As Time Goes By

The grand plan is take all of our vinyl to mp3’s, maybe 200 albums or so. After this morning I am not sure that I have the stomach for it. We’ve been married a long time but should we ever divorce there are some albums we would not fight over. Since I was home alone I decided to experiment with one that my better half would have little interest in, my choice happened to be Joni Mitchell’s ‘Clouds’.

I opened the cover and there in writing, that these days I need cheaters from the dollar store to read, was my name, my maiden name. The name bestowed upon me by two wonderful people who are no longer here. Sucker punch number one. Too stupid to stop, I slapped it on the turntable and lowered the needle.

Joni’s lilting voice filled my living room. Lyrics as familiar to me as my name came back to me. The sadness of my senior year in high school, the excitement of my freshman year in college, Frisbee on the lawn, double bubble... a million memories came flooding in.

Music is amazing, isn’t it? Music can not only move us in the present but can become entwined in our lives. A song can make us happy, make us sad, make us laugh. (Think Get Tarzan). But music can also define an event and forever represent that moment in time. I’ll never hear Stevie Wonder’s ‘Isn’t she lovely’, without seeing in my minds eye, myself, walking happily through campus in the Spring, music pouring out of open dorm windows, or hear ‘Let’s go Round Again’ without remembering ‘the boys’ singing out at the Breakers while burning a tree (yes the whole thing, uncut).

Looking back it is easy to think of those times as carefree. They weren’t really, there were breakups, grade troubles, money troubles and other troubles. But troubles fade when you are further on down the road and become part of the legend.

This morning, when those oh so familiar notes poured out of my speakers, I began to cry. Shed a tear for what was and can never be again, not that I would want it to be, now is pretty good place.

I am looking forward to and dreading the days ahead. I know that as we work through the stack it is inevitable that a few more tears will be shed.

Mem'ries,
Light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories
Of the way we were
Scattered pictures,
Of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were
Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we? Could we?
Mem'ries, may be beautiful and yet
What's too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget
So it's the laughter
We will remember
Whenever we remember...
The way we were...
the way we were...

And yes, I have the album.

Blogging

Why do people blog and why do people read them? What is the point of sending out into the ether what you had for breakfast, whose walking by your window? Why do I love reading them?

Yes, I love reading blogs. Does this mean I have some huge deficit in my life that I need to fill by living vicariously through others? I don't think so, unless you believe that to be true of all voracious readers. The Internet is the new home of the short story.

Each blog post is a short story to be savored. Some are marvelous and others, well not so much.

This is a sucky time to be the owner of a newspaper but a wonderful time to be a reader. The scope and breadth of my reading is not being dictated by publishers deciding what will sell and is not distorted by editors demanding changes. I am free to read anything my heart desires from political commentary from the far left to the far right and some commentary that defies definition. I can read about poker, travel, cooking, erotica and daily life. The permutations are endless. It's an all you can read buffet.

I am so happy to be in the here and now.

The Dirty Little Secret

I love when other bloggers post about what they are reading. I have gotten some very good suggestions and have discovered authors that I would have never discovered otherwise.

But among the mainstream blogger crowd you never see anyone admit to a pot boiler or bodice ripper addiction. I'm here to come clean. I am addicted to both.

It all started with Mary Stewart and the Reader's Digest Condensed Books. My parents had an impressive collection of Reader's Digest Books housed on shelves on either side of our fireplace. My mother liked them because the spines were attractive and uniform, but both my parents also read them. Growing up, I read them too. I still have a few volumes with my favorite stories in them. Shameless, I know.

I read fast, comprehend well, and retain poorly. Slowing down doesn't help retention. I discovered this flaw during my school years and developed my study habits and addiction to Celestial Seasoning's Morning Thunder accordingly.

I went through a stage where I read the classics and what is generally considered more hardy fare. (No pun intended). Then came children. Then came law school. Then came working in social justice. When you spend your days knee deep in trying to fix social issues on a person by person basis, heavy reading at the end of the day just isn't very appealing.

A flight to London is a two book, one movie and a nap flight. I prefer a good historical romance for these because they are typically longer. Laurens, Jeffries, and Quinn come to mind. A flight to Vegas is a good mystery, preferably one of the tongue in cheek kind. A Friedman, Hiaasen, or Coben will usually fit the bill. On the return flight, if I haven't already indulged in a spate of book buying, I treat myself at the airport to whatever suits my fancy. It makes me feel better about the end of what is usually a glorious trip.

I whip these great reads out with no book covers and no subterfuge. It amazes me that people who are willing to converse about 'American Idol', 'The Simpsons' or 'Family Guy' would cast dispersions on what a person reads, ANYTHING a person reads. (That's not to say I don't watch the Simpsons or Family Guy).

If your perception of me is going to be governed by the fact that I am reading a novel with a Fabian look alike on the cover, will you do me a favor? Will you play poker with me? Please?

For anyone looking for a good entertaining read I suggest the following, in no particular order. They have given me many hours of pleasure. They have changed lives. While my husband and I were going through our Kinky Friedman phase we started calling taking a dump "Taking a Nixon". This was always accompanied by and met with, a huge amount of laughter. I believe we may have permanently warped our children.

Mysteries (mostly)

Colin Dexter (Inspector Morse)
Elizabeth George (Inspector Lynley)
Donna Leon (Commissario Guido Brunetti)
Clive Cussler (Dirk Pitt)
Carl Hiaasen
James Swain (Tony Valentine)
Kinky Friedman (Kinky Friedman)
Ian Rankin (Inspector Rebus)
Margaret Maron (Judge Deborah Knott)
Harlen Coben (Myron Bolitar)

Romances

Stephanie Laurens
Julia Quinn
Nora Roberts
Mary Balogh
Suzanne Enoch
Jude Deveraux
Madeline Hunter
Julia London
Julie Garwood
Eloisa James

Another Auld Lang Syne

On New Years Eve, I ended up sitting in a strange bar listening to a young man's band playing Jazz. To my uneducated ear they played it quite well and covered some of the jazz standards that even I recognized. The setting didn't really matter as I was with the folks I wanted to be with, had a Jameson and Ginger at hand and got a smooch at the stroke of midnight from my smoocher of 28+ years.

For me, New Years is usually more about seeing the New Year in rather than ushering the old one out. This year I was sorry to see the year go. I had a lot of fun turning fifty.

I am not sure that you ever completely learn the lesson life offered me this year. I began to learn to celebrate every day, seize the opportunities offered, create opportunities and invite everyone you care about to come along. I suspect it is a work in progress. As my mother would have said "Easier said than done". In retrospect, all I can say is WOW what a difference a little effort makes.

I have read many blog posts talking about people's resolutions for the New Year. Basically, the resolutions are to make better choices, like, rather than stuffing my face with high fat, high calorie food I shall eat healthy and I will spend less time mindlessly surfing the web and more time being productive. Most folks have a very specific plan on how to obtain their goals. I would bet that those folks will successfully achieve their goals to some degree.

For me, I'm going to take a step back and resolve to make good choices for the moment I'm in. While oatmeal is the appropriate breakfast food this morning that is not to say that the trucker's special at the Peppermill may not be the right breakfast in the future.

I think the trick is understanding that a good choice is not always about being healthy, safe or wise. 'Good' is the measuring stick but I get to define the calibration.

I want to make good choices and enjoy the ride. I might not bet on me, but I wouldn't bet against me.

With a Tickle and Grin

If you look up 'Pollyanna' in the dictionary you will find a picture of my fat middle aged self.

There is much in this world and life in general to be disgruntled with, the highlights being the economy, terrorism, and the environmental degradation of our planet just to name a few. It has always been hip to dwell on the negative, revel in the angst. Our greatest artists in almost every genre are revered for it. Hemingway, Van Gogh, Billie Holliday... the list is endless.

Pollyanna's are not admired and those seeking the middle ground, let's call them realists for lack of a better term are not even acknowledged. It all begins with the premise that there is nothing purely evil or purely good. Pollyanna's look for the good in all things and realists acknowledge both the good and evil. I like to think that I am realist with pollyannaish tendencies.

I want to slap the world and impose upon folks the same rules I used to make my kids follow. In my house my kids were never allowed to say that they hated each other or their parents. I demanded that they express themselves with more specificity, explaining that words once uttered can't be taken back. You can be really angry with your brother about something he did but you don't hate him. In our house it was okay to scream at your sibling that you were really pissed off that they broke your toy but not okay to say you hated them. It was okay to fight and be angry with your family as long as you were truthful about what you were fighting about. Much easier said than done and this remains a work in progress.

There are a lot of crappy things in life but it is not all crap. There is much in my world that I am not happy with, my job, my weight, my fitness level, my finances, my country's finances, the number of people starving in the world and on and on. Making changes in all these things is within my power. I need only to reach out and do them. Will I? Maybe or maybe I will continue to succumb to inertia, but it is within my grasp to go either way.

I can whine about what I don't like but don't get off my ass to change, I can make changes, I can enjoy what I have or I can do some combination of all three. The latter is likely the definition of human nature.

Age has not brought me patience. Nothing pisses me off more than me sitting around examining all that is wrong with me, my family and the world. I dropped a friend off at the airport the other day and as I was pulling away from the curb a plane took off overhead with that whoosh and whine you only hear at the airport. I love that sound. It encompasses the anticipation of travel, the thrill of going new places, meeting new people, experiencing new things. I actually thought to myself how glad I was to hear that sound yesterday and experience that rush, then I thought about how stupid I was to think that. A good self-scolding followed, not for the first thought but for the second. I want to live my life happy to hear those sounds. I want to be a realist and acknowledge that some things are shit but I want to be forward looking and forward moving.

And I am damn it.


Just because this is what set me off doesn't mean it isn't good reading. It is, very good reading and exactly what good writing is supposed to be, moving and thought provoking.... go now, read it.

http://mcgtruckin.blogspot.com/

A Long Time Gone

It's been awhile and much has changed.

I turned 50 in Amsterdam as planned and since then the world has conspired to make me feel much older. I'm not sure what one can say about the election, our goverment, and the economy. It's a train wreck unfolding in front of my eyes and I can't look away.

Someone said that if it is truly a worldwide crash at least we are all in this together. The fact that there were many others similarly situated didn't seem to help much during the Great Depression.

Nothing the Fed is throwing at this seems to help. Bailout bill passed, market drops like a rock, interest rates lowered, market drops like a rock. The third quarter statements have started rolling in and I am filing them without looking.

It was a very helpless feeling being in Amsterdam and watching the international news. Ah, well, didn't want to retire early anyway.

Despite the economy, a good time was had in Amsterdam by all. What a lovely city. Traveling with a group is a lot like trying to govern by committee. Amsterdam lent itself well to group travel as there were many drinking establishments and enough but not too much to do. I increased my lifetime consumption of Heinkein by a hundredfold. It certainly tasted better there than it ever has here.

We rented bikes and rode from our hotel, by the cruise ship passenger terminal, through the city center. It was absolutely terrifying. Bikes everywhere, city traffic, trams. My bike was slightly too big for me so I could not put just one leg down and stay on the seat but had to get all the way off the seat. Whoever refers to riding a bike as something you never forget is full of shit, at least when it involves a million other bikers and traffic. The high point of the day was when I lost the bike key and the bike shop owner had to come on his electric scooter and drop off a new one. That was only 25 euros, more than two times the bike rental. OOOPS.

Anyway if you need proof I was really there I included a picture.

Where is that bottle of Stoli?

I thought that it would get easier. I was wrong. When it came time to drop my oldest off at college I did some serious beach time and some serious damage to a bottle or two. It didn’t help that we were leaving her in a place I knew well, the place where I fell in love, made life long friends and started my own journey as an adult. All I felt then was that she was leaving and I wasn’t ready. Thankfully, she was.

That August, which seems so long ago, I was surrounded by some of those life long friends as we camped at ‘the good spot’. Our annual camping trip has often coincided with the return of the college students. That summer, in addition to watching the sun set in the big lake, we moved my daughter into the same dorm that some of us had lived in over twenty years earlier.

When she had a moment of panic and decided that perhaps her choice of college was too far from home, I held firm. I told her that she was welcome to transfer but she had to stick out the semester. In my heart I wanted to pack all of her belongings and bring her home with us. We returned home alone and she never looked back.

Friday as we leave for another of our annual trips I am preparing for yet another goodbye. For the last two years our daughter has lived with us while working and saving money to go to graduate school. Next week, she is packing her bags and heading out. History repeats itself. She is ready. I am not.

During her two years at home she has taught herself to cook via the Food Channel. We have been treated to some amazing meals. Healthy ones too, because she is looking out for the old folks. Every Saturday we pick up a box of organic produce from the Community Supported Agriculture program we signed up for. I have eaten more vegetables in the last 3 months than in my previous 49 years.

I’ve seen more movies than in the previous decade and she has seen more foreign films that she knew they made. We hated the Cowboy Junkies and loved Cross Canadian Ragweed and Backyard Tire Fire. We had a beer together in a gay bar.

She’s been my friend and my playmate. This would be a lot more interesting if I had some tales of mother/daughter conflict to tell, but I don’t. Gone are the arguments so common during her teen years when I began to believe that my brain had somehow slipped out my ear. Now it’s political discussions (she made me go to my first caucus), shared books, shopping trips and baseball games. (Tuesday is dollar hotdog day, she has decreed that it is a good day to go to the ballpark whether the home team wins or loses).

She is an amazing, intelligent and vibrant young woman. I am so privileged to be her mother. I know that she has to go. I want her to. But I will miss her so.