On both sides of my family are faulty hearts. Maternal side is faulty valves and Paternal side is clogged arteries necessitating stents. One of my younger brothers went in for his third stent just yesterday. It’s some scary stuff. My dad died of heart failure – perhaps a stent could have saved him. My mother died of pulmonary disease or at least that is what the death certificate says – she actually died of heart…
I was watching parts of The Queen last night with Helen Mirren – if you haven’t seen this movie, watch it, it’s incredible as a study in the subtlety of character development. The part about Diana’s death was mesmerizing. Do you remember where you were when she died. I lived at 449 Vermont Street, and woke to go down and get the newspaper (I was at war with the delivery man), and saw the headlines…
Today Sarkozy is in town and telling the U.S. they need to police the world after what happened in Moscow. Really? I thought us policing the world is what generated the ire of a thousand would be nations. I read this in Harper’s this morning, pulled from the Virginia Gazette in 1774: Some fitter day shall crown us the Masters of the Main, In giving laws and freedom to subject France and Spain, And all…
It’s Passover and like a lot of the last few Passovers in my life, there was a lot of talk about a seder but no actual one materialized. It’s hard to get a seder going these days. I remember in California when Jan Birnbaum had the seders at Catahoula in Calistoga – boy now that was a seder. Delicious!! In the meantime, I won’t be having the bitter herbs or the haroseh but I will…
In Turkey, when the moon is full, you open your purse and repeat three times – Fill It Up, Fill It Up, Fill It Up. Tonight, for the full moon, I sat with Tin in my lap, feeding him a bottle as we watched the full moon and the golden halo around it and said what my mother used to say to me when I was his age, “I see the moon, the moon sees…
Tin, Loca and I went to the park and there was this young couple making out, nay, getting it on, right in the midst of the kids and ducks. Gadzooks! Just yesterday, two dogs were almost going at it while we were watching the Mardi Gras Indians and I overheard a woman with a French accent say, “My, even the dogs are flirting.” Spring has sprung and I for one can attest to the fact…
People ask weird stuff like where’d he come from? when they see Tin. Where does he look like he came from? I want to say. I always just say Gary, Indiana but then that always prompts people to start singing Gary, Indiana from The Music Man. I’ve got to come back with a better line like Mars, Girls are from Venus and Boys are from Mars – Right?
I was walking in the park late yesterday when we ran into one of my fellow walkers. Tin was busy being busy, going where he wanted to go and not even being cajoled to go on the path I was trying to direct him to. The guy said, “He looks like he is into everything.” “Bingo,” I said. “They’re self-educators,” he said. “Working their way through the world and figuring it out as they go…
I had Tin on my hip early this morning when we went outside to put the recycles in the bin under the porch. He wouldn’t let go of the empty yogurt container and I was cajoling him into either dropping it himself or giving it to Mommy. Neither working. So then I stood him on the porch and was joking around with him when a woman’s voice said, “Isn’t he adorable when he smiles.” It…