The Burrow

photo courtesy of JPetersenPhotography We're visiting. I can't promise lots of verbiage. I can promise lots of pictures.

I left one episode out of yesterday's post.   It didn't fit with the overall tenor, but it exists out there. I was teary, standing outside the voting area, and an elderly man and woman smiled with are you okay? looks on their faces.  I smiled back at them.   "I just voted for a woman for president and I'm a little overwhelmed." The woman smiled back as the man  said "Yeah, get ready for a woman president."  "From your mouth to God's ear," I replied, channeling G'ma and Bubba and all the women in my lineage who never had the opportunity to hope for this very moment....... and he GRIMACED! Say what you will about Hillary, growing up when we did it was impossible to imagine  a female POTUS. What she had to do in order to get to this place, without tons of money (Diane Feinstein comes to mind), on a national scale, for sure left detritus in her wake. How could it not? But she has my same body parts, has had my same experiences,...

Dear FlapJilly, You were in pre-school today, all the way across the country from your grandparents.  That's the only reason I didn't take you with me this afternoon.  Your absence is the only unfortunate part of an otherwise remarkable day. I voted for a woman to be the President of the United States. I didn't see her opponent's name on the ballot; my gaze stopped right at the top.  PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES - Clinton/Kane was all that I could read.  There were tears, FlapJilly, real wet tears in my eyes. The world is a far more accommodating place right now than it was when I was 2.  You'll never need a man to co-sign a loan or a credit card application.  No salesman will refuse to talk to you without your husband standing by your side... no salesman with whom you'd do business, that is.  You can secure birth control without a marriage license and a willing gynecologist. You'll never know a world where race or gender determines whether...

I have a Facebook friend I don't really know.  Do you? She connected with me when I was perforated back in 2011.  Among all the high school friends and acquaintances (there were 600+ of us in the class) she is one of the few who maintained the relationship.  I've watched her grandchildren grow, even as I wondered how I knew her.  The yearbook picture didn't help.  Who was she? Finally, I asked her.  It took a lot of courage to decide to say "I don't remember you from high school.  Why weren't we friends?  I think we would have liked one another." The pause she took before answering my question left me hollow in my heart.  Had I insulted her?  Was my carefully crafted questioning, developed over several days, shared and vetted with my closest friends, more annoying than we had supposed?  I didn't want to lose her, but I had to know. Just before it got really awkward, she sent a little laugh over the phone and into my ear. "...

The display on the table attracted my attention as I was leaving the gym.  A lovely woman, a bit younger than I, wondered if I wanted to take 30 seconds and determine my body mass index. Sure. I held that weird device in my two sweaty palms, arms straight out in front of my chest.  She took it from me almost immediately, asked my age, told me my number and directed my eyes to the chart on the table.   I smiled.  I was ideal. Not average, or low, or high.   Ideal.   Sounded pretty perfect to me.  I was proud, and expected the gym's health and wellness person to share my joy.   No such luck. She wanted to get me off my high cholesterol medicine (even though I failed already on a diet-and-exercise regime).  She knew that there was more I could do and she and her trainers were ready to help. I smiled, shook my head, told her I was satisfied with ideal  and left. I refused to be aggravated.  I was having too ...

People who never post on Facebook - like Not-Kathy - posted this There were on-going love letters all series long, like this one, from SIR: Dear Jake Arrieta,  You complete me! Love,  Brian but something about this game brought out people who, in ordinary circumstances, would never turn the television to sports.  Look at these texts from JannyLou, yesterday during the 3rd inning: Cubbies lookin' good.  I cannot believe I am watching baseball for you so I can root for them!..... I've been sitting all day.... Fast Eddie did GOTV door knocking....  Double Play.  Wow. My shirt from the 1989 National League Division Championship and my gym rat tank top will soon be joined with one featuring these guys. But my favorite graphic is this one, sent to all those doubters and disbelievers. GO CUBBIES!!!

Have you heard of them?  Ask a youngster with access to YouTube to show you one, I refuse to link to such nonsense. Following on the heels of an unsubstantiated report of children being lured into the South Carolina woods by an evil, scary clown, the interwebs have exploded with videos purporting to show teens battling fright wigs and face paint.  Mr. 11 and Mr. 13 spent a recent evening talking sports with TBG as the game was on our tv and begging me to watch the clown videos. No, thank you, I have no interest in being scared. It's not scary.  It's funny.  Watch this one..... this one.... this one.... Since nothing is more persistent than an 11 year old on a mission to improve my life, I looked.  A car full of kids crushing a clown beneath their tires, over and over again.  A clown with a machete chasing a kid.  On and on and on it must have gone, but two were enough for me, but not for Mr. 11.  He giggled until it was time to leave. Fa...

I'm a Cubs fan.  It's my natural state of affairs. I allowed myself to buy into the hype this year.  I was foolish and I was forgetful and I got what I deserved. Only 2 out of the last 20 winningest teams in baseball  have won the World Series.  When you hit a losing streak in a seven game series it's hard to regroup, to recoup, to make the fans smile again. And so, tonight, when I should be able to turn to Fox Sports One for an escape from debate, I have no alternative but to stick with Hillary and The Donald.  I'll have a belly ache no matter where I land. Woe is me, I'm a Cubs fan.  I don't mess with the mojo.  When we checked in on-line and saw that Chicago was ahead we knew that we couldn't start the tape delay until it was all over.  They were doing just fine without us. And I fell right back into it, along with half the crowd in Dodger Stadium.  Russel and Rizzo broke out of their slumps and everyone was smiling and, once aga...

Dear Ivanka, I know what you're going through. I had a difficult father, too. He asked a young father at an adjoining restaurant booth if his almost-2 year old son was "retarded.... why isn't he talking if he's not?  Are you talking to him?  He should be talking......" and when the over-6'-tall-muscled-and-furious gentleman stood up, I just shrugged. "Go ahead.  Smack him.  He's totally out of control."   And then, because I really didn't want him to come to any physical harm, I added this harmless lie: "You should see him when he's off his meds." I ushered my embarrassment and my never-medicated-even-though-he-should-have-been paternal unit out the door, apologizing to the point where the insulted father smiled and shrugged back. "Good luck," he said, "you've got your hands full." And so do you, Ivanka. The difference is, I recognized my father's outrageous behavior, and never considered...

This is the face by which I will be remembered. This is not the face I see when I think of myself.  That face is younger, smoother, tauter, darker and so much less grey. That's the ME which created the SHE who they see. FlapJilly will never know the scurrying, go-on-forever, sure-I-can-do-that-with-you woman who was lost in 2011.  She'll have lots of fun with the wait-for-Gramma woman who will take her to the park and throw rocks into the river and push her on the swings; of that I am certain.  But I wish she could have hung out with me before bullets took my flexibility and my stamina. TBG mourns the fact that I never really knew his mother.  Nannie had her first cancer surgery while her son and I were on our first date.  I met her when she was old; the cancer diagnosis changed her, he says.  I knew her when she was in her recliner in the tv room.  He remembers her pitching fastballs and swimming and whistling for him to come home with a blast...

The Cubbies clinched the first of the three series, and they were on my mind.  They defeated the San Francisco Giants, so Marin was on my mind as well. I never think of watching sports in California without remembering Bunionella and her brood, cheering in front of the bigger-than-ours-with-more-than-quadrophonic-sound media system her husband and son had installed in their family room. They didn't watch much tv beyond Nat Geo and sports, but they did watch their sports.  And so did we. And so it wasn't totally surprising that Bunionella called me as I was driving into the parking lot that morning.  I was thinking of baseball and so was she and our thoughts collided in the quantum sphere and there we were, Did you see that game????  talking for a minute or two. It's been months since we spoke.  It may well be months until we speak again.  But we both know that we'll each be thinking of the other as the Cubbies play on.  Good friends are conne...

An earlier version was published on 10/14/12, three weeks after we hosted Little Cuter & SIR's wedding. ***** It was always very confusing - was his birthday the 12th or the 14th of October?  One of them was Columbus Day and the other was Herb's Day and to this moment I still have to stop and think.... and it's gotten harder since the bureaucrats moved Chris's Day to the generic. But he was around me in spirit at the wedding he missed by a decade or so, and he's not having an easy time returning to his life on the other side. Yes, I am much happier blaming him for intruding than wondering why I am conversing with dead people. In my defense, we're not so much conversing as he is hovering and I am feeling nudged. For example, I misplaced the green metal hiking pole I've been using to keep me balanced and symmetrical.  I could have used the metal one with the "I Love Tucson" sticker crookedly affixed just below the grip, but it looks...

Big Cuter's high school lacrosse team got no respect.  The administration, the athletic department, the other students, no one seemed to care.  Parents hired coaches and tried to cobble together practice schedules on fields that were never available.  One year, they used a paved parking lot and the grassy overflow area behind it.... and they had to travel to another town's Rec Center to do so. Then, a private/public partnership was proposed.  The Community College would allow the high school to renovate the college's playing field.  In return, the high school could hold lacrosse practices and games on the College's campus.  We had the money, they had the flat land, the field was in disrepair, the kids needed a place to play.... it was a perfect plan. Parents were dunned for the funds, of course.  There were a lot of fabulously wealthy families who were more than able to fund the whole expensive-but-not-obscenely-so project without blinking, but...

Updated from 2009 My paragraphs were longer, then. Today, October 12, is Columbus Day. Not Amerigo Vespucci Day. Not Leif Ericson Day. Columbus Day. It was certainly not Indigenous People's Day... unless you want to celebrate the beginning of the end. But, I digress.  Today is Columbus Day. Chris and his fleet landed at a place he named San Salvador on October 12, 1492. Of course, that was according to the Julian Calendar. In 1582, a papal bull (and what an image  that  conjures in the brain) restructured the concept of the leap year and named the new calendar after the Pope himself. Suddenly, La Nina and La Pinta and La Santa Maria had landed 9 days later, on October 21st, Gregorian time. Adding 3 days every 4 centuries doesn't seem like a big difference, but try telling that to Columbus. Someone must have agreed with me on this, since we celebrate his arrival on the Julian date. I love it when things that shouldn't change don't change. And that's why I...

After  yesterday's rant , I want to write about a lovely use of the spoken word.  I want to bask in the aura  of someone using the language in thoughtful ways.  I want to recall the comfort of knowing that verbs and nouns will agree while perfectly positioned among interesting clauses. Bob Costas, the man whose post was hi-jacked over the weekend , earned this post on Saturday night.  He's a baseball guy and a smart guy and I can overlook his failure to visibly age because, like Mary Carillo, he makes sports watching an enjoyable experience. His encyclopedic knowledge satisfies TBG's No Stupid Sports Talk rule.  He appears genuine in his enthusiasm, and his boyishness just adds to his charm.  But it's what comes out of his mouth that makes me smile. "A likely reprise of the Game 1 match-up...."  left me dancing with reprise  and unable to tell you anything more about the match up.  He could have said repeat; I appreciate a ma...

There's been a lot said about words this weekend. Should some words be bleeped out in audio?  Should some words be repeated by commentators?There was no consistency - neither within nor between the outlets. How private are your words?  Is wearing a microphone enough evidence ? How about giggling at those words?  I heard no embarrassed twittering; I heard coarse laughter. And there was much discussion of the meta-issue, the framing of the dialogue.  And this is where it got interesting. Predatory (those tic tacs) Sexual (that word we're not saying) Assault (without waiting).  Not bad language.  Sexual Assault.... that which boys all over America, Freshman Orientations heavy on respect for boundaries still ringing in their ears, have now heard the Republican Candidate for President announce that he'd disregard it all, and it's okay, because he's a star. This is about all our children - boys and girls. CNN's John King's defense of men in locker ...

A friend vented this afternoon.  She called her mom for a recipe - her Every Sunday Apple Crisp - and got chaos in return. Everyone was upset.  Mom couldn't remember anything, and was concerned and then even more confused.  My friend was mortified to have reminded her mom of the sorry state of her mind, was distraught that her mother couldn't remember something which had always been readily accessible, was sad and lonely and hurting. At the end of the phone call she typed to me, knowing that I'd been there and done that and come out, smiling, on the other end.  It's not easy, watching a parent slip away.  G'ma was comfortable with her inability to remember - Will it help if I get aggravated?  And who wants to be around a cranky old lady, anyhow?   I thought about how I had a harder time with it than she did.  Especially in the beginning, when denial was easier to fall into.  I thought about the beginning, and how I didn't want to admit ...

Where were we when Peachellow and Yeach  were discussed? You know the color, somewhere between peach and yellow, as the sun is setting  but it's still bright outside.  It's the color of coming home early enough to play outside, for a little while, anyway, before it got dark and Mom had to make dinner. All four of us remember discussing it.  Big Cuter and I know it was in Chicago, though he thinks we were still on Lake Shore Drive and I know we were going west on Fullerton, where the Mies van der Rohe building is set back enough to afford a great view of an urban sunset.  Little Cuter and TBG are cresting a hill in San Francisco; though she is certain it was Geary, TBG only recollects coming over the top of a hill. It's interesting that we all agree that the conversation was vehicular in location.  I think I was driving the kids, without TBG.... and only believing he wasn't there because I was behind the wheel.... which wouldn't have happened had he be...

This was part of a longer post from 2009.  As a kid on Long Island, we had a family dentist. His office was a short bike ride away; going to appointments on my own was my first really grown-up experience. Down Benjamin Road, then cut through Ellen Terry Drive, which was named for the actress, not some builder's daughter. I liked knowing that. Ride under the giant poplars hiding the too-big-for0-the neighborhood, gated, wonder-who-lives-there house and then cross Brower Avenue. Carefully, very very carefully, looking left then right then right again because there was a triangle one block down that way and cars came from both sides of it and merged in front of the office. For a while, there was a little farm on that triangle, and that made crossing marginally easier. I came home from college one Thanksgiving to find 3 houses blocking the long view of the furthest right angle.... but I digress. His office had crisp copies of  Children's Highlights  (or was it  High...

I never made that challah. I did, however, shine the honey server. I spent far too long rubbing gently but firmly as I heard my parents chiding me for allowing the silver to tarnish so badly.  If I'd done it regularly, I wouldn't be suffering right now.  Of course, this information came from the ghosts of people who, after polishing the decorative silver, would wrap each item in Saran Wrap before depositing it on the open display shelves of the hutch. Though I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now, I did enjoy spending time with my parental spectres.  That's the best part of these holiday - the memories. Happy Second day of Rosh HaShana to one and all. Wishing you sweetness and joy in the coming year. With love, a/b

I have apples.  I'll make a challah. I have honey from Tiburon's finest bees and a lovely glass of a fruity red wine. I won't spend the day in prayer.  I'll spend some time with memories and I'll try my hand, once again, at chicken soup.   I'll appreciate the smells and the sights and the love while I'm at the dentist and while I'm playing Mah Jongg. Perhaps, if I had family nearby, I'd go with them to sing the songs and revel in the familiarity.  But here, now, I'm happy reflecting on the year past and the year to come within the comfort of my own, personal space ***** Daddooooo always made us pose for a family photo.  This was never a pleasant experience.  We were recalcitrant and the camera took adjusting and G'ma was ready to take off her shoes but there we were, under the big tree in the backyard, being hollered at to SMILE!! Somewhere, in someone's basement or linen closet, is a box of 8mm films of those afternoons.  Perhaps...