The Burrow

Turns out that June 29th is not only my parents' wedding anniversary, it is also the birthday of one of my favorite lyricists, Frank Loesser.  Born to a musical family in New York, his choice of popular rather than classical caused him no end of heartbreak growing up.  Once he caught on though, there was no stopping him.  His parents finally came around. His songs were written as stories to be told, rather than sung.  He was quite unhappy with the casting of Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit in the film version of Guys and Dolls; he sang too well.  A true New Yorker, Loesser knew that the cadence of Damon Runyon's language was music enough.  Listen....... I got a horse right here, his name is Paul Revere...... are you standing next to me under a street lamp outside an OTB parlor reading the Racing Form and bouncing on the toes of your shoes?  The tune is simple enough for a toddler to hum (just ask the Cuters) and the story tells itself.  The fa...

G'ma and Daddooooo would have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary today.   They were married at the Waldorf Astoria on Thursday, June 29, 1950, in a ceremony that someone must have enjoyed but where the pictures show many grimaces and only a few strained smiles.  Everyone looks aggravated.  Maybe it's because it was a Thursday?  There was a religious prohibition on marriages during most of the summer (having something to do with Tisha b'Av but which G'ma always took personally) and G'ma was teaching until the end of June and maybe she should have looked at the situation a little more carefully, anyway. " No one listened to me.... his mother ran that show." I heard that when I was planning my wedding, and I still get the shivers remembering my mom's face as she said it.  They went to Mexico and Cuba for their honeymoon.  There were red fire ants parading in full battle array around their casita.  Daddooooo " dove off a cliff and left my hea...

Sometimes I really like my life.   Amster and TBG are sitting on the couch, discussing economics and life plans and discounting as she prepares for a deposition and he shares his wisdom.  The air-conditioning is humming along,  the loaf of fresh bread made our lunchtime sandwiches even more delicious, and Amster finally understands what the charts were trying to tell her.   TBG feels useful and Amster feels smart and I feel the love. The quail eggs have hatched and parental units are shepherding babies around the neighborhood.  Some managed to salvage 2 little ones, some 5, but one family hit the jackpot.  There must be 10 or more little fuzzy creatures following the grown-ups in the family that traipses through my courtyard in the late afternoon.  They move so quickly it's hard to count.  Do you think it's too anthropomorphic to decide that this dad is sticking his chest out just a little bit further than the dad with the 2 chicks?...

I've been putting off writing this post.  Every time I think about writing it I get sad.  I am not sure where I'm going to end up with this, but if you're hoping for light-heartedness, I think you'd better search elsewhere. When the Cuters were little, I used to laugh when hearing about "the terrible twos."  To my mind, it was no worse than the threes or the fours or the tens, and certainly not worse than the 12's.  It was a stage, and it would pass.  More often, the new behaviors were worse than the previous ones, but at least they were horrible in a new way.  The novelty of it all helped me get through the days, and, in the end, I held onto the knowledge that they would, eventually, with the passage of time, become adults who could be responsible for managing their own stages themselves.  When things changed, I had to remind myself that it was all for the good.  Aging meant growing and developing;  it was my job to keep them safe while ge...

USA! USA! USA! Donovan to Altidore to Dempsey for the shot - blocked! - then the rebound off the goalie back out to Donovan who zings it right into the back of the net.  The Algerians were sad, the Americans were euphoric.  No matter what happens now, they have made it out of the Group Round in the World Cup for the first time since 1930. And that is something to celebrate.  TBG and I put on our American flag clothes and hung the flag outside. USA! USA! USA! ***** McChrystal is out and Petreus is in and the war goes on and on. It's obvious to everyone that McChrstal was out of line;  I've not heard anyone defending him, on tv, radio or in the papers.  I have to think that Michael Hastings is a hell of a reporter, and probably somewhat of a chameleon, too.  Stuck in Europe with the general and his henchmen, involuntary companions as Eyjafjallajokull spewed ash into the skies,  I'm sure they did all the manly man things I see in the movies, and the...

I am tired of excuses.  I am tired of people and organizations laying the blame everywhere but where it ought to be.  I am tired of explanations and reasons and gibberish when what I want is " It's my fault"  "I am responsible"  "I can do better." BP is the obvious whipping boy, but that feels like a cheap shot right now.  I'll leave it to members of Congress to ask questions without receiving real answers.  I'm no longer surprised that CEO's claim to have no knowledge of the heinous behaviors of their underlings.  Ken Lay set a high standard for such prevarication; Tony Hayward was an amateur in comparison.  I wondered during the Enron debacle as I wonder now:  if they were so clueless how did they manage to be in charge? My annoyances are more personal today, though.  I went to the pod-castle to kiss G'ma good morning and found that the date had not been crossed off the calendar.  I'd asked the workers to help keep her oriented...

I was not invisible at lunch today.  I was the star attraction. G'ma and I had some family errands to run so I dropped by her pod-castle to collect her after lunch.  My timing was a bit off, though, and when I got there the residents were still  seated at their round tables in their comfortable chairs, awaiting their noontime repast.  Salads had been served and consumed and removed - except for G'ma's since she likes to munch on her lettuce as she's having her main course - and the 4 of them were waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting.  The deaf one and the querulous one and G'ma and the newcomer with the quiet voice were sitting patiently, watching the cloud in the sky drift across the window.  Then a little wren landed on the outer windowsill and we were all amused for another little while.  And still they waited.  I shared my cell phone's screen saver shot of Thomas, our Grand-Dog, and tried to find a topic of conversation.  And ...

Amster invited me to join the party last night, and I said yes.  TBG isn't much for sitting on bar stools or imbibing the liquid refreshments proferred by the bartender, so spending Saturday night apart from him wasn't a problem for either of us.  There are many advantages to being part of a long marriage; the ability to spend time without each other is one of them. We started off at Jax Kitchen for Jax Ice Water and the cheese plate.  Known in other establishments as Kansas City Ice Water, this crystal clear confection is a sweet-but-not-too-sweet way to wet your whistle on a hot summer's evening.  And yes, I know that summer doesn't start until the 22 nd of June, but if the National Weather Service can make an arbitrary decision regarding the start of the monsoon season, I feel justified in declaring that any day where the temperature is over 100 o can be called summer .  Touching the steering wheel or shifting from first to second reinforces the fact that,...

So many many things to talk about today..... Let's get the whole small people thing out of the way, first.  My position on the assassination of the Gulf of Mexico has already been made clear - some of the prettiest and most productive shoreline in the world is being altered irreparably and expensively because nobody wondered what might go wrong if safety were sacrificed to profit.  BP's executives should have to explain themselves, to as many Congressional Committees as want to flay them.  Yes, it's an extraordinarily absurd exercise and a vanity showcase for our elected officials to demonstrate their outrage but humiliation is all we've got going for us right now.  The oil keeps gushing into the Gulf, and we're reduced to collecting snippets of hair and shoving them into nylons.  Does anyone even wear nylons anymore? But, I digress.  BP's chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, was interviewed in the driveway of the White House this week.  He had just...

Yesterday's post got me thinking about my paternal grandmother.  She's been haunting my thoughts all day, not letting go, a constant presence nagging, picking, worrying at the back of my mind.  She was a confusing person for a young girl, and she's not become any clearer with the passage of time. Eight of her nine siblings were born in Europe.  That's what she called it.  Not Galicia.  Not Poland.  Not Russia.  Europe.  When her parents decided to come to America, they sent Rae and her younger sister off to a cousin in London.  Apparently, two young girls were more trouble than they were worth. That arrangement lasted less than a year.  My grandmother convinced her relatives that she was not going to live anywhere except where her parents and sisters and brother were living, and if that meant taking her 10 year old self and her 8 year old sister alone, in steerage, across the Atlantic Ocean, to people who had demonstrated in a fairl...

G'ma and I are going to a family wedding. She's met the groom, my first cousin's son, but she doesn't remember where or when. Actually, to say that she's met him is an exaggeration. What she actually said was, “I must have met him sometime, don't you think?” Ah, yes, welcome to our world. A Save the Date card arrived in the spring; it had no last names anywhere. The picture of the happy couple afforded us no clues, either. TBG and I were stumped. Visiting G'ma and finding a similar card on her coffee table helped my synapses to snap together and make the family connection. We laughed about it for a long time. The invitations followed in due course, one to each of our homes. It was decision time – should we go? It's an easy flight from Tucson's tiny airport to LAX's long concourses, but Southwest will push G'ma in style while I follow dutifully behind, toting the walker and the carry-ons and the medicine. We're arriving a f...

What a wonderful two hours we spent watching Will Smith's kid hang out with Jackie Chan. Yes, it's a remake, but this one is at least as good as Mr. Miyage and “wax on – wax off”.  This time it's "jacket on - jacket off," but the message of discipline and training and respect is still the same.  Michael Wilbon may think that it's "too young" for him, but I think he's wrong. Jackie Chan always does his own stunts, and if you didn't believe it before, just watch him walk up the steps in this film.  Think Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not or Gunsmoke's Chester; the hitch in the step that's been earned by a lifetime of enjoyable hard work.  There's jauntiness tempered with age and experiences, and a rueful acceptance of the fact that some parts wake up faster than others now.  In an understated way, he's telling us that we can watch the movie we saw as kids, and that we can enjoy it every bit as much as we did...

It's the World Cup - soccer's quadrennial international get-together. Hosted in Africa for the first time since its inception in 1930, it's America's least watched sporting event over which everyone else in the world is obsessing.  People are getting up at ridiculous hours of the night to watch their country kick for the honor and the glory of getting out of the group round.   Do not worry, Grasshopper.  Elucidation is on its way. First, I should establish my bona fides.  I understand the basics of the game.  I watched it, sometimes twice a day, for a decade and a half.  I coached, until the 7 year olds asked me if I realized that everyone on the team could kick the ball better than I could.  At that point I retired to the post of Team Mom, a position I relinquished reluctantly when the Little Cuter went off to college.  The high schools in Marin thought they played pretty well, and the championship games usually involved a school or a player wi...

TBG likes to say that America, like Americans, is fat around the middle.  At the risk of offending a reader or two who might actually inhabit the 500 miles of Kansas, Wyoming, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa... you know, those square states which are on the way to but not quite really there....  it's kind of extra.  After a week in Chicago, one of the all time great towns for those who like to eat, I'm thinking that I ought to stop repeating his joke.  It feels just a little too close for comfort.  I'm hiking tomorrow and my favorite shorts won't snap. How did this happen?  Well, for starters there was breakfast at Ann Sather's.   I've been eating there, at one location or another, since I was a graduate student 35 years ago.  We used to go for the apple pancakes, waiting in line on Sunday mornings in the snow, knowing we'd be warm, inside and out, once they were on the table before us.   There's a branch around the corner from the kids' apartm...