Nuts & Bolts

Green Eggs and Ham (tomorrow)

2011-04-23T17:11:00.000-07:00

More beautiful than Faberge
More fun than iScreening
More egg salad than can be eaten in a week

A timeless wish for the coming New Year

2010-12-24T08:16:00.000-08:00

Right now,

stop and take a moment to enjoy

the small and often random things

in your world that bring you joy.

May your joy be infectious and help

to make our world a kinder place.

From my 2010 Photograph Vault

2010-12-07T20:17:00.000-08:00

Fine Print: King Tut was king for a little while

but not long because he died.
Had the only tomb that was not robbed by the robbers like the others.

And was married at the young age of 12. Married his half sister.

(From a Long Beach 6th Grade History Day student display board. The history lesson, boiled down to 41 words, taught me everything I need to know about Tutankhamun. The photograph, faintly familiar, intrigued me.)

Boy George as King Tut

Barbra as King Tut
(because Portar is right!)

Amy as King Tut

(because Aunt Naycy is right too!)

It's Never Too Late to be Happy : )

2010-11-28T20:57:00.000-08:00

Even though I missed posting on Thanksgiving Eve my annual six degress of happiness list, I am mindful to not take my abundance and good fortune for granted. My whittled-down list of ten things that make me happy . . .

1. Reading in bed on Sunday mornings.
2. Clown shoes in the shoe rack. They were an important element in my ten year-old’s dead clown Halloween costume, but now they represent whimsy for a boy who has gotten over his coulrophobia.
3. Following my thirteen year-old into his universe of musicianship and learning from him about a discipline that would have remained for me in another galaxy far, far away.
4. My fortitude. Damn, I am one tough cookie!
5. My family who individually and collectively mean the world to me.
6. The rhythmic beat from the blue Orbitron drum set played at random by the flutist.
7. The bottle garden still full of jalapeños, basil, and lettuce.
8. The abundance of dirt cheap, highly-drinkable wine. Cheers!
9. All of the friends and acquaintances who have given me so much of themselves.
10. My RDO (Regular Day Off) every other Friday, my port in the storm.

I hope that your day of thanksgiving continues today as mine does.

Mega Man Begins

2010-10-10T15:40:00.000-07:00

(Littlest Toggle returns with his take on his brother's seventh-grade Comp & Lit assignment to create a super hero.)

It was 2124 when a terrible thing happened. An asteroid hit a man named Owen Johnson. When he woke up in the hospital in a full body cast he wondered how he was still alive. Ten months later when he got out of the hospital, he started noticing weird things like he could lift really heavy objects and he was slowly starting to shrink.

Owen asked his doctor what was happening. The doctor didn’t know but he didn’t want him to come back because he thought Owen was crazy. Two weeks later Owen figured out that he was a super human. Owen figured this out when he kept seeing more then one of himselves. He found out that he could grow and shrink; multiply himself, he had super strength, and could fly [just barely].

Owen decided to put his powers to good and fight evil but first he would need some clothes and some super hero weapons. So Owen went to go look for some super clothes that would grow and shrink with him. He went online to the local super hero website and went under the section called growth and shrinkage clothes. There were three different sets. One had a big M on it and it came in lime green and magenta. Another had a PP on it and it came in black and brown so he said no to the one with a PP on it and finally one had a J on it and came in turquoise. Owen decided on the one with the M on it and picked the lime green. He would be known as Mega Man!

Next he had to look for some weapons. He went back to the website and went under weapons. There were flamethrowers, lasers, dart guns, freeze rays, power drainers [only good for one use], and other gadgets such as ray guns and grappling hooks. Owen decided to take a dart gun and a freeze ray because he thought that they would be the most useful.

Mega Man went out to fight evil. He had many enemies such as Robo Man, The Crusher, The Screamer, Robo Man [rebuilt], Electro Man, but the worst was Party Pooper who took the PP clothes in black and brown. PP disgusted Mega Man because his power is to wreck parties by poisoning the food and punch, making it rain at out door parties, and turning the balloons alive to attack the people at the parties. But Mega Man has put him in jail many times. Unfortunely, PP keeps getting out so that makes Mega Man even more mad.

But if Mega Man is ever around there will be no evil villains because he will take them down!

Patterns

2010-09-05T21:12:00.000-07:00

Berries, Alamitos Bay Farmer's Market ~ Long Beach, CA ~ June 2010

Alamitos Bay Farmer's Market ~ Every Sunday 9 a.m. til 2 p.m.

Rock Fish caught off of Long Beach, CA ~ June 2010

Lobsters bought at Chatam Fish Market, Chatam, MA ~ July 2010

The SoCal tie-up ~ June 2010

Major League hose ~ Dodger Stadium ~ June 2010

Abalone ~ Lotus Land, Santa Barbara, CA ~ June 2010

Sunrise from the Irma B ~ Channel Islands ~ June 2010

Poles through galley window on the Irma B ~ Channel Islands ~ June 2010

Kebobs on grill ~ Oreleans, MA ~ July 2010

Barrel cacti ~ Lotus Land, Santa Barbara, CA ~ June 2010

Stone walk way ~ Lotus Land, Santa Barbara, CA ~ June 2010

Skaket Beach ~ Orleans, MA ~ July 2010

Seaweed ~ Leadbetter Beach, Santa Barbara, CA ~ July 2010

Outrigger canoer's hair ~ Leadbetter Beach, Santa Barbara, CA ~ July 2010

The Face I Have Earned

2010-06-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

"Nature gives you your face at twenty. Life shapes your face at thirty. But the face you have at fifty is the face you have earned." ~ Coco Chanel. Born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in 1883, she would later claim that her real date of birth was 1893, making her ten years younger.

Mine is an expressive face that doesn’t hold back or mask emotion. Criss-crossing lines etch my skin like roads on a topographic map leading to and from my joy, pain, humor, and sorrow. I feel unexpectedly serene today, a bit giddy, in fact, at how good it feels to be me on my fiftieth birthday. My need to experience, to love, to achieve, to improve are as urgent today as they were yesterday. My possibilities still feel endless. Life is so rich!

Excerpt from Forty-Four, written May 2004.

(I am thankful for wisdom that comes from aging and incremental self-acceptance.)

I'm days from my forty-fourth birthday and tomorrow I have a consult with Dr. Sharma for a shot of Botox to erase my furrowed forehead and the parallel and perpendicular lines that balance between my eyebrows. Dr. Sharma ran an ad in the local newspaper and I answered it. A licensed OB/GYN, Dr. Sharma switched to cosmetic surgery because she's too tired to get up in the middle of the night to deliver babies. No lie. Her gay receptionist told me so.

I found a picture the other night of my mother from last Thanksgiving. She sends pictures because she lives seven hundred miles away and believes that sending a holiday photograph keeps us connected. In my mother's beaming face, I see that my parallel and perpendicular lines came from her. My forehead furrows are my own contribution to my facial canvas. My mother always said I had and expressive face. My elation, surprise, curiosity, concern, anger, and sorrow have been etching those uniform rows for the past four decades.

My four-year-old son has asked me repeatedly if I am mad at him. My parallel-and-perpendiculars must be getting deeper, I thought. I'm not angry with him or anyone, am I? Then, my six-year-old son asked me if I was concerned. Yes, I have concerns. Are they now manifesting between my eye brows?

My sons' questions motivated me to seek a free Botox consult with Dr. Sharma. At least, that's what I tell people. It's such an endearing truth that can be leveraged to do something I never saw myself doing: work. Sure, I still wear my retainer every night to prevent the natural gap between my two front teeth. And I even use professional-grade dental bleach to undo what my coffee and red wine habit do to my teeth. Somehow these cosmetic dalliances seem like child's play compared to what Dr. Sharma can do for me.

"Science has been able to harness the botulism disease toxin for a positive result. The chemical produced by the bacterium that causes botulism blocks nerve impulses to muscles, causing a form of paralysis weakness," according to the other CDC, the Center for Dermatology Care, a self-proclaimed authority on Botox and other forms of work.

In addition to never seeing myself doing work, I also never saw myself injecting perfectly healthy tissue with a muscle-paralyzing toxin. Did I possess that much self-loathing?

I have a fantasy that I will go to Dr. Sharma's Botox party, get my one site for $100, and after seeing the results of Dr. Sharma's fountain of youth, begin to consider a breast augmentation for my 36B breasts. Then the tummy-tuck to fix what my baby boys did to my abdomen. I helped with my tummy, by getting lazy about diet and exercise, but no one needs to know that. I have another endearing truth to justify my tummy tuck: two healthy nine-pound babies over a three-year span after the age of 35, each delivered by Caesarian section.

While waiting for Dr. Sharma to arrive, I filled out the required insurance and liability release paper work. I looked up from my clipboard to see a twenty-something woman walk through the waiting room with two cantaloupes strategically placed under her taut T-shirt. I immediately doubted Dr. Sharma's judgment.

Dr. Sharma's not-really-a-nurse called my name and then lead me back to an exam room where she went over the risks, side effects, and the cost of my Botox treatment. "Do you have any questions?" the non-nurse asked.

Yes. "How many Botox injections have Dr. Sharma done and can I see some pictures?"

"She's done hundreds. We only have a few pictures because most people don't want their faces in the book where their neighbors might recognize them."

"Oh," I said. I began to understand that there's a degree of shame woven into seeking and receiving work.

Dr. Sharma arrived for my consult, tired from all of the cosmetic surgery she had been doing. I had found out from her non-nurse that Dr. Sharma still delivers babies for established patients. I wondered if she offered package deals: pre- and postpartum care, plus, for an extra $2,500 a tummy-tuck, a breast augmentation, or a vaginal rejuvenation. Your choice!

I told Dr. Sharma about my interest in erasing my parallel and perpendicular lines between my eye brows. I wanted to take the conservative approach. Dr. Sharma leaned in, looked over her bifocals, shook her head and told me that she wanted to shoot up my forehead too. I then noticed that Dr. Sharma was furrow-free. Come to think of it, so was her entire staff.

After my consult, I decided Botox was the lost leader of cosmetic surgery. It's cheap relative to other work. If you're satisfied, you return in three months for another injection and another selling opportunity for the doctor to share with you what she can do to restore your natural beauty. An open vial of Botox has a 24-hour shelf life, so Dr. Sharma likes to gang up three patients and call it a party. I told Dr. Sharma's non-nurse to call me when two patients wanted to get together and party.

~ ~ ~

My work friend, Audry, is about to have a facelift. Audry is fifty-years-old but has the body of a twenty-five year old. Audry proclaims to be steeped in workplace research. She advised me that for women to be competitive and successful in business, they must look age neutral. Women must look perpetually between the ages of 35 and 41, old enough to instill credibility and experience, but not too old to look old and contemptible. Audry is all for work and is in full support of my decision to get a few Botox injections. If I didn't know Audry, I would be hurt by her enthusiastic encouragement, which translates to, "your face is detracting from your face."

"Botox makes people look more at ease and it doesn't affect their minds. Baby boomers don't want to age gracefully, they want to manage their age," said Dr. Rod Rohrich, a Dallas-based plastic surgeon and past president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Apparently, my age is just one more thing for me to manage, right after, my career, my investment portfolio, my household and my anger. It's no wonder I have concerns.

Audry called me today from San Francisco where she went to have her facelift. She was convalescing at her twin sister’s home there. It was good to hear from her. She reported that she didn't feel much pain after her surgery and hardly had to take any pain killers. Audry told me that the only pain came two weeks after the surgery when the doctor removed her facial bandages and her first layer of skin came with it. She fainted in the elevator on the way down.

"Do you like the result?" I asked.

"It's not what I expected. My chin looks like it belongs to Jay Leno," she told me. "I didn't get my eyes done, so I still have 50 year-old eyes, but on a 30 year-old face."

I hung up the phone and realized Dr. Sharma had never called me to come down and party. Six weeks had passed since my consult. I thought about Adury’s face and then took Dr. Sharma's dissing as the best birthday gift I could ever get.

Steppin' Out

2010-06-12T22:13:00.000-07:00

I met up with my new Meetup group on Thursday evening to “hike” Signal Hill. The Meetup intro to the Signal Hill Hiking Club describes the 5.75 mile route as a two hour intermediate-paced hike. My first test was maintaining my brisk stride straight up Hill Street, also known as “The Decider”. Apparently, a few walkers decide to turn around and head back to their cars after attempting the incline. I wasn’t one of them. I kept up, broke a sweat, met some friendly, fit people, and felt that I may have found a good weekly cardio workout with a spectacular panoramic view.

In my back yard. Hell yes, we want the radio tower! You can put it right next to the built-in gas grill.

Walkers. I was never at the front of the pack. At least at the back of the pack, I could take pictures and linger on the view. (Palos Verdes Peninsula)

Rectangular sunset. The open space seemed to contain the setting sun.

Barkin' dogs. Cheap sneakers = sore feet. It has been two days and my feet are still achin'. Waiting for UPS to deliver relief.

The Tale of The Last Survivor

2010-06-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

(A fourth grade slasher-survivor story written by the Littlest Toggle.)

The last zombie was slayed by Mathew Lizers and now the hags were next. A whole army of warriors, half wiped out, had to go against zombies, hags and vampires.

The warriors had defeated the zombies and were on hags now. The leader, Noa Moonslayer, told a quarter of his people to go get reinforcements and about half an hour later, fifty more people came but it was too late.

Almost all of the army was corpses laying on the ground because they had gotten to the dreadful vampires and bam they got tumbled. Noa Moonslayer and the few that remained retreated and plotted for several months about how to defeat the vampires but what they did not know was that the vampire army was getting larger too.

Now that both armies were larger, they fought. It was a dirty fight with both armies losing soldiers quickly. The human army had wizards, but the vampires had more soldiers. At the end of the war, everybody was dead except the vampire leader and Noa Moonslayer

Noa crawled over badly injured, pulled out his boot knife, and stabbed the vampire’s neck repeatedly until the vampire leader had no more life. Noa went unconscious.

He was so tired and bloody that he went to sleep and didn’t wake up until a week later. When Noa woke up the vampire leader was not where Noa had killed him. All of a sudden, Noa heard a roar behind him and felt a sharp pain in his back. It got worse and worse until he took a knife from a dead person’s hand and stabled the vampire leader until he was on the ground not moving.

But Noa was very injured and really hungry so he ripped the cloths off of a corpse next to him and wrapped the cloth over his wounds. For food he found some wild berries and herbs. He would rest for a day and then go out the next day in look of another kingdom because he assumed that other creatures had taken the kingdom over since the army was not there.

In the morning he built a standard shelter like a teepee, but he couldn’t fold it up to take with him. After that, he made a fishing pole but when he dropped his line in the water, it snapped in two when he caught a fish.

When fishing didn’t work, he decided to get some water. Noa knew of a fresh water spring near by and after got some water he told himself not to get angry but that he was having herbs and berries again for dinner.

That night he stayed calm after his shelter fell over for the third time. Finally it stayed up and he tried to make a fire, but the only thing he made was a fool of himself. Noa was so tired that if an opera was playing near by, he wouldn’t have noticed. Eventually he gave up after the wind blew out his only spark.

When he woke up the next day, he decided that he should travel to another kingdom and hope that there would be a civilization. First he would have to get enough food and water for a long trip.

He went crab hunting but only caught four small crabs. “Good enough for now,” Noa said. Noa searched for two hours until he found some nice fibers to weave a basket for water. He had seen the ladies weave and he had made an okay basket before so he went to work. An hour later, he was done. It was great! After he filled the basket with water he found some berries and a few herbs. The next day he set off to find another kingdom.

Noa went the other direction, away from his kingdom, because he didn’t want to run into it. After about two weeks he could see a kingdom in the distance. It turned out to be just some trees. A month passed before he found a new kingdom.

Once inside the kingdom’s giant door he changed his whole life. First, he got better food with the few gold he had. He also got better clothing. With the last gold piece, Noa rented a very small room.

Noa figured out, after a few years, that he stayed alive the whole time when he slept for a week before he killed the vampire because a wizard that he was staying with had come and cast a spell on him so that he would stay alive for that week. But it didn’t matter to Noa because he had a wife, two children, a house, and a nice job. His job was a blacksmith and he loved his job. Eventually, he died of old age at age 94 and his loving sons still have adventures like his all of the time.

~ The End ~

Virtually Invisible

2010-06-02T21:47:00.000-07:00

I really need to staple a Post-it note to my forehead for the next big holiday weekend that says, “What? Go to the beach? Are you ca-razy?!!!” I felt compelled this past holiday weekend to swim in the ocean and so I did.

My family came along and humored my insane idea to drive to the beach on Memorial Day. We’d lucked out, thankfully, after only two hours in the car, and found street parking. I felt giddy to carry the beach gear down to the sand.

After eating a sandwich, I walked the sand strand between breaking ocean waves and the throng of humanity. The ocean felt cold washing up against my legs. I relished the sound of breaking waves, the smell of salt in the air. I felt restored.

I looked away from the water to the masses, sunbathing in last year’s swimsuits. The bulges, the rolls, the girth! It was late in the day and a lot of people were already splotchy sunburned-red. I could see Splotchy-red, but also splotchy-black and blue from asymmetrically placed tattoos. A crucifix-on-a-chain, Tweety Bird, several sets of angle wings, women’s names with their apparent likeness. All manner of “body art” on display.

I drove to work the day after the holiday and heard on NPR a dated piece about a performance art installation called . . . and Counting. Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, turned his back into a canvas to commemorate both Iraqi and American war dead

The buzzing from the electric needle during the story sounded like mosquitoes flying into a heat lamp. I hate those bits of audible “clip art” scattered throughout NPR features, but this time, I could feel the sting, feel the lose of life added to Bilal’s back. In the 24-hour live performance which took place from March 8 to March 9, 2010, Bilal’s back was tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each of the war casualties near the cities where they had died.

I wanted to see what was described on the radio. I wanted to see this tattoo. What would 5,000 dead American soldiers represented by visible, permanent, red ink dots and 100,000 Iraqi casualties, represented by dots of seemingly invisible green UV ink, look like?

The black light told the stunning, continuing story. Bilal doesn’t have enough skin.

Seeking true north

2010-05-29T22:33:00.000-07:00

“A few days ago, I read that a samurai philosophy is to refrain until you can respond instead of reacting. I must work on that.” ~ From “Witness” an essay by Andre Dubus.

Lately, I find that I’m open to guideposts from anywhere that will magnetize my inner compass and show me what I need to see.

Andre Dubus did just that in his essay “Witness” where he recounts his personal odyssey about recovering from a horrific accident while he was assisting two people from their own accident off the side of the road. He lost his leg and his mobility while being a Good Samaritan.

I had checked out “Best American Essays – 1998” from the library to read “Silk Parachutes”, but it was “Witness” that showed me what I needed to see.

I have been a reactor practically my entire 49 years. It didn’t take much to get me to react, a look, a word, my own misunderstanding and the snappy, sharp, defensive me would strike out in a half-cocked reaction, achieving absolutely nothing of what I wanted. I wanted to be heard, to be recognized, to be right.

Refraining has a calming, thoughtful effect. It makes me feel mature, as if I’m finally growing up. I have to be disciplined to refrain, the way I suppose the samurai practiced. I often fail. Like Dubus, I must work on that.

Double Take

2010-05-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

My annual visit to see my mom last month put us on a mini road trip to the Green Springs, a beautiful mountain retreat just 25 minutes from downtown Ashland, OR . The Green Springs boast lakes, mountains, and pastures. I saw grazing cattle that could have wandered onto the road. But the appliances, oh, those beasts ya really gotta look out for.

11. My Six Degrees of Happiness Tradition

2009-11-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

The Albino Technicolor Dream Coat Turkey

I associate my happiness with my thankfulness and gratitude for everything that makes my life so rich. As I have done on past Thanksgiving Eves, here is my spontaneous list of thanksgiving, in no particular order . . .

1.   Books-on-CD that make my commute bearable.
2.   My commute. I am grateful to have a job to commute to.
3.   My job. I just love being the boss.
4.   Two bathrooms. The Rec Room is finally done . . . yippie!
5.   Playing poker with my family on Sunday mornings.
6.   My good health and vitality. I feel lucky every single day about this.
7.   People. I love ‘em, even with all of their warts, shortcomings, and desires.
8.   My people. My partner and our sons make me whole.
9.   My curiosity and need to continue learning about the world.
10. Humor. Can't get enough of seeing it as thread in the lace of my life.

I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving!

The Must-Have Disposable Shoe

2009-11-12T22:37:00.000-08:00

Down to the local Van’s retailer on September 11th for new school shoes
Seeking something that fits the criteria for middle-school cool
Found it in the grey Van’s with red eyelets and strings

I remember that same desire for a start of middle-school cool shoe

Mine was the wallaby, crepe sole, leather upper

Lasted until June when my toes started to pinch

I drilled my middle-schooler on math story problems last night,

Interrupted only to bring in the box from the UPS driver
Delivering the replacement grey Van’s with red eyelets and strings sent for on November 6th

Q. A mom paid $49 for a canvas pair of Van's

Her boy wore them for 45 days

How much did the mom pay per day before a new pair arrived?

A. 92 cents.*

*(The mom, deeply conflicted, pondered what 92 cents a day could buy for third world people around the globe, some of whom have never worn shoes.)

On Halloween Eve

2009-10-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

Jack-o-lantern glow from a SpongeBob Square Mouth

scooped and carved at the same table where he eats his

peanut butter and jelly Monday through Friday.

Jack-o has girth and plenty of real estate for him

to add the square eye brows and old-school triangle eyes, nose.

His Jack-o lit up the playground first, freeing him

to feed at the Oreo and candy corn trough before the rush.

Then the other Jack-os rolled out, lined up, and found fire,

illuminating the dark black top and the long Halloween tradition at our school.

Oh, what a fleeting treat!

Gossamer Wings and Veils

2009-10-23T16:45:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered a diabolical plot to rip off the Tooth Fairy’s wings.

Not too long ago, I watched my soon-to-be twelve year old boy yank out his baby molar that had been flip-flopping in his mouth all day. He handed me the tooth and I handed him a cup of warm salt water. He swished his mouth, brushed his remaining and emerging teeth, and went to bed. There was no mention of the Tooth Fairy or the cha-ching the Tooth Fairy would leave under his pillow. It puzzled me why he didn’t ask me for the tooth. I placed it in the chi bowl he had made me for Mother’s Day last year and I forgot about it.

A few days passed and my older boy was searching all the usual places for his dislodged molar. When I asked him what he was looking for, I got a vague response.

My younger boy blurted out, “He’s not going to tell anyone when he puts his tooth under his pillow to see if the Tooth Fairy will come!”

I wondered what was worse for my older boy: to have his brother rat him out, to have his suspicions about the Tooth Fairy remain unconfirmed, or to have his mother find out about his need to test the validity of Tooth Fairy?

My younger boy had a compelling need to protect the unholy trinity for himself. I could hear the peril in his voice and it melted me with tenderness with a bit of sorrow. It was too soon for him to hear the harsh truth about the Tooth Fairy. Besides, it’s never a good time to hear a stammering parent tell a flimsy white lie to bolster an even flimsier story about a winged creature who deals in dislodged enamel. Once the wings, the ears or the beard are pulled off of any member of the unholy trinity, the entire trinity is debunked, and then what is left?

My older boy lost another molar the other night. He swished with salt water, he handed me his tooth and went to bed. His tooth joined his other molar in my chi bowl. Two baby teeth together in my chi bowl say he knows without saying. It says my boy has passed through the veil from his childhood to what’s next.

I wasn’t prepared for his truth, even though I know he knows, but there it is. He reinforced his message when he told me that he wants to be a dead and bloody Santa Claus for Halloween. “No, not Santa!” I thought. I need to protect the Jolly Old Man for myself. I need the anticipation of his magical arrival. I am forever seven years-old where Santa is concerned and I am old enough not to say so.

A into B, B into C

2009-10-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

IKEA doesn’t include words in their product instructions. Those Swedish engineers figure that universal hieroglyphic drawings on newsprint is all any modern DIY homeowner needs to insert wooden pegs and newfangled Phillips screws into birch veneered pressed wood. Perhaps IKEA should also include a series of rising and setting suns to connote the weekends the homeowner can expect to spend on assembly . . . .

"Sing Out, Louise!"

2009-10-16T22:23:00.000-07:00

I heard about this on NPR during my evening commute recently. It sounded easy. It turned out to be hard. (Following the directions challenged me. I also winced at discovering my audible blinders. After NPR completes its Top 50 compile, I am looking forward to stretching my narrow opinion to other continents, languages, genders, and world views.)

Between Oct. 5 and Oct. 16, we're asking you — NPR listeners and readers — to tell us who in the whole world possesses the most beautiful, singular voice you have ever heard. Leave your picks, along with a sentence defending each choice and a link to an audio clip if possible

Joni Mitchell. Mitchell’s nuanced voice makes me feel I live the stories she tells in her songs. “Blue”

Cassandra Wilson. Wilson’s voice makes me feel swept away in romantic rapture. “Tupelo Honey”

Alison Krauss. I feel that I am levitating when I hear Krauss sing. “Down in the River to Prey”

kd lang. If lang’s voice were glass, it would be the finest crystal on earth. “Hallelujah”

Dusty Springfield. Springfield’s heart and soul play back-up to her sultry voice. “Just A Little Lovin’”

Seeing Red

2009-09-07T20:39:00.000-07:00

What a fitting day, Labor Day, to spend on my knees reworking part of my patio slate installation done by a laborer I had paid in full on the eve of my Hawaiian vacation. Jose, my hired-hand, wanted to finish his tile job while my family was away for two weeks. I didn’t like the idea of him being on my property alone, but okay, at least the job would be done when we returned. He must have been tired of getting up off of his knees to walk to his tile saw. Individual slate pieces had to be custom-cut to fit properly along the patio edge, but Jose cut them all the same size. Some pieces hung over the edge and some were too short, revealing the concrete patio slab. If I had a dollar for every f-bomb I hurled at Jose on my Labor Day, I am certain I would have recouped the dinero he managed to pry out of wallet before the job was done. When will I learn to say, “No!” to workmen who insist on being paid before I am satisfied with their work? I talk to my children all the time about experiences becoming sign-posts for learning. Jose is my sign-post for not paying for any job until it has been completed to my satisfaction. And if Jose can’t be a big enough sign-post for me, my raw knees can.
~ ~ ~
Mixed Media: Red Grapes In Wet Cement

Velcroing Divided Cells

2009-01-30T22:10:00.000-08:00

My oldest boy shares a birthday with the McCaughey septuplets born November 19, 1997. The McCaughey septuplets were lauded by most and lavished with everything needed to make a family of three, then instantly ten, squarely middle class and wanting for little, other than a good night’s sleep. Gifts of time, helping hands, and tax deductible durable goods flowed from the kindness of strangers, neighbors, and corporate marketing departments. MSNBC continues to follow the septuplets year after year. Gee, they’re a feel-good story.

How ironic it was the other night to see my son demonstrate his invention for the mother of octuplets born January 27, 2009, who said she would breastfeed her eight babies. Breastfeed! Eight babies!!! His invention followed the twentieth century American assembly line model with a little Velcro thrown in.

It is a simple concept full of equity and logic: papoose-wearing babies will be Velcroed to the wall, each baby positioned on the wall to meet mother’s nipple, two babies sucking simultaneously, of course. Mother sets timer and babies suck for 30 seconds . . . re-a, re-a, re-a, re-a, re-a (sounds like Maggie Simpson sucking her pacifier). Babies release mother’s breasts, mother moves to awaiting two hungry babies. Suck, release. Repeat. Suck, release. Repeat. (Never mind the wailing sobs from the babies released who didn’t get their fill, nor those babies who had fallen asleep, were not quite hungry then, or who had trouble latching.)

I was amused and touched by my boy’s interest and concern for these eight tiny, hungry mouths. His invention and demonstration would continue to amuse me if I didn’t know the surfacing details of this young woman’s life that includes 6 children waiting at home for her. The baffling reveal today was that the mother of eight had had the embryo’s implanted into her uterus, expecting only one to survive. What doctor did that to her? Where does he practice and why is he still allowed to practice?!

I heard on the radio on my ride home tonight that it takes over $2 million to raise a kid which doesn't include Barry teaching him the Ode to Joy. What was this single mother thinking?! No media corporation, benefactor, or neighbor has come forward with the offer of a larger house or a billion diapers or a helping hand. We will all pay for this crime and most of all the eight babies will pay the biggest price, followed by their six siblings.

Simple Gifts

2009-01-22T21:08:00.000-08:00

Barry came for lesson-number-one while I was at work and spent equal time with my boys on their keyboard. After dinner, I enjoyed a recital for dessert.

My younger boy, having had only a handful of keyboard lessons before school in the first grade, started from the beginning. Barry taught him the Three Gs. My boy played with focus and enthusiasm, showing me how he could slide on the keys at the end of the piece. Barry is already teaching him tricks.

Barry asked my older boy what kind of music he would like to learn to play. He told Barry “classic”. I would have expected him to say “classic rock”, but Smoke on the Water is so second grade, apparently. My older boy sat in front of the keyboard, flexed his fingers, laid them on the keys, and Ode to Joy filled the room.

Three Gs with a side of Joy. How sweet!

Bow-wow-wow Revisited.

2009-01-19T17:04:00.000-08:00

Bike path.

Me on bike path.

A sign!

Big Dog.

Little dog.

One short dog out.

Two tall dogs in.

"A dog party!

A big dog party!

Big dogs, little dogs,

red dogs, blue dogs,

yellow dogs, green dogs,

black dogs, and white dogs

are all at a dog party!

What a dog party!"

~P.D. Eastman, "Go, Dog. Go!"

~ ~ ~

I went out searching for my joy today and I found it at the dog beach. I didn't know where I would find it, but there it was romping in the shore and chasing thrown objects. There is nothing quite as infectious as a dog's smile. I felt my cheeks stretch from my own smile from watching and remembering Emma. This was her kind of scene. I missed Emma today, yet felt her with me. She's running with my other smiling dogs, deep in my heart.

Green Fly on Blue Cauliflower

2009-01-19T15:59:00.000-08:00

Unholy Humiliation

2009-01-18T22:27:00.000-08:00

I knew Gene Robinson was thrown a bone, but I was eager to help him put a shine on it. That’s how desperate we gay folks are for recognition, acknowledgement, and a seat at the adult table. I watched the Obama Inaugural Celebration for Robinson, for his prayer, and to feel a part of the Hope. Where was Robinson today? He was there, right on time and on cue to deliver the kick-off prayer, but the cameras and audio engineers were on a different schedule. The humiliation stings almost as much as much as it did on election night and the passing of H8. Does Gene Robinson feel played and humiliated? I want to stop caring about equal rights for LGBT people. I want to unplug and not give a shit, but I can’t. I feel obligated and bound to what’s right. I am not alone, but I feel no comfort in this crowd.

Unabashedly Bitter

2009-01-12T20:23:00.000-08:00

Bow-wow-wow. What more can I say after being thrown an inaugural bone called Gene Robinson? Oh, and it’s the Sunday, kick-off event, mixed some where in with Bono, The Boss and Beyoncé, and the five thousand other events leading up to the main event on Tuesday.

Bishop Gene Robinson is the warm up band for the main event on Tuesday, Rick Warren. I’m so happy Bishop Robinson is tickled to give a prayer in front of the Lincoln Memorial to kick-off inauguration season. I wish instead that he could have tapped into his own bitterness and said, “Fuck no! I will not be an afterthought to fix your damaging mistake!” And if he couldn’t have tapped into his own bitterness, I would have welcomed him to tap into mine.

I am wallowing in my bitterness until Wednesday, January 21, 2009. Then, I will rise above, because bitterness is corrosive and I refuse to let "them" rot me from the inside out. By the way, there is plenty of bitterness to go around. Check out the comments from this Concord Monitor frontpager today.
~ ~ ~
N.H. bishop invited to D.C. to give prayer
Robinson to speak at an inaugural eve
By ANNMARIE TIMMINS Monitor staff

New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, an outspoken, international gay rights leader, has been asked to give a prayer at one of President-elect Barack Obama's first inauguration events at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The announcement follows weeks of criticism from Robinson and gay-rights groups over Obama's decision to tap the Rev. Rick Warren, who's likened committed gay relationships to incest and polygamy, to pray on inauguration day.

Robinson, an early Obama supporter, said last month the choice of Warren left him feeling as if he'd been slapped in the face. In a telephone interview this weekend, Robinson, of Weare, said he doesn't believe Obama has included him in response to the Warren criticism. But he said his inclusion won't go unnoticed by the gay and lesbian community.

"It's important for any minority to see themselves represented in some way," Robinson said. "Whether it be a racial minority, an ethnic minority or, in our case, a sexual minority. Just seeing someone like you up front matters."

Warren, author and high-profile pastor of a California mega-church, will still give the invocation at the Jan. 20 inauguration, shortly before Obama delivers his much-anticipated inaugural address. Robinson will share his invocation prayer Sunday afternoon on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during an inaugural kick-off event.

Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden will be there, and Obama is expected to speak, Robinson said. The event will be open to the public and run on HBO. Robinson doesn't yet know what he'll say, but he knows he won't use a Bible.

"While that is a holy and sacred text to me, it is not for many Americans," Robinson said. "I will be careful not to be especially Christian in my prayer. This is a prayer for the whole nation."

Robinson said the Obama team has given him no direction on what to include in his remarks.
Clark Stevens, spokesman for the inaugural committee, said he could not disclose the rest of Sunday's program because it was still being finalized. He said the committee extended the invite to Robinson because Robinson had offered his advice to Obama during the campaign and because of his church work.

"Bishop Robinson is one of our nation's most prominent religious leaders," Stevens said.
When asked whether Robinson was included to calm the Warren complaints, Stevens repeated himself. "(Robinson's) an important figure in the religious community," he said. "We are excited that he will be involved."

At home, Robinson was long known foremost as a gifted and devoted priest. He gained international attention after New Hampshire Episcopalians made him their bishop and, as a result, the worldwide church's first openly gay bishop.

His election has divided the church here and abroad. Despite his insistence that he wants to be "the good bishop, not the gay bishop," Robinson has sought out a high-profile role as a gay rights activist while also leading his congregations here.

He signed on to the Obama campaign early during the New Hampshire primary, saying he liked Obama's commitment to uniting people of different viewpoints and lifestyles. When Obama invited Warren, who has campaigned against gay marriage in California, to give the invocation inauguration day, Robinson shared his disappointment.

"I actually have a lot of respect for Rick Warren, amongst evangelicals," Robinson told Beliefnet.com in late December. "He's taken a hit for his compassionate response to AIDS, his commitment to alleviating poverty. He's done some good things. The difficult thing is that he's said, and continues to affirm, some horrendous things about homosexuality."

In other interviews, Robinson said Warren deserved "to be at the table" but not in such a prominent way. And he wasn't alone. Gay rights groups chimed in with their own complaints.
Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, told one interviewer that the Warren selection was a "genuine blow" to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Americans. Frank Rich, a New York Times columnist, called Obama's choice a "glib" use of political capital and accused the president-elect of cockiness.

Still, when Robinson got his invite from the inauguration committee two weeks ago, he said he didn't connect it to his criticism of Warren. "I don't think the campaign balanced this out," he said. "It wasn't their thinking."

Instead, he was "honored, stunned and also very excited," he said. The committee has also invited Robinson and his partner, Mark Andrew, to participate in some other inauguration events, both private and public, he said. They leave for Washington, D.C., on Saturday.

Robinson said he's particularly glad he will speak on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, his favorite of the Washington, D.C., memorials.

"What is particularly moving for me is that I'll be standing on what I consider to be holy ground," he said. "It's the site of the 'I Have a Dream' speech, and I've always been moved by the Gettysburg Address. All of it will be pretty overwhelming."

He will spend the time until then drafting his prayer. He'd like it to be a surprise and reflective of the times, he said. "I think these are sober and difficult times that we are facing," Robinson said. "It won't be a happy, clappy prayer."

Robinson will wear his purple bishop's shirt and the gold cross given him by the church after he became bishop. It's made from pieces of gold - treasured rings, necklaces and pins - donated by members of the church and others who've become supporters.

The Road Already Traveled

2008-12-27T19:00:00.000-08:00

A Bible-thumper came to my door today. I was still in my sleep clothes, but opened the door anyway. The Thumper was an elderly man with a tie as wide as a boulevard and teeth as yellow as the traffic signal controlling the cars. He was friendly and upbeat as he pressed his four-color pamphlet into my hand. He quickly shifted gears and spoke of the virtues of the Bible as soon as I took his paper. He spoke quickly and deliberately.

When Bible-thumpers have come to my door in the past, I have taken the pamphlet, thanked them, and wished them “God bless” before I shut the door, but not today. I told the friendly old man out canvassing for the Lord, that I don’t believe in the Bible. I pressed the paper back into his hand and wished him good luck. That’s the best I had for him. He was a bit taken aback and thanked me. I shut the door almost in his face.

I have always known that the Bible was written by men for men to control us all, but I have also believed that there were grains of truth embedded in the Bible’s pages that transcended manipulation. Like the selfless stuff Jesus did on behalf of lepers. Today, I heard myself, and I was a bit shocked, but not because I gave the old man the bum’s rush, but because I felt empowered to do so.

“I don’t believe in the Bible.”

Call me a “Christophobe” if you must. Hell, Rick Warren would. The irony is that, as a lesbian, I live more of a Christ-like life than Rick Warren.

The passing of Proposition 8 and President-elect Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to lead the country in the hopeful prayer for the next four years has at once crushed and emboldened me.

I feel the marrow-stinging pain that macro-oppression and homophobia can inflict. I’ve felt it in degrees over the past 27 years, since I came “out” at age 21. I’ve been called a fag, had a hotel worker sweep dirt on me as I’ve walked back from a Pride festival, and lost a promotion because I’m gay. So what?

I’ve managed to rise above and persevere and continue to fight the good fight and donate my time and money for what I believe is a worthwhile cause: equal rights. The sting in my marrow since November 4th and the December 18th Rick Warren pile-on is seeded in empathy for my children who must also, through no choice of their own, experience oppression and homophobia through me. No one wants to see their parents treated as second class citizens, especially the ones who live a Christ-like life.

So the battle line has been scorched into the earth: Religion vs. Homosexuality. Okay then. Fair warning. You don’t want to piss off the gays. Just ask Rodney King.

“The gays was out marching that day. For some kind of gay rights. I get my ass kicked just in time the day before so it's already a lot of people at the courthouse. They started protesting against what the police did to me, the gays was like it was almost like they flipped their sign around and said "No Justice! No Peace!" And you know how the gay people are, they fuckin go off, you know what I mean? So the cops got scared as fuck, you know what I mean? That's what I like about gays - they bring flavor to the world. They some real people, you know what I mean?” ~Rodney King, Celebrity Rehab.
~ ~ ~
Photo above: Participants marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in protest of discriminatory voting practices, 1965.
~ ~ ~
Like shouting in a canyon, without the echo
. . . my post on http://change.gov/page/content/contact/

Dear Mr. President-elect,
I campaigned for you. I gave you money. I voted for you. I had hoped that change would come with your election. Your announcement of Rick Warren to give the opening invocation at your inauguration, shocked, appalled, and insulted me. You could have chosen any fundamentalist pastor to represent another voice, but you chose a bigot who campaigns against gay rights and excludes homosexuals from attending his church. “What would Jesus do?”

Clearly, Rick Warren could care less to answer that question and instead chooses to preach hatred. He actually does more than preach. He is a highly political leader of a mega-church who has compared abortion to the Holocaust and opposed marriage reform in terms equivalent to the bigoted plaintiffs in the 1967 civil rights case overturning anti-miscegenation marriage laws. In an era when gay rights are the epicenter, Rick Warren is a widely recognized voice arguing against those rights. By comparison, if this were Lincoln's inauguration, Rick Warren would have been the equivalent pro-slavery pastor giving the invocation. If this were Wilson's inauguration, Rick Warren would have been the equivalent of an anti-women's suffrage pastor saying a prayer. For FDR, he would have been the same as inviting a pastor opposed to rights for the poor. For Kennedy, he would have been the same as inviting a pastor who spoke out repeatedly about the dangers of desegregation. And now for you to invite a voice known for arguing against progress is stunningly disappointing.

Kicking gays to the curb has been the American political standard. When is the change coming for us, Mr. President-elect?

Six Degrees of Happiness Transformed

2008-11-26T20:29:00.000-08:00

Make a wish, baby!

Hi-ho, it is Thanksgiving here in the United States of America once again! On the brink of past Thanksgiving long weekends, I have posted about what makes me happy. Happiness, like control, is an illusion, and I am happy to understand that truth. I am grounded in reality here on earth and therefore happy. As a fellow rider on the blue orb, I would rather tell you on the eve of Thanksgiving 2008 what I am thankful for, in no particular order . . .

1. irony
2. being comfortable in my own skin
3. my conservative financial values that have insulated my family during the global financial maelstrom
4. my partner of 23 years (who might be my spouse some day) who has the same values as me
5. to be a contributor and participant in THE civil rights movement of the 21st century
6. my two boys who pop me out of my internal debris and make me a better human being
7. my love of people and human potential
8. my curiosity and potential for creating
9. slouchy Friday nights with homemade vegetarian pizza
10. Santa Barbara Syrahs . . . have you tried them?

Happy Thanksgiving to all and to Thivai Abhor in particular.

Redefining the Hood Ornament

2008-09-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

I am confounded by the goat that has taken root to my neighbor’s roof. It has spent some time with the taxidermist, and for that, I am thankful. Large, living animals inhabit my neighbors’ roof tops, so a living goat would not seem farfetched. Most mornings, I watch forty-pound raccoons waddle across the composite roof next door, practically flipping me the bird as they pass by my bathroom window.

I have wondered how much longer my neighbor’s cloven-hoofed stationary weather vein’s woolen coat will look so white, with the air pollution in the Los Angeles basin being at cancer-causing levels. Not that the stuffed goat would get cancer, of course, but he is sure to start looking grey and then sooty-black.

Then it will rain.

It's a blessing that I won’t have to smell my neighbor's soggy, stuffed goat. I am fearful, however, that the goat will be adorned with some kind of green and red reindeer kitsch around Thanksgiving. There is really nothing worse than a sooty and soggy dead animal trying to pass as a decked hall. Talk about a kill joy at the most wonderful time of the year. Oye!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
What I've learned about goats:
Goats are extremely curious and intelligent.
Goats are very coordinated and can climb and hold their balance in the most precarious places.
Goats are clean animals, according to the Bible .
Goats have trundled through the White House.

For Aunt Connie

2008-09-20T22:48:00.000-07:00

Aunt Connie died today and my ten-year-old son wanted to roast meat in her honor. He expected to be shut down, but I surprised him by supporting his need to grill.

He grilled what meat was in the freezer – chicken legs and a boneless chicken breast -- on the rock-and-mud pit he manufactured with his brother last February. He wanted to marinade the meat and asked me for my citrus recipe. I sat with him while he grilled and basted the chicken.

While he worked, my son asked me to go backpacking with him and live off the land. “No cooler, Mommy.” I told him I didn’t think I could do that, but I didn’t tell him why. After a day of backpacking and living off the land, I am certain I would require a cold beer at the end of the day. He basted and turned the legs and told me of his plan to build an adobe oven near the roasting pit. “We can bake bread,” he told me. “Indeed we can,” I said.

My son set the tables with candles and laid the feast he had prepared. He went to his room and returned wearing a dress polo shirt. We all went around the table and spoke of Aunt Connie and then toasted her memory. The chicken was spectacular. Basted with love, it could be nothing less.

Where have I gone?

2008-09-20T22:01:00.000-07:00

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” ~ Alice

I wish I had a tale to tell to explain where I have gone. I am here. I am still here. I will always be here. Where else would I go?

The nuance of my hereness is that I have turned inward. When I was outward-facing I was here, writing about what resonated within because I was compelled to write about it. I saw people, shapes, colors, situations that made me itch until I captured it all in words.

What I see inward can barely be spoken, let alone written about, even for my own viewing. Things I see that used to move me to a key board, get little of my attention now. I have thought that I should write about that but I don’t. I am indifferent to what I see and bored by my own vision.

My inward journey has been necessary and personally productive. But I miss my Zone. I miss the electric feeling from transcribing what I see or how I experience something into words. I miss the outward me and wonder if I am in for good.

What I saw today

2008-04-11T22:07:00.000-07:00

I saw daylight through a woman’s ear lobe today. She was in a grocery line ahead of me. I saw sunlight illuminating a portion of her neck that should have been in the shadow of her pony tail. I discretely shifted my weight to the left and forward and saw the 3/8 inch stretch ring in the young woman’s ear. Then I saw the braces on her teeth. Aesthetic contradictions, I thought.

I a saw a brown man selling oranges from a purple shopping cart at the 710 Freeway terminus today. If I could have, I would have bought a bag of oranges from him just to taste the color.

I saw my mother in a photograph of myself today. I was holding my soon-to-be eight-year old on a too-big bicycle on a gravel road near Santa Barbara during a recent Spring Break get-away. I was in the background, but still, it was her! It was my mother holding my son. Where was I? I had to magnify the photo to see that it was me. My mother doesn’t own a pair of blue Crocs.

I saw a Jaguar cross three lanes on the 710 Freeway today to dislodge unfurled paper towels that had wrapped around the Jag’s grill and fluttered over the hood to impair the driver’s vision. It reminded me of a smartly dressed woman exiting the Ladies’ Rest Room walking confidently back to her dinner companions with toilet paper stuck to her $400 shoe. If only her eyes peered over her shoes. Tisk.

Everything else is a blur.

Corrected Vision

2008-04-09T23:00:00.000-07:00

“Is that because you didn’t see her when you saw her?” my partner asked.

I blinked my eyes, unable to answer. Why was I repeatedly watching Ani Difranco on a YouTube Tonight Show clip from a few days ago?

My first viewing was when my partner had played it for me on Saturday morning, the day after we had seen Ani perform at the opulent Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles. A bobbing guitar playing figure on the stage sang Ani’s songs and I believed it was her.

I wore my Harry Potter’s to the concert on Friday night, as I am wearing them now on Day 5 of an eye infection I seem to get every two years. A coworker said that I looked like Harry Potter during Eye Infection 2004, and while I felt hurt by his remark, I adopted that name for my glasses.

Harry Potter and I only share the shape of our lenses, not the prescription. The prescriptive lenses to correct my astigmatism, compounded with the little extra correction for my near sightedness, distort my eyes and make them appear ferret-like. At least that’s how I see it.

I couldn’t read the freeway signs on the ride in to Los Angeles which wasn’t great since I was driving. It was already dark and my fair night vision had been reduced to poor. The street lights, stop lights, well, any light or lit sign looked like an illuminated blob. I’ve neglected my eye exams over the last few years and there was no amount of squinting that would make up for it.

“You’re going to have to help me navigate,” I told my partner, as we approached a freeway exit. “I really can’t see.”
“Then why are you driving?”
“Because you are having trouble with your eyes,” I said. (My partner is on the upswing from several eye surgeries.)

I laughed. It was a little too loud and a little fake and it fit into a key hole that unlocked my vanity. Not my physical vanity, but my emotional vanity. I’m used to looking at my physical vanity during these eye infection bouts.

It’s as if a vinyl record is placed on a turntable when I wear my glasses for an extended period of time. The needle finds a groove and the old message plays through the dust and scratches: “You’re not the pretty one. You’re not the pretty one. You’re not the pretty one.”

I'm mildly amused to see something so obsolete still playing inside me, yet still have enough emotional power to make me turn my head to hear the message through the dust and scratches.

My new digitized vanity looks like emotional arrogance. It’s new to me, and indescribable, so will require my patience to let it come into focus. It’s presentation is completely digital – On/Off. Driving virtually blind showed me that I think I am bigger than I actually am. Good intentions are good, but reckless endangerment is bad. On/Off. I’m sobered to see how I've overestimated myself.

32 Flavors
By Ani Difranco

squint your eyes and look closer
I'm not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
and I'm beyond your peripheral vision
so you might want to turn your head
cause someday you're going to get hungry
and eat most of the words you just said

both my parents taught me about good will
and I have done well by their names
just the kindness I've lavished on strangers
is more than I can explain
still there's many who've turned
out their porch lights
just so I would think they were not home
and hid in the dark of their windows
til I'd passed and left them alone

and god help you if you are an ugly girl
course too pretty is also your doom
cause everyone harbors a secret hatred
for the prettiest girl in the room
and god help you if you are a pheonix
and you dare to rise up from the ash
a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy
while you are just flying back

I'm not trying to give my life meaning
by demeaning you
and I would like to state for the record
I did everything that I could do
I'm not saying that I'm a saint
I just don't want to live that way
no, I will never be a saint
but I will always say

squint your eyes and look closer
I'm not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
And I'm beyond your peripheral vision
So you might want to turn your head
Cause someday you might find you're starving
and eating all of the words you said

Larue Redux

2008-04-08T22:05:00.000-07:00

My cryptic account of the clipper ship running aground has piqued some interest in Dr. Larue. He cannot adequately be described, but must be experienced. I wish everyone I have met was like that.

I was trying to remember when I met him and I’m still not sure. Maybe it was 1987. He was dating Robin, my partner’s best friend. The first meeting, or my memory of what I think was the first meeting, was at a wedding at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for Robin and my partner’s mutual friend. At one point at the sit-own reception, Dr. Larue flung a dinner roll at Robin who was standing half way across the room. Apparently, he really didn’t want to be there.

I got to know Dr. Larue after that wedding reception over the years and watched him learn when it is appropriate to throw a dinner roll at the woman you are dating and when it is not. He learned social etiquette after the window for such education has gracefully closed for the rest of us. Yet, he can be a warm host when he wants to be. I have been the guest of honor at his studio where he has microwaved Potato Surprise for me on my birthday.

If the good Doctor wants to learn or experience something, anything, he will. He does not broadcast in his appearance or demeanor the creative, ingenious, zany, insane potential he has for manifesting his ideas. He simply does.

He has strolled with me through the Philadelphia Museum of Art when I was 8 months pregnant. He hates babies and most young children and isn’t ashamed to say so. He has done significant home improvement projects with me when he was merely a willing participant with power tools. He has kept rats as pets, beat his hand on a cement block for his martial arts practice, and slept in the same industrial studio since I have know him.

He holds his compass steady and stays true to his North. That's Dr. Larue.

The Doctor Makes House Calls

2008-03-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

(Dr. Larue sans nose adhesive)

The good Dr. Larue made an unscheduled house call today. I was bent over in the prone weeding position and didn’t notice his arrival. No matter. Dr. Larue quietly left one of his calling cards in the next planter from where I was weeding. Then he cruised my street, watched from the quiet comfort of his unadorned Prius.

His red nose was spotted by my partner who bellowed, “Larue!” My children and the neighbor boys chased him like dogs. Dr. Larue parked and admitted to leaving the clipper ship that we were gathered around. My oldest boy claimed it as his own and immediately began repairs.

Dr. Larue had damaged the ship and inflicted the sails to lit cigarettes for some creative piece he was working on. This is the same Dr. Larue who pickled vintage 1950’s Barbie heads, motorized a pram and rode it around a dry lake bed, photographed a hitching post black jockey from San Pedro, California to Laughlin, Nevada, photographed the contents of willing women’s purses, sewed hand bags out of truck tire inner tubes, and, well, I lost touch with the good doctor for a while. I know there is more.

I always want to know what the more is. He makes me feel like free spirits don’t have to finally conform just because they are graying at the temples. He’s the type of doctor I want in my life because he’s a self-proclaimed doctor. He makes it all up as he goes and reminds me about how serendipitous life becomes when the house calls are unscheduled.

Clipper Ship Poetry Slam

2008-03-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

Clipper Ships

by Matt Montini
"Me and my dad make models of clipper ships."
"I like clipper ships because they are fast."
"Clipper ships sail the ocean."
"Clipper ships never sail on rivers or lakes."
"Clipper ships have lots of sails and are made out of wood."
OK. Who's next?

(Excerpt from Little Man Tate)

Clipper Ships

by Toggle Switch

“A clipper ship is in the planter.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“No kidding. It’s a clipper ship, alright.”
“Where?”
“There.”
“Get the camera.”

I have arrived at the party!

2008-02-29T23:59:00.000-08:00

Was that more than six words?

Toggle Switch: Aging, I learn more, know less.

Mrs. TS: Input output bathe work sleep again

Little Toggle: Swimming, school, summer, music, knives, sweets

Littlest Toggle: Swimmer eats burritos, artist plays hard.

Today Only: Hallmark should hop on leap year.

Picture Justification: Seeing lunar eclipse thrills my retinas.

Contents as Art

2008-01-20T19:03:00.000-08:00

I unexpectedly saw an old friend last Saturday night and felt myself reel back to 1991 when the contents of my purse feel under his bohemian photographic gaze. I wasn’t special then, merely willing. Any woman who agreed to unclasp her latch and pour her contents onto his canvas received equal attention.

He was cleaning out his studio recently and my contents were in a collection with others finding their way to their rightful owners and final resting places. If my contents-as-art were to hang in a gallery and be given a title, “Practical” would sit unchallenged under his archival quality print.

Perhaps contents reflect center cores of character? It surprised me that seventeen year-old artifacts are not that far off from my contents from today. It shouldn’t have. All changes happen at the fringe, the core remains the same.

“Practical” 1991 (from left to right)

Paper Debris: I still have my Vons club card, somewhere. I simply have to enter my phone number at the check stand to get the Vons Club savings. Old receipts from a forgotten purchase.

Check Book: I rarely write checks now. I never carry the check book.

Tiny Notebook: Indispensable for quick notes and ideas. I wish I still had this one to see what I had thought was worthy of capture.

Black Pens: I never use blue.

A Polaroid Proof: From another gaze by the same photographer. That’s me in a Laughlin casino in front of a quarter poker slot machine. There is a plastic flamingo behind me. A black lawn jockey is somewhere in the proof. I cant find him in the scene today.

Key Ring: I’m still using that 29 cent hardware store key ring. Only the keys have changed.

Hair Brush: I have more hair today, but I don’t carry a hair brush. Curious.

Pocket Calendar with Clip: When did Paper Debris become worthy to clip in my calendar? If I read my own mind, I suspect I clipped appointment cards, the kind the dentist fills out and hands you before you leave the office.

Tic-Tacs: Spearmint was a new flavor way back then.

No DEC: A corporate pin-on button give-away when my company migrate from a aged and failing DEC to an IBM mainframe.

In the Belly of the Whale: I gave up that practical little guppy when he started to unravel. A Band-Aid: I must have had new pumps and I was anticipating blisters on my heels. Eye drops: My eyes got dry then. They still do. Chap Stick: I hate dry, chapped lips.

Sunglasses: Always dark lenses. Those were tortoise shell frames, as I recall.

My Wallet: Always black leather and fat. Full of everything but cash.

“Practical, Still” 2008 (from left to right)

Paper Debris: More paper debris than 17 years ago, and trash too.

Check Book: I never carry the check book. Except today, the only time I have ever photographed the contents of my purse.

Tiny Notebook: I started writing again in a tiny notebook at the tail end of last year. I love this little bound version. It feels sturdy and permanent as if the quick notes and ideas I jot down have substance and potential to germinate into full grown pieces.

Black Pens: Black roller balls. Some things never change.

Tic-Tacs: Fresh breath is timeless.

Spare Subaru Clicker: After ten years of daily use and abuse, plastic just wears out.

Portable Medicine Cabinet: Old Advil bottle filled with an assortment of pain relievers. Lip goo clear and colored. Floss (never leave home without it now). Hand cream, the kind that the Norwegian fisherman use.

Key Ring: My office keys. My other key ring must have been on the horse-head key hook inside the house.

Franklin Planner: I’m old school. I like paper calendars and mechanical pencils.

Twin Blackberries: I’m old school, yet technologically redundant. I’m an IT paradox.

Ben Franklins: My Whole Food cheaters in their broken glass case. When I am desperate to read the 6 point type in dim light, I pop them on the end of my nose.

Sunglasses: Dark lenses and metal frames. The same pair I’ve been wearing for at least 15 years. I’ve replaced the lenses twice.

My Wallet: Black lovely leather, zips all the way around. This one has eighty-three dollars in it. Fringe.

A moment

2007-12-31T18:29:00.000-08:00

Bird-like, bare-chested sitting on the back yard fake enameled royal blue ice cream parlor chair. Navy blue sweat pants hang on his legs, a size too big. The Conair buzzes. His wheat colored hair flies in the breeze like a wish made on a dandelion. He grips the chair seat, expected to sit still, expecting some pain as if about to receive an inoculation. “All done?” He asks, hopeful, pleading.

The older boy, down to his navy blue Hanes underwear, skin whiter than the snow that will never fall here, admonishes, “Watch the ears. They’re big like an elephant’s.” A thin black comb drags through his copper curls, the tines scraping his scalp. “Ouch! You’re hurting me.” The Conair whirs and competes with the twin engine Cessna flying low overhead.

She sees things only an artists sees. Today her medium is her sons’ hair. She has studied both heads when they were both cue balls. The hair patterns were implied for the first year of their lives and then confirmed when they both started growing their hair and sprouting front teeth. She touches their heads and feels her way across the cut. She could run the humming Conair across each boys head with her eyes closed if she wanted to, but she doesn’t, ever.

A Christmas Mystery: Santa Takes a Back Seat

2007-12-24T11:19:00.000-08:00

(Written and illustrated by the Littlest Toggle, age 7. "I thought people would enjoy my story.")

One day over at the North Pole the elves went into the toy factory and the toys were all gone. One of the elves said “Lets go tell Santa”. So they all went to get Santa. An elf knocked on the door knock knock knock. When no one came they pushed the door open and Santa was not there. But there was foot tracks leading out the window. The glass was broken. The elves climbed through the sharp glass and walked over to the sleigh. One elf named A.J. said ”go Dasher, Rudolph, Doner, Comet, Blitzen, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen and Cupid.”

All of the reindeer flew up in the air. Santa’s sleigh flew up in the air. The elf named Quincy saw a car driving away from the north pole. He told the elf driving Santa’s sleigh to land on top of the car. Then Vixen saw Santa sitting in the backseat of the car with all of the toys.

Then Quincy saw the driver of the car. It was his archenemy Arnold trying to steal Christmas because Santa picked Quincy to be an elf. Quincy knew that Arnold was trying to steal Christmas because Santa chose Quincy to be an elf instead of Arnold.

Quincy told Rudolph to shine his nose at Arnold so that he would take a wrong turn down the dead end road. A.J. the elf said, “It worked!” Arnold stopped the car and Quincy opened the back door that let Santa and the toys out.

“Arnold, I had no idea you wanted to be an elf so badly. Christmas can’t be stolen. What would you like for Christmas?” Santa said.

“I want to be an elf more than anything,” Arnold said.

“You can work on the trains for the good boys and girls,” Santa said.

“Sorry Santa for trying to steal Christmas," Arnold said.

“Let’s go have have some hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls,” Santa said.

They lived happily ever after.

Merry Christmas!

Holiday Made in U.S.A.

2007-12-24T10:19:00.000-08:00

Peanut Claus

(Foreign workers earning less than peanuts a day were not involved in the creation of Peanut Claus. Hand-made in Santa Ana, California, by a self-proclaimed lover of tedium resulting in holiday whimsy.)

Exponential

2007-11-25T11:56:00.000-08:00

My partner began the tedious chore of transferring our digital photos stored on her iMac to her somewhat new iBookPro today. The digital photography age began in our household in 2001 with a big investment in the then cutting-edge Nikon Coolpix 995. It was a deliberate departure from film, which reminds me of this:

While on a camping trip two years ago with my then five-year old son, I took a picture of him with a one-use camera. He asked to see the photograph in the LCD panel which didn’t exist. I told him the camera had film and he couldn’t see it until it was developed. He asked me what “film” was.

I have a reputation in my family for promising to send photos and then forgetting to do so. It feels like a huge effort to print digital photographs, which I find stunningly ridiculous when I think about how I used to put “film” on the shopping list, remember to bring extra film to an event, drive the exposed film to the photo processor, remember to pick it up . . . .

A digital camera and a huge computer hard drive make every snap of the shutter a potential keepsake. That makes room for some inexpensive creative freedom, something film can’t compete with. Six years, four digital cameras, and 14,874 photographs later, I am at once aware that my children are still that, children. If I could do math beyond simple arithmetic, I could predict today how many thousands of digital photographs I will have of them when they leave home. I could do some capacity planning and start seriously saving for the super computer I will need to buy in order to store and catalogue their childhood images.

I see those cheeky babies appear in all of their 256-color digital imagery on the iBookPro’s flat screen now and I am transported to the moment the files were created. Looking doesn’t bring them back into my arms and onto my hip. My babies are trapped in my boys. I find my own sentimentality is like eating a pound of fudge, sweet yet sickeningly heavy.

Picture books will be made, not for me, but for them. There's a service for that, you know? Someday it will be fun for them to see their beginnings and their progression into manhood neatly chronicled in bound tome-like books. I may even enjoy a taste of my own sentimentality then.

I should order several bound picture books, a set for them and a set for me, but I’m old school. I have my cigar box. It is my collection of Kodak photographs from my own childhood that I have had for years. It is a tactical experience for me to pull out the faded and archival-quality prints, to look at the date stamps in the white print borders, to know that my mother and father touched those physical artifacts from my life, and I have them with me today.

Perhaps I’ll give my boys bound books and a cigar box. That sounds like a comfy spot between the old school and the new.

"I'm ready for my close up, Mr. Demille."

2007-11-24T21:59:00.000-08:00

Thank you, clammy, for encouraging my happy indulgence.

Technicolor Bed Hair

Tog Liechtenstein

I've always known you were there.

Floss me!

I'm told I have a square jaw.

The Wizard of Toggs

I've got my eye on you.

Let It Be for I am the Walrus.

Revisiting Six Degrees of Happiness

2007-11-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

Something reminded me of this post from two years ago and I suddenlty felt a new list coming on. I associate my happiness with my thankfulness, so perhaps it is list of thanksgiving for the uncomplicated things in my life.

Ten things that make me happy right at this very moment:

1. Spending quality time in my MacBook’s photo booth.
2. Watching a House marathon in my bed hair and flannel pajamas during the day.
3. Eating a huge bowl of Cuties.
4. Experiencing my children bloom into rare beauties.
5. Daily reminders that I live in Paradise.
6. Feelinig the adrenalin rush from the possibility that I can ride that coming wave.
7. My new job where everything is at once familiar and yet so very strange.
8. Carpooling with Dennis Bartel.
9. Everyone I am lucky to know, from a minute ago to a million years ago.
10. Knowing that tomorrow is a new day and that opportunity awaits me.

100 Words: Rusty

2007-11-20T06:59:00.000-08:00

I thought I could sit here and easily bang out 100 words and pick up where I left off. I am self-conscious from trying so hard now, hoping for a couple of cranks on the nut of my creativity and expecting some budge from the bolt. I like the part of me that can thread a nut on a bolt, yet I am surprised that my threads have rusted. I deserve to twist without satisfaction. The best way to get rid of rust is to prevent it. I should remember this moment, but instead I want my WD-40 can to always be full.

Can you say, “Coulrophobia?”

2007-10-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

My youngest boy, only nineteen months-old at the time, riding in the Radio Flyer wagon that I was pulling at the local Christmas parade, was accosted by a teenager on a skate board with a rainbow afro and a can of Silly String.

Terror! Freight! Panic!

There was no way for me to anticipate or intervene. The Silly String stream hit my baby in the chest, he burst into tears, and his coulrophobia was born.

Every October, my boys decide upon a Halloween costume. Every year, since my seven year-old had language, I have encouraged him to be a clown. Every year he says, “No, mommy.”

What a wonderful way for a boy with coulrophobia to take his power back than to actually become what he fears and see that there is nothing behind the grease paint, but a human being just like him?

He is going as Santa Claus for Halloween this year. That’s about as close to a clown as he will ever get. I relish the irony even if he can’t.

~ ~ ~

My boy asked me not to buy the ice cream cones with the clown. When I told him the clown brand was all the story offered, he asked me to alter the box. I did, and always will.

My Postcard from the Dead Letter Bin: Sent from New Orleans, Louisiana, March 4, 2007, Vatican Mosaic Studio Tour.

2007-09-17T22:22:00.001-07:00

(The United State Postal Service started a dead letter office in 1825 to deal with undeliverable mail. Approximately 57 million items end up in this office every year, where enclosed items of value are removed and the correspondence is destroyed. When enclosed items are deemed to be of obviously exceptional value, efforts may be made to return them to the sender.)

Why some craftsmen choose to work in mosaic and copy classic masterpiece paintings is beyond my creative sensibility, but I still wanted to make time and stop in at The Old Ursuline Convent in the French Quarter during my February convention trip. The Vatican Mosaic Studio Tour’s exclusive one-city show had finally arrived in New Orleans. Had Hurricane Katrina lost her devastating wind and had Hurricane Rita veered farther south, I would have been a year too late.

The craftsmanship and attention to detail in each mosaic piece was awe-inspiring. I respect the craftsman’s ability to find the correct color and hue in glass to replicate the master’s work. Then to find the patience to assemble the replica piece by piece and derive satisfaction from a minimal amount of progress from a maximum of effort is testament to perseverance.

Thirty seven mosaics hung in various rooms through out the Ursuline convent, representing secular and religious themes. Monet, Van Gogh, Chagall and Rembrandt also had their work recreated in glass and were familiar and enjoyable to see in another medium. The religious pieces, one a huge Mary on her way to a Catholic church in Milwaukee, glittered with her gold in leaf aura, were hugley popular with the other show visitors.

I found myself at the end of a show, having walked through the corridors where some of the mosaics hung, to the show’s termination point: the gift shop. The Vatican Mosaic Studio Tour funneled its visitors out the back door of the Old Ursuline Convent and into a giant white tent, the kind that get set up for catered political events and outdoor high-end weddings.

The make-shift gift shop was a replica of the Old Ursuline Convent gift shop with its offering of devotional paraphernalia, crucifix jewelry, and prayer books with a strategic sprinkling of souvenir items for the Vatican Mosaic show. Museum directors have really honed their marketing skills by transforming images that started in oil paint, replicated in glass, and ended in plastic. The plastic, of course, will transform itself to paper and that will hopefully be used to fuel future shows such as The Vatican Mosaic Studio Tour, no matter what taste is left in the mouths of tour visitors.

The Vacation Souvenirs I Didn’t Buy

2007-09-08T19:55:00.000-07:00

My oldest son started the fourth grade this week and so did his introduction to California and its 21 missions as the primary focus of his social studies curriculum. It’s a blessing and curse for children to endure their parents’ reminiscent. I shared this one with my son when it seemed like a good idea to wedge a trip to San Diego de Alcala*, the first and “mother” of all missions, in between two days at Sea World:

“I remember one year when my dad got a California map out and marked all 21 missions and planned our family vacation.”

God, I feel old when I do that.

I must have been in the fourth grade when my father drove our Country Squire station wagon for hours until we reached each of the adobe structures that held some meaning to the state history where I was born.

I don’t remember gift shops at the missions we visited. I also don’t remember coffee bars, but I didn’t drink coffee then and my parents didn’t either. If there were gift shops back then, I would have had my eye on the Turkey Nun, not because I am Catholic, I’m not, but because she’s just so darn cute.

Cyber Nun would have been impossible to pass up too, but she would have been holding a Smith Corona manual typewriter, unless she was truly modern, like the Flying Nun. Then she would have been holding an IBM Selectric.

*(Is it bad that my heart soared when I read of Frey Jayme’s bludgeoning at the hands of the native people on the very spot where he died?)

Be a Hammer not an Anvil

2007-08-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

I saw this amazing photograph and breathed a sigh of relief. The Utah miners are saved! I thought. Positive thinking. Hopeful thinking. Wishful thinking. Delusional thinking.

I was mistaken. The official AP captian informed me: "Ritual recycling: A man in Nicaragua is covered in recycled oil Friday during celebrations of the patron saint of Managua, St. Dominic of Guzman, in Managua."

Who was St. Dominic of Guzman that he would compell men to cover themselves in recycled oil full of toxins and debris? Why oil? I couldn't find the answer on the Internet, the Source of All Modern Truth. Perhaps it is a local Managuan ritual that has yet to be documented and turned into digital information?

But this, as old and dead as Saint Dominic exisits in I's and O's on the Internet:

A man who governs his passions is master of his world. We must either command them or be enslaved by them. It is better to be a hammer than an anvil. - Saint Dominic

I am a hammer.

AP photo by Esteban Felix, August 10, 2007.

Find Your Peace Where Ever You Are

2007-07-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

I found mine this morning aboard the MV Challenger, a marine biology rig, manned with forty day campers dressed as sea creatures. A hazy marine layer bounced a terrific glare off of the gray ocean as we escaped the no-wake zone. My seven year-old sea anemone son brought the sun shine out in me. Oh, to steal away from work for an unplanned three-hour cruise that didn’t result in a shipwreck with the Professor and Mary Ann meant one-on-one time with my sea anemone, the sea breeze on my face, and a little education about the teeming sea life in the Long Beach breakwater (who knew?).

The marine biology crew cast a wide net and hauled in lobsters, shrimp, bottom feeder fish (California halibut, the only name I can remember), and a lot of shiny white fish that looked like they could become bait unless they grew a lot bigger real fast. Then the crew dropped a dredge and scooped up what looked like yuck from the forty foot ocean depth. More sea life! All kinds of wormy creatures and star-thingies live in the dark chocolate brown silt.

The flip-flop wearing marine biologist who spoke into a microphone kept talking about ocean flora and fauna adaptation. The California halibut is as brown as the silt it lives on. After birth, the Cali-hali migrates its right eye to the left of its body so that both eyes are on “top” once it is fully grown.

I understood the marine biologist perfectly. Adapt to your changing environment. Move your eyes to see clearly. Adapt and your peace will come.

My anemone amongst the mussels.

48 Hours Away

2007-06-19T20:30:00.000-07:00

Carey
Joni Mitchell, 1970

The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldn't sleep
Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey But it's really not my home
My fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet
And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne . . .

I took my boys camping for three short days and two short nights to El Capitán State Beach just north of Santa Barbara. We joined 15 other families who we have a very loose association as they either live in our town or attend our school or know someone who attends our school.

A few of my observations and suggestions from my 48 hour camp out follow:

Never camp for less than it takes you to pack and unpack.

When camping with a group, always under pack. You can count on many people over packing and through the communal kindness of fellow campers find what you didn’t pack by simply asking, “Does anyone have _________?”

Reciprocate to your fellow campers with the items that you have over packed. I followed my own advise above and didn’t over pack but gladly volunteered my Coleman propane two-burner stove and cutting board for Monday night’s Mexican Fiesta.

When cooking for a group, as we all did, cut the quantity you think you need in half. I still feel sick from the volume of fresh, still-edible food thrown in the dumpster simply because no one wanted to transport it home. The homeless shelter in my town could have eaten very well for a night on what we threw away. (I grabbed items I could bring home and feed my family, but still I feel guilty about what I saw being hastily thrown away. Americans!)

Bring a ball, any ball. Children can make a long-lasting game with a tennis ball, soccer ball, or Whiffleball. Adults like a good ball game too, if they can get the ball away from the children.

Clip your children’s fingernails before leaving home for camp. Eradicating the biological accumulation under their nails becomes a post-camping chore along with unpacking the car and how to get the ten pounds of camping crap back into the five pound camping crap bin.

In 1969 a blowout on an oil rig six miles off of Santa Barbara spewed 3 million gallons of oil into the ocean -- killing thousands of fish, birds, sea lions, and other forms of marine life, and befouling beaches for miles. That was 38 years ago and I can tell you that the Santa Barbara oil spill clean-up is still not done. The soles of my feet were anointed with the black ooze and it took elbow grease and Goof Off to remove the remnants of that man-made catastrophe after I excavated my children’s finger nails.

Seaweed indicates ocean life. Rejoice in the slimy feel of kelp wrapping around your ankles when you venture into the surf.

Take a fist full of quarters. Even thought you think you aren’t going to shower because you’ve been swimming in the ocean, hot water redeems and makes a person feel human again. Two quarters is all anyone needs to feel human again. Women tend to think they need 18 quarters to feel human again, but not me.

If the Women’s Shower has a line out the door, discretely move to the Men’s Shower. Call into the room as if you are looking for your son (even if you don’t have a son) and if no one answers or there is no movement, slip into the nearest shower and shut the door. Two quarters equals 4 minutes of hot water. Any more is simply greedy.

Look for the magical free spirit in the group. There is always one. If it isn’t you then look closely. I found him early on Sunday afternoon. I called him the Bubble Man because he had a machine that created bubbles within bubbles. He first brought the machine to the beach and bubbles drifted over the white water. He then cranked up the machine after dinner. The children ran to the Bubble Man and his machine every time. He told them to bring back the bubbles so that he could put them back in the machine. I believed if a bubble could be returned to him, he could put it back in the machine.

My postcard from the Dead Letter Bin: Sent from Metairie, Louisiana, March 8, 2007

2007-06-15T23:50:00.000-07:00

(The United State Postal Service started a dead letter office in 1825 to deal with undeliverable mail. Approximately 57 million items end up in this office every year, where enclosed items of value are removed and the correspondence is destroyed. I am pulling this postcard, and others to come, from the dead letter bin because it has sat undelivered, until now. )

I went to a week-long conference in New Orleans and Delta overbooked my return light. As a consolation, after waiting two hours after my flight departed, I receive a $400 voucher for a ticket to fly on Delta to any of the contiguous United States, a free cab ride to and from the airport, and a night at the Metairie Landmark Hotel.

My luggage was sent on to Los Angeles and I only had the clothes on my back. When I arrived at the Landmark Hotel, it was undergoing renovations but the lounge was still open for business, at least until 9 p.m. I arrived fifteen minutes before closing and plonked down at a table. The other bumped Delta travelers were sitting at their lonesome tables, still in dressed in their corporate attire.

Televisions glowed from the elevated corners of the room sending cacophonous tinny soundtracks into the thick Metairie night. The lounge was open, but the waitress or waiter was gone as if fired before the rush. A table of local women sat next to me.

I must have had that “I’m hungry and thirsty and not going home tonight” look on my face because a woman with ham hocks for biceps got up from the local table and asked me if I wanted a drink. Hell yes I wanted a drink, one of those Louisiana beers, what was it called? “Abita.” Yeah, that one. She went behind the bar and opened an Abita with her teeth then brought the bottle to me. Okay, she used a bottle opener, but she was the type who could have used her teeth.

Then she asked me what I wanted to eat. I asked her what she liked. “Anything fried,” she told me. “I’ll have the salmon, grilled.” No, I’m not from here lady, so don’t be hurt.

How bad could the grilled salmon be? When you haven’t eaten for eight hours and you know you will wear the clothes you have perspired in all day again tomorrow, anything hot tastes darn good. It did.

After my salmon and Abita, I ascended to the eighth floor in the Landmark’s foggy glass elevator. It would be replaced as part of the Landmark’s renovation effort, wouldn’t it? I found my room, the one with the floral wallpaper. I locked the door with the chain lock. Surely the chain locks would be replaced during renovation with modern-day slide bolts, wouldn’t they? At least I could work in the morning. I had my laptop with me. I looked for the internet connection. DSL? Dial up? When I found a telephone hardwired into the wall, I stripped down to my underwear and went to bed.

I discovered the next day that Metairie isn’t a complete backwater. I walked out of the Landmark Hotel, made a hard left and walked past the car repair and body shops on my way to what appeared to be a mall. I could charge my Blackberry and at least read some emails (my charger was in my luggage in Los Angeles by then). Inching towards the mall I looked to my left and saw a Whole Foods. It was an oasis in the swamp-filled desert, complete with outdoor tables and chairs.

The Metairie Whole Foods parking lot is a beautiful sight in March. I should know. I looked at it for six hours before calling for my free cab ride to the airport.

Lineage

2007-06-03T11:24:00.001-07:00

Thirteen days remain in the school year and the papers and worksheets bulge in my boys’ school folders. I sat at my dining room table last night reading each paper and sorting them into two piles: Recycle Bin / Keepers. This Keeper touched me and unexpectedly showed me what I already knew about my oldest son.

(Self portrait drawing found on hand-written original poem on July 21, 2007.)

Self Portrait
By my 3rd grade Son
April 2007

My eyes are like great ants
Marching over words
In the books I read.

My mind is an army
Blocking off bad thoughts
And letting in new thoughts and ideas
To keep me happy.

My hair is like fire
Burning what gets tangled in my curls.

My ears are like traps
Catching sounds in their clutches.

My heart is filled with caring
Like a good friend.

Parallel Lines

2007-05-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

I felt compelled to visit my mother and so I did.

It was a trip I had felt driven to take for 6 months before I actually boarded the plane in March. I thought it was a trip I needed to take because time is progressing and I hadn’t spent one-on-one time with my mom in years. I have learned through experience that my regrets come from what I haven’t done. I didn’t want this trip to become a regret.

If I had not visited my mother then, I would not have discovered the writer she has become. My mother shared with me her poems, the ones she had started writing in 2005. Her poems were a window pane into a creative side of herself that I had never seen.

She read several of her poems to me after dinner on Saturday night in front of a snapping fire. I could hear in her voice her vulnerability from sharing her work with me as well as her vulnerability in the work itself. Her concrete descriptions used to convey her feelings felt unexpectedly familiar to me, as if I had seen my mother’s face and discovered for the first time that we both balanced parallel lines between our eye brows.

My mother’s father was a writer. I had known that he wrote for a living. It wasn’t creative writing, but clack-clack-clacking at General Electric’s corporate typewriter. When he was away from his wool-suited world, I hope that he gave himself a bit of space to reflect on his life and to write his concrete descriptions. I would relish the chance to read something written from his hand, to follow the parallels from his world into mine.

Corn
Cylone Moore
January 2005

Gold Bantam corn
1940’s Victory Garden favorite
Growing green, tall
Silky tassels
Shining yellow kernels

August . . . first corn harvested
Sugar sweet, no butter needed
Corn roasts celebrating
Haying season’s end
Time to come together.

Farm trucks, cars packed
Like pick-up-sticks in
Door yard
Wood fire pit glowing, fragment
Sunset, pink and gold
Soft summer breeze
Hint of cooler days and nights.

Beer bottles opened,
Rich laughter hearing
Fishing, hunting tales retold
Little ones, teens
Chasing fireflies, each other
Celebrating being alive.

Fifty years later
Remembering how teenagers
Stole over to front pasture
Lying close, blankets
Giggles, jokes, eating
Roasted corn
Sneaking a beer, a kiss or two

Happy heart, fond memories
Roasting corn, wood fire smell
Sounds of laughter
Remain alive and vibrant as when I was fourteen.

"Do you have that barrel in a size 10?"

2007-04-15T12:15:00.000-07:00

On April 15th, the United States traditional tax day, I offer you my own personal tax bane, the Alternative Minimum Tax. It's the tax that if your run-of-the-mill federal and state income taxes didn't lighten your bank account, the AMT will make you feel pounds lighter as your remaining greenbacks fly from your pockets like pigeons returning home to the Treasury.

Barrels don't come with pockets.

~ ~ ~
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal
Democrats and the AMT
Opinion Page, April 14, 2007; Page A8

This year more than three million taxpayers will be hit by the Alternative Minimum Tax on their 2006 income. But next year that number could rise to 23 million unless Democrats in Congress come up with a way to halt the juggernaut that is the AMT. The fixes that have been put in place the past few years have expired, and if nothing is done nearly one in five filers will be caught short by a tax that was created in 1969 to target 21 -- yes, 21 -- millionaires who had managed to avoid paying any taxes at all.

Who are those 23 million? If you live in one of the high-tax states (like California, New York and Conneticut), have a family with children, and make even $75,000 a year, you would probably be one of them.

Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal
Congress's Taxing Hurdle: The AMT
By NICK TIMIRAOS, April 14, 2007; Page A7

As many Americans race to finish their taxes, Congress returns from recess next week facing twin challenges: fixing the alternative minimum tax and raising money to pay for the fix.

The alternative minimum tax originally was created to prevent the wealthy from using heavy deductions to legally avoid paying income tax. But because it is not adjusted for inflation, the tax increasingly ensnares upper-middle-class taxpayers who never were intended to be its targets.

Repealing the tax is supported by members of Congress but is costly. The government could lose $1 trillion in revenue over the next decade if it were eliminated. That has Congress looking at a partial repeal and also at ways to ramp up tax collections by, among other things, trying to close the estimated $290 billion "tax gap" -- the difference between what taxpayers should have paid and what they actually pay.

While the alternative minimum tax means a significant boost in the tax bills of many Americans, proposals to close the tax gap -- by increasing resources for the tax collector -- could be costly for many, too.

Here's what's at stake:

What is the alternative minimum tax? The AMT is a separate system from the regular income tax, and it operates under many different rules. There are two rates -- 26% and 28%. Some popular deductions that many people claim under the regular system, such as state and local taxes, aren't allowed under the AMT. Because of the AMT, taxpayers at certain income levels have to figure out their taxes both ways and pay the higher amount.

How many people are affected? Four million taxpayers will pay the AMT in their 2006 taxes, but that could rise to 23 million for taxes filed next year. Those who pay the tax face an average increase in their tax bill of $6,800.

The problem has become more pronounced because President Bush's tax cuts lowered income-tax obligations for those who pay through the regular tax system without addressing the growing numbers that are subject to the alternative minimum tax.

Who is most likely to get hit by the AMT? The tax tends to hit those with annual incomes between $100,000 and $500,000 the most, but it could reach some who earn as little as $50,000 to $75,000 on next year's taxes.

White-collar professionals in high-tax states like California and in the Northeast tend to bear the brunt of the tax, because it doesn't give credits for state and local taxes. Taxpayers with large families or high medical expenses also are hit harder because it doesn't provide credits for dependents and has a higher threshold for deductions for medical expenses.

What will Congress do? In past years, Congress and the president have prevented the growing reach of the AMT with a series of one-year fixes. Congress passed such a fix for taxes filed this year, but hasn't passed one yet for next year's taxes.

Democrats have suggested that they want to permanently overhaul the tax, but because they have passed pay-as-you-go spending rules, the government would have to pay for the lost revenue by increasing taxes or cutting spending. Ultimately, Congress may defer action until after the 2008 election, when it also will consider the fate of the Bush tax cuts.

If Congress boosts the resources of the Internal Revenue Service, who will be affected? The difference between what taxpayers should have paid and what they actually paid on time was $345 billion in 2001. After enforcement efforts, it collected $55 billion, leaving a net gap of $290 billion. The IRS estimates the overall compliance rate at about 84%.

President Bush's budget for the 2008 fiscal year proposes a $410 million spending increase for compliance programs in order to bring in $29 billion in increased taxes over the next decade. Congress might increase that even more.

As a result, the number of families who are audited could rise. Right now, about 1% of all filings are audited. The odds of an audit are higher for those with higher incomes. Around 6% of individuals with an annual income exceeding $1 million were audited last year.

Small businesses and the self-employed are estimated to be the largest source of the tax gap, and therefore would likely bear the brunt of more aggressive enforcement efforts. One proposal would require banks to report to the IRS merchants' annual credit-card payments so that the IRS could compare the tax returns of small businesses with the payments to determine any underreporting of income. Small-business groups are fighting back by arguing that more intrusive regulation would add to their already high tax-preparation costs.

~ ~ ~

The AMT illustrates how a good-faith attempt to address an issue in the income tax system can have enormous unintended and undesirable consequences."
Eric Solomon, Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, U.S. Treasury Department

"It is easy to look at a $290 billion tax gap and see a pot of gold. But for many taxpayers, efforts to close that gap could become a mountain of paperwork." Scott Hodge, President, Tax Foundation

The Facts
Form 1040, the main tax-filing application, got its name because it was the 1,040th form issued by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, a predecessor to the IRS.

In 2000, each $100 collected by the IRS cost 39 cents to collect.

The first electronic transmission of a tax return to the IRS occurred in 1986. Last year, more than 73 million people filed their taxes electronically.

In a March survey by Harris Interactive, 58% of those polled said they believed their taxes are "too high," about 31% said they are "about right" and 2% said they are "too low."

Americans spent more than 6.4 billion hours on tax compliance in 2005.

In 2001, taxpayers paid, on average, a "surtax" of more than $2,000 each to subsidize noncompliance by others.

The 16th Amendment created the federal income tax in 1913. In its first year, it taxed incomes of more than $3,000 at 1% and incomes of more than $20,000 (about $400,000 adjusted for inflation) at rates from 2% to 7%.

California Screamin'

2007-04-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

We drove south to San Diego County to experience one of Sunset Magazine’s Top Ten Coastal Escapes* this past Monday. Oh, I had no idea that Item # 4 La Jolla could churn so much bile in my stomach and manufacture so much tension in my car! What is it about getting lost and not being able to get found or at least to the final destination that conjures up road trips during summer vacations and feeling very small from the backseat of my parent’s car? My father would jerk the car to the side of the road and unfurl the map. Or was that my mother’s job and after she failed to right the wrong directions, my father would snatch the map from her and figure it out for himself. I was having one of those flashback moments while seeking a Top Ten Coastal Escape. I played every parental role, the navigator, the driver, the navigating driver. It was sheer luck that we ended up at our final destination: the Scripps Institution of Oceanography pier and adjacent tide pools. Believe me, sometimes the journey stinks and the destination is pure relief.

The crashing surf and visit to the tide pools quickly undid the stress that had lodged in my shoulders and stomach. Looking into a microcosmic world where everything is alive but appears dormant slowed me down to be an observer of the world in the tide pools and around me. My boys were thrilled to observe with their eyes and with their hands. The tide was rising. I didn’t want to leave. Just a few more sets of crashing waves to flush it all away was all I wanted, was all I needed.

I loved the juxtaposition of the natural kelp debris and the unnatural orange debris.

(*Sunset Magazine was glib about the information they printed. There is no parking at the Scripps pier. It is a research facility on the UCSD campus and no one knows where it is except the Oceanographers who are studying there. I mean no one because I asked no less than 15 people from students to locals. The website listed in the article is for the UCSD food service and the address is smack-dab in the middle of the campus miles from the pier. And most importantly, they failed to print that the breakfast burritos aren’t served past 11 a.m.)

Clamming in Cali

2007-04-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

I was nervous about having my very first house guest in the Little Hacienda where I have lived with my family for the last six years. It didn’t matter that I felt Clammy was an old friend who I had only met once before. I made no effort to embellish her sleeping arrangements for the four nights and three days she would stayed at my house. In fact, I tried to paint a harsh picture in an unconscious effort to manage her expectations.

“You’ll be on a blow-up mattress in my breakfast room. It will be like camping” I told her.
“I love to camp!” she told me.

It wasn’t until Clammy was two days on my breakfast room floor that I learned that she had never camped in her life. Never! I was at once honored and appalled. What else hadn’t Clammy done that I assumed she had?

“How about a tofu burger?” I asked her, as we toodled down Pacific Coast Highway on a pristine spring day in my jeep known as the Honey Bee. The Bee’s recessed top exposed our fresh-from-winter skin to the bright southern Cali sun. I could feel my nose sizzle like a hunk of blackened tofu on a hot grill.

“Hey, I’m open,” she said, through her smile, but her big brown eyes looked a little horrified.
“Are you sure? We can eat anywhere you want,” I reassured her.
“I want the California experience,” she said, convincing herself.

I suspected Clammy had never eaten a blackened tofu burger with mushrooms, just like she had never been camping. We had walked on Laguna’s Main Beach and then up Forrest Avenue, looking in the shops that sold the California image in the form of expensive souvenirs and home decorator items. Clammy wasn’t interested in bringing any of what they were peddling back to Boston. I was surprisingly relieved.

We returned to the Honey Bee with a few minutes left on the parking meter. I drove south on Pacific Coast Highway toward Dana Point and stopped at a local lunch joint I had been reminded of that morning. The tourists on Forrest Avenue know nothing of this shack know as Taco Loco and would quickly walk past it without giving it a consideration.

“We can eat anywhere you want,” repeating my earlier mantra while propping the backdoor open for Clammy.
“Hey, I’m game,” she said.

Clammy personifies the term “easy going”. She is open to new experiences and truly goes with the flow like a meandering river. That's was it. I wouldn’t try to protect her any longer. We were going in.

Taco Loco feels crowded even when no one is there. The shack is no more than 8 feet by 12 feet. Clammy looked at the menu and could see that there were backdoors there too. She was a real trooper, though, and let me order for the both of us.

The guy in the tie-dyed Taco Loco T-shirt behind the counter asked if we wanted mild, medium, or hot sauce on our tofu burgers. We both opted for medium hot because who really knows how hot hot is? It had been a while since my last grilled blackened tofu burger so I hugged the middle of the road along with Clammy.

Our number was called surprisingly fast and we carried our real China plates to a sidwalk table. We both opened wide and quickly downed our blackened tofu burgers and accompanying tortilla chips that had also received a generous drizzling of medium hot sauce.

If it wasn’t for the mustard and heap of guacamole and medium hot sauce drizzle, I think Clammy would have thought she was eating an In-and-Out burger. But her In-and-Out experience wasn’t until the next day. I didn’t ask her, but I would place a hefty bet on Clammy choosing the blackened tofu burger over the In-and-Out burger any day.

If I’m wrong, at least she got an In-and-Out T-shirt along with her cheeseburger. If I’m right, then the next time I’m at Taco Loco, I’ll be picking up one of those tie-dye numbers for Clammy’s Cali T-shirt collection.

Adaptation Revisited

2007-03-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

It was Santa’s idea to bring a new hoop to replace the cracked and cock-eyed hoop that my boys have adapted to shooting baskets into for the past year.

In past Christmases, Santa would have spent a few extra minutes at my house installing the hoop. After all, how much extra effort could it possibly take to pull the sleigh up next to the busted rim, apply a little magic, slip off the rusted bolts, ratchet the new hoop to the backboard before yelling, “On Dance, On Blitzen . . .!”

Alas, Santa must have had too many houses ahead of him this past Christmas or he was just plain too tired. Can’t say as I blame him. It took me until March to find the energy to face the rusted bolts on the old hoop. I applied WD40, my idea of magic, and then cranked on the bolts with every kind of wrench in my tool box.

“With the right tool, any job can be done,” I told my eager nine year old. Then I corrected myself.

“With the right tool, any job can be done quickly.” I didn’t have the right tool. My socket wrench set had gone missing. It’s not uncommon for anything to go missing at my house and then to turn up after a replacement has been purchased. I hadn't purchased a new socket wrench set yet.

I stood on my eight foot ladder and held the bolt with gripper pliers while I fumbled to untwist the nut with a crescent wrench. I looked for my son below, but he had disappeared. Moments later, my neighbor, Andy, emerged from his back yard with a 32-bit socket wrench set and an eight foot ladder. My son knew that if we didn’t know where ours was, Andy would know where his was.

Two heads are better than one and four hands are better than two when it comes to retrofitting a basketball hoop from Santa on a nine-year old backboard. After two hours and a trip to Home Depot for skinnier bolts, the hoop was secure.

My son asked if he could take the first shot and I was please to tell him of course, take the first shot. He dribbled, set and shot the ball. It hit the rim and bounced down the alley. The lesson of adaptation continued to be taught by the basketball hoop. It was time to adapt to the new tension in the rim and the new hoop’s unforgiving ninety degree angle.

“Why Doesn’t Toggle Blog Anymore?”

2007-03-24T12:35:00.000-07:00

The question from my virtual world and physical world readers makes me feel at once flattered, introspective, and pressured.

The answer is, “I don’t know.”

I have a litany of time-and-energy excuses that can be applied to anything that I am trying to avoid. It is as if the more I stay away from the act of writing the harder it is to get back to it. Not a surprise. So I am up to my old trick of writing about not writing to get me writing again.

What can I tell you? Hummm . . . . I haven’t surfed since December 26, 2006, and I miss it. My new surfboard, a Christmas gift from my partner, has traveled to the beach three times and felt the water only once. The two land-lubbing trips were failures on my part to read the surf report before wracking my board to the top of the Jeep . . . . I planted an Early Girl tomato start in a barrel instead of a hay bale. It’s the pedestrian approach to backyard tomato-growing, I know, but the perky little start looks so happy in the barrel with its dark green leaves stretched out to the sun like a baby reaching for her mommy. I have high hopes for early fruit from you, little plant, little plant . . . . My April Allure arrived on Saturday and it's a good thing because I've been feeling like I need a few new Spring beauty tips . . . . I traveled along with 25,000 colleagues to New Orleans where we pumped money and faith into a city still struggling to recover from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. There’s a blog or two in there fermenting like a fine Cabernet in an old oak barrel, not to be served before its time . . . . My oldest son insisted he wanted to play baseball, so I reluctantly signed him up in a different league not associated with Little League. His passion and my guarded optimism have been rewarded with a positive junior baseball experience. My son is thriving (and having fun) under the leadership and coaching of a fine man who understands the goal is to build skill and confidence in his players, not win games at any cost. Oh, and perhaps the very best part? I only have to work one shift in the snack shack, instead of four.

The Never Ending White Christmas

2007-02-19T19:40:00.000-08:00

Like so much in life, timing is everything. The same applies to Christmas artifacts transported to the alley in February and set out as an offering to passing Alley Rats. Was he really a lame-deer masquerading as a reindeer unable to stand on his own four feet? Where were his two compadres (the Big Lots always sell his ilk in threes). I should have rescued him from his pathetic end, but the thought of acquiring an alley-offered Made In China white-washed stick deer felt oppressive, especially in February. I had put my Christmas decorations away seven weeks ago! Trash pick-up is tomorrow. I hope he can bring good cheer to the seagulls and sanitation workers at the land fill.

Straight from “Scalpel News” (February Allure Magazine)

2007-01-31T21:40:00.000-08:00

Implants for Lips
By Joan Kron

The latest invention for plumping lips, called FulFil, is similar in concept to breast implants. A small silicone sac, inserted into the lip through a single incision, is injected with saline solution in a 20 minute procedure. Patients attain soft, natural-looking results, with none of the stiffness that was seen with tube-like Gore-Tex implants, an earlier technology, according to a video presentation by Atlanta a plastic surgeon Miles Graivier at the annual meeting of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. FulFil is FDA-approved as a nose splint, but to date, 200 women have received as a lip implant with no complications (a coating on the removable implant is designed to keep from shifting or hardening), and 90 percent of the them have reported being satisfied. “while we’ve seen success, this is still in the development phase,” says Graivier, a consultant to Juva Medical, the American manufacturer. “Placement techniques and implant design are still being refined.” In development now are a similar implant for smile lines and improved version of the FulFil that will allow saline to be added or removed with a syringe at any time after placement of the implant. (Toggle: This 196 word piece reeks of wrong-doing -- the use of an FDA-approved product for another use, the "consulting" by Dr. Miles Graivier to the manufactuor, the poor writing . . . . The obvious aside, I just have to ask, isn’t Gore-Tex rainy day outerwear? I suppose that’s one way of preventing chapped lips, to Gore-Tex them first.)

63% more surgical (non-injectable) lip-plumping procedures were performed in 2005 versus 2004 ~ American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery

Lift Preserver
by Joan Kron

Thread lifts or string lifts – in which a doctor inserts threads into the skin to tighten it – have been promoted as less invasive alternates to face lifts. But they actually function best if used to support the deeper tissue in combination with real face-lift, says Robert Singer, a plastic surgeon in San Diego who headed a panel on the lift for the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. That way, the surgeon can better see where to place the sutures. Thread lifts in the cheeks tend to be more successful than in the forehead and neck, but they generally last no more than two years if they’re performed without a face-lift , doctors report. (Toggle: I am reminded of a World War II sailor who was tattooed. Fifty years later, the tattoo looks less like Betty Boop and more like a blue blob on the sailor’s bicep. Won’t this “advanced” plastic surgery lead to men and women looking like Frankenstein-y blobs fifty years from now?)

Riders on the Orb

2007-01-23T17:30:00.000-08:00

The Day Begins
Redwave, Knight

Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is gray and yellow, white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion

Pinprick holes in a colourless sky
Let insipid figures of light pass by
The mighty light of ten thousand suns
Challenges infinity and is soon gone
Night time, to some a brief interlude

To others the fear of solitude
Brave Helios, wake up your steeds
Bring the warmth the countryside needs
~ ~ ~
I saw a man walking along the sidewalk barefoot and shirtless while I was stopped at a traffic light, an unremarkable sight in southern California except for the ten year low temperatures. He had his arms wrapped around his emaciated frame as if he could protect his raw skin from the forty degree sting. He looked like a child in danger where only a parent’s adrenaline can scoop the child up in time from an impending calamity. I looked at the man and felt an adrenaline surge.

I pulled my car to the curb and got out. At once I felt myself in danger. Might the man be crazy? The threat felt false to me. I approached the man and stood in front of him within a few feet of touching him.

His feet looked unexpectedly clean and manicured. His body was not pocked with sores. He wasn’t covered in dirt. He was simply naked except for the scruffy trousers that hung around his hips.

His unexpected clean-shaven face gave away his homelessness by revealing weather-beaten skin. He had a crooked jaw as if it had been broken too many times. Only a few yellow teeth remained in the lower right side of his mouth.

His eyes were clear in a way I didn’t expect. I was mesmerzied by their color, an alluring azure blue. I looked at this man and felt that I saw him. This was a man whose mother gave him life. This was a man who was a boy once. This was a man who I hoped was loved by someone somewhere. Maybe the person who gave him the razor to shave loved him.

“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To get a drink.”
“It’s cold today. Where are your shirt and shoes?”

He pointed at a pile left in front of the Latter Day Saints church door behind him.

“It’s cold today. Can you go get your shirt and shoes on?”
He told me he could.
“Have you eaten today?”
He shook his head no.
“Will you eat something before you get your drink?”
He shook his head yes.

I returned to the interior of my warm car. I fished a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and walked back to the man. I handed it to him and he quickly pocketed it.

The money felt like an embarrassingly hollow gesture, as if any denomination could or would change anything.

“Will you eat before you get drink?”
“Yes.”
“You need to get dressed. It’s cold today. Will you get dressed?”
He shook his head yes.

I got back in my car and watched him. He returned to his pile of things and put a shirt on. I felt relieved, as if the danger had passed.
~ ~ ~
A man who lived just a few doors down from me killed himself this week. He was a faceless neighbor. I have too many of those. I don’t know that I had ever seen him.

“At least he did it in his car,” someone said.

I wasn’t there, but I saw it all.

My neighbor made a hard right from the street we shared onto the nearest cross street and then immediately pulled over.

Were you just out of sight of your wife? Did you have your back to your life and felt free enough to pull the trigger? You drove a mini van which translates in every language to children. Were your children home or in school?

I can see your foot dandling outside of the driver’s door. It is a cartoonish foot, or that of a mannequin or a giant stuffed doll, not the foot of a man so desperate, so despondent, so done, that on a sunny yet frigid southern California morning a self-inflicted gun shot to the head inside the family mini van brought you instantaneous relief from all things corporal. Your feet went forever cold inside of your shoes.

Yellow CRIME SCEEN tape zipped up the street that was far from a crime. The crime was his relentless, persecuting pain. The crime was that death trumped life and no amount of motherly, spousal, parental, or godly love could save him.
~ ~ ~
A boy left for school in his navy blue school uniform jacket, his shoes tied, his hair combed. The air was unseasonably cold so his mother would drive him to school instead of walk today.

They drove up the alley from their garage and were immediately stopped by yellow ribbons. CRIME SCENE CRIME SCENE CRIME SCENE. The boy’s mother wanted to protect her son from the unseen CRIME SCENE remnants, but there it was, a perfectly still foot hanging outside of a mini van door. The foot was not remarkable. The leather shoe and brown sock contrasted benignly with the blue denim above the ankle.

The man could have been looking for something on the floor board of the mini van in the split second the boy and his mother drove by. He could have gone unnoticed in the rush to get to school on time. It was the yellow CRIME SCENE tape and swarming black wool uniformed officers that changed what the boy saw from a still life to a still life.

The mother tried to avert her son's eyes to protect his innocence, but there was no where to look except at the lifeless foot trapped in a useless shoe.
~ ~ ~
Late Lament
Graeme Edge

Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bedsitter people look back and lament
Another day's useless energy spent

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and suckles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young

Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow, white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion

Corporate Conversations

2007-01-21T09:42:00.000-08:00

"Whole Foods threatened to terminate its contract with a California duck grower because he processed and distributed the products of a foie gras producer. The supermarket chain has stopped selling live lobsters, it says, until it can figure out how to keep them more comfortable on their trip from ocean to fish counter. Lobster “condos” have been suggested."

Shouldn’t someone suggest to Whole Foods that the lobsters they sell will be the most comfortable in the ocean? Then again, I understand that neuroscience has established that any life form below a primate is neurologically incapable of consciousness. A lobster wouldn't be any more aware of its body being boiled than a tree branch would be aware of being sawed off.

~ ~ ~
From the WSJ Opinion Page . . .
Udder Madness
January 20, 2007; Page A10

Starbucks advertises itself as a coffee company with a social conscience. These are the folks who created the marketing gimmick of "fair trade" coffee for America's latte drinkers. So it's no shock that Starbucks announced this week that it will buckle under to pressure from left-wing activist groups and phase-out its purchases of milk containing artificial growth hormone.

In so doing the company will help legitimize one of the greatest consumer frauds of recent times: that milk from cows injected with the growth hormone rBGH causes cancer. The hormone's critics also allege that drinking this milk causes early puberty in girls. About 20% of dairy products today comes from cows injected with hormones, which causes them to produce more milk, which in turn reduces prices to consumers. But for 20 years, green and Naderite groups, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, have waged a campaign against rBGH. That campaign has duped millions of health-conscious Americans into paying 40 cents to $2 a gallon more for "hormone-free" milk.

It's a free country, and if Americans are willing to pay a $2-a-gallon premium for a meaningless label on the milk carton, so be it. But as far back as 1993 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved rGBH-milk as "safe for human consumption." Some 14 billion gallons have since been consumed, and there have been no documented instances of disease or sickness. Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution, a former director of the FDA's office of biotechnology, states emphatically: "There is no scientific evidence of a cancer link from the hormone rBGH -- period."

Ironically, many of the same "green" groups, which insist that we follow the "scientific consensus" on global warming, are contemptuous of the genuine scientific agreement on the benefits of bio-engineering. One might think that the left would celebrate technologies that make food more plentiful and cheaper for consumers. With recent claims that millions of Americans go to bed hungry each night, why aren't these groups cheering innovations that cut food costs for the world?

Instead, the Organic Consumers Association, one of the leading opponents of rBGH, compares dairy farms to "concentration camps" on its Website. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claims that hormones are unfair to the cows because they have to carry around more milk. (Toggle says: I would like to see where these claims are made. I laughed out loud at this, especially if it is true.)

The affluent in America can afford to pay higher grocery bills and buy $3 coffee every morning as they wage war against biotechnology. But they do so at the expense of the world's poor, who benefit most from cheap, more abundant food. "There are often fatal consequences to these groups' Luddite philosophy," notes Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

As for Starbucks, its spokesman Brandon Borrman told us "we are only responding to the desires of our customers." It's hard to see how Starbucks can absorb the higher costs of hormone-free milk without off-loading them onto their customers' lattes. And maybe there's a kind of justice in that. As to "social responsibility," it's hard to see where the responsibility lies in promoting a scientifically discredited fear.

(Toggle says: American consumers really want the freedom to choose. That’s why there are 18 different variations on a stinkin’ Starbucks latte. Why can’t Starbucks offer their customers who care about lattes free of rBGH-hormone milk that choice, just like they offer soy, skim, 1% and whole fat milk? Then again, why should they when they can pass on the cost of hormone-free milk in every cup they serve? Watch for a surge in Starbucks profit margin.

I will continue to avoid Starbucks and buy from my local roaster, even if I get a dose of rBGH in every latte.)

Bound for the Bountiful

2007-01-03T23:00:00.000-08:00

I drove 500 miles south on Interstate 5 today. It was a beautiful day to drive through California’s San Joaquin Valley as the sun was bright and the sky shone a brilliant steel blue. My fingers ache from the unconscious demands I placed on them today. They gripped the wheel of my Subaru Outback like meat hooks in a cow’s carcass.

A ride through the San Joaquin Valley reveals two flavors of cow: the manure on the fields and the breathtaking stench of the slaughter house. The good news is that both feel like a rough slap in the face and then the sting fades fairly quickly.

The manure smelled of corporate order and profitability, a necessity for the success of the corporate farm that is the San Joaquin Valley. The slaughter house reminded me of my dead dog Emma and Michael Pollen. When Emma was ill, she left a stink similar to what I smelled today. Michael Pollen was conjured by the stench of cow dung and blood because of his easy to digest logic about America’s corn-fed diet.

Every GAS-FOOD-LODGING exit along I-5 supports America’s obsessive appetite for beef with a promise of golden arches, a demonic smiling clown or a monarch at every off ramp serving their corn-fed beef patties fried, super sized or at least “your way.”

This comes as no surprise and is far from an original observation. Travel across any American interstate and the GAS-FOOD-LODGING landscape is identical. I pity the road tripping vegetarian who can’t find a Subway along the way.

I will swear off beef for my 2007 New Year’s resolution even though I never make resolutions because I never keep them. I won’t keep this one either, but I should. We all should.

Driving through the San Joaquin Valley is like driving through a mixed up rainbow. A blanket of twiggy red almond trees spring up right after the Grapevine. (I suppose I should include the Grapevine in my mixed up rainbow, but the drab brown branches from the barren grape plants faded into the blurred landscape and barely caught my eye).

For one stretch along I-5, hundreds of yellow onions littered the side of the highway. Their golden brown husks matched the blanket of unplowed yellow earth as if they were buttons that had popped off of their cashmere coat. I felt bad for those onions. I always feel badly for food that goes uneaten.

A green patchwork quilt undulated over the low hills for hours as I drove. I tried to make out what was actually making the diamond green patterns without losing control of my eighty mile an hour chariot. Something bushy, deep green and full of vitamins?

If white was a color in the rainbow, it would fit in the San Joaquin mixed up rainbow, not as something living and growing, but as miles and miles of PVC pipe. Seedlings poked their fresh heads through the earth and then emerged through their PVC birth canals to embrace the sun and sky. The grapevines, the onions, the unnamed bushy green plants all seemed to have their beginnings passing through PVC pipe.

I saw two-foot white letters painted on the side of a giant empty navy blue produce truck that said ORGANIC and I felt relieved and comforted that “organic” is a real concept in the corporate farming industry, or at least it is a real concept on the side of a produce truck in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley.

Can PVC pipe and organic produce touch? Is it like keeping Kosher? Just wondering . . .

Local farmers’ markets offer so much locally grown organic produce. I feel connected to the person who grew the produce because that’s who is usually selling it. There’s nutrition in each spinach leaf as well as the farmer’s pride.

I resolve to eat more organic produce in 2007. I will trust that it is indeed organic and better for me and the land in which it is grown. I will put organic lettuce and organic tomatoes on my 100% pure beef hamburgers sizzling from the grill. I will feel at once guilty and smug about my hamburger.

I resolve to look at my 2007 resolution in 2008 and hopefully, by then, replace fish with beef.

On second thought, why wait?

Reverse déjà vu

2006-12-08T22:57:00.000-08:00

My youngest son is growing grass in a sock. It started as a school project in a cup on the kitchen window sill, but quickly became something begging for personification.

My youngest son is growing his hair. His other mother said that the boys will grow their hair until the Iraq War is over. She calls it their Peace-Out hair. I expect their hair will be down their backs before the war ends.

Tonight Janice Joplin appeared on my television singing Cry Baby. I wasn’t watching TV, but stopped and then sat down to watch. I let the song soak through me. I wanted to feel Janice sing the blues. My father’s vitriolic voice interrupted like a juke box prematurely changing the record.

“Nothing but a filthy drug addict.”

“A scourge.”

“Just look at her.”

I did tonight. I looked with fresh eyes 38-years after my father’s judgmental diatribe. Janice was a threat to American decency and it was his parental duty to infuse fear in my heart about Janice Joplin and her long-haired hippie lot.

Janice walked with the microphone pressed to her lips. She commanded the stage. She kicked her legs and twisted her hips and the band started playing. She was slender and wore white hip-huggers, like the kind sold today. She wore a fat shiny gold belt that matched the gold star on her hip-huggers. Her hair was in her face but it looked clean. She had acne on her left cheek and rings on just about every finger.

My youngest son came in and flopped in my lap.

“That’s Janice Joplin,” I said. “She’s singing the blues.”

“What are the blues?”

“When you sing a song from the bottom of your heart to try to feel better,” I said.

“Does she sing for a living?”

”Not anymore,” I said. “She’s dead.”

“How did she die?”

“Drugs,” I said.

“What are drugs?”

“Sometimes people take too much medicine. It’s not good for you to take too much.”

What did my youngest son who is growing his hair long and grass in a sock see? A woman who could be a woman walking down our street, singing from the bottom of her heart to feel better.

Cry Baby
Cry-y-y ... ha ha ha ha ... baby, cry baby, cry baby,
Welcome back home. I know she told you, I know she told you that she loved youMuch more than I do,
But I know she left you,
And you swear that you just don't know why,
Well, honey I swear I'll always be roundIf you ever want meCome on and cry, cry baby, cry baby, cry baby, yeah,
Oh, like you always seem to do.

Don't you know, Honey, nobody ever gonna love youThe way I try to do.Who'll be willing to take your painAnd all your heartache, too ?Honey, I swear I'll always, I'll always be aroundIf you ever want meCome on and cry, cry baby, cry baby yeah, cry baby, yeah, Oh daddy, welcome back home, yeah.

I know when you're sharp and round, babe, Seems like the grass always looks greener,When you're looking over there in somebody else's back-yardSo I know what you're tryin' to tell meWhen you say, mama, mama, mama, mama, mama,I've gotta go out shopping for my lifeI've gotta find my, my own true third eye,Hare Krishna identity out there on the road there.

And although it may be comfortable hereSleeping in all your nice bed with all those satin sheetsAnd all that nice fur, eatin' all that chickenGettin' stoned, havin' a good time I have to go and rough itI have to go to Africa Or I have to go to Omaha, or some place like that,I have to find myself, you know what I mean ?So there's this stud, man, walkin' around the fuckin' highways of America with a pack on his backLookin' for his identity, right ?

Well, I want to say baby don't you know you left your mama here all alone ?You left your good lovin' mama right at homeAnd that should be identity enough for any man, ha ha ha!So I said baby, I know that you're gonna come home to me some dayAnd I'll be able to tell when you walk in my front doorI do, I just do believe that I can be lookin' in your eyesSo Lord, you finally realizeSo you can put your head on my shoulder, babe,'Cause I know you got some more tears to share,Come on, let it go,So come on, come on, come on, come on, come on,Honey, cry, cry baby, cry baby, cry,

Honey when you got some more tears to shedHoney I won't let a man stand in your way, babe,You have to snap all your fear from the door house away dearYou just gotta let it go, baby, come on,Honey cry, oh, cry to me baby.

Black Eye Friday

2006-11-24T18:05:00.000-08:00

I refused to leave my house today. If I didn’t need it, I wasn’t shopping for it. What I needed was to recover from the run-up to Thanksgiving that culminated in a delicious and enjoyable feast on the patio with my family. The turkey tells a different story.

I was luxuriating in my bed hair at half past twelve today, perusing the advertising circulars that had just arrived in the mail. I look at circulars to mindlessly browse from the comfort of my own sofa and for the occasional lost leader bargain. Today I saw in several circulars the gift that no American can live without: The Chocolate Fountain.

Why must we be persuaded to spend our hard-earned cash on a worthless appliance that can have no other function but to spill liquefied chocolate from tier to tier to tier and then to regurgitate it again and again until the plug is pulled?

Last year I believe the gift under every American’s Christmas tree was the Panini Maker and the year before that was Jack LaLanne’s Power Juicer and the year before that was the Whole Turkey Fryer and the year before that was the Panasonic Bread Machine and the year before that was the George Foreman Grill and the year before that . . . .

Why must there always be a the gift? Are we American’s so empty that we must fill the void with single-purposed appliances?

For less than the price of a Chocolate Fountain a llama can be placed under a loved one’s Christmas tree. Well, the promise of a llama, that is. Very little, if any, wrapping paper is needed. It will never be taken to the garage nor dumped into a land fill. It is a gift of hope and resourceful renewal, a gift that’s sweeter than chocolate.

When resources are scarce, it's important that livestock don't use up land reserved for people. At home in rough, mountainous areas of Latin America, llamas are a blessing to families with limited pasture land, and they play a pivotal role in the cultural life of indigenous communities on the high plains of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

Women weave their llamas' fleece into warm clothing to wear or sell. They load them up with goods for market and trek with them across rugged slopes at high altitudes. As they travel, llamas' padded feet don't damage the fragile terrain and their selective browsing doesn't destroy sparse vegetation.

Llamas and their kin, the alpaca, provide Heifer families with invaluable sources of transportation, income and wool, which is prized for making blankets, ponchos, carpet and rope.

Llamas are remarkably disease resistant and require little care; they can carry small loads for distances over rugged slopes at high altitudes. ~Heifer International

What I know now that I surf

2006-11-12T17:10:00.000-08:00

I know that the adventurous spirit that drove me to walk to the San Gabriel River mouth at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains when I was four still lives inside of me.

I know that sitting on my nine foot board and watching a pelican with a four foot wingspan fly by transcends me.

I know that my desire to surf warms me when all that I am wearing is a polyester swimsuit and rash guard in 60 degree ocean water.

I know that a wetsuit that fits correctly feels like a sausage casing.

I know that my newly acquired surfing name, “Clobber Knees,” no longer applies now that I have a wetsuit with padded knees.

I know that zipping up my own wetsuit makes me feel confident.

I know that riding the face of the wave feels like a cross between sliding on a slippery surface and flying.

I know that I am coordinated, can listen to instruction, and can immediately apply what I am told by my surf coach, Jason. (I know because Jason told me so.)

I know that my will to stand up on the surf board forces me to push through a back spasm.

I know that yoga and surfing are close cousins.

I know that I feel invigorated in a way that only focused effort, accomplishment, and the ocean can invigorate.

I know that I am standing at the threshold of a whole new sub-culture that I know little about.

I know that I look forward to surfing and am deeply disappointed when I can’t.

I know that one reason I am considering changing jobs is the ability to take every Friday off to pursue a good wave, or at least the possibility for a good wave.

I know I have a voracious hunger when I step out of the ocean and onto the sand.

I know that I have retrieved a long lost part of me by adding water.

Just Getting Started

2006-11-12T10:38:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about creativity lately, especially about my assumptions around the notion that everyone is creative. I believe everyone has the potential to be creative even if they don’t use traditional avenues for creative expression such as painting, writing, composing, or spinning a potter’s wheel. Creativity can be applied to thinking and problem solving. Creativity, I believe, is a force that runs through each of us like a subterranean river. Possibility and opportunity open each of us up to drinking from that river. It’s never too late to start drilling a well.

"People don't use their creativity as they get older. They think this is supposed to be the end of this and the end of that. But you can't always be so sure that it is the end." ~ Anne Porter, poet

Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal
A 95-Year-Old PoetFinds Her Muse And Literary Praise
'You Can't Drive Anymore,But You Can Still Write';
Homage to Her Late Son
By Lucette Lagnado / Photo By Doug Kuntz
November 11, 2006; Page A1

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- At 95, Anne Porter has senior moments, like finding a ticket that says "Keep This Ticket" in her purse and having no idea what it was for or how it got there.

It is one more frustration of getting old, along with relying on a walker to compensate for an uncertain gait and wearing oversize glasses to reinforce fading eyes. Mrs. Porter also finds inspiration in these setbacks, and that has helped to launch an unlikely, late-blooming literary career.

That mysterious ticket, for instance, inspired this poem:
I keep it carefully
Because I'm old
Which means
I'll soon be leaving
For another country
Where possibly
Some blinding-bright
Enormous angel
Will stop me
At the border
And ask
To see my ticket.

Mrs. Porter was 83 years old when her first volume of poetry, "An Altogether Different Language," was published in 1994. The book was named a finalist in the National Book Awards. A judge of the awards, David Lehman, a poet and professor at The New School in New York, subsequently decided to include Mrs. Porter in the Oxford Book of American Poetry, placing one of her longer poems alongside the works of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot.

"Anne Porter is a marvelously talented poet who has not yet received the recognition that is her due," says Mr. Lehman, who praises her work for its "literary simplicity and directness."

Asked why she keeps writing poems through her 80s and 90s, Mrs. Porter responds that art may be the only pursuit that old age can't wreck:

"You can't sing anymore, you can't dance anymore, you can't drive anymore -- but you can still write," she says.

Poetry is a field filled with productive old people. Stanley Kunitz, the American poet laureate who died in May at the age of 100, was writing poems and being published till the end of his life. The late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize when he was nearly 70. John Ashbery, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is prolific at nearly 80. The new U.S. poet laureate, Donald Hall, is 78 and still working.

Mr. Hall muses that some elderly poets may find the medium well-suited to the rigors of old age: "Poems are made for other persons to read but made out of silence and solitude, and perhaps there is more silence and solitude in the world of the old," he says.

Mrs. Porter has developed a knack for chronicling the rigors of old age with biting verse, as in "Old in the City":
You stay away from doctors,
They'd send you to the hospital,
Where pieces are cut out of you,
And after that you die.

She has done readings at Canio's Books, a literary hangout here in Sag Harbor, at churches, schools, libraries and at downtown New York bar called KGB, where many in the audience were in their 20s. "I was perfectly comfortable," she says.

Mrs. Porter was married to the artist Fairfield Porter, considered one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century. After he died in 1975, she found life on her own difficult, especially as her health declined. She lived with her youngest daughter for years. When her daughter married and moved out, Mrs. Porter suffered several crises. "I fell downstairs twice," she says. Alone and increasingly vulnerable, she decided to sell her home and move into an assisted-living community run by Quakers.

She was all set to go when her daughter and son-in-law offered her another option: come live with them in a nearby town, not far from the home she owned for decades with her late husband. They built Mrs. Porter a separate wing with vaulted ceilings, giving it the look and feel of a cathedral. In one sun-drenched room, they set up a desk and workspace and hung paintings and drawings by her late husband. In the space opposite the desk, they placed her favorite painting of all, of her late son, Johnny, who died in 1980.

One of Mrs. Porter's most acclaimed poems, written when she was in her early 70s, is a lengthy homage to her late son, who suffered from what she believes to be either schizophrenia or autism:
Though your shoelaces were hardly ever tied
And you seldom wore matching socks
You tried to behave with dignity in the village
"So as not to embarrass my little sisters."
...
And for years your times at home were so short and so far apart
That hearing them once called "visits" you turned white,
So deep was your speechless fear
That you might be only a guest at home, and have no home.

Mrs. Porter says she usually thinks about a poem and outlines it in her mind, and only then begins to sit down and write. She prefers scribbling verses on stray pieces of paper -- backs of envelopes, old invitations, whatever she finds at hand. Only when she has a final version does she sit down and begin to type it up.

Shunning computers, she works on an ancient manual typewriter belonging to her late husband. It is hard for her to walk, so she stuffs a pouch attached to her walker with notes and drafts and rolls it around from room to room.

After her 1994 book, she published "Living Things" this year. It contains the poems from her earlier collection and 39 new ones. This year, her publisher, Zoland Books, now an imprint of Steerforth Press in New Hampshire, asked for more poems that would go in a new anthology.
Being able to live with her family has helped her with her poetry, she suspects. "I feel sheltered. While I am in bed, I can hear them laughing and I know they are good," Mrs. Porter says.
She adds: "Institutional life is a little chilling to a person's imagination."

Born in 1911 to a family of Boston Brahmins, Mrs. Porter remembers writing poetry as a child of 7. She attended Bryn Mawr and Harvard, but dropped out of both. After her marriage, she raised five children and quietly continued writing.

The marriage was stormy, she and others recall. Mrs. Porter led her life in the shadow of her husband. "There was a lot of hospitality -- cooking, plus raising five kids and she had her hands full," says Elizabeth Porter Balzer, her daughter. Whatever poems Mrs. Porter wrote, she wrote on the side.

She only threw herself into her own work as an artist after her husband died. "I remember realizing that I was alone, and I'd have to be more organized," she says. "I had these poems, and I thought that it would be worthwhile working on them. I started to write."

Roads Less Traveled

2006-11-11T23:20:00.000-08:00

When I walk up the wide beach after my surfing lesson and I hear the plink-plink-plink of piano keys, I smile broadly because I know that I live in Paradise. Only in Paradise can a middle-aged woman surf in November and then be serenaded by Jack The Knife while rinsing the ocean water out of her hair and off of her skin.

These guys play the beach parking lot just about every Saturday around noon. They were parked and playing long before I started my weekly pilgrimage to the ocean, but now they are part of my routine. To see and hear them play reinforces for me that all creative avenues are open for travel. Just pick a vehicle and go.

Exhaling

2006-10-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in my car the other day eating a peanut butter cookie that crumbled into a thousand crumbs and fell onto my black trousers. I quickly distributed the crumbs across the carpet of my car. When my hand stopped sweeping the crumbs off of my pants, I thought about how I should have listed in my last post all of the food I’ve dropped over the years into the nooks and crannies between my driver’s seat and the driveshaft console that separates the driver’s seat from the passenger’s seat. All of the grapes that have long since become raisons, the potato chips that have petrified from the southern California heat, and the wayward pickle surely have increased my car’s stink factor year after year.

I opened the driver’s door and got out to dust the micro-crumbs from my trousers. I bent to pick up the hunky crumbs from the floor board before I could grind them into the mat. It was then that I saw it: the Jerry Lundegaard aka the Wonder Wafer. The senior at my car wash had discretely placed the Wonder Wafer between the edge of the carpet and the driver’s seat.

I held the one inch square piece of cardboard on the edges as if I were a crime scene investigator afraid to leave my finger prints on the evidence. I was really afraid of transferring the wonder of the Wonder Wafer to my finger tips that would touch my clothes and skin. I didn’t want to become Jerry Lundegaard.

I noticed the URL for Wonder Wafers and made a note of it on the back of a napkin. It wasn’t until I had returned home and fired up my web browser that I met Candace, Courtney, Mindy, Megan, and Jennifer, the low budget animated spokes models for Wonder Wafers. Each spokes model introduces herself in a way that makes me expect her to tell me her astrology sign and her hobby.

I couldn’t sit through Candace’s pitch so I clicked on Insta Scent and listened to Megan for a bit before I moved on to Signs & Decals and listened to all of Courtney’s message. Courtney was the only spokes model of color and I found her the most interesting to look at. I decided that Candace, Courtney, Mindy, Megan, and Jennifer, all share a voice box.

When Courtney finished telling me in her auto-attendant cadence about the free standing signs and vending machine decals available from Wonder Wafers, I felt compelled to click on her nose. I warmed up to Wonder Wafers when Courtney followed the cursor around her head and crossed her eyes when the cursor landed on her nose. If only she had brought her right hand into view and squeezed her nose between her index finger and thumb while saying in her best spokes model voice, “P.U.,” then I really would have become a Wonder Wafers convert.

APRIL FRESH BABY POWDER CLEAN CAR

FRESH N CLEAN JASMINE LEATHER

LEMON NU CAR MULBERRY

PINA COLADA PINE SPICE

STRAWBERRY VANILLA WILD CHERRY

Holding My Breath

2006-10-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

Jerry Lundegaard has been riding around in my car all week. Imagine! A used car salesman that won’t ever let the test drive end. I forget about Jerry after I park my car in front of my house after coming home from work. Then within minutes of my forty-five minute morning commute, Jerry materializes. If I could reach over and open the passenger door as I’m speeding up the 605 freeway and push Jerry out, I would. I hate him that much.

Jerry called shotgun last week when I went to the car wash and told the senior that I wanted the deluxe wash, but absolutely no “fragrance.” I like the stink I have created in my eight-year old Subaru Legacy Outback. It is layered blend of spilled coffee, rotting car seats, and my sweat. Why would I ever want to mask that scent with Alpine Pine, Dutch Apple Pie, Ultra Cherry, Citrus Mist, or the scent that reminds me of a used car salesman’s cheap aftershave, Powder?

I can’t figure out where Jerry hides when I’m not driving. Is he in a time release capsule discretely inserted into my car’s ventilation system? Is he heat activated? Does he have a shelf life and if he does, when can I expect him to expire? These are the questions I repeatedly ask myself.

I have one more question: why is it that Jerry is lasting longer than my car wash? I feel I must take action: I will write JERRY LUNDEGAARD MUST DIE in the grime on the hood of my car and return to the car wash where I will demand a free wash and an exorcism.

(For those of you who feel car fragrance is a necessity, try one of these. Which one would I hang from my rear view mirror? You Asked For It. The Sweet Scent of Revenge sounds as close to Unscented as a car air freshener can get.)

Gidgit Reincarnated

2006-10-07T23:03:00.000-07:00

"The outcasts create their own society, and their place in it. It's up to you," says Gidget, "and that's the lesson of 'Gidget.'"

"I mean, I went to the beach, and there was a guy living in a shack, just so he could surf all the time. Imagine that! I sure couldn't, not at that age. Doesn't everyone have a mom and a dad and a house? I was amazed. The concept changed me."

My eight year-old son inspired me three weeks ago to see that surfing at forty-six could be more than a missed opportunity, but a viable possibility. Under an azure blue sky, with an on-shore breeze, I had my second surfing lesson today.

My son has been taking surfing lessons at Seal Beach, California, since late August. I have enjoyed sitting on the sand every Saturday morning, sipping coffee from a paper cup, feeling the weight of my week dissipate, and watching him spring to his feet on an eight foot foam board.

I wish I could pin point the defining moment when I decided that I too could spring to my feet on a surf board and ride the wave into shore. I remember thinking that eventually my son would no longer need lessons, but a ride to the beach. Then I saw us in the ocean together. It felt as if it was something we could share for a while before he would want to surf with his friends instead of his mom.

Last week, for my first lesson, I wore a pair of swim goggles in an effort to keep my contact lenses in my eyes. Jason, my instructor, said that they eventually would be ripped off of my face. I told Jason I was practically blind and would wear them for this lesson. Jason is a kind, gifted teach who lets his students learn their lessons through experience. My goggles fogged over consistently, obscuring my vision.

At some point in my life I became insecure in the ocean without the benefit of corrected 20/20 vision. Or I thought I was. I body surfed practically every weekend when I was a teenager in Newport Beach, California, without the aid of any corrective lenses and learned to judge the wave sets by the shadows on the water. I told Jason at the end of last week’s lesson that I would shed the goggles for the next lesson.

Today the beach and water were practically deserted. The surf was flat and the breeze was brisk. My son entered the water with his usual unbridled abandon. I sat on a towel, sans paper coffee cup, and watched the goose bumps rise on my thighs. I should have bought that wet suit I tried on last weekend at Katin’s, I thought.

I felt the chickens call out to me in my head, “cluck, cluck, cluck.” I could probably give my lesson to my son, I thought, since he had a wet suit and I had only a rash guard covering my bathing suit. Besides, the waves were flat. I could cut Jason a break and send him home early, my lesson money tucked safely in his pocket.

My son’s lesson ended and he collapsed on the towel, complaining about how cold he was. The clucking in my brain was getting loader.

“Are you ready?” Jason asked me.

I took off my glasses and said, “Let’s go.”

Jason gave me the longer fiberglass board and told me to paddle out. I topped the board and paddled through some dying white water. The water splashed me in the face and drenched my torso. “Whooho!” I shouted. The chickens in my brain were scared away to look for a warmer coop. I felt cold and proud.

Jason coached me in wave selection. I watched the water rise and knew that they waves were getting bigger by the sun-sequins on the wave’s face. I felt like I was sixteen again.

I progressed to each stage of surfing from the week before: up to my knees, up to one knee with my goofy foot extended. I thought about each movement and making the movement as the wimpy white watered pushed my long board toward shore. I told Jason about my process and how I was thinking about what he was telling me and trying to make my body do what my brain was telling it.

Jason told me that when I progress pass the white water to what surfing is – stepping into liquid – that I would have to stand up within two seconds. I realized then that there was no thinking in surfing. Surfing is about sensing and perceiving. I could sense the wave. I could perceive the crest from the glittered edge.

My wave came. “Paddle hard!” Jason shouted, and I did.

I pressed myself up from the fiberglass board and sprung to my feet. I had no thoughts of mechanics. I saw myself standing on the board today to ride a wave before I ever arrived at the beach. That’s what I wanted today. That’s what I earned today and I have the knees to prove it.

One Year of Nuts & Bolts

2006-10-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

I have Thivai Abhor to thank for this post. I am a sentimental soul and would have felt some affection for my blog a year after I had launched it, but to write about why I blog a year later? I would have kept those thoughts to myself.

Today, October 6, 2006, my blog feels like an unattended, weedy garden. A year ago, in my inaugural post I said, "I have an expectation of other bloggers that they post frequently. Otherwise, why bother? I do not think I will meet my own expectation, but who knows?" I have felt the pressure of my own expectation over the past year and even created goals for myself to post consecutively for seven days. Could I do it? Did I have it in me to write every day?

I met my self-imposed goal. Through that exercise I discovered that I most enjoy writing for my blog when I have something to say that has touched me. Writing for quantity felt false. It is a visceral feeling I have that drives me to write. I need to write. Some of my posts are banal chatter, but I think there is a place for that in a blog, especially Nuts & Bolts.

Lately, I write for my blog because I miss the mental calisthenics only writing gives me. Writing takes me into a maze of doorways and passages that I don't or can't enter performing any other activity.

I write my blog as if I had my own column at the Los Angeles Times. I try to be fair, decent and me. I enjoy controlling what I will write about and how I will present it visually. The journalistic blog that I write is ultimately a one way conversation where anyone with an internet browser is invited to read and comment. I have little expectation that people will read and comment, but it is much more fun and enlightening when they do.

I only semi-regret one post in the last year. I let the post stand as-is and didn't delete it. I didn't like the 3D feedback I received about it, but interestingly, it had nothing to do with me or my 3D world. It was the one about getting a hymen-tuck for your mister.

Ironically, hymen-tuck is the one search subject that has brought the second to the most visitors to Nuts & Bolts. The biggest search subject is growing tomatoes in hay bales. I can't tell you how relieved I am that there is more interest in hay bale gardening than hymen-tucking!

Why do I blog instead of fill up a spiral note book? Because it is the first medium where I have creative control over the schedule, content and presentation of my writing. It is a the first medim that connects me with people I would otherwise not interact with. It is a reciprocal medium that a magazine can never be. Comments are posted and dialogue ensues. Or not. Until the next post.

The allure of Allure

2006-09-29T20:55:00.000-07:00

(That's a "presentable" picture of Christina Aguilera. It was really hard to find, if you know what I mean.)

My Allure magazine arrived the other day. I say “my” because my name is on the subscription label even though I didn’t order and pay for Allure magazine and anyone who has any inkling about who I am would never buy Allure magazine for me. I would, however, appreciate an anonymous subscription to Surface, Smithsonian, The Atlantic Monthly, or The New Yorker, but apparently those are not to arrive without me writing a check first.

I furrowed my brow when I saw the magazine in my mail pile. “More recycling!” I thought. We just got two sets of three inch-thick phone books delivered to the house. Two sets! The message on the front of the second set said, “now you have a set of Verizon Phone Books for your home office!” What an antiquated wasteful way to deliver information that can be quickly and more accurately accessed from the computer in the home office.

I was thinking about the second set of phone books that I just put in the recycling bin and how I had an Allure magazine to throw on the heap and would apparently have one every month for the next eleven months.

You really can judge a book by its cover. The September 2006 issue of Allure features a full faced, one-eyed platinum blond pouty-lipped Christina Aguilera on the cover, her name in sixty point reverse type and “Are We in Therapy Now?’ in twenty point black type right under her name. Is Christina in therapy now? Do Allure readers want to know the answer? From what I gathered from the article, there was no need to overtly answer the question because, “At 10:30 p.m., Aguilera jumped into her husbands black BMW and headed home. The next day, they were gong to Disneyland for a week with Bratman’s mother and Aguilera’s mother and brother – a fitting vacation for a former Mouseketeer.” What Mouseketeer needs therapy? I mean, really.

A few profound Call Outs from Allure
“47 of women have dark circles, but no puffiness; 9% have puffy eyes, but no dark circles. An unlucky 28% have both. ~ Allure.com poll” I fall into the 28%. I blame work for the past 45 days for my black bags. I also blame Allure because I can.

“Toning and tightening the skin can act like a girdle to hold back the bags,” says dermatologist David Bank.” I would like to go eye to baggy eye with David Bank and ask him if women really wear girdles in 2006. I would ask him if he thinks they should. If he said, “Yes,” I would hand him a girdle and ask him to wear it for 12 hours and then ask him the question again.

“A patient slips her hands inside the gadget to diminish age spots and lines.” All a patient ever needs, apparently, is a gadget as a first step to any recovery. Remember that if you are ever a patient. If you are a patient with age spots and lines, you have bigger problems than age spots and lines, so focus on your chemo or your dialysis or whatever gadget is delivering your treatment, and ignore your blessed age spots and lines.

I'll be back next month with choice insights and learnings from the October Allure. There's a lot of knowledge to be gained in that beauty tome. I'm finally ready to matriculate into beauty college and take Eyebrows 101.

Worth More Than "Credit"

2006-09-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

I started the third grade with Miss Clair, a blond, bright and vivacious woman, and ended the year with Mrs. Tice, the new wife of a dentist who seemed to have an edge to her. It was the same woman, transformed by matrimony, or perhaps it was the grating effect of a room full of cut- up eight year-olds like me.

I got me first detention in third grade. My neighbor and best friend, Jeff Bartelli, and I pulled the pen portion of Bic ball point pens apart and used the clear plastic shaft as spit wad shooters. We perfected our spit wad missles and launched them clear across the room. I missed recess for a week.

I remember struggling with the multiplication table in the classroom. I remember trying to understand what a predicate was and its relationship to a subject. I remember the big boy in the red sweater whose name eludes me 38 years later. He had a wide face and doe eyes and was allergic to bee stings. The red sweater he wore every day was supposed to protect him from bee stings. In the third grade, I knew it didn’t protect him against southern California heat stroke, his face as red as his sweater on those triple digit Indian summer days.

I don’t remember doing homework in the third grade. Not.At.All.

I don’t remember one or the other of my parents sitting with me for two hours the way I sit with my third grader every evening. Why do I sit with my him? To help keep him focused, to get through the piles of papers and assignments, to sign my initials in his homework book that indicates he did what was required.

One assignment my son did tonight struck me as finally substantive and important. He was to choose an article out of a TIME for Kids magazine and diagram the parts of the article, including writing down a fact he had learned, a question he a had about what he read, and to write a new head line. The head line must have been the creative element in the assignment. My son chose the article, “Can New Orleans Rise and Shine?” and breezed through the diagramming and questions.

Then he set to work on an invention to help school children continue to go to school in the event of a flood. He drew his invention as he explained to me how pressing this button moved a roof over their heads and brought desks to the water tight chamber. I watched him as he worked. His pencil sketching, his lips moving, his eyes darting from the page to my face as he explained the mechanics of his humanitarian invention. He went on for at least fifteen minutes.

I wanted to include his drawing in his homework to be returned to school tomorrow. His teacher deserves to see the true learning homework provides. That was the work that earned credit tonight.

Post Card #4: Dueling Desserts: MA Cannoli vs. PA Cannoli

2006-08-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

When I am on vacation, I eat what I want, as much as I want, when I want it. I indulge in the third slice of bread, the splash of wine (you can go ahead and fill it to the top), and dessert after every meal. I had the luxury of eating a lot of cannoli from three bakeries and one restaurant in two cities. Here’s how the cannoli stacked up in the pastry case. Listed in the order in which they were eaten.

Mike’s Pastry, 300 Hanover St, Boston, MA
We went to Mike’s after my molten Puttenesca at Artu with clammy. The place was crowded with all manner of people rushing the counter. It must be good with a crowd like that, right? We left with several pink pastry boxes tied with twine holding the ricotta filled shells of our East Coast dreams. We walked up the street in the dusky light to a closed Massachusetts Transportation Authority office that had what looked like a brick amphitheatre in front. The boys ran around the amphitheater in circles while we gorged on Mike’s cannoli. The shell was crispy and the ricotta filling had the perfect pitch of ricotta and confectioners sugar. The tiny chocolate chips on the end gave this cannoli a rich edge. Literally. I ate a whole cannoli and then half of a second.

Modern Pastry. 257 Hanover Street, Boston, MA
Even though I ate the worst pizza of my entire life in the North End of Boston, I ate the best cannoli of my life right across from the pizza place. Modern edged Mike’s cannoli out of first place because it was just plain fresher. The shell wasn’t crisper and the chocolate chips weren’t superior, but the ricotta filling was lighter as if the folks at Modern had seen me coming and started whipping the ricotta and sugar right then. I ate a whole cannoli and wished I had a second.

Ralph’s Italian Restaurant, 760 South Ninth St., Philadelphia, PA
I had heard about Ralph’s when I lived in a Philadelphia suburb in the late nineties. I spent a lot of time in south Philly while I lived there. The gay rag I worked for was in south Philly and the Italian cooking class I attended was deep in the Italian ghetto that is South Philly. In all of that time and opportunity, I had never eaten at Ralph’s until I vacationed in Philadelphia.
From the Ralph’s website:
“Ralph's has been in business since 1900. Four Generations of the same family have owned and operated the restaurant since Its inception. One Hundred years later we work as hard as Francesco Dispigno and his son Ralph to maintain the tradition that has been built for almost a century. We are the oldest family owned Italian restaurant in the country. Everything is made to order with the finest ingredients from recipes that have been passed down from one generation to another, so sit back, relax and enjoy”
Maybe it was the non-existent parking or the waiters throwing the food at us that put the cannoli in down position. I would like to say that’s why, but the truth is that Ralph’s cannoli is a fraud. Ralph! Come on! You have a reputation to uphold and what have you done? You have cut the ricotta like a drug dealer cuts the cocaine. I think you must have used sour cream. I ate the entire cannoli, thinking that it would magically change into a what I had expected from the oldest Italian restaurant in America. For shame, Ralph!

Termini Bros., Reading Terminal Market, 12th and Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA
I had to wait for three days for Termini Bros. to open their stall at the Reading Terminal Market across from our hotel. I anticipated an appropriately sweet and crispy anecdote to Ralph’s cannoli. Termini Bros. was a nostalgic favorite. If any bakery was going to redeem cannoli in Philadelphia, it was Termini Bros. They were my first taste of East Coast Italian baking when I lived in Philadelphia. I deflected elbows at the crowded counter at the Termini Bros. bakery in Ardmore back in 1997 just to leave with a pink box of just-filled cannoli. It was worth the bruises then. When Termini Bros. opened in the Reading Terminal Market the day before we were to check out, the women behind the counter looked haggard. “Four cannoli, please,” I said. Their sour looks indicated that if they had to fill one more goddam cannoli shell, they were going to spit in the ricotta. I took a bite of the Termini Bros. cannoli in our hotel room while sitting on the stiff sofa. The shell cracked and the filling was thick and tasted haggard. Was I done with eating what I want, as much as I want, when I want it? I ate a second bite and threw the rest of the cannoli in the trash.

At the buzzer: Boston 2, Philadelphia 0.

Post Card #3: Give a boy a fish, he eats for a day

2006-08-21T22:45:00.000-07:00

When a boy visits a river, he needs to fish. When no pole is available, he needs a net. When no net is available, he makes one. He fishes for what swims between his legs, his feet lost in the murky muddy river bottom. He swoops his net through the salty water again and again, coming up empty. He perseveres. The boy modifies his technique. He enlists the help of another boy. He instructs the other boy in his new technique. He is patient. The boys hold the net under water and wait. The fish swim between them and the net is hoisted out of the river. Minute translucent silver fish, erroneously called “minnows”, flinch and flop on the make-shift net. The boy is elated. He has caught a fish. Many fish. He is a fisherman.

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
“Mommy, I’m going to eat a minnow.”
“Go right ahead.”
Gulp!
“Did you eat that thing?’
“Yeah.”
“Alive?!”
“Yeah.”
“Why?!!”
“I saw it on Survivor.”

Post Card #2: "Meeting and old friend"

2006-08-17T23:14:00.000-07:00

My pal clammy became my blogging pal shortly after we became pen pals. That was last year. Little did I know that our email exchange, sparked by her simple query about California wineries on a television message board, would develop into a budding friendship that culminated in our meeting in person this year.

When people asked me what I had planned for my summer vacation this year, I told them that my pen pal, clammy, whom I had never met, and further more, had met on the Internet, had offered me the use of her summer home on Cape Cod for a week. Eye brows raised as those same people wanted to know how I met this pen pal and was I really taking my family and my partner’s best friend and son to a home of someone I had never met before? Yep. That’s what I had planned.

After seven months of planning and waiting (mostly waiting), I walked down Prince Street, one of the narrow streets in Boston’s North End, and saw clammy walking toward me. I gave her a hug and then shook her hand. I looked into her big, brown friendly eyes and was surprised only by how alive she was. That sounds strange, I know. Her eyes conveyed so much more of her friendly, open heart that I had met and gotten acquainted with over the previous fourteen months through her written word.

It was as if I hadn’t seen my friend clammy for a very long time and we were having a long-awaited homecoming even though I’m not from Boston or the East Coast. Meeting her felt simply like a natural next step in our friendship.

Clammy sat at the head of the table and I sat to her left at the modern Italian restaurant, Artu. We were all glad to be inside as the T had dumped us out by the Garden in the sticky-hot afternoon. We walked in spiral until a kind woman named Coreen, whose apricot colored hair contrasted against her all-white pant suit, offered to walk us to Artu’s. “It’s on my way home,” she said, but I think she would have walked with us even if it wasn’t on her way home. I was so grateful for Coreen’s help, I wanted to invite her along.

Once inside we quickly ordered drinks and scanned the menu. I should have had what clammy ordered which was one of the specials for the evening. After six plates arrived at our table, I could still see the white table cloth in front of me. I told everyone to eat. I waited. I waited some more. I finally flagged our waiter and showed him the table cloth. He freaked out in a “I’m a waiter at a white table cloth restaurant” kind of way and quickly returned to the kitchen. My dish, Penne alla Puttanesca, apparently, had been ordered and delivered to a diner at another table. The waiter apologized repeatedly and said it would be just one minute. I waited and then my plate of Puttanesca arrived practically flaming. I like it hot, but this pasta was molten. I waited for it to cool. Once it had cooled beyond the scalding point, I enjoyed the spicy pasta I had patiently waited for.

It occurred to me that my Puttanesca personified my meeting with clammy. Patience and time brings good things to good people.

Post Card #1: “That warm-fuzzy feeling only ORANGE can give”

2006-08-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

My family and I returned home late last night from our 16-day, three-legged East Coast vacation. We were actually ready to return home on August 9, but we couldn’t get a flight back. We easily occupied ourselves for another day in Philadelphia – the third leg in our three-legged journey – until our scheduled return on August 10.

We drove from Philadelphia to Baltimore Washington International Airport late Thursday morning to catch our 5:30 p.m. flight. We were listening to the best radio station in the world when we heard during the 5 minute NPR headline news about the thwarted terrorist plot at Heathrow Airport. London airports were on RED alart and U.S. airports were on ORANGE.

“Travelers are advised to arrive 3 hours early to clear heightened security check points in time for flights.” We decided to forego the Baltimore “sight seeing” we had planned for the afternoon.

“No liquids or gels or any kind will be permitted in carry-on baggage. Items must be checked in baggage. This includes all beverages, shampoo, suntan lotion, creams, tooth paste, hair gel, and other items of similar consistency.” We complied. At the Hertz rental pavilion we stuffed the liquid and gel-like items into our luggage, including the children’s Tylenol and Motrin and three bottles of Bullfrog sunscreen.

What we didn’t stuff into our luggage was the four bottles of eye drops that my partner was using for the divot in her cornea due to a cheap flying toy injury that happened during the first five minutes of Leg-Two: Cape Cod. The woman at the United counter checking our bags said that it was up to TSA if she could carry those on. We hoped for the best and proceeded to look for the long security line.

We never found it. Apparently, those who had to fly did so yesterday. Those who could postpone trips made changes to their travel plans. We lined up in the shortest TSA security line I’ve ever been in, removed our shoes, loaded our carry-on backpacks and luggage on the conveyer belt and walked through the metal detector.

My oldest son went through first as he had placed his backpack on the conveyer belt first. A TSA agent in her late fifties with stained teeth and badly died hair asked if his backpack belonged to us. My son said it was his. He approached the inspection area as our bags came through and piled up.

The TSA agent unzipped his back pack and removed Blue Bear, my son’s beloved Teddy bear that has been loved so much he has a shiny patina on his blue fabric. Then the TSA agent removed a half-drunk plastic bottle of Poland Springs water. Nope. Not allowed. My son turned bright red and could feel the weight of the severity of his infraction.

Meanwhile I collected our bags and put my New Balance tennis shoes back on my feet. We stepped away from the TSA security check point where everyone was looking agitated or irritated in the glow of the ORANGE threat condition.

We were walking toward our gate when I told my partner that her prescription eye drops made it through. In fact, her purse opened on the belt and they started to fall out. I put them back in and closed up her bag.

We sat for a long while waiting for our plane to board and recounted all of the the liquid and gel-like items that we were carrying on the airplane: my contact lens eye drops for dry eyes (and they get very dry on an airplane), my Blistex lip goo, my Burt's Bees lip stick (rhubarb), my travel pack of Wet-ones, her Tide “on the go” stain stick, her four bottles of prescription eye drops, her sample packages of Banana Boat sunscreen picked up at the Italian street fair in Boston from Leg-One.

We openly tipped our heads back and dripped drops into our eyes. I unabashedly smeared lip goo on my lips. No one with authority noticed.

We boarded the plane and fastened our seat belts low and securely across our laps. I tapped my partner’s arm across the aisle to see what I was seeing coming toward us: a woman with three giant inflated Mylar balloons, all pink, advertising Happy Birthday. The woman stuffed them into the overhead bin.

The pink bobbing balloons caught the eye of one of the flight attendants. The woman was advised that the balloons would not be allowed on the flight. The woman protested saying that the captain said she could bring them on. The flight attendant rolled her eyes and headed for the cockpit and then quickly returned to say, “No Mylar balloons allowed,” and trundled up the aisle, the balloons bouncing on the backs of the heads of the settled passengers.

At that moment, I felt safe. Very safe.

I am an American

2006-07-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

This is my 47th Independence Day as an American. Well, what else would I be? I was born here, I have traveled to Canada. I have traveled to Mexico. That’s it. I’m and American. A North American. A citizen of the Untied States of America. I once was proud of that fact.

When I was a girl, around age nine, I was vacationing in Palm Springs, California, with my family. It was an extended vacation, the kind that has a planned duration and then gets extended day after day. We were pressing up against the Fourth of July and my parents wanted to stay through the holiday. I begged them to go home. I had made a banner at home that said, “Happy Birthday USA” and I wanted to hang it up on the Fourth of July. We returned home a day or two before the Fourth, not because my parents heard my desperate plea, but because my mother had had enough sun.

Days after hanging my banner, Neil Armstrong was about to walk on the moon. I had a small telescope and a note book where I kept indecipherable notations about what I saw through the eye piece. I had a few National Geographic magazines that had chronicled the phases of the moon. I looked at the moon and I wrote down what I saw and then wrote down what the National Geographic had said what I had seen. An American was about to walk on the moon. I was watching and I was proud.

The last surge of patriotism I recall feeling was in September 2001. You can see my 911 Flag in the picture. (Well, gee, if Blogger would let me post a picture, you could see it. Arg! ) That’s what I call it because I placed it in the flag holder on the front of my house on September 11, 2001, and didn’t take it down until September 11, 2003. It shows the weather and grime a flag manufactured to blow in the wind only a handful of times a year can accumulate after 730 days.

Fear fueled my patriotism on September 11, 2001. I didn’t know if there were going to be more than four airplanes. I feared for my life and the life of my family. I placed that American flag on my house as if it were a Star Wars deflector shield. (Oh, if you could hear the peals of laughter coming from me right now!) Every single notion of American invincibility had been destroyed that day. Every single internalized line of patriotic rhetoric had been challenged and then, in the coming months and years, blown up.

Similar to the destruction in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or Dresden, Americans had a golden opportunity to rebuild our collective consciousness about who we are as Americans, beginning on September 11, 2001. But it was a missed opportunity. George W. Bush took us the other way, in the opposite direction to places most of us Americans will never recover from. For me, an American, I will not forgive, nor forget, the atrocities of George W. Bush.

Guantanamo Bay. (This is GOOD!)
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal
Justices Bar Guantanamo Tribunals
High Court Says President Exceeded War Powers
JESS BRAVIN, June 30, 2006; Page A1

WASHINGTON -- In a withering opinion handed down on the last day of its term, the Supreme Court declared unlawful the Bush administration's military tribunals, an alternative legal system established to prosecute enemy prisoners without granting them traditional rights found in courts-martial. The tribunals were among the first and most far-reaching of White House responses to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The 5-to-3 ruling specifically repudiated the tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, finding that by denying fundamental rights to defendants, they violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. But it also raised questions about the logic behind the aggressive legal strategy the administration has used to expand executive authority on multiple fronts, including warrantless surveillance of targets within the U.S., and the broad monitoring of international financial transactions.

The victor in the legal case was a former driver for Osama bin Laden, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was caught when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.

But while he can no longer be tried before a tribunal, there is little chance that he -- or the approximately 450 other men held at Guantanamo -- will be set free, either. The court didn't address the legality of holding enemy combatants while hostilities continue, but rather said that if they are to be prosecuted for war crimes, the proceedings must obey the laws of war. The ruling "won't cause killers to be put on the street," President Bush said at a news conference.

The tribunals, known formally as military commissions, were conceived as a response to the challenges of prosecuting suspected international terrorists.

While promising defendants a "full and fair" trial, Mr. Bush's Nov. 13, 2001, order establishing the panels of military officers permitted them to exclude the accused from proceedings and deny defendants access to prosecution evidence as well. It let the panels consider virtually any evidence they considered "probative," including hearsay. Moreover, the order denied defendants the right of appeal to independent courts.

The justices made the administration's choices clear: It can prosecute the enemy prisoners under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which effectively requires proceedings akin to a court-martial. Or it can persuade Congress to adopt a different legal regime for them. Making its own rules outside congressional authority was illegal, the justices found.

In the November 2001 decree, styled a "military order," Mr. Bush authorized military commissions to try defendants he selected, according to rules he created, for crimes he defined. But Justice John Paul Stevens, in a 73-page opinion for the court joined in most part by four other justices, went piece-by-piece through the legal theories the president had asserted, finding in each instance that they ran afoul of law and precedent.

Describing the opinion as a "limited" one, Justice Stevens said the court merely was affirming that if the president sought to prosecute enemy prisoners, he must do so in accord with existing laws of war, not create new ones he found "more convenient." A plurality also found that the charge against Mr. Hamdan, conspiracy, wasn't a war crime.

Still, the ruling cast doubt over another widely disputed legal claim the administration has made -- that the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which forbid "humiliating and degrading treatment," do not protect prisoners held at Guantanamo. While the administration contended that the treaty's enforcement was a matter between governments, the court read the conventions as a codification of the laws of war that Congress had incorporated into American military law. Attorneys contesting the broader policies of detention and interrogation at Guantanamo are likely to seize on yesterday's opinion.

The case brought a contentious end to the first term of the Roberts Court. Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito vigorously dissented, contending the Detainee Treatment Act, a law signed Dec. 30 that provides Guantanamo prisoners with limited access to the courts, required dismissal of the case, and castigating the majority's "audacity" in second-guessing the president.

Iraq
For every American soldier who dies in Iraq, the flag should be flown at half-mast, to honor that soldier’s life, regardless of why he or she is fighting in a senseless war, in a volunteer military, where the Commander in Chief doesn’t have a clear understanding of his own military intelligence or stragegy, nor the diverse culture of the Iraquis people.

Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal
Tribute or Protest?
Lowering flags for soldiers killed in Iraq emerges as another flashpoint on the home front.
By JEFFREY ZASLOW July 1, 2006; Page A1

In some 16 states, flags are routinely lowered for fallen home-state soldiers. But what some see as a gesture of tribute, others consider inappropriate, demoralizing and even devious. Half-staff efforts, which have spread to states Oregon, Minnesota, California, Illinois, Kentucky and Maine -- are generating controversy a mong politicians, veterans and citizens unsure about whether and when to lower the flag.

The U.S. Flag Code, adopted in 1942, says governors may honor state "officials" after they die by lowering the flag. Critics say it is inappropriate for governors to label soldiers as officials. Some wonder whether the flag tributes are really an attempt to undermine support for the war by reminding Americans of the fatalities. And though many veterans welcome the lowered flags, others say the day for honoring war dead is Memorial Day.

During World War II, when Michigan soldiers were dying at the rate of 13 a day, there was no effort to lower flags for every one of them. "If there had been, the flag would never have been raised for the entire war," says Bruce Butgereit, of Kentwood, Mich., who serves as national patriotic instructor of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War.

American Injustice, still a long road to go
I am including an excerpt from Frederick Douglas’s July 5, 1852, speech here in my Independence Day reflection because it is still pertinent. We have so many injustices, double standards and hypocrisies in American, still, today. What our founders gave us was such a strong foundation. Let’s let all people, no matter what their color, creed, sexual orientation, or otherness benefit from the gift they gave us in July 1776.

Frederick Douglas
July 5, 1852,
Speech at Declaration of Independence signing commemoration, held at Rochester's Corinthian Hall.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Hope for us all

I am sharing Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of the Morning” here, now, because I want to feel hope, on this, my 47th Independence Day. I want to believe that good will still come from every action I take as an American citizen. I want to feel pride in my citizenship, in my nation.

On the Pulse of the Morning
Maya Angelou
January 20, 1993

A Rock,
A River,
A TreeHosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

I will give you no more hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.

Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.

Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.

The River sings and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

I let my children play with matches

2006-06-23T23:55:00.000-07:00

And why shouldn’t I?

Children tell you what they’re ready for even if you aren’t ready for it. That’s been my experience as a parent. I try to push past my own fears where my children are concerned and trust what they are telling me.

It’s the simplest of requests, really, like when my oldest son at age four wanted to learn how to strike a match. He was in preschool then and I remember thinking that teaching him to strike a match would have to be one of those things that remained within our home. He would have to agree to not share his new skill at circle time, not by demonstrating how he could strike a match or by telling about his experience lightingthe barbeque. He agreed. Other parents can be freaks and I didn’t want to have to weather their silent vibey judgment sent my preschool son’s way or mine. (I can be a freak too. Takes one to know one.)

My son has been striking matches for four years now. He’s quite good. He knows the proper way to hold a lit match. He knows how to light the wadded up paper in the barbeque stove pipe. He knows what to do if the match burns too low and he loses his nerve. He knows that above all, with matches and fire, he needs adult supervision.

Embracing my son’s need to learn how to strike a match and allowing him to do so has broadened his creative possibilities. Since he knows how to strike a match, the creative progression was to build a camp fire out of the materials he found in the yard. A campfire is worthless unless it is lit. A galvanized bucket full of water hanging over a lit campfire in the yard needs to come to a rolling boil in order to see what other possibilities will emerge.

As is often the case in any parent-child relationship, my son didn’t ask, he just “did”. He built the camp fire first and then used logic to try to convince me that it needed to be lit. What he didn’t know was that I was in awe of his camp fire’s construction and that, yes, he could light it. What he didn’t know is that I let him light it because it was art to me and the finishing touch was the flame.

My son’s needs around his camp fire were different than mine. My son was preparing for a three day camping trip and felt responsible to bring the matches, the wood, the skill and experience to provide the camp fire. I felt responsible to provide him an open channel for his next creative possibility.

Markers

2006-06-10T23:50:00.000-07:00

^ Photo of NAMES Memorial Quilt on the Washington DC Mall in 1996 goes here ^
It took more than $3 million, but in October 1996, the whole quilt — then totaling 40,000 panels — was laid over the National Mall in Washington. More than a million people showed up. There were 20,000 boxes of tissues on hand. Afterwards, the money flowed.

I read two newspapers regularly: The Wall Street Journal and the Sunday Los Angeles Times. Last Sunday, the Times cover story was this: AIDS at 25 – The Quilt Fades to Obscurity.

I felt as if I had seen the name of a long lost friend when I saw this article. I think I even uttered an, “Ooh.” If I didn’t out load, I did in my mind.

Seeing the NAMES Quilt at 25 says to me I’ve been an out-lesbian for a very long time, more than half of my life! Not that that has any significance, other than to mark time for myself and make me reflect on my participation in activism that was driven by a deadly disease.

I was a 21 year-old woman who came out when young men were dying for no apparent reason, before the virus and disease that was killing them had names and acronyms.

My coming out was joyously spent in gay bars on Sunday nights at the edge of the ocean, where the party seemed to tumble toward infinity carried on a disco beat that boomed louder than the breaking waves. The heady smell of dance floor sweat, amyl nitrate and Polo cologne created an aural memory for me that I will never forget.

When I wasn’t partying with the gay boys, I was dropping dollar bills into Melissa Etheridge’s tip cup over at the Que Sera. She drove a yellow AMC Pacer then and had some groupie chick unload her acoustic guitar and amplifier into the legendary lesbian bar on Cherry and Seventh Street in Long Beach, California. She perfected “Meet Me In the Back” and “Bring Me Some Water” in front of the Norm-like dykes on their bar stools and baby dykes like me perched within feet of the woman who exuded passion for the songs she sang. Ah, good times, good times.
I first saw the NAMES quilt displayed at the Queen Mary in Long Beach. (Yes, what an apt venue for such a display!) I don’t remember the year now, it may have been 1990. The air was thick in the Queen’s Salon with grief and mourning. I added my own after seeing the partner of one of the shop owners in town there, completely ravaged with AIDS. I remember he gave me a friendly smile and we chatted a bit before I moved on along the panels and sobbed into my hands.

Before AIDS drug cocktails, there was activism. I walked in many AIDS-walk fundraisers. I raised money for the NAMES Quilt because it was such a tangible and personal way for people who had lost a loved-one to mourn. My NAMES T-shirt with the purple letters faded from the wear.

The AIDS hysteria that reached a shrieking pitch during the late eighties spawned a political movement has not been matched since. It is because of AIDS and the SILENCE=DEATH urgency that so many people came out of the closet at work, to their families, to themselves. Why not? They had nothing to lose except their lives.

There are so many layers to the Coming-Out onion. A lesbian or gay man never is completely OUT because there is always that new acquaintance that will ask about our families or our spouses and there is always a choice to be made: diversion or disclosure.

My children inspired me to kick my own doors open where they once were shut. I didn’t want to buy into the shame that homophobia spawns, even today, especially where my children are concerned. I owe them disclosure and that disclosure frees me.

But the activism inspired by the AIDS epidemic paved the way for me to be open about who I am and my life with anyone who was or is interested. Those people represented on each Quilt panel, those loved-ones who sewed the panels, created an enduring artifact for love, acknowledgement and remembrance.

David Kurin, director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, described the quilt as "probably the greatest piece of folk art ever made."

There is no question that this is true.

AIDS AT 25
The Quilt Fades to Obscurity
Once a mighty symbol of love and loss, the tribute to victims of AIDS has gone from large to largely forgotten.
By Alan Zarembo, Times Staff Writer, June 4, 2006

Excerpt:
She is constantly sewing. Hunched over pieces of the quilt, the seamstress stitches fraying edges and little tears that have accumulated over the years.

When she [Gert McMullin] is finished mending a piece, she folds the fabric and carries it into a long, quiet gallery. Metal shelves stretch the length of the room.

Each shelf holds five 12-foot-square blocks of quilt.Each block is made of eight panels.Each panel, the size of a grave, contains a name."There are some spots that are really faded, that you can barely see anymore," said the seamstress.

Here, in a corrugated-steel warehouse in Atlanta, lies the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the most powerful icon in the history of AIDS. In the 25 years of the epidemic, no symbol has managed to capture the sense of rage and loss like the quilt, born in a San Francisco backyard in 1987.

It brought the horror of the disease to America with both its vastness and detail — a patchwork the size of 24 football fields sewn from the artifacts of lost lives. It became the banner of the epidemic, shaking the government and priming the funding pipeline that has poured billions of dollars into AIDS research.

Today, the quilt has largely become a museum piece.

David Kurin, director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, described the quilt as "probably the greatest piece of folk art ever made."

The panels, which once arrived by the thousands each year, now trickle in at a few dozen a month. The more than 50 quilt chapters that once spread the word across the country have dwindled to 16.

The NAMES Project Foundation, which oversees the quilt, has downsized to stave off bankruptcy.
~ ~ ~
'A 54-Ton Albatross'More than any factor, the drugs have transformed the quilt.

Introduced a decade ago, cocktails of antiretroviral drugs can keep patients alive for years, perhaps indefinitely. Though millions of people still die abroad, in the United States, annual deaths peaked in 1995 at 51,000.

The desperation that had driven the growth of the quilt seemed to fade away.New panels stopped arriving in large numbers, and so did the donations of $200 or more that often accompanied them.

Last year, the NAMES Project received 609 new panels — the majority of them for gay men who died in the 1990s.The foundation today raises just a fraction of what it once did. Its budget of $1.2 million a year is enough to keep nine full-time employees to watch over the quilt. The quilt was moved from San Francisco to Atlanta in 2001 because rent was cheaper.

The quilt has "gone from an activist tool to a 54-ton albatross," said David Gere, a professor at UCLA who studies the intersection of art and AIDS.

The quilt has gone the way of AIDS itself in the United States — swept into the background as new drugs have driven down the death rate here and shifted the epicenter of anguish abroad, where the disease kills 2.8 million people a year.

Devil's in the details

2006-06-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

(Halleluiah . . . Halleluiah . . . Halleluiah . . . )

From Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal
What’s News front page, second to the last bullet.

The Vatican declared that the traditional family is threatened as never before by contraception, abortion, in vitro fertilization and gay marriage. [Toggle scratches her head and thinks that the Catholic Church is seriously threatened by its arcane declarations. Oh well. How can the traditional family be threatened by limiting the number of children who are born into the family through contraception? How can the traditional family be threatened by an act that eliminates an unwanted birth? How can the traditional family be threatened by in vitro fertilization, a procedure that has helped many infertile couples conceive a child and start a traditional family? How can a commitment with all of the legal bindings that a marriage contract guarantees, regardless of the sex of the partners, threaten the traditional family? The Dinosaurs, the Dodo Bird, the Catholic Church, the Traditional Family . . . . ]

Dodo by Lisa Sheffield Miller

When words aren’t enough

2006-06-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

^ insert image of Toggle Switch, arms crossed, brow furrowed, here ^

It annoys me to the point of not posting to my blog that Blogger cannot accept uploaded images right now. At least not from me!

I understand extended, seemingly unresolvable, unscheduled outages. They suck for the technicians. They suck for the customer.

I love words, for sure. I like the images that they can conjure, the multi-dimensional Technicolor worlds they can create.

When I write a post for my blog, I follow the thread and see where it leads me. Oh, the joy of the journey! When I’ve arrived, or at last come to a stopping point, I like to sit a moment and let a visual present itself, if it hasn’t done so already. If I don’t have a photograph, I’ll take one. If I can’t take one, I’ll search for one, usually on Google Images.

I have no idea if the images I post enhance or detract from my words. No one has ever said either way. But for me, posting an image is like putting terminating punctuation at the end of the last sentence. Until I do so, the post feels open-ended and incomplete. It’s just plain hard for me to move on.

Won't you help me, Blogger, move on?!
Herumph.

Mama Bear Rising

2006-06-03T23:32:00.000-07:00

So we’re driving tonight on the 405 southbound, already in Orange County, toward south Orange County, to our niece’s birthday party. My boys are in the back seat and my partner is in the passenger seat. I plug my iPod into the radio and my partner tells me, “That woman who you like is going to be on 89.3 at 5:00.” She’s speaking of Sonya Kitchell, my newest favorite singer/songwriter.

I unplug my iPod and push the pre-set on the car radio for 89.3, the Pasadena NPR station. George Bush is talking. It’s a sound bite from his radio address from today:

Marriage is the most enduring and important human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith. Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society. Marriage cannot be cut off from its cultural, religious, and natural roots without weakening this good influence on society. Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.

As this debate goes forward, we must remember that every American deserves to be treated with tolerance, respect, and dignity. All of us have a duty to conduct this discussion with civility and decency toward one another, and all people deserve to have their voices heard. A constitutional amendment will put a decision that is critical to American families and American society in the hands of the American people, which is exactly where it belongs. Democracy, not court orders, should decide the future of marriage in America.

I quickly turned the radio off and started ranting under my breath so that my partner could hear me. I hoped my boys could not.

This is an American Family, Mr. President! Your failed constitutional amendment is critical to my family’s well-being. I need to turn you off so that my sons don’t have to hear your bigoted comments and internalize them. Yeah, every American does deserve to be treated with tolerance, respect and dignity, except you know nothing about these qualities!

My partner listened, and then said, “You know, they need something to distract us from the war. They killed all of those Iraqis and the heat is getting turned up.”

She’s right, of course. How many more years of Dubya do we have to endure and how much more damage will he do before he’s outta here?

Little League Baseball 2006: Sort-of Post Mortem (Padres 1, White Sox 7)

2006-05-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

My oldest boy moved from T-ball to the kid pitch level called Minor B this season. It was his second season to play baseball. He was a Padre.

My oldest boy is a gangly kid with flat feet who writes left-handed but bats right-handed. He gets that handedness thing from me. My boy plays because he likes the social interaction that only a team can bring. It’s like a family, really. There are those who you click with and there are those who you just can’t stand. But still, at the end of the day, at the end of the game, there is a feeling of camaraderie that only a team can bring.

When I was a kid in the third grade, I heard about the city softball league from the girls on the playground and I immediately started badgering my parents to sign me up. I didn’t have to badger them much because they signed me up for the coming season pretty quickly. They bought me a genuine cowhide leather right-handed ball glove and a pair of rubber cleats. I was set.

Softball was my life. I put every ounce of myself into the game and I turned out to be a good player, but not a great player. My yard stick for measuring my ability was the fact that I was never picked for the post-season team. As a parent with a child in Little League, I know that had little to do with my ability and everything to do with parental politics.

One year, it was the first year after my parent’s divorce, my father coached my team. I was thrilled. It connected us through something we both loved: my softball. Our team sucked, something I nor he was not used to, but the opportunity to be together during the week and on weekends because of softball meant everything to me. I think it meant everything to him too.

My son played his last Little League game for the season a few nights ago. I left work a little early to join my partner and younger son in the bleachers to cheer the Padres on. My son was on the bench when I arrived. He had struck out.

“Did he go down swinging?” I asked my partner.

“Yes,” she said.

Redeemed, I thought. There is honor in stricking out while swinging. To just stand there, well, somehow that just feels like a ballplayer’s not giving his all.

The league rules say that every player must have one at-bat and play two innings in the field. My son had played his first inning in right field, the position he had played all season. I was looking forward to him standing like a totem to the Little League gods in right field for one more inning. It never came to pass.

This game, the White Sox-Padre game would determine who was done for the season and who would continue in post season play. To write about the competitive nature of Little League coaches at the expense of the young spirits they coach is cliché. To write about parents projecting their own needs and desires on their children is also cliché. Yet, at the Little League field these dynamics are so thick it is almost comedy.

The White Sox were clearly a better team than our Padres. During a third inning play, when the ball was hit into the outfield by a towering White Sox, the runners ran, and the ball was thrown into home plate. Our catcher tagged the runner but the Umpire called him safe. I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t care. But the Padres coach cared so much that he has appealed the game.

Appealed the game. To whom?! For what?!? Instead of sending the message to the eight and nine-year olds in his charge that sometimes not all calls go our way even when they should, he is sending the message that if you don’t agree, litigate, arbitrate. Don’t go down gracefully, go down with bile in your mouth and contempt in your heart.

I want to tell my son there’s always next season, but apparently there’s still this season.

Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind

2006-05-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

My deepest thanks to clammy for sending me a copy of the PBS American Masters documentary, Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind. What a pleasure to journey through Joni’s music and career, watching live footage from her very early days to talking head shots of the modern Joni in controlled retrospection, unabashedly smoking a cigarette. She’s a marvel of vision, craft, and talent. She’s also a rebel that has never laid down for the established Music biz. Her art was always first and still is, regardless of whether that art comes through her box of paints or guitar strings.

Joni Mitchell’s music is woven into my fabric, like yarn in a multi-textured quilt. When I was twelve, I used to have an AM/FM radio, as coveted as an iPod is today for a twelve year-old. I would listen to it constantly. The local radio station, KNX-FM, played Joni regularly. My ears were glued to the white plastic that housed the built-in speaker, hoping for “Electricity” or “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire,” from For the Roses.

My first Joni album was Court and Spark which I received for my fourteenth birthday in 1974. Back then I had a record player with needles. I wore deeper groves into Court and Spark. At age fourteen, “Trouble Child” spoke to me as if it was written about me.

But that’s the point of Joni Mitchell’s music. It is at once poignant and completely relatable. At least it was for me as an introspective gawky teenager. And it is today for me an introspective geeky woman.

Toggle’s Joni Mitchell Desert Island Picks (not at all easy!)
1. Case of You from Blue – 1971. It’s just a visually beautiful song about longing and love. I love this stanza: Oh I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints / I'm frightened by the devil / And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid.
2. Help Me from Court & Spark – 1974. I never get tired of hearing and ultimately singing this love song that captures that feeling that only those who have fallen in love can understand.
3. Sweet Bird from The Hissing of Summer Lawns – 1975. This song “represents” this album that I played repeatedly in the summer of 1976, looking for solace for my broken heart.
4. Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song) from Turbulent Indigo – 1994. I love this song because it has an epic quality and speaks to the river of sorrow that flows through me. I also like hearing Joni’s aged voice.
5. Face Lift from Taming the Tiger – 1998. Anthem to middle age and mother-daughter relationships. I like the visuals, the dialogue, and the clarinet.

Trouble Child, 1974
Up in a sterilized room
Where they let you be lazy
Knowing your attitudes all wrong
And you got to change
And that’s not easy
Dragon shining with all values known
Dazzling you-keeping you from your own
Where is the lion in you to defy him
When you’re this weak
And this spacey...
So what are you going to do about it
You cant live life and you cant leave it
Advice and religion-you cant take it
You cant seem to believe it
The peacock is afraid to parade
You’re under the thumb of the maid
You really cant give love in this condition
Still you know how you need it
They open and close you
Then they talk like they know you
They don’t know you
They’re friends and they’re foes too
Trouble child
Breaking like the waves at Malibu
So why does it come as such a shock
To know you really have no one
Only a river of changing faces
Looking for an ocean
They trickle through your leaky plans
Another dream over the dam
And you’re lying in some room
Feeling like your right to be human
Is going over too
Well some are going to knock you
And somell try to clock you
You know its really hard
To talk sense to you
Trouble child
Breaking like the waves at Malibu

Best Joni Mitchell Web Site: http://jonimitchell.com/

Photo © Norman Seeff . . . inside The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Big sky expectations

2006-05-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

California Scenario

Expectations are a fascinating form of desire. To want something to go a certain way, to want someone to act or respond in a preconceived manner, to experience something new based on something old.

On my drive to work one winter morning, I heard about the Isamu Noguchi exhibit that ran from February to last weekend at the Los Angeles Japanese American National Museum.

My first exposure to Noguchi came after spending many hours on many visits to his California Scenario installation that’s sandwiched between two high rise office buildings in Costa Mesa, California. There’s also a parking structure and art house movie theater that’s separated by California Scenario.

A major artistic attempt to interpret California exists in a public setting at Costa Mesa in Southern California .

The art is by Isamu Noguchi, a California native whom many critics consider to be one of America 's leading sculptors. His creation is a 1.6-acre collection of sculptures and plantings called CALIFORNIA SCENARIO. This Costa Mesa sculpture and horticulture landscape presents an abstract, condensed vision of the Golden State.

Noguchi, whose work over a 50-year span has won international acclaim, sees his creation as a "dramatic abstract of the California environment."

The setting's sculptural and horticultural elements address an ambitious theme: a representation of the reality of California. The artist's manner of presentation is highly crafted, evoking the restrained and representational qualities so appreciated in some Japanese art. Noguchi attempts to recreate and reconstitute, in miniature, the experience of the state.

As you walk around this urban space, which is open free to the public from 8 a.m. to midnight , six distinct and named aspects of California greet you. The names are the sculptor's words – Water Source, The Desert Land, The Forest Walk, Land Use, Energy Fountain, The Lima Bean -- and do not appear on the images themselves.

After leaving a movie, my partner and I would linger in Noguchi’s California representation. There is a certain serenity that permeates the air there that is stronger than the glass and steel skyscrapers. It was a perfect place to reflect on the film we had just viewed.

I felt compelled to attend Noguchi’s exhibit in Los Angeles before it closed. I wanted to feel transformed by his ability to impart serenity through sculpture.

I decided to ditch work last Friday morning and go get my serenity before it was too late. I sent my partner an email on Wednesday night, inviting her to ditch with me. She was in the next room, so I could have easily asked her to join me, but some how sending her a written invitation seemed like the proper way to include her in my plans.

I didn’t expect her to ride along as she has commitments and a calendar to keep, but to my delight she did. An impromptu date, how sweet!

What I felt at the Japanese American National Museum was a bit claustrophobic and constrictive. I expected the big sky, expansive feeling I get when I visit California Scenario.

Noguchi’s museum show required my eyes and ears only. I wanted to touch.

The first installation was set artifacts from Noguchi’s work with Martha Graham. The lyre, from Orpheus, was my favorite. If I was that type of person, I wouldn’t mind a lapel pin replica, but I’m not.

My other favorite piece was a chess table that had glass rings from years of use. Applied art elevated to fine art.

It wasn’t until we entered the vaulted room for the installation for Appalachian Spring, where the music was piped in over head, that I started to feel the serenity I was seeking. Aaron Copeland is one of my favorite American composers. Noguchi’s set designs were simple and let Copeland’s music take center stage.

We left the museum and I expected to drive back to our end of Los Angeles County and work that afternoon. I would eat something from the fridge before going on to work.

Instead, my partner asked a local where the best noodles were. The guy scratched a name on a piece of scrap paper and pointed down the street. We set out on foot looking for the best Noodle Experience of our lives.

I didn’t expect we would find it, but after one call to Information, we did. The line was 18 deep at Orochon Ramen and it was after 1 p.m. We waited and hour to sit down.

We ordered the Miso Ramen and iced tea. The bowls were as deep as basins. One bowl would have been more than enough for both of us, but I asked that the chef throw some heat in my broth which he did and my ear drums burned. The chef had exceeded my expectations and it was indeed the best ramen of my life.

Mother Toggle

2006-05-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

Mother’s Day has again caught me off guard. I feel as if it pounces on me like a rude co-worker interrupting my flow for her own “very important” needs.

I don’t think I have always felt this way. I think it started when I became a mother eight years ago.

The thing is that I don’t feel that Mother’s Day applies to me. Mother’s Day, where I am concerned, feels artificial.

Lately, when I’ve tried to make Mother’s Day be about my partner, the Stay-At-Home-Mom, my boys ask, “What about you?”

My boys are used to making two Mother’s Day cards and gifts in school. I enjoy their sentiments and little remembrances, but on the day itself, Mother’s Day, I would rather it be like any other Sunday, where I walk around in my bed hair, weed the flower beds, prepare Sunday Supper, enter my church, known as Sunday Night TV, right on schedule, and look forward to the coming week.

I don’t want my children to pamper and honor me. It was my choice to give birth to them. They had no say in the matter. If anything, I should be pampering and honoring them on Mother’s Day.

I suppose Mother’s Day for me is about thanksgiving.

I owe my partner a lifetime of gratitude for helping me to find the courage to become a mother. I was fearful I would be a bad mother. I am far from it.

My children challenge me every day to be the best person I can be, to not wallow in self-indulgent angst, but to rise above my own gravity and walk in the beams that their bright lights cast.

I am a better person for becoming a mother, for seeing the remarkable gifts that my children are not only to me and my partner, but to the planet.

This Mother's Day I will be calling my mother. I will tell her that I love her and that I appreciate the sign-posts she has left for me on my Motherhood journey.

Leave the hay for the horses

2006-05-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

I feel compelled to blurt. I have a reputation for blurting, so here I go.

My tomatoes are no longer in a hay bale!

My father-in-law was concerned that our hay bale might spontaneously combust. (I want to howl with laughter right now writing that, but the man is a trusted advisor on everything, so I didn’t doubt he had reliable information about combusting hay bales.) The bale was a foot from the garage. Inside the garage is the usual combustible garage stuff plus the Honey Bee, our Jeep.

The hay was water logged from all of the rain we’ve had this spring, but not in a there’s-no-way-it-will-combust way. It was molding from the inside out, yet the tomatoes were dry. Some of the tomato’s wilting leaves appeared to have been kissed by mold too.

The marigolds were no help. They too, were dry, and they were ugly.

The tomatoes were in the hay bale for a month when it was time to go on my Las Vegas vacation. I had no one to worry over my hay baled-tomatoes.

I panicked.

I want tomatoes, damn it!

The night before we left on vacation, I transplanted Roma, Early Girl, and Mr. Stripey into one gallon plastic containers. They looked pretty sickly. I watered them and let the idea of home-grown tomatoes go.

We returned from vacation, the tomatoes had survived along with my hope for caprese salad in June. I transplanted them to terra cotta pots in the next sunniest spot in the yard.

What a hay bale taught me

I learned that the man with the hooks from the feed lot where I bought the hay bale would once again have come in handy when I attempted to move the soggy hay bale to the nearby planter.

I learned that a hay bale rolls if you use your knees and grunt while pushing it over on its side.

I learned that hay makes great mulch and covers a considerable amount of square footage.

I learned that many, many, many people are searching the internet for “growing tomatoes in hay bales”. They have stopped by Nuts & Bolts to read my tomato-meets-hay bale story.

For those of you still interested in planting your tomatoes in a hay bale, my advice to you is to not have any expectation or desire for tomatoes. After that, I would recommend that you prepare your hay bale. I skipped that step. Finally, if you can, somehow manage your hay bale’s mold, your anxiety level may not get as high as mine did. Let me know how that last step turns out for you.

My Permanent Record

2006-05-10T13:24:00.000-07:00

My second grader is overly concerned about the status of his Permanent Record. He is knee-deep in State Testing and has been influenced by his school’s Powers That Be almost to the point of brainwashing about the importance of State Testing and how his results impact his Permanent Record.

I told him that his principal cares about State Testing but his results don’t go on his Permanent Record. I told him I had no idea where my Permanent Record was. I said that my Permanent Record hasn’t hindered me from pursuing interests and education, so he should just do the best he can on the test. He seemed a bit skeptical.

At dinner last night, we ran the Permanent Record topic around the table yet again. My partner told our sons that if anyone knew where the Permanent Records were kept it was me since I make my living running computers and databases.

“Nope, there is no Permanent Record,” I said. “You don’t even have a Permanent Medical Record.”

If ever there was a need for a Permanent Record, it’s in the healthcare arena. My children don’t know my keen interest in this particular topic, but I follow it closely as part of my IT Toiler career in healthcare.

Yet, I worry about an electronic medical record, even though the Federal Government tries to protect my privacy with regulations like HIPAA. Information gets leaked. Information gets tossed in the recycling bin, the wind blows and papers scatter. Information gets stolen out of Iron Mountain trucks by thieves who think the back-up tapes are filled, not with electronic health information about my last doctor visit, but with credit card numbers.

I know the Permanent Record is used as an intimidation tactic on school-aged children, but what about the Public Record?

The phone rang after dinner last night. I was in the yard, so my partner answered. She came to the back door, the phone cradled between her shoulder and ear, to ask me if I would be willing to have a lawn sign placed in our yard for one of the local city council candidates involved in a run-off on June 6. We never post anything political on our cars or in our yard.

My partner told me the candidate’s name. “Who?” I asked.

“You voted for her!” my partner reminded me.

“Oh, I guess, if you want to,” I said a little sheepishly about the lawn sign.

My partner hung up the phone and then told me that not only had I voted for this candidate but that she was a lesbian and knew our address. I wondered how the caller knew that I had voted for her. Then I realized that I barely knew that I voted for her, so there was another source for this information.

Last June, my partner and I registered as California State Domestic Partners. A matter of my Public Record, but apparently not my Permanent Record (although where my DP status is concerned, I hope it is also a Permanent Record).

So Data Miners, get your queries written, cuz there’s gold in them thar Public Records. Target your audience, perform your search, make your cold calls and post your lawn signs.

I want to get a warm fuzzy feeling from all of this, but it all just makes me want to pull the shades and screen all calls.

Picture up there: Façade of (former) Public Record Office, Chancery, LA

Some things I saw this past week

2006-05-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

The scariest sight: A miner’s lung sitting next to a smoker’s lung sitting next to a non-smoker’s lung. The miner’s lung was as black as tar and sparkled like a diamond. The smoker’s lung was black and grimy. The non-smoker's lung was pale grey. I think the miner’s lung was thrown in as a shout-out to Colorado’s mining history. (Viewed at Body Worlds 2, Denver Museum of Nature and Science).

The most exquisite sight: The enormous display from Colorado's own Sweet Home Mine where a six-foot wall of blood-red rhodochrosite crystals scream for attention. They looked as if they were Jolly Rancher cherry candies that had fallen onto a white crystal floor. (Viewed at the Minerals & Gems exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science)

The most breathtaking sight: The view from atop Bible Peak on Santa Catalina Island where I could see azure, emerald and indigo hues of the Pacific Ocean and dolphins swimming and jumping along the variegated coast line. I expected to remain on the mainland while my family attended an Adventure Guides campout at Camp Fox on Catalina Island. I was a second string sub who got the nod on Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. as my older son had come down hard with scarlet fewer. He was almost as red as a rhodochrosite crystal and certainly as indigo as the Pacific Ocean about having to miss this annual camping trip.

The most endearing sight: My youngest son will turn six in ten days. What a comfort and pleasure to watch him this weekend live and play independently from his older brother. He is the youngest of his Adventure Guides group, yet he is his own person, strong, fair, and sweet. I had no expectations for my island camping weekend, and from that I was open to possibility and vision. What a true blessing.

Old Friends* like Bookends

2006-05-04T19:45:00.000-07:00

I climbed the eight-foot ladder last weekend to retrieve a new plastic airplane from the garage roof when I saw Squeaky Snowman laying in the raven of a terra cotta roof tile. He was a chameleon in the scoop of the roof, blending perfectly into the terra cotta tile highlights. It was like seeing an old friend for me.

Squeaky Snowman could easily become a PSA for the damage that UV rays can do to unprotected skin, regardless of whether that skin is made out of plastic or flesh.

“So that’s where you went,” I thought, tossing him to the mending green St. Augustine grass below.

Squeaky Turnip had turned up a few weeks earlier. Squeaky T had faded to shades of black and white long before he got lost in the underbrush of the willow tree. Squeaky T was Emma C’s first squeaky toy, given to her by Uncle Mark and Hannah on Christmas day 1992.

Hannah and Emma C Goldman are running together with the big dogs now. I hope my girl is chasing a bouncing rubber ball that squeaks when she catches it.

*Old Friends
Paul Simon, 1968

Old friends
Sat on their park bench
Like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes
Of the old friends

Old Friends

Winter companions
The old men
Lost in their overcoats
Waiting for the sunset
The sounds of the city
Sifting through the trees
Settle like dust
On the shoulders
Of the old friends

Can you imagine us year from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy

Old Friends
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fear . . .

A Business Opportunity for Dummies

2006-04-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

When I saw this story on the Weekend WSJ front page I had to read it, I couldn’t look away.

My first ventriloquist experience was at the Vons grocery store when I went to see Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney. I must been four or five. My actual memory is of the anticipation at going, not the actual seeing. My older sister and I were glued to the TV every week for the Winchell-Mahoney Hour. We were early groupies, apparently, unable to look away.

My last vent experience was just the other night when an Everybody Loves Raymond rerun was playing in the background of the room I was walking through. Robert had Timmy, his dummy, on his knee, entertaining the patients at a hospital. Raymond was jealous at the attention Robert was getting, but that didn’t stop Robert from flapping his jaws and using Ray for the butt of Timmy’s barbs and jokes. Ray kept saying, “He’s plastic” every time Robert referred to Timmy’s wooden head.

I had to stop and watch. I still can't look away.

So Who Will Teach Performance Tips For Dummies Now?
The Ventriloquist's Trade Loses a Big Mouth As a Company Bows Out
By G. BRUCE KNECHT
April 15, 2006; WSJ Page A1

Ventriloquists earn their keep by putting words in other people's mouths. But this weekend, many of them are feeling speechless.

That's because the ventriloquism world just lost its best-known institution. For more than 70 years, Maher Ventriloquists Studios has been making dummies and teaching people how to talk without moving their lips. It is difficult to find a ventriloquist who has not "graduated" from the Maher Home Study Course, which promised "Anyone Can Learn!"

But with muted interest in the art form -- and an aging owner eager to retire -- the company closed Friday.

For ventriloquists, or vents, as they call themselves, it's as if the sky is falling.

"Maher provided the puppets, the scripts and jokes, even performance tables and carrying cases -- everything you need," laments Mark Wade, an Ohio-based ventriloquist veteran.

That included "Slappy," a 30-inch-tall doll with a flattop hairdo and a red carnation stuck in his miniature suit jacket. He was available until yesterday at a going-out-of-business price of $75.

Lisa Sweasy, the curator of Kentucky's Vent Haven Museum -- a Mecca for vents that describes itself as the world's only museum of ventriloquism -- is somber. "We are in a season of uncertainty," she says.

Since 1969, Maher has sold more than 10,000 dummies and twice that many people have learned ventriloquism through its course, which consists of pamphlets, a video, exams and various learning tools. Among the lessons: how to use something called a "ventril-o-aid" -- a Popsicle stick-like device that goes between the teeth to help novices learn to speak without moving their jaws.
In describing the vexing problem of pronouncing words that normally require a burst of air from the lips -- those that begin with B, M and P -- the course suggests the beginner start by replacing words like "please" and "pray" with back-of-the mouth substitutes like "klease" and "kray."

Later on, the course makes it clear that this is only a short-term solution and offers some guidance:

"Adjust your tongue slightly by pressing it harder (or more lightly) against the surfaces of your mouth and teeth to achieve the most accurate sound. Use the entire front of the tongue rather than just the tip."

For most of its history, the offbeat company has prospered. In recent years, about 500 people a year have bought Maher's course, each one paying $99.95. It sold standard dummies that can turn their heads, open and shut their mouths and move their eyes, for $200 to $400. Dummies that could flap their ears, wink and arch their eyebrows cost as much as $1,400.

Ventriloquism has been around since antiquity but its peculiar skills weren't widely taught until 1934 when Fred Maher started his company, which he originally called the Maher School of Ventriloquism.

Before then, some performers sold how-to books, but most were intended more to make money than impart skills. "One of the books I read said you had to put cotton in your mouth -- that didn't work -- and another one said you had to have two larynxes," recalls Mr. Wade, a full-time vent since 1980. Today, his performances -- more than 400 each year at kids' events nationwide -- feature a duck and a hillbilly, among other characters.

Mr. Maher taught his earliest students in person, in Detroit. Later, he introduced the home-study course. The business took off after World War II when veterans who had seen ventriloquism acts during the USO's traveling shows signed up for the course. It was the art form's golden age.

Led by Edgar Bergen (father of actress Candice) and his wisecracking sidekick Charlie McCarthy, vents became a wildly popular form of entertainment on the radio. The Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Show aired from 1937 until 1956. "Ventriloquists on radio was huge -- as big as Brad and Angelina are now," says Tom Ladshaw, a longtime vent.

For the past 37 years, the man behind Maher was Clinton Detweiler, who bought the company in 1969 from Mr. Maher's widow for $16,000. At the time, he was working as a cake decorator and looking for a different business opportunity that would allow him to work from home.

His interest in ventriloquism was piqued several years earlier when he noticed a 10-year-old girl entertaining shoppers with a dummy in a grocery store. "Everyone was watching her," he remembers. "It was like some kind of magic. I said, 'this is something I need to know more about.' "

After completing Maher's course, Mr. Detweiler became a part-time performer. When he bought the company several years later, the former pastry man set out to produce dummies from his home in Littleton, Colo. His primary goal, though, was the training of new vents.

He created exams for the course and personally graded all of them. Some of the questions were technical (True or false: Vowels have smooth gentle sounds which normally flow primarily through the nose). Others focused on the art of performing (The eye level of the ventriloquist figure or puppet should be a) higher, b) lower, or c) even with the eyes of the ventriloquist?). A final performance test and a written report from a witness also became a requirement for a graduation certificate.

Mr. Detweiler has served as the president of the North American Association of Ventriloquists, and wrote a newsletter called "Newsy Vents." He also created a blog (http://www.newsyvents.blogspot.com/) and dozens of instructional booklets. Titles include "Creating a Character," "Conquering Stage Fright," and "Making it up as You Go." He repaired dummies and helped get the word out about an annual convention for ventriloquists -- an event that is still scheduled for mid-July.

Maher prospered during most of Mr. Detweiler's ownership, its revenue reaching a peak of a bit over $400,000 in the mid-1990s, he says.

But the ventriloquism field has been losing ground ever since the days when performers were regulars on the Ed Sullivan Show and other variety programs of the 1950s and 1960s. Today, there are no real "celebrity vents" and very few young people are taking up the art of the dummy. "Electronics changed everything," says Mr. Detweiler. "Kids are using computers and iPods -- they don't have time for ventriloquism or any of the arts."

The Internet also took a toll on Maher's market, as it enabled new makers to gain a share of the dummy trade. By last year, the company's revenue was just a third of what it was a decade earlier. Mr. Detweiler, 69, did his best to persuade his daughter, Joy Scheuerman, to take over the business. But she has never had the same passion for the work and she feared that profits would continue to dwindle.

Several potential buyers have stepped forward but Mr. Detweiler rejected them out of hand. The reason: He didn't think they would have the patience to nurture would-be vents. "You cannot sell passion and creativity," says Mr. Detweiler, who still plans to build some dummies each year. "That's what drives the business and I can't figure out how to pass that on."

He's hoping that some of his customers can help fill the void. Full-time Dallas performer Timothy Cowles will distribute some of Maher's educational products.

Mr. Detweiler, meanwhile, has barely had time to think about his planned retirement. News of the company's closing, announced on its Web site in late December, led to a flood of calls -- and last orders. He sold 102 dummies in the first quarter of this year, an all-time record. "We should have gone out of business once a year," he says.

"Chirp"

2006-04-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

Continuing with my eating and food theme . . .

We just finished Sunday supper. Babyback ribs and chicken on the backyard grill. Corn bread baked in a cast iron skillet, a simple romain lettuce salad with blue cheese, naval oranges off of the tree, and barbequed Peeps for dessert.

There is truly no better way to rid your children’s Easter basket of those hideous marshmallow and sugar encrusted animals than to skewer them and turn them gently over the dying barbeque fire. The little chickies transform into what tastes like a poor man’s Crème Brule. Not only do they taste delicious, but there is a sadistic enjoyment that comes from watching the bunny’s eye stretch past his neck and the chick’s eye expand as if becoming another ring around Saturn.

The beautiful thing about barbequed Peeps is that you don’t have to wait for Easter as Peeps come in all shapes for what seems like the monthly holiday or celebration. If the Easter Bunny forgot to leave Peeps in your child’s Easter basket, look for Peep stars and American flags for Memorial Day.

Oh, and fair warning! A barbequed Peep can burn you as if you’ve popped a glowing Kingsford coal inside your mouth. Be patient. It’s worth the wait.