No, it wasn’t any of those — that thing that swooped low and heavy over the sunroof of my car from a tree at the foot of the driveway. At first I thought it was a wild turkey, but when it landed in another tree across the road, I noticed that it had a red head. It looked more like a buzzard.
What it was is a turkey vulture, and it must live somewhere very nearby because I saw it again this evening flapping through the woods toward the lake.
I know when they soar high in the sky, gliding on air currents, turkey vultures look like hawks, and now I know that’s what I often see high above the cliffs. But when one makes its landing approach through a stand of trees, it looks like a big fat ball of feathers hurled from the sky.
It must have a nest somewhere nearby. I wonder if I can find it.

I make sure I see just about every movie about ballroom dancing that comes out. Some I’ve seen several times. But I watched one the other day that is worth watching even if you don’t dance. After watching it, you might want to.
I never head of Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School , but my sib rented it thinking my mom and I would like it. My mother loves to watch ballroom dancing. Marisa Tomei, Mary Steenburgen, Sean Astin, John Goodman, Sonia Braga, Adam Arkin — the list of great performers goes on. Even Danny DeVito (although I’ll be damned if I remember him in it!) And none of them is a “ballroom dancer.”
There is a line in the movie about dancing “to exorcise my demons.” I guess that’s how it always worked for me. But that’s not what the movie is about, and what it’s about is not just one simple idea.
If you can find it, rent it.

While many citizens of New York State scrambled to figure out what to do about the state’s Supreme Court’s ruling against gay marriage, I was having lunch with a male couple who have been together for 37 years. That’s a lot longer than many heterosexual marriages.
The lunch was at their weekend home, filled with memorabilia from their various travels. Lunch was home cooked and delicious, beginning with an fettucini Alfredo prepared at the table, with real butter, fresh egg yolk, parmesan cheese, and (I think) scallions. I wished I had asked to take the leftovers home with me.

John Lennon

The broccoli never went for good green food; instead, it flowered whitely and prematurely behind the row of healthy but inedible marigolds. Obviously I did something wrong when I planted it, so its growing life was considerably stunted. It all looks pretty, but it’s lost its purpose.

I sit on the bed with my mother this morning as she cries. “I’m thinking about my brother,” she says. She misses her brother. Before I moved her in with me, which was a year before her brother died, they shared a two family home. He drove; she cooked. They were good company for each other until each started down that road toward senility. Even then, they had those old memories to share of their childhood years when their mother took them to live in Poland, after WWI and before WWII. That’s what they would remember. That’s what they would talk about.
Over on Doug’s site, he’s remembering his childhood, which was similar to mine.
Hah (I commented on his post) I remember those days too. The first tv I saw was at my aunt’s house — 9 inch black and whilte screen that most of the time showed a station symbol because there were only a few shows available. We called pizza “hot pie,” and the kind that oozes as in your {Doug’s) description is still the best kind. It’s hard to find these days. “Fast food” came form Fred Laney’s hot dog wagon that was pulled by a little pony and came around once a week.
In the summer, trucks laden with fruit and vegetables came by once a week, too, with their drivers shouting “waaterrmellonnnn!!” Coal was shunted into our cellar to heat the coal furnace, which my father had to fill with a shovel. I would swipe some to draw “Girls Are” on the sidewalk.
Doug describes many of the things I also remember: the black and white televisions on which we put a plastic sheet that was blue (like the sky) on the top, red in the middle, and green (like grass) on the bottom. There were no such things as credit cards, and our phones all were “party-lines.” (Go over to Doug’s; he explains it all.)
Meanwhile, I’ve got to stop at the market to pick up some broccoli. The kind without flowers.

A great idea that never went anywhere.

I subscribe to Harper’s Weekly, where included items come strung together, the significant mixed with the strange. You wind up with an oddly accurate cross section of current life on this planet. Here are some excerpts:

Movies on AMC and TCM are the movies my mother will watch. Well, sort of “watch.” I’m never sure if she’s really paying attention; I think the movie becomes background noise for her ruminations.
We watched Gold Diggers of 1933 yesterday — or at least I did. Mom wandered off sometime before the end and took a nap. I couldn’t help think to myself that things haven’t changed all that much. Near the end is a production number (Busby Berkely certainly knew how to stage them) centered around a song “Remember My Forgotten Man,” who was the soldier returning home from war, the farmer losing his land to a national depression. He was broke, defeated, jobless, alone. There were a lot of them then, and there are a lot of them now. Sung by Joan Blondell, it’s a very UN-feminist song, but it did reflect the truth of many women back then.
The other night we watched The Emerald Forest. I thought my mom would object to the nudity; the fact that she didn’t makes me think she wasn’t really watching it. I loved the lushness — of the forest, of the people, of the myths. I guess that’s why I can stand living in the situation I’m in: I live in the middle of natural lushness. Even though my vegetable garden has succumbed to various critters, my flowers are abundantly blooming. The sky is curtained with trees, and birds of every color flock to our feeders.(Even though I bought a book to help me identify the birds, I’ve decided not to bother. It’s enough to watch them up close) One feeder, outside our window, puts me close enough to look into their eyes. As long as I don’t move, they don’t notice me through the glass.
Al Gore’s movie about global warming is not playing at the movie theater in town. I guess I’ll have to buy that one:

After she refused to eat the salmon I prepared, after she took my book and hid it in her nightstand, after she walked aimlessly around her space while I sat encouraging her to watch television with me, she wandered over to my sib’s space and is watching tv with him. Ahhhhhh! I have some breathing space before the “4400” comes on.
And so I go and read some of my favorite weblogs and come upon By Bea’s Bedside weblog, to which I linked from the comments left on Ronni’s post at Time Goes By.
Alexandra, who is Bea’s daughter and also her caregiver is having a much different experience than I. I envy her selflessness and her mother’s personality. I plan on reading her often; maybe I can learn to look at my mother through her colorful eyes.
Meanwhile, while I was at Ronni’s I lifted the “Keep on Blogging” poster now in my sidebar from Ronni’s site. I’ve got to get over to Ronni’s more often. Everything she has to say winds up being something I already care about.

I don’t know anyone around here, and my chance of meeting any interesting men is zero.
WRONG!
But I blew it.
I’m standing in the line at ShopRite, and behind me is a tall, gray-haired, slim guy who starts talking to me.
“Ah, watermelon,” he says, glancing in my shopping cart. “You know it’s summer when there’s watermelon.”
And so the conversation starts. I find out that he’s cooking for sixteen people this weekend — chicken on the BBQ, peas and chopped shallot salad, asparagus and procuitto, three bean salad. He loves to cook. He comments on the good stuff I have in my cart, we both have grandchildren, he’s single (he works that in very subtly). He’s SINGLE. I think he leaves me an opening to invite myself to dinner, but I don’t pick it up and run with it.
What’s the matter with me!!
I get out to the parking lot and pack my car with my groceries. I get in and take out of my wallet my weblog “business card.” I drive around the parking lot to see if I can catch up with him — good excuse: I’m always looking for readers for my weblog.
No dice.
I blew it. I am such an idiot.
That snake is living right under my doorstep — scared him/her out when I left to go grocery shopping. Lithuanian folklore says that snakes under your doorstep are good luck.
I blew it.

Iknow that injustice is rampant in this world — bad things happen to good people.
Lots of times those injustices happen arbitrarily: Life As Crapshoot.
But sometimes they could have been avoided, and there are individuals responsible for perpetrating them. I’m thinking of the injustices that Mandarin Meg should never have suffered.
Because I have a hard time falling asleep at night, I often listen to novels that I download from my library and play on my mp3 player. I don’t listen to great literature; I usually listen to mysteries of various kinds. (What has that got to do with injustice, you might be wondering.) Lately I’ve been listening to the “Sisterhood” series written by Fern MIchaels. The stories revolve around a group of women, all of whom have had great injustices done to them that the legal system was not able to deal with for one reason or another. Led by a very wealthy “older woman” (she’s 60; imagine that!) they go about using their individual abilities– vigilante style — to right the wrongs done to them and other women.
As many bloggers respond to the tragedy of Meg’s death, I’m thinking we should start a blogger group that would use all of our skills on the internet to right wrongs done to other bloggers. We could call ourselves

Yes, what if…………………………