The Burrow

Breakfast with old friends just may be my favorite thing in the world.  An omelette at Yolk and two hours of conversation with people I've known since my 20's was the perfect start to a long and stressful day.  We covered hip replacements and politics and John Corzine as we devoured Eggs Benedict and english muffins and green tea.  It was wonderful. I spent the afternoon at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, being evaluated and examined and pronounced perfectly healed and in need of continued exercise and massage and pilates.  I must stop referring to my injured leg pejoratively.  Apparently, there is research showing that thinking bad thoughts increases inflammation.  Seriously. Nance asked yesterday if I had any suggestions to make traveling while damaged more palatable.  I have none.  I am slower than anyone with whom I walk.  I am achy and sweaty and every step is a major event.  Everyone walks faster than I do.  Uphil...

Typing that title, I remember standing at the blackboard (in the dark ages, before white boards were replaced by smart boards) and arguing with the teacher that traveling had 2 L's, not one.  I was fairly adamant about it, as was she.  Richard Levine opened the dictionary and told us that we were both correct as I watched the teacher shake her head and erase my extraneous (in her eyes, at least) L.  She was the teacher, she was in charge, what did we know, anyway?  Fifth grade was a hard year. Travel(l)ing with a leg and a half is hard, too.  Brother and 2 of the 3 women in his life took me to the National Zoo on Friday morning.  It was 60 and sunny in DC; the rain clouds were gone by the time we met up at my hotel and it was a glorious day for a walk.  By the time we got to the end of the hotel's approach road (it was much too long to be called a driveway) I was exhausted.  We piled into a taxi to save my hip for the hippos.  $10 to...

I just finished reading The Marriage Plot. Jeffrey Eugenides's story follows three twenty-somethings as they graduate from Brown and dip their toes into the world of adulthood circa 1983. Their paths are unpaved and unwashed and uncertain. The two men are damaged and their female love interest is just about perfect and life goes on around them as they struggle to figure out which direction their futures will take. Living with mental illness is the spine of this story, although an argument could be made (as I did to myself before I put fingers to keys this afternoon) for marriage or the-search-for-one's-true-self as the over-arching theme. But the characters' intersection with religion and marriage are impacted by Leonard's manic-depression. His illness is untouched by anything. Drug therapy and academia and private school girls and Mother Teresa are all on the receiving end of Eugenides' reproving tongue. Class differences and financial security, a...

She's the feel good story of the day.  I'm honored to be attached to her coattails. "I miss you" was the operant phrase, and for the first time I saw on Rep. Giffords' face just how big a toll this decision was taking.  Saying goodbye is never easy.  Leaving a good job isn't either.  Watching her sit and stand, faux-clapping and looking brave, my heart was heavy. Literally.  I never knew that phrase in such a visceral sense before watching my Congresswoman mount the stairs to the Speaker's chair.  My hip hurt for her as she lugged her unresponsive side up two or three of the biggest highest most torturous steps ever created.  She teetered.... I gasped.... and TBG and I both exhaled "Oh, Mark!" as our brains went immediately to her husband, entrusting the safety of the person he cares most about in the whole wide world to John Boehner and Debbie Wasserman Schulz.  Sometimes you have to have been-there-done-that to know just how anxious eve...

I'm on my way out of town this weekend. My travels will take me to Washington, DC and Chicago.  I have to stop in Chicago; Little Cuter and I have a date to shop for wedding dresses.  For most normal mothers and daughters, this would be a moment of great joy and delight.  Much girlish giggling and motherly adoration would be dispensed.  Ball gowns and 20' trains and veils with flowery halos holding them in place would be examined lovingly.  The moment would be the culmination of years of wistful drooling over the Vows section of The Sunday New York Times. Unfortunately for us, we are missing the bride gene.  We are stumbling in the dark.  MOTG saw the look of distress on Little Cuter's face last summer and with her gentle and loving assistance, other venues and locations were considered and rejected.   Her mother-in-law-to-be helped my little girl shift perspectives and find suitable alternatives which ultimately led to a smaller yet eve...

The San Francisco 49'ers lost a heart-breaker Sunday night.  Big Cuter can now attend his conference (in Paris... poor baby) without feeling that he's leaving his team in the lurch.  Personally, I am reveling in the success of a quarterback who actually graduated from college (a semester early) with Deans' List grades.  Smart rules! ***** The Fox Theatre was going to be the venue for Sunday's movies-in-the-afternoon-with-the-girls because I thought that the original 3:10 to Yuma was on the schedule. Turns out that Russel Crowe was going to be on the big screen, not Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. I was looking forward to seeing an old movie in an old theatre and sharing the joy with Elizibeth, my favorite teenager. Instead, we shifted our sights to the local mall and Marky Mark. Am I the only one who remembers the hoopla over his underwear ad in Times Square? http://markyadvertising.tripod.com/ ***** I am now the proud possessor of a Kindle Fire.  Big Cuter ta...

Go ahead. Watch it. Your boss won't mind, I'm sure. Just lean to one side and let her look over your shoulder at those luminous eyes, let him hear that strong and fragile voice.  You'll share a sigh and move on, knowing that you just saw someone do the right thing. In a political environment filled with vitriol and blather, Congresswoman Giffords gives us two minutes of warmth and promise.  Barbed wire never looked this good. If wishing could make it so, this video would be Gabrielle Giffords announcing her return to Congress. If determination and grit and will were enough... if there had been .....if only. Alas, as Gabby says, we can't change it.   In between football and Joe Paterno and Marky Mark at the movies, Amster received a text and an email and JannyLou left me two messages.  The news was traveling like wildfire.  I sat in the dark booth at lunch, eyes pressed to a smartphone, as my Congresswoman said goodbye. She belongs to herself and to...

Shannon came into our lives at UMC, in the ICU.  Arriving at the hospital before 7am, she was the only massage therapist able to get past the security guards and up to the floor where the families were gathered, overwhelmed and under-prepared, struggling with surgeries and breathing tubes and fear.  She set up her table in The Zen Room, a quiet place for families to escape the hubub of the machinery which was saving the lives of someone they loved.  It was dimly lit and silent.  TBG found his way there sometime between my first and second surgeries.  I imagine he'd had a meal or two in between doctors telling him what else they were going to do to me.  He and Little Cuter and SIR never left me alone, and the strain was taking its toll.  Walking down the hallway, spying Shannon and her table, he went into the room and began to heal. For a brief moment, it was all about him.  How was he doing?  What parts hurt him right now... or, the sho...

For some reason or other, I came to the keyboard this afternoon thinking about sledding.  Perhaps it was the season's worth of snow CNN showed me being dumped on Seattle today.  Perhaps it was JenniJazz and her pooch striding out on the road in front of my picture window.   Perhaps it's the fact that it is January, the middle of winter, and my body is longing for puffy flakes falling on my face. Whatever its genesis, I have the distinct feeling of missing the snow. Little Cuter's email last week said it best I love how it quiets the city down and makes everything look like Narnia. Don't get me wrong,  there is no way that I want to live with ice underfoot and feet of crystals to be shoveled.  But every once in a while I get to remembering..... G'ma putting on her woolen hat with the earflaps and her red flannel jacket with the zillions of pockets and lacing her shoes up while sitting on the steps in the front hall.  Daddooooo was to...

It has been such a long time since I've had a chance to read for pleasure.  In the last year gunshots and recovery and a consequent lack of concentration found me, for the first time in my adult life, with no novels on my "to be read" shelf and no desire to find any to fill the spaces. Once my brain started to function again, I found myself taking two Humanities Seminars at the UofA.  Between the history of the fall of the Roman Republic and an exploration of humans' expression of consciousness I barely had time to keep up with Doonesbury.  Once classes ended for the semester, I was busy with brownies and holidaze and family and taking a quiet moment for myself was out of the question.  Then, suddenly, everyone was gone and the house was back to normal and the Stroll and Roll was planned and executed and I had time.  My first stop on my first regular day was the Nanini branch of the Pima County Library. The literary gods rained ambrosia on me.  ...

photo: Darlene Danehy Last week's Stroll and Roll was an unmitigated success. Throngs of Tucsonans joined GRIN and the Christina-Taylor Green Memorial Foundation for three hours of exercise and side-walk chalk and hugs. It was a magical way to make lemonade out of lemons, and TBG and I were determined to do just that. Photo : David Sanders I admit to a certain level of trepidation, though.  My last outing on a sunny Saturday morning in early January didn't have a happy ending.  This year, though I would be more wary, I was carrying a heightened sense of alert... alarm... okay.... fear.  I was scared to go out in public.  I was going to do it, but I was going to be scared. That was the case until I ventured west of the freeway to the offices of the Pima County Department of Transportation, home of some of the loveliest public servants with whom I have ever had the pleasure to work.  After rolling up the maps and finalizing the list of thing...

Spending the morning at the VA Ambulatory Surgery center shouldn't have been an emotional experience.  Amster was having a pin removed from her foot and I was transportation and emotional support.  She's got a spasm in her neck and 4 kids to supervise this evening, so I'm on duty til everyone is asleep.  The morning piece was supposed to be the easy part. There weren't enough chairs for the waiting family and friends. No one standing was older or more infirm than I am, so I remained comfortably ensconced in my oversized arm-chair, feeling no guilt at all.  The WWII vet smiling at me across the room, the young couple sharing the tiny love seat, the older couple holding hands as he waited to be called - we were a lovely, calm, relaxed group of 25 adults and one sleeping infant sharing a space. CNN, broadcasting from a tiny flat screen in the corner above the Family Consult room, seemed like a good choice to me.  Politically middle of the road, it is easily ig...

My dad was really good with little kids.  I mean, he was really really good with them.  He knew just what to say, he knew just what would be interesting, and he was never afraid to allow them to push themselves to the limit.  In the workshop, as the parent of one of those kids, it was hard to watch as my little one wielded a saw.  Her look of triumph as the wood fell into two neat slices almost kinda sorta made up for the fact that my heart was lodged permanently in my throat. I was on CBS last week, sharing the love with Ms. Levine's English-language-learners, and watching myself climb up the ladder to the loft bed we use as a cozy place to read I just had to laugh.  There was no way that taking myself up there, in my cowboy boots, with a thigh that resists coming parallel to the floor, was a good idea.  But the kids were up there and so was The Snowy Day and we know that book and my presence was requested so up I went. Do you think it might be...

I seem to be a sucker for poetry in the wintertime.  Last year it was Billy Collins.  Today it was Maya Angelou.  I'm thinking of making this an annual mental excursion.  My brain is a-twitter with the rhythm and the rhyme and the grace and the depth of Ms. Angelou's words as spoken by William Fry, Ph.D. The Happy Ladies Club monthly luncheon speaker, Dr. Fry, according to The Learning Curve brochure,   is an award-winning literature professor.  From my personal experience this afternoon, I can add brilliant interpreter of the poet's words .  It was a pleasure to be in the room with him. He read us They Went Home: They went home and told their wives, that never once in all their lives, had they known a girl like me, But... They went home. They said my house was licking clean, no word I spoke was ever mean, I had an air of mystery, But... They went home. My praises were on all men's lips, they liked my smile, my wit, my hips, the...

It's quite lovely to be sitting on Douglas, dinner dishes cleaned up and Big Cuter on the phone talking Tebow with his dad, my fingers typing random nonsense to you.  I am reveling in this new year. ***** Ron Paul came in second in New Hampshire's primary and only Rachel Maddow wondered if the Republican Party was paying any attention to that fact.  Wanting all perspectives on the situation, we left CNN for Fox, lasted about two minutes and found Rachel asking if the platform might represent Ron Paul's views.  After all, nearly 20% of primary voters find him attractive. I'm trying to remain calm as I contemplate President Paul dismantling our government. ***** My dentist has a sonic tooth polisher.  There was no pressing, no whirring, no tingling from my teeth to my toes when I went in for a cleaning today.  Instead, there was a gentle stream of water and a strong pulsing sensation but none of my usually sensitive spots sent me jumping or flailing.  S...

Happy New Year to one and all!  May it be full of merriment and wonder. I know, I know, I'm a week late to the party. It doesn't matter, really.  I'll catch up.  But right now I am reveling in a sense of starting fresh, of incorporating but not dwelling in the past, of beginning the next chapter of my life. It helps that I'll turn 60 seven weeks from today. Sixty is a big number but it's a meaningless statistic in terms of what is relevant to my life right now.  As almost everyone of my friends from January 8th said this weekend, every day is a miracle, a gift, an unexpected but gratefully appreciated bonus.  My line has been that "the sun came up and I was here to see it.  By definition, that makes it a good day." Those good days have been measured again...

I am out of words, denizens. The media, my friends, my family... they've taken them all and left me with a semi-exploding head and a heart wrapped in warmth. I'm going to take the next few days to unwind from the Stroll and Roll and the memories and the celebrations and the candlelight vigil and the news reports and the emails and cards and phone calls filled with love and thinking of you and encouragement. I know I'd promised to leave this episode behind me, but...... I nearly ran off the highway after dropping SIR and Little Cuter at the airport this morning when I heard the NPR announcer segue from one story to another like this: "Susan Hileman took her ...." It was so sad to be alone in the car; there was no one to hoot and holler with. I keep thinking that I am used to the celebrity, but I guess I'm really not. A lovely young producer from The State of the Reunion sent me to KUAT's studios on the UofA campus where I read, and re-read an...