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.
————-
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.
_______________
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.

I’ve watched eight movies in the past four days, including Matrix Revolutions (I actually went to the movies by myself on Thanksgiving eve) and Bowling for Columbine, which I rented. Watching those two movies within 24 hours of each other was enough to push me over the funk edge.
So I just kept watching movies. I had nothing better to do anyway. And, since I’m a good multi-tasker, I could watch TV and still work on some boa-scarves and other stuff that I’m going to sell at a craft fair in my building this weekend.
When I was kid (that’s before TV) I escaped via radio, fantasy books, and creating cool clothes on paper. And I spent most of my time escaping, since I was house-bound a lot with asthma and had to take care of myself.
It seems that I’m heading back to where I started, only now its TV and DVD, fantasy books, and creating cool clothes out of yarn. It’s a good thing that I’ve had some memorable adventures in between, because I’d be pretty pissed at finding myself pretty much back where I started. And back with my mother, to boot.
Actually, the truth is, I could get out and do things. But what exactly is it that I would do at my age? What new things can I take up? I started learning to tap dance but my herniated disc acted up and that was that. I have so little input that I can’t seem to generate the output that transforms itself into what was once pretty good poetry.
Most of my life right now is one big volunteer effort, so I sure don’t want to volunteer anywhere else. I’ve lost touch with what I like to do for fun. I haven’t made any new (other-than-blogger) friends in three years now. And that’s very unlike me.
I guess maybe I’m feeling the same as Tom Shugart, but for different reasons. (Actually, I can’t seem to get onto Tom’s site because of some kind of cookies that his haloscan comment function is trying to get my computer to accept and it won’t. I know that it has something to do with my security settings, but I don’t want to degrade them and I don’t have trouble with anyone else site. Anyone have any suggestions?)
So I read. A lot. Just started Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum as I read through the Discworld series. I just finished Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, which I spent most of Thanksgiving Day finishing.
Escape. Fantasy.
Tonight, there’s Alias and Criminal Intent (I dig Vincent D’Onofrio) — which I have to tape bacause it’s on at the same time as Alias, and The Practice (ditto James Spader).
Escape.
Is that all there is left for me, I keep thinking?
I’ve got to get out and visit my grandson and take him his Christmas presents, which, of course, I went overboard buying. (I just love Amazon.com’s free shipping.)
I miss having a reason to feel in a holiday mood. I need to make some new friends. I need to hug my grandson and my daughter and my angel of a son-in-law.
I need a reason not to escape.

They’re shifting, dissolving, resolving, evolving — those strings — the ones that join loose pieces, and the ones that ground us, keep us from drifting into various netherworlds, the ones that tie bloodlines together. So much shifting these days.
I was one of those who noticed that Tom Shugart had become missing in action. But now he’s back. At least for now.
Can you imagine? He’s tired of being retired! Wants to get back into the old grind. Except that today’s grinding machine is not the one he left behind. He let go of the string and can’t seem to catch hold of it again.
There was a point in my life at which I looked forward to retirement. I was tired of all of the strings I was expected to keep weaving together every day. They were not my strings. I looked forward to playing with strings of my own choosing.
Several organizations in which I had been involved had asked me to serve on their boards. And then there was the ballroom dancing. I once considered teaching it after I retired. I thought of all the time I would have to create wearable art, to get involved in that community, do all the craft shows that abound this time of year.
Uh uh. Parenting a parent hasn’t left much time to do all of that. Neither has my aging spine left much opportunity. But I still don’t miss going to work.
One of my best friends who retired several months ago is so busy traveling and lunching and socializing that she can’t imagine how she had a life before she retired.
I’ve found that men I know seem to have a harder time adjusting to retirement than women. Is it because we women tend to have lots of other things that we like to do and work actually got in the way of our doing them? Is it that we have hobbies and interests that we can’t wait to pursue when we finally have the time?
On the other hand, the husband of a friend of mine retired when he was fifty from a job he didn’t really like in order to spend his time building furniture — on his own time, in his own workshop, using his own designs. His wife liked her job and so she continued to work.
Back to the first hand, one of my cousins, who retired from college teaching and whose pension was more than he made teaching, says he’s going to accept an offer to go back and teach. Go figure.
As more and more jobs dissolve, as careers disappear, more and more retirement-age people are going to find themselves (sooner than they expected) facing several decades that they will have to fill with something.
I’ve always believed that kids need to learn more than just the traditional school subjects. They need to learn to be curious, to explore, to develop creative interests beyond those that prepare them to earn a living. It seems to me that, given what life in the future will look like, it’s all the more important to give students those learning experiences, to give them a chance to experiment with lots of brightly colored, multi-stranded strings, to begin imagining what kind of vibrant life they might one day weave for themselves.
In the meanwhile, Tom, if you’re getting bored and miss having all that stress, I’ll trade lives with you for a while. You won’t have much time to miss the challenges of the consulting business.

It’s been a year and a half (that’s when I stopped ballroom dancing and dudeing up with the frilly fun clothes that go along with it) since I wore pantihose, but I struggled into a pair yesterday as I readied myself for my cousin’s daughter’s wedding. I finally twisted far enough to get them on, but not after hearing a few crunches and cracks in my back. Not a good sound for someone who’s got a major problem with a disc in her lumbar spine. As it turned out, no harm seemed to have been done, but I have promised myself that from now on, no more pantihose.
And then my cousin’s daughter and now husband promised each other, in front of friends and family, all the things that people promise each other when they’re in happily love and looking toward a future together.
It was a traditional Catholic wedding ceremony that included a reading from the Book of Genesis about how the Judeo-Christian God created man, realized that the poor guy was lonesome, and then formed woman out of the guy’s rib. Yeecchh!!
I wanted to stand up and yell, “Hey, haven’t you heard of Lilith? Don’t you know the power of myth to make real history happen? No, No! That’s not the story that needs to be told. You got it wrong. You got it all wrong!!”
But, of course, I didn’t. I just squirmed in my seat and hoped for the best.
And the reception was the best! Tribal, even.
I have to hand it to my cousin’s daughter and her mate. It was their celebration and their way to celebrate. The DJ revved up everyone (except those of my mother’s generation) with rhythms driven by blood-pounding drums. And the tribe gathered around the newlyweds, who writhed and wound around each other as well as others in the gathering circle as the bride’s white gown sparkled through the web of strobing limbs. They danced in groups, alone, and in pairs — men with women, women with women, men with men. The beat went on, and on, and on. The circle ebbed and flowed and whooped and danced. The air throbbed with promise.
And my cousins and I crowned our you’d-never-know-it-graying-heads with glow-in-the-dark circlets and became, for those moments, our younger, vital, music-infused selves. Luckily, I must have sent my sciatic nerve into shock because it never felt a thing.
After the reception, some of my cousins went back to one of their homes to continue partying. I had to drive back upstate. The party was over for me. At least this one was.
But I’m promising myself that I will find more chances to party. And I’m promising myself that I will do it without the back-breaking risk of wriggling into those claustraphobic pantihose.

I’m a day late, but yesterday I was driving downstate to and attending a wedding. And before that I was getting ready to drive downstate and attend a wedding.
I remember that crisp sunny day in November — I was taking my almost year-old daughter out for a walk and got half way up the hill when a neighbor stuck her head out her door and yelled that the president had been shot. “President of what?” I asked, never even considering that it could be “The President.”
I turned around and went back home and spent the rest of the day in front of the television set. I don’t even think it was a color tv back then. This was the second time that the immediacy of television broacasting hit home for me.* I was watching real-time history unfold on a little screen in the corner of my living room. I didn’t have to be there to be there. Reality TV: what a concept!
I remember when JFK was running for president and I was a college student but too young to vote. But a friend of mine wasn’t too young, and I talked him into letting me drive him back to his home town to cast his ballot. (I was too young too vote, but not too young to have a car and a license and a readiness for adventure.)
Yesterday, that friend had this to share:
I still miss jfk. That was driven home to me this day.
I had no intention back then of voting for him. Politics was not in my frame of reference. I was not long out of the army, I was not long back in college at a new school. I was busy studying and playing. But a college friend insisted I had to vote, even drove me from Albany down to Dobbs Ferry and back that election day so I could cast a ballot. But I did it only as a favor. Then after the election, I listened to the Inaugural speech, and for the first time ever and since, a politician touched me. He awoke in me a sense of hope and purpose, convinced me it was my responsibility to reach out to those in need, to speak out against injustice, to try to make a difference. That was his magic, he could do that. His basic drive was to reach out to the world, to try to join hands to make the world and lives everywhere better. “Preemptive war” was not part of his vocabulary or manner. The Peace Corps was, the moon mission was. We were part of the human race, not a country needing to prevail.
When he was shot and killed, I was not long a teacher (in part my reaching out to make a difference)…. And throughout that long, emotionally crushing weekend, as with many others, something drained out of me: this was change we had not anticipated, were not prepared for. Hope and promise were dying. Somehow, we knew things would never again be the same for us. Forces we hadn’t dreamed of took it all away. And we were right. Things never have been the same. It has been a long downhill slide since that weekend. No one could ever measure up to him as an inspiration, as someone who was clearly human (complete with human weaknesses) but who could evoke a sense of meaning — not so much as an American, but as a human being. That was his massiveness: he appealed to our humanity. Tell me another political leader who’s done so since. You can’t because there has been, is, no other.
*The first time was in 1962, when I stood outside the bookstore in graduate school and watched John Glenn turn all of those science fictions stories I constantly devoured into awesome reality.

From here:
LONDON (AP) – A woman scaled a gate at Buckingham Palace on Monday, unfurling an upside-down American flag in protest, while Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic delivered an 85,000-signature petition asking Prime Minister Tony Blair to call off U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit to Britain this week…..
…..Officers cordoned off the area and after about two hours the woman climbed down. She was arrested on charges including aggravated trespass. Police did not release the woman’s name, but media reports identified her as Lindis Percy, 61, a veteran protester.

For years, until the paper it was typed on began to yellow and crumble, I had a quote from Alan Watts prominently displayed on my refrigerator. It said something about learning to use the system so that it doesn’t use you. Following that advice is what make me successful in a job where its bureaucratic governmental system was famous for regularly chewing up independent thinkers and spitting them out to look for less stressful ways to support themselves.
As I continue to mull over how to use this system that’s called “blogging” so that I’m not being used BY IT, I can’t help noticing all the ads on tv for the Victoria Secret’s fashion show that’s coming up in a few days, and I stop to read a piece about the show and model Tyra Banks that’s in my local TV listings.
Now, I don’t have anything against astoundingly gorgeous women. I wish I were one myself. I don’t have anything against wearing make-up and sexy clothes. I’ve been known to painstakingly apply them myself on myself.
I do hate the message about what’s important about being female that ads like Victoria’s Secret’s spread so enticingly. But that’s not what I’m writing about here.
This is about being smart about using a system that you’re in so that it doesn’t use you. And Tyra Banks seems to be doing that, not only doing well what she does and enjoying it, but using her initial success in that system to move up in the system. She formed her own modelling agency, actively produced “America’s Next Top Model” (which I actually watched a few times) and apparently produced the upcoming VS television fashion show. In her interview, she says
They thought that all was just going to come in, do my on-camera stuff, and just leave and take the producing credit. But I was there right through the budgeting and the lighting and the editing.
Even the music cues you hear on the show ere eeither approved or changed by me. If I say I want the girls to wear clown noses, everybody will look at me like I’m crazy, but they’ll do it.
Now maybe that’s just PR hype by her publicist, but it provides an example to younger females that smart and ambitious women, who also happen to be beautiful, can intelligently use the system in which they become famous to their ongoing professional advantage. And they it’s OK to have fun doing what you make money doing.
On the other hand (or maybe not), according to my favorite local Sunday newspaper columnist Diane Cameron, Vogue magazine has provided the front money, along with cosmetic manufacturing companies, to open a beauty school in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Cameron writes:
Does that seem a paradox? The burka comes off, but mascara, liner and lipstick replace it? It’s certainly a mixed blessing to have won the freedom to participate in the dominant culture’s pressure toward high standards of attractiveness and grooming. This seems a situation where women exchange one kind of social oppression for another. One woman’s constraint may be another’s liberation.
She also says:
There is another facet, though, to this beauty school endeavor. The beauty business is, after all, a business, and this program will teach work skills. Vogue’s Kabul salon project is a form of economic development. Beauty salons are a good option, because they can be started at home and they have needed flexibility for women who are supporting families.
But, as Cameron says at the end of her piece:
…we have to always remember the unspoken credo of the beauty industry: Make up, make over and make money.
That’s the delimma women face in trying to be successful in a world where the values — for beauty and sensuality; for financial success, for professional success, and even for personal success — are set and maintained largely by males (not all males, but certainly lots of them) and those females who have bought into that set of values. We have two choices: we can fight the system and refuse to “buy” into what really is a system based on valuing the superficial or we can use that system and, in the process, add substance and deeper human values. I’m not saying that one way works better than the other. I’t can work either way.
I’m not saying that Banks is doing that necessarily. But she could. And I don’t think that the Kabul beauty school will be doing that. But it could. It would mean creatively taking an existing skewed sexist system and transforming it, from within, to better the position that women are in within that system — to expand the choices that women have over how to live their lives, to affirm that we can enjoy enhancing our “femaleness” externally while still demonstating (and insisting on being treated respectfully for) our fundamental professional and intellectual strengths. One choice doesn’t have to preclude the other.
That’s what feminism has always been about for me — my choice to be externally female (make-up, stylish clothes and all) and still be acknowledged, respected, and rewarded for my fundamental knowledge, experience, accomplishments, and intellegence. And not just as a professional, but as a mother, grandmother, caregiver, and poet. (Heh. And also as a bitch, witch, harridan, and hag.)
Thanks, Shelley, for stirring up my ashes and getting my fire going again. I ain’t giving up on this, and I sure hope that you don’t.