NEW GLASSES

Except he has a better camera.

My first post was on November 29, 2001, and it had a blogspot url. I spent the next month blogging about learning to blog. By the end of my second blogging month, I had discovered zefrank and was exploring the differences among journalism, commentary, and reporting. I became obsessed with linking to other bloggers. In less than six months I started to hit my writing stride.
Between then and now Kalilily Time has accumulated several thousand posts (many of them not worth reading) and half as many comments. I’ve made many blogging friends and lost track of some of them; I’ve had some disagreements and even more laughs. Every once in a while I think about quitting, but here I still am.
I wonder if I can make it to a decade.

The following are excerpted from the current Harper’s Weekly Review.

• in Ramsey, New Jersey, a flock of turkeys was spotted waiting for a New York-bound train.
• a college student in Portland, Oregon, was expelled after questioning a classmate’s belief in leprechauns
• Chinese scientists revealed that showing pornography to pandas has helped increase the captive panda population, and said that they had successfully mated robot fish.
• Israeli military officials decided that Miss Israel, in order to prevent bruises on her legs, should not have to carry a rifle
• police in the Mpumalanga region of South Africa were looking for the owner of an unclaimed penis
• the Yellow River turned red for the second time in a month
• Indian officials announced that they would establish seven vulture havens in order to relieve shortages at the Towers of Silence, where Zoroastrians leave their dead to be eaten.

And then this from Harper’s as well. The very very opposite of whimsy:

Researchers in Navajo territories suggested
that abandoned, rain-filled uranium-mining pits had led to
eyeless sheep and disabled Native-American children.
Meanwhile, back to whimsy on the mountain, where this afternoon I watched a doe and her two offspring foraging right outside the kitchen window as the various birds took turns picking at the suet pack. It was like a scene from a Disney movie. At one point, one of the deer looked into the window and directly into my eyes, but I stood perfectly still so after a second or two, it went back to its munching. I didn’t dare move to get my camera.
And even as this magical moment happens, there is an email waiting for me from one of my close women friends telling me that her career Army son (with three small children) has been told he’ll be going to Iraq in February.
Magic and mayhem. I guess it’s always been like that.

Today is my daughter’s birthday, and I am feeling so very grateful for the relationship we have, despite her few tumultuous late teen-age years. She has grown into a strong and creative woman of great compassion and sensitivity. Her home is warm and inviting and relaxing. And I’m not saying this just because I had the best Thanksgiving I’ve had in decades and I didn’t have to lift a finger.
I can’t help but compare our relationship with the one I had/have with my own mother. There is even a bigger difference between my relationship with my grandson and my mother’s with my two kids. When my kids were young, a visit from my folks was not something that they would get terribly excited about. I don’t remember my mother ever playing with them or engaging with them in any meaningful way or bringing them any little fun “surprises.” My father was better at understanding how to play, and he reached out to my kids in ways that were fun. I don’t think my mother, to this day, has any concept of “play.”
On the other hand, my grandson looks forward to my visits. (Of course I always bring him a present, and that certainly adds to his anticipation.) We spend most of my days there playing together, imagining, making up stories, and laughing at silly things. My evenings are spent in conversations with my daughter — the kinds of conversations I never had with my mother. My son-in-law and I usually talk politics; my mother barely even spoke to my husband.
And so today, on my daughter’s birthday, I am feeling so very grateful for my daughter and the peace and joy she brings into my life. And I am so very sad that my mother and I have never been able to come even close to feeling like that about each other.
Happy Birthday, Melissa.

We sat on the floor and he played “construction site” while I played with blocks. No plan. No expectations. I played with the blocks, mindlessly moving them, stacking them, toppling them. Nothing mattered — not the choices or the colors or the configurations. It was play. Pure relaxing thought-less play. I didn’t cook, I didn’t wash dishes. All I did was play. What a wonderfully happy holiday!!
We also played astronauts in the space-shuttle/tent I brought him.

He’s my rocketman!

I also actually had time to sit and read my latest issue of Harper’s magazine. Unfortunately, I left it behind. There were bits in it that I wanted to post. The only one I remember is that too much testosterone kills brain cells. (Heh. That would be the one line I’d remember!)
And now I’m back, feet resuming the step by step, day by day journey on this hard ground. I would rather be lost in space.

I am leaving early tomorrow to spend two nights with my daughter and family, and she has invited her in-law family over for a big Thanksgiving dinner. This will be the first holiday in five years that actually will feel like a holiday. I’m leaving a Thanksgiving dinner for my mother and brother. My mom is mad at me for leaving her. No surprise.
A Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Go here to create one of your own.

Their cars are parked all along the highway between here and town, where there are forests and ponds and places where wildlife like to hang out. I don’t know it they’re after the four-footed or the flying, whether they’re hunting for supper or sport. I hope that they will eat what they kill. That should be the way of it.
I had venison once. It was cooked by the hunter who killed it. It tasked fine but somehow, well, I just couldn’t enjoy it.
They make seasoned buckshot now, you know. Well, it isn’t real buckshot; rather it’s very hard pellets of seasoning, so you can flavor your bird before you even get around to plucking its feathers. How’s that for convenience.
Maybe if I had to hunt and gather, I wouldn’t eat so much. And then there’s all the exercise that goes along with hunting and gathering. I guess I could go out and live in the forest. But with all of those other hunters out there I probably wouldn’t last long.
I have always been hungry. Only before this, I was able to find lots of ways to fill myself with satisfactions other than food.
I can smell the sweet bread baking in my bread machine.

Sometimes the only way to survive is to detach — detach your brain from the whining and complaining and criticizing, from demands and expectations and disputes.
The danger is, once you start detaching, momentum takes over.
I retreat into my own body, the senses that satisfy. I eat a whole package of Pims cookies, the kind with orange jam inside. I spray the scent of grapefruit around my room. I sit in silence, sweet silence.
I imagine great gaps of space between me and them. Distance.

There were five of us at the Cheescake Factory Sunday morning, jovially bantering with our cute young waiter and laughing our way through an assortment of brunch delicacies, from French Toast to a perfect Breakfast Quesadilla. And, of course, cheesecake. I’m addicted to Key Lime cheesecake.
We like to kid around with young waitpeople, giving them “motherly” advice, making them laugh, and managing to find out more about them than they realize. And then we leave a big tip. They are aways a major part of our dining experience.
The pizza and several glasses of wine the night before relaxed me so much that the kink in my back that’s been there for a week finally started to dissolve. Wine, laughter, and good friends with whom you share the same politics — that’s the best medicine in the world. We laugh at ourselves and we laugh at each other, reminding ourselves not to take ourselves too seriously.
We do take politics seriously, however, and the brunch was as much a celebration of the election outcomes as it was a celebration of just being together again.
In between the wine and the cheescake, I ran around buying stuff I needed in stores that we don’t have here in the mountains. I especially load up on my cat litter at PetSmart — Swheatscoop, which is make out of wheat and so it doesn’t get my cat constipated, as other litter does. Apparently, she ingests a certain amount of litter when she cleans her paws. The wheat just gets digested and doesn’t plug her up. It’s expensive, but, hey, she’s worth it. And, since her litter is in my one large room living space, it sure helps that there’s no odor!!
Leaving my mother with my brother on Saturday was like leaving a three-year old. She cried, cursed, used guilt, and had an elder-trantrum. But I went, and she survived just fine.
For the past several years, I have spent every holiday with my mother. But this Thanksgiving, I’m planning to go to my daughter’s. I’ll cook the usual turkey and mashed potatoes and “kapusta” and my brother can heat it up (or not) on Thanksgiving Day.
I’m looking forward to having the feeling of family.