the words haven't caught magic, my job is just to get them down and then polish and polish until some sort of gleam begins to shine through.
It's all I can do. Because for some reason, I have to.
And beyond that, far, far beyond that, it's my joy.
There is nothing in this world more satisfying to me than sitting here, letting words come and typing them out. If I am never published, ever, it's still been the grandest thing. I have written some things. Some people have read them.
Right now, this very second, I get to do that. It's pouring rain outside, it's thundering, it's lightening, and I am writing. Once I sat in this very same spot as a hurricane whipped through, beating the trees into submission with its wind, flooding the yard with its waters and I did not stop writing.
Some days I think, "Why? I'm not clever, I'm not funny, I'm not cool. I'm an old mother who writes about the chunks and slivers of life I've been handed. So what? Who cares?"
Then I say, "Shut up."
And I sit down and I write.
I may not have magic. I may not be magic.
But the words, writing the words, always is.

I'm Talking About Menopause Again So Skip This One

Damn. It's hot. All of a sudden, it is very, very hot. And to my huge dismay, the hot flashes that I've been having for ten years and which have seemed milder and less frequent over the past few cooler months have come back in force, reminding me all too well that I am a post-menopausal woman fighting with every breath she has to maintain some semblance of mental health and well being.
However, I am discovering that like the war on terror, the battle against aging is not one that can ever be realistically won.
I went to a web site the other day that purported to give holistic advice about fighting the symptoms of menopause. The advice was hardly groundbreaking or earthshaking, but more along the lines of: eat more flax and salmon, take vitamins, ingest more soy, and oh yes- EXERCISE!
I wanted to throw the website through the metaphorical window (or, to be more accurate, throw whoever wrote that crap through a real window) because I already do all that shit and it's not working. Do you hear me? It is not working.
And I'm cranky. And I'm annoyed. And I'm hot. And I'm feeling useless and bitchy and as whiny as a toddler needing a nap, which is exactly what I look like in my linen (absorbent for the hot flash sweat) overalls (the only garment that really fits me these days). A really, really old toddler.
Good look, right?
Actually right now I'm wearing men's cargo shorts and a tank top. Another good look.
Do I even own a real woman's garment?
Probably. But it doesn't fit.
Yeah, yeah. I've covered this ground before but let me tell you something- people are not talking about menopause the way they should be. I haven't seen the new Sex and the City movie but I'd bet the ranch they aren't discussing hot flashes in that movie. For one thing, those women would not be wearing those clothes if they were having hot flashes. For another, those women are not real women. They're pretty, pretty dolls who resemble women in the way that women who are created and given things to say by gay men are women.
Don't get me wrong. I can't wait to see the movie. I personally love Carrie and Samantha and Charlotte and Miranda, too. Honestly. I love them from the tip-top of their non-graying heads to the bottom of their Manolo Blahniks but they're not real women.
Because if they were, at least one of them would be in perimenopause by this point and having hot flashes out the yang.
But hot flashes aren't sexy. Not in any way.
And menopause isn't either. Just the word makes you think of things you'd really rather not, doesn't it?
Let's do a little word association here.
Okay. When you hear the word "menopause" what do you think of?
I'll go first.
Old age. Bitterness. The end of fun. The end of sleep. Sweat. Fat. Time For Botox. Time For Husband To Look For Younger Wife. Caftans. Muu-muu's. Ugly shoes. Crone, hag, old, bag.
Now- your turn!
Bet you didn't say sexy, powerful, cute, juicy, go-go boots, or a barrel full of fun! now, did you?
No. You did not.
There is sort of a baby-boomer-invented attitude about menopause I've noticed lately that supposedly celebrates this part of aging and I guess that's a positive thing but it's just so lame. And it has this girly-winky-jokiness about it that I am not personally feeling in the least. Let me just say right now that I don't wear red hats and go to lunch with women wearing purple. I do not call hot-flashes power surges and I want to smack people who do. Hard. And I do not believe that fifty is the new thirty. Not in any way, shape, or form. I also do not think it's cool for women over the age of fifty to go to third world countries and "date" much, much, much younger men.
Have some fucking dignity here, women! Please!
And I don't want to take hormones. Hormones got me in enough trouble in my youth. Not that the lack of them is doing me any favors, but what's the point in trying to artificially create a situation that's over and dead? This may be a ignorant and wrong-thinking attitude but it's the one I have.
So here's how I'm handling the situation:
I'm putting on my overalls and doing as much yard work as I can stand in the heat. I will continue to walk and do yoga and lift weights. I sleep with the AC on low, plus a fan at my head and one at my feet. I will continue to eat flax, salmon, and soy and take my damn vitamins. They may not be working but at least I feel like I'm doing something.
And last but not least, I'm growing ever crankier, bitchier and meaner by the second and I'm finding I have less and less tolerance for bullshit with every hot flash I experience. And that is fine with me.
And I'm not pretending it's not happening and I'm not pretending it's all groovy.
Because it's not.
But by god, I want to be one of those tough old biddies that makes it through "the change" with at least a little bit of muscle tone, a lot of grit, and a good-looking yard.
And a husband, too, but that's another blog for another day.
And if they ever do a sequel to the Sex and The City movie, I'm going to see if I can help write the screenplay. Because if anyone could look good in linen overalls, it would be Carrie Bradshaw.
Damn her.

Sometimes

The heaviness of my blessings
Pushes me into a position
Of prayer.
Which means
I dance.

Today I Have Sympathy For The Devil

Roseanne Barr is one of those people whom you either love or you hate. Sort of like cilantro. Yep, I'd call Roseanne the cilantro of the comedy world.

Me? I love cilantro and I can't help but love Roseanne, too. Oh, she gets weird sometimes, but I have a huge (some would say too huge) tolerance for weird.

What I don't have is a tolerance for is Christian Rock.

Which is what my yoga teacher tried to play for us today as we were doing yoga.

Deep breath. Deep, deep breath.

First of all, who does yoga to rock music?

Second of all, who in their right mind plays Christian rock for a yoga class of two, one of them an avowed next-best-thing-to-an-atheist? I suppose I haven't come out and said I was an avowed good-as-an-atheist to her, but after over a year of comments, I'd have thought she'd have figured it out. For example, it might have been a clue when I told her that I was reading a great book called God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

She is not stupid, so perhaps she was trying to proselytize to me via the coolness of rock music.
Hmmmm....

I don't know. I do know that it upset me so much that I thought I might explode. But I'm polite. I was in her house, listening to her music and she is the teacher. Now, to give her credit, she did say when she put it on that perhaps it was too "jazzy" for us and to let her know.

Jazzy wasn't the problem.

And I was afraid to open my mouth because I was afraid that if I did, great burning flames would shoot out, scorching everything in the entire room and perhaps burning up her couch, her entertainment system, and her poor old crippled dog whom I do have an affection for.

So I kept my mouth shut.

Thankfully, my across-the-street neighbor who goes to yoga with me said, very quietly and politely, "You know, this music isn't really working for me."

She's a saint and I owe her a martini.

Now. What does all of this have to do with Roseanne Barr? Just something she said once about how wrong Christian rock is. "What's next?" she mused. "Christian porn?"

I am thinking I might have to invite my yoga teacher over here for some yoga and I'll put on Beggar's Banquet and play a little bit of Sympathy for the Devil. Maybe a little Stray Cat Blues. Maybe a little Street Fighting Man.
I think that would be appropriate, don't you?

Anyway, in other Lloyd news, I went to the Lloyd Community Preservation Trust meeting last night. This was the fourth of these meetings I've attended. The same five people are always there and we always discuss the same thing, which is an old store that is being restored. No pun intended, believe me.

The store is almost done with its restoration and now we need to figure out what we're going to do with it. The answer is- until we get electricity to it- nothing. And there is no money for electricity. So there you go. We are a community body of civic-minded people who are accomplishing....very little.

We also discussed the fact that our local "real" store appears to be closed and this is upsetting as the crack dealers will probably move in. Jefferson County is a very large but very poor county and we have only one town and very few sheriffs. Lloyd is not a real town. It's barely a village. But the little convenience store was at the heart of it and the man who ran it was our eyes and our ears and he was calm and cool and universally respected and liked, as was his wife. I feel that without him, our center will crumble and since nature abhors a vacuum and since crack-heads seem to need a place to gather, I fear for our little village.

We shall see.

And that's about as bloggy as I get. As our beloved Juancho said once, he felt he needed to go wash his hands after being bloggy, and I feel the same.

Please forgive me and just chalk it up to my recent exposure to Christian Rock. I will be fine as soon as I find my Beggar's Banquet CD and crank it up to 10. This will be happening around six p.m. tonight. A martini may be involved.

Stop by if you would care to join me in this powerful and healing ceremony. It will be a spiritual event.

Amen.

How Many Types of Rain Do You Guess There Are?

It's raining. That good type of steady, slow rain that feels like maybe it's found a good book and a comfortable chair and has settled in to stay for awhile.
Should be good sleeping tonight.

Coming, Going, Here, Gone. All At The Same Time

When I was in the eighth grade, my Girl Scout troop came to Tallahassee from Winter Haven, where we lived. This was in 1968, right after Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated and the entire country was dazed and unbelieving, reeling and anxious. The African-American community was devastated and there had been riots and rumors of riots and since Tallahassee was the state capitol, my scout leader was concerned that perhaps we should postpone our trip until things settled down, but someone calmed her fears, convinced her we'd be fine, and so, dressed in our uniforms and with our little suitcases, we boarded the train in Winter Haven and rode it to Tallahassee.
My scout leader was a woman from Illinois or Indiana or Iowa- one of those heartland states that begins with the letter i. She was a woman who, looking back, must have been abused or molested or perhaps both, in childhood because she was filled with fears and anxieties and was constantly warning her daughter, who was one of my best friends, to be on the lookout for this or that possible threat. And I doubt she'd ever even laid eyes on a person of color until she came to Florida as an adult and she probably had some of the most overt prejudices I've ever seen. Once, when I was in high school, she saw me giving a ride to a black friend of mine and told her daughter that she was no longer allowed to associate with me.
So, given that combination, it's a wonder we did come to view the Capitol at all, but we did, and I don't remember much about the train ride except that it seemed to me that the bar car was where the action was and they served a fine turkey sandwich.
We stayed at the Floridan Hotel and that I remember well. It was fairly old even then, and had that great old hotel smell which is sadly lacking in today's Marriotts and Holiday Inns. It was a smell made up of elements of time and wear and dust and mildew and of all the people who'd stayed there- their clothes, their shoes, their cigarettes, their soap and shampoo and shaving cream, their body odors, their breath, their sex, their room-service meals.
To an eighth grade girl, it was intoxicating.
We were vastly relieved to discover that the black people of Tallahassee were not rioting. The men who toted the bags and the women who cleaned the rooms went about their jobs with no outward display of hatred towards us although who knows? They may have made the sign of the evil eye at us when our backs were turned. I wouldn't have blamed them then and I wouldn't blame them now.
Our visit was entirely uneventful. We went to the Capitol. We met Claude Kirk, the governor. We visited FSU where one of our scout's sisters was matriculating. She gave us a little tour of the campus.
All of those things were fine but what I remember most was visiting the Little Folks toy store which was right across the street from the hotel. We saw Claude Kirk's wife, Erika, shopping for toys there. She was a beautiful, glamorous woman and as close to a celebrity as we were going to see. My friend, Mary Lane, bought a stuffed giraffe that day. I wonder if she still has it.
The other thing I remember was eating our supper at Angelo's restaurant which was also across the street, right next to Little Folks. Mary Lane and I split an order of spaghetti.
I do not forget meals.
I had no idea on that trip so long ago that I would one day move to Tallahassee. That the Floridan would play a role in my future, that I would eat hundreds of meals at Angelo's and that I would buy toys for my first child at Little Folks. I was a Girl Scout, on a trip to the Capitol. I had no idea what my future held.
Things change. They do. The Floridan is long gone, as is Little Folks, as is Angelo and his restaurant which I will forever mourn the loss of.
And I am not going to sit here and say that everything changes for the worse. I know I wouldn't say that if I were black, although things in this country are still not what you'd call civil, and rights are denied people because of the color of their skin every moment of every day.
But there are laws. Things do change. We might have a dark-skinned president by this time next year.
And won't that be fine? Won't that be proof that change can be good?
It was just odd this morning to open the paper and see the report on the ground-breaking of the new Floridan, to remember staying there as a girl and to remember how, when I was pregnant with Hank I worked there, in one of the rented side-spaces, for my friend Ruth in her graphics design business. My friend Karen went into labor there.
Buildings can define space and thus, define human activities and lives. Bricks and mortar will rise up into the sky again and Tallahassee will redefine itself once again when they do. There may be a hotel there and it may be called the Floridan but it will never smell the same.
And me? I'm hanging on here in Lloyd in a house that's been here since the nineteenth century, it's walls and floors defining my life this very moment. It was right here when my Girl Scout troop took the train into Tallahassee and we probably passed right by it on the track that runs through my back yard now.
And there I was, a child sitting in a train, wearing a green skirt, a white blouse, a badge sash and a beret, anticipating the huge adventure of a trip away, never knowing that I was passing within a hundred yards of a place I'd live with my as then yet-undreamed of husband and children.
The me of the past flew right past her future and the me of the present looks back and thinks how the past has flown by.
I could almost shiver, thinking of that, how the present and the past and the future are always happening, as we hurtle through space, passengers on this planet for the short time we're given, thinking we know exactly where we're going, our uncertain tickets clutched in our hands.
Where does the time go? I have no idea. I am not a philosopher or a physicist. I am only a woman, sitting in a room facing a railroad track, thinking of a girl.
I am that girl. I am that woman.
I am sitting still. I am flying foward.
I am hurtling through space.

On Being a Housewife

Let us hope that I am better at the wife part than I am at the keeping house part.

I'm The Derider

Today is Memorial Day and our president spoke from Arlington Cemetery where he placed the traditional wreaths on the graves of the unknown soldiers.

I heard part of our Chief Expletive's remarks and had to go and look online to see if what I heard was really what he said and it would appear that it was. Here's the part I'm talking about:

'They're an awesome bunch of people and the United States is blessed to have such citizens..."

He was talking about the dead buried at Arlington and if you'll notice, it would appear Bush isn't aware that these are not actual real citizens anymore, and we don't exactly have them, if you know what I mean, unless you mean their bones which we do have. In some cases, anyway.

Is there no end to this man's idiocy?

I doubt Bush wrote the speech but if it were me being given those words to read, I think I would have objected to that part and also the part where he called the dead "awesome." Bush is probably not aware of this, but everything from Taco Bell burritos to Hannah Montana are routinely referred to as awesome, which made his words sound not only ridiculous but insulting when used in the context of human beings who died while serving our country.

It's not just what the president says that makes him sound like a moron though, it's how he sounds when he's saying it. I've heard he's not as dumb as he sounds, but that's not very reassuring because he sounds WAY, WAY, WAY too dumb to be even president of the local chapter of banana sticker collectors, much less to be president of the United States of America.

But here's the thing- we elected the man. At least once.

Oh not me and probably not you, but a lot of people voted for him. I asked one woman I know why on earth she voted for him the second time. I said I could sort of understand voting for him the first time (although really, I can't) but the second as well?

She hemmed and hawed and said something about "life style issues" which we all know means abortions and gay marriage but then she got a bit huffy and said, "Look, my husband and I have worked for everything we've ever gotten. And we don't like giving our money to people who don't want to work."

So, okay, elect an obvious moron because he's a Republican and Republicans keep our taxes low.
Well, if you're wealthy, anyway.

And here we are, about to face another election and perhaps the Democrats have a chance this year with Obama. But there's part of me that worries that there are so many fearful racist people in this country that McCain will win and if he does, we're done for in my opinion, because not only does he want to stay the course in Iraq, he wants to make Bush's tax cuts permanent and he really, really wants to overturn Roe v. Wade which he honestly could manage with a few supreme court appointments.

My husband and I talk about moving to another country sometimes and if McCain gets elected, I'm going to get really serious about it and I'll want to take my kids with me.

Not just because I think he'll be such a horrible president but because I just don't want to live in a country where the people would vote such a man to office and I don't want any grandchildren I might have growing up in a country who would elect that sort of president again either.

Haven't we learned anything? It's not like Bush has done one damn good thing for the country in his eight years of being the decider. Sometimes when I see people who still have Bush stickers on their bumpers I want to stop them, grab them by the shoulders and ask, "Do you like the way this is turning out? Are ya happy now? Are you so proud of the idiot that you just can't bear to take his name off your car? Really?"

I'm trying so hard to believe that Bush's elections were aberrant behavior on the part of the American citizens but I swear to God, if McCain gets elected, I'm going to have to face the fact that it was actually abhorrent behavior on our part and that really, yes, we are a country of morons.

And we'll deserve everything we get and frankly, I don't want it.

And even more frankly, I don't think I can survive it.

She's The One Who Looks Like Me. Only Prettier. And Filled With Light.

Today is Bob Dylan's sixty-seventh birthday but I'm not his mama and as such, I don't have a birth story to go along with with his special day but I am the mama of another child born on this day, thirty years ago. I believe I've written about the births of every one of my children except for my May's and today would be the day.
May was my second baby and I remember distinctly the moment I figured out I was pregnant with her. I was digging a ditch through the hard red clay on the property where her dad and brother and I were living, right here in Lloyd, about four miles down the road from where I live now. I was digging the ditch to lay a water line to run to my washing machine.
For some reason, it struck me as I dug that I was feeling a bit...pregnant.
I know that sounds vague, but I'd been pregnant enough already (besides being pregnant with Hank, I'd had a miscarriage before I got pregnant with May) to know the feeling and what it meant.
I don't think I stopped digging but just registered the feeling and went on with my digging. If indeed I was pregnant, the sooner we got that washing machine hooked up, the better.
We were living then in a 10 by 50 single-wide trailer and I was feeling proud of the fact that I had running water, which I had not had in the house we were living in before we moved the trailer onto our land. That house had been a lovely old thing and we paid the royal sum of seventy-five dollars a year to rent it (and that's not a misprint and I am not making it up) but like I said, it had no running water and it had no heat and it was hotter than an oven in summer and colder than an igloo in winter and the floors weren't level and you could see the outside from the inside inbetween the boards but I loved it anyway. We pumped water with a hand pump and hauled it in for cooking and drinking and we had an outhouse.
It was the outhouse that led to us moving to the trailer. One morning in the midst of a terrible hay fever attack I woke up and took my miserable self to the outhouse and while in there I got stung by a wasp at the exact same time I saw a snake at my feet. The resulting hysteria led to going trailer shopping that very day. Our plan had been to build a house on our property before we moved there but I could see that this house-building was going to take a while and frankly, I needed a bathroom.
By the time May was born, we were settled into the trailer quite nicely. It was small but I liked it as well as you could like a trailer. The bathroom was probably the biggest room in the house and that made me happy. Plus, we not only had running water, we had an air conditioner in the bedroom and if that wasn't living high on the hog, I don't know what is.
Two days before May was born I was in that bathroom in the early morning when my water broke. Yippie! I thought, the baby will be here soon! but as hard as I tried I could not get my contractions to start. I drank tea made of black cohosh which is about the nastiest-tasting substance on earth and took my nine-plus month pregnant self for a run down the dirt road but still no contractions.
By that afternoon I decided to give up the effort for awhile and laid down for a nap with instructions to my husband to watch Hank who was playing outside with his little Fisher Price farm. I had just gotten to the deep part of sleep when the man, in a state of great agitation, woke me to tell me that he couldn't find Hank.
That's a whole story in itself but he was finally found down the road, all the way across Highway 158 which is the same road I live on now, naked as a jaybird and accompanied by our two bull dogs. I promptly went into hysterics and carried him home, crying all the way, and that as much as anything probably got me really started in labor.
I labored all the next day with my midwife friends checking in on me and by dark, they came and settled in to stay the night. I am a slow, slow baby-haver.
My main midwife had another lady on "simmer" and she had to leave in the middle of the night to go deliver that baby and it was just as she was pulling up in her little VW Beetle at dawn that May started to make her appearance.
I can't say that her birth was easier than my first but the pushing-out part surely was. I don't think I pushed three times before her little body slid out and I was able to see who I'd been toting around inside for all those months. I'd honestly thought I was having a boy so it was with some surprise that I discovered she was a girl and I didn't have a name for her but I'd been thinking about "May" for some reason (uh? it WAS May) and my brave and hard-working midwife's name was Ellen so she was named May Ellen. We came to find out after we'd named her that her grandmother on her father's side was named May and her mother's name was Ellen, so there you go. Meant to be.
Now here's the funny thing: I had spent my entire pregnancy with May feeling huge amounts of guilt because I knew in my heart that there was no way I would ever be able to love any child the way I already loved Hank. Just wasn't possible. And so I thought she'd be born cheated and that thought gave me grave concern. But what I learned the second she was born was that the human heart (or at least the mother's human heart) is not limited in the amount of love it can hold and as soon as I saw her precious little face and held her in my arms, I realized that all of my worry had been completely for naught and that there was possibly no end to the amount of love I could have for my babies, even if I had fifty, which I was certainly sure I would never do. In fact, I was pretty sure I'd never have another baby at all, which is what I'd thought after the first one, too. And the third, but there again, that's another story.
So I fell in love with May on that just-dawning morning in May in a single-wide trailer in Jefferson County, that holy sort of mother love which is as close to heaven as I'll probably ever know. The midwives cleaned me up and changed my sheets and then they went off home to tend to their families and my friend Lynn brought Hank home because she'd taken him for me the day before because I'd known I couldn't concentrate on birthing this child with my first baby there to need my attention too. This was the very first time Hank and I had ever been separated for so long and I doubt I would have trusted anyone in the world to take him except for Lynn and I think Hank still remembers parts of that day and night, even though he wasn't yet two and they are good memories.
So there we were, reunited as a family, the four of us, and being only twenty-three, I felt pretty good for just having given birth and for having been up for about three days in a row. We loaded up the old '55 Buick Roadmaster and drove to town for a newborn check and no one at the doctor's office could believe I'd just had a baby.
Youth is great.
We drove home and I suppose we rested some that afternoon and I still remember what I cooked for dinner that night which was oven-barbequed chicken and potatoes from the garden. It was a delicious meal that we sat down together to eat, a father, a mother, a red-headed almost-two year old, and a brand, new baby at my breast.
A feast for the body and a feast for the soul and as with my first child, I felt reborn after the birth, almost as new and pure as she was. I was frankly amazed at how well everything had gone and even more astounded that I'd given birth to this beautiful child who looked so much like Hank when he'd been born that her father said, "Well, Mary, when we make a baby, I guess that's what it looks like," which cracked the midwives up. They still resemble each other which is odd because May looks enough like me to be my clone and Hank looks like his dad.
Genetics are crazy things.
Before I got pregnant with May I kept seeing a light out of the corner of my eye. It would come and then go and of course if that happened now I'd think I had a brain tumor but in those old hippie days, I just took it as a sign that a spirit was trying to "get in" and I still think that's true. May has always had an incredibly strong spirit and is as light-filled and purposeful as anyone you'll ever meet. At the age of sixteen she was hit by a car, walking to school and I still can't talk about that without crying. Frankly, it's a miracle she's alive but she is and she works on her feet and she walks all over Tallahassee and she, like the rest of my kids, is a dancer.
She's also a writer and one of these days, she'll start blogging too and then you'll see that what I'm saying is true.
She's strong and she's smart. This past year has been one of profound and positive change for her and I am standing in amazement, watching this process. As with all my children, she has been, since the moment of her birth, one of my best and most influential teachers and we probably spend at least an hour a day on the phone, discussing everything from books to meals, but mostly just making each other laugh. Besides looking like each other, we move alike, we sound alike and we think alike. We certainly share a sense of humor.
That girl has been a joy to me for thirty years now. She's tried me- don't get me wrong. When she was nineteen she announced that she was going to travel the country in her little truck all by herself and no matter how I tried to dissuade her, she just wouldn't stop making plans.
And she did it. She got in that little truck and drove off and left me crying. This was pre-cell phone days, too, and looking back, I don't know how I stopped myself from throwing my body under the wheels of the vehicle to stop her from leaving but she did fine. There are probably some things she never told me about her journey, but she's here, she's alive, and that light I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye shines now from her own eyes and every time I see them I feel the same joy I felt the day she was born.
Happy birthday, my darling.
Thank you for bringing that light to earth through me and sharing it.
You're a gorgeous, talented woman and it's a better world because you're in it.
And you taught me about the human heart and how much love it can hold which is a lesson that still, thirty years later, is as profound and true as it was the day you taught it to me, just by being born.
Tomorrow we'll all get together for shrimp salad and key lime pie and we'll celebrate you and the day you made your way here but it's today that I'm thinking about all of this, crying a little as I write it because I'm just so glad you're here.
And that I get to be your mama.
Amen.
Happy birthday.
Shine on.