Emmylou Harris

Amazing. Always has been, always will be. She turned 60 this year, and she is as gorgeous as ever. Her hair, once raven black with a signature sweep of white is now fully and proudly silver.

Her lyrics are haunting, her voice is magical. She's been performing and writing for over 40 of her 60 years, and her discography is stunning.

She only gets better with time.

The Connection
The heel of my boot is on the leg of my chair
My chair leans back and rests on the wall
And the wall runs the length of my room to the door
And the door reaches down to the sidewalk

And the sidewalk leads to the edge of the street
And the street takes you out to the old highway
And the highway ends at the county line bridge
The bridge takes you up to the interstate

The interstate rolls on beyond the horizon
Where miles tend to turn into days
It finally runs into
The high road that winds through the city that took you away

And it reaches a sidewalk that kisses a wall
And the wall rises up to the 33rd floor
And the floor feels you stand at the balcony ridge
From the rail you look out on the interstate

The interstate rolls on beyond the horizon
A highway of dreams come and gone
And always leads back through the roads that connects you
To the fool that keeps holding on

The heel of my boot is on the leg of my chair . . .

Vocabularia

I made the following statement today. "I corrected your blogname on my blogroll."

That got me to thinking . . . I never even uttered the word "blog" prior to, hmm, 2004.

What other words do I say on a nearly daily basis that I didn't even know this time last year, or the year before? I didn't think there could be all that many, until I really started thinking about it.

Here, in no particular order, are things that I utter or think about nearly daily that were not a part of my consciousness 12-24 months ago:

Blog (blogging, blogger, blogroll, and all the other forms)
YouTube
Wickerman
MySpace
Lancet

I'm growing as a person, and I owe it all to the internets.

Fellow Human Beings of Earth

David Gilmour is a god. Then, now . . .





Bob Geldof is pretty cool, too.

That is all.

Trick or Treat . . . Smell My Feet!

If you have a 5 year old at your house, then you have probably heard that as many times as I have this past month. Interestingly enough, 5 year olds NEVER tire of saying it, and then dissolving into uncontrollable laughter. My son is no exception, except maybe for the fact that he ACTUALLY tries to make you smell his feet (he's pretty strong and agile, too, so no laying on the sofa around here until closer to Thanksgiving.)

We tend to do things up big around here for Halloween. It's always been one of my favorite holidays, and even though schools don't have Halloween carnivals anymore, and kids can't trick or treat unsupervised, and you have to check the candy bags for razor blades, it's still a cool holiday. We generally kick things off by erecting our huge blowup scarecrow on October 1 (the Homeowner's Association LOVES us!) and follow that up by repeated viewings of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" throughout the month, awaiting the arrival of the Big Party To End All Parties that ALWAYS occurs the Saturday before Halloween.

Except this year.

Our friends, who have dutifully thrown the best party ever for many, many years, finally decided to discontinue the tradition this year. Speculation is that the party was getting too big, there were too many people, too much booze and weed, and too many hassles, too many complaints from the neighbors, and too much hassle all around. Can't say I blame them, but damn, was I disappointed.

But, I did what you do when the best party in the world is dead and gone, I found another. It seemed a shame not to take advantage of our costumes (Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Wolf), so we crashed the Masquerade Ball at Wild Bill's Saloon. It was lots of fun, about 5,000 people strong, and nearly everyone was dressed up!

It drew a big crowd, because there was $5,000 on the line for Best Costume. There were guys there on stilts inside 8 foot tall monster costumes, all manner of witches, goblins, devils, and superheroes. There was even one lady who had recreated a full-scale framed painting of the Mona Lisa, which she wore and stuck her own head and arms through. I saw her dancing with Teen Wolf at one point (he took the big prize, by the way. Don't you know the stilts monster guys were pissed off about that?)

Saturday slowly, ever so slowly gave way to Tuesday . . . THE day. I don't know how the kids made it through the school day! I joined my kindergartener for "Fall Centers" (remember, they can't call it a Halloween Party in public school) and I was in charge of helping kids glue eyes and mouths to foam pumpkin cutouts. My "center" was totally outdone by the "smear peanut butter on a pinecone and roll it in birdseed" center, not to mention the "make a spider out of doughnuts and pretzel sticks and icing and decorate with candy" center. Ah, well . . . when it's all said and done, and the doughnut spiders have been eaten, and the birdseed and peanut butter have all been pecked away, my foam pumpkin cutouts will remain (that is, if the moms don't throw them in the garbage the minute that Halloween is over. I keep all that stuff, but then again, I am sort of a packrat when it comes to stuff my kids make.)

Once the agony of the school day had passed, and I extricated myself from my work (harder and harder these days), we prepared ourselves for The Moment . . . Sundown on Halloween night. Hub had been home sick the previous day and Halloween day with some kind of stomach bug, but he was a trooper, gathering the troops. We had invited the kids' friends to come walk the neighborhood with us. Really sweet kids, brother and sister, same age as my two, and all four are inseparable. We had missed the little boy's birthday earlier in the month, so we set up a quick party table with cupcakes (like you need THAT on Halloween), popcorn and presents. Imagine our surprise when he showed up, dressed exactly like MY kid!


Hilarious!

The kids decided to pool their resources and dump their candy into a community wagon as we went through the neighborhood. The wagon was pulled by Weenie the Wonderdog, who was celebrating her 3rd "birthday" with us (I got her from the pound on Halloween day, 2003.)

By the time 8:00 pm rolled around, we had (easily) 15 pounds of candy, 4 tired kids, and a worn out dog. It was worth it. And for the record, nope, I didn't eat ANY candy. Good for me.

Happy Halloween, ya'll.

Breathing deep and treading water

So . . . hmm.

Last night, I took the kids to Johnny's NY Pizza to meet up with my uncle (my mother's brother) for dinner. He wanted all of us kids to gather there to talk with him about my parents, their (delapidated) house, their (dwindling) finances, etc.

We all gathered there, me and my kids, my sister and her family, one brother, his kids, and my uncle brought my mom. It's not often that we all gather together, and I can't remember the last time all 6 of my mom's grandkids were in one spot at the same time.

When the food starts to arrive (calzones, spaghetti, and pizza for most, Greek salad and some kind of low carb chicken wrap thingy for me, not bad), the conversation turns to me, and not in a good way.

"You know, you can cure that diabetes with deep breathing and lots of drinking water," Uncle announces to me and the rest of the table. He goes on in this vein, making me feel like, evidently, I have failed to care for myself properly, and with a few obvious changes that I should know, I could be restored to perfect health.

This, embarassingly enough, spins into a discussion about weight management there at the table, which feels strangely familiar to me. For whatever reason, my family has always felt free to discuss me in this way whenever we have gatherings; I can't ever remember it being any different. Being a fat girl in an normally-weighted family is no fun, trust me.

Sometimes the discussions start out on a good note ("Hey! You've lost weight!"), and sometimes they start with a confidential whisper ("Rita, you have to try this new diet that my best friend's mother's hairstylist found.) It's a strange thing to be dissected that way by people that are supposed to love you, but I figured that was just my penance for being a fat girl in a thin family.

He said some other stuff between bites of pizza that I wasn't really listening to, because I was thinking about when he would come to visit us when I was a little girl; he would produce a portable minibar out of the trunk of his Cadillac, and he would have a (nearly) permanent glass of some concoction or other in his hand for the entire visit. I always looked forward to his visits; he lived in Florida in a beautiful house with an indoor pool, played golf, had lots of money, and was always the life of the party. Very Rat Pack. Very charismatic. It dawned on me that even though I admired him, I never felt very good around him.

He was still lecturing when I started thinking closely about my mother's siblings. While he wasn't diabetic or heavy, he was an alcoholic. Ditto for one of my mother's sisters. Two of her brothers were diabetics (one also alcoholic), both ended up on dialysis, losing this or that limb as things progressed. Their offspring (my siblings and first cousins) are comprised of a fairly high percentage of regularly-weighted alcoholics and addicts (my oldest brother included in that count.) In the entire family, there really is only one other cousin that is heavy like me, and like me, he becomes the center and focus of most of the family's clucking and fingerpointing. He just had a quad bypass last month, and everyone down to a person seemed to openly blame him for his poor health, but never mentioned his brother, who has been a longtime addict and alcoholic. Interesting.

It didn't dawn on me then, but it was crystal clear to me last night, sitting in that pizza joint, picking at salad, and listening to a sermon: no one really ever discusses the rampant alcoholism, drug addiction and diabetes in my mother's family, but discussing weight is fair game.

I also realized that maybe my dad wasn't the only one in my family deep in denial. Taking a closer look, it might be the whole damn bunch.