Velvet Sacks

Four days' worth of not very much

2007-02-20T14:28:00.001-06:00

My four-day weekend is almost over. It's gone by in a flash, and I don't have too much to show for it. Here's how I've passed my time:

Saturday:

Slept late.
Finished reading Iris Johansen's Stalemate.
Babysat the granddogs, Lucy and Winston, while their mama worked in her studio in my backyard.
Washed and folded four loads of laundry.
Spent half the afternoon working through the first three lessons in a tutorial called Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0, Classroom in a Book.
Ate something so boring I can't even remember it for dinner.
Watched equally boring TV until bedtime.
Started reading James Patterson's Cross.
Oh, yeah, and read other people's blogs off and on throughout the day.

Sunday:

Slept late again.
Unloaded the dishwasher.
Read the interesting parts of the newspaper (which my daughter kindly picked up from the driveway as she came over to work again).
Babysat the granddogs again.
Read other people's blogs and thought about answering e-mail.
Dusted and vacuumed (which I'd intended to do on Saturday).
Got a phone call from my boss, telling me he was on his way home from the hospital (thank goodness).*
Showered and otherwise whipped myself into suitable shape to appear in public.
Went to the movies with my two daughters. We saw Dreamgirls, which, if you like musicals, you might enjoy as much as we did.*
Went to Outback Steakhouse for dinner after the movie. I had a horseradish-encrusted filet that was so good I can still remember the taste of every bite.*
Forgot to tape the season premiere The Amazing Race. Dadgum it!
Went to bed, read a little bit, and could not fall asleep for the life of me until after four in the morning. My legs ached (from dusting and vacuuming the entire house, standing up through a shower and primping session, and climbing stairs in the movie theater) and my brain pumped out a steady stream of thoughts and ideas that could have easily waited until morning.

Monday:

Woke up early to let the dogs out, then went back to bed.
Woke up again when my daughter called to say she was on her way over.
Let my daughter and the granddogs in, then went back to bed until a little past noon.
Read other people's blogs and considered answering e-mail.
Scanned dozens of photos my younger daughter brought over the day before. These were pictures of her biological father (my first husband) and his siblings and ancestors. I wanted to be sure these people were included in my genealogy database in case my girls ever get interested in that kind of thing. Here's my favorite photo of the whole batch:

Made a salmon loaf for supper--fast and relatively good.
Talked on the phone with next-door neighbor I haven't seen for a while.
Talked on the phone with neighbor in front of me to offer condolences after I learned (from next-door neighbor) that their little dog had died.
Felt bummed out by those two phone calls, and wasted two mindless hours watching Wife Swap and Supernanny.
Forgot to take the garbage to the curb because it didn't feel like Monday night.
Went to bed and read for an hour.
Slept eight hours of blissful, uninterrupted sleep.*

Tuesday (today, so far):

Got up at six forty-five and stayed up (pats self on back).
Watched the Today show in its entirety.
Gave Butch a long belly-rub and Kadi a full-body massage.
Read some more of my book. And some more of other people's blogs.
Cropped and labeled all the photos I scanned on Monday.
Talked to both daughters on the phone.
Ate the leftover salmon loaf.
Took ground meat out of the freezer to thaw for spaghetti sauce (which lets me put off going to the grocery store for at least one more day).
Wrote this blog entry (while watching part of Divorce Court and part of Ellen).

Before the day is over, I'll answer those e-mails, write checks to pay a few bills, wash one more load of clothes, make and eat the spaghetti, watch American Idol and take my book to bed again.

If you're still with me, you may have noticed it would be difficult to get a good blog entry out of any single item on this list, which is why I didn't even try. These last four days have been mostly uneventful, but they've also been really, really restful. I'm feeling good!

*The best parts of the whole four days.

The best part of last week...

2007-03-18T18:59:00.001-05:00

...without a doubt, was the visit by my aunt and uncle from Springfield, Missouri. What a charming pair they are! I know their age in years (thanks to my handy-dandy genealogy database), but their energy and good looks defy how old I know them to be. I feel decrepit sometimes, but these delightful folks are young!

My dad was one of nine children, and this particular uncle is his youngest brother. This photo is how I remembered him for almost 40 years, from the time I left Missouri until I saw him and his lovely wife again at a family reunion in 1996.

It means so much to me that these warm, beautiful people took the time to travel all the way here, and to my sister's home in Texas, to check on the two "little girls" who moved so far away so many years ago. It was a long way to go, especially since my aunt wasn't feeling so well.

I grew up without my father. In fact, I was almost 50 before we communicated frequently enough that I felt I knew him fairly well. Needless to say, there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge of him and his birth family.

By visiting us, my aunt and uncle have given my sister and me the gift of a piece of our father, a piece of our history, a piece of our family.

Priceless!

Living the good life

2007-05-14T17:43:00.001-05:00

This past weekend was nearly perfect. I spent most of Saturday doing genealogy research. A single clue in the 1920 U.S. Census led to a wealth of information I hadn't uncovered before. It was like finding a key to a treasure chest, opening it and finding a key to a second treasure chest, which contained a map to another buried treasure, and on and on and on. So much fun.

Mother's Day was delightful. The family got together at my younger daughter's house for boiled crawfish, lots of laughter, and much the same kind of day we had last year. The location was different, as were the gifts, but the rest of it was familiar right down to the finale of Survivor to cap off the day. In this case familiarity does not breed contempt; I could do it again today, tomorrow, and the day after that.

My kids are so thoughtful, and I'm not speaking only about their perfect choices for Mother's Day gifts or even the lawn-mowing I appreciate so much. They show they care in little ways all year long: a hard-to-reach light bulb changed, a dishwasher emptied, a newspaper brought in from the end of the driveway, a phone call fit into an extremely busy schedule. They're good people, and I'm lucky to have them.

On top of cutting the grass and trimming weeds at the end of last week, my son-in-law made time to clear away the heavy, dirt-filled pots (I killed the plants) from my patio and to fold up and put away the extra-large dog kennel that's too heavy and bulky for me to handle by myself. I enjoy sitting out there in the late afternoon, when the sun is less brutal, and he made it a nicer place to be.

The only point of concern the whole weekend was the point on top of Butch's noggin: a big goose egg showed up Saturday morning and lasted almost until bedtime. I didn't see it happen, so I'm not sure how he did it, but the location of the bump made the CSI part of me think he must have raised his head up under a table or something.

I'm glad I didn't see it happen. A hit that hard would have freaked me out, and it didn't seem to bother him much at all. When I first noticed the bump, he was in the act of using his nose to flip my hand off the computer mouse, then grabbing my wrist in his mouth to pull me where he wanted me to go (to the treat cabinet, of course). He was obviously happy and hungry, and his brain was functioning well enough to figure out how to get me to do what he wanted, so I knew it couldn't be too bad.

Weekends like this past one always make me feel very, very grateful. I hope yours was as good.

Still another Boleyn girl

2008-03-09T11:10:00.019-05:00

Blogging wasn't the first pastime to keep me tethered to the computer for hours on end. That distinction belongs to genealogy, a joyful pursuit that began in 1989 and continues to this day. I couldn't begin to estimate the hours (and dollars) I've spent tracing my ancestors and learning as much as I could about them.

Most of the people in my family history were ordinary citizens, living their lives in the best way they could, much as most of us try to do. I'm pleased to have inherited whatever common genes I share with them, and I wish I knew more about them.

Other ancestors were more prominent, so much more has been written about them, and some of them were not especially nice. If you've turned on your television set for more than an hour in the last month, you've probably seen the trailer for The Other Boleyn Girl. The "other" refers to Mary Boleyn, the lesser known sister of Anne Boleyn, whom King Henry VIII married and later caused to be beheaded. Mary was my 15th-great-grandmother, on my mother's side of the family.

Mary was a married woman (girl, more accurately) who had a long-term affair with Henry VIII before her wily sister, Anne, wormed her way into his favor. The stories of these two sisters totally dispel the notion held by some folks that Hollywood is to blame for today's "loose morals." Ha! The people in that particular royal circle thought up plenty of naughtiness all by themselves.

I wish I'd known all this stuff when I was younger. When my mother walked in and found teenage me in a passionate lip-lock with my boyfriend, it would have been really handy to be able to say, "I know this looks bad, Mother, but at least I'm not as bad as your Granny Mary or Auntie Anne." And if, as an adult, I ever made a questionable, late-night decision out of loneliness or longing (not that I'd ever admit to that), it would have been less regrettable in the morning if I'd known about Mary and Anne. I could have written off my foolishness to genetics and cut myself some slack.

Fortunately, in the generations between Mary Boleyn and myself, our gene pool has been watered down by plenty of people who were more grounded than the members of King Henry's court. Grounded is better, I think. I may never have romanced a king, but I've loved at least one royal pain in the a$$, and I suspect my experience in that regard was not dissimilar to Mary's.

When I think about Mary, I like to picture her in the latter years of her life. She married a second time, for love apparently. Because Mary married a commoner, her sister, who was queen by then, banished her and her husband from the court. According to historians, they lived the rest of their lives in relative anonymity.

If there was any part of Mary that's now a part of me, I believe she appreciated the peace and quiet.

Pride? Yes, mostly. I guess.

2008-07-27T14:51:00.012-05:00

Carmon, of Life at Star’s Rest, has tagged me for a meme, one she suggested in a comment on this blog would be “pretty easy.” I’m supposed to list six things I’m proud of.

On the surface that sounds easy: children, grandchildren, country, uh....uh...

That’s as far as I got before I realized this would be the most difficult meme I’ve ever attempted. It was Friday when I read that I’d been tagged, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since, trying to evaluate every possible answer for its truthfulness. What I discovered, to my dismay, is that listing things I’m not proud of would be an easier task. That would be a longer list, too.

Nevertheless, after much soul-searching, here is my list of six things I’m proud of (sort of):

1. I’m proud that I have an innate sense of fairness that allows me to see and understand both sides of an issue. This has been an asset in my career, when I’ve been able to help one person understand another’s point of view, and in my personal life, when I’ve been able to step back from my own opinion long enough to learn from someone else’s.

Sometimes the fairness thing annoys people. When someone makes a sweeping generalization and waits for me to respond affirmatively, I rarely do, because my mind immediately begins screaming, “Wait a minute, that’s not always true; what about this or that?” Sometimes I can keep those arguments to myself and sometimes I can’t.

Fairness is not at the top of the list of things I’m proud of, but I listed it first because it’s the thing that made this list so hard to complete. As soon as I’d think of something to be proud of, I’d think, well, that’s one way to look at it, but the flip side of it is...

You get the picture.

2. I mentioned my children and grandchildren above. Because they, and probably you by now, already know how proud I am of them, I’ll lump them together with the rest of my family for the purposes of this exercise. Family includes in-laws, too, not just the folks whose genes I share.

I’m immensely proud to be part of this large group of people. They’re bright, funny, loving and giving. They know when to have a good time and when to get serious, and they make me feel wonderful in their company. I love these people deeply.

As individuals, we’re not without our problems. My father joked once that there’d be enough anti-depressants at our family reunion to stock a pharmacy, and he may not have missed the mark by much. For the most part, we’re normal, stable, compassionate, good citizens, but we’ve all had at least brief moments of heartbreak or melancholy that knocked us for a loop

As a family, we are perfect in our imperfections. Although we’ve traveled some bumpy roads, we’ve helped each other smooth out the bumps, and there’s been plenty of love, joy and laughter along the way.

3. I’m proud to be an American, even if I haven’t always been proud of the actions and decisions of our government. The thing is, though, I expect the French are proud of France and the Brits are proud of Great Britain, and I believe they have a right to be.

When I think about America, what I feel more than pride is great good fortune. How lucky am I to have been born in a land of such abundance and opportunity? By an accident of birth, I hit the geographic lottery.

Once again, in the interest of fairness, I realize that there are pockets of poverty and misfortune right here in the good ol’ US of A. I guess I’m most proud of America when I see our citizens working together to take care of the least among us.

4. I’m proud to be a good listener, I’m proud that I can keep a confidence, and I’m proud that I mind my own business. Most of the time. I’ve bundled these three qualities together because they often become important at the same time, in the same situation.

I can listen empathetically for long stretches of time without feeling the need to interrupt and turn the conversation back to what I’d prefer to talk about. I’m proud of this because there have been times in my life when being able to talk to a good listener has lifted my own spirits, and it makes me feel good to do that for others. Unfortunately, I’ve learned that my personal store of empathy and compassion is finite. If I hear someone complain about the same things over and over and over again, I not only cease listening, I may even begin to hide from that person. I’m not proud of that, but it helps me maintain my sanity.

When, while listening, I’m asked to keep a confidence, I do exactly that. Almost always and almost always forever. The exception to that rule occurs rarely, only if someone drops a bombshell that explodes into my own life. In that case I reserve the right to seek out my own good listener, one who can also keep a confidence, to help me think things through.

I mind my own business, and usually I’m proud of that. If you tell me A, B and C, I’ll assume that's all you want to say and that if you want me to know X, Y and Z, you’ll tell me in your own good time. Till then, I won’t pry. Unfortunately, I’ve learned that a lot of people aren’t straightforward about asking for help when they need it, and I, in the course of minding my own business, have missed some vital hints. Sometimes everyone would have been better off if I had asked a couple of probing questions.

5. I’m proud that I’ve had some long-term jobs, one for seventeen years and the current one (in one variation or another) for nearly ten. It pleases me to know that I stayed the course through various assignments and various supervisors, remaining flexible enough to handle changes and performing consistently to meet the expectations of those who depended on me.

There was one period of time when I defined myself almost entirely on the basis of what I accomplished at work. It is with great pride that I can tell you how good it feels to have gotten over that nonsense.

6. The last item on this list is one that almost didn’t occur to me, but I’m glad I remembered in time to include it. A few months short of twenty years ago, I began researching my family’s history. I’m proud of this ongoing body of work and of the patience and persistence that have kept me following first one thread, then another, through a vast maze of documents.

This has been a labor of love. It may appear to others to be nothing but thousands of names and dates sprinkled with an occasional relevant fact or legend, but I saw in each name an individual human being whose own life gave meaning to my own. Genealogy awakened in me an interest in history and geography, two subjects I found boring in school. Typing each new name into my database, I’ve imagined what life was like for that person in that particular place and time. In thinking about them, I’ve become fond of all of them.

Most of my family members are too busy living in the moment to spend time wondering about people they’ve never known, and that's as it should be. But I'm ready. If the genealogy bug ever bites one of them the way it sneaked up and bit me, I’ll proudly help scratch the itch.

----------

I've probably overthought this challenge way too much, but that's my six.

I'll tag Alison, for whom I could list six things to be proud of in about a minute; Betty, who has a knack for wrapping up life's experiences in articulate tidy bundles; and Yajeev, who's always on the lookout for blog ideas and whose list will probably be as funny as it is inspirational.

It's harder than it used to be

2010-01-05T19:01:00.007-06:00

Blogging, that is. And dealing with changes, too.

My retirement gift to myself was a new computer. Having nearly pulled my hair out over repeated virus problems at home and at work, I took my daughter Kim's advice and bought an iMac. I'm very satisfied with the computer itself, but what I failed to realize was that some of my favorite software isn't available for Mac systems.

I like to write my blog posts in a word-processing program (where editing is easier) and transfer them to Blogger for posting. There used to be a version of WordPerfect (my old favorite word-processing standby) for Mac, but there isn't anymore. When I bought the new computer, I had to decide between Pages and Microsoft Word. I knew I wasn't nuts about Word, so I chose the less expensive Pages. So far I've been able to do everything I've needed in Pages, but it's always taken longer than it would have in WordPerfect. (Maybe I need to read that manual I bought instead of relying on the trial-and-error method.)

Also, the little keyboard that comes with iMac, streamlined and quiet as it is, isn't as comfortable for me as an older style keyboard. The keys are full-sized on the new keyboard, but they're closer together, too. The problems were worse because the arthritis in my right hand has increased during the last year. When I hold my hand flat and try to put my fingers together, there's a distinct "V" space between my middle finger and ring finger from the fingertips to the second joint. That made it very easy to type a semi-colon instead of an "l" on the closely spaced keys. For example, if I'd had the holiday spirit, I might have typed: "Deck the ha;;s with boughs of ho;;y; fa ;a ;a ;a ;a ;a ;a ;a ;a!" Fortunately, Kim came up with a spare, older-model keyboard that has made it much easier to keep my fingers where they're supposed to be.

Today I decided to do a little blog housekeeping and clean up the sidebar. Much to my surprise, somebody apparently broke Blogger while I was gone. The "drag and drop" page elements neither drag nor drop. I was able to edit existing elements, but I couldn't add anything to the sidebar, and I couldn't move anything from one spot to the other.

Have you experienced this problem, too? Do you know of other things that have changed about Blogger in the last year? Any good new features I might enjoy? Or bad things I may not have discovered yet?

Any tips will be appreciated.

Talk Radio Haiku

2008-04-26T17:21:00.009-05:00

Ranting, radical,
muckraking windbag spewing
hate for a living.

Did you know?

2008-04-27T20:48:00.004-05:00

In the past few days I learned two new things, and I wish I'd paid more attention so I could give credit to the sources of this newfound knowledge.

While surfing the Net this afternoon, I ran across a computer tip on someone's blog: If you hold down the ctrl key while you roll the little wheel on the mouse back and forth, you can make the text larger or smaller. Try it. Isn't that cool? (Some of you probably already knew this, but it was news to me.)

On some show on the Animal Planet channel, I learned that veterinarians now say that the old way of calculating a dog's age (one year in a dog's life equals seven in a human's) is inaccurate. The new way, they say, is to count the first two years of a dog's life as 25 human years, then add four years for each actual year after that. Under the old calculations, 10-year-old Butch would now be the equivalent of a 70-year-old human. But with the new math, he's only 57. That's much better.

Hmm. Now that I've checked the dog-age fact on the Internet, I'm finding that everyone seems to agree that the old method is obsolete, but opinions vary slightly on the numbers to use for the new method. At any rate, I've just this minute discovered a very handy chart in case I forget from day to day how old my dogs are.

Whatever. Class dismissed.

Paper dolls from different sets

2008-04-30T18:43:00.007-05:00

Women of a certain age probably remember playing with paper dolls when they were children, but I'm guessing that most of my (two or three) male readers never had that experience. For the men's benefit, I'll explain:

Paper dolls usually came (do they still?) in a booklet that included two or three human figures to be punched out of cardboard, plus several pages of paper clothing to be cut out with scissors and hung by folded tabs from the shoulders of the cardboard people. All the dolls in a particular booklet would have similarly painted features and be of approximately the same size. It was easy to believe they were friends or family members.

I loved paper dolls when I was a kid, and I owned several sets of them. The problem was that the sets weren't interchangeable. Even though I had lots of paper dolls, I could never pretend to host a large gathering, because the people from different sets didn't go together. For example, there might have been a set of little-girl dolls who were ten inches tall and proportionately wide, and the adult glamour girls in another set might have been only eight inches tall. There was no way to pretend the glamour girls were the mothers of the little-girl paper dolls. I had a good imagination, but not that good.

I've been thinking about this because sometimes I see real people with other real people who look like they belong to different sets. Do you know what I mean?

For example, if I see a very tall, skinny woman walking with a really short, round man, I think, ah, different sets. Or if I see a well-groomed, professionally manicured woman wearing a business suit, I'd never guess that the guy across the room wearing overalls is her husband. In my mind, her husband would be wearing a coat and tie. Hip-hop artists and country singers don't seem to me like they go together, and yet there they are, at the Grammy awards, all getting along.

The good news is that even as I notice the differences in people, even as my paper-doll-influenced mind sorts and categorizes them into sets, I've outgrown the idea that the sets shouldn't mingle. As an adult, I've learned that a gathering of people "from different sets" can be much more interesting than a group of people who are all just alike. It's diversity, it's a good thing, and I'm glad to see most of the world making progress in that direction.

Although, to be honest, I'd still have a hard time putting those eight-inch glamour girls with the ten-inch giant children.

Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin

2008-05-07T18:56:00.007-05:00

There’s a mole on my chin. Not the dark, beauty-mark kind of mole, but a flesh-colored bump that’s been there for as long as I can remember. I’m so used to it I can look in the mirror to put on makeup and never even see it.

And yet it drives me crazy.

I don’t remember when it happened, but at some point a few years back, little hairs began to sprout from that mole. Although my feminine ego demands the use of the word “hairs,” “whiskers” would probably be more accurate: They’re as stiff as broom straws.

I’m vigilant about removing each hair as soon as I find it, but the mole is big enough that two or three hairs can grow on it at the same time. And they grow fast. I pluck one out and another one pops up a millimeter away. It’s like playing Whac-A-Mole, only with tweezers.

Plucking those little bristles isn’t easy. It’s hard to get a good grip on them. Even when I do, they do not turn loose willingly.

I hate those hairs. I hate them so much that in my mind each one of them has its own malicious personality. When I catch one in my tweezers, I imagine it as a tiny creature burrowed deep inside a pore, it’s arms and legs stretched out across the doorway, hanging on with all its might while I pull on its ugly head.

Ha! Got the little bastard.

Expectations

2008-05-10T14:27:00.008-05:00

All over the Internet this weekend there will be tributes to mothers, and this will be one of them. This one will be a little different, I suspect. This one is about a mother-daughter relationship that was troubled for more than fifty years. If that last sentence resonates with you, then this post may offer you hope.

From the time I was a small, small girl, I knew my mother was more beautiful than any other mothers I knew. Her beauty set her apart, made her special in my eyes, like the princesses in the fairy tales I read. More than anything, I wanted to please her. And for more than fifty years, I believed I fell short.

Mother had been athletic in her youth, and I was a bookworm. She had been the life of the party, and I was happier playing quietly by myself or with just one friend. She was neat, and I was messy. We were different in too many ways to count.

Mother sewed beautifully. She kept my sister and me in pretty dresses and spent hours with pin curls and perms, trying to manage my straight, fine hair. Somehow I got the idea that I wasn’t pretty enough to suit her, that she did these things so I wouldn’t embarrass her in front of her friends.

In contrast to my sweet-natured grandmother, who seemed pleased to have me around, Mother's no-nonsense approach seemed harsh. She was quick to scold and quick to set me straight when I got too full of myself. She took care of me, so I knew she loved me on some level, but I didn't think she liked me very much.

When I was 14, Mother married a man she’d known for only three weeks. She uprooted us from our grandparents’ home in Missouri and moved us to Texas, and I was angrier with her than I’d ever known it was possible to be. Neither of us knew at the time that 14 is a particularly nasty age under the best of circumstances, and we didn’t have much nice to say to each other for the next four years. I had a bad attitude, and Mother had a tongue that could slice a person in two with a couple of well-placed words. We were angry with each other more often than not, and we were both too stubborn to consider the other person's point of view.

At 18, when I got a marriage proposal, I jumped on it. I told Mother I was getting married in a week and moving away, and I was hurt at her eagerness to make wedding arrangements. I had hoped she'd try to talk me out of it. In hindsight, I realize that it must have seemed an answer to her prayers. With two more teenage girls and a three-year-old boy in the house, she needed the extra room. I married and left home with the clothes from my closet, a suitcase full of hurt and anger, and a desperate need to be loved. My expectations were unrealistic, and the marriage was a disaster.

Two kids and seven years later, I married a second time, this time to a man whose career kept us moving across the country. This marriage was better, certainly more peaceful, and I learned more about love and trust than I'd ever known before.

As I traveled around the country with my family in those years, I kept in touch with my mother. We were bonded by our relationship, but we weren’t close. Our letters to each other were chatty, exchanging news but never sharing feelings. I loved Mother, but I felt less vulnerable by keeping her at a distance.

In the late ‘70s, my husband and I moved our family closer than we’d been before to the town where my mother lived. Only three hours away, we could visit more frequently. Those visits were good because I could spend time with my family, but I could still get home in just a few hours if feelings got too intense. I listened more than I talked on those visits, and sometimes, on the drive home, I’d think about the fact that Mother didn’t know one thing more about me at the end of the visit than she did at the beginning. I wondered if she realized that.

My second marriage ended in the early ‘80s, then both my children grew up and left home. I began to focus on my career. I loved my job and excelled at it. I took continuing education courses, attended seminars, and buried myself in self-help books, trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted out of life. I had relationships with a series of men and learned something from each of them. I began to grow into my own skin. Somewhere along the way, I realized that it’s okay to be imperfect, that, all things considered, I’d turned out okay.

Once I began to cut myself some slack, I found I was able to do the same for others. My job at that time included traveling a couple of times each month, trips that would take me through my mother’s town. I’d leave after work, spend the night with Mother, and complete the trip early the next morning. We supplemented these visits with weekly long-distance phone calls, and we began to really know each other. The more comfortable I became with the woman I’d grown up to be, the more comfortable I became with Mother. My walls began to crumble, and my stifled anger began to dissipate.

One thing I wanted more than anything was to hear Mother say, “I love you.” She could write it, but she couldn’t say the words out loud. She couldn’t even say, when prompted, “I love you, too.” I was in my fifties by the time I figured out that she did love me, even if she didn’t always show it in the usual ways, and I was in my mid- to late-fifties when I heard her say the words for the first time. It was a moment that affected me profoundly. We hugged afterwards, but neither of us mentioned the significance of the moment.

My stepfather (the man who’d moved us to Texas) died in 1996. He and Mother had been married 39 years at that time, in stark contradiction to what 14-year-old me had seen as an impulsive action with no thought on Mother’s part as to the consequences. Mother had never lived alone, and she seemed lost in some ways after Daddy died. Ironically, it was when she was lost that I finally found her.

For the first time in our lives, Mother and I had hours alone on our visits. We set the mother and daughter roles aside and talked with each other as one woman to another. I learned about her early life and the dreams and expectations she’d had as a young woman. I learned how her dreams had been shattered, her trust broken, and how she’d resolved to protect her own daughters from the disappointments and disillusionments that had made her cynical and bitter. As Mother talked about different periods of her life, I remembered incidents from those same periods and re-evaluated them in the context of what Mother had been experiencing at the time. Like an old-western hanging judge, I'd made decisions about her without hearing all the evidence.

For example, Mother had always discouraged me from having any big ideas. She valued practicality, and whenever I’d come close to "flying," she'd verbally clip my wings to keep me earthbound. Until I got to know her better, I’d always felt she was being spiteful when she damped my enthusiasm. It had never occurred to me she’d done it to protect me, to keep me from falling too far and too hard. She never explained this to me, but I figured it out from listening to her talk about her own life, her own hopes and fears. I still think her cautious approach was a mistake, but understanding it changed my way of thinking about it.

Mother learned more about me, too, during the talks we had in her last years. She had apparently assumed that my dreams were the same as hers, and that to find myself in middle age without a man in my life must be terribly disappointing. She wanted that for me, to keep me safe. Through our talks, she grew to understand that I’m contented on my own and don't feel incomplete because I don't have a mate. Her acceptance of that fact put a stop to the inquiries about the state of my love life, questions that I'd perceived as veiled criticisms.

The trouble in my relationship with my mother had been born of expectations, the expectations each of us had for ourselves and for each other. I feel so stupid sometimes that it took me so long to drop my expectations of what a mother “should be” and accept her and love her for who she was. We wasted so much time.

I’m forever grateful for our last few years together. I learned to love Mother with an open heart, imperfect as she was and as I am, to know her as the fun person her friends knew and the caring person she was with her youngest grandchildren. I’m thankful that we had the time to untangle the misunderstandings we’d had without the necessity of rehashing them. She's gone from this planet, but I’m happy that I feel her spirit with me as often as I do. It's hard to explain to people that I feel closer to Mother now than I did for many years while she was alive.

Every year, on Mother’s Day, I used to struggle with finding the right card. The messages on most of them included words like “sweet” and “kind” and “thoughtful,” and those words seemed insincere. I wanted a card that dispensed with syrupy sentiment and said some clear version of “Happy Mother’s Day, I hope you know I love you.” If you find yourself looking for that same kind of card, then this post has been written with you in mind. Here's some unsolicited advice:

Set reasonable expectations for yourself and use those as your guidelines for how you live your life. Sometimes we give our mothers (and their words) more power over us than they should have: more power than our mothers know they have and, in fact, more power than they want. So don’t worry so much about whether or not you meet your mother's expectations.

If you want your relationship with your mother to be better, focus instead on the expectations you have for her. Ask yourself if they’re fair. I know there’s a wide range of mothers, from the worst to the best, and I don’t know which kind you have. But is there any chance you’ve set your expectations too high? Would your relationship improve if you could take a step back and measure your mother on the same scale you use to measure your friends? Can you take a look at the whole woman your mother is, not just the part of her that’s all tangled up with you?

All I ask is that you think about it. Don’t waste as much time as I did. Someone has to take the first step, and if somehow you turned out to be the one who's better emotionally equipped to do it, then it might as well be you. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there who know they've made mistakes and to all the nearly perfect ones who have set the bar so high for the rest of us. I hope our children know that all of us are doing the best we can.

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To my own mom: I appreciate you, I miss you, and I’ll love you always. I know you know I can feel you with me, and I know you know it delights me. Happy Mother’s Day.

In the flesh...

2008-05-15T20:00:00.002-05:00

...of one home-grown tomato, I found the summers of my childhood.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a real tomato, not the grainy kind the supermarket sells, but the plump, juice-filled variety that my grandfather used to grow. When I saw a few of them sitting on the counter at the little corner store, I had to have one.

The first bite brought with it the taste of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and fresh corn on the cob, all washed down with a tall glass of sweetened iced tea. My favorite part of that meal used to be the very end of it, when the juice from the sliced tomatoes mingled with the butter left behind by the corn. I’d stall until everyone else had left the table, then I’d pick up my plate and drink every last drop of that salty juice.

The second bite opened a mental window that looked out onto the backyard of the home where I grew up. On the left was Packy’s garden, the corn growing taller than he was, almost obscuring him in his khaki clothing as he leaned over to pluck a fat worm from a tomato plant and plop it into the hand of my fearless little sister.

A grapevine covered the low fence that ran down the middle of the backyard. The purple grapes made my mouth itch, but I ate my fill. My grandmother harvested the rest of the grapes and turned them into jellies, jams, and quart jars of grapejuice.

At the front end of the grapevine fence, the end nearest the back porch, my grandmother grew morning glories, hydrangeas, marigolds and pansies. Along the length of the grapevine, she grew lilies, sunflowers, and spiky gladiolus. The sweet perfume of the flowers drifted to the far side of the yard and caressed the laundry that hung on the clothesline every Monday the weather permitted.

One bite of a tomato took me home.

The bookkeeper

2008-05-12T18:03:00.003-05:00

The title of this post refers to me, but it has nothing at all to do with numbers. Rather, it refers to my tendency to keep books around just because they're, well, books. They don't have to be particularly good books, but if there are pages bound between two covers, I have the dickens of a time getting rid of them.

I just counted fourteen sets of bookshelves in my den. They're all packed with books, and there are tall stacks of books sitting on top of the shelves and on top of my desk. These are all books that I've already read, some of them more than once and some of them that I don't remember at all.

Of course, I want to keep all the really good books to read again someday. And if I remember a book because of how much I didn't like it, I won't have a problem giving it away. My biggest concern is the books I've forgotten. I suppose I could reread them. They'd be new to me, at least in the beginning, but if they were forgettable the first time around, do I want to invest the time in them again? And how many pages of those forgettable books will I need to reread before I can make up my mind what to do with them?

I've taken the first step, which was getting some sturdy boxes to hold the books I plan to give away. I thought I'd sort the books into the boxes by genre, but once they're boxed up, I'm not sure what to do with them. Should I put the boxes on the front lawn with a sign that reads "free to a good home"? Does Goodwill take books? Any ideas, anybody?

Six random things about me TODAY

2008-05-18T17:27:00.006-05:00

Three days ago, Alison tagged me with a meme. I'm supposed to list six random things about me today, so that's what I'll do. Unfortunately for you, dear readers, my answers would have been more interesting on the intervening three days, but on those days I didn't find time to post.

Here goes:

1. For breakfast today I had buttered toast with homemade blackberry jelly, a gift from a former client. It was delicious! I've never made jelly in my life, and I've always admired those who do it.

2. I stayed in my bathrobe until after noon, which kept me from walking out to the road to pick up the Sunday newspaper. By the time I got dressed, I found the paper right outside my door. Cool! (I suspect it was put there by my son-in-law, who came over to cut the lawn. Thanks, Troy, on both counts.)

3. The best part of my morning was the time spent snuggling on the sofa with Butch. He slept with his head on my lap for nearly two hours, during which I channel-surfed and watched some really boring TV rather than take a chance on disturbing him. Snuggle time with him is too precious.

4. I filled up my gas tank today, paying more than I've ever paid in my life to do it ($3.79/gallon). That, I'm sure, is an experience I share with many of you, and I find it appalling.

5. While I was out, I picked up a 12-pak of Diet Coke, went to Sonic to pick up lunch, then went to Hot Wok to get egg foo yung for supper. There'll be enough leftover egg foo yung to eat for lunch tomorrow. I chose to go to these particular places because I could go there without having to do my hair and makeup first, sometehing I'd have felt compelled to do before the supermarket shopping trip I really needed to make. Now I'm good to go until tomorrow night. Draw your own conclusions about the logic I used to justify these errands.

6. I'll cry tonight, just like I do every Sunday night when I watch "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." I'm a sucker for a sentimental story with a happy ending.

I won't tag anyone, but if you feel inspired to post six things about your day (especially if yours was more interesting than mine), by all means leave a comment to let us know when you've posted.

Yawn. (Kadi just read this.)

Two key principles

2008-05-20T19:34:00.015-05:00

Principle No. 1:
Keep track of ‘em. Your keys, that is.

Principle No. 2:
Keep spare keys in safe places in case you screw up on Principle No. 1.

Yesterday, when the clock struck quittin’ time, I turned off my computer, rolled my wheeled office chair a couple of feet to push the buttons that locked the file cabinets, rolled back to pick up my purse, and reached inside it for my keys. They weren’t where they were supposed to be.

I took everything out of that part of my purse to see for myself. I needed my eyes to convince my brain that my empty fingers weren’t lying. “Wait!” I yelled to two co-workers who were still in the building. “Don’t leave me,” I pleaded. “I can’t find my keys.” If I hadn't caught them before they left, I couldn’t have locked up the building to go home.

My missing key chain held my car key, a remote keyless entry/alarm fob, my house key, my gate key, and keys to the front and back doors of the office. It also held a tiny file cabinet key that opens the file drawers I’d just locked.

I went through my purse again, section by section, carefully but quickly. I pinched all around the lining in case the (big wad of) keys had somehow slipped through an undiscovered open seam. I shook the purse to listen for the jingle of the keys. Nothing there.

My co-workers helped me look all over my desk, in the desk drawers, in the wastebasket and file box under the desk, and all around the floor. I took practically everything out of my purse again. As we searched, I began mentally backtracking to the last time I’d used the keys. It was after lunch, I recalled. I’d unlocked a file cabinet to put something in it. When I thought about it, I remembered having trouble getting the documents to fit properly in the file. In fact, I’d had to use both hands. Had I possibly laid the keys in the file drawer so both hands would be free? I couldn’t say. I was pretty sure of one thing: the only key to that fireproof, tamper-proof file cabinet was on my key chain.

After about ten minutes of searching, we gave up. One co-worker lent me her key to the front door, and the other stayed with me while I verged on panic. Fortunately, I found a spare car key I didn't know I had in a zipped pocket in my purse. Even more fortunately, and unlike the keyless entry system that came with my last car, this car key overrode the alarm system, let me turn the engine on, and didn’t lock up the steering mechanism. Once we confirmed that, I knew I could at least get home.

Home. How would I get in the house? My co-worker waited while I went back in the office and called my daughter. My daughter has a key to my house, she lives five minutes away, and she was home, thank goodness. My co-worker locked the building, I drove home, and my daughter was here waiting for me with the door wide open. Whew! Welcome home.

Once inside my house, I made a beeline to the place where I was pretty sure I had stashed some keys. I found an extra house key and an extra gate key, plus the spare keyless entry fob for my car. As far as office keys were concerned, I figured I’d call a locksmith first thing this morning to make new keys for the office doors and to drill out and replace the locks on the file cabinets. Since it was my fault, I expected to pay for the locksmith. It would be an expensive mistake, but at least I had a plan.

Plan or not, I couldn’t relax. I tried to watch TV, but some nebulous thought kept niggling at the back of my mind. The more I thought about it, I remembered that another co-worker, one who had left for a different job more than four years ago, used to have a key to those file cabinets. What happened to her key? A little more time passed, and it popped into my mind that I'd found a bunch of keys in a desk drawer when we moved offices last year. What had I done with them? Another twenty minutes went by while I tried to recreate the logic I would have used in determining where to put all those keys. Finally, I thought I knew where they might be. The only question remaining was whether or not there was a file cabinet key among them.

I knew I should just hold that thought until morning. I knew it would be foolish to drive back to the office last night to satisfy my curiosity. Wasteful, too, considering the present price of gasoline. It would be a totally unnecessary errand and would have no effect whatsoever on the outcome.

I did it anyway. I drove back to the office, located the batch of extra keys, dug among them and found a file cabinet key, tried the lock, and it popped right open. Bingo! I pulled a drawer open, and there was my key chain, right where I'd never intended to leave it. I could have kissed it.

Some days we get lucky. Most days, in my experience, we’re better off to have a backup plan.

Scraps

2008-05-28T21:07:00.006-05:00

For the past few days I've been hard-pressed to think of a single subject that's blogworthy, so tonight I'll feed you scraps: the literary equivalent of a casserole thrown together from the contents of a nearly bare pantry.

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Today I saw a red-tailed hawk sitting on the ground of a residential corner lot. His head swiveled as he watched me drive around the corner, but he didn't seem too concerned about the presence of an interloper. I couldn't see for sure, but I suspect he was having lunch. It was that time of day.

*********

Still on the subject of wildlife, I found a dried frog carcass flattened in the driveway yesterday. It was so flat I thought it might be funny to post a picture of it with a silly caption, so I snapped a couple of shots. On the driveway the frog isn't that visible. It almost blends in with the rough concrete beneath it. On my computer monitor, however, the close-up photo tells a different story. One skinny front leg is twisted at an unnatural angle, and there's nothing at all funny about it.

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For Mother's Day, my younger daughter gave me a digital picture frame. This past weekend I finally had time to sit down and figure out how to load it with some favorite photos. It's really nice to be able to glance over and see a slideshow starring the people and pets that make my life feel so rich. (No frog pictures included.)

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My grandson is presently on his senior trip to Mexico. A few days after his graduation ceremony, I got a thank-you note that said, in part, "Thank you very much for the money...It will come in very handy for college (cough cough Cancun)." I love that ~~boy~~ young man.

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Butch is lying on the floor beside me right now, sound asleep. His tail just gave a couple of big wags, so I guess he's having a happy dream. I always wonder if he's sightless in his dreams or if he sees things the way he used to.

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I'll bet there isn't one among you who doesn't clearly know the difference between withdrawal and surrender. I wish somebody would explain it to John McCain.

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"Dancing with the Stars" is over, so I'm getting my dance fix now with hours and hours of audition shows on "So You Think You Can Dance." It must feel really great to be able to move your body like that. I was always the one in Jazzercise class who kicked to the left when everybody else kicked to the right.

*********

On a grocery shopping trip yesterday I wanted to buy potato chips to eat with my lunchtime sandwiches next week, but they only had extra-large bags. It seemed wasteful to buy that many potato chips. But then I saw the "buy one, get one free" sign, and who could refuse a deal like that? I bought two bags, and today I gave one bag away. Which leaves me with one huge bag containing more chips than I want or need, so it's still wasteful, isn't it?

*********

As much as I hate shopping, it feels good to have the pantry and refrigerator full again. My house is relatively clean, too. I was feeling kind of good about all that, but now I'm getting nervous. I've never met Holly's mother, and I just read online that a clean house and food in the fridge mean she's coming to visit. Holy crap! Now I need to clear off the dining table and steam clean the rugs.

Welcome distractions

2008-06-01T20:43:00.005-05:00

I've spent most of the weekend watching TV (the Democratic Party delegate debate), reading (a new Harlan Coben mystery), catching up on writing book reviews (boy, was I behind), and playing with all the dogs (the granddogs spent Friday and Saturday nights with us). Now it's Sunday night and I'm doing last-minute laundry that I could have done Friday night.

I'm trying to keep my mind preoccupied with trivial stuff so I won't worry about my best boy, Butch. We visited the vet again Saturday morning, following up after he completed four weeks of antibiotics to treat his anal sac infection. The infection seems to have cleared up, and Butch doesn't have his head up under his tail nearly so often, so I know he's more comfortable than he was. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the vet says there's a mass in his rectal area that seems to involve more than swollen anal sacs. She thinks he has a tumor. She actually said the "C-word." I'll take him in Tuesday for a biopsy, which means putting him under anesthesia again. Considering the problems he had last time, that's a scary enough concept without even thinking about the possible results of the biopsy.

So, I won't let myself think about it yet. At least not much. He's in good spirits and doesn't seem to be in any pain, and I owe it to him to keep my attitude as positive as his is.

I'll keep you posted.

And now we wait

2008-06-03T20:19:00.003-05:00

It'll be sometime next week before we have the results of the biopsy, but Butch is home.

Much to everybody's relief, he had no problems during anesthesia this time. He is showing some of the same behaviors that scared me so much after his last bout of anesthesia -- whining with every exhaled breath, pacing, bumping into things -- but it doesn't frighten me as much this time around.

I can tell that the biggest problem we're going to have in the next few days is to keep him from "chewing" on his freshly shaved behind and possibly pulling out stitches. I just fussed at him twice to make him stop it. After the second time, he climbed off the futon and went into the living room. I followed him in there and found him -- no surprise -- with his head up under his tail.

So, since Butch can't be trusted, I won't write as much as I intended to tonight. I'll post again as soon as I don't have to police him. In the meantime, please know how much I appreciate your concern and your prayers.

Try, try again

2008-06-06T20:14:00.008-05:00

Tuesday night Butch whined, paced and chewed at his behind until almost six in the morning. I don’t know if he slept at all, and I personally slept for about an hour, if you add all the five-minute sleep intervals together.

By the time the sun came up Wednesday morning, my brain was so fried that I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew I couldn’t leave Butch alone to inflict certain damage on his new stitches, and I was so exhausted I felt sick, but there were things I had to do at the office. I managed an inadequate sponge-bath and five minutes with a curling iron, then puzzled what to do about Butch. He’d stopped whining. He’d had food and water and had successfully completed his business outside, which was very good news under the circumstances. I made a split-second decision, put the leash on him and took him with me to work.

In the nearly three years since Butch’s eye surgery, this was the first time he’d been anywhere other than his own house, his own yard, or the animal hospital. He hesitated just inside the door to the office, then relaxed when friendly hands and voices welcomed him. I led him down the hall to my desk, spread a clean sheet on the floor, and encouraged him to lie down. He remained alert, wagging his tail and straining at the leash to get better acquainted with new people, then finally calmed down and napped on the sheet.

As soon as the crucial jobs were done, I took the rest of the day off. Butch and I went home, where I thought we'd go to sleep immediately. We didn’t. He licked and chewed, and I made him stop. Over and over and over.

In your comments to my last post, several of you asked about the possibility of putting one of those cone-shaped Elizabethan collars on Butch. If I hadn’t been too tired to respond, I’d have told you about the time when he’d had the cruciate ligaments repaired in both knees. The vet put an E-collar on him then, but removed it minutes later out of concern that Butch’s leaping and bucking would further damage his injured legs. And then I’d have told you that a different vet had tried an E-collar after Butch’s eye surgery, removing it almost immediately in fear that Butch’s blindly violent twists and turns would cause him additional harm. In my mind, the E-collar wouldn’t work this time, either, but you made me think about it.

By Wednesday night I could have slept through a tornado, and I think Butch must have been in the same shape. I only recall telling him to stop chewing a few times during that night, and we got all the way out of bed only twice.

On Thursday morning I was relieved that Butch’s bottom didn’t look too bad, and I thought maybe the urge to chew the stitches had passed. I cut the tail off an old, soft T-shirt and fashioned a diaper I thought might keep him away from the stitches. Then I left for work and worried about him all morning long. By the time I got home at lunchtime, Butch had managed to chew the stitches enough that blood and other gunk was dripping down his backside, and I wasn’t sure if he’d done serious damage or not. I cleaned him up, patched him as well as I could, and made a better diaper, this one out of an old pillow case, with an elastic belt looped through slots I'd cut in it. Then I went back to work just long enough to request emergency vacation time.

Back we went to the vet. Remarkably, Butch hadn’t done permanent damage. Aside from all the licking and chewing, the vet said, he appeared to be healing nicely. She added a second antibiotic to his daily medications, plus an ointment to apply to his stitches twice a day. Then I asked if we could try the E-collar again. I told her everything I just told you about his prior experiences with it, but I was getting desperate. I told her he might just have to suck it up and deal with it this time.

A vet tech left the room for a few minutes and came back with an E-collar. They fastened it around Butch’s neck and we waited for the explosion. He shook his head gently a couple of times. He scooted backwards to try to get away from it. And that was it. There was no more drama. He had a hard time navigating with that big thing on his head -- a harder time than a sighted dog would have had -- but he kept his dignity and managed the best he could.

He’s worn the collar almost constantly since then, and he’s bumped into a lot of things. At first he had a problem of over-correction. If he bumped something to his right, he’d turn 180 degrees to his left and crash into something on that side, but he’s beginning to get the hang of it. Because his nose serves as his eyes, he’s used to walking with his nose just inches from the floor. He can’t do that now without the bottom of the collar dragging against the floor. Instead, he’s learned to walk a few steps with his head held high, then flip it way forward to plop the whole circumference of the circular collar against the floor while he takes a good whiff. He’s figured out how to back out slowly when the collar has prevented him from turning around in tight spots. He seems to have accepted the fact that he can't scratch his behind, or his ears for that matter, and to live with that reality.

This afternoon, not quite brave enough to leap up onto the sofa while wearing the new collar, Butch summoned up the courage to climb up cautiously. Once there, he snuggled up against me and laid his head with its big silly "hat" on my chest. He’s learned that most of the pleasures of life are still available to him, and I’ve learned it’s not so bad to watch television through a semi-transparent plastic cone.

Considering everything Butch has had to deal with in his ten years, I suppose he's grown to understand that a big lampshade attached to his head is no big deal.

The ravages of nature

2008-06-08T17:44:00.016-05:00

The granddogs, Lucy and Winston, were with us from Thursday night until a couple of hours ago, which meant more frequent trips to the backyard over the past few days. Around noon yesterday, when I opened the back door to let all the dogs back inside, I noticed an injured green lizard just a couple of feet from the door. I started to move it, but the dogs whizzed past me so fast I just ignored the lizard and shut the door. I thought maybe a bird would get it if I was lucky.

The next time I let the dogs out, the lizard was still there, and it was covered with hundreds of fire ants. My goal quickly changed from moving the lizard to keeping the dogs out of the moving, lizard-shaped mass of ants. If you've never been bitten by fire ants, you wouldn't believe how painful the bites are.

We made a couple more trips outside before bedtime, and each time I glanced warily at the lizard. The ants were still working on it when I locked the door for the last time, but their numbers seemed to be dwindling.

This morning, first thing, I stepped outside with the pups and found this (click the picture to get a better look if you aren't squeamish):

It was so hot at seven o'clock this morning that I only got this one shot of the lizard's skeleton before my camera lens fogged up. While I wiped the condensation off the lens with the hem of my bathrobe, dainty little Lucy spotted the string of tiny bones and had herself a pre-breakfast snack. (No kisses for Lucy today.)

I'd made the appropriate grossed-out noises and headed back to the door when something else caught my eye:

This furry creature was about two inches long. It was on the concrete just under the patio table. We get furry caterpillars here sometimes, but I've never seen anything like this, so I waited and watched for a minute. It didn't move. I touched it with the toe of my slip-on shoe (afraid that the shoe would slip off), and the thing still didn't move. I bent down to get a closer look. The more I looked at it, the more horrified I became. It looked like a piece of Winston's foot.

Just in time to prevent a total freak-out, Winston came running up to the door. I inspected him quickly, breathed a sigh of relief that I wouldn't have to explain something terrible to his mother, and went back to checking out the furry thing under the table.

I nudged it with my foot once more, then kicked it all the way over to look at its underbelly. Hmm. The underbelly was a swatch of fabric, with visible stitches. That's when I remembered seeing a ravaged stuffed animal lying just inside the door. A stuffed animal, further investigation revealed, that now had only one ear.

This was entirely too much raw nature for a city girl to handle so early in the morning.

It's NOT cancer!

2008-06-12T22:04:00.004-05:00

Hallelujah! Butch's biopsy came back clean, no cancer cells at all.

When I first posted about the biopsy, nan16 commented: "I have heard that sometimes when there have been numerous infections, scar tissue eventually builds up and it looks and feels like a tumor, much like an abscess can calcify around it after a long time." She was right on the money.

Butch has had repeated infections since October, and the speculation is that there was an anal-sac rupture that kept the area infected with bacteria. For now, he's on another four-week round of antibiotics, and then we'll see.

The vet said she doesn't think surgery is an option in the near future because the tissue in the affected area is too fragile. I wonder, though, if an anal sac ruptured, won't it keep on causing infections one right after another? We go back next Tuesday to get Butch's stitches out, so I'll ask more questions then.

Thank you all so much for worrying right along with us. Your support made it a lot easier to keep a positive outlook while we waited for news.

Timothy John Russert, Jr. - 1950-2008

2008-06-13T21:02:00.010-05:00

Move over, St. Peter, there’s a new guy in town.

You’ve been in charge of the Pearly Gates as long as I can remember and then some, if I’m to believe what I’m told, and I’ve never heard any complaints about the job you’re doing. Today, though, I’m thinking you must have been in dire need of some help.

Most of us here on Earth have watched the news enough to be aware of the population explosion on our planet. I guess more people living means more people dying, and that must translate into longer lines of souls waiting for you to decide if you’ll let them into Heaven.

I’m not exactly sure what the criteria for entry are these days. I’m guessing the basics are still used as guidelines, like obeying the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule, but I suspect the Powers That Be have eased up on some of the old rules and set the bar higher on others. Possibly, if enough lawyers have made it into Heaven, they’ve convinced you to create another whole set of ordinances to serve as loopholes in case too many of the new arrivals are litigious. It's probably getting increasingly difficult to keep up with all of that.

I’m thinking about all this stuff, thinking maybe you need help, because I can’t think of any other reason why God would have taken Tim Russert from us right in the middle of this important, historical election. He was the one current news journalist I felt I could count on religiously (if you don’t mind my use of the word) to sort through the truths, the half-truths and the full-blown lies. He was unbiased. He was well-prepared, armed with the background knowledge to ask all the right questions of our leaders and those who aspired to lead us. His questions elicited the kind of answers we needed to help us evaluate the subjects of his interviews and make good decisions in the voting booth. If the information we needed was mired in complexities, he whipped out his whiteboard and erasable markers and made it clear for us.

How are we going to get along without him? And how must he feel about being called away at this particular time? As one of his news colleagues shared today, Tim Russert considered election year to be his Super Bowl. Why in the world (or in Heaven?) was journalism's quarterback yanked right before the second half of this high-stakes game?

I was asking myself all those questions, St. Peter, and after a while it dawned on me that there might be an even more important job for Tim Russert to do. He’s uniquely qualified for a job like yours. His fairness, his thoroughness, his ability to separate truth from self-serving rhetoric in the course of an interview -– nowhere are those skills more valuable than right there at the Pearly Gates. If that’s where he is, then I guess I understand, but I still feel really, really sad. And I do wish you could have handled things on your own at least through November.

When you see God, St. Peter, please remind Him that those of us in America have some important decisions to make in the next few months. We’ll need His guidance more than ever now that Tim Russert is gone.

Politico Butch (alternate title: Lie low, unstitch)

2008-06-18T19:09:00.012-05:00

Butch has never been particularly enthusiastic about riding in the car, and he's resisted it even more than usual on our many recent trips to the veterinarian. (I guess enough anal probes could have that effect on an otherwise affable pooch.) Yesterday, when I had to take him back to the vet to get his stitches removed, I was expecting quite a struggle.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

When Butch heard me get the leash out of the cabinet, he walked to the front door and waited. Outside, he didn't pull away from the car. He stood quietly until I opened the door, then climbed right up inside it, crossed the back seat and assumed his usual riding position: standing up with his head between the door post and the back of the front seat.

He seemed to be in such a good mood. He didn't pant, didn't tremble, didn't whine. Thirty-five minutes later, when we arrived at the vet's office, Butch didn't wait for me to open the back car door. Instead, he climbed forward between the front seats, over the console and the emergency brake, and followed me out the front door. I barely had time to grab his leash first.

Once out of the car, he didn't fool around. He walked carefully to the curb, took a step up, and led me toward the front door, barely stopping to sniff all the wonderful doggy smells on the sidewalk. He waited patiently while I opened the outer door, then the inner door. Inside, he couldn't have been happier.

It was five o'clock, and the lobby was crowded. Butch worked the crowd. If he'd been human, I would have thought he was politicking, so eager he was to meet all the people and make new friends. He stretched the leash as far as it would go in the direction of each voice he heard, his tail wagging furiously.

After we checked in, we moved over to a seating area to wait. Butch knew the lay of the land. He quickly zeroed in on the table where the treat jar stands and made it his business to buddy up to the lady seated next to it. It didn't take more than 15 seconds for him to score a couple of treats. That lady indulged him for a while, and as soon as she left, another woman who'd been seated nearby got up and moved into the vacated seat. She picked up where the first lady left off, petting Butch and offering him (low-cal) treats. He bestowed many kisses on both of them.

When the vet tech came to take us to the back, Butch followed through the lobby and down the hall as if he could see everything clearly -- didn't miss a step. Inside the exam room, he stood beside me for just a moment, then lay down comfortably on the floor to wait. He showed no signs of stress whatsoever.

The vet came in, and Butch rose to greet her, exchanging his kisses and tail wags for her skritches and still more treats. While this was going on, she and I talked about his progress, and then it was time for him to step up onto the stainless steel table, the one that rises up to waist height at the touch of a button.

Huh-uh. Not gonna do it. The instant Butch's foot touched the table, he pulled it back and dropped into a sitting position on the floor. The vet tech attempted to put her arms under his belly to lift him, so he countered with his favorite anti-bath move: he fell over onto his back and went completely limp, legs sticking out in every direction.

There's no picking him up when he does that.

I give the vet credit for being a good sport. She abandoned the table idea, thrust a handful of treats into my palm, and assigned me the job of holding Butch's head and distracting him with the treats. The vet tech knelt beside him to keep his body still. And the vet, bless her heart, got down on the floor on her knees and elbows, held Butch's tail out of her way somehow, and carefully clipped and plucked the stitches out of his butt.

I chatted with the vet a bit more, after which Butch held his head high as we made one last pass among his "constituents" and left the building. There's no doubt in my mind that if he had understood the concept of applause, he would have expected it.

Blah-blah, whine, whatever

2008-06-22T18:17:00.005-05:00

I learned a long time ago that in order to maintain my sanity, I need to build a certain amount of down time into every day and a big chunk of it (usually Sunday) into every week. It isn’t that my life is particularly stressful; compared to lots of folks, it’s fairly sedate. The problem is that I’ve grown used to sedate. That’s the way I like it.

And the last two weeks have been hectic:

***** I’ve driven into Baton Rouge twice to take Butch to the vet. (Two phone calls were necessary to arrange that).

***** I’ve had two doctors’ appointments for myself: one with the GP to get prescriptions renewed and one with the dermatologist to confirm that all the spots that have materialized on my skin over the past few years are benign and common. (These appointments also required two phone calls, one of which was wasted because they had no record of the appointment when I showed up. Fortunately, they were able to fit me in.)

***** The cable TV guy had to come out twice, once when I was home and once when I wasn’t, to replace the DVR that was installed about five months ago and fix the on-screen caller ID that has never worked. (These repairs took three telephone calls, and I found out the day after they fixed the caller ID that my voice mail stopped working. Haven’t dealt with that one yet.)

***** There were multiple after-work trips to Kmart, the gas station and, because rain practically every afternoon prevented supermarket shopping, an assortment of fast-food restaurants. All in all, I’ve had something to do almost every evening.

Needless to say, all that stuff -- plus a full-time job, of course -- cut dramatically into my blogging time. I did my best to keep up with reading my favorite blogs, but I got way behind on posting and commenting.

The brightest spot of this whole two-week period was Friday afternoon, when my two daughters and I had lunch together, then went to see Sex and the City. We had a great time. I guess I could consider that afternoon as “down time,” but I felt so “up” about it, it would seem like a misnomer.

Yesterday and today, surrounded by chores that needed doing, I’ve taken it easy. It’s Sunday evening already, and I’m still in my bathrobe. I turned on the dishwasher earlier, and I'll possibly wash a couple of loads of laundry before bedtime. First, though, I think I’ll get dressed. It's time to go get take-out food again, and I can multi-task by picking up the Sunday morning newspaper that's still sitting at the curb.

I’ll try to spend some quality time here next week.

Hitting a new low

2008-06-25T17:39:00.012-05:00

I’ve heard all the jokes about old people who are cranky all the time, and ever since I officially became an old person, I’ve wanted to dispel that rumor. I’ve always imagined myself growing old gracefully the way my grandmother did, with a perpetual smile on my face and a kind word for everybody. Lately, I’m really struggling with that.

Over the past two or three years, since the post-Katrina population explosion created one endless traffic jam on Baton Rouge area roads, I’ve developed an unpleasant habit. I find that in the semi-soundproof sanctuary of my automobile, where I’m sure no one can hear me, I have begun to state out loud my opinion of other drivers and to address them by names that seem appropriate only in the heat of the moment.”

Sometimes I do it in the form of a statement: “That’s really smart, (expletive deleted).”

Or it may be in the form of a question: “What the hell kind of signal was that, (expletive deleted)?”

To be clear, the drivers who tick me off are doing stupid things, creating traffic hazards, and possibly putting my life in danger, so they totally deserve to have it called to their attention. Still, I’m too ~~cowardly~~ wise to confront an idiot like that directly, so it isn't as if anyone's behavior is being changed by my words. All the anger does is make me feel bad. I know it would be healthier for me to blow it off, let it go, and I’m really working on that.

But last week? Last week I was driving on a little residential side street. There was no traffic at all. Half a block ahead of me, I spotted a squirrel in the grass near the curb on my left. I could tell by looking at him that he was thinking about crossing the road, so I slowed down and watched carefully. Just before I pulled up even with the squirrel, he darted into my path. I braked hard, and I promise you my first thought was, “Ohhhh, be careful little squirrel!”

I didn’t hit the squirrel. But the squirrel didn’t cross the road, either. He stopped directly in front of my right front tire and looked from one side of the street to the other, back and forth, back and forth. “Hmm, what should I do?” he seemed to be thinking. “Should I go back to where I started? Or would it make more sense to go the rest of the way to the other side of the street? Let me think...I’m just. Not. Sure. What I want to do. This lady doesn’t seem inclined to run over me, so I have some time to make up my mind. Hum-de-dum-de-dum, eeny, meeny, miney, mo.” And then he turned around and crossed in front of me again, right back to where he’d started.

That’s when I called a squirrel an a$$hole, right out loud.

I'm worried that I may have crossed some kind of a line.