The Burrow

Between talking to FlapJilly and hugging FlapJilly  I haven't had time to think of anything deeper than the profundity of the love one can conjure up when faced with the eyes of the child of your child. I know you'll understand.

We're visiting FlapJilly, and we're singing silly songs. Little Bunny Foo Foo,   hopping through the forest,   picking up the field mice,   and bopping them over their heads. Nobody could remember the rest of the tune.  It was searched on the interwebs, and we learned of the Fairy Godmother who gave the bunny three chances to reform before she turned him into a goon. The moral of the story?  Hare today, goon tomorrow. That, denizens, is a feghoot  - a short poem or story which ends in an awful play on words. Mr. Peabody and Sherman's adventures on Rocky and Bullwinkle  were feghoots. TBG wanted me to share his favorite : The fairy godmother promises everything to Benny as long as he doesn't shave.  He shaves, she turns him to ash, and puts him in a vase. The moral?  A Benny shaved is a Benny urned. Feel free to groan, and then to thank me for your new word.

A friend came home from a Caribbean cruise to 5" of snow.   It's all gone now , he went on to say, but...(it's) cold....30 degrees cold. I'm so sorry that there are those of you experiencing gloomy skies and frigid temperatures.  I type that wearing shorts and a tee shirt.  I walked to get a manicure this morning; one mile in the bright sunshine without a jacket or gloves or a scarf or anything.  Again, I'm really really sorry you can't share the joy of living here right now. Feeling magnanimous, I am ready to share the joy.  This is what's happening outside my house right now: The animals are awake. Those mounds are the doorway to the burrows of the little ground squirrels which munch on my cactus flowers.  They are adorable, as long as they aren't eating my petunias.  They are also very hard to photograph; they are quick.   The wildflowers are blooming, as my allergies attest. The brittle bush and the desert marigolds...

Dear Elizibeth, So, you've said YES to the offer to be on tv. It's a true crime series, and you are certainly connected to a true crime. You know the details, you know how you feel, but that's not enough. I'm here to protect you and prepare you. I've had some experience in these matters, after all. I was naïve going into it. I called my girlfriend – she used to dress Oprah – for the most important advice. What should I wear? She cautioned against a white blouse and a dark skirt, which surprised me. She was the one who told me that was the outfit which could go anywhere, be any level of fancy it needed to be. Apparently, white is not a great color on tv. Blue is best, she said. Be careful not to wear something with a busy pattern, and avoid stripes if at all possible. Let nothing distract from that beautiful face. That seemed to be the theme of her instructions. From my own experience, I'd encourage you to stay away from dangling ...

No one asks me how I'm doing any more.  It's been 50 some months since I was perforated, and the constant interest in my well-being has waned. I am no longer approached on the sidewalk.  I can buy a melon without being hugged by a stranger.  No one has offered to pray for me in a very long time. Instead, I go to the gym and I go to Pilates and I walk to golf tournaments .  I park where there is room to maneuver, instead of trying to find the spot closest to the door.  Every once in a while, I walk through the market without leaning on a cart, which is a long way from needing the motorized wagon to buy a gallon of milk. My endurance is a work in progress.  It's never been my long suit, and that has been a convenient excuse behind which to hide. I know it was part of me before January, 2011, and I expect that it will be for the rest of my life.  I've always been a sprinter, not a miler. On the other hand, I'm never going to be able to take a long hik...

One emailed, asking for a lawyer in Tucson to whom she could refer a friend. Two are going to pass us like ships in the night this week.  We're hoping to avoid a mid-sea collision, but we'd really like to have dinner together. And then my roommate from sophomore year in college said she was coming to town. It was a trifecta of loveliness. The lawyer's name would be passed on with confidence.  We'll try to be organized enough to find our friends for a meal.  And I spent yesterday afternoon in my backyard, chatting up a storm with a woman I haven't seen for 25 years or so. As I said, a trifecta of loveliness settle into my soul this weekend. We sent her family off to the golf tournament , and we plunked ourselves in the lawn furniture, with snacks and drinks and each other.  The family was gone for two hours; it felt like fifteen minutes. She'd been married to a guy from college, who'd been a friend of mine, as well.  She's divorced and remar...

Amster scored tickets to the Tucson Conquistadores Classsic. It's a stop on the Champions Tour. The 13th tee is at the end of my street,  Amster left her car in my driveway and we walked the half mile downhill to the golf course.  There was no one taking tickets; it's a quiet cul de sac whose proximity to the festivities is a well kept secret. Not wanting to be scofflaws, we affixed our tickets to our wrists and stepped onto the paved pathway. We walked toward the tents, found snacks   and shade, and made ourselves comfortable. We were there at 10am, well before the crowds. The kids were able to stand at the rope and see the rings on the golfers' fingers. We watched a few putts, saw a few drives sailing up up up and landing with a satisfying thunk,  and then they had had enough. I had, too, and Amster had found a friend so I thought of you and the post I'd write. I tried to take a picture of the poster with the golfers' nam...

"Does spelling count?" Mr. McCarthy's response has stayed with me for half a century.   "If I say no, will you misspell on purpose? Spelling always counts."     Spelling has always come easily to me, a fact I attributed to the all the reading I did.  I was disabused of that notion when Big Cuter and Princess Myrtle came along.  They're both voracious readers, and neither of them can spell.  That doesn't mean that they don't try.  They understand that it is important. Automated writing systems are exacerbating the problem. Autocorrect may change the entire word, but spell check keeps most people honest these days.  With the demise of cursive writing - Mr 9 is in the last class to learn it in his school district - I mourn the impending loss of the hand written note ... and with its disappearance the need to learn to spell. After all, no one will notice if your grocery list is misspelled. I've grown used to poor editing in ebooks I r...

We had the same family physician for 15 years.  He was a cardiologist by training, and every check up included an EKG taken by his wife, his nurse/office manager.  She wore white patterned hose and a white nurse's dress and never failed to make you feel welcomed and protected. Then, Dr. Smith got sick and died.  We moved to California and found a pediatrician and a family care practice and a gynecologist.  I took the Cuters to the first and myself to the last and never, in the 17 years we lived there did I ever need to see the GP.  I come from hearty peasant stock , as I liked to remind TBG.  If I were sick, it never lasted longer than 24 hours.  Over the counter medications took care of all my needs. Moving to Arizona left us, once again, in need of a doctor.  TBG developed symptoms requiring care, and I called physicians based on geography and availability.  Dr. Cantor could see him at 4pm that day; he became our family physician by def...

with a terrible cold and it's all I can do to move my fingers over the keyboard. But, I never want to disappoint you so, today I'm sending you to a beautiful pieces of writing, found for me by Little Cuter. This link  takes you to Stanford Medical 's Spring 2015 issue. Here's a taste, from the very end: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

Quotes and ideas from TFOB authors: T. Jefferson Parker  - On finishing a wonderful book:  That feeling you get when you can't read anything else for a while after it's done.  It changes your life for a while Adam Mansbach - On reading You can reach a level of intimacy unparalleled in anything else. Adam Mansbach - On profanity It's said that profanity is used because the author cannot think of another word. I can always think of another word.  Sometimes, fuck is the right word.  No parent has ever stood over a screaming child at 3 in the morning and said "Go the heck to sleep!" Merle Reagle -  On the misuse of the language You're just exasperating the situation ..... it gets to the point, but it's wrong! Merle Reagle -   On clues he couldn't use in a puzzle, but had to share with us Tyne Daley's take on 50 Shades of Grey -  Gag Me and Lace Me Aaron Paul was a meth head actor  in Breaking Bad ( meth head.... method......

It's my favorite weekend of the year... and Tucson has a lot of really good weekends. It started on Friday night with The Rock Bottom Remainders Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Scott Turow were just a few of the authors who should keep their day jobs. What they lacked in skill they made up for with enthusiasm. Amy Tan has some dance moves, and Dave Barry has a love affair going on with the harmonica, and I'm still hoarse from singing along. The concert was over by 9:30; we were told that clapping for an encore would be to no avail. They had played all the songs they knew. The next morning dawned sunny and warm. I parked where I wanted to end my day, and strolled past the circus performers  and down the UofA Mall. It was lined with those ubiquitous white tents... tents which captured the heat as Valerie Plame and Michael McGarrity interviewed one another.  The moderator had nothing to do but enjoy the repartee.... which, except for a grammatical faux pas or ...

That's the conclusion I have drawn after today's Humanities Seminar .  The topic is The Evolution of Cognition, and my approach to the subject has evolved as the class has gone on. I enjoyed the first few lectures, although they seemed rather basic in many respects.  What is science?  What about the scientific method?  Do we start with a hypothesis or is general curiosity preferred?  I had been taught the answers, and thought that everyone in the room had been taught them, too.  We were all fairly well educated older adults, after all. But today, as we moved from the provable to the hypothetical, a certain sentence caught my attention. "And, you remember, science teaches us that  ...." All the what if's and possibly's were caught up right there - there were certain pieces of the puzzle which are provable.  There's a touchstone of what is  that science can explain.  The leaps between those facts are what makes it the humanities, I...

He was my hero. Nurse Nancy said it to me on the phone this afternoon. I was about to say the same thing to her. When bullets began to fly, he ran toward them. He was bleeding.  His head had intersected with a 9mm shell.   He was 75 years old. He tackled the shooter. One year later, at the same grocery store, at the same time of day, we survivors and citizen heroes and families and friends gathered to celebrate the creation of Americans for Responsible Solutions , Gabby Giffords' and Mark Kelly's attempt to right the world.  There was a big crowd, and there was visible security.  Before the ceremony began, as the media readied itself,  my achy hip took refuge on a chair next to Col. Bill's wife.   "Where's TBG?" she wondered. "Where's Col. Bill?" I replied. We scanned the crowd, and then felt gentle taps on our shoulders. TBG had gone around the crowd clockwise.  Col Bill had gone the other direction.  They hadn...

I found a new word today.  My hard copy dictionary was useless, so to Google I went.  Apparently, this has been a thing  since 2014.  Where have I been?  How have I missed this trend?  An entire fashion cycle has come (and some would say gone) before I had a chance to reject it myself. I'm not the only one, it seems.  According to dazeddigital.com,    Normcore  dominated the search engine requests this year. Presumably everybody was Googling it because they had no idea what it was. Right away, I started to feel better. According to The Guardian , the phrase grew out of five young marketing execs with arts backgrounds sitting in an apartment, wondering why Power Points were so boring.  They formed K-Hole , and began to publish papers.  With names like Prolasticity A Report on Patience and Fragmoretation A Report on Visibility , it's obvious that they've taken their cue from the Burrow's inventiveness with the language. ...

"Were you a teacher in Chicago like the rest of these girls?"  was the first interrogatory from my right.  We had been strangers until we played mah jongg together last Monday .  Now, we're old friends. And yes, we are girls , because, as we agreed over the clacking tiles this morning, somehow it's the right word to use when playing mah jongg.  Rosemarie, to my left, was reminiscing about the sounds the women who played when she was a girl, and we laughed about the perfectly polished nails and the extra long Virginia Slims which were part and parcel of what mah jongg was to us, as young onlookers. Now, as a much older but not much wiser player, I'm enjoying the fact that I can make a mistake and Scarlett, a veteran of NYC and Floridian games, tells me "not to worry... girls who've been playing forever mistake flowers for one bams." I promise, in the context of the game that makes sense.  It would be a lot simpler if the tiles were congruent bet...

Brenda Starr and I walked some more of the Rillito Park Path this morning.  We wore tee shirts. The wildflowers are blooming, and my yard is ablaze with random, disorganized color. I spent the afternoon re-potting and installing and pruning and straightening and cleaning the containers. It wasn't too cold to be in the shade in the courtyard nor was it too hot to be potting roses in the sunshine out back. I have a stack of large print mysteries on the bookshelf, books that my library always seems to have on hand.  I can drive twenty-some minutes and be on campus for a class or a lecture or an exhibit or a recital or downtown for a concert or a great meal..... and there's always parking and it's usually free. Did I mention that I was outside all day today?  Did I tell you the part about the tee shirt? I have to keep focusing on these things, denizens, because this state is in the hands of people who are turning it into something unrecognizable, something which...

Sitting at the Author's Table at today's Literary and Prologue Society of the Southwest's luncheon, I found the answer to a question and some food for thought. Over my strawberry shortcake dessert, I listened to Laila Lalami, author of The Moor's Account, tell us that we are all Moors.   I've always wondered if Othello was an Arab Negro , as is her main character, or if he was of a more Semitic cast.  If Ms Lalami is correct, he's both of them and all of them and each of them. I'm comfortable with that conclusion.  It's nice that someone else is thinking about it, too. Her historical novel tells the tale of the first non-European explorer/invader/conqueror of the New World. How is it that I am 63 years old and this is the first I am hearing about him?  His story, though short on details, certainly deserves mention. I flashed to Big Cuter's 9th grade social studies text, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States , and my son...

Mark Cuban was talking to Wilbon and Kornheiser on Pardon the Interruption.  The owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks is always good for a quote, a controversy, a puzzlement.  Things were going along smoothly until he was asked about resting players instead of showcasing their talent. He thought it was just fine.  He thought that the end goal of every team was to earn a spot and then succeed in the playoffs.  It's a long, brutal season which takes a toll on the human body. Sure, said Wilbon, but what about the fans?  Families gear up for their one shot at an NBA game and LeBron's on the bench?  That's a pretty expensive disappointment. Here's where Cuban lost me.   It's about more than one player.  It's about the experience of being next to your wife, your son, your friend, and being there.   The drivel went on and on, while the split screen showed an obese man gyrating in a too-much-belly-exposing tee shirt, explosions, mascots... all o...

We were sweating like nobody's business, to quote Daddooooo.  It was cool for Tucson, and Scarlett and I were wearing sweaters.  They proved to be a big mistake.  Butterflies like it hot and humid.  We humans... not so much.  Those huge glossy green leaves are not indigenous to our arid climate.  They were very happy in the Butterfly Magic exhibit, though. There were weird vines  and strange leaves  and fluttering among the greenery and the sunshine were butterflies.  There were these teeny ones which barely alit long enough to be photographed, but which fluttered all around us, tempting me to try to capture them in pixels.  There were yellow ones, getting up close and personal with one another. There was lots of eating going on.    A slow approach with wings opening as they got closer to the food source.  This smaller orange fella was fluttering madly, taking a more pro-active app...