Are these any old times?

Has our country always sunk to the lowest common denominator

Or is this a new trend?

Is willful ignorance the path we have chosen?

Do we prefer magical thoughts over science?

Have we actually chosen to let men, women, children, and even babies, die so people can get richer?

Pro-lifers kill.

Religious people kill.

Our President incites riots, protects criminals, does not believe in the rule of law.

Were our founding fathers the seeds for this horror?

Was America ever great?

I'm really not sure anymore.

It certainly is not now.

Fumes of fame

People love a cause.

Good, bad, religious, political, whatever the cause, it draws people like a lure draws trout, rouses them like cattle in a stampede, brings out the worst much quicker than the best.

They come marching, leaping, screaming, praying, and fighting, often ready to die, or even kill, in the name of whatever it is that stirs them up. Even peace.

Directing the fury of both righteous and self righteous mobs into productive uses instead of fanning the flames and feeding off the fumes of fame, a good leader addresses the problems and soothes the raging hormones.

But when the leader is a jack in the box, popping up at regular intervals singing Pop Goes The Weasel, no one knows what to do and all that energy is wasted.

It's all in the game

In these days of the me too movement, it becomes even more confusing when dealing with the past. The past, in fact, is over, except when it is not, because the past is filled with the building blocks for the now.

Trust is built on the past.

Trust of other people, but most importantly trusting oneself, one's own judgement, trusting in one's own ability to read signs correctly.

Great manipulators are chameleons. Vacillating  between victims and saviors they blur the lines of a fairy tale for unsuspecting prey. Prince Charming rides in on a black horse to save the day because he has no choice. He is as much a victim as poor Snow white. Forced into his role because he is Prince Charming, a character who must save the sirens who tempt him with their innocence before he escapes with his life in tow.

It is even confusing looking back. If it was the first foray into the seemingly adult world of love there was no experience to back up the conflicting feelings. Like a fly fisherman, casting and reeling in, experience really does count. The initiation rites the predator uses are confusingly intermingled.

Love is painful. Love is dark. Love is a gift from God. Love is ephemeral. Love is never having to say you're sorry. Love makes everything fair game. It's all in the game.

Even if the object of the game has no idea it is a game.

When a great gamer plays with someone who is naïve and trusting, it changes the future forever.

For one of them.

And it is in the future, once the object has lived a lifetime watching the gamer continue to play, that the past becomes clearer. Still confusing, but clearer.

It really was not love -- at all.

Excuses, excuses

I was looking at exercise machines online and I realized it was the three bears all over again. One was too hard, another too expensive and all of them were too much work!

The one bit of wisdom that I have gleaned after nearly three quarters of a century, is that I am not going to do anything that I don't enjoy for very long.

It doesn't matter how much it costs, or doesn't cost. It doesn't even matter if I can do it with people, or at home. First priority is will I do it?

You can tell me I will die if I don't. You can make all kinds of threats, but they will have an expiration date of approximately one to two weeks.

I am a realist.

I know that I will never be forty again.

I could be much better, but there has to be a reason to work for that and I haven't found one that works for me.

Honesty is a horrible excuse, but there it is.

My haunted plant

Actually calling my plant haunted is a stretch. It may just be very sensitive.

To the way I feel!

I was sending an impassioned note about a CVS drug store employee not wearing a mask when I looked up to see one strand on my pothos plant swinging madly back and forth, like a pendulum.

There are no windows open in this room. There is no fan going. There are no air vents. No one was moving.

The plant is approximately eight feet away from where I am sitting and I have tried all kinds of things trying to make it move. I've breathed hard, sighed, even tried to blow on it from here with no results at all.

Of course plants grow, so maybe I witnessed the moment when growth caused this particular strand to fall off of another.

There is no rewind and I was so taken up watching it that I didn't think to record it, so it will forever be a mystery.

Heartfelt

Time flies whether you are having fun, or not.

All things come to an end, good or bad.

Life is seldom as lyrical, or horrible as we view it in a moment.

Drama is created by those seeking more, in the hope that it will do the job.

We are not as important as we think we are, except to ourselves.

And when all is said and done:

I will still love you with my whole heart.

Walk with me

Today I have a strange sense of being. A combination of 1970 spring when I was a spring chicken myself and 2020 plague.

As the curtain rises in Illinois it feels as if the climax will follow the end. The music builds to a crescendo, expectations rise, but are they fatalistic or hopeful?

I am texting with my Shipt shopper, a new addition to my life during this crisis and she is good. We are evidently kindred food spirits. Her recommendations for substitutes are right on. I feel like I am robo shopping in real time.

I have also spent so much virtual time in North Carolina big box hardware stores that I feel like I may be an apprentice carpenter, but of course I am only talking to a part time handy man, grocery shopper, landscaper, home schooler. Being a jack of many trades works in today's world.

Bestest has been communicating with people in England and France, but my world is much smaller. He takes me virtual dog walking every morning and briefs me on human kindness at its source.

This virtual world has become my whole world for the past couple of months. Venturing beyond it is actually a little intimidating.

Maybe

Joy often seems to follow despair. I don't know why that is.

Maybe it's because once you give up everything, even hope, there is more space and even less resistance for something new to seep in.

And seeping in, if it is not destroyed by the status quo, it might grow.

And growing, it might turn out to be strong and good and maybe even beautiful.

I think believing  that is what has always kept me going.

Time to bloom

Bestest is living through a particularly creative period in his life. I think even he is amazed at the way his mind has been working.

Of course this is always a part of who he is in some way: as a teacher trying to keep things interesting for his students, as a friend and son and husband, always finding unique ways to express himself and make life better for others.

In a normal year he is busier though.

Not only is he a professor, author, composer, he is also a world wide traveler. When class is not in session, and sometimes because he is teaching, he is often in New York, or California, sometimes even England, or Italy, a few times in Amsterdam and Greece.

Very social.

Very creative.

Very gifted musically.

All he needed was time.

This quarantine is definitely not all bad.

It creates time to bloom.

Truth or belief

I woke up this morning and I thought it was Wednesday.

I really believed it was Wednesday.

I actually saw Wednesday on my clock that has the day and time.

I played Words with Friends thinking I hadn't won many solo games for it already being Wednesday.

I checked the weather on my phone and thought it was not functioning, because it didn't say Wednesday.

I finally realized today is actually Tuesday (by checking my computer) and suddenly my clock said Tuesday and my Alice in Wonderland day ended.

It is frightening how my world tried to adapt to my beliefs, or perhaps how I adapted to make what I believed true.

Teddy bears

Always one to over indulge myself, my son once made me a sixty minute tape of the one song that I played all day long.

Now, with instant replay and quick links, that is no longer necessary.

I just put the link on my phone, or desktop background and, voila!

My newest love is written, played, sung and recorded by Bestest.

I thought he had rewritten it so that it was recognizable, but not quite the same.

But he hasn't! That makes me inordinately happy.

Like a teddy bear it becomes a thing of comfort, one that I hear instead of cuddling.

I don't wish I was 18 again

I'm not cool.

I don't drink beer till I can't stand up. I haven't smoked in forty years. I don't dance to prove I'm like the kids. or go to church to prove I'm god fearing.

I have no need to break the rules to prove my power.

Why should I try to act like I'm eighteen now?

I would rather be seventy.

It took a long time to get here and I learned a lot along the way.

Every day I learn more.

There are down sides to everything, but it's the big picture that counts.

The American Way

The new American way is emerging as Trump makes America great. Policy changes at the national level are now being passed down to the states.

If you don't like something, ignore it, threaten it, shoot it.

If you have a question about anything never go to an expert, they are biased. Always go to the person with the least amount of knowledge.

If something doesn't turn out the way you expected, or like, blame someone else.

Encourage confrontations, they will distract people from the chaos at the top.

Changing your mind negates all laws, all honorable agreements, all common sense actions.

A word is as good as reality. Just say it and it's true.

Remember, the rich really know. No one should have to study for an education, just buy one.

Fairy Tales can come true, it can happen to you . . . because ogres are real and dragons have wheels.

Run away

I went to walk in the woods today.

And all the wild things chased me away.

The solitude I generally find there was gone, infested by clouds of people bearing fishing poles and Trump hats.

Running maskless in groups of whatever, laughing, shouting, riding bicycles and motorcycles, driving big monster trucks and Humvees.

Those people seeking freedom have found it and I don't belong there anymore.

One mother wearing one of the only two masks I saw was pushing her masked child in a stroller down the edge of a road. I gave her a thumbs up, but I am terrified she might have thought it was the finger. She pulled her mask up higher, looked around and certainly did not look happy.

I only saw her because she was on the road to the quickest way out. I felt trapped. Sometimes I wasn't sure where, or even if, to drive, it was so crowded with people walking, riding, running on roads that are generally a portal to birdsong.

I heard no birds, saw no birds, except for a dead goose lying in the road, mashed by something too big and too fast for it to avoid. It felt like a harbinger, a warning and I listened.

Wish fulfillment

We live in an age where people confuse wishing and wanting with actual science.

Just because something is inconvenient does not make it false and anyone who believes they have enough money to make the coronavirus leave them alone, or climate change a fairy tale needs to be quietly inserted into a straitjacket.

Granted we did not get to this age of smog and pollution without science, but abandoning the laws of science, or selling them to the highest bidder will not make very real problems go away.

It is difficult when people are afraid and their leader is a snake oil salesman from medieval times. Drink the juice and make me happy he tweets like some mad canary who has eaten too many of the wrong seeds.

We have reached the point where people are going to have to be brave enough to corral this jester and his fringe elements. You cannot shoot a virus. You cannot use the same thing to clean your body that you use to clean your toilets. If you cannot contain an ego maniac, how in the world can you hope to deal with Mother Nature. She's been around a lot longer and her methods are fool proof. The problem is, she does not think of people any differently than she does tigers, or elephants, bacteria or viruses. If we die; we die.

I suppose this could herald the age of the Great Darwinian purge, but it's going to take a lot of good people with it too.

Appendage

Sometimes I look back on my life, trying to figure out why I did what I did, felt what I did, became who I am.

Today one very important thing hit me. I was brought up to be an appendage. To my mother who needed an oldest daughter to help out with the other children, the house, her scapegoat and whipping boy. To my father who wanted to make my mother happy more than anything else on earth.

They prepared me to be a wife and mother. That was their highest aspiration for this child of theirs that they felt was pretty average and maybe a bit less so in the looks department. I was considered beautiful until about age three when it became apparent that I would not be small and delicate. Then my sister became the family's only hope for beauty because, at least, she was small.

My curiosity was indulged. Having a wide range of interests would make me a better wife and mother. But it all ended there. There would be no big university, or professional degrees. A wife needed to be able to follow her husband and make his life what he needed it to be.

It wasn't until my marriage ended that I realized he had not been brought up that way. He was not raised to make me happy the way I had been groomed to anticipate his every need. I resented that, but little by little I learned to make myself happy. I wish I had figured that out thirty years earlier, but instead I had translated my behavior as my primary purpose for everyone I came in contact with, throughout my world. Hindsight is only good for learning. It doesn't justify, it merely teaches.

My curiosity has served me well. I have learned to live with myself and mostly enjoy it. I can do for me what I was brought up to do for others. It simply took a while for me to think of doing that, try it out, brave the discomfort and then own it.

I've had a lot of help, a lot of teachers both good and bad, and I am pretty sure I will continue to process all this for the rest of my life. In Popeye's famous words, "I yam what I yam." The trick is to embrace it: success, thorns, mud and all.

Turning my baggage into an appendage for myself has taken a life time.

Unfair

I think people who have grown up in an age of charge cards and mortgages, people who have worked hard and long all their lives, people who have been sold the idea that success is measured in money and stock, are feeling cheated.

The very rich can still pack up and go to their summer homes. They have homes large enough to accommodate groups of friends and family even tennis courts and golf courses, but if they get sick enough, they still die.

Mother Nature is a brutally equal rights parent. She cannot be bought off. You can mess with her, pollute her air, melt her icebergs, kill her forests and trees, hang some of her children's heads on your walls as trophies, but deep inside she will outlive you and all the generations who follow you.

In the very end there will be no plaques on her mountains touting the Vanderbilts, or Rockefellers. And if life resurrects itself after she has time to clean house, they will study us the way we do the Minoans: our homes, our Porsche chariots, our monuments and religious lore.

That is the hard part of being human. To us we are everything. To the earth we are just another species.

Nobody knows

The world has changed.

In the weeks since we've been aware of covid-19 life on this earth has altered significantly.

I wonder how we will look back at this period.

Will we see how naïve we were? Did we really expect the world to continue on in hedonistic glee, thinking everything important could be bought?

Will we ever take hugging for granted again?

Will carefree parties, or even gatherings ever exist again?

Will we regret not taking advantage of the lack of smog and pollution?

As the earth rebels will we remember when weather was reasonable or predictable?

Will we remember this as the time our president urged us into armed conflict to resolve our differences?

Is this the real beginning of the end as the virus begins to mutate in response to our responses?

Almost four years ago it began and how it will end nobody knows.

Muddy waters

Everyone has something that makes them special, or especially lovable

to someone.

It may be a trait that drives another person crazy.

It may be something society values, or abhors.

But if it is endearing to you then you have found your soulmate.

Otherwise:

Keep on swimming.

Venturing out

I woke up to a gorgeous day and decided that today I would leave the house for the first time in over a month to return my library books to the library drop box.

Since I was up and dressed in real clothes, which fit by the way, I went to the mail box. I took two sacks. One for all the garbage I can't get them to stop sending and one for things I needed to look at. The first sack was so full I could barely get it around all the unwanted, unsolicited mail. The second contained a bill for an eye appointment last August! Why would they wait this long? And yes it was just recently sent. There was also a tag saying it was time to get a new license plate sticker. Another hundred fifty dollars!

I took care of this and headed for the car, but it was deader than a doornail. Although I don't know what a doornail is, I do know my car would not turn over. My daughter did not have jumper cables. I could not find mine, so I called my insurance company to see what I should do.

The woman on the phone was so sweet. She offered to pick me up wherever I was in Mattoon? I finally realized I had called my medical insurance agent, not my auto agent. I apologized and tried again. This time a young man answered the phone, but said he was not authorized to help me, someone would call me back.

And they did. A very nice woman said I could call a tow truck and pay them then send her the receipt and she would reimburse me, or I could call their number and they would just take care of it. That sounded good to me.

I called and an hour later a guy came out, called me from the parking lot and told me to come outside, get into my car, roll up all the windows and release the hood. I did and he got out of his car, ran over to mine with a little ghost buster machine and zapped my battery which promptly started. He said to keep the motor running till two o'clock. No problem I had to mail the bill to the eye doctor and return my books.

I drove to the old post office to discover they took out the mailboxes! I found the new post office and I could see the mailboxes, but it took two rounds through there to figure out how to get to them. Luckily the library had changed nothing so returning the books was simple.

Oh, yes, did I mention that my phone was dead and I had to be tethered to a charger during all of this? Seems I had accidentally disconnected the other end of my charging cable from the wall last night and hadn't noticed.

Instant family

I just watched the film, Instant Family about becoming foster parents and adopting.

What a movie.

It was my story and not my story all at the same time.

I wish we had had the support group they had, but we didn't. Once we decided to foster and were approved, boom, we were the experts.

Except we weren't of course.

In the movie this couple had such a close relationship and it carried through the fostering and adopting. Ours did not. Oh we stayed together, but the marriage was over long before it ended..

Maybe it was over before we started.

I thought we loved each other so much that we had love to share. Looking back I don't think he was in the same place. I think it's possible he wanted to be in that place though.

We experienced so many of the same events they did in this movie during our years of fostering and then adopting, it was eye opening to see these were normal.

Part of it is the number of children, because every human being is different and has different needs and children come with personalities, quirks and gifts that make each one a world unto its own.

I doubt if raising kids is ever easy, but I know that when you add three children in three years spanning seven years in age, it is gonna be one wild romp.

Looking back, I feel blessed, but I didn't always feel that way while doing it.

Stirs my soul

What constitutes good music? I remember music appreciation courses that might have made me hate music forever if I had not had the good fortune to hear it in so many other places.

Asking what good music is reminds me of a song whos words I can't remember, lol. I remember the tune and the timing. It was an upbeat little thing, maybe from a musical that went "To a ______, it's a __ __ __." And goes on to mention others who find similar things.

So typical of me anymore, but the idea is that good music absolutely depends on who you ask. Whether it is classical, or rock, or indie, or opera, or ragtime, or folk, or heavy metal, or whatever, people are picky about their music.

I find music written and sung by the same person, personally and IN person, the most beautiful music of all. It's like someone baring a bit of their soul in ways no one else possibly could.

After that it is music that moves my soul in some emotional way, whether that is haunting, or stirring, or evoking some picture that touches my deepest sense of belonging. It can be anything from Mozart's variations Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman (which sounds like Twinkle twinkle little star, to Sousa's marches, Celtic folk music, Nessun Dorma from Puccini's opera, Turandot, to many popular songs from the radio.

I admit I am common by music snob standards. I love John Williams' music. It lifts me into realms I find many other composers miss. I love Jerry Bock and Andrew Lloyd Weber and others I cannot think of right now.

Which of these, beyond the personal musicians do I love best? That totally depends on the hour.

Reality

Reality television has a new meaning for me. I never watched it on my TV set, but the real life version outside my windows has become a sanity check after so many weeks alone.

I live at a curve in my neighborhood, so I can see a fair amount of what goes on for a block in either of two directions. The people directly across the street are the most active. They appear to be a young set of grandparents with a daughter who has two boys ages probably 6-9 who visits very frequently.  This house once let the boys roam the neighborhood on bikes. That doesn't happen now, but there are often four cars there and various projects in progress from installing refrigerators and freezers in the garage to building a patio somewhere I can't see. It's a combination HGTV and Parenthood.

Down the other street is the guy who is out there polishing and fine tuning his car for that day when he can take it out and show it off. His husky pup, which has grown considerably, watches.

And then there are the young Indian families with their children. They tend to gather at socially safe distances in the evening to laugh and talk while their children play. The sidewalk art is lovely, the children are even more so. One father was taking his little daughter on a bike ride of sorts today. They stopped frequently so she could pick dandelions and put them in her basket before taking off on another wobbly ride.

I am a combination of the adoring grandmother watching her family and Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched, standing at my window watching silent television without any backup music except for the occasional plane, lawn mower, or siren.