But before I leave….

….I just have to point to this one:
U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
Read the Washington Post story here.
Get that idiot out of the White House and his cronies out of their posh posts in Washington!!

Heading out.

My mother’s mobile enough. My brother says that he’s coming up for a couple of days. (That always remains to be seen.) The food is ready. Her refrigerator is packed and my friends are on alert. I’m packed. I leave for Boston tomorrow morning. Gonna hug the little guy and his cool mom. Gonna sit on their deck and drink tea and take deep breaths while the work gets done on their kitchen and they head for the park. Be back Thursday. 🙂

Booking It

One of the things we three did a lot on our vacation was read. After I finished The Lovely Bones , I passed it along to P, who is found it more disturbing than I did. For a story that begins and is based in a terribly violent act, I think it really is a very sweet and life-affirming tale.
The big hit of the week, however, was Jane Juska

A moment back in the real world.

I interrupt the song of my vacationing self to confront the ongoing and frustratingly tough stuff. From a piece in the Oakland Tribune:
BALAD, Iraq — On a scorching afternoon, while on duty at an Army airfield, Sgt. David Borell was approached by an Iraqi who pleaded for help for his three children, burned when they set fire to a bag containing explosive powder left over from the war in Iraq.
Borell immediately called for assistance. But the two Army doctors who arrived about an hour later refused to help the children because their injuries were not life-threatening and had not been inflicted by U.S. troops.
Now the two girls and a boy are covered with scabs and the boy cannot use his right leg. And Borell is shattered.
“I have never seen in almost 14 years of Army experience anything that callous,” said Borell, who recounted the June 13 incident to The Associated Press.

[snip]

Friends on vacation.

Vacation Story 2.
Good friends are the ones who help you survive your other relationships.
I have gone on some vacations with male Significant Others and have had some great times. I’ve also gone on such a vacation and have had not such a great time. I once went on a vacation with a former male Significant Other with whom I had remained “just friends.” We had a non-sexual blast and traveled together more comfortably than we did when we were more intimately involved. We even stayed in the same hotel room, used the same bathroom etc. (He’s coming into town in a few weeks, and he’s going to stop by with a bottle of wine and stories to tell me about his new life in Portland, OR.)
Good friends are the ones who help you survive your other relationships.
I always have almost perfect vacations with my women friends. We don?t actually divide up the chores of sharing space in a rented cottage, but it all always flows with ease and good humor. It’s not that we are all similar in temperament and talents; rather we are all adamant about being respected for who and how we are. And, of course, we actually like each other, and we like to both nurture and be nurtured.
The three of us in Maine this time have all been divorced (one of us three times); two of us have kids; one of us was raped in her teens; we all like men and are all tired of the struggle it always seems to be to keep our integrity, identity, and voice in a relationship with a man. We are tired of their not taking responsibility for everything from household chores to extended family dynamics. We are tired of accommodating. For the other two, it’s probably a temporary thing; one is five years younger than I and the other 9 years younger. For me it’s probably a permanent fatigue.
So, it?s not surprising that we spent several Maine evenings last week sitting around doing a “group therapy” thing. We?ve all been through it; we know how to listen and how to respond with compassion and encouragement; we all know how to constructively construct any criticism we might have, how to wrap our suggestions in heartstrings. We don’t always agree, but we give each other lots to think about, and we accept our disagreements as part of who we are.
And, when we play Boggle, we get very competitive, shrieking and whooping, bitching, and guffawing. We forgot a dictionary this time, so we had a few arguments about the validity of a few word spellings. Heh. They tend to defer to me because I taught English. I frequently bluff when I’m not sure; I’m also frequently right!
I?m sure that we gave the quiet people in the neighboring cottages something to wonder about — what with all the Boggling noise, the frequent group hugs, the strange sage/cedar smudging smells, the echoing tones of my Tibetan bell, and the fire burning in my mini-cauldron on the deck on our last night there, where we symbolically exorcised the bad stuff we?d been carrying around. (More on that later.)
Good friends are the ones who help you survive your other relationships.

It’s not easy seeing green.

Vacation Story 1.
One night during vacation, I woke out of a sound sleep to see the world outside my high windows suffused with an eerie intense green light. I blink and the light slowly fades. My friend P also says that she remembers seeing some kind of green light through her closed eyelids. But she assumed that she was dreaming and just went back to sleep.
All week long we discuss what it could have been. We speculate (laughing nervously): Aliens? Some meteorological phenomenon? Swamp gas? A sign that our healing rituals are working? (Green is the color of healing.) Wouldn

The Week at a Glance

Still waiting to hear from my mom’s doctor. Meanwhile, I’m taking her over to P’s house (she’s the blonde in the photos below) to extend the vacation one more day and let her feed us a light supper. M, the other vacation friend, will come over too, so I’m bringing them both printouts of the collage — which is numbered by the days. Still no time to tell the vacation story. Of course, you know what they say about pictures….
collage2.jpg