As I was posting the reference below to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, unbeknown to me, my mother was unearthing photographs of my daughter who, as a junior in high school, choreographed, costumed, and danced her own original interpretation of that piece. Her costume was flesh-colored and glittery. Her makeup dramatic. Her movements fierce. This in a school district community that, at the time, was quite unsophisticated. (Actually, given the large number of current unsophisticated national constituencies, it was apparently ahead of its time.)
Anway, I just love this photo, which, according to writing on the back, was taken and given to her by one of my daughter’s teachers.

I must not have taken any photos of her that evening since no others are turning up. I do remember sitting in the middle of the audience listening to the murmurs during her performance that probably had more to do with the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra under her leotard than with the choice of performance piece. I wish I could have taped the comments afterward from other parents as they tried to come up with something that would not give away their real opinions.

to stroke the skin of ripening
birches fringed like armies
of buckskinned arms, their fine-boned
fingers splattering buds like spots
of blood in the sky
The above is from one of my poems that was published back in the mid-eighties. The birches in the park haven’t yet begun to sprout, but there are these bushes doing something similar:

My favorite spring poem is this one by ee cummings (sorry, but the spacing doesn’t seem to come out the way it’s supposed to, even though it looks fine in the “entry” box).
in just-
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonman whistles
far
and
wee
Around here it is certainly JUST spring. The ice is just thinning. The mud is just emerging into something puddleluscious. The sky today is an Easter Bunny blue, but just how long it will last is anybody’s guess.

I have always done whatever spring cleaning I get around to doing with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring blaring in the background.
It’s time for revving up. C’mon Oestre. You go, girl.

A little early for April Fool’s Day, but this — from Scientific American via Too Much and Too Little — is too good to make wait.
from the Scientific American editorial
Okay, We Give Up

Okay, We Give Up
MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
COPYRIGHT 2005 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.

After my daughter and her husband bought their little ranch on a dead-end street in a little town in western Massachusetts, they began to realize all of the things that are wrong with it. Mold behind the walls in the basement. Bathroom too small. Not enough closets after all. Windows need replacing.
But last week they watched out their kitchen window as eight deer cavorted around just behind the bush that separates their back yard (which badly needs re-grading) and the nature preserve that abuts their property.
And each day the same family of cardinals gathers at the bird feeder that graces the corner of their yard.
There’s very little traffic on their road, and the neighbor (who is my daughter’s age) two houses down runs a small day-care center where my grandson loves to hang out with the other kids while my daughter and her neighbor hang out in the background.
My son-in-law works at a new job that he likes that is less than a ten-minute drive from the house. Sometimes he even comes home for lunch.
The house can be fixed enough to be comfortable and safe, but a friendly neighborhood where deer meander past your back yard is, as they say, priceless — and, in the grand scheme of things, enough to balance out the bad.
I try to remind myself of that as I find myself back in my little apartment, across the hall from my mom. I think of the victims of the tsunami who are struggling to rebuild some kind — any kind — of roofs over their heads, and I think that what I have is enough. For now, anyway.
The Little Picture is what we make of it. We have no control over the Big One.
My three days of belly-laughing with my grandson is enough to balance out the stuff that sometimes doesn’t seem enough.

A basket lined with purple feathers and strings the colors of spring. Eggs within eggs within eggs within rest fossils from other places, other times. Moons and hares and runes (znaki) that my Polish pagan ancestors might or might not have used to help make sense of a unpredictable world.
Yesterday, on the Spring Equinox, we five women gathered for a pot-luck brunch and some sympathetic magic. Or maybe it was just our ritualistic way to manifest our yearnings for warm weather and green shoots and, in general, a world more to our liking.
Tomorrow I head out to see my grandson. Rain, snow, or any weather, he makes me feel as though it’s Spring. There is nothing I like more then spending some time in his joy-filled toddler world.
And I desperately need that feeling. My next door 77 year old neighbor, who was taken to the hospital in an ambulance three weeks ago, apparently has blood leaking into her brain. Another neighbor, who walks with a walker, fell down yesterday and broke her arm.
Today, I took my mother to my brother’s, where low clouds hovered over the Catskill Mountains, and, even though Spring showed no signs of even considering to make its approach, I was still soothed by the serenity of the monotoned wooded landscape.
I’m sure that there were creatures dying somewhere in those acres of trees and stones. But that’s not the same….not the same as when it happens within this concerete and steel warehouse (upscale though it is).
My mother is doing surprisingly well on new medication. She is much less anxious and unhappy. We play cards, laugh, wait together for Spring.
On the white doors along the long hallways in our building hang the various shapes and colors of Spring. There are silk calla lilies on mine. But there is no magic here. Lots of sympathy, but no magic.
Magic is an exhuberant two-and-a-half year old running out to greet his Grammy, who, of course, has brought him a surprise.
Spring will come. Like magic.

I can’t remember the last time I was out on a Saturday night. I can’t remember the last time I had a glass of wine out on a Saturday night.
So, this was a special occasion for me on several levels.
I started reading Dave Rogers’ original weblog, Time’s Shadow, when I began blogging, when we were all a part of AKMA’s fantasy University of Blogaria. (The Happy Tutor reminisces here about those good ol’ days, back in 2001-02))
Then Dave went dark for a while, and I lost track of him. He’s back in the blogosphere with Groundhog Day, and he was back in the Albany NY area this weekend to visit his sisters on the way to Syracuse to visit his folks.
So we made a date to meet. (I told my mother I was going to meet one of my girlfriends, since she panics every time she thinks that I might abandon her in favor of some guy. Dave brought his lovely teenage daughter along to protect him, just in case I proved to be an axe murderer.}
There’s something special about meeting, in person, someone whom you’ve gotten to know through his writing. We only had an hour to chat, though, since Dave had to leave early Sunday morning for his drive, with his offspring, to visit his parents.
But it was a wonderful hour of gossiping about other bloggers; sharing, in person, more details of what we share on our blogs; laughing and imbibing (him beer, me wine). We also shared in some of his daughter’s calorie-filled dessert. It really was like hanging out with a long-time and dear friend.
Dave lives in Florida, so who knows if we’ll ever have a chance for a meet-up again. But, you never know, since I have cousins in Florida, and I plan to visit them often when I’m free of caregiving responsibilities. Dave says he’s going to take ballroom dance lessons. Maybe he’ll give me a spin around the dance floor.
In the meanwhile, thanks for the memory, Dave.

I bought a set of beepers and put one on her keys and the other in her purse. I keep the third. That way I can always track down her keys and purse when she can’t find them. Which is just about every day. Sometimes twice. Tonight it was as I was falling asleep and she called me because someone has stolen her purse. Beep Beep. It was right where she hung it in the closet — not that she remembers doing that.
Her brain scan shows moderate to severe atrophy.
She hugs me a lot. Tells me that I’m her beautiful daughter. Thanks me often for what I do for her. Begs me not to leave her.
She doesn’t realize how fast I have to run just to keep up. Beep. Beep.

We’re being duped at every turn. No wonder we don’t know where to turn.
Half of the time that we think we’re watching news reports, we’re really watching video news releases prepared by public relations firms for organizations promoting their own agendas, and that includes the Bush administration. What we are led to believe are news reports are really propaganda.
There is, at least one voice in the PR industry who is calling attention to this unethical practice. Richard Edelman, president and CEO of the world’s largest independent public relations firm, blogs the following, as he refers to an article published in the NY Times:
“Under the Bush Administration, the federal government has used a well-established TOOL of public relations; the pre-packaged, READY-TO-SERVE news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations…” It is a world where all participants benefit…Public relations firms secure government contracts worth MILLIONS of dollars…”In three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office has held that government-made news segments may even constitute improper covert PROPAGANDA…” An FCC decision in year 2000 states that “Listeners and viewers are entitled to know by whom they are being PERSUADED…” (Note that the capital letters are my own so that you get the full effect of the words being used).
Edelman goes on to say:
What can be done? Let’s start by revealing the size of our US government contracts. We have heard in the media that PR agencies are receiving $250 million from the US Government each year to promote its programs. I’m skeptical of this number. At that level, Government contracts would constitute 10% of the fees of the top ten agencies in the world. At Edelman, our fees from the US Government (we have one account, from the US Department of Commerce to promote travel to the US from the UK) are $400,000, out of our global total of $240 million in fees. I understand from another top-ten firm that they only have 3% of its fees from Government contracts. So a useful first step toward transparency is to end the mystery of size of fees by having each firm reveal total spending by US Government-related accounts.
From www.prwatch.com/spin:
VNRs are produced for the government by private contractors and the State Department’s Office of Broadcasting Services, the Agriculture Department’s Broadcast Media and Technology Center, and the Defense Department’s Pentagon Channel, among others. We’ve been criticizing VNRs used as propaganda for more than a decade. For example, our 1995 book Toxic Sludge Is Good For You described how VNRs were used to sell the first Bush administration’s Persian Gulf war.
The New York Times editorial (repeated in Truthout.org) lays it all out:
As documented this week in an article in The Times by David Barstow and Robin Stein, more than 20 federal agencies, including the State Department and the Defense Department, now create fake news clips. The Bush administration spent $254 million in its first four years on contracts with public relations firms, more than double the amount spent by the Clinton administration.
Most of these tapes are very skillfully done, including “interviews” that seem genuine and “reporters” who look much like the real thing. Only sophisticated viewers would easily recognize that these videos are actually unpaid commercial announcements for the White House or some other part of the government. Some of the videos clearly cross the line into the proscribed territory of propaganda, and the Government Accountability Office says at least two were illegally distributed.
I wonder how much Hitler spent on his propaganda machine?
And then there’s the propaganda aimed at keeping the white boys off the front lines:
“The U.S. Army is adjusting its marketing pitch to minorities as the war in Iraq hurts recruiting efforts among Hispanics and, especially, African-Americans,” reports Advertising Age. Leo Burnett is the Army’s lead marketing agency, with Cartel Creativo doing Hispanic, and Muse Cordero Chen & Partners and Vital Marketing Group doing African-American, outreach. The Army will “maintain a minority presence in general-market advertising, craft minority-specific messages,” and “focus Spanish-language messages at parents and ‘influencers.'” Political science professor Peter Feaver expressed skepticism, saying, “If the problem is Iraq, there’s not much in the short run that the Army recruiters can do.”
“Outreach” in this case is just another word for propaganda.
Wal-Mart’s television commercials are propagandizing really hard to off-set what everyone knows is really going on — that women employees are concentrated in lower-paying jobs, are paid less than men on the same job, and are less likely than men to advance to management positions? These gender patterns persist even though overall women have more seniority, lower turn over rates, and higher performance ratings in most Wal-Mart positions than their male counterparts.
And that’s just Wal-Mart’s Little Picture. In the Big Picture:
The giant retailer’s low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart’s relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are we shopping our way straight to the unemployment line?
Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
“You won’t hear anything negative from most people,” says Paul Kelly, founder of Silvermine Consulting Group, a company that helps businesses work more effectively with retailers. “It would be committing suicide. If Wal-Mart takes something the wrong way, it’s like Saddam Hussein. You just don’t want to piss them off.”
It’s a killer American capitalist success story. Read it and weep.
And then start paying a lot closer attention to how we’re all being hoodwinked every time we turn around.
Especially watch how Dumbya tries to hoodwink us into believing that he’s not making every effort to undermine Constitutional checks and balances. Watch as Senator Harry Reid fights the good fight, pointing out the fallacies and dangers of the Republican effort …to use extraordinary parliamentary tactics allowing the Republican majority to rubberstamp the handful of nominees already rejected and all future Bush nominees.
Keep an eye on that effort of Bush to do still another endrun around the law of this land.
And as Factcheck.org so clearly reminds us, Bush’s propaganda machine is still churning out lies about Social Security:
In a new TV ad, Progress for America exaggerates the true state of Social Security’s finances by comparing it to the Titanic. The ad claims the system will go “bankrupt” if nothing is done and that we must rescue the program “before it hits the iceberg.” Actually, neutral experts predict the system can pay between 70 and 80 percent of currently scheduled benefits even if the Trust Fund is exhausted, which isn’t predicted to happen for another 37 years, at least.
The ad also touts Bush’s plan for “voluntary personal retirement accounts” as though that would improve the system’s finances. But even the White House now acknowledges that individual accounts alone do nothing to fix the system’s long-term financial shortfall.
I’m not sure how we Americans can keep ourselves from being hoodwinked over and over again by all of those working so hard to turn this country into something it was never meant to be so that they can reap one kind of out-of-whack profit or another.
Checking these non-partisan sites can help us to keep our eyes open:
www.factcheck.org
www.prwatch.org/spin
and also www.truthout.org
It’s that price of freedom, right?

Today I mailed out some poems to a university poetry contest for poets over 50. I’ve been procrastinating for a month, trying to decide if I should do it or not. The deadline is March 15, so if I was going to do it, they had to go in the mail today. Maybe mailing them on my birthday will bring me luck.
Then there’s the other side of the coin.
I haven’t been lucky with some of my weblogger friends who have tried to leave comments on my weblog but are blocked. b!X says that I seem to have blacklisted anything that comes from blogspot.com. I probably wreaked a lot more havoc with my blacklisting than that; he’s trying to figure it out. Bleh.
And I left my mom home to made a quick run over the the little post office in the mall so that I could mail in the poetry by Priority Mail. Mall customers are not supposed to use the post office parking spaces, but it was snowing, so of course people did (the post office was almost empty but the parking spaces were full up) so I kind of created an extra space next to the last car and was in and out in just about five minutes. Of course, the security patrol left a warning sticker on my car. That pissed me off, so I just mailed the Security Office a pissed off letter, the warning sticker, and my receipt from the post office. It probably won’t do any good, but it made me feel better.
What really made me feel better was a message on my phone left by my 2.5 years old granson while I was out. “Happy Birthday, Grammy,” squealed his little-boy voice. “I love you.”
And then I got a call from a friend whom I’ve known for 40 years. Our paths cross periodically. She didn’t know it was my birthday and called just to check in. We’re going to see “Aviator” tomorrow and catch some dinner. She reminded me of how, twenty years ago, it was I who called around and rounded people up to go out and party. So much of who I am has faded into the past. At least for now. And at least for now I have friends who continue to return my past favors.
And I made myself a chocolate cream pie with Oreo cookie crust.
The good always seems to more than balance the bad.

65.
I’ve got my Medicare card, but it still doesn’t seem possible. How could I be that old? I watch some middle-aged couple demonstrating basic ballroom steps on my public TV station and think how much I loved dancing and how much I’d like to get back into that someday.
Someday? How many days for ballroom dancing do I think I have left? And first, I’d have to drop the 20 pounds I put on over the past three years of taking care of my mother and turning to tasty food as my one consistent sensual comfort.
I went out yesterday and had lunch with a couple whom I’ve known snce college, but, as my mom continues to slip away, I’ll have even fewer opportunities than I have now to indulge is freedom and comfort. I have to believe, however, that I will have another life to create for myself when she’s no longer around. She’s already 89. Chances are that I’ll live to at least that age. Hell, Chita Rivera is in her seventies and still going strong on the dance floor. Well, I’d still have to lose at least those 20 extra pounds.
On every birthday since I started blogging in 2002,I’ve posted a photo of myself. I started blogging about the same time my mother began to become more dependent on me. She changed. I changed.

So, I was born on March 11, 1940 at 3:42 a.m. My early birthdays were big parties with lots of friends and relatives. We were a part of a large extended family. Yesterday, my mother unearthed this photo from my seventh birthday:

There will be no party for me today. I’ll take my 92 year old neighbor on our usual Friday grocery run. Maybe I’ll rent a video. Pick up some kind of special dessert.