Happy Birthday

"Frank, you got mail from your friends in New York," I said, as I sorted the mail.

He opened up his birthday card from the New York Yankees. "My first birthday card is from the Yankees!" he said.

Those Kid Fan Club Memberships are worth every penny. Coupons, a tshirt, a calender and stickers, etc. Also? They get mail all year round.

Mary's birthday is coming up before Frank's.

"What do you want?" I ask her.

"A sock monkey," she says.

"No, really," I say.

"Yes, really," she says.

Sigh. I solved this one and she will be tickled.

What did parents do before the Internet?

Extra curricular

"Can we get a case with backpack straps?" I asked.

"A gig bag?" the music store clerk asked. "Of course."

"I'm going to be a football playing cello player," my son said.

"Yes you are, honey."

Just to add to the list of crazy things I have carried on my bike in the month of August (Husker poster clipped to board, hula hoop, four sacks of groceries...) I rode my bike with a cello on my back today to get Frank to school.

Play it Sam

I didn't feel well today after my day at work. My husband was leaving town. I have an early morning hearing in a town two hours from here that scares the crap out of me. I got Hannah to take Frank to and from Boy Scouts. I went to bed with a heating pad and a box of crackers and found Casablanca on the classic movie channel. During all of this, Anna got a message from her boyfriend - they're breaking up - it's a mutual thing and we've all seen it coming - they're in different schools this year, etc. - it's really ok, but sad. I called the then-crying Anna to me and we watched the movie together. I shared my Cheez Its. I was bawling when Rick was waiting at the train station in Paris. Bill happened to come in to say goodbye at that exact moment.

"What's wrong?!" he asked in alarm.

"She left him waiting at the train station," I sobbed.

Anna, mourning her first love, rolled her eyes.

I think she'll be ok.

Safe

"It looks like we're just going to get Defense signatures this year, Mom," commented Frank as we waited in line for the Safeties. We were an hour into Fan Day and there were only thirty minutes left before the players left the field.

"No, you'll get some Offense too, since you're in line for the Safeties," said the woman ahead of us.

She explained to us that her job was to get the Offense signatures, and her son was getting the Defense, and her husband was getting the Quarterbacks. (I didn't ask her who was in line for the coaches, since she was clearly not in charge and just doing what she though she was supposed to do.)

"No. Safeties are Defense," said Frank, holding his Defense poster. ("I'm so glad he's a real boy, Bill commented.) The crowd around us concurred. The woman stressed for a minute, and then called her son on her cellphone, who apparently hadn't made it to the line for Safeties yet, and told her that if she were close enough to go ahead and get signatures, but to get them on the signature card, not the banner. (I know, I know.) Most lines were running at least thirty minutes a piece. The quarterbacks and coaches were an hour and a half at least. And that was the entire allotment of "Fan Day."

We got all the Defense. (Including the safeties.) The lines were the shortest. And his poster is full. So is my heart.

Maybe Art Doesn't Help

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
By George W. Bush*

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

*these are all purportedly direct quotes, though taken out of context and reassembled into a "poem."

(Bill also pointed out that Hitler painted.)

A Cultural Revolution Revelation

I like to think that if George Bush at least wrote poetry about the things he's done, that I could forgive him just a little.

Did you know that Mao Zedong envisioned the Three Gorges Dam and wrote a poem about it?

I will remark to anyone who will listen to me that the greatest problem in our society right now is the business degree. We need leaders and business people with a liberal arts education - an understanding of history and literature and language - poetry.

I took the girls to see "Up the Yangtze" which was a documentary about a 15 year old girl whose family was one of the 1.5 million people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project. Her family could not afford to send her to high school, so she went to work on a cruise ship on the very river flooding her family's farm and home. Sometimes I can nag and tell the girls they are fortunate. Sometimes they need to see it on a giant movie screen.

"Just think, you could go to high school and wash one family's sink of dishes, or you could not go to high school and spend your entire day literally washing an entire boat load of people's dirty dishes," I said.

Rather than roll her eyes, Anna looked aghast. "Wow," she said.

Great plans are afoot:
A bridge will fly to span the north and south,
Turning a deep chasm into a thoroughfare,
Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
To hold back Wushan's clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges
The mountain goddess if she is still there
Will marvel at a world so changed.

Welcome Home

It is a strange thing to return to a place that you lived once long ago. I was familiar with the town and the people and the landscape. I showed up at our host's home in cowgirl boots and he was delighted. "I thought there would be sandburs," I explained.

We ate fantastic steak and our hosts shared food and drink and stories in a way that made me feel entirely welcome. Rob, the attorney who invited my Legal Aid program for the weekend, does work for us and he wanted to introduce us to the Sandhills. He arranged for those of us who camp to have a primo campsite on the river. It was across the road from the hills that we got our Chirstmas tree at when we lived in Brownlee. I lay on my air mattress in the morning and watched the river go by. I walked down the path and just sat on the bank listening to the cows and felt the tears well up as the cows and the sound of the grass and the feel of the sky moved memories deep within me. When we went into town I knew the grocery store and the Main street and remembered my library. We canoed down the river and the differences are huge, but the similarities are also huge. "I know the school turn and the Berry Bridge," I said in surprise as we got directions for our canoe trip. I sat by the campfire that night eating too many marshmallows and I felt content and at home. Rob and his wife came by in the morning to have coffee at the campfire with us and Rob and I shared stories of the people "from the South" (meaning South of Valentine) as he called it, that we both knew.

I wrote a thank you note to my hosts and thanked them for reminding me of all the things I love about the Sandhills - the sky, the river, the beef, and most of all, the people of the Sandhills who are the most amazing hosts that I have experienced. I felt as if I had gone home - though I haven't lived there for 25 years.