The Burrow

Clicking through the channels, we came upon " Dancing With the Stars: The Announcement." Five women ... Brandy (who took Kobe Bryant to her senior prom), Baby from Dirty Dancing , a starlet with a strange name, Florence Henderson (yes, Mrs. Brady) and then, as if the devil himself had created the perfect storm of pseudo-celebrity, humiliation and self-abasement, the fifth and final contestant emerged from behind the curtain.  Bristol Palin. Even now, ten minutes after seeing it, I have goose bumps and a queasy feeling in my gut.  Sweetheart, where is your mother?   Can I take you in and show you that there are other options available to you?  Whoring yourself to an intrusive public, greedy for a glimpse of where is she now may not be the best example for you to set for your little one.  The poor kid already has a father whose naked self is displayed on newsstands everywhere. You are a very public single mother, with easy access to any media outlet you'd...

They were out in full force, today, the good daughters (and a few sons).  G'ma's pod-castle is one of several on a piece of former scrub land which is now labeled a village .  It's always seemed as if that were over-stating the case; there wasn't as much activity as the word village conjures up for me.  But today, for some reason, the inter-connected parking lot and the walkways around the individual pod-castles were humming with activity.  There was actually traffic in the round-about - a first in the 13 months I've been visiting G'ma there.  A woman my age was holding hands with an older woman as they made their way from a parked car to the front courtyard of G'ma's building. There was an equal measure of physical and emotional support in their grip... and the emotions were going both ways.  I flashed to the same scene 50 years earlier, where the balance of power and cognition and responsibility was radically different, but the sense of responsibili...

 (For those of you who know me and are wondering if this story is about you, the answer is no.  I've been carrying this around since college; "Promise Not To Tell" was a frequent conversation starter in those days.  It bothered me then, and it bothers me now.) What would you do? You're talking to someone about a mutual friend and your interlocutor looks at you, cocks her head, says " OK, you can't tell Mutual Friend about this but.........." and then proceeds to give you information you wish you didn't have.  It doesn't matter what you've been told. Maybe it's evidence of an affair, or a problem at work.  The content is less important than the meta-message: you know something which impacts someone you care about and you are bound not to reveal it. Why are you bound?  Because that's exactly what it feels like - caught, tied up, trying to loosen one end of the bindings just pulling them tighter somewhere else.   I'm going t...

Do men really have that hard a time making friends?  There's been discussion over in Time Goes By on the subject, with most of the comments coming from women.  Leaving that interesting fact alone for a while, I have been wandering in the valley of the man cave recently.  It started with Nance's love note to her husband , who seems like an all around great guy.  Then Ronni posted Bill's lament, and I began the old "compare and contrast" game.  Why is DH never referred to as lonely or alone?  Why can't Bill find anyone to discuss world events instead of sports and hunting?  They are both men, yet one is content and one is not. Revenge of the Caveman was a C+ theatrical event, but it did have some interesting moments.  One came as he drew a distinction between the hunter and the gatherer.  The hunter - typically male - was engaged in a one on one battle to the death with another living being.  The gatherers depended on one another to colle...

Yes, I did.  Today, as my marriage is celebrating the fact that it is old enough to be president, I cast my ballot. The polling place wasn't where the postcard had said it would be, but I was driving so it wasn't that big of a deal.  Of course, the fact that the people and machines were in the Y's gym and not on the campus of the Community College was somewhat confusing, but I just kept driving through their adjoining parking lots until I saw the signs exhorting me to            VOTE HERE     I am nothing if not obedient, so I parked and entered and        followed the similarly sized and shaped arrows down the hall and past the Silver Sneakers doing their chair aerobics and down the ramp and there it was, in the gym, just like it ought to be.  G'ma was an election monitor/poll watcher/voter registrar in every election I can remember growing up.  These people were just a...

Do you know where you were 35 years ago?  Do you remember the weather and what you were wearing and what you had for dinner and who was late and who was obnoxious and how it felt to go to sleep that night? Probably not.... unless it's your anniversary today, too. I'm writing this the evening before the big event, and I'm time traveling to G'ma and Daddooooo's backyard on Long Island.  There's a yellow and white striped tent covering the grass, and the tables are stacked alongside the path towards the garbage cans.  The cans which have been removed to a less conspicuous location, further from the walkway to be used by the guests as they arrive to celebrate with us, even though I thought it would be nice for my family and friends to admire the paint job we'd done on them one boring summer afternoon.  They weren't elegant, but they were us.   I lost that battle to G'ma's raised eyebrow and fifteen syllable enunciation of my name. TBG's famil...

I'm having a hard time staying focused.  The Big Cuter is back in San Francisco, preparing for his first day of class.  Mr 5 started kindergarten while I was in New York 10 days ago and the Crayola kids are already playing Fall Ball.  All over the country, people are saying that summer is over..... I'm just not ready for that to be true. I attended every single meeting of the Board of Trustees of our school district in Marin.  I may never finish the sweater I tried to knit as I listened, but I always listened.  We moved to town in July, and I decided to become involved in my community.  I began with the Design Review Board meetings, but there was too much hostility over the shape of the pavers in a driveway or the exact shade of taupe which might be acceptable to the neighbors for my taste. The School Board was 5 people behind some tables in the middle school library, and 30 or so folding chairs set up between the cookies and coffee and the door.  Th...

Well behaved children seem to be few and far between these days. The airports were filled with screamers and runners and whiners and criers and the generally disobedient. The third time the boys aimed the laser pointer at my face I felt called upon to comment. My raised eyebrows hadn't stopped them, nor had my scowl, so they heard my stern, G'ma voice reminding them that blinding strangers probably wasn't the best way for them to occupy their time. Their grown-ups grabbed the device and then went on ignoring them. I sighed and changed my seat. ***** Sitting on the beach with the Golden Girls, we watched as Maya and Jesse tossed crumbs to the seagulls. Big mistake, kids. Where once there had been one lonely bird floating on the air currents, suddenly there were a dozen or more, squawking and cawing and pecking and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It was a tribute to good parenting as Mike-the-Dad stopped the behavior as they began their second throws. Add...

Between jet lag and the gym, laundry and the dry cleaner, G'ma and the Big Cuter (who's here for a visit and is a very attractive nuisance), I'm am post-less.  Absolutely out of deep thoughts.  Stuck in this semi-exhausted state, I am going to let my photos of New York City amuse you today.  I will try to do better on the morrow.  For now, take a walk with MTF and me as we stroll down 5th Avenue, from 31st Street to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village: We walked out of the Chandler Hotel on Thursday night, looking for a glass of wine and an appetizer to tide us over until MTF's travel angst had passed.  As we passed Guy and Gallard's Cafe we overheard someone mention that the wine was 2-for-1.  Perfect!  After an artichoke pizzette (tiny pizza, apparently) and 3 glasses of Malbec we were rewarded with a warm elephant ear pastry by the smiling waiter.  There was no reason to search for dinner.  Our bellies were full as we returned t...

There are chain letters and then there are chain letters. Sometimes, the email just makes me want to remove my hair in great clumps.  Sometimes I sigh, wondering why this particular correspondent can't figure out that I never send them back to her --- oh yes, the best ones always want to instill guilt by saying b e sure to send it back to me... I want to fire her as my friend.... if I didn't love her so much.... or if she weren't TBG's cousin.  I'm reminded of one of my favorite adages: friends: the family you choose for yourself.  But then I begin to wonder if that means family: the friends you are stuck with. Anyhow, if you've been reading for a while you know that I often bemoan (ok, I whine about) the fact that it's been harder than I'd anticipated to make friends here in Tucson.  I have a couple of close buddies, but my bench is not as deep as it could be.  I look to the interweb and you, Dear Readers, for the connections I'm trying to develop...

We revisited our old haunts today.  The Little Red Store MTF incognito...preserving her identity smelled just the same as it did when we were in Junior High, trying to look old enough to buy cigarettes.  We knew that they'd moved the counter to another corner Walking in felt just a little bit off.  The new owners were as interested in our old stories as we were in their new one.  It was disappointing to find no Pixie Stix filled with Lik'm Aid powder nor candy necklaces we could eat off our necks, but we got over it quickly.  We drove past MTF's parents' house, and her aunt's house, and her grandmother's house and her elementary school and the car was filled with her squeals.  I know, she's really too old to be squealing, but this was her first visit in 40 years and we love her so we made allowances for the noises.  Our high school has been expanded and there's a fancy digital sign out in front but the inside was dingy and dusty and dark....

Roomie lives 3 blocks from the ocean.  Coming from the desert southwest, this was about as perfect an end to my New York sojourn as I could have imagined.  She's the Weather Goddess - bright clear skies and big big waves on Saturday and then a lightly overcast Sunday made it possible for us to bronze our bodies and then cement the tan without over-doing it.  Can you tell that we spent every weekend of our teen years perfecting the process?  Memories of buses to the beach and kisses under the boardwalk kept us chattering away like magpies.  We laughed at the 20-somethings who arrived as we used to do, in small groups looking for the spot on the beach where the rest of the gang was hanging See how neatly they are lined up, all in a row?  Soon after I took this photo, three more girls arrived.  There was no room in the line-up for their beach chairs, and they were forced to create a second tier.  That was fine for two of them, who opened their mag...

Chicago is humid. At 9 o'clock in the morning, I'm greeted by the sweaty faces of the commuters at the bus stop on the corner. Taxi's fly by and SIR hails a white one just for me. He hoists my suitcase into the deep trunk, one of the little things he does that makes me (and the Little Cuter) love him. There's not a misstep in his wonderfulness – I go through doors he holds open, I enter elevators before he does, his eyes are always roving, wondering if there's something else he can do to make my stay more perfect. He looks at my girl the way a mother wants a man to look at her daughter. It makes it easier to leave, knowing she has someone who is looking out for her. ***** O'Hare is no more manageable at 9:45am than it was at 5:45pm. The breakfasts are overpriced ($12 for eggs, toast, frozen potatoes and a coke) and the crowds are moving right through the middle of the over-wide walkways. Is there some special terminal dispensation from the “keep to the ...

I'm on the road again.  I've left my flowering plants in CT's capable hands and TBG to fend for himself as I fly east.  MTF and Roomie and I are gathering this weekend on Long Island for another mini-reunion, and, for $30 more I tacked on a quick visit to the Little Cuter and her boys.  Airline pricing remains a mystery to me, but I was glad to take advantage of this peculiarity for the chance to hug the kids.  American Airlines has bizarre overhead bins, smaller on one side than the other.  There were many helpful tall men available to assist me as I shifted my rolling suitcase, having misjudged the depth at first.  For some reason, I'd selected a window seat instead of my usual aisle, and the two men I dislodged were glad to see a small person curl up against the side of the plane.  The guy on the aisle slept, but the middle seat was occupied by a tall, dark and handsome 20-something test pilot.  Had he not been married and the proud papa of a...

It's summer, and I want to be outside in the garden. It's summer, and I want my knees to be covered with soil and I want my fingernails to be blackened and broken by the earth I'm pushing aside as I place the transplants gently into their new homes.   It's summer, and I'm sitting inside, typing to you, because it's just too hot to be out there.  We've turned off the heating elements feeding the pool and it's still 95.  That makes for a relaxing bathtub, but doesn't do much to cool off a suffering gardener. I tried.  I really did.  I went out to water the plants which aren't reached by the irrigation system, and I nearly drowned in my own perspiration.  Dragging hoses across the desert - even a 50' hose reaching just across my driveway and into my front yard - is more exertion than I'm looking for these days. trek2befit.com Mattie offered a yoga hike on Saturday morning, and I signed up without thinking much about it.  As the tem...