He lights up my life. Corny, but no kidding.
My apartment is small and it faces north, so it’s always dark. Even the full-spectrum light I have over my small eating table doesn’t offset the amount of time I spend in the shadow of aging and ailing hearts.
He gives me hope. Makes me laugh, want to hug and giggle and hide and seek. Reminds me that sweetness still is.
It’s also sweet to see b!X making his mark in and on Portland OR, as he uses this technology’s “print-on-demand” capacity to send his virutal Portland Communique into the real world in paper form. I haven’t mentioned his entrepreneurial Communique Press experiment before because I hadn’t had his 500+ page Volume I book in hand. But now I do, and so now I am. With photos he’s taken and included to give visual vitality to his posts, he has cleverly chronicled an action-packed six months in the lives of Portland’s unique politics, policies, and procrastinations. His Volume II, recently made available, follows the stories into the second six months of this past year. I haven’t bought that one yet, but I intend to.
I probably won’t buy his reprints of public domain, rare and/or out-of-print books about Portland, but it seems to me that all of the stuff he’s making available will be of great use for research purposes, and I would imagine that libraries would want to own them. He makes a momma proud.
We who write (whether here or there) leave a legacy of words and ideas that we hope will be meaningful to others. At least I think that’s what most of us would like to do.
Even Rage Boy, who, it seems to me, is going about it all the wrong way as he tries to model the “use it or lose it” approach to holding the line on freedom of speech. In response to a recent email of his bemoaning the lack of response he apparently is getting to whatever he is writing, I was inspired to write a rap.

The Crone Raps the RBoy
just because you feed it….doesn’t meant I eat it….I read it and delete it…speedy one-click…smack the dick
in a universe speaking…hours of power….here too much snide sneaks…through the mean streaks…disguised as wise
we all have choice of voice…(turds are true words, too)…but some myths in the making…just aren’t worth taking…to heart and home
thus spake the Crone
I wonder how many copies of his compiled current blog posts he would sell if he went the print-on-demand route. Probably not as many calendars as the original now-famous Calendar Girls sold. I can’t wait to see the movie. (Which reminds me that I think Halley’s take on pin-ups is so much more sexy and engaging than all that rather unappetizing RB-flaunted porn.)
On the eve of the Solstice, my women friends and I made “Ya-Ya” hats using the legacy of hats and costume jewelry that one of their (recently deceased) mothers had left. Heh. Maybe we should do our own “hats-off” nude calendar. Or maybe not.
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While I was on my forced hiatus from blogging, I did an enormous amount of reading. Just about all of the novels I read used mythic analogies to tell stories that, for me, became even more real because of their connections to those larger-than-life legends. Carol Goodman’s The Seduction of Water and The Lake of Dead Languages. Daniel Wallace’s The Watermelon King (I want to see his Big Fish movie, so I didn’t read that one). Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, The DaVinci Code, and Digital Fortress. And, of course, several books in Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld series — which I’ll probably be reading for the rest of my life.
Finally, I just finished Alice Hoffman’s Blue Diary, which was different from the other novels of hers that I’ve read in that it didn’t have all of those undertones of magic. But it was full of her usual lyrical writing and soul-stabbing truths — like: the ones who love us most are the ones who leave; and no matter how well we think we know our mates or our children, chances are we really don’t know them at all.
Which brings me back to my grandson, who lights up my life and gives me hope. Who will someday leave, and whom I probably won’t really know at all. Like b!X and my daughter — and all of the others who now only haunt my shadows. But I love them all anyway. That’s the real, important point.

I’m thinking of that song from “West Side Story.”
I’ve often felt out of place, out of time — born too late or too early. I was a little too young to really be a “beatnik” and too old to be a “hippie.” I’m too old to be a Boomer and too young to be a Solid Senior. I’m neither theist nor atheist, neither New Ager nor Old Fart. I’ve always have to keep struggling to keep from falling between life’s cracks, to find a place of my own. When armed with time, energy, and complete autonomy, I can be pretty successful at grabbing my piece of the action. But the care of a parent who has lived her life self-absorbed, oblivious to the world around her and in denial of the world inside her is making dangerous dents in that armor.
And so I much appreciate the comments left yesterday by my ol’ blogpals Allan, Mike, and Ray. And the emails from Steve James (the dad of Blog Sister and Apprentice Crone Andrea James) and from Tom Shugart and Frank Paynter.
Notice anything signficant about the names of those who have offered encouragement? Yup, all male. I don’t know what that ultimately means, but it’s interesting, isn’t it?? (I have to think on that some more.)
Yes, I miss writing here and reading out there, and so I am finding my way back, but not to the same place I was before.
I’m working on revising my blogroll. And working on some additional pages to this site.
I’m working on re-creating my circle of friends, here, there, everywhere.
My women friends in this painfully real world are my lifelines. While they question the wisdom of my choice to give up what was my life in order to take care of my mother (not one of them who had that choice to make made the one I have), they draw me out, get me out, give me reasons to get myself out of this literally dark apartment. Solstice gatherings with two different groups of women friends stirred what has been languishing in the cauldron’s depths.
Saturday I leave my mother home alone to go out and visit my grandson. That will be my real holiday celebration. And my son-in-law and I are going to see Lord of the Rings, since my daughter doesn’t want to leave the baby, expecially since he just had ear tubes put in three days ago.
So, thank you, guys, for being here. These days I have no men friends in my Real World — out of circumstance, not choice. And I’ve always had male friends to kid around with, bust chops with. Thanks for reminding me that you’re still close by and ready to rock.
It’s going to be a slow resurrection for me, but I’m working on it. Working on it all. Getting geared up for a second wind. Hold onto your hats.
MEANWHILE, if anyone has a suggestion about why I can save and rebuild my MT posts here from my laptop but can’t from my other computer (even though both are XP), I’d appreciate your leaving a comment here. My big Dell just leaves me stuck on the “Rebuilding new entry” message. It gets saved but it doesn’t appear on my blog. I have to connect my laptop to my modem and then I can call up my blog and rebuild it from there so that the new entry appears. (Which is what I have to do right now. ) I don’t have a clue. Anyone??

Sometimes fate forces you to go where you’ve been avoiding going. In my case, my son’s server, on which this blog resides, has been down for several weeks.
And this down time forced me to go back to life “BB” — Before Blogging. Lots of time for reading and relating and relaxing. Introspecting.
I don’t know yet if I’m back or not.
This is a place holder while I continue to figure out exactly what place, if any, I want to occupy here among the vast array of blogvoices vying for public validation.
What’s the point? Or more to the point, what’s MY point.

This comment was left today on my earlier post about Using the Systems and the hairdressing school that is being instituted in Kabul Afghanistan as a way of training some women to support themselves. I’m posting the comment because it reflects how some of us make assumptions that put us at odds with other cultures. (Or maybe, as well, how some of us women make assumptions that put us at odds with other women.)
This is what “Debbie” the hairdresser in Kabul had to say:
I am one of the founders and trainers at the kabul beauty school. When i read the comments about the beauty school in kabul i must say i am saddened. I am not sure if the people realize that so many of the women in afghanistan can not read and write. doing hairdressing keeps them from begging and will feed there family. I think also one thing that the people dont realize is that the beauty salons have alway played a large roll for the women of afghanistan. The women have always cared for there hair and makeup much more than we do in the states. THis is a proud profession for the women of kabul. Often the women who are hairdresser make more money than there husbands. We are doing much more than just teaching them hairdressing. We are giving them hope and giving them a chance to have a brighter future. We are not changing them. we are giving them the skills to do what they have always done. Now when they give a haircut or color or perm they have the knowledge to do it correct. we also teach them bussiness classes. but the most important thing we do is become there friend and there familys friend. kabul has changed my life for the better and it is the afghan women who through there courage and strenth i have been able to face things in my life that i could never face before. we are not going into kabul and trying to make them westeren. why spoil a beautiful culture. they are perfect just the way they are. we just want to help then any way we can. If i was a reading teacher i would teach them to read. but i am a hairdresser so i teach them hair.
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Last night’s episode on The Practice actually had me thinking that I wanted to blog something about cultural differences. In that episode, one of the lawyers defends a twelve-year-old girl who is trying to escape an arranged marriage in her home country. The girl’s parents are sophisticated and educated (her mother is a visiting college professor) but they adhere to their cultural tradition of early arranged marriages. The girl makes an eloquent plea to the judge as she asks for political asylum, asserting that she doesn’t even like her intended spouse (who is 15 years old), does not want to have sex, and is sure that she will be raped by him on her wedding night if she refuses. She wants a life different from the one imposed on her by her parents’ culture.
The judge denies asylum and she is forced to go back to her country and succumb to her parents’ wishes.
By some feminist standards, setting up a beauty school in Kabul to teach women to be hairdressers might not be the optimum solution for helping women there to achieve better lives. But it works in their culture and it gives them an option; they can choose to learn that skill or not. At least it’s a viable choice.
I believe that we should all be pressing for cultural changes that ensure that the choices of individuals are honored, especially choices that are made on behalf of personal autonomy, integrity, and self-determination.
Of course, in the fictional television case, the individual was a minor and under parental supervision. But parents are not always the best judges of what’s right for the their child. The newspaper is full of cases of parental child abuse.
It’s a dilemma. We don’t want a Big Brother or Big Sister standing over us to make sure that we treat each other (regardless of age, sex, culture, or religious beliefs) with respect, dignity, compassion, and sovereignty. But, as a species, we sure do seem to have trouble behaving like that on our own.
And President Dumbya stands out among us as one of the worst offenders of all times.