Best Words Ever

This morning on KERA - our local public radio station - I heard the best words ever:

"A high of 78"

It can only improve from here.

Get out and enjoy the north wind.  Look for geese. Think of better times to come.

Could be......Who knows?

Really, friends.  I never intended this blog to go fallow. Life has had other ideas.

For now, I'm going to aim for once-a-month...kind of the post-menopausal version of cramps.

I've been in a tub of glum for a good long while.  The details aren't really interesting (even to me), so you shall be spared. I am, sadly, not one of those writers who is spurred on by adversity.  If I were, you wouldn't have enough time to read about 2012.

But this week feels different.

Fall approacheth.

I've blogged before (here, here, here, and here for example ) about my deep-seated love of autumn.

My fellow hell-dwellers here in Texas can attest to the cruel trick Nature played on us recently, that morning when we woke up to weather in the high 50s.  One of fall's harbingers in these parts is the first time you walk outdoors and find the Air Out There cooler than the Air Inside Here.  While it is true that the temperatures are marginally cooler, one morning does not fall make. Especially if the afternoon brings a high way up in the 90s.

This morning, however, I saw a more reliable sign.  The light has changed.

I am seriously impaired when it comes to the visual arts.  My stick figures are below the 50th percentile.  I don't have the vocabulary to describe this, so bear with me.

Summer light here is harsh.  It's white. It's brutal and unforgiving.  It can start as early as March and last into November in a bad year.

Fall light is softer. It's golden. It gilds things. It flatters. It can be as hot and uncomfortable as summer light, but does not bring the misery.

Today brought golden light.

And the acorns in my yard are twice the size they were last year.

So fall must be close.

And maybe -- just maybe -- we'll see winter.  Then I will have no choice but to cheer up!

Voting "Bock!"

 "Bock! Bock! Bock!"

Let's talk about Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission (2010).

Waaaaaaay back in the late 1970s, my political science professor taught me that the branch of government that would have the strongest effect on my day-to-day life was the Supreme Court.  Decades after decades, decisions after decisions have proved him correct.

Thanks to the Citizens United case, our wallets are now our voter registration cards and our nation's cash registers are our ballot boxes.

Anyone who doubted Dr. Street's wisdom only needed to drive past a Chick-Fil-A yesterday to witness an object lesson. While I cannot confirm this figure, I read today that Chick-Fil-A - that supporter of "Biblical Families" - earned an entire quarter's of profits in one day. One. Day.*

If one individual, Mike Huckabee in this case, can mobilize such an economic tsunami, those of us who hope for President Obama's November reelection should sit down and make some plans.

Do not be deluded.  Put down your delicious glass of Pinot Gris and LISTEN. 

It is extremely likely that our next president will be Mitt Romney.

Why?  

President Obama swept into office on the votes of individuals who were not "players" in prior elections.  Many of those individuals did not get exactly the things they had hoped for.  For this reason, they are unlikely to believe that voting is worth the effort.  Evangelical Christians do not have this problem.  They will not stay home, no way no how.

Several years ago while waiting in a checkout line, I heard a child tell his mother he wanted a rubber chicken he spied on the display rack.  She replied, "Sweetheart, you don't need a rubber chicken."  After a pause, he said, "I want something I need."

Isn't this what voting comes down to?  We all want something we need.

Right now, voters need reassurance. They want to believe that one candidate or the other will quash their fears and deliver a rubber chicken.

Guess what?  There is no rubber chicken.

Instead, there are RIGHTS. And LIBERTY.  And FREEDOM.

Basic civil rights - like marriage and decisions about your own actual body - belong to all Americans, gay, straight, purple, male, or female.  Those uppercase words are in danger for many of us.

I will put my money where my mouth is.  I will respect the right of those who disagree with me to vote for whomever they choose.  I will respect the rights of those who do not believe a woman's body is her own to not get abortions.  I will respect the rights of those who do not believe gay Americans deserve the property advantages marriage bestows to stay home from gay weddings.  And I will support the right of evangelical Christians to buy chicken sandwiches until the cows come home.

After all, this is America.

If, however, you believe that rights are universal - without regard to color, gender, or sexual orientation - I beg you to do whatever you can to bring out the vote for President Obama in November.

Everyone deserves more than a rubber chicken.

*Correction: This figure turned out to be an exaggeration. The last figure I read was eight million, a record one-day profit. Still...the money here is stupendous.

A little love letter....

Yesterday, the heavens opened and rained down love upon me, love dressed in the clothes of The World's Best Friends.


Just over a month since my sister's death, I found myself hard up against the deadline to clear out her apartment. 


I'd been through the rehearsals for this last August when she moved from a non-assisted senior complex into a wonderful assisted living facility, and the year before that when she moved to the senior complex from the house she'd shared with our mother.  Over the years, she had turned into - if not a full-blown hoarder - a person with a serious inability to part with stuff.  She wasn't a generalist, like the folks you see on reality TV, their spaces full of every item they've ever touched.  She was a woman with specific attachments.  While she was more than willing to toss things like family photos ("Why should I keep those? What's the point?" she asked as Young Girl and I pulled our history from the large green trash bin after my mother's death), she refused to part with a single book, be it a cheesy circa-1962 "annual" from the pharmaceutical giant for which my father worked (full of head shots of every intravenous fluid salesman in the country), one of four outdated dictionaries, or one of the dreadful romances or cozy-mysteries she favored. She had mock turtlenecks in every color L.L Bean produced in any given five-year period with fake Crocs to match. In the last move, I did manage to coax her down to 25 shapeless fleecy vests.  You get the picture.


Handling the tangible evidence of a lost life is always complicated, but doing so in an assisted living facility is exponentially more so. With every box or bag you cart down the hallway, you see realization of their near future on the faces of the elders you pass, regardless of their level of cognitive capacity.  They all know what it means when the furniture starts to move.  I did my best to work while people were in the dining room or at "Sit-er-Size" or bingo, but contact was unavoidable and painful all around. I told myself I was putting the task off because of my other responsibilities - funny how busy we become when we need to be - but the truth was I just didn't want to do it.  Too much finality.


I'd declined many offers of help. Part of me somehow felt I was doing some kind of penance, paying attention after the fact, and that such things needed to be done in isolation.  But the unit had been rented for August and it was Time.


I asked the fabulous women of First Amendment Friday if they could help me for a couple of hours yesterday.  I needed, I told them, help bagging up and loading the items I was sending to the Women's Crisis Center resale shop.  If we had time, maybe we could take some of the smaller stuff to my house in our cars.  Then we'd have lunch, and discuss a time when their teenage sons might be available to move the larger things.


Every one of them who was in town showed up at the appointed hour, and pitched in with organization and discernment that was far beyond my capacity. They knew what to do when I didn't and they did it. Before I really knew what had happened, my van was full of the resale bags and boxes, and their cars were packed to the brim with keeper things.  We dropped those at my house, delivered to the resale store, then rendezvoused for lunch.


Cue the cloudburst.


While we waited for our food, they announced that they'd decided they were going to take care of the rest of it that afternoon. Without my help.  They realized, they told me, that I'd reached my capacity and they took away the keys to my sister's apartment. After lunch, they came to my house and commandeered my van.


About an hour later, four chosen sisters, two of their husbands, and five assorted teenage sons and their friends descended upon me with everything in tow.  Everything.  Some went into the garage, some into the house. My van was packed with boxes of books I plan to sell a few towns away. I stood in my bare feet with my drawn, sad face and watched true friendship in action.


This post goes out to you, my friends.  My birth family may be gone, but your love and support hold me close in ways it never did.


Love,
Me

Next Chapter

Once again, I emerge from the depths with a little update and yet another promise to resume blogging.  Maybe this time it will take. For now? Three cheers for bullet points.

• My sister died on Thursday, June 21.  You can find the Whole Sad Story in previous posts.  Her Stage IV breast cancer was diagnosed 6 months before our mother's death in 2009. She endured chemo, whole brain radiation, gamma knife surgery and suffered the worst side effects of them all.  We found out, about six months ago, that the cancer had returned in her bones; her subsequent rapid decline led us to infer that it had again bloomed in her brain.  The amazing nurses at Home Hospice   and Traditions Senior Living and Memory Care, who took such good and kind care of her over the last year, believe she had a left-side stroke on or about June 14.  I believe that most of her final week was pain free, for which I am grateful. 
• Young Girl is tall, strong, beautiful, and smart at the twelve-thirteen midpoint.  She's an inch and a half taller than I am and stealing my shoes. The last six weeks of school were a struggle thanks to a nasty bout of drug-resistant strep combined with mononucleosis.  All of this made the crutching required by her knee injury even more atrocious.  She rarely made it through more than two hours of school each day, but still finished with straight As and outstanding test scores.  I could not be any prouder. She's enjoying a second much-deserved week at camp and will visit a friend in Tennessee next month, her first solo flight.
• Our friends are our rocks right now, our true family.  Some of you know the details of the Great Unpleasantness (there's a southern euphemism for you, right up there with "The War of Northern Aggression") afoot in The Man's extended family.  Let's just say that my chosen sisters and brothers restore my faith in humanity.
• I agreed to humiliate myself in a production at our local children's theater, opening July 6. I'd forgotten how much fun it can be to play.  This was a much needed lesson.

Summer is Icumen In

...'Cause there's bacon to fry and there's biscuits to bake
On the stove that the Salvation Army won't take
And you open the windows and turn on the fan
'Cause it's hotter than hell when the sun hits the land...
                                  -- Steven Fromholz
                                     "Texas Trilogy"

I have nothing to add.  See you soon.

"We've got a special plaster..."

If you're one of my FB friends, you may recall that I've had the songs from "Godspell" (the 70s version, as there are some beautiful lyrics changes in the current Broadway production) stuck in my head. My brain is churning an essay/post about the relative social contexts of the old and new versions, and about Christianity and politics in general.

I need to do a bit of research before I hold forth, but do know I'm thinking about it. So if you know anything about the Mars Hill community, the recent upsurge of Bible Churches, the move to "re-masculinize" the church, or the current branding of "nondenominational," please contact me privately. I am genuinely interested in your thoughts and will keep them private. If you prefer to leave them as public comments, that's just fine.

The mean and "Christian" [quotation marks intentional] tenor of the increasingly nasty Republican primary race is raising the hair on the back of my neck. I'm hearing a lot of the usual evangelical code words (although I was amused to hear Michelle Bachman loving on Benjamin Franklin in her out-of-the-race speech. Michelle. Look up Deist). And I'm hearing candidates and the nasty new "super pacs" prancing a minuet around the label "Mormon" in much the same way folks did around the term "race" in 2008. Every candidate has his (and I definitely mean the masculine pronoun) special version of religion that he is certain will guide us back to our rightful place in the global patriarchy (and yes, I mean that, too).

So I leave you with the concept of "special plaster," from the original lyrics of "Beautiful City," and ask you to ruminate upon it until I return.

We don't need alabaster

We don't need chrome

We've got our special plaster

Take my hand

I'll take you home.

What "special plaster" do we need?