The Burrow

I've had senseless tragedies on my mind today, as the Aurora shooter asserts an affirmative defense, thus requiring a trial. His sanity will be examined, the details will be hashed and rehashed and diced and sliced and it will last for a very long time.   Eighty-two theater-goers were shot that night.  Eighty-two stories are waiting to be heard. The judge said that the trial will center on the testimony of mental health experts weighing in on the shooter's mental state at the time of the rampage, and not on that of the victims. Victims....oh, I don't like that word at all.  It's accurate and it's necessary and it has legal ramifications but I still don't like it. The number of people who have a vested interest in the case comes close to 700, as the judge considers those in the adjoining theaters to have been at risk, too. All those people may not testify, but they'll have a chance to see every bit of the legal proceedings.  It's their right. It...

The kids are back in school, whether I think it's too early in the year or not, and yesterday the Official Adopted Grandmother of Prince Elementary School (that would be me) made her first lunchtime appearance. Dressed in my coat of many colors, I had stickers in my pocket and a smile on my face. After an hour, there were fewer stickers, but many more smiles. "Do you remember me?"  they asked, and "Of course!"  I did even if I didn't. I have very few of their names in my permanent memory bank, though I recognize the usual suspects by sight. They are all a little taller... " nearly as tall as you are, Granny." "Can we sing the Jingle Bells song?"  a big boy wondered, and I shrugged and started crooning. This is the only audience on the planet which appreciates my vocalizations. We're working on learning the second verse, especially because it ends in kerplop!  That is a very funny word, especially if you speak Urdu at home.  I don...

I'm watching the butterflies dine on the lantana.  Big black ones with yellow markings, bigger orange ones with black markings, the gigantic yellow ones that create their own jet stream as they fly past my ear. They are in the crepe myrtle.  They crash into the clean glass of the picture window, making a noise much larger than their size warrants. Sometimes, they attach themselves to the window itself. I watch their antennae twitch. I remember reading that butterflies taste with their feet and I wonder how glass communicates that it is not edible. I see a small one alight on the black metal gate and flee as quickly as it landed. Black metal must not be a tasty dish. The leaves of my roses and bougainvilla and spring bulbs are bitten into interesting patterns. Some are nibbled around the edges.  Some have holes chewed out from the middle.  Some have the tips snipped off, as if with a razor blade. Chemical sprays and home remedies exist, should I want to addres...

"It's not summer. I'm in school." Out of the mouths of babes, comes the wisdom I've been searching for.  Not only is it psychologically impossible for me to consider a ten month school year which begins before Labor Day, I now have empirical evidence that it interferes with learning.  Mr. 8 refused to believe that Fall would begin when the equinox said it would begin and not when his school district decided. I'm not sure that's what they mean by parenting against the culture, but it's somewhere close. ***** It's not Tucson's summer, that's for sure. It seems as if the south shore of Long Island has been superimposed on my new home town. The air is thick. The clouds are gray. Ninety degree days are nearly unbearable; I am not accustomed to the humidity and I am not a happy camper. ***** I used to enjoy August afternoons.  There was a laziness I never felt at any other time.  The air was super-heated; the tar sealing the cracks in t...

Ronni Bennett's blog is the template for living well and growing old at the same time. She's a no-nonsense former New Yorker who left Greenwich Village for first one, then the other, Portland. She made a new life for herself, all on her own. She's one of the women on whom I'm modeling my old age. Every once in a while, she types a line or two that stops me in my tracks.  In  An Old Age Better Than I Expected  she writes about her surprise at being  alive and vibrant and spirited and vital as she works her way through her eighth decade. Leaving behind the shoulds, the expectations, the to do's of her younger years, she's free to explore and create and do what she wants when she wants.  And then, there was this: I am done improving myself. Self-help be damned. I am what I am and so I shall remain. I started to laugh, wrote a comment on the post, and came right here to share my own thoughts on the subject. Taking my place at the keyboard, I watch a woman ...

The campaign to send the Pilates Youth Program participants to Florida is well on its way.   Can YOU  help?  Donate Now - Secure Online Fundraising This bonus post is brought to you by the boys and girls of PYP, Body Works Studios, and GRandparentsINresidence.... all of whom thank you for your support.

I sat in a room with  Elmore Leonard telling  Bill Buckmaster  that Hemingway didn't have a sense of humor and talking about writing books because he liked the names of places (Djbouti, Tishimingo) and selling a 4500 word story called  3:10 to Yuma  for $90. I wrote that on March 15, 2010, in my post  about the Tucson Festival of Books.  After hearing him speak, I went to the library and began a tour through his entire oeuvre.  I reserved the books.  I read ancient paperback editions and decrepit hardcovers and I paid for one or two at Bookmans.   I was left hungry for more.  And now there won't be any more. I'm inexpressibly sad.  That sentence was a lot longer but the PS from the  cast of  Justified   shut me right up:    We wrote longer versions of this statement, but as Elmore always said: Leave out the parts people tend to skip.     There was never a reason to skip a...

This was going to be a picture post, but the lightning began early this afternoon. I'm watching the clouds bump into one another and suddenly the noise doesn't seem surprising.  The electrical storm is vertical today. There's no rain, but trees are flailing about, prickly acacias catching and releasing the neighboring oleander. The dust from the under-development-patch-of-dirt to the east is moving in twenty foot gusts. I like that.... gusts of dust. This kind of weather leads to flights of fancy... or foolishness... like that, I'm afraid.  There's no going outside. JannyLou's pool guy just screeched out of her driveway, not wanting to be the tallest object in sight, holding the metal handle of a skimmer, standing next to a large body of water. It was a wise decision. My desert mountain laurel is very happy that I left it staked up for another season.  Its roots still aren't deep enough or spread wide enough to withstand these blasts of air. The lantana...

I've never seen television like this before. I've tried to write two other posts for you since I sat down, but my mind is stuck with Walter and Jesse and Skylar and Hank.  If you haven't seen the series, I apologize in advance.  I can't think of anything else today. Not one single thing. The kids have been encouraging us to watch it for years. We started on our family vacation at Little Cuter and SIR's house last month; a television marathon because it was hot and muggy and mosquito-y outside and air conditioned and comfy on Cozy Rosie, inside.  It didn't matter what we were doing; we just wanted to be together. And, together we were, til the early morning hours, unable to tear ourselves away. It's a slow burn , as Little Cuter kept reminding us, as one episode flowed seamlessly into the next, picking up the story exactly where it had been left behind. Gale Ann Hurd, of Terminator and  Walking Dead  fame, told us at BlogHer'13 that "all the best...

They met in the fourth grade. Two very very very bright boys with very very very different temperaments, sitting in the back row, bored to tears.  One, Big Cuter, solved the problem of the uninvested teacher by hiding 700 page fantasy paperbacks on his knees, below his desk. ACE, less able to sit still than my son, found new and ever more challenging ways of annoying the teacher. By the time his mother and I decided to take matters into our own hands, and began in-class tutoring, the boys had forged an alliance. They were smart, and they knew it. They played (and play)  Magic: The Gathering  and Axis and Allies and Risk  and Battleship and Warhammer, from fourth grade   all through high school and college ...different schools but still friends. And they read. Not just the sports pages (this was in 1992, denizens, when newspapers not the interwebs brought information to your door), but the front page and the editorials. They read everything the teachers assig...

When we decided to move to Tucson, it was trending purple.  Honest.  I'm not lying. We had a Jewish, Democrat, woman in the House and John McCain, the maverick, in the Senate, and a woman in the governor's chair, not for the first time, either. Then, President Obama stole Janet for Homeland Security and John McCain decided Sarah Palin was fit to be one 71 year old heartbeat away from the presidency and instead of Gabby in the Senate I have Jeff Flake.  Sometimes it's a little bit of an embarrassment to admit that I'm from Arizona. On Sunday, Sgt. Lois and I were surrounded by a house full of like-minded, pro-choice, Democrats, at Arizona List's fete honoring Pam Simon, a fellow January 8th shootee, for her quiet determination and hard work on the issue of sensible gun legislation  It was muggy and close quarters and it filled my heart with joy. The Assistant Leader of the Democratic Caucus of the Arizona Senate was there, telling us that three women now lead t...

I have health insurance. I probably wouldn't have health insurance were it not for the Affordable Care Act. My room-and-board bill after eleven days in the hospital back in January, 2011, was $145,000. That's for the bed and the sheets and the cleaning staff and the food and the aides and the nurses.  It doesn't include any of the tests, procedures, materials, surgeries, anesthesia, physicians, therapists, or consultations. It cost that much for me to sleep there... though I didn't do much sleeping, if the truth be told. I was lucky.  My costs were covered by several government programs which come into play when you are shot standing ten feet from your Congresswoman.  That's called "participation in a federally protected activity" and interfering with my participation in that activity is the reason the shooter is spending twenty of his 140-years-after-his-seven-life-sentences in a Federal penitentiary.  Getting shot is never a good idea.  If it's g...

In the months I spent lying on Douglas-the-couch, adjusting my pillows so that I could avoid being blinded by the sun traipsing across the sky, willing my bones to grow and my nerves to regenerate, missing Christina-Taylor and my lost physical capabilities in alternating breaths, I reexamined my life. Well before I heard Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of  Lean In , wonder What would you do if you weren't afraid?  at BlogHer'13, I was asking myself the same question. What did I want to do with this new path? Why was I focusing on the problems instead of the actions? Why was I afraid? True, bullets had penetrated my previously intact self.  My little friend was dead. My Congresswoman was damaged and a young man was being forcibly medicated so that he could stand trial for trying to kill us all.  Some of my fears were justified.  I knew that.  I faced them every day, and every day they became just a little less intense, a little more knowable,...

At least she understood the word incontinent . That's about as happy as I can be about the scene in G'ma's apartment last Thursday. The physical therapist was discharging her from home care.  She's walking better than she has in years, lifting her quads and bending her ankles and using her entire leg in the process. The PT has instructed the staff and watched as they perform the two sets of exercises my two-months-past-her-broken-leg-90-year-old mother does every day.  She complains. She moans. She cajoles.  She complies. The therapy is working.  She's made enough progress to continue on her own. Thus, the creation of a discharge summary and a plan. The PT, G'ma, and I sat in her apartment and reviewed her systems, inside and out.  Heart, lungs, activities of daily living... all were considered.  " Can she brush her own hair?" set my short hairs on edge... she  was sitting right there and was as aggravated as I was. " Of course I can brush m...

He's eight.  Blanky has holes. Blanky is too small.  He can't curl up inside and hide from the world. Blanky's not big enough to comfort him completely. Life's thrown him a curve or two, none of his own making, all of which hurt his heart.  It's a sweet, loving, gentle heart. The Ben's Bells necklace he wears every day is but one indication of his kind soul. People this good often need more protection than the rest of us.  Hence, the need to improve Blanky.  Sometimes, an inanimate object is needed when hugs are the only thing that will assuage the pain...and the person whose hugs are required is not available.  What to do?  He asked, and I answered. We'd make a new blanket. We might even learn to sew along the way. Amster bought Miss Texas a bright pink sewing machine for $5 at a garage sale. She made the purchase knowing that I would be the instructor; her many talents do not include stichery of any kind. Miss Texas's brothers wanted to learn ...