If I Knew What I Was Doing I Wouldn't be Here

Remembering Sal - Salvatore J. Zisa

2010-09-11T11:00:00.000-04:00

When I was a freshman in college in the 1970's, I took my very first job, as a "confection attendant" - aka candy girl - at the Hyway Theatre in Fair Lawn. Over the years we were employed there, I and my co-workers became a very tight-knit group that hung out together after work, at whatever places we could find that were open and served food after midnight. It wasn't a job for us. More like a place to get into the movies for free and to make some pocket change while goofing around with people we liked. Most of us got jobs for friends, or got our jobs there because we knew someone who also worked at the Hyway. (I got mine from a classmate of my sisters, Linda Wasserman.)

One of the ushers, (I think it was Carl Winter) got a girl he knew a job, and she had a friend named Sal who also hung out sometimes with her and with us. She lived on Pomona Ave, near the Fair Lawn - Hawthorne border, and he was from Hawthorne.

Ask me her name, and I can't remember, but I always remembered Sal. He was quiet and serious most of the time, maybe even a bit shy to hang out with what was a big group of strangers that had spent a few years working and being friends. He had a soft voice most of the the time, sitting quietly at the table when we went out to eat after work, sober-faced, just eating and listening to us clown around and unwind. But it always happened that at some point he would unexpectedly jump into the conversation and have everyone cracking up, as if he'd known all of us for years and years, too.

After a few weeks, he seemed to be one of the gang. We would try, but we could never talk him into taking a job with us. He had better ideas than spending his life making minimum wage to sweep up popcorn in the lobby. In that regard, he was a lot more mature than the rest of us. He was in school. He had plans. The biggest plans we all had was what weekend to go to the shore, and what movies were opening that we could get into for free.

At some point, his female friend got a better job and quit, and Sal stopped socializing with us, too. Eventually, we all moved on to other things, got real jobs that worked normal hours, and stopped hanging out late and driving home on empty streets in cars stuffed with as many as we could fit into them.

In other words, we grew up.

In that blur of a week in September five years ago, I remember seeing his name and hometown on a message board as I searched for the name of some of my husband's former co-workers at the WTC. The first time I saw his face, I recognized him.

Damn, damn, damn.

When the New York Times posted his profile, it said:

The Top Priority

When traveling on business, as he often did, Salvatore Zisa, 45, would almost invariably take the red-eye flight home from the West Coast. From the airport, he would then typically proceed directly into the office at Marsh Inc., where he was a senior vice president, arriving at his desk as though he had slept in a bed like everyone else. This pattern repeated itself again and again over the years.

Workaholic? Maybe. Or maybe just a father who wanted to make sure he could get home to Hawthorne, N.J., in time for a soccer game where his daughter Christina, 16, or his son Joseph, 12, would expect to look up and see him cheering.

"His priority was making sure he got to his kids' games on time, that he didn't miss anything," said his brother, Tony Zisa. "He traveled a lot, but he would work his schedule around making sure he was home for the important things. He was always there for our parents, and for his kids, and for his wife."

For all of us living in the suburbs of NYC, the events of 9/11/01 will forever remain in names on a list that were of neighbors, co-workers, faces we passed on the street or saw on a train, in a meeting, in a lobby, at the newstand or at the bagel shop nodding over a cup of coffee. Or a face from nearly thirty years in the past, a guy that made us all laugh over garlic bread and pizza at Barcelona's on Harrison Ave. in Garfield as we sat having dinner after work at midnight, too young, too full of life, to go home to sleep yet.

I will always remember Sal, and I am happy to remember him as I knew him. And I am sure there are a lot of others out there who he touched who are thinking of him, forever young, forever with that smile he was always sharing, too. Having him pass through our lives was a gift.

I am sorry that I never got to meet that guy he grew up to be.

More comments from Sal's coworkers at the Marsh memorial site. Or view the guest book dedicated to him at Legacy.com . His panel in the United in Memory Quilt is here.

There is a scholarship set up in his memory - for more information, look here.

Many groups have proposed alternative ways to honor the memory of victims of 9/11, most by volunteering or participating in community service projects. Sal's page on the USA initiative site, part of the movement known as One Day's Pay is here. I am proud to be a volunteer in my own community, something I did after my family's 9/11 experience, and hope that you will help turn this tragic day into something that helps make America a better place.

Please take a moment to leave your comments and view some of the others memorialized by the participating bloggers of the 2996 project

(My husband is a 9/11 WTC survivior. I wrote a little bit about his experiences back in April. The link is posted below.)

Comments about the movie about Flight 93

2010-09-05T00:52:00.000-04:00

(I originally posted this in April, 2006. This is a repost.)

People are falling all over themselves to discuss the trailers for the movie that have taken unsuspecting people by surprise with footage of the events of 9/11. Imagine you are from the area, like I am, and you go to see a nice, relaxing film, and find yourself confronted with the worst thing you have ever witnessed - and the idea that someone is making a piece of fiction out of it, to entertain, of all things.

My husband worked for Dean Witter Discover in 1993, was there when the first bombing took place and evacuated down 86 floors, through the fire and smoke. He will tell you that after that day, whenever he was there, it was always in the back of his mind that the WTC - and Manhattan - was a target.

He was born in Queens, and up until our marriage, a life-long NYC-er. He would never consider working any where else. We bought our house to be near the train to Manhattan, in fact, because that's where he wants to be.

By 9/11/01, he had left the job at the WTC, for a job as an internet architect in a building at the corner of John and Water Streets. On Monday, 9/10, he spent the day in a training seminar in the South Tower, preparing for meetings the following day at Windows on the World with co-workers for the computer expo that was being held there. He owes his life partly to a decision to get breakfast before going up from his office to the meeting - he and his office mates were crossing back from a bagel store and standing in John Street when the first plane hit, and still standing there, trying to get in touch with the big boss and their families to tell them where they were when the second plane struck.

For most of that morning, until his floor secretary's fiancee got a call out to me that he'd heard from her and my husband, I thought he was at Windows on the World and, after the tower fell, that he was dead.

Living in Bergen County, there is not one day that has gone by that the events of that day are not fresh in my mind and reflected in daily life. To think of someone using the deaths of my neighbors, anyone's neighbors as a means to make money makes me want to throw up. My husband had PTS afterwards, and still can not talk about things that he saw that day as he stupidly nearly got killed when the first tower collapsed and he was walking/running to try to get to the ferry only two blocks away. Only a stranger that pulled him to his feet when he fell over the decorative fence around the little park, and the people at the Battery Park City condo office that opened up their door to people fleeing the falling tower helped him get home - so he was incredibly fortunate that day in many ways. I can not even begin to fathom the pain of the family members of those on both airplanes - and, unfortunately, I know all too well the pain of friends and family members of those that died in the towers; both my husband and I lost neighbors, friends and acquaintances.

I got involved in volunteering in my community as a direct response to 9/11, and have spent much of my free time since fundraising for a memorial to victims of that day and other acts of terrorism in my town. So here I am, asking people to purchase bricks or donate for plantings in memory of people I lived around - and someone is going to make more money for their own pockets in one movie showing than we have raised in five years from the community.

Would I censor the movie, or demand it be pulled, or stop it - no. This is still America, and the rights of idiots to exploit the pain and suffering of others has to be weighed as part of the price we pay for the right to express our own thoughts. Would I spend a penny to see it, or willingly watch it - no. And I will not have kind thoughts for the values of those that do walk into a theatre or pay to own such exploitation. It takes a level of obliviousness and crassness that diminshes us all to do that. Something is definately skewed in priorities in this country if this picture has more than a handful of interest - supporting a work of absolute fiction and imaginary storytelling based upon a horrible tragedy. I would much rather see people take the nine or ten bucks and donate it to a charity or hurricane relief or to someplace where it will make the world a more compassionate place than dwell upon the pain of others for a cheap thrill. That is sick in a way I do not want to think about human beings as being.

I prefer to think about those that engaged in the small acts that made a difference, and those that went up the stairs when others were fleeing down - the countless people that helped others, the ones that sheltered strangers, supported the police and fire in the weeks afterwards, all of those of us that lived 9/11 up close and all of those who felt the pain in their hearts and did whatever they could. That is the story to be told. Not the explotation of death, but the affirmation of lives lived with compassion for others. Not the vicarious thrill of fiction, but the very real best of human nature that saved my husband, extended hands out to strangers, and wrapped all of us touched by this event with a human connection that no terrorist can ever break.

There's no one home, so please don't knock...

2010-06-02T14:15:00.002-04:00

I had forgotten all about this blog. Seriously. I discovered most of the links I had up were to my Hometown AOL pages, which have been gone for more than a year. The others were to my Geocities page about Molly, which is also long gone.

So while the internet may have a long memory, in my case, it has dementia, too. Trying to recall a web page that has been deleted is about as futile. I promise to fix things one of these days. Otherwise, there is always archive.org and the Wayback machine.

"The world has changed. We now dream in color'

2009-01-21T12:25:00.004-05:00

From the official website of the White House, the first act of our new president:

NATIONAL DAY OF RENEWAL AND RECONCILIATION, 2009

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

As I take the sacred oath of the highest office in the land, I am humbled by the responsibility placed upon my shoulders, renewed by the courage and decency of the American people, and fortified by my faith in an awesome God.

We are in the midst of a season of trial. Our Nation is being tested, and our people know great uncertainty. Yet the story of America is one of renewal in the face of adversity, reconciliation in a time of discord, and we know that there is a purpose for everything under heaven.

On this Inauguration Day, we are reminded that we are heirs to over two centuries of American democracy, and that this legacy is not simply a birthright -- it is a glorious burden. Now it falls to us to come together as a people to carry it forward once more.

So in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, let us remember that: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 20, 2009, a National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation, and call upon all of our citizens to serve one another and the common purpose of remaking this Nation for our new century.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-third.

How can anyone argue with that? How can anyone have fault with it? After the past decades of failures, of political side-taking, of battling over things that are not really that important to most of us who have things like keeping a roof over our heads, and keeping a job, and feeding ourselves and our children - how refreshing it is to see someone finally in power who asks nothing more than that we try to serve each other? It's like wandering in the wasteland and finding someone offering a glass of water and a map and good wishes to you if you journey on, or a solicitation of assistance if you do not wish to.
We have awakened in a new place, a place where it does not matter what shade your skin may be. What matters is what heart it contains and what it is willing to bend and embrace in fellow human beings. I said to my husband last night that the day that a woman is standing on the Capitol steps and takes the stewardship of the nation into her hands, I will feel we have overcome the last hurdle. He said "The glass ceiling breaks slowly, but once it breaks, it is quicker and quicker each time."
I hope the joy will spread to my daughters, that they too will have the same chance in this place, in this world, as their male companions. We all dream - and dreams should never have a limit.

Robert Kennedy

2008-06-05T13:09:00.005-04:00

Tomorrow, it will be forty years since the death of Robert Kennedy, one day after he was shot in the early morning hours at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he walked in a kitchen passageway on his way out of the hotel ballroom.

On June 5th, 1968, I woke up, put on my radio, and just cried. I was scheduled to spend half a day in middle school, and half a day at St. Anne's, the local Roman Catholic church, prepping for my confirmation the next day. I remember a lot of people seemed to be optimistic that Bobby was hanging on, that he might recover from the shooting. And that we were already numb from the shooting of MLK just eight weeks before.

When I got up on the morning of the 6th, and heard the news, I didn't have time to really let it sink in. I was thirteen, the same age my older daughter is now, and I knew that I had a long day ahead of me, and I was nervous that the Archbishop was doing our ceremony, and I was not a studious Catholic. I remember getting to St. Anne's for the day long preparations. The nuns marched us into the church without anyone talking, and they asked us to pray. Some of them were crying, some of them looked like they had been crying, and all of us, kids and adults, were in shock. I know I was. I remember looking up for a moment, and seeing how many of my friends had their heads bowed - a church full of teenagers, and the only sound was the whispers of prayers.

My parents were admirers of his. His running for President held such hope that he had a true vision to get us out of that war, and to get us to be a fairer, more caring nation.

I remember thinking that how could anyone shoot a man like that, and at the same time, thinking that, like Martin, the good, and the honest, and the caring were now fair game in a land that put weapons and the right to own them so far ahead of the precious gift of such men among us. Too many times since, I have been reminded of the price we have paid, and continue to pay, for the worship of handguns and the refusal of have some national sanity to control the ownership of things that have no other purpose than to kill human beings. But back in 1968, even after the murder of his brother, the murder of Martin Luther King, the mass insanity that must have these things to own was so ingrained in our society, it seemed it would never be rooted out, and we would continue to pay the price for it, in the blood of public figures and private citizens, as we have.

I have never, never felt the same about politics or my own country since that day. At the mass before my confirmation, the Archbishop asked us to think about dedicating ourselves to the ideals that Robert Kennedy had for this nation. That has resonated within me ever since. As has the question about how much different this nation and the world would have been if he had missed that appointment with death and continued on his path to the Presidency. Imagine if Nixon had never been elected. If the upheavals that tore apart the US in the time he was in office had never happened. If Kent State had not happened. Or Woodstock. If a Kennedy had been President at the time of Bangala Desh, and the first inklings of the oil crisis...

"Some men see things as they are, and ask 'Why?'", as Teddy said at his wake in St. Patrick's, "He dreamed things that never were and said 'Why not?'"

Forty years later, we are still asking that question. And it's damn time we demand an answer of our own government. It is the least we can do in his memory.

My daughter, the star!

2008-05-29T13:26:00.002-04:00

Last night, my younger daughter was one of the leads in her fifth grade musical production. In her school, the outgoing class produces a special show for the parents and the entire school, based upon popular music and Broadway plays. As a matter of fact, the atrium of the school has photographic collages of classes from the 1960's through last year for almost every group that has ever graduated.

My daughter sang in every number as part of the chorus when she wasn't doing her lead part, just like every other kid. But she auditioned and tried out several times for the role of "Sandy", from the cast of "Grease". When she got the part, she kept it a secret. At least until her father spilled the beans by accident about two months ago. She had planned to surprise me the night of the show.

But, in hindsight, it was a good thing to have been prepared.

There were weeks where she listened to the music on a DVD borrowed from the library endlessly, with an aside to watch "Hairspray" between times. I explained "Amercan Bandstand" and Dick Clark and poodle skirts and how "Grease", the play, came out when I was in high school and started a whole music revival of the simple rock from the 1950's at a time when Rock was a serious anti-war thing, and that "Grease" was sort of an antidote. And how I worked in the movie theater when the movie came out, and saw it like a billion times myself, but no one I knew from the Fifties was REALLY like that. It was a Seventies take on what the Fifties was, meaning there was a lot of stuff that looked good then, but wasn't authentic. Sort of how I remembered John Travolta hanging out with his brother Joey at the Jade Fountain in Paramus before he was playing a 1970's high school student on TV, BEFORE he played a 1950's one in the movie, or even a 1950's Mom in Hairspray.

As an aside, I also had to explain hair spray. And beehive hair. And, yes, I am that old that I remember it. I even had a poodle skirt, after the fashion had ended, in my "dress-up" clothes when I was little. And I remember watching "Bandstand" when the "big kids" with the big hair wore them.

But that kid! She pointed to her classmate playing Danny and sang "He's the one that I want" and just floored me in her black capri's a little black top with all those flirting eyes and little hip twirls, and I was the mother of The Star. Just like that. I could have busted a gut if I wasn't so busy trying to get my little digital camcorder to record the moment in all it's two inch by three inch glory. As my friend said: "We are such MOMS!".

One of her classmates had the other fifth-graders in tears when she sang a slow, heartfelt version of "Let it be". There was a lot of talent in that room last night.

Please excuse me for noticing mostly one kid. My daughter, the star. With her ponytail and big blue eyes.

Still trying to figure out when my baby got that big. Although the fact that she can wear my shoes and steals my old shirts should have clued me in already.

The C word

2008-02-15T17:18:00.003-05:00

I saw Jane Fonda on Today yesterday, and somehow it slipped past me that she said the "c" word on live TV.

Does this means my morals are forever corrupted because I didn't notice it? Does this mean there is something I have to worry about because my children were in the room, too? Do I need to be put in stocks in the public square, like poor Meridith, who didn't react fast enough and was suspended this morning from the show?

Nonsense.

Every night on television, each and every one of us is exposed to the visual pornography of violence delivered live into our homes. The prudery that demands that none of us ever say another name for our body parts, that barely lets us acknowledge that we have them in the first place, demands a swift justice be meted out for the mention of anything other than the clinical "vagina". We can see gunplay, we can see cruelty, we can see drugs and alcohol and every step along the way to sexual degradation, but we can't say "cunt", a word that means "wedge" in latin. The FCC demands that no one ever know what a real breast looks like, or a real body - but we can show a politely dead one on the news, and as long as the blood is only a little bit, that is perfectly OK for family hour. It's no different in a society that makes women nurse their children in bathrooms, out of the public site, lest someone find a feeding infant to be offensive to their delicate sensibilities. I can remember breastfeeding my daughter under a blanket, facing a wall in Paramus Park, and having someone tap me on the shoulder to complain. Why can't I tap the FCC on the shoilder and tell it just how ridiculous this all is?

So three cheers for the moral watchdogs that decide what is appropriate in your home and mine. Or, as my father used to say "What a bunch of clueless assholes."

The Bitch Cat from Hell

2008-01-11T10:29:00.000-05:00

When the people at the animal rescue start to question whether or not you really want a particular kitten, you should listen to them, and not to the kids or the big kid who have become smitten with her cute looks, while you have become bitten by the sharp little teeth behind the disguise.

She looks SOOOOOO cute, doesn't she? She's a ticking time bomb, but she hides it well. We adopted her in January 2007, about a week before the last of the old cats died. Unfortunately, the past year has been a journey of discovering how abused this poor sweet looking thing must have been before she was placed in our care. She hates me. She comes over to me, paws my legs, and asks me to allow her on my lap. She curls up and purrs. And then, for no reason, she will either growl and bite me, swat at my face with her front paws, or just growl and go bonkers, all teeth and claws, until she can jump away. If one of the dogs is nearby, she will then attack the poor dog, biting their legs like in danger of her life, while the poor dog turns and looks at me, trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Her real nature comes out - as she sees us taking her picture while she lurks in wait inside a package of bottle water in a corner of the kitchen.

In the past year, she has mellowed a bit. She never goes after the kids. She lets the younger one carry her around the house, and climbs up into her top bunk to sleep at night. She now climbs on my lap when she's hungry or thirsty and does not immediately attack me - heck, this morning, she actually curled up and went to sleep instead of biting me - but she's still the most unpredictable animal I have ever had. Ginger, the big dog, is her archenemy, although Ginger doesn't seem to know it, and takes her attacks as a stunning surprise every time. Ginger likes cats, used to lick one of them until her head was soggy and she got bored and walked away, but now comes immediately over to my desk when Joelle starts to growl, as if she's going to fend off the attack personally.

More on the Cat from Hell, later.

More Brooklyn

2007-11-13T20:03:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I thought Blogger was having a melt down. Turned out it was the Western Digital 80 gig drive I installed less than 6 weeks ago as a data drive. Next time I booted up, my system told me the SMART was bad and that I needed to backup and reboot. I'm SMARTer too. I am replacing the drive with a Seagate 160 for less money than the WD. Now if I can convince WD to RMA the drive, or the OEM guy we bought it from, I'll be alphabetically happy.

Anyway - more of the Prospect Park area of Brooklyn:

Brooklyn

2007-11-10T12:30:00.000-05:00

A photo from late September, when we attended a Buddhist Peace festival in Prospect Park.
I had never been to the actual park before, although I had been through the area many, many years ago. I had forgotten how wonderful the neighborhood around the park is. Many, many beautiful old brownstones lovingly restored like the one above.

Right now Blogger is having a meltdown, so I will have to upload the rest later.

This is why I garden

2007-08-13T11:10:00.000-04:00

Daylilies and a Sunflower as big as the Sun.

There is little that can be as satisfying as planting a seed the size of your pinky nail in April, and standing underneath a nine-foot tall sunflower in July. Or sticking what looks like a bundle of roots into the ground and finding yourself surrounded with a riot of bright orange lilies almost as tall as your shoulders.

Except maybe having fresh grapes to eat, a handful of warm tomatoes, a bowl of cucumber salad and green beans just blanched. Makes sharing the sunflowers with the chickdees that much more fair. Birdies got to eat, too.

Life Alterations or Why I am Not a Credible Person - again?

2007-06-12T05:39:00.000-04:00

(Image: The "Crazy neighbor"/aka CN, sighting down his driveway with a rifle. Across the street is a house where three girls are about to come home from school at the time this was taken.)

I have edited and removed this post entirely. Let's just say that when someone tells the boro attorney that you don't like what the chief of police is telling people because it is both untrue AND an invasion of privacy that he is sharing information about you, the reaction of the town is to immediately punish YOU and the person that told you about this.

I am neither a genius nor is "there a thin line between genius and insanity". Time to sell my house, move and sue this town.

And the guy with the guns is still playing with them in his garage, whenever I am outside in my yard. Chickenshit sits hidden in his garage, but the sound is unmistakable. What a waste of oxygen atoms.

What Memorial Day is all about.

2007-05-28T15:27:00.000-04:00

It started as a day to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers after the Civil War. Those at the time assumed that there would be no more important wars requiring these ceremonies. Most of them would have been hard pressed to comprehend the next century and the carnage and death that would follow in Cuba, Flanders, Normandy, Korea, and a little French Colony that no one thought about in their era - Vietnam. Or the war that was never declared, in two nations far from here with little of concern to most of us at the time of the civil war but of the most extreme importance in this era of machines and plastics.

Now, it's a weekend getaway to a place at the beach, or a parade where they throw candy at the kids, after which we burn meat, eat too much, and hang out doing things we normally can't or won't do, in celebration of the coming warmth.

Just a reminder of what Memorial day is really about - my blog entry from last Memorial day:

http://ifiknewwhat.blogspot.com/2006/05/remembering-bobby.html

The Danse Russe by Williams

2007-02-19T03:54:00.000-05:00

When I discovered The Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams, I thought I had discovered something, but it turned out to be something else. When I looked out the bedroom window to the house across the street, through the linden trees, it was just another house I saw across the street. I would play games that the middle son was in his bedroom across and through the trees, and I would pull the shades tight in some modesty that I thought I needed from his peeks of life through the trees.

Now, the windows are gone, the odd angle of the roof below where I peered to listen to the summer's hail and the ice dams of the winter, where I always thought that in case of fire I could cling to the ledge below and jump into the azaleas below, landing in a bed of furious pinks and reds and whites and purples, colors of the tropics against the dark red brick of the house.

Well the people that bought it when we sold it out from my mother, they have no care about the azaleas, or the halls wandered late at night, with the cold kitchen tile and the fake red tile on the floor. The way it felt to be a little ill and step into the colder tile of the black and white bathroom floor, reflected in the silvered mirror when you closed the door and pulled open the medicine chest to sit on the edge of the sink and examine your zits in the mirror to the drone of the tv in the living room. The way the blue and green setional couch hugged the walls between the room divider and the side of the fireplace. The way the beige carpet smelled when you stretched out on the floor at christmas to examine your new Vac-u-form. The old air conditioner that replaced one of the rose windows on either side of the fireplace over the couch. And the winters when you'd set the flue and pile the logs on, to lay on the carpet-covering brown goatskin rug, the shaggy one that the cat's always loved to knead. There was a way that the light fell upon it to make it look otherworldly, as if it were the pelt of a trophy hunter's pride, laid out on the hearth of the home like a grand prize, in front of the TV and the fire.

But the people that bought the house stripped it bare, ripped of the second floor and stuck up new sticks. My blue bathroom is gone, along with the closet where I left my old transistor radio, the red one. The room under the eaves that smelled of dust and the toys we stored in there when we no longer played with them, the toys I dragged out last summer, still in stale cardboard boxes, to leave in the basement of my own house now. What kind of careless people would tear down brick and put up plastic, cover the warm brick where I found the handprint of a mason from the 1920's with plastic siding, as if that were an improvement?

I look at vintage photos now, and see brick houses with the windows decorated like battlements in brick, and wonder what souless people could do that to a house, cover it with plastic siding and tear it apart, leaving the shrubs rootless in the yard, the front steps chipped and chiseled and discarded for the dumpster where I sat and sold lemonade and watched other kids on their bycycles, held the door open for my own daughters on hot summer days, or pushed the mechanincal doorbell to summon my mother to let us into her house, me and my horde of tired kids on halloween, for thanksgiving dinner. When I drove by, I thought of the shock of seeing my grandmother's house in Jersey City was gone. As if the world has a vacancy that can never be filled again. That's what my kids will think. No one will ever look out that picture window in the front and move the curtains aside with a wave of a hand at them. The window itself is gone, the shrubs my mother so tenderly cut and shaped for all those years, the radiator that was in the way so you could never look straight out, but so that you could lean your elbows to hold your head and peek and hide from the strangers at the front door if you wanted to. The window where I watched boyfriends drive off into the night, and cars come and go. Where I heard Trixie the dog barking, and Shadow, where my Ignatz cat sat and surveyed the grass outside and jumped out of sight to greet me at the back door when I arrived home.

What a world our homes are, from the trinkets in the windows and the view of the universe we see from them, the pine tree in the yard, the lindens as they grew old and died, the wavering light of summers and winter snow and the hurricane when the dead trees were scattered and fallen across the street the entire block and how odd the light seemed afterwards. How odd it was to see sky and not trees and how bright and unnatural and naked. Now the sky is open, the roof is open and green grass that still pokes up in the winter is harsh beneath the dumpster and the uprooted shrubs. I want to drive by in the dead of night and see the darkness of the place of my childhood. But it is gone. The world is gone. Left to haunt my thoughts at four in the morning in my cold house, a world I can only hold inside for this brief time, until I too am gone. And someone takes my bones and covers them with plastic, like the brick house, and hides them from sight as something unneeded, ugly and old.

And the place most familiar, the things touched in the dark and remembered, fade and are gone forever to nothingness. Time is evil.

Happy New Year!

2007-01-02T00:26:00.000-05:00

After eating several pounds of king crab legs dipped in garlic butter last night, Alfredo with shrimp, lemon pie, countless cups of hazelnut coffee, I just want to waddle in here and wish everyone a happy new year, and all the best for whatever 2007 will bring.

It's all got to be uphill from here. And at my present weight, it certainly feels it!

Rant du Jour - Modern Medicine

2006-12-11T10:04:00.000-05:00

I got a phone call from my sister last week that my mother fell and hit her head again at the assisted living for adults with dementia that my sister had moved her to, after my mother fell and hit her head and broke her wrist at the regular assisted living. This means that my mother's mental state has gotten to the point where she can not function at all without someone acting as a caretaker 24 hours a day. She no longer has the ability to protect herself or think about her own safety, to use a walker or a cane to move around her room. It means she will be probably tied into a wheelchair when no one can watch her, rolled around like furniture and planted someplace where she can't get hurt by trying to take care of herself.

All of those images of the worst that a nursing home has to offer, especially when viewed through the eyes of the able-bodied. All of those things that we all dread happening to us when we are elderly. And not what any of us ever think will happen to all that we've managed to accumulate in life, the money, the possessions, the memories. All gone. All disposed of. And all that's left is a stream of days sitting like a potted plant in front of a TV or moved from place to place to be "entertained", to receive "enrichment", and to be managed.

And this is the best that money gets us at the end of our lives, thanks to modern medicine and medications that keep us alive longer, well past the point where the rest of us is worn out and no longer working.

OK - here's my rant:

I have very mild hypertension - so mild that ten years ago, my blood pressure would have been considered in the range of normal for my age. Somewhere between 120 and 130 over 80 - just ten points (or whatever it is) over what someone has decided is normal for an over fifty woman.

Every time I go to the doctor, for whatever reason, I am given a script for medication for hypertension. Just like every post-menopausal woman is given a script for anti-osteoporosis medication, and/or a bone scan and is told to get a mamogram and other tests, most of which involve radiation exposure.

What percentage of those tested get cancer from that exposure? No one knows.

What percentage of high blood pressure leads to health problems and what percentage of medication leads to health problems? No one knows.

What percentage of post-menopausal women would benefit from more exercise and a better diet? All of them. So what to do? Give them more pills to take, of course, and tell them that it won't hurt, and they probably will not even know they are taking the medication. Well, someone exposed to low levels of anything probably won't know about it either, until it kills them. Or just cripples them.

When I was pregnant, I had a huge discussion with my OB/GYN about the particular medication he wanted to put me on for pre-eclampsia. When I used to go to my mother's Parkinson group, almost all the people there had been on Aldomet for their blood pressure. It's a drug that no one understands how it works but that it affects dopomine in the brain and lowers the blood pressure, and studies have never been able to link it to problems in pregnant women. So it is automatically assumed to be safe to give to them. Short-term, it might be. But no one has ever done a follow up study on the children born to these mothers. So we really DON'T know. But thousands of pregnant woman are told to take it every year.

So I did, and I worry about what I did to my children, and may never know the answer.

Anyway, there are no real studies out there to see what the long-term effects of anti-hypertensives do to the people that take them. Do they live longer? Do they have less problems because of their lowered blood pressure? You'd assume yes, but, guess what? There has never been a study of that, so we are ingesting all sorts of odd chemicals on the pretense that we are improving our health, but with no real idea if we really are. But someone in the pharmecutical industry is driving a BMW because they can sell a drug to more and more doctors, and someone who owns shares in a pharmacy is doing quite well because they can sell more and more drugs at a profit. But are we living longer, or feeling better, or even having a better life? The answer is statistically, no, not really - not in any way attributable to the drugs we are swallowing.

The question really is why are we allowing this to be done to us? Why aren't we fighting it? My next-door neighbor is going bankrupt because he has been told he needs to get a shot that costs $300 every two weeks because of his bloodpressure, and $300 worth of monthly medications to further control it, and the side effects of all these drugs. And he's nearly eighty years old. So he has a much longer potential lifespan, but he's living in near poverty to have it. And his real problem, the kidney disease that is raising his blood pressure, is not treated. Only the symptoms. My husband, who is about 80 pounds overweight, is on an injection created from gila monster venom twice a day, four different medications for diabetes, an anti-depressive, a chlorestoral lowering drug, a baby aspirin, and a couple more that I can't think of at the moment. If this wasn't covered by his health insurance, it is more than a thousand dollars a month in medications. And, honestly, if he lost the weight, he probably would not need the drugs - so why are insurors so willing to pay for them and not for a dietician and a health club to encourage him to improve his health?

I had a big argument with his GP over my blood pressure and my decision to monitor it rather than immediately starting the two different medications he decided I needed. I lost weight, and increased my level of exercise, and lowered my pressure from what it was to what it is. And I could walk outside and get hit by a bus, or die of a heart attack when I am eighty, without medication, or live to be a miserable, incontinent, demential eighty-five year old with twelve daily medications and a three thousand dollar a week room in a nursing home. My mother is there now, and she's just turned 75. I would not want her life, and she doesn't either, even if she really barely understands what is going on. At some point, we have to expect that just because we can extend life with medications a bit, no one lives forever, and there is a point where the benefits are not outweighed by the cost of propping up lives with drugs on the pretense of making them better.

When my dog was diagnosed with lymphoma, the vet told me the next thing to do would be to have her cancer "staged" and start chemo. So what did that involved? Major internal surgery for about $800 for the dog who would now have to recover from it, plus still have lymphoma. Then chemo, which, in animals, is not always a big deal - which might get her an additional six months of remission. Or might not, at all. At a cost of two or three thousand dollars more. At the end, tho, the cancer always wins. Meanwhile, she needed to be on comfort medications. And needed to be screened for other medical problems, at a cost, to us, of nearly another five hundred dollars.

What happened at the end? After eight weeks, Molly died of lymphoma, without the major surgery. Without the chemo, which would have allowed her another four months of life. Or possible not. Or she could have been hit by a car when she darted out the door, as she used to do all the time. No one will ever know. But we did what we thought was best for her, and she took her last breath where she was surrounded by her family and in a place where she was HOME. That's better than probably you or I will be allowed to have. Not tortured in an effort to stave off the unstoppable, not drugged into a stupor, not handled by strangers who don't care much, not in a place we don't know, with choices made for us by people that don't know us, have no idea of what we would want or how we lived. Molly got a better death than most humans are now allowed to have.

How sad is that for all of us?

Sometimes, medicine has to make difficult choices. The problem is no one is willing to do that anymore. And the government, the people we trust to make sure the best choices are made, isn't doing that either. So we slog along, being told absolutes that aren't anything, that have no facts to back them up - and we spend huge amonts of money on hopes that aren't based in anything real. We put hopelessly brain-damaged people on life support until their bodies literally decay, because the doctors won't tell us not to, and can - so they do. We treat diseases we might get - and get other diseases from the medication that kill us instead. And instead of just making a choice and saying that no one lives forever, but the quality of the here and now is what matters most.

And how really sad, and really, pathetic, is that? We are exploited to the end - and those that survive us, laden with guilt that they might not have done all they could, in the impossible effort to cheat death. Mortality always wins - but the greed in the culture can not and will not admit that, even to themselves. And never, ever, to us.

More Christmas

2006-12-02T22:47:00.000-05:00

This one is from an actual photograph from one of last year's blizzards - the arbor vitea's belong to my neighbor across the street, so this is a close up view of what I see from my desk. These bushes are so pretty that they have become the backdrop for everyone's posed pictures - high school graduations, proms, christenings - everyone is walking over and posing the kids and the family in front of them all the time, including us, so I figured I might as well have them on my desktop. If you want 'em, right click and save them. I use a blue desktop to frame them rather than stretching the image out, but it works either way.

Another Christmas Window background, thanks to Paint Shop Pro. Sized at 800 x 600, you can swipe it by right clicking and saving.

More Molly

2006-12-02T10:06:00.000-05:00

Molly, Ginger and Grendel (clockwise from left)

Molly decides that Gren's ears aren't clean enough.

I miss my smiling dog - every time I'd come in the back door, she'd be grinning at me (as she plotted how to get outside and run away for a couple of hours). The day I took her to the vet, she stood on the metal table, looking out the window, and then cased the joint - standing up on the windowstill to see if she could open the window and peering into the wall vent looking for alternative means of escape.

She was sweet, but those wheels never stopped turning. One of the biggest things to hit me is the act of leaving the screen door open off the kitchen for fresh air. I haven't done that since June 2001 when I found out the hard way that Molly could force it open. And no one has peed in the living room for a week.

Wait a minute - just why do I miss that dog?

Molly

2006-11-25T11:40:00.000-05:00

My dog Molly died yesterday after a struggle with lymphoma for most of the past two months.

She was a monumental pain in the ass from the day we bought her home from the shelter. Pregnant, I spent most of the summer of 2001 with her and nine puppies in the middle of my living room, a slave to dog containment and poo. I developed elaborate means of laying down grocery bags and newspapers in layers to make it a little simpler to maneuver around puppies in a wading pool, and an old playpen, and finally a huge metal dog crate. Molly was not housebroken, and nursing dogs eat and relieve themselves seemingly a thousand times a day. And I patrolled the house, mop in one hand, Nature's Miracle in the other - seemingly a thousand times a day, plus all the times the puppies got out, or Molly let them out, or the kids let them out.

But then there was the night that I was putting up the side on the playpen, Molly on the outside, the puppies inside, and she came over and insistently stood on the side so that I could not lift it and lock it. One at a time, she licked each of her children on the snout, wagging tails on both sides, as if she were counting noses and saying good night. Only when she was done, did she jump down and let me secure the side. She repeated this ritual every night until most of the puppies had gone to their new homes, and only she and four of them were left. And, then, it was just Molly and her son Grendel, the runt of the litter. She'd look over her shoulder at him, and lead him into the crate for the night, crying and barking and carrying on until both of them finally settled down.

She opened the refridgerator, and stole a turkey. She taught Grendel how to do it, and when Ginger, one of the other puppies, was returned to us after six months, she taught Ginger. So we'd get up in the middle of the night to the sound of three dogs trying to scratch the door open to the Magic Food Place when we tried to outsmart them with a toddler lock on the door. Woe betide us if we forgot to latch that latch. Molly never missed a chance.

Then there was the time that she and Grendel figured out that they could squeeze out the space on the side of the air conditioner in the children's bedroom. First, the plastic shutters were destroyed. Then, when I replaced them with masonite and screws, they pushed the entire air conditioner out of the window when I forgot to lock them in the crate while I ran and errand for 45 minutes. I came home to find it hanging from the back of the house by the cord, and both dogs tied up in the yard by a neighbor that had found them. And a police officer, trying to push the air conditioner back in because the door to the house was locked. So the air conditioner went back in with heavy mending plates screwing it in to the windowframe and securing it from moving.

I thought that was it. Problem solved.

A few days later, I came home to find Molly tied to the front railing.

Another neighbor was standing on her porch across the street, and watched Molly push open a partially open inside window and scratch her way out through the screen, poke her body through the hole she had made, and leap into the bushes from the dining room window. Molly, being the friendly thing she was, ran right to the neighbor, and quickly back into captivity.

So I learned to close windows when I went outside for a minute.

A week later, we go out to dinner. And come home to an empty house. No dogs. Thinking someone had broken into the house and taken them, it took us a while to see a window that had been closed tight in the kid's bedroom was wide open and the screen shredded. They had made their escape somehow. A few minutes of searching, and Ginger came back from a dumpster around the corner, covered in blood from hitting the footboard of the neighbor's truck on the way out - and the other two were caught about a block away a few minutes later. Molly had managed to open a closed, but not locked, window, a trick I could not believe any dog would do, until she got brazen enough to try to do it one day right in front of me - she would claw at the window until she could get it open a narrow crack, and then use brute force to push it up with her nose.

So every window on the house got a safety wedge to prevent it from opening more than a few inches.

Over the past five years, we discovered that Molly could shoulder her way out the screen door, taking Grendel with her (Ginger stopped following her after she got hurt jumping out the window), and be gone for hours if we turned our back for a second. And she would not come back, except to Larry, no matter how pleadingly I begged, until she was tired or satisfied that whatever her mission had been was completed.

But she was my dog after a while, totally mine. She started sleeping on the bed, between Larry and I, her head on my shoulder, snoring into my ear all night long. She was always where ever I was, under my feet as I sat at this desk, tripping me in the kitchen, watching me from the bedroom doorway - and outside the bathroom whenever I took a shower or closed the door. Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, she was so weak she tottered when she walked, but I was not permitted to go to the bathroom without Molly guarding the door - I could hear her nails on the floor, slowly, sliding a bit, as she got up from where ever she had been painfully trying to rest, and flopping down against the door with a groan from the other side of the door. After our guest had gone home, I sat here, looking down the long center hallway as Molly struggled to her feet and walked toward the back door and the kitchen where we had been keeping newspaper on the floor because the medication had been making her urinate constantly. When she got to the paper, she turned around and looked right at me as she went, clearly telling me that she was a good girl and knew what the paper was for, dignity intact to nearly the end.

Yesterday, I found her at the foot of the bed, stretched out on the rug, her breathing labored and loud. I called her name and told her it was OK to let go. Her eyes were open, but she never looked at me - she was in some other place, far away. But the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile when I said her name.

She died a half hour later, at home, having said her goodbyes to all of us in her favorite spot.

Smiling.

Happy Turkey Day.

2006-11-23T10:43:00.000-05:00

Wish me luck. One of the kids was up until 3 AM, Molly the dog is dying from lymphoma within the next few days since her drugs have stopped working, we have company coming, I'm still defrosting the turkey breast as I watch the parade, there are spiderwebs in the oven in the basement, and trash is strewn from one end of the house to the other. And the extra dresser is still in the kitchen, like an unwanted maple houseguest - I can't even open the door to the refridgerator completely.

On the other hand, I have a home, I have family that loves me, and friends that emailed me this morning to send their wishes. I have a friend that is taking three trains to get here to see us because he does not drive and did not want to put us out to pick him up at his home. I have a cool pair of PJ's to wear at the moment, a pair of comfortable shoes, a warm bed, and a change of clothes to wear later. I have a pair of almost-new jeans. And a set of antique mix and match dishes to display. I even have a bottle of wine and some gourmet Turbo Dog beer to cook with in my kitchen.

In Iraq, in Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Sudan, in places where the floor is dust and there is no roof, children will get up hungry and be fortunate if they survive the day. Their mothers will cook over fires of twigs laid on rocks. They will have never seen a turkey, and their dogs will be for the purpose of hunting or a meal. They will wear the only clothing they have, barefoot, and scavage among the grass and the harvested fields or from a truck full of strangers with bags of handouts and leftovers from places far away. Their children be up at 3 AM, running from gunfire and bombs, if they haven't been victims of diseases that we treat here with one pill a day for ten days.

While we are vexed by the imperfections of our world, and irritated by what are blessings to millions of those who do not share the gift of living here, in this country, we should do more than just give thanks at our table. Let us look upon the blessings of friends and family and the absence of hunger, a warm room, and take a moment to be grateful. Just as those with none of this wealth are grateful for the things that are not - that they have a meal and someone to share it with. In the spectrum of humanity, that is really what life is all about.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Christmas Wallpaper

2006-11-19T11:47:00.000-05:00

Technically, it's sort of more Holiday than Christmas, but I created this image a few years ago to use as a backdrop for the season. It's 800 x 600, and if you click on the small image, blogger will open a page with just the image. Right click and Save As and it's all yours. Hope you enjoy it.

More to come.

What are you doing here? GO VOTE

2006-11-07T09:15:00.000-05:00

If you haven't done so already, get your ass out of the chair and GO VOTE. Given what is at stake, this is probably the most important election of our lifetimes. If the Republicans maintain their control over Washington, expect a draft to prop up the puppets in Iraq and Afghanistan, and march ever onward towards the rich oil fields of Iran's Gulf of Persia. Expect more spying on the lives of ordinary people under the guise of controlling "terrorism". Expect more body searches, more secret courts, more detainees held in secret prisons, more revelations of torture, more fear-mongering, and more real reasons to fear our own government.

We have begun the short march towards quasi-religious fascism in this country under the guise of Mom, apple pie and keeping us safe from the Islamo-fascists. But we need to make sure that the fascists in our own back yard do not get a greater toe-hold and greater empowerment.

If they do, the next election will be a moot point - if it isn't already too late.

In case anyone is wondering

2006-10-24T11:40:00.000-04:00

...why I haven't been here:

My computer is terminally ill.

My mommieboard is rebooting the machine at random intervals due to a short I've been trying to repair for three weeks. I have now surrendered, and will be replacing it sometime next week, along with my processor(s).

At one point, I was reduced to picking my bookmark file out of recovered clusters with a hex editor. (I am too much a geek, I realized, when I thought about having the forethought to even know HOW to do that.) It is a wonderful thing, the way Ex-Pee handles application data. You can lose more files with even greater speed now than under the older versions. Plus restore totally useless Restore points to find nothing has been fixed because of the way Restore works.

No wonder Bill Gates has the manse in Washington, and I'm here freezing in Joisy.

Back-ups are a wonderful thing, though. Thank god someone had already thought of them before Bill came along, or I'd be REALLY screwed.

This is only a Test, Jennie

2006-10-02T17:39:00.000-04:00

Jennie had a tooth that needed root canal therapy to save it. Her face blew up like a lop-sided squirrel, and she was begging for Junior Motrin the way I sometimes beg for sour cream and onion dip, but a lot louder and more insistent. She has always had whining down to an art form, and when her tooth and her face hurts, she's entitled to hone it up to a new high, and she did. Ignoring a constant "Put ice on your face" and "This is what happens when you don't let Dr. Joy work on your teeth because you were too afraid of the novocain needle", she actually preferred going to school over my company at home.

I didn't know that she was going to the nurse at school for ice packs because she was lying to me about how bad and how much her tooth hurt. So I got a "bad parent" phone call from the school nurse, during which I had to explain that we knew she needed a root canal - she had refused to let the dentist near her after an hour of trying, at which time the dentist gave up and handed me the xrays and the business cards from two pediatric dental clinics - and were trying to get her to a pediatric dentist that specialized in children with fear issues - and that it had taken five adults to hold her down for the anesthesia shot for the stitches in her toe a few weeks ago. That's one adult for every one and a quarter sutures, but who's counting?

The nurse told me she would never send a child to school with a face as swollen as that, and that the swelling could go to her brain and blah blah blah. I picked her up from school expecting a misshapen jaw drawing the attention of everyone. But the kid that I picked up looked normal. Perfectly normal. Her normal chipmunk cheeks normal, but normal. I had a few choice mental words with the nurse, but, hey, it's only September. Plenty of time between now and June to uselessly vent.

I get out the list of pediatric dentists covered by our medical and compare it to the names the original dentist had given to me when she surrendered to Jennie's ability to hold off the needle. There was one matching name, and, after stating the emergency and the nature of Jennie's problem, the dentist reassured me that she'd just finished working with an autistic child this morning. After that, Jennie would be no big deal. She's used to these sort of things with scared children.

OK, sounds good to me - I make the appointment and prepare for battle with Jennifer.

Flash forward to the dentist. She's a little tiny thing, with an office with fish everywhere, fish on a monitor in the waiting room, fish murals, and a fish fountain on the wall with running water, and anemone things on the arms of the chair for the kids to play with. Very much a theme. She's sweet and talks Jen through an examination of the tooth and the rest of her mouth, and a prescription for an antibiotic - and then tells me she can't do anything else, since she's not an endodontist. So we search our insurance for a pediatric endodontist, find no one listed, and start calling all the names we can get a referrals from the original dentist. Phone call number three is a guy with kids who works on kids. Says he's a father with three little ones, one of whom is also terrified of needles, so he understands what we are going through. He wants Jen to be the last appointment of the day, so that he can take his time to try to relax her and work on her.

I will greatly abbreviate what followed, except to say it took two trips, a prescription for Valium for Jennie, four hours on two different days in the waiting room, and two hours in the dental chair before the work was STARTED.

I needed medication of the liquid kind by the time it was all over - but I refrained. Besides, I was too tired to drink afterwards. And I needed to go to the store for more Junior Motrin.

Parenthood. Why, exactly, did we want to have kids in the first place? All the cats ever did was throw up on the furniture, a feat Jennie did within five minutes of her arrival home. None of them ever managed to kick me in the face while screaming and punching me - and that was AFTER the Valium.

Bomba the Jungle Boy

2006-09-19T10:37:00.000-04:00

Back sometime in my childhood, my siblings and I inherited a box of children's harcover books from our neighbors, the Carovillanos. I don't remember if I ever read this, although chances are I did, because I read pretty much everything in the house with printed words and a cover that I could reach.

I was one of those kids that could not fall asleep without a book. I would drag the old Book of Knowledge up from downstairs until my mother got smart and put it in the hallway outside my room to save on my nocturnal roamings. Given that this was a set purchased for my father, and copyrighted sometime around 1933, it was a bit odd to read, but if there was nothing else I hadn't read around but the dreaded "Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories" or those encyclopedia volumes, it was a no brainer. "Uncle Arthur" was BORING.

Old pictures - Pop and Miss Chips

2006-09-18T16:47:00.000-04:00

(Please excuse me while I recover from an unattended CHKDSK that seems to have eaten my c: drive.)

In this picture, my great-grandfather Rudolph Sprenger, called Pops by everyone in the family, sits in his living room chair with my grandmother's dog Miss Chips doing her best imitation of the RCA dog. Based upon the newspaper headline of the Jersey Journal in his lap - "Hungarian Premier Capitulates", the picture was taken in 1956.

I have a memory of spending the day at "Pop's" house when I was a little girl, sitting in the kitchen while he made me toast. He did it in one of those old toasters with a triangular base with two sides that had doors you opened to lay the toast on, partly upright, until one side was done; you'd then turn it over and brown the other side. I remembered that he had a little white mustache, and a very faint accent, and that he was rolly-polly and very old.

I carried this for many, many years before I actually saw his picture, knew who it was when I saw it - and had a shock when I visited his gravesite when my father died in 1984 and realized that Pop - my dad's grandfather - had died in 1957, when I was barely two and a half. When I think about the circumstances of being left with Pop, it was most likely after my sister was born
in 1956, while were were still living in an apartment on Communipaw Avenue in Jersey City. My grandmother lived with her father at what had been the family home since shortly after 1903 - 10 Claremont Avenue, an asbestos shingle-sided narrow row house on a steep street with a view of the Statue of Liberty (and a little bit of lower Manhattan) to the left as you stood on the front steps.

My grandmother had married young, and her husband, Thomas, had died when my father was only 4, at the height of the Depression. So she and her son moved in with her parents, and Pop and his wife Katherine became the real parents of my father. She had no say in the home, although she was the apple of her father's eye. From what my dad used to say, her mother ruled with an iron will that no one dared cross.

Anna, my grandmother, was a wild one. I'm still trying to ferret out details, but she remarried and divorced once after being widowed, the divorce supposedly because she was cheating on her second husband while he was in the Army during the second World War - or at least that is the story my mother told me. I remember my grandmother as doting on me, with wirey silver black hair (although she wasn't that old - barely fifty), bringing me a hankie of some kind everytime she visited as a sort of token between us. Some of them had edges she had tatted, some of them were printed with cartoon characters or ornate flowers - and some of them are still in my dresser to this day. For whatever reason, she had a big plastic bag of them, from which she never failed to give me one every time I saw her.

I remembered her house in Jersey City had an odd smell - wet linoleum and a bready smell - and a washing machine with a mangle, and an old coal stove that had been converted to gas sometime in the 1920's, oddly next to a modern stove. And this wire hair terrier named Miss Chips who liked to bite people, the first pedigreed dog I remember seeing, utterly my grandmother's dog, and utterly nuts.

"Get away from the dog," both my mother and father and grandmother would say the moment you entered the house. Chips was a biter whenever she felt either playful or angry, two moods that she could go from in seconds. I still remember the feel of her coat, wire-haired but silky at the same time. She reminded me of the old horsehair sofa my grandmother had.

Years later, in her old age, Chips lost most of her eyesight and bit one person too many and my grandmother had to put her down. The legal matters involved apparently were to much for Anna, and her mind snapped. One day my father walked in the door from his overnight shift in the morning as the Jersey City police called - they'd picked her up, naked as a jaybird, trying to get on a bus. After a few days in the hospital, she came to live with us. But she would never be "right" again.

For the rest of her life, until the day she died, she moved in and out of an assortment of mental hospitals and nursing homes, diagnosed as scizophrentic and/or just delusional. No one really could figure her out. And, in those days, no one tried really hard. So from the age of 54, until she died at 82, she lived in a place in her mind alone, divorced from all the hardships that life had done to her, where she never felt safe, but where she retained a quirky sacarsm to the end.

Just so sad.

Keith Olberman's Message

2006-09-12T10:03:00.000-04:00

The following editorial was made by Keith Olbermann on his MSNBC show,
"Countdown" tonight on the 5th anniversary of 9/11. It is the most
powerfully courageous speech I've heard by a network newsperson since
the Vietnam War era:

This hole in the ground

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40
days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of
what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains
of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes
and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into
my soul -- two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York
policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or
more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always
shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have
"forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping,
opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a
commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago
could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our
eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us
could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud
defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards
and criminals.

Five years later this country's wound is still open.

Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months
after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr.
Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot
hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,
have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their
reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we
can not hallow this ground." So we won't.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and
jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the
money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and
buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of
doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on
these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The
terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment
you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this
city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the
promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and
painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout
the country. The government, the President in particular, was given
every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot
be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be
squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to
take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being
American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did
the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them,
"bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would
have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as
morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the
Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the
terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection"
meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a
despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee,
hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a
war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is
"lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume
responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to
this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect
and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he
alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that
he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in
his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most
radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be
televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by
bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the
whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office
seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the
only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the
unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless
death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and
turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How
dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as
long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this
government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from
March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and
this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful
things.

And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting
episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials
disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for
calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests
he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and
suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced.
An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor,
returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by
hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device
that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no
need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human
machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find,
and it's themselves."

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it
up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves
tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and
explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts,
attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a
thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its
own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be,
if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public
chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of
it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely
question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this
empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this
administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

And not to belittle anyone's feeling, but, yes, this was an attack on the entire country, but you have to be here in NYC or at the Pentagon to understand that this was more than that. We knew the people that were in there, and many of us might have been in there ourselves, had been there in the past, and looked at those buildings out our offices, our schoolrooms, when we went for a drive. For us, the skyline of NYC and particularly Manhattan is ever present within our view directly or within a short distance.

Last night, I stood in my yard at midnight and saw the beams of light from "Tribute in Lights" directly to the east. They gradually faded into the cloudless sky, and the mixed emotions I felt at seeing them, from my home, are troubling and hard to explain. Not to denegrate anyone, but a tourist from Nebraska is not and never will share how that is. It's like walking through a cemetary reading names and dates on the stones of strangers, versus stumbling upon that of someone you knew. We all knew somebody there. We all lost somebody there. And we lost our innocence and safety there as well.

If I Knew What I Was Doing I Wouldn't be Here: Comments about the movie about Flight 93

2006-09-11T08:15:00.000-04:00

If I Knew What I Was Doing I Wouldn't be Here: Comments about the movie about Flight 93

Link to my previous post

Still fallen

2006-09-10T18:00:00.000-04:00

I have been writing poetry since I was in kindergarten. For all my life, it has been the way I express my feelings and experiences on the most elemental level. The monday after 9/11, my husband and I and our two daughters attended a memorial service held at Veteran's Park in Edgewater, NJ, across the Hudson from upper Manhattan.

My husband is a Buddhist, and his sect had spent that summer building a Peace garden at the water's edge in the park. We stood there, at sunset, with thousands of others, all of us neighbors, each holding a candle. At seven PM, a few words were said, and we all sang "God Bless America". And each of us, one by one, walked to the star-shaped flagpole's concrete base, and left our candles there. When I got home that night, I started writing. A few weeks later, I read an account in the Record, our local newspaper, about the family of one young man that included his mother's comments about how they were dealing with the fact that his remains were not found. She spoke of finding peace as she watched the smoke from the fires after the tower fell drift into that beautiful blue sky downriver over the Statue of Liberty and the river. It was like watching her son go to heaven. I had the same feeling the night that I stood at the vigil.

(The poem is copyright 2001-2006 Evelyn McHugh. Not to be reproduced or copied without permission)

still
fallen

. . .

What is that?

I watched
Watched what but did not understand
Did not want to understand
Pristine heavens, a thin drift trailing off
Trailing off marred
The eye wanted to fill in the hole
That should not be there

And another

What is that

Quickly at the same time
And understanding
In some part of my thoughts
But not my eyes
Understanding
Flecks of white
Men had taken their jackets off
Since at the office things were
Now casually open
The outline like in a cartoon
Of wings interrupted
And a drift of anger
And the teaming flecks of white
Understanding what
Eyes could not
Or I could not
Removed in my distance
With watching

From my distance,
Not a bang, not a rumble of thunder
Like the ground opened or
Taking an elevator
It just
Fell
And a pall of white
Crept over
Crept over until it reached
The water
Between the streets
Crept over
Taller than Trinity
Over the green parks
Touching the water
Reflecting the pall
And the lie of heaven
Crept over as if it were running
And could go no further than the river
Crept over and spread thin and
Fell in upon itself like an echo.

We heard others
Say how awful it must be
Up there
That the better choice
Is to jump

We heard others
Weeping
But you had to understand
You had to understand

I watched flecks of
White on the skymost highest roof
Tumble down
The spear that groped for the sky
Tumble down
And the pall that crept over
And the running
And the start of the waiting
And the eye still looked
And the eye only did not understand
Far worse
Far worse
Looking for the things that
Had fallen
And finding them fallen
To look up
And . . .
And to know there is no answer
But the shock of a pall
And the empty place our eyes see
Like a tongue looks for a tooth
And the brightness of the day
And the lie of heaven
And still looking
And still gone
Still.

How bad must it be
That the only choice
Is to jump
Yet to land
Still looking for the
Missing parts
. . . an amputee
feeling them
and knowing

gone

And ghosts
And no answer on the phone
And
Passed understanding
Cannot
Like I jumped too
But the ground is too far
Or I have fallen through
And there is no bottom
Just the lie of heaven
And the quiet clouds
And stillness
Where noise used to be
No matter how many times
I remember I watch
No matter how many times
Still
fallen in the grey dust
Still fallen
Still falling

I do not understand

Fallen

Across the river
My flesh untouched
But

. . .

(epilogue)

Over the granite
Over the shine
Over the reflections of the setting sun
Over the Hudson and Ellis and Liberty
drifting
white
Some parent said the soul of their son
Went out to sea
Beneath that impartial sky
Some say just gone
Some stare and wait
Still lost in not understanding

I stood in a park
A week later
A park on the other side
And heard the ghosts of sirens still faint
And the thin white pall
Veiling the first few stars

And I hope
Out to sea in the peaceful sky
Ever towards the stars and the sunset
Look down and see the thousands of candles
All the witnesses
Because I can not bear to know
Not understanding
Some empty filled with sky and stars
Where noise
Where lives
It replaced

No lessons
No preaching
No

Just we in our humanity
Lighting candles and speaking
Bravely
While ungrasping a space
Too big to ever contain
Like the sea and the sky
And the drifting paleness that
Goes on until
Spread thin we can not see it
It fades someday
And only the darkening skies
Know it was there.

Gone

. . .

the birds
wheel in circles
something some sound
come upon them sudden
rise in a clotted cloud
gulls and pigeons
starlings and sparrows

when I thought of you
on wings if you were a bird
silver great wings
riding the thermals
a dark
against the sun
a shadow
a wheel and below others
wheeling motionless
wind carried
with no effort
on your part
just moved along
carried on the thermal
current the invisible current
with no terminus
you can see but up

like smoke blown to heaven
no end no edge
just riding upwards
until my eye can not make out
the dark speck
still rising.

. . .

finale

(to my husband)

at the basement landing
a pair of suit pants
that are ripped on the knee
where you jumped the fence
behind the winter garden

you came in,
hugged me,
just as I went to get our daughter from school
and took off the pants
of your good suit
to show me where you had fallen
as you jumped the fence

Things you Learn at Street Fairs

2006-09-04T17:40:00.001-04:00

Went to a local street fair today in search of antiques and, in the case of the husband, something for lunch.

This particular fair is always populated by people running for office, and people that want to run for office against them, with both sides manning big booths loaded with signage.

Every year, we look for the same party's booth to get hamburgers because they are always cheaper and well made, with a great variety of condiments available. And we look for the booth from the other side, because they always have free stuff being handed out, and free popcorn and balloons for kids. But I never really thought about it until today when I asked Himself where he wanted to eat and he reminded me that he always gets hamburgers at the tent run by the Republicans because they are better than the commercial vendors'. As we were saying this, the Democratic surrogate came by, and his aides were handing out pens and water bottles for the kids.

So, in a nutshell, we had party politics. The Republican's working the crowd make sure that there is plenty of well-made food. You have to pay for it, but the spread is lavish. Meanwhile, the Democrats just hand out stuff, but all you get for free is popcorn or water or stuff you probably won't take if you already have it, unless you are like those little old ladies that work the fair with shopping bags, grabbing candy and pens and squeeze balls and coffee mugs..., and I would bet that most of them haven't registered to vote since their kids were in elementary school.

I think this is why I am an Independent....

Child of the Space Age

2006-09-02T22:13:00.000-04:00

I was a toddler when Sputnik launched, old enough to walk around the neighborhood after school listening on my red RCA Transistor Radio (with leather case) when John Glenn made his three and a half orbits. But the infatuation with space and rocket ships goes back two generations before mine, to the writings of H.G. Wells and the birth of science fiction.

There is something compelling in the way imaginations transferred human battle drama into space by drawing helmets and space rockets, as if foretelling that no matter how evolved we pretend to be, and how we can dress up the apeman, he still wants to fight off his neighbors with what amounts to just a better class of rocks in a new jungle. And what used to be tales narrated by the campfire, are now pretty paper to look at in front of the TV.

The themes are forever. Only the landscape changes.

One simple word

2006-09-01T18:20:00.000-04:00

One powerful word that can change the world = http://www.impeachnet.net/blog/about/.

ADSense has a Sense of Humor

2006-09-01T11:58:00.000-04:00

For the past few weeks, the little AdSense things were somehow related to the line in my profile about being vaccinated with a phonograph needle. There were adds about vintage stylus' and turntables and equipment repair.

So I posted the comments from the Mayor of Salt Lake City yesterday, and now they suddenly have turned to garbage and how to clean out your home, and the ilk. I know we need to sweep the phonies out of office. Had no idea that Google agreed with me....

I am not the problem, boys....

2006-08-31T18:31:00.000-04:00

you are, George and Donnie.

The mayor of Salt Lake City made the following comments as the President and Secretary of State traveled there as a stop on the administration's campaign to belittle and besmirch those that think that they are a bunch of fools and worse.

The mayor's comments
Address by
Mayor Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson

Washington Square
Salt Lake City, Utah
August 30, 2006

A patriot is a person who loves his or her country.

Who among you loves your country so much that you have come here today to raise your voice out of deep concern for our nation - and for our world?

And who among you loves your country so much that you insist that our nation's leaders tell us the truth?

Let's hear it: "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

Let no one deny we are patriots. We support our nation's troops. We are grateful to our veterans who have sacrificed so much for our freedoms. We love our country, we hold dear the values upon which our nation was founded, and we are distressed at what our President, his administration, and our Congress are doing to, and in the name of, our great nation.

Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.

A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating president.

That is not a patriot. Rather, that person is a sycophant. That person is a member of a frightening culture of obedience - a culture where falling in line with authority is more important than choosing what is right, even if it is not easy, safe, or popular. And, I suspect, that person is afraid - afraid we are right, afraid of the truth (even to the point of denying it), afraid he or she has put in with an oppressive, inhumane, regime that does not respect the laws and traditions of our country, and that history will rank as the worst presidency our nation has ever had to endure.

In response to those who believe we should blindly support this disastrous president, his administration, and the complacent, complicit Congress, listen to the words of Theodore Roosevelt, a great president and a Republican, who said:

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

We are here today as truth-tellers.

And we are here to demand: "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

We are here today to insist that those who were elected to be our leaders must tell us the truth.

We are here today to insist that our news media live up to its sacred responsibility to ascertain and report the truth - rather than acting like nothing more than a bulletin board for the lies and propaganda of a manipulative, dishonest federal government.

We have been getting just about everything but the truth on matters of life and death . . . on matters upon which our nation's reputation hinges . . . on matters that directly relate to our nation's fundamental values . . . and on matters relating to the survival of our planet.

In the process, our nation has engaged in an unnecessary war, based upon false justifications. More than a hundred thousand people have been killed - and many more have been seriously maimed, brain damaged, or rendered mentally ill. Our nation's reputation throughout much of the world has been destroyed. We have many more enemies bent on our destruction than before our invasion of Iraq. And the hatred toward us has grown to the point that it will take many years, perhaps generations, to overcome the loathing created by our invasion and occupation of a Muslim country.

What incredible ineptitude and callousness for our President to talk about a Crusade while lying to us to make a case for the invasion and occupation of a Muslim country!

Our children and later generations will pay the price of the lies, the violence, the cruelty, the incompetence, and the inhumanity of the Bush administration and the lackey Congress that has so cowardly abrogated its responsibility and authority under our checks-and-balances system of government.

We are here to say, "We will not stand for it any more. No more lies. No more pre-emptive, illegal war, based on false information. No more God-is-on-our-side religious nonsense to justify this immoral, illegal war. No more inhumanity."

Let's raise our voices, and demand, "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

Let's consider some of the most monstrous lies - lies that have led us, like a nation of sheep, to this tragic war.

Following September 11, 2001, the world knew that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were responsible for the horrific attacks on our country. Our long-time allies were sympathetic and supportive. But our president transformed that support into international disdain for the United States, choosing to illegally invade and occupy Iraq, rather than focus on and capture the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.

Why invade and occupy Iraq? Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice represented to us, without qualification, that there were strong ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

In September, 2002, President Bush made the incredible claim that "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam."

President Bush represented to Congress, without any factual basis whatsoever, that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks.

Our President and Vice-President, along with an unquestioning news media, repeatedly led our nation to believe that there was a working relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government, a relationship that threatened the US.

Even last week, when I met with Thomas Bock, National Commander of the American Legion, I asked him why we are engaged in the war in Iraq. He said, "Why, of course, because of the 9/11 attacks on our country." I asked, "What did Iraq have to do with those attacks?" He looked puzzled, then said, "Well, the connection between al Qaeda and Iraq."

I was shocked. Here is a man who has criticized us for opposing the war in Iraq - and he is completely wrong about the underlying facts used to justify this war.

Not only has there never been any evidence of any involvement by Saddam Hussein or Iraq with the attacks on 9/11, but there has never been any evidence of any operational connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Colin Powell finally conceded there is no "concrete evidence about the connection." "The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track al Qaeda" disclosed that "his team had found no evidence linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein." And the top investigator for our European allies has said, `If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever.'"

President Bush himself finally admitted nine days ago during a press conference that there was no connection between the attacks on 9/11 and Iraq. It's terrific that the President has now admitted what others have known for so long - but where is the accountability for the tragic war we were led into on the basis of his earlier misrepresentations?

Besides the fictions of Saddam Hussein somehow being linked to the 9/11 attacks and his supposed connection with al Qaeda, what was the principal justification for forgoing additional weapons inspections, failing to work with our allies toward a solution, refraining from seeking additional resolutions from the United Nations, and hurrying to war - a so-called "pre-emptive" war - in which we would attack and occupy a Muslim nation that posed no security risk to the United States, and cause the deaths of many thousands of innocent men, women, and children - and the deaths and lifetime injuries to many thousands of our own servicemen and servicewomen?

The principal claim was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction - biological and chemical weapons - and was seeking to build up a nuclear weapons capability. As we now know, there was nothing - no evidence whatsoever - to support those claims.

President Bush represented to us - and to people around the world - that one of the reasons we needed to make war in Iraq - and to do it right away - was because Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons. His assertions about Saddam Hussein trying to purchase nuclear materials from an African nation and about Iraq seeking to obtain aluminum tubes for the enrichment of uranium were challenged at the time by our own intelligence agency and scientists, yet he didn't tell us that!

Ten days before the invasion of Iraq, it was proven that the documents upon which President Bush's claim about Saddam Hussein trying to obtain uranium was based were forgeries. However, President Bush did not disclose that to the American people. By that failure, he betrayed each of us, he betrayed our country, and he betrayed the cause of world peace.

Neither did the vast majority of the news media disclose the forgeries - until it was far too late. It took our local newspapers here in Salt Lake City four months - until after President Bush declared that major combat in Iraq was over - to report the discovery that the documents were forgeries - and, therefore, that there was no basis for the false claims about Saddam Hussein trying to build up a nuclear capability. By its failure to promptly disclose the forgeries, the news media betrayed us as well.

Had the American people known we were being lied to - had President Bush informed us that the documents were forged and that he had no other basis for his claim - had our nation's media done its job, rather than slavishly repeating to us the lies being fed to it by the Bush administration - our nation may well not have allowed the commencement of this outrageous, illegal, unjustified war.

To President Bush, to his administration, to our go-along Congress, and to our news media, we are here today, demanding, "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said that high-strength aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," warning "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Undisclosed by President Bush or Condoleezza Rice was the fact that top nuclear scientists had informed the Administration that the tubes were "too narrow, too heavy, too long" to be useful in developing nuclear weapons and could be used for other purposes. Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, agreed.

So much for the phony claims of Saddam Hussein building nuclear weapons - the primary claims justifying the rush to war.

What were we told about chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction? These claims were as baseless and fraudulent as the claims about nuclear weapons.

President Bush told us in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. Then, in May of 2003, he made the outlandish statement that, "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us, "We know where the [WMDs] are." Vice President Cheney and then-Secretary of State Powell also joined in the chorus of lies and misinformation about weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, no stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons were found. Bush Administration Weapons Inspector David Kay noted that Iraq did not have an ongoing chemical weapons program after 1991--a conclusion remarkably similar to statements made by Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 attacks - and before they sacrificed the truth in the service of promoting the Bush administration's case for war against Iraq.

On February 24, 2001, less than 7 months before 9/11, Colin Powell said that Saddam Hussein "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors," said Colin Powell.

And in July 2001, two months before 9/11, Condoleezza Rice said: "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

It is astounding how they changed their claims after the President decided to make a case for the invasion and occupation of Iraq!

To think that we could be lied to by so many members of the Bush administration with such impunity is frightening - chilling. Yet these imperious, arrogant, dishonest people think we should just fall in line with them and continue to take them at their word.

The truth has been established. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on the United States. There is no evidence of any operational ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. And there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

What a tragedy, leading to greater tragedy. We are fed lie after lie, our media reinforces those lies, and we are a nation led to a tragic, illegal, unprovoked war.

We are here because of our values. We love our country. We cherish the freedoms and liberties of our country. We don't call those who speak out against our nation's leaders unpatriotic or un-American or appeasers of fascists. We have good, wholesome family values. In our families, we teach honesty, we teach kindness and compassion toward others, we teach that violence, if ever justified, must be an absolutely last resort. In our families, we teach that our nation's constitutional values are to be upheld, and that they are worth standing up and fighting for. Our family values promote respect and equal rights toward everyone, regardless of race, ethnic origin, and sexual orientation. In our families, we teach the value of hard work and competence - and we are left to wonder about a President who, after receiving an intelligence memo about the threat posed by al Qaeda, decides to continue his month-long vacation - just before the 9/11 attacks on our country.

As we demand the truth from others, let us also face the truth. Our government all too often has not cared about the human rights of people in other nations - and it doesn't really care about democracy, unless it leads to the election of those who will do our bidding.

Consider the irony regarding the claims that Saddam had chemical weapons and, because of that, we needed to rush to war in Iraq. When Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons - first against Iranians, then against his own people, the Kurds - our country provided him with biological and chemical agents and equipment to make the weapons. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush refused even to support economic sanctions against Hussein for his use of weapons of mass destruction. What did our nation do in response to Hussein's use of chemical weapons, killing tens of thousand of people, when he actually had them? We befriended, coddled, and rewarded him - with government-guaranteed loans totaling $5 billion since 1983, freeing up currency for Hussein to modernize his military assets.

Perhaps those in the US government who aided and abetted Saddam Hussein to further US business interests, while he was gassing the Kurds, should be sharing his courtroom dock as he is being tried now for crimes against humanity.

No more lies, no more hiding of the truth, no more wars that more than triple the value of stock in Dick Cheney's prior employer, Halliburton - and which, as of last September, has increased the value of the Halliburton CEO's stock by $78 million.

We are patriots. We're deeply concerned. And we demand change, now.

No more lies from Condoleezza Rice about whether she and President Bush were advised before 9/11 of the possibility of planes being flown into buildings by terrorists.

No more gross incompetence in the office of the Secretary of Defense.

No more torture of human beings.

No more disregard of the basic human rights enshrined in the Geneva Convention.

No more kidnapping of people and sending them off to secret prisons in nations where we can expect they will be tortured.

No more unconstitutional wiretapping of Americans.

No more proposed amendments to the United States Constitution that would, for the first time, limit fundamental rights and liberties for entire classes of people simply on the basis of sexual orientation.

No more federal land giveaways to developers.

No more increases in mercury emissions from old, dirty, dangerous coal-burning power plants.

No more backroom deals that deprive protection for millions of acres of wild lands.

No more attacks on immigrants who work so hard to build better lives.

No more inaction by Congress on fixing our hypocritical and inconsistent immigration laws and policies.

No more reliance on fiction rather than the science of global warming.

No more manipulation of our media with false propaganda.

No more disastrous cuts in funding for those most in need.

No more federal cuts in community policing and local law enforcement grant programs for our cities.

No more inaction on stopping the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

No more of the Patriot Act.

No more killing.

No more pre-emptive wars.

No more contempt for our long-time allies around the world.

No more dependence on foreign oil.

No more failure to impose increased fuel efficiency standards for automobiles.

No more energy policies developed in secret meetings between Dick Cheney and his energy company cronies.

No more excuses for failing to aggressively cut global warming pollutant emissions.

No more tragically incompetent federal responses to natural disasters.

No more tax cuts for the wealthiest, while the middle class and those who are economically-disadvantaged continue to struggle more and more each year.

No more reckless spending and massive tax cuts, resulting in historic deficits and historic accumulated national debt.

No more purchasing of elections by the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the country.

No more phony, ineffective, inhumane so-called war on drugs.

No more failure to pass an increase in the minimum wage.

No more silence by the American people.

This is a new day. We will not be silent. We will continue to raise our voices. We will bring others with us. We will grow and grow, regardless of political party - unified in our insistence upon the truth, upon peace-making, upon more humane treatment of our brothers and sisters around the world.

We will be ever cognizant of our moral responsibility to speak up in the face of wrongdoing, and to work as we can for a better, safer, more just community, nation, and world.

So we won't let down. We won't be quiet. We will continue to resist the lies, the deception, the outrages of the Bush administration. We will insist that peace be pursued, and that, as a nation, we help those in need. We must break the cycle of hatred, of intolerance, of exploitation. We must pursue peace as vigorously as the Bush administration has pursued war. It's up to all of us to do our part.

Thank you everyone for lending your voices to this call for compassion, for peace, for greater humanity. Let us keep in mind the injunction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

My comments:

I am not a fascist. I am not a fool. And anyone that wants to tell me I am not patriotic or entitled express my disgust at the dismantling of the United States of most of the past 220 years, before these clowns tried to parlay the deaths of my neighbors in an act of extremists into a means to control the population with fear and enrich the pockets of their corporate donor, is more than welcome to say it to my face so I can have the personal privilege of kicking their ignorant, lying ass.

Keith Obermann had it exactly right in his commentary on the lies that try to turn those of us that question the government into some sort of anti-American scum. I only hope that as many of us as are now being labeled that way make a special effort this year to send a message to take back our country from these real anti-Americans/

Before and After

2006-08-29T14:21:00.000-04:00

Just to give you an idea of how bad these magazines really are after forty and fifty years in the workshop at my mother's old house - take a look at the covers above. Even the original scan does not do full justice to the waterstains and wavey remains of these magazines. I have to use both hands to press them against the glass to get them flat enough to be useful. An attempt to scan the Corvair article inside was an exercise in frustration. Short of taking out the pages, there is no way to scan them and get them to lay flat. And the way they smell.....the basement was wet. Not damp. Frequently, there were inches of water on the floor because my mother, as years went by, did not bother using a sump pump because of the sheer amount of junk that filled every inch of floor in usually soaking wet cardboard boxes. Let me delicately say that after weeks of cleaning things out, the contents that were left filled an entire garbage truck - not a container, but an entire truck with compactor. And there was another container worth of trash that didn't fit in the truck.

These old magazines were saved the last night I visited the house to patrol the remains for anything I might have missed from my father's workshop, untouched since the early 1980's when my parents divorced. They were propped up in wooden crates my father had made to fit them - and, unfortunately, most of them were too damaged to salvage - on shelves he had made to store his books. I plan on slowly scanning the covers, and whatever interests me from the inside, and then deciding what to do with them, since they stink, are brittle andd falling apart, and really aren't of interest to my family or my kids. So, meanwhile, I'm keeping myself occupied and remembering the cars of my childhood.

(And just in case you missed the apparent theme of "cars with bad brakes" in the past two posts, it was not intentional. And the brakes on the Mercedes did get fixed. At some point, my father horsetraded "The Garbage Truck" for a '66 Corvair Monza that he had for a long time - for him, anyway - until someone made him an offer for it and he transformed it into a big green Plymouth Fury III. That's another story.)

Buy a Mercedes and build your own Portable Pump?

2006-08-28T17:26:00.001-04:00

From the August 1959 issue of Science and Mechanics.

My parents bought a used 1957 Mercedes back around 1964. Painted the same shade as municipal trucks in town, we kids immediately dubbed it "The Garbage Truck", and the name stuck. The car was cheap because it had a bad handbrake, and the previous owner had parked it uphill from a chainlink fence. By the time my parents owned it, the bumper had been bumped, and the infamous Mercedes grill had a nice fence-post-sized hole. But it was a cool car, with folding down rear seats and seat belts at a time no American car had either.

We used to lock my brother in the truck by folding up the rear seat. My mother got used to calling him to dinner from the faint screams of "Mommy?" from the trunk. And my sister and I got a good whopping with the wooden spoon, even as we secretly laughed at what we had done to the annoying little brother.

It's a wonder he speaks to either of us!

The New Edsel

2006-08-27T17:20:00.000-04:00

From the cover of the October 1957 issue of Science and Mechanics. Be glad that you can't smell the original after forty years of being in the basement of my parent's old house. They stink.

When I was a kid, the neighbor up the street had a pink and beige '57 Edsel. At least he did until the brakes started to give out and he couldn't park it on the street anymore for fear that it would roll down the steep hill and end up straddling a lane or two of Route 17 at the bottom. It was a big, unimpressive car, except for the color which was of the sort of shades that made the cars of the 1960's look serene by comparison. For all the nostalgia about chrome and tail fins at car shows, I doubt any car maker will ever again offer the sort of demented combinations of flat pepto and canned mushroom soup of the Edsel. Or the buttons on the steering wheel as shown in the scan. Please note the test driver is doing a hearty 55 or so, a speed at which a real Edsel would be vibrating like a harp...

The 2996 Project

2006-08-24T11:04:00.000-04:00

I am honored to be a particpant in the
2996 Project, where bloggers from all over the US and world will each be honoring a victim of the 9/11 attacks. The link to the project's home page is also in my sidebar.

"Honey, take the phone - you have a call"

2006-08-23T18:47:00.000-04:00

Almost forgot. I walked in the house Monday after picking my husband from the train station and the phone rang while I was still in the doorway. Expecting it to be one of the kid's friends, I thought he was teasing when he handed me the phone and told me I had a call.

"Who is this?", I asked.

"Oh, hi, Evelyn, this is {female former boss)" Just like that and without letting me get in a word, "So sorry we had to let you go."

"Uh, Ok, is there something you need from me?" I mumbled as my life flashed before me - I was stunned that my husband hadn't had the good sense to say I wasn't THERE.

"Well, you remember those tools you asked me to order? Do you still want them?" My husband had found some little handtools being sold on Ebay, and we had asked her if she could locate some, that the company could make a nice deal selling them because there were no American sources for them and all the hobby people were trying to get their hands on them to resell.

I told her "Let me ask my husband...." and handed him the phone. And heard him walk over to the base - and hang it up. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. And whether to call back and apologize, just in case I ever need a reference from them....

"No one talks to my wife like that" was the answer.

Good guy, that fella.

Modern Food

2006-08-23T18:05:00.000-04:00

I've been looking at some of the 1950's cookbooks I own. Some are well thumbed, like my mother's "German Cookbook", from which she prepared alledgedly Swiss cuisine - she was born in Luzern - because she really did not have a clue as to how to cook when she met my father who was stationed in Germany. And, being the discriminating gourmet that he was, he never knew the difference.

Every dinner in my childhood consisted of a hunk of meat (usually cooked to a hockey-puck like tenderness), a starch (potatoes or rice, but mostly potatoes) and one over-boiled green something or yellow something - or turnips. My father loved turnips. Personally, I have spent the decades since moving out avoiding anything turnip or turnip-like. My mother always makes them for Thanksgiving, and I try to sit upwind and look the other way as they pass by me. Sometimes there would be a pile of canned, sliced beets garnished with a lump of butter. No margarine in Dad's house.

Beef was almost always chuck steak, the kind with the big globs of delicious, oily, burnt fat on the outside. (After my mother's cooking, the only part that was still chewable. Chicken was for Sunday and barbeques outside in the summer - or, cooked in the lovely tomatoe sauce made with Spatini sauce mix and two cans of tomatoe paste until the meat had sort of disolved and fallen from the bones into the sauce. And then there was Hasenpfeffer, a roast Mom also made on Sundays a couple of times a year. It was one of the few things that actually was never overcooked, but watched like a hawk until it was perfect. We all loved it, with the slightly vinegary gravy and carrots that fell apart into morsels of wonderful tenderness.

And then Mom got a real refridgerator to replace the Kelvinator that she had been given as a wedding present for her first appartment. This one had a freezer that made ice cubes, as opposed to the little tin box in the top center of the old one, that would keep a quart of ice cream and two trays of water semi-solid as long as no one opened the door too much.

And with the new refridgerator and freezer came a journey to the frozen foods aisle of the A&P and Shop-rite.

And then there was the Sunday that Mom asked me to take out the meat for the hasenpfeffer.

And I discovered it still had little furry feet left on by the butcher. To my credit, I did not tell my siblings, and I ate it. Eventually, my sister found out - and that was the end of hasenpfeffer on Sundays.

If we had hamburgers at home, they were always made "German-style", meaning containing minced onion and breadcrumbs or crackers and an egg. They were charcoal black and crusty, and about a third the size of the raw meat by the time Mom got done with them. You could use them as a weapon if the other siblings got on your nerves, and we did, too. They also came in handy if you had a stubborn front tooth that was wiggling but not quite out yet, and the Little Rascals thing of tying a string around it and the other end to a doorknob while slamming the door was too daunting to try.

So here I sit, fanning through pages of artfully arranged pastel plastic plates, ganished with bright red tomatoes and little poofy dabs of fluffy white stuff that could be mayo, or whipped cream, or Marshmellow Fluff. There is usually a glass of transparent liquid on a coaster, and a bunch of shiney bright thingies to fill up the empty table space.

The reality was that if there was something fluffy and white on the plate either Mom made whipped mashed potatoes for the starch requirement, or she was doing her nails while cooking, and put the cotton ball down for a minute. The potatoes did taste better, tho.

The Talking Machine

2006-08-22T23:29:00.000-04:00

(Click in image for a full-sized scan)

From Book One of an encyclopedia, vintage 1933, that belonged to my father, and was one of my favorite amusements as a child. I spent countless hours with one volume or another of these books flopped open on the floor next to my bed. So, being a child of the 1960's I had a rather odd collection of knowledge about outdated machinery and old victorian poetry. Some of the information is still useful, some of the information on art and language is timeless. But, whew, the science. And the social studies. And even the arts and crafts. When was the last time a child had access to a discarded soap box to make a doll bed. Or a boy needed a list of tools that every lad should have, and instructions on how to make a toolbox from an orange crate?

I've had enough trouble trying to explain to my kids about those things called records that used to be played with a needle on a turntable. On a Gramophone. A thing that you cranked - not plugged in. In a house that might not even have had electricity back in 1930...

Gas prices

2006-08-16T09:21:00.000-04:00

We have two cars. One of them, the one we just bought, takes regular gas. The other one takes premium because it is an older, high performance car that we really only use as a spare. My husband bought it as a collectible, intending to drive it only a few miles a month to car shows. So it sits in the driveway, snuggled under a huge cover, for most of the month.

Unfortunately, we don't always have the option to leave it there. Sometimes, he can't commute by train, or we need to go two different places, or we just need to transport things that won't fit into the newer, smaller car, but will fit into the massive trunk of the other, a 1996 Impala SS.

Two weeks ago, the new car had to go in for a three month checkup. It was a weekend, so I needed to go places, run errands, and I had no choice but to take the Impala. Granted, it's big. It's fast. It corners like a bus, and I could put all three dogs and the kids in the truck and have room left over for groceries. Park it somewhere in all its gleaming mean black glory, and there is always some guy, hands in pockets, checking it out when we come back to it in the parking lot. They never expect to see it driven by a woman, or comment when I say that it is my husband's car. Well, maybe to tell me that they wanted one but their wife refused to let them buy it. I tell them that my husband bought it and snuck it into the driveway without consulting me, and they sort of nod and you know exactly what they are thinking. That they would be dead if they did that. And I tell them that I was so pissed that I refused to drive it for more than a year. And now he and I have to flip over who gets to use it - until the past year or so.

Not since I was a teenager have I ever found myself in a gas station with no choice but to use a credit card to buy enough gas to get home. There have been times when I have had to scrounge for the change in the ashtray, or borrow a buck or two from a passenger. But $3.53 a gallon for gas? Or, rather, more than forty bucks just to top off the tank in the big car? Yikes. Get gas and suddenly I am seventeen and driving Dad's Pontiac Bonneville to the Merit station, and fumbling through my purse to find that last dollar in change while some kid who barely speaks English is glaring at me for holding things up.

I'm lucky because I live where I can walk to the post office and the bank and the grocery store. When I was working, I could have even walked to work, or taken the free minibus with all the little old ladies who have nothing to do but go shopping at eight in the morning. I think about all those people who live in West Podunk and have to drive an hour or two to work, and have no other choice like a train or a bus. And all those maids and cleaning ladies and porters and janitors and guys that make minimum wage who have to find a way to divide a quarter of their take-home pay to the car instead of other things - like food and rent.

We all drive too much. I think part of the obesity problem in this country comes from that. No one walks. Not if they have a car. My neighbors tease me because my kids walk to school year-round. They offer me rides from the grocery store (all of two blocks away) as if I were strange for not wanting to take a car to pick up a couple of things that fit in one or two bags. When I run into then at the post office, they are utterly amazed that I'd walk ten blocks to get there. And back. But it's no big deal - by the time I park, it's a block and a half less. I walked before the price of gas went up. I walked when it was a little over a dollar a gallon. And when I stop walking, I miss it. I probably know more about the little stores and the people that own them and hang out there than most of my neighbors will ever know because all they have time to notice is the parking spaces and the lines they wait in at the post office and the bank. I get to see that geese nested under the pine tree in the front of the grocery store's lawn. And that there is a falcon stooping to pick off pigeons from the ledge of the post office. And that there is a guy with an old Jaguar that parks at the bagel shop for coffee every day. Now we nod as we pass each other.

You can't buy that stuff. And it's better not to drive past it, anyway.

Maybe the guy that kept yelling "Get a horse!" to the first Model T on the block had the right idea...and maybe I ought to get those three lazy dogs a harness and cart!

Honey, I'm home...

2006-08-13T13:13:00.000-04:00

(scan from book on houseplants and from photo - original collage)

A new direction

2006-08-13T10:02:00.000-04:00

I've spent most of the past forty years doing artwork - from crayons on the bond paper my father used to sneak home from work to jewelry and assemblages to watercolors and weaving. When I purchased my first home computer, the first thing I did was play with the drawing program that came with it, making some very juvenile "art" that I thought was the cat's pajamas, or, at least, Spot the cat.

Over the years, I have done web design, and a lot of graphic images, mostly to amuse myself, while continuing to design jewelry and build little scuptures from found objects. The computer art has one serious advantage. I don't have to dust it or keep the kids from playing with it and breaking it. Having just bought a very nice inkjet to go with what is becoming a large array of color and laser printers on the geeknet here at the house, I spent a lot of time over the past few days scaning and printing and just printing out some of my creations. I went to the massive expense of buying two HUGE frames for a buck apiece to fill in the living room, filled them with the kids artwork instead, and now have about fifty garage-sale finds and dollar store bargains to hang along with them of Mommie's Art. Hence the printing.

I am not too literate with file sharing, so I need to find a place to upload some of the images I want to make public. For the moment, I'm going to upload a few smaller things here. Hope you like them.

(And for the friend who asked me how I was doing after being "let go", either I haven't hit the ground yet, or it is sort of being beaten up by a munchkin around the ankles. I'm fine, thank you. Talk to me in another month when I have to pay the NJ mortgage and property tax bill, I may have a different answer...)

I've been expunged from the sweathouse.

2006-08-12T04:28:00.000-04:00

It meant I had to climb up a flight of stairs to my office which was seriously overheated in winter and summer, with the added charm of having ductwork so dirty that I was itching all over whenever the air was circulating, especially on my neck, arms, and legs for most of the past month and a half. I had hives so bad that I wanted to claw off my skin, and I worked with that lovely sensation every day. Only when I went downstairs would the itching stop.

So I complained to the boss. I was dismissed to the point where I showed her the rash on my legs, the hairbrush dots and welts. She conceded that her daughter complained about a problem in a way that implied I was not truthful somehow.

The boss worked on the spare desk in my office last week. Monday morning, two of the laborers came into my office, entered the cockloft, and emerged with a filthy air filter. Without a word being said, it became pretty clear that the problem was not just affecting me or my imagination, but just maybe that there was a real situation of some allergen or chemical blowing all over me while I worked in my little penthouse sweatshop.

Then, Friday, I was told I was being "let go". That phrase always brings to mind an image of being dangled out a window and released. Except that the next paragraph included a "I hope you don't mind if [female boss] calls you to get help for the next few days with what is on your desk" and a request to tell him what was on my desk. So I did. And got the feeling that I was explaining nuclear fission to a duck. I was so shocked that I forgot to remove my passwords and personal stuff from the computer, and am left with the image of my kids pictures and my desktop art sitting on that machine in a place I really loathe, for the amusement of people that lied to me. And exposed me to god only knows what stuff that made my skin itch when I was just trying to work and earn a living.

I will keep repeating my phrase about 'living well is the best revenge" and move on. I know what the truth is, and what the lies were, and I am better off being an honest person than the people that misrepresent and abuse. They have the idiot accountant, the software that doesn't work, the benefit of having the mistakes of my three predecessors cleaned up even if they have no idea that there were mistakes, and all that. I did a good job. And they know I did, too. Else he would not feel compelled to fire me while asking me to accept their phone calls and help them. What kind of people do that? I know. And so do they. And it is really that simple. As the officer says "Move on, nothing to see here". Or as I just said to one of my coworkers about the pretentious religious zealot that also worked there - living like that is more than enough punishment. We make our own hell. I prefer to make my own heaven, thank you. I'd rather be the person that bought a bag of ice because I felt sorry that the boss was in pain from having a tooth extracted, and spent time doing things for others so that they would not have to do them, than in the shoes of those that abused that largesse. Not one moment in those shoes, in fact.

I'm perfectly fine in mine right now, thank you.

Now, do you really think that I could not figure out what was going on, either? I knew. Right along. Gives me points for having character that you will never have. And pity the poor soul that next moves into that office, because she will inherit a legacy of lies and mismanagement. Or he. That person will be free to take lunch at three PM, to go to the bank and never get a penny for gas, and to be expected to do the Yassssurh dance whenever the boss makes an entrance. The difference is that I mistakenly liked you as a person. And thought that the same was true of you. Now I know why the other woman cried so much (as you repeatedly told me). And it wasn't because of her mother-in-law. It was because she was trapped.

I'm not.

Resisting Urges

2006-08-12T04:22:00.000-04:00

It's really too bad that people do not have warning labels stamped on their forehead. I can think of several people that should have the name of their favorite orifice inscribed where the public can see it and be protected. Maybe that is what the scarlett letter stood for?

Who are these people and why were they in Dad's papers?

2006-08-11T08:56:00.000-04:00

When I was cleaning out my mother's house last spring, this tiny picture was down in what used to be my dad's workshop in the middle of a pile of papers that had not been touched since he divorced my mother in 1978 (he died in 1984). It was somewhere between old newspaper clipings, his childhood scrapbook and two Mets programs from 1962 and 1964. There was no clue as to who these people might be or what the interesting native costumes on the cut-off people (women, I presume) might be. After scaning it, I noticed that the house in the background looks to have a thatched roof, and that there is only a reflection of trees in the window, so the house is not on a street in a suburb or city. Other than that, I am stumped. The people - the young men in the back row look like they might be my grandfather and his brother Gene - don't appear in any other photos I have. The black-haired woman is dressed in fashions circa 1925-1928, with her short dress and muley shoes and cloche hat. But she's not in any other picture I have either. Are they family, ancestors, or just strangers or friends of someone?

Wish I knew the story, Dad.

A little art to tide us over

2006-08-08T08:25:00.000-04:00

One of the magical sunflowers from last year's garden. This was a color-changing .gif, but I forgot that Blogger turns everything into a png file, so we lost the animation. Guess I'll have to figure out how to fool it.

The sunflowers in the yard are eight feet tall and more this year. The best part is that I didn't plant a single one - they reseed themselves every year, thanks to the sloppiness of the goldfinches. Mother Nature wins one again.

Remembering Bobby

2006-05-29T19:18:00.000-04:00

One of the names on the wall in Washington:

Robert Carovillano

As with all names, there are dozens of stories, people who recall the human, the relicts, the turn of a nose or a crew cut or a laugh.

I grew up at 24 Roliver Street in Rutherford, NJ, a suburb of New York City so close that you can see the Empire State Building in the distance. I was the oldest of the three little kids who lived next door to his house on sharply terraced lots on a very steep street. Bobby's mom Pat and my mom were best friends, and, since my mother hadn't learned to drive, the two women often ran errands together.

Bobby sometimes babysat for us, and he loved to play games with us even when he was just hanging out at home. He had a pair of bongos that he played all the time, usually half-sitting out the windows of his bedroom, and if I or my younger sister or brother were outside on the side of our house, he would mysteriously vanish, still playing, only to suddenly appear in a different window. It was a constant game that we thought was hysterical. One day the bongos were out at the curb. He had broken the piece of wood that tied them together, and gotten another set. I asked his mom, Pat, if I could take them, and she said yes. I was maybe eight or nine at the time, and loved that they were Bobby's and that they made a lot of cool noise. He had decorated them with leftover decals from model cars and that made them even cooler in my eyes.

When we prepared to move from the house in August 1966, we threw out or sold most of our toys, but I insisted on keeping the bongos, to the point where my mom threw them out several times, and I kept retrieving them from the trash. She must have finally given up, because the bongos ended up on the floor of my bedroom closet in the new house, sort of a security blanket in a strange place.

Six months after we moved, I came home from sixth grade in my new school to find Pat in our kitchen talking to our mother. Bobby had been killed. I can still remember the shock, like I remember JFK and other events, the look on their faces as they talked about making the funeral arrangements. It was the first time anyone I ever knew had died. Here I am, forty years later, and I still can see his face, flitting from window to window as he played with a couple of little girls. He would have been a wonderful adult, a wonderful parent, and I think of him all the time whenever someone mentions that war. It changed my view of the world and of politics in so many ways I can't explain them.

When my mother's house was cleaned out and sold last spring, Bobby's bongos were still up in my mother's attic. Now they are upstairs in my house once again. My kids couldn't understand what I wanted with an old set of broken drums and repeatedly asked me about them until I gave in any explained how I came to have them and what they meant to me. My older daughter remembered hearing me talk about how someone I knew had died in Vietnam, and we went online to the Wall site and looked up Bobby's information.

It doesn't say very much. Just dates, rank and a tiny bit of how his life ended. It is up to us who still remember him, and all the other names on the wall, to pass on what we do remember to those they never got a chance to meet. In my mind, I could see a grey-haired guy, with kids of his own, racing from room to room to surprise them as they played outside. With that smile I can still remember.

Damn. Damn.

If you have ever read "Patterns" by Amy Lowell, it is what I am thinking now, too.

I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime-tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the plashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden-paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles
on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon --
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
"Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday se'nnight."
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
"Any answer, Madam," said my footman.
"No," I told him.
"See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer."
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, "It shall be as you have said."
Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

A day of remembrance

2006-05-29T13:11:00.000-04:00

I am unhappy with the current trend of seeing Memorial Day as nothing more than a day to go shopping, or to the beach, or to have a really big outdoor party. We boomers are a generation isolated from the reality of wars, unless we are unfortunate enough to have a child in Iraq or Afghaninstan, or are old enough to have been in Vietnam. To us, this is all too abstract, and it is in danger of becoming even more so for our children.

I was struck this morning by the dwindling number of WWII vets, mostly riding in cars, that there are in the parade in town each year. As I explained to my kids, when I was their age, there were WWI vets, in their odd doughboy hats, leading the parade. Now there are less than 100 of them still alive in the US.

My husband is a practicing Buddhist, and we are raising our children in that belief. The most important message we get from it is the futility of war. And that peace is also a battle that must be constantly waged from within as well as without. Peace has no veterans in parades, but it requires all of us to take part, or none of us will survive - even more so in this era of instant carnage. It does not mean one can not defend oneself, or one's nation - just that the bloodshed is an absolute last resort, taken with extreme reservation and respect for life.

I posted this elsewhere this morning, and want to repeat this for those seeking to find music for the holiday observances:

Almost all the branches of service - Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines (of course) and even the Coast Guard have military music available for free public download. Much of this is intended to be played at public assemblies and military funerals where no musicians are available. There is a national shortage of volunteers to play taps at the funeral of veterans, and this is one way for the services to deal with the problem. Some even include directions for the recommended order of play, for example.

Links:

US Marine Corp Band
www.marineband.usmc.mil/

US Air Force Band
http://www.usafband.com/
(One of my favorites)

US Coast Guard Band
http://www.uscg.mil/band/

US Army Bands
http://www.usarmyband.com/
http://bands.army.mil/

US Army Field Band
http://www.army.mil/fieldband/

There are a lot more out there that can be found by searching. Most have a listening room, most have downloadable music files of usually excellent quality. Some even have CD's available for purchase/and/or/download.

(Remembering my Dad, a Coast Guard Reserve and Army vet who served from 1948 - 1953, and my childhood babysitter, Bobby Carovillano who went to war in 1965 and is now memorialized on a wall in Washington, with more than 57,000 others, young and old.)

Creepy Bunny - meet CREEPY BARBIE

2006-04-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

The really scary thing is this is the same doll that is in the other picture. All I did is redress her and brush her hair. (She's really Diva from Barbie and the Rockers - so perhaps she's mellowing after her stage career.)

Happy Birthday to you-know-who

2006-04-11T21:36:00.000-04:00

Eleven years ago tonight, I was recovering from the birth of this 3 pound 15 ounce cutie five weeks shy of her scheduled arrival. Twenty-seven days in the SCN, and $78,000 in medical bills later, they sent her home weighing a whopping 4 pounds 8 ounces with a butt the size of a Barbie but the attitude of a pitt bull holding a steak.

Eleven years later, she's still got the attitude and a sister. (She's the one on the right - her sister the stand up comedian is the one on the left making the wiseass face.) Back then, she was happy with a pacifier made of a rolled up cloth diaper with a premie nipple taped to the end of it. Now it's "Dream Life", Tamagouchi, a billion Barbies, Inuyasha, and a whole lot more.

Happy Birthday, to the former Monster Baby (because she used to growl like a little monster, of course)!

OK Everybody - Tell me it's time to go to bed...

2006-04-10T01:40:00.000-04:00

I hate these damn time changes. Last weekend, I got up refreshed and perky. A week later, I am a squirrel on speed. I can't sleep. I can't relax. I keep thinking it's an hour earlier than it is - because it really IS an hour earlier.

Hal - my mind is goinggggggggg............................................

What the hell time is it, anway?

The incredible farting dog and other tales of woe

2006-04-09T19:49:00.000-04:00

On my birthday a few weeks ago, I was given a black tee shirt with a giant pictograph of a dog, with pictographic swirls and lines indicating the act of - er - passing wind, as they used to say if they said anything at all.

Just underneath are the words "The dog did it".

You have to live here to understand that one of our three dogs, Ginger, is a walking bag of wind.

Loud wind. Loud enough that there is never any question of the source.

She walks down the hall, and with each step, she farts. She lays down on the bed - and farts. Not a stealth, little dog fart. The sort of fart that unmarried uncles make when they play "pull my finger".

There is never any doubt that the dog did it. And to remove any doubts, she usually repeats the performance. Loudly and deadly.

When I go to sleep, I must make sure that the quieter end is facing me. She has actually been so loud that she has awakened me from a sound sleep. And hiding your face under the blankets is useless.

We have changed that poor dog's diet on the advice of everyone we could think of. Nothing helps. She's just born to fart.

You know you have a problem when you make a constant effort to be upwind of the dog. And notice that even the other dogs do it.

FWIT, you haven't experienced cerebral humor until you have walked around wearing a picture of a farting dog on your chest in the grocery store. Where, of course, you run into at least three parents of children in school with one of your kids. And, not until you have engaged the last one in conversation remembered what you are wearing.

Heck, my kids didn't need playdates, anyway!

Dark Shadows and Dan Curtis

2006-04-02T14:10:00.000-04:00

I was just reading at another Blog that Dan Curtis, the TV producer, died last week. He was the force behind the TV soap opera about vampires, werewolves and a strange little town called Collinswood where the Collins family consisted of a group of inbred relatives of dubious mental state and their cursed ancestor, a vampire named Barnabas. Who sometimes was a vampire, sometimes wasn't, and was in love with a blond witch wannabe who looked just like his 17th century love named Angelique, who had been reincarnated as a rather bitchy woman now named Cassandra.

(I know there are a lot of thirty and forty somethings who wonder why they have those names. They can blame it on Dan Curtis)

The matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Collins, was played by former child actress Joan Bennett in sort of a haze of bad acting, further enhanced by years of plastic surgery and pancake makeup leaving her perpetually unable to move any muscle on her face. And the overall effect included jet black hair, forever tied in a bun to hid her facial wrinkles being pulled back with the old trick of taping back hunks of hair from the sides and forehead tightly - the effect was like having your facial skin pulled with rubber bands. She had one expression - puzzlement - because her eyebrows were somewhere in the middle of her forehead.

(I just looked up her credits and bio on IMDB - she was born in 1910, making her nearly 70 at the time I was watching her on Dark Shadows. And she started acting in the 1920's, as a child, with her big sister Constance. Yikes!)

There was a small rotating cast of mostly Canadian actors, who were always playing the 1700 version of their identical 1960's selves - to the point that everyone had two names. Everyone except Barnabas, of course. The 1700 version of him was the 1960's vampire version, too.

There was a man-made monster named Adam, and an Eve, and the cousin who was turned into a werewolf, and the caretaker who was forced to do Barnabas' daytime dirty work. There were pretty women that worked as nannys in the family castle on the sea cliffs, caring for what were supposed to be Joan Bennett's elementary school-aged children (I guess when your family is cursed by a vampire, menopause is the least of your worries). There was Quentin who was in loved with the oldest daughter. He even had his own theme music and later surfaced as the malignant landowner next door to Falconcrest where he plagued Jane Wyman instead of Joan Bennett. (Played by David Selby, of course, on that soap he managed to repeat his bad karma and pine for his true love when she drowned in the swimming pool after catching her engagement ring in the drain on the bottom).

Anyway:

Starting in middle school, my afternoons were ruled by the need to get home in time to see Dark Shadows, which started at 4:00 here in the New Yawk area, followed by the 4:30 Movie on channel 7, followed by Bill Beutel and Roger Grimsby on Eyewitness News at 6. There was Maggie and the Beautiful Machine on channel 13 - WNET - an exercise program led by a woman with waist length grey hair that I thought was soo cool back around 1968 or so (Now that I am a woman with long greying hair she seems even cooler) which started at 3:30 and ended at 4, perfect timing. My best friend Patti and I would talk on the phone, stretching the cord around the wall from the kitchen into the dining room and just barely into the living room where I could hold it at arms length and see the TV (B & W, of course). So when I think of Dark Shadows, I remember a lot of shouting of "OH MY GOD - ROGER, LOOK OUT - the Reverend is a VAMPIRE NOW!" to the telephone handset about a two feet from my face, as close as I could get it without pulling the phone off the wall...."

Dan Curtis went on from Dark Shadows to direct and produce a lot of really bad TV to better TV (at least a better budget) with "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance". And "Supertrain" - one of the most incredibly over-budgetted BAD TV shows and series of all time.

RIP, Dan - you made my teenage years an interesting place, filled with bad production values and imagination.

OK, This could get interesting....

2006-03-26T22:44:00.000-05:00

Went to Legal Seafood for dinner for the first time. Worked my drooling way through the menu, realized that if I ordered what I wanted, dinner for the three adults and two kids would be about a week's grocery budget and then some. So I got extravagant and ordered fish and chips.

Technically, it wasn't really chips. No vinegar, no rolled up newspaper - just shoestring potatoes just like the ones from the grocery store. Heck, MacLardAss has better fries than these.

But the cod.....it was incredible. It was the softest, fluffy-est melt-in-your-mouth fish I have ever had. It was wrapped in a crunchy, wonderfully perfectly fried crust that tasted of fresh flour and salt and pepper. (I'm getting hungry again just thinking about it!)

My older daughter whined her way to the table, complaining about how the place smelled of fish. People turned and looked at her, so I felt like I had a "Bad Parent" tatoo on my forehead as they stared at the loud kid with the attitude. I needed duct tape at that point. Or a magic Cone of Silence. Or something.

She whined her way through the kid's menu while her sister colored her picture of a shark and made fun of the "Things you probably didn't know" on the inside of the menu. She complained about lobster. She complained about shrimp. When her sister said she was ordering chicken fingers, she complained about that, too. There is a rule that siblings can never order the same food. I remember that one from my childhood, too. So Whiney-Pants ordered the fish-shaped ravioli, after much consultation about what it contained: cheese. No fish.

And then the fried clam appetizer appeared. She complained about how I had a little plastic sword in my lemon in the ice water, and she didn't. Her sister had a sword. So I surrendered mine to her and they proceeded to have pinky swordfights, not too loudly, thank God. Five minutes later, I bit into a "chip" and something crunchy was in my mouth.

Crap. It's the tooth that anchors my bridge. So much for eating the softest, fluffy-est cod. So much for eating, period. I took my doggie bag like a good girl and left while my husband's editor paid for dinner.

I figure the fish and chips will cost us a couple of thousand at the dentist to replace the bridge that now has to be replaced, and root canal, and all the happy dental torture that goes along with it.

Legal Seafood, indeed. I'll have to rob a bank to pay this one off!

So what am I doing here anyway?

2006-03-26T18:55:00.000-05:00

Someone dared me to do this.

I have strong opinions and have spent way too much time expressing them all over the place to not have a blog. Plus I know so much more than the average human being that I certainly should be sharing the depth of my wisdom for the sake of humanity. Really.