In case anyone is wondering

...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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADSense has a Sense of Humor

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....

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

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?

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

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

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"

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

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

(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

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!