June 2010

June 4, 2010

Watched a fine documentary last night—“It Might Get Loud,” the story of three great guitarists and their love of music. Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge got together in what looked to be a barn for a day of talking and playing guitars. My favorite part of the film occurred at the end, when the three jammed to The Band’s “The Weight.” There is something irresistible about watching people get completely lost in the moment. And that’s what these three were doing during this song. Midway through it, I was tearing up, so enthralled with watching them, unawares, loving what they were doing.

Some of the best parts of life come when we are witnesses rather than the starring actors. Earlier this week, an evening bike ride took a happy detour in Woods Park, where two men were flying radio-controlled planes in one of the open fields. I was mesmerized by this loping, looping, surreal, mini air show, as were a handful of Latino kids, arms thrown in the air, giggles leaking from their happy lips as these planes buzzed and teased them. I struggled to get back on my bike and leave behind all this spontaneous joy, but eventually gave in to the call of home, after talking with one of the men who assured both Mark and me that, yes, we, too, could fly one of these planes. Let’s just say that Hobby Town was part of a follow-up research project we’ve undertaken.

I think these two events—the soulful jam and the joyful air show—represent what I love most about the promise of summer. This is the perfect season for getting lost in something, for wandering without purpose or forethought. It is ironic that we should have to practice or set aside time for spontaneity, but I suppose, for most of us, that’s exactly what we need to do if we are to nurture these moments of being lost in something. Summer offers the perfect palate for just such things. It is a long stretch of sun and slowness that calls us out of our homes, out of routine and rigor, and into something completely different.

I, for one, am hungry for something completely different.


June 4, 2010


Ode to Marti

Been mullin' what to do
About a small little brew
That blew up in my face
At Julie's fine place
Mullin' away just for you!

Here’s to Marti
A life at the party
Who, despite her degree,
Can feel like debris
And get downright tarty!

Here’s to the others
Who whine to their mothers
Once more overlooked
and still underbooked
Mrs. Populatities, if they had their druthers

Seems we all like our names
Lit up in bright flames
Shared in bright spaces,
And quite public places
Even if it’s all just a game.

So I rectify the past,
For they kicked my white ass
On Julie’s nice patio
Ba DUM, you big Daddio!
Let’s hope this will last!


June 6, 2010


We have the best newspaper carrier at least west of the Mississippi, if not west of the Allegheny and Charles, as well. In a newspaper-junkie household in which at least half of the members are awake before 5 a.m. most days, this journalistic brag carries significant and prideful weight. As is the case with all humans, though, --even those with seeming super-hero qualities—our newspaper carrier occasionally lets us down. Take this morning, for instance. It’s a sad work day when Mark, who backs out his Subaru no later than 5:35 a.m., leaves sans headlines and local weather, with no official sense of the day’s significant events. Alas, such was the scenario this morning.

And I, good and faithful wife who also is hampered by an inability to sleep past the cardinals’ first songs but who packages her appallingly early morning greetings as tributes to a husband rather than acknowledgement of sleep issues, am left with nothing, come 5:40. No paper. No husband. No real options beyond picking up a book which, let’s be honest here, isn’t deadline driven or in any way otherwise dependent upon today’s date.

Finally, unbearably, shockingly and most certainly disappointingly (which, I’m thinking is not a word, except among the grammatically feeble), it took until (gasp!) almost 6:10 for our carrier (or what I can only hope is a slacker fill-in) to come rambling down Woods Avenue, hope and focus wrapped in news-filled condoms, delivering the goods which, frankly, already seemed a bit stale by that point. And yet, I let out a little yip upon hearing the hefty “thud” of a Sunday edition challenge the wood paneling of our front door.

After perusing the front-page section, though, I realized that its delayed delivery was probably was a good thing, considering the proliferation of stories that just as easily could have been labeled “Humans Behaving Badly.” For a day wrapped in rapt holiness, it sometimes seems that the titans of this obviously godless, undoubtedly communist industry of journalism downright revel in the spiritually bubble-popping headlines they put together for a Sunday. I am assaulted by photos of sluggish, hospice-qualifying pelicans weighed down by a substance most appropriately called “crude,” articles of yet another Israeli seizure of a ship, headlines claiming “Business as usual” in evaluating the back-room politics of my holdout-for-hope President Barack Obama, mutterings of Central-American claims of another murder committed by the Holloway suspect, details of the FDIC takeover of a local bank. . . seriously, it’s enough to keep a person from attending one’s liberal, attendance-optional, guilt-free church today (then again, the need to play Scrabble before noon already had proved reason enough, if I’m to be honest here).

Heck, even a viewing of “Avatar” last night left me with a “what a bunch of losers humans are” taste in my mouth, which most certainly contributed to my early-morning rising, what with the pull of and hope that a daub of early-morning toothpaste promised. Bad enough to awaken with morning breath, without the sullying effects of a general distaste for humanity adding to the problem.

I’d originally set out to write this as a “just when things look bad” piece, in which I ultimately praised the good and humane efforts of the majority of people in the world. But it turns out I’ve gone on too long to find the “oomph” to respond to despondence with evidence of hope. Besides, I write this after reading only the front section of the paper and it occurs to me that, cradled within at the very least the “Living” and “Sports” sections, there is ample evidence that contradicts the stories and images that threaten to harsh my mellow. Surely, it is a reasonable response, then, to wrap up this piece so that I may apply the feel-good salve that awaits me somewhere deep in the pages of my Sunday Journal-Star.


June 9, 2010


I have really tight teeth. Not “tight” like I used that term in the 70s (i.e., totally awesome), but “tight” as in “ain’t no breeze movin’ through these parts” tight. I imagine that’s why it took me about 40 years to start flossing. Prior to the breakthrough development of Oral B’s ultra-thin Satin Floss, the semi annual floss fests that took place at my dentist’s office felt like razor wire in the “rinse” cycle. Back then, my dental hygienist had to mount the chair and do warm-up exercises to get anything to move between my molars.

Since I’m on the topic and this is my little world, there’s a great dental-related story I should share. . .

Friend Morgan, who is a dentist, recommended a friend of his when I was shopping around for dentists 25 years ago. I took him up on the offer and began taking my tooth-related needs to a small office near Leon’s Grocery Store off of South Street. One time, while getting a crown, the crowd of dental-office employees hovering over me began doing some old-fashioned gossiping. Seems the dentist who’d formerly owned the practice had recently taken up with a local lady. Despite being numbed to the gills, I was compelled to speak up when the hygienist uttered “Did you hear that Dr. Marshall is dating someone?”

“Dohtah Dih Mahshllll?” I spat (no, really, I did spit).

“Um hmmmm,” she acknowledged.

Turns out they were gossiping about my mom and my soon-to-be stepfather. Who’da thunk I’d have chosen the former practice of my future stepfather, and that I’d hear a group of people telling I hope not-too-titillating stories about my 73-year-old mother over novacaine and mouth mirrors?!

Ah, but I wander. . .

Ultimately, there are two reasons I started flossing about 8 years ago—one, as I’d previously mentioned, was the discovery of that waxy, thin-as-spring-ice Oral B floss. The other was because of the influence of my stepfather, Dick Marshall, DDS (sounds like a 70s T.V show). I don’t know if I wanted to impress him or if I was just trying to fend off the inevitable, bloody-gums gossip that would eventually reach his ears, since we now went to the same dentist. Whatever the reason, I began the tedious, painful process of daily flossing. Now I’m hooked. And just in time, it turns out.

Not too long ago, I was reading a story about habits and longevity. Turns out that people who floss regularly can add up to 5 years to their lives. FIVE years! It got me thinking—are my healthy, pink gums really adding time to my life or is flossing simply an indicator of other, life-extending habits?

We use indicators all the time. Little snapshots become magically-enlarged billboards as we extract from them perhaps far more than should be expected. When my great neighbors Jody and Jeremy first moved in, it was hard to ignore Jeremy’s tat-riddled arms and shoulders. Was this body art an indicator of future keggers and confrontations? Uh, no. Let’s just say that, now that they have two young children, it’s a nightly race between Jeremy and me to see who can make it to the 10 o’clock news. It’s a goal neither of us has achieved yet.

While I don’t see our information-obsessed culture giving up its love affair with indicators any time soon, it’s good to remind ourselves that sometimes tattoos are just tattoos and that flossing may be the result of a cheap cut of beef rather than a commitment to longevity.


June 10, 2010


The other evening, I decided to watch some flowers move. Unfortunately, the breeze got in the way, forcing me to suspend my experiment. So, how can the wind get in the way of watching something move? It gets in the way when the movement I’m seeking is the act of ritual opening and closing. I wanted to watch these flowers close up shop for the night. I wanted to see, in super slo-mo, their petals stretching upward, towards the sky, before collapsing upon each other for some well-earned slumber.

I was willing to wait to watch that happen.

Such is not the case with my school district’s new email system, however.

In the time that it took to ponder this morning’s subject, to do some stretches for a funky kink in my back, and to actually set fingertips to keyboard, putting down an intro plus a short follow-up paragraph, my sleepy, new, allegedly “improved” email system managed to find its front door, so that I could knock for admittance. Add another series of activities, from letting the dog out to watching the clouds flit across the sky, and you get an idea of how long it took to find out I had two new emails to open. Two emails, whose reputations instantly were sullied by the fact that it took 10 minutes to retrieve them.

Technology does funny things to our sense of time. It also does funny things to our opinions of things, simply because of the time it takes to access those very things. Hardly fair, I know, but true.

Nature has a similar, albeit, antithetical effect over us. Where technology rewards speed, nature gives its nod to the process, something that invariably takes longer out of doors. It’s why we plant gardens and celebrate the turning over of seasons. It’s why we gasp as we watch the sun turn beet red before bed, utterly amazed that we can witness the turning of the earth in the sinking of the sun. And in those instances when nature takes its lead from technology, embracing speed rather than evolution, we hold our collective breath as the storm appears from seemingly nowhere, the thin tail of the tornado weaving its way through boulevards and business districts.

Maybe we don’t appreciate the values of technology or nature until something comes along to challenge those same values. I don’t realize how much I’ve come to expect speed from technology until a clunky new email system forces me to wait up to (GASP!) five minutes to access my email. Maybe I forget how much I value nature’s unfolding until I experience a torrent of unexpected violence pour forth from the skies.

And so, it turns out that sometimes we require the unexpected to once again frame our expectations of things. I should, I suppose, thank that clunky, new email system for giving me something to write about today.


June 15, 2010


Letter-Jacket Jihad

Third and long,
V E R Y long
As in 30-years-3-mortgages-5-jobs-not-counting-that-one-in-Tuscon-2-kids-and-one-trophy-wife long.
More A.A.R.P. than
We We We We DO that stuff, DO that stuff
. . . did
that
stuff. . .
Long ago having traded teetering on greatness for tottering on stairsteps
Not choice so much as it was circumstance

Tan pants pocket snags on the cracked vinyl of a
Booth seat from some bygone era
Fingers drumming the tabletop now tacky
With spilled dreams and salt-rimmed margaritas
Make mine a double

Like one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse
--only puffier,
He tries to recall the glory days when doom rained down
Upon the vaunted Knights
Under the white-hot lights of Seacrest Field
The announcer’s voice bouncing off of all those houses
On Hazelwood Drive

What was it that made that moment “the one?”


June 15, 2010


While waiting for Allison to emerge from volleyball this afternoon, I looked out over a long stretch of nature, a green field buffeted by a stand of trees to the west. A row of hay bales rested up against a fence near my car. It was here that a bird landed, unaware both of me and of itself, it seems.

At first, I couldn’t identify it—flashes of color against its chest made me wonder if it was a Baltimore Oriole, albeit, an off-course one. Somehow, its chest changed colors before my eyes and I started to think it might be a Meadowlark, certainly more at home in this field, though it seemed to have misplaced its black collar.

Even the bird itself seemed unable to decide what it was, stretching its wings high above its head, as though hoping something might come to it. At other times, it puffed itself up, and I swear I could see it inhale and exhale, like a strutting rooster with something to prove.

And then, as quickly as it had transformed itself from fruit eater to bug eater, it became what it had been born to be—a robin. Nothing more. And yet, those ten fascinating minutes I’d spent pondering its background, enjoying its displays that seemed to have no more purpose than providing the bird with something to do, they were ten excellent minutes I was glad to have.

This bird had reminded me, once again, that expectations are simply lines in the sand, malleable fences that can be crossed as easily as they can pen things in. For ten minutes, this most common of birds had been anything but itself to me. In the process, it made me think of my own children and those wonderful moments in their lives when they emerge as something I had not quite expected.


June 17, 2010


I am averse to teenaged-girl drama. Averse to, unfortunately, does not mean “immune to.” And so, my mama heart aches for daughter Allison, who wonders what it is about her that draws the laser-edged fire of her female friends.

I lay next to her in her bed, surrounded by funky, bright-colored wall decals, piles of clothing scattered about the floor, and just enough “girl” things that make me wonder if she’s really mine, and she tells me about the bitter ending to an otherwise good summer day. I lay there, listening, but also recalling the fine work of the afternoon’s cloudburst, how it had skittered away all the heat and humidity, leaving behind a rare, calm, crisp summer evening that was meant to be savored. And I wonder what it would take to skitter away all the heat and humidity of teenaged girls . . . .

What can I say to comfort her that will be both honest and helpful? I can only tell her that humans are imperfect and it is best not to take one moment in time and ask it to represent all those that have been and are yet to come. I tell her that silence can be more effective than lectures or explanations. That sharing is sometimes best done in small, measured doses, rather than in gushing heaps that, to some, speak of weakness and vulnerability.

And then she asks the question that boils it all down.

Is it wrong to be myself?

(sigh)

No, it is never wrong to be yourself. Just. . . complicated.

I stroke her hair and tell her all the reasons that make me love her, or at least those reasons that are most accessible to me at 10:30 p.m. I tell her that the best thing about the morning is that it gives us permission to start anew, to call “do overs,” to get up and try again, which is the essence of humanity and, sometimes, the very definition of “courage.”

We say our "good nights". I should be tired. It is long past my typical bedtime. But sleep comes slowly to me, hampered by doubts and the desire to protect someone I love.


June 19, 2010


A JOURNALISTIC JUMBLE
Today, I got the hankering to see what would happen to two top newspaper stories if I swapped sports-page quotes for the news stories and news-page quotes for the sports story. Below are the results of my journalistic experiment.

CHAIRMAN: BP CEO OFF SPILL DUTY

NEW ORLEANS—BP’s chairman said Friday that CEO Tony Hayward is on his way out as the company’s point man on the Gulf oil spill crisis.

“He just ignored us", Landon Donovan said. “Or he didn’t understand.”

Other BP officials, however, said the switch had been announced previously and will not take place for some time.

“I’ve been doing this for 32 years,” said Tom Lemming. “The one player I remember them getting out of Chicago was Nate Turner. He was a big catch because they beat Notre Dame for him.”

BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg told Britain’s Sky News television on Friday that “they’ve been talking to me for about a year now, but they told me that I had to come into camp and show off my skills and show them what I could do.”

Svanberg’s statement sowed confusion among other BP officials.

“I wanted it so bad, and sometimes when you want it so bad, it slips away from you,” said Kobe Bryant.

The chairman’s comments have overshadowed some positive news in the cleanup effort. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen announced earlier Friday that a newly expanded system is capturing or incinerating more than a million gallons of oil a day.

“For an 11-year-old, nothing could be a bigger deal,” Steve Rosenblatt said earlier this week.

By late June, the oil giant hopes it can keep nearly 90 percent of the flow from hitting the ocean.

“Look what it’s turned into. It’s been a place where young men have literally found their destiny,” said Rosenblatt. “It’s been a great run, probably longer than one would expect.”


REF'S CALL PREVENTS U.S. VICTORY

JOHANNESBURG—Maurice Edu kicked the ball into the net. American players jumped around wildly, thinking they had capped a historic comeback, turning a two-goal, first-half deficit into a 3-2 victory over Slovenia in the World Cup.

Referee Koman Coulibaly of Mali had called it off. Over and over, American players asked “Why?”

“Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups are tyring to recruit some young people in order to carry out attacks in an apparent attempt to show that they are still active,” said Hazim Ali.

“His teacher called and said it wasn’t appropriate,” said one official. Others had their opinions as well.

“What [Mr. Coulibaly] seems to be suggesting here is that we should be forced to use him, and I don’t think that’s the business of the state auditor’s office,” said Chris Beutler.

Perhaps Coulibaly, working his first World Cup game, will never explain himself. By the rules, he doesn’t have to speak to the media on game days and his next availability isn’t until Monday. Perhaps it will remain one of those unsolved soccer mysteries.

“Everybody’s a little skeptical down here right now, including myself,” said Bill Glider.

What is known for now is this: Donovan and Michael Bradley scored second-half goals that did count, and U.S. hopes to reach the second round remained alive with a 2-2- tie Friday night. And for one pure moment, Edu felt “pure excitement.”

It didn’t last.

“I am so devastated with this accident,” he said. “Deeply sorry and so distraught.”


June 22, 2010


It’s an odd experience, to see yourself outside of yourself. Odd, but not all that unusual. And so, as I find my routine in these summer months, one punctuated by bike rides on the most excellent 3-speed Purple Hawaii with green rims, there are times when I wonder if I’m a bit of a sad spectacle. Especially at stop lights—the long-suffering intersection at 32nd and Capital Parkway is first to come to mind—where I am forced to take a break from the joy of pedaling and instead get a rather shocking glimpse of my gear.

First, there are those shorts. That awful, paint-spattered pair that’s missing a button. I can almost hear my mom’s sharp intake of air as she withholds at least verbal judgment. These are paired not with a matching shirt but rather with whatever shirt it was that accompanied me to bed the night before. And, while I may very well pretend that I started wearing a helmet when my children were born and because it is the right and safe thing to do, the true answer probably is rooted more in my roots than anything else. “Roots,” as in “hair.” When a person is willing to go into the world with bed head, such a decision really should be accompanied by a sturdy, polystyrene “hat,” tastefully anchored under the chin with a snazzy little strap.

Sometimes, it’s all I can do to keep from running the light and riding against (or directly into) traffic.

And now that I have a decent car—one with the requisite number of hubcaps AND rearview mirrors—that came with a decent stereo—one whose LED panel actually displays the station number rather than administers a Rorschach—it is again at stop lights where I am aware of my music choices, especially when the HUMpah HUMpah of a great bass riff seems to reverberate against the next car’s interior. In those precious, stare-inducing seconds between realization and volume control, I feel the searing eyes of the woman in the snappy Passat as she wonders what the hell I’m doing listening to THAT kind of music.

As I teeter on increasingly-abundant AARP junk mail, I find myself torn between who it is that brings me pleasure and who it is that draws others’ ire—even though these two are certainly one and the same. On one shoulder sits the “act your age, not your shoe size” ogre, the one that makes me glad that my feet actually seem to be growing. On the other lounges the laid-back “Peace, love and Bobby Sherman” genie, prodding me to buy a whoopee cushion and some disappearing ink.

For now, I am mostly content to live with both parasites, understanding that there are times and places for all behavior and that, with a little guidance, I may very well be able to correctly identify which situation I happen to be in at the moment and adjust accordingly.


June 23, 2010


I’d been formulating the question for weeks, if not months. It had to be worded just right, because the presumption was so . . . strange. I mean, really, is it possible that disease or dysfunction would have a unique smell to it? Yet I couldn’t deny the facts, despite not quite knowing what they were exactly.

For the past several months, there’s been an unpleasant scent in my nose. Fortunately, it’s not always there, but it’s there enough of the time that I’ve wondered if it was me or something else. After all, why wouldn’t the inside of a body have a scent to it? We are, after all, mobile cities chock full of parasitic renters who pay us in god-knows-what. Besides, no one else has commented on the smell.

Oddly, the scent hits me at different times, in different places. Almost always about halfway up the stairs. Sometimes in the library. And, the other day, in the sanctity of my nearly-new used Nissan Altima, where, before, all things had been perfect and beautiful and anything but malodorous.

And so, with a doctor’s appointment already in the books, I’d been formulating the question.

“So, Dr. Hurlbut, hehehheheheh, is it possible to smell illness?”

“Say, doc, I was wondering. I’ve had this odd smell in my nose lately. Any chance boogars smell?”

Alack and alas, though, the mystery unraveled itself yesterday, pointing to me simply as a victim, not as the source. For once, it seems, someone else had caught a whiff.

In passing (not that kind of passing, thankfully), Mark mentioned that he keeps getting whiffs of what he assumed was dog urine in our house. He’d smell it in the basement, on the library rug, upstairs. And, while Hobbes the Hobo dog has been known to periodically suffer in the gastrointestinal way, he also happens to have a bladder of steel, seemingly able to go entire months without peeing, so it was unlikely that he was the culprit.

The simple act of tying his shoe yesterday afternoon proved to be the beginning of a definitive answer. That’s when Mark took a snuff of his sole. And gagged a bit. Turns out that the smell that has wafted its way upward all these months is some sort of material adhesed to Mark’s shoes. It’s not his feet. Or his socks. Or some festering disease within my skull. It’s Mark’s shoes.

I can’t say our lives have returned to normal since that moment of odiferous discovery. I can’t say that the smell has gone either. At least not until I can convince Mark to chuck the Chucks (okay, they’re not really Chuck Taylors, but I liked the idea of writing that word twice in a row) and get himself a new pair. Of shoes, that is.


June 25, 2010


I am no fan of fruit flies, but I do have a grudging respect for them. While I was on my bike ride this morning, these seasonal visitors somehow found a temporarily-abandoned, peeled banana I’d left in the library. It takes me about 4.5 seconds to walk from our kitchen to the library, but, to a fruit fly, this space must be something like traveling from East High to North Star—no simple jaunt down the block. Yet, within 45 minutes of my desertion of the endangered fruit (it’s true—enjoy your bananas NOW!), a happy horde of fruit flies had found refuge on its woody exterior.

I can only hope they didn’t have fruit-fly relations with or on the banana, considering that I ate it shortly after returning from my ride. Granted, bananas have a long and sordid history with tasteless sex jokes and 13-year-old boys, but, without the taunting pistils of a pollen-laden flower, I don’t really know what they’d get from a cross-species tryst. Not much, I hope.

While I’d rather not share my house with fruit flies—or coconut ants or spiders, and definitely NOT with roaches—I am generally generous with my insect friends. In most cases, I prefer search-and-rescue operations over Ghenghis Khan tactics. I don’t like to poison things or step on them—and, even when I wet a Kleenex to loosen the spider from its temporary place on the ceiling just above my bed, my goal is not to squish the life out of him but rather to reunite him with his outdoor friends.

This did not happen the other night, when I watched a spider lower itself like a rappeller from the ceiling just above Mark’s pillow. Fortunately, this took place while Mark--who would have screamed like a little girl had he been there--was taking a bath. Still, I was sort of sorry that he couldn’t see it all unfold in its nightmarish glory, the unsuspecting spider swinging down his rope like an elementary kid glad to have made it to the top. Wet Kleenex in hand, I uttered a silent prayer to the arachnid gods and proceeded to squish the guts out of the fella, knowing that search-and-rescue would not be acceptable to Mark. He needed proof, in the form of legs curled inward, tucked within the recesses of a Kleenex now floating in the toilet.

Fare thee well, my spider friend. May you come back as a beautiful butterfly, lilting from one pistil to the next, never bothering to ask them their names.


June 25, 2010


Dear God,
Bless me father, for I have sinned. Given that you are omniscient and probably a little bored from time to time, I’m sure you already realize that Allison and I went to the mall today. That’s not the reason I’m writing you today, although I suppose going to the mall might qualify as a venial sin. I will say an extra Hail Mary tonight just in case. Anyway, I let Allison buy two really awful pairs of shorts today. I suppose I could argue with you that they were less awful than all the other shorts in that awful, awful store, but, if that’s true, well, then, you already know that, too.

It’s amazing that you don’t come off as a know-it-all, but you really don’t. Anyway, I wander. . .

So, I was wondering if you could talk to the people who design clothes for girls . . . As you know already (yet I feel compelled to remind you), they are “clothes” only in the most Pharisaic, letter-of-the-law sense, qualifying for no better reason than because they have buttons and zippers and holes for limbs and just the tiniest bit of cloth held together by what must be, at most, like a an inch or two of thread. Seriously, God, these shorts make Jesus’ loin cloth look like a pair of parachute pants in comparison.

And have you seen the tops they’re selling to girls these days? I know I don’t need to tell you this, God, but they make little girls look preggers! And that is NOT a good look for most young girls, your son’s mother an exception, of course.

So, anyway, while I know it’s really bad to wish ill of others, I must admit that a part of me would love to hear that you have dealt with my request in a clever and funny way. Maybe a perpetual snuggy or some chafing for these alleged designers? Or possibly you could turn the hearts of middle-aged women and cause them to seek out these awful fashions—but just for one day because, really, I don’t want this to go so far that wars or acne break out. Well, it’s not really my place to suggest possible penitent options for others.

Mostly, I just want my daughter to be able to buy something that doesn’t look like she dances around poles for a living. I want her to have choices in which her body is not outlined so clearly for others, clothes that leave plenty to the imagination, while also leaving a little extra green in the pocketbook as well, since I’m asking.

Anyway, I hope you’ll consider my request. It is made with a mostly pure heart and good intentions, with just maybe a hint of schadenfreude thrown in, but I’m working on that. Thank you for considering this matter. I hope you have a great weekend!

Sincerely Yours,
Jane Raglin Holt
Lincoln, NE
USA
Earth (third rock from the sun)



June 30, 2010


It seems that the closer I get to the 4th of July, the further I get from the present. Even though I’m just shy of 50, my eyes scan the papers, looking for firecracker-stand inserts filled with promises of hisses and bangs and booms. I stop by the ATM and get some extra cash for Eric and Allison, not because they requested it, but because it at least a moral if not a legal requirement to have extra money to spend on fireworks.

It used to be that I could think of no greater holiday in the year. This one had it all—summer heat, time off, grilled food, fun explosives, parties and swimming pools. Say “4th of July” and I think of penny dives and greased-watermelon contests at East Hills, the fun interrupted only by the bizarre beer races that pulled the adults into the water at each safety break.

Say “4th of July” and I flash back to the night my dad directed a full frontal pop-bottle rocket assault on our neighbors, the Poppes. The Poppes also happened to have an in-ground trampoline that, I do believe, we air conditioned on that fatal night. I will never forget the image of my dad, in a lawn chair parked in the middle of our driveway, directing the neighbor kids, each with his or her own pop bottle and supply of rockets: Ready, Aim, FIRE! Nor will I forget the suave and nearly undetectable turn he made, this time looking uphill rather than down, when he saw Mr. Poppe finally come out of his house to confront us about the assault. I never knew what compelled my dad to lead that attack. My guess is that Mr. Poppe and his brood were all Republicans. But that’s just a guess.

Say “4th of July” and I flash back to all of the parties I’ve had on that holiday. Two, in particular, stand out. For one, I’d bought enough brisket to feed 50 people and got what seemed to be good advice from neighbor Cathy, who showed me how to prepare so much meat, using her pressure cooker. The afternoon of the 3rd, I popped that meat into the pressure cooker and proceeded to go to “Moulin Rouge” at the local theatre. By the time Mark and I returned, there was a definite meaty smell in our house. I unlocked the lid of the pressure cooker, ready to be tempted by perfectly-cooked brisket. What I found instead was something that looked like a moon rock, dark and hard and about the size of a baseball.

Never thought I’d say this, but Russ’s IGA on 17th and Washington came to the rescue on the morning of the 4th, a wise and overworked butcher getting me the replacement brisket and telling me how to cook it before the gang got here.

The other memorable Independence Day party moment came when Mark was cajoled into lighting a pop bottle rocket. It had been, perhaps, 30 years since he’d lit his last firecracker, a flaw I had overlooked until that fateful moment. Caught up in the excitement of illegal fireworks—or perhaps having grown tired of Corey’s prodding him to join in—Mark reached down and extracted a lone bottle rocket from the gross. He put it into the pop bottle, grudgingly lit the fuse and, with the élan of a bored sloth, held out his arm for the inevitable takeoff.

Just as his rocket became airborn, Jill stepped out of her car, purse on her shoulder and salad in her hands. Mark’s rocket arced quickly and then made a beeline back to earth. Well, not exactly back to earth. The bottle rocket was drawn to the pocket of Jill’s purse, which had called it to come hither, where it then proceeded to blow up. While I’m not so sure that Jill was glad to be there at that very moment, I knew that I was where I was meant to be, having witnessed a fantastic, one-in-a-million moment, reluctantly starring my husband Mark Holt and his wayward rocket.

As I’ve gotten older, I have grown less tolerant of the really loud fireworks, the ones with “Missouri” stamped upon their fragile paper shells. And the litter gets to me, as well, though that’s nothing new. And yet, I still find myself happily in the moment, straddling past and present, recalling the joyful and dangerous abandon of my youth, while cradling a cold one in my hands.