Our great American family

Americans like simplicity. They may like it painted, studded, covered in knickknacks and sprinkled with glitter, but they want it to fit neatly into a little niche in the drop top desk.

All gays could work at the Bird Cage. Lesbians are rough, tough and militant. Transgender folk equate with Ripley's Siamese twins.

Our fifty shades of race lay on a sliding scale of value.

Democrats are bleeding heart liberals and Republicans are budding Hitlers.

The list goes on, but the truth is that most of us are much more alike than we want to admit, or care to believe.

We act out of fear and ignorance. We are quick to jump on bandwagons as long as there are other familiar faces on board.

We believe in karma and heaven and hell, for those others who threaten our being.

We are tweens in a world that is watching us grow up in a painfully dangerous situation.

Usually governed by a president who is chosen because he is older, wiser, and more grounded than the masses, our Rumspringa has not yet destroyed the earth.

But now the head of the family is riding around with the top down, honking the horn, shouting at passers by and indiscriminatingly throwing trash out the window.

That is definitely not so great.

He's only a bird in a golden cage

Perhaps our president knows his limitations better than we think. He's already back on the campaign trail. It's the one thing he's really good at.

How will he be remembered?

Alternative truth?

Locker room talk?

Tweeting like some frantic canary banging it's head against the bars of its golden cage?

The one thing you can count on is that no matter how low we set the bar, Trump can get under it.

Out of the mouths of babes

Is life about passion or showing off?

Do we only work for carrots?

If everyone is doing their best why shouldn't they all make a decent living?

It is difficult to know if anyone is doing their best, but we have used that as an excuse to misuse people since time began.

Is it really necessary for one person to make a hundred, a thousand times more than another? Are people truly motivated to create, invent, or be more useful if they have more than they will ever need in ten lifetimes? Does keeping hard working, good people eternally poor benefit anyone?

My five year old grandson was playing and had to come up with a problem He said one man has double money and the other has none. When asked what the problem is, he says they need to learn to share.

That is pure logic.

The future

When I was young there was the future.

That distant place where whatever problem I was dealing with at the time, might be fixed.

That place that held hope in its cupped hands.

I suppose there is still a future.

A time that is still to come where things will be different and maybe better.

A place that is a little shakier than it used to be in my sixty seven year old hands.

I have less time to consider the future now.

Distance becomes more daunting when my bones ache and breath gets shorter.

I think I need to do more dealing with now.

Now.

Volunteer

Growing up I was not encouraged to get a job until I was out of high school. Of course I was only seventeen, so that wasn't too awful . . .

My first jobs were babysitting and mowing yards, but my first real job was working for my grandmother's nursing home. I collected dirty laundry. Washed it. Dried it and returned it to wherever it belonged. Sometimes I helped out in the kitchen with breakfast or supper. It was a family business. The ladies were sweet. It seemed like a decent job.

Then I went away to school and when I came home I worked for a small insurance company. It felt pointless to me.

Later I worked for a larger insurance company and for a while it did feel important, but I didn't work selling people insurance, or underwriting their policies. I worked in personnel. People are important to me, but I only stayed here about two and a half years before quitting.

At home I took maintaining our yard and home very seriously and I also took playing tennis very seriously. Often playing six hours a day before going home to cook dinner.

I had a few novelty jobs like pumping gas that lasted less than a year for one reason or another. Then the children entered the picture and I took rearing them very seriously. I can think of nothing more important than caring for the next generation of people who will run the world. It is the hardest job in the world when done right, but the payoff is in things much more valuable than money. It is a labor of love.

Once my children were all in school, I worked in their preschool until just before our divorce.  It was the best job I ever had! The pay was awful, but it, too, was a labor of love.

Later, when circumstances changed, I went back to the big insurance company for another two and a half years. It was horrible and I worked with some wonderful people in Agency, but I worked under a woman who could make the sun look blue. I quit and went to work for a florist.

I actually loved working there. I answered the phone, took orders, did some billing, learned how to help people order flowers for weddings and funerals, learned a lot about the greenhouse plants and in my spare time, fluffed carnations and plucked roses. I underestimated how much I loved working there when I moved away. When I finally made it back here, the shop had closed.

Now I volunteer at an elementary school. I have done this sort of work since my youngest child started kindergarten and he is 38. I wish they paid for this kind of work. I would get a full time job.

But schools today are lucky to have libraries. In fact, they are lucky to have buses to get the kids to school and teachers to teach them. So I volunteer.

The luxury of volunteering is just that, but it has let me spend most of my life doing what I thought was important.

Where the money tree grows

The American Dream has become the American Nightmare.

Every day a new crisis emerges.  It is a production worthy of the anti-Disney.

Instead of banshees and forest fires, we have Isis driving anything movable with explosives taped to their souls. Instead of bad fairies, we have Trump waiving his twitter account around. Instead of mean villains, we have Senators dancing in the streets singing, "School's out! Health care's out. Look at how our president pouts!"

The chess games in the park are being played by Russians using our votes as pawns and North Koreans who have replaced the knights with nuclear weapons.

The Queen of Hearts has Thumper baked into a pie and Bambi is staked out for target practice by the NRA.

There are random cures for whatever ails us. Health care for the rich and famous. Schools for the wealthy and wily. And guns for everyone!

Once upon a time there was truth, but Republicans ever after demands its demise.

To be

Everyone needs a Merlin.

An authority figure, who knows everything and if he ever gets it wrong, has the ability to use his magic to make it all better.

It doesn't matter if he is a Disney Merlin, a Malory Merlin, or maybe just a great dad.

The important thing is that we believe in him.

Belief is the most magical word in the world, because when we believe in something we can let go of all the millions of other things that block our thoughts, and imagination, and power.

And then we are free to really be.

The lie

My granddaughter just had a terrible disappointment.

She planned to move into a new apartment for months. She had saved the money and trusted that the person who would be her new roommate was getting ready too.

People who knew both of them asked lots of questions and all the answers sounded right.

But in the end the other person let her down. This person must have known all along that this would happen. She hadn't really made the necessary arrangements.

I just do not understand why she let my granddaughter go right up until the last moment, when it was too late to change anything, before finally letting her know it wasn't going to happen.

People continue to amaze and disappoint me.

The truth would have opened the door for a hundred possibilities, but the lie locked it in for good.

Profiles in behavior

Three year olds can be very difficult.

Their ultimate source is whoever they are used to telling them what to do and it doesn't matter if that information is reliable, or fact based.

They are as impressed by fairy tales as they are by science.

Rational behavior dissolves into temper tantrums when they don't get what they want.

They are not always capable of discerning the difference between rudeness and negotiation and don't understand why one isn't as good as the other, (as long as they think they got what they want.)

They want what they want and they want it now.

Thank god three year olds can't vote.

Mind under matter

I don't understand the way nature works, but I do know it is a true mystery.

My husband was terrified of birds and he was the only person I ever knew who was constantly being bombarded by blue jays. They would fly in and dive bomb his head.

I am afraid of dogs and somehow dogs sense that. I have been backed into a corner by more dogs than I care to remember.

Bestest is afraid of wasps and has been stung before, but today he was simply running down a street when a wasp swooped in and stung his upper arm.

I walked through bees every day of the summer when I lived in North Carolina and I had to walk under a wasp nest for a week, but none of them stung me. In fact, the only time I've been stung was when I stepped on a bee.

It makes me wonder even more if we are more powerful than we believe. There must be something in us that draws these things we are afraid of. Now if we could only figure out what, or why. I have been successful passing some dogs when I concentrate on a single yellow daisy I once saw growing on a sand dune. I am sure, among other things, it controls the perspiration of fear on my body.

It is probably the same reason Voodoo works and faith healers are successful. It is why some people make miraculous recoveries and probably accounts for a lot of the synchronicities in our lives. We are like walking, talking, out of control radio towers just buzzing with messages we don't know how to smell, see, or control in any way.

The neverending puzzle

Someone wrote a plea for pity and sympathy on social media using  "bad" words to equate life with a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces keep getting knocked off the table by a "jerk".

It touched a nerve. I am always suspect of people who over react in public and I don't really care for the way this person expressed herself this time, but I do like the analogy.

In my long years of living, and yes I am old, I have discovered that life is indeed like a puzzle, The Neverending Puzzle that is constantly being knocked off the table by one thing or another.

Just about the time I think it is taking shape, I discover that it is a two sided puzzle and I have some of the pieces upside down. While I am sorting that out, I realize that this puzzle isn't the huge happy family one with familiar faces, but the family of the heart one filled with people who don't know each other and whose only connection is knowing me. Then I find more pieces on the floor and when I fit them in, I see this is really a puzzle about love and how hard it is to love real people with real feelings and real needs and not just pretty smiles on a box lid.

People are always knocking pieces off the table and maybe that is an important part of life. Kind of like Shiva dancing away the old moments to make way for the new, or clearing the air to make way for new ideas. Destruction opens the way for reconstruction.

Everyone needs to find his or her own way of coping with these "jerks". One of my favorites is a line from Fiddler On The Roof where Tevye asks the Rabbi if there is a proper blessing for the Czar and he responds, "May God bless and keep him -- far away from us."

It acknowledges our actual inability to really effect change for anyone except for ourselves. Railing against the Czar doesn't hurt him at all, but it sure does mess up my life. It's better for me if I just keep putting that puzzle together and finding ways to get lost in the beauty and intricacies of this piece or that.

The big picture is probably beyond my comprehension.

Father's Day

My mother remembered her father picking her up in the morning, wrapping her in a blanket and carrying her down to the cook stove in the kitchen where it was warm. It was one of the ways he showed love.

I remember my paternal grandfather taking me out to eat, first as a very young child at the country club and later as a teen at his restaurant. He equated love with food.

My father would spend hours talking to me about the things that fascinated me. He taught me to love books and libraries. Education was his way of loving.

My husband shared his love of computers with our children. That was his way.

Now I look at my sons who are much more hands on fathers than the fathers of my past. They have changed diapers, bathed, dressed, made ballerina buns and made music with their children. They show love by constantly being there for whatever is going on and I am so impressed when I see how they instinctively do all the things people once thought only mothers could do.

They are possibly the greatest generation of fathers to hit the earth running so far and I am proud of the way their children embrace life and move through it trying out all kinds of things with great abandon and persistence.

Loving life is the greatest gift I think any father can give his children.

Presto Change Oh

All I can say to those people who are backing away from Trump right now is, "What took you so long?"

It's not like Trump has changed anything from when he campaigned. He was just as careless, mean, crude, self involved, bullying, and ill suited for the job as he is today.

I suppose if money is God then Trump might have been the golden calf for those who thought they could steal, shoot, shove and mock their way to the top.

But minus a real Moses, and a burning cherry tree, it looks like our arch villains might have stepped in and carried away their golden child.

I only hope we have learned something from this embarrassing bit of history.

Magic thinking can't run a country . . . and

Money can't buy intelligence if the person holding the purse strings doesn't know what it is.

Turbulence and pitfalls

I am a bundle of feelings tucked inside a human body.

Those feelings propel me across the landscape of my life a hundred miles an hour, scooping up experiences, falling into pitfalls, rolling over rough places and lapping up the long greenswards that really are there if I take time to notice them.

It took me a very long time before I realized that I was the cultivator of those peaceful places. That the one constant in my life is the intensity of my feelings and how I react to these feelings determines how the landscape is drawn.

I have been free to be my own creator for many years now and I do a pretty good job of taking care of me most of the time, but lately I have found myself bogged down.

Caught in one of the huge pits I mistook for a greensward because of its size, I have been lost in the soft pathos of a problem outside of my reach until I realized that hours, days, weeks have passed and I have accomplished virtually nothing.

If I had fallen into a rocky pit I could grasp hold and climb out, but this soft, sweetly dangerous place has no handholds that I can find. Wailing and screaming in outrage, or turning myself into a pitiful pot of neediness are dangerous and worthless ways of dealing with life. They really do not work.

My emotions are like a herd of wild horses. Always struggling to charge forward, manes flying, hooves pounding, muscles flexing to do the work and do it now. But the solution is generally more about standing still.

Patient, persistent, consciousness is hard for me.

Sleep tight

I have had many sleepless nights since the shocking election of our current president, but now things are getting interesting.

On one hand we have a man who has been able to buy whatever he dreamed of and that included his brand of honesty, justice and loyalty.

On the other hand we have a country whose checks and balances have protected us from men like him for a very long time.

I, for one, would never want to be part of the white house right now where people are lining up and determining the pecking order for who will be thrown under the bus when Mueller's top notch legal team begins to sort out all the shenanigans going on there.

Right now we have a president who doesn't seem to know the difference between a reality show and government. He wants ratings and he has people watching, there is no doubt about that.

With Robert Mueller's carefully selected and very experienced team giving up impressive salaries to work on this problem,  I will sleep much better.

Thought provoking

Hate is becoming the norm in our country. In fact, many people right at the top seem to encourage hatefulness and violence as long as it is aimed at the "right" people.

Listening to today's nonstop news I have to wonder if there would have been so much coverage if the shooter had been in a poor neighborhood park, or at a Jewish synagogue, or Muslim mosque?

This happened to American royalty in their own neighborhood playing America's sacred sport.

These people believed that they were safe from this sort of act.

All people should have that same security.

Once the people who make the laws start being touched by the same life problems the rest of us deal with perhaps they will feel differently about the laws they pass and do not pass.

Romanticizing today's tragedy will not fundamentally change what is wrong in our country, but possibly it will open a few more doors.

Spoiled rotten

People do the saddest things in the name of love and sometimes it just makes me angry.

The words spoiled child have been perverted into meaning a well loved child who gets showered in love and stuff, but in the end, twenty, thirty, even fifty, or sixty, years later, that child shows what spoiled means. It's like rotten hamburger, or bad steak. People don't want it around.

Worse, bad habits, foisted on innocent children allow them to believe that what they do is okay, or maybe even legendary and funny and somehow cool.

It isn't so.

The woman whose family thought it was cute when she screwed things up, continues to screw things up until she hurts someone, or herself irrevocably. And the man who was a wild child in his teens drinks and smokes himself to a painful early grave.

It's not so exciting when you can't breathe, or walk, and you look ten years older than everyone else your age. You can make excuses, but they don't really change anything.

No one wishes this for their children and yet they give them all the tools they need to do it.

And the worst part is that it is irrevocable. Once you are grown up the only one who can really change you -- is you. No matter how sad your parents might be, or how much they love you, it is out of their hands.

All they have left is the guilt.

Lying awake at night

Three years old, lying awake in bed worrying about dying and going to heaven where I wouldn't know anyone. My mother assured me that my grandfather, who was in heaven, would know me.

That wasn't much comfort to me, a frightened three year, who didn't realize her mother was simply mourning the death of her father. I spent a lot of time in my early years worrying about when I would die and how it would go.

Five years later I had changed my thinking. I realized I would probably not die for a long time, but now I worried that those I loved might die before me.  I would lie in bed thinking about how young my parents were and how they would probably live until I was very old. They were 21 and 22 when I was born.  And . . . since I was the oldest sibling in my family and basically the oldest of my cousins I should never have to mourn the loss of anyone I loved.

Still I worried.

Nobody really important to me died during my childhood and I was married with children before my grandma and great aunt died. It was hard. They were close, but I had children and a husband now and I was realizing people didn't have to die to leave. They could leave by divorce. I was back to lying awake at night.

My mother died suddenly when I was 36. I was devastated. For five years I had asthma attacks, nightmares, depression. My husband left a couple of times, but the last time was right after all the children were out of the house and I was almost fifty. Then my father died a year later. Suddenly people were leaving me right and left. It was terrifying.

Now my brother is obviously close to death. Maybe not weeks, or even months, but who knows. He has a DNR on his refrigerator and even though he is my little brother, he is very ill. He was supposed to die before he was three. We grew up knowing he would die, but he was too full of it. He was the one who would never have kids. He had four. He is 64 and  a great grandfather now but I am less ready now than I was when he was a baby.

It seems people are always leaving. One way or another, life is a solitary road where I may walk side by side with those I love, holding their hands, gazing on them with love, but never really having a real grasp on them.

Heaven? I don't know if I believe in that anymore. I want to. I'm just not sure. I do believe in wind and rain and earth and that this world is all one and I think I am reconciled to becoming part of that with all those I love some day.

But, sometimes, I still lie awake at night.

This greatness is scary

For America to be great again all we need do is turn back the clocks to a time when the great white father sat in the white house and ruled us all in patriarchal glory.

Racism was the rule. Misogyny was the norm. People died daily from things we now have pharmaceuticals to prevent (of course most people cannot afford them now.)

Pick your era and you can pick the ethnic group who was out of favor and considered barely human, the micks, the wops, the chinks, the . . . we are very good at naming scapegoats.

Mob justice picked up locally wherever the feds fell short.

We hung, burned, tar and feathered, or just shot people and it was a form of savage entertainment enjoyed by many who brought their young that they might be inculcated early on.

Abortions were illegal, but being a single mother was a sin born by a lot of virgin births.

Normal, decent, worthy people meant white protestant straight men with money and their offspring, if they conformed.

Keep people afraid, hungry, uneducated and at each other's throats and you can get by with a lot.

When people are busy looking over their shoulders for the bad people, the scary people, the different people, when people are hungry and sick and confused,  they don't notice where they are being led.

Believe me, this greatness is scary.

A major coup

 GOP unshaken by Comey's testimony against Trump.

Why would anyone think otherwise?

It's not like Comey's testimony brought up anything we all didn't know, or suspect about our president's personality and character.

Shaking up the GOP has less to do with what is right, or wrong, legal, or illegal, than what Trump can do because he is governed by only one rule-- what he wants. Even a picture, which is supposedly worth a thousand words, cannot change his mind.

Trump is one of those frightening people who believes what he says, even when it absolutely contradicts what he said, or did, before. 

The GOP has decided to back him because -- well, God only knows -- but probably because they think his outrageous behavior will, or would have, garnered them things they wouldn't get if Clinton was elected. They might have preferred someone else, but no one else had enough money.

Right now Trump is the one sure thing the GOP has. He is a sitting president of the United States of America, elected in spite of his manners, morals, pouty face, temper tantrums, or alternative truth.

That in and of itself is quite a coup.

Meetups

I had brunch with two women from my meetup group today and I came away feeling empowered and grown up and intellectually satisfied.

The women in this meetup are wonderful.

They are strong, well educated and so diverse.

Today it was a very small group, only three people spanning nearly three generations. An engineer, an artist, and me (whatever I am.)

I didn't discover this group until last August, but it has added so much to my life. We are simply a group of women who get together. It can be for coffee, brunch, a movie, book club, happy hour, or pretty much whatever someone wants to do. They invite people to join them and generally put a cap on the number of people in order to keep the conversation lively and intimate.

This group is right up my alley. The commitment is whatever you want it to be, but mostly just to bring yourself, your opinions, and your experiences together with other women who enjoy the same things.

Disappointment

I am genuinely disappointed and saddened by the lack of caring and consideration in today's world.

People seem to feel it is unnecessary to say thank you, or even acknowledge most acts of kindness.

They do not feel it is important to respond at all, unless there is something they want or need from another person.

People cancel at the last moment, fail to include people who always include them, and don't think twice about any of it.

The lack of simple good manners is obvious at the highest echelons in our country and the meanness of spirit is growing more violent every day.

I expect that sort of thing from a certain sort of person, but I do not expect it from others and that is what causes the disappointment.

Life

I stand here right in the middle of the festivities. The sun is shining, The weather is perfect. I feel great and right there before me -- everything is happening.

I hear the music playing as the carousel goes round and round. It is a magnificent merry-go-round with carved animals and big mirrors. I see swans and unicorns, rabbits, horses and black panthers.

People I love are riding on it and I can see their smiling faces. They wave at me and even shout out when they come around each time. It is great to be so close.

But I feel a pang tugging at my mind and heart.

I wish I was on that carousel. Riding round and round, up and down, feeling the vibrations of the music in my hands as I hold onto the animal I chose. I want to ride next to those people I love. Touch them, Actually be with them in body as well as spirit.

When it stops I don't get on though. I almost do, but then I realize no one I know is on it now. They have moved on to some other place, but I am trapped at the merry-go-round waiting to see them the next time they are on it.

Next!

They say most of us have a video of our life playing in the back of our heads.

I think I used to have one of those, but it became evident, early on, that my life would not be following the script.

Some things turned out better than I expected.

Others were a disappointment.

And some were just a sort of numbing surprise.

But life is life. It has a way of wearing you down, lifting you up, carrying you along and you can either learn to swim with the current, become a little bit creative, or drown in the chaos.

I recommend the creative approach. Make lemonade out of lemons, pies out of mud, and take time to smell the roses, but no matter what else you do, just keep going, because you never know what's going to be next.

Toss the video, it's probably an old VHS tape anyway.

Behind the leopard's spots

Good writing is often a form of manipulation.

Facts and clues are interwoven into a beguiling message that lures people into agreement.

It is an art learned by good debaters, and ambassadors. It is a skill inherent in good politicians.

It can be used, or misused.

Mostly, it allows people to feel that they, themselves, have discovered something very important.

Healthcare for all

We've got it all wrong,

Spending money on cancer research and childhood leukemia like we can buy a cure.

Then not giving it to people when we get it.

Because the people who have the cure, get to decide who lives and who dies.

They believe it is more important for their children to live in thirty room mansions and have four hundred dollar onesies than it is for another child to live at all.

They get to decide who dies of what when.

Buying and selling life is wrong.

Prayer

Why do we plant the seeds of doubt in our children's minds?

Why not allow them to find the power inside themselves and not teach them to give that power away?

Most of us have given up ascribing bad actions to Satan, or devils. When do we do the same with good ones?

Instead of turning God into a distant super man with man-like limitations like jealousy and ego and capriciousness, why not accept that this power really might have created us in its own image and it exists all around, inside and outside of us? In a sense we are as much God as we are Smiths, or Browns. We are our father's, or mother's, children.

Obviously we have not grown into many God-like powers. Our abilities manifest so randomly that we ascribe our inability to control them to mean they are not ours in the first place. What if we nurtured them instead? Believed in them?  Prayer appears to work.

Just maybe not the way we think.

Greatness

People have always feared new things and for good reason. There are always people around trying to fool us, or take advantage of us, or use us, so until the new becomes common, those who don't really understand it, or what it is used for, or why it is useful will remember, fondly, those days before it existed.

Remembering is comfortable. Aging takes away many of our faculties. Eyes, dim, muscles atrophy, health ebbs away, but the joy of remembering is kind of like popping a DVD into its player. Suddenly a distant event is right here. My heart can still pound with the excitement, or ache with the beauty. Love can smooth out the rough spots, sometimes erasing them entirely. The past is perfect -- perfectly ours to remember as we will.

We all know the two extremes of the rememberers. Those who grew up in Eden where the world was simple and perfect and the sun shone every day on the vaguely misty gardens full of puppies and kittens wearing bows around their necks while sitting at tea parties with unending plates of homemade chocolate chip cookies before them. And the others who had to walk ten miles, uphill, to school, in freezing weather, wearing only threadbare coats and carrying a lunch of one baked potato to keep their hands warm. Both ending up as better human beings because of this.

And remember how much more innocent the world was before chariots sped down Roman roads, or people learned to read and write and share their inflammatory ideas, or the Pony Express quickly spread bad news across the continent. Imagine the joy of a life lived without the telegraph , or telephone, who both kept people from speaking face to face! Imagine what it was like when children still died daily from tetanus, or whooping cough, or polio and survivors bore smallpox scars all over their bodies.

The road to success depends on each one of us using whatever is available for good purposes. We really don't want to go back to the old good ole days when the cure for cancer is in the future and the end of war lies beyond that.

Greatness lies within each one of us. How we use what is available makes all the difference. Educate yourself. Think. Be great.

Time warps

they rise as if today were their birth day

flash feelings, glancing thoughts

intense reactions to long past occurrences

and I wonder how time rewraps itself

curling around my brainstem

filling up my mind

overflowing into the present

carrying me back

without a time machine

without a will

without a doubt