I didn't go.
When I got in my car, parked in the blazing heat, the car thermometer said 114 degrees! Even now, after 9 p.m. it's triple digit heat outside.
Instead, I made dozens of gel prints, getting into it so much I totally lost track of time. Then Jan and Carma came over and the two dogs romped inside like crazy girls, both starved for doggie play.
Will sent me this amazing photo--a classic, taken on his iPhone!
This is happening tomorrow: Elena is riding in the event her mom did, side saddle, with fancy clothes!
She's been at rock climbing camp all week, just decided today to give it a go.
I learned today that we have 30,000 MILES of veins in our legs.
I won't bore you with road signs, but to make a longish story shorter, in the long mystery road of tracking down a reason for pain in my calves and feet, I found myself in a vein doc's office three times this week--along with my dear friend Janet who went with me twice for moral and memory support. (That's friendship right there!)
We both are very impressed with Dr. Timothy Straight. He spent about half an hour at each visit explaining what can go wrong with the veins and touching my legs to test for pulses and edema. Then he ordered a ultrasound of my legs. Today we went back for the results.
Most of my miles are fine. There are three trouble spots which could be responsible for the pain, but those veins are relatively superficial. The first step is to wear compression socks-to-thigh every day as a diagnostic. If they help reduce the pain, I can return for an ablation of those veins, done by laser in his office, not surgery!
What causes it? 70% hereditary.
I would never have thought to consult a vein doctor, but Janet did some research online and we went to investigate. A more serious condition is PAD--peripheral artery disease--which I don't have. But for those of you who may have pain in your legs or cramps, you might want to consider checking out the miles of veins you never even think about. Solutions are relatively simple in most cases.
Jan recommended this doc and I highly recommend him to you if you ever need a vein specialist.
Just caught the tail end of 60 Minutes--a story about men and women honored by the Carnegie Foundation for heroism. Very interesting!
The people who saved a life by risking their own said, "I didn't think about it. I just did it." One ran into the ocean to rescue a drowning boy, then went back for a second (who was unable to be saved). Six years later, he says, "A real hero would have saved the second boy."
A teenaged girl saved by a hero when her car spun out of control in heavy traffic is now a neuroscientist who studies the brains of people with high empathy and people without empathy. Sociopaths have no empathy. If you show a photos of people in distress, it barely registers with viewers incapable of empathy. They simply do not do "feeling with" other people.
She showed brain imaging that showed the brains of high-empathy people and sociopaths. In the area of the amygdala, they do not look the same! Maybe we are hard-wired to either respond to people in pain or look away?
One of the heroes who broke a windshield to extricate a woman in a burning car had a prison record. Yet when he acted on his better impulses, he didn't stop to consider his safety. After his act of heroism, he resolved to care for other people, and he donated a kidney to a stranger.
One act doesn't necessarily define a person. Maybe empathy can be learned? I'm not an expert, just thinking about the implications as we wrestle with the astounding increase in mass shootings.
Yesterday, walking out of Whole Foods as I was walking in, two men addressed Luci like this:
"Oh, what a fine dog you are!" one squatted to tell her.
"And," the other added, "You have such an important tail."
I've heard Luci's tail called a lot of things--my previous favorite being "resplendent, which it is. A long shaggy tail on such a little dog is definitely noteworthy, and it's often noted, but I'd never have thought of it as important.
I love this so much that if I were a writer of children's stories, I'd write one about a fine dog with an important tail!
For the first five or six decades of life, it's as if we're all climbing some hill in our heads--getting, as best we can, the stuff we need to complete the picture called What My Life Is Going To Look Like.
The very first choice I made in that direction was choosing the china, crystal and silverware to set a table and have dinner parties. I barely knew how to cook, but so what? Married people were supposed to throw dinner parties, right? Place settings were advertised in Seventeen and Bride magazines to get us there. Not recipes, but the carriers of food and drinks to mouths.
I have rarely had a dinner party. I used to cook for people and always for my family, but I don't even do that anymore. Yesterday we celebrated Will's and Veronica's pair of 44th birthdays together at a Thai restaurant.
We sold our wedding silver to buy a dog--a German Shepherd named Tony, a dog I'll never forget. The silver was returned to a department store a knife and a fork at a time until we had enough money to buy the dog. Then the set was incomplete, so we sold the rest.
We didn't actually have a table anyway, just a three-legged one that we propped on the radiator, and a series of rental houses with not enough space for dinner parties. All I'm saying is that my Big Hill of the time didn't match my imagination.
Along the way, there were other hills, smaller than Whole Life Hills, but hills nonetheless.
Now, most of us have reached an age when we're acquiring way less. We know what we need for the real lives we have. In fact, most of us--like Barbel on a smaller scale--are letting things go, even beautiful and potentially useful things.
Learning to paint and collage was a hill I started three years ago. I bought all the sets of paints, papers, brushes and do-dads I saw crafters and artists using on You Tube.
I had fun playing with supplies, so I don't regret it. But now I'm editing them, giving away what I'm no longer likely to use--like glitter and paint colors I don't care for, magenta, some greens.
Having learned to mix my own colors with primary red, blue and yellow, and black and white, I don't need sets of colors. Cooks know that the main event of a meal is the deliciousness of the food, not the plates and glasses and forks.
I've spent the weekend organizing my painted papers and gel prints into four baskets--cool colors, warm colors, black and white, and neutrals. I'm more likely to use them if I can find the color I want without searching through stacks and stacks of pages.
One of my new favorite art teachers taught me this.
My previous work space was more like a buffet--too much for anything to feel special. This newly sorted space feels clean, more user friendly. What's left will find its way into collages and painted compositions. Sometimes less really is more.
Today I had a long wonderful FaceTime visit with my dear friend Barbel in Albuquerque. After a difficult series of cancer treatments, she is well--and well on her way to her next adventure in The Netherlands! This is the best news I've heard in ages!
Barbel here with her love, Karel, who lives in The Netherlands.
Barbel is a happy, generous, lively, creative soul! She's packing up everything she owns right now, planning a big estate sale before her September move. We talked about her readiness to let go of almost all the beautiful things in her house to start a new life with Karel. She'll be taking only clothes and art and art supplies--but that's okay. She's ready.
Barbel has always been a woman of adventure. She moved here as a young woman from Germany, then made her home in Texas--San Antonio and Alpine--and now New Mexico. And here she goes again around her September birthday. She doesn't know the language yet, but knows the languages of life and love. Her positive attitude and friendliness will cross any other language barriers and she'll have countless new friends by the end of the first year.
These two happy faces say it all!
All day I've been thinking about these children, an hour's drive from here, killed by an 18-year-old with a machine gun.
These fourth graders are all somebody's Elena, somebody's Makken. Beloved children whose parents have taken them to school and dance lessons and Little League, have reminded them to brush their teeth, do their homework, and follow the traditions and rules of their family.
Ten year olds, like Elena and Makken, have already imagined their future careers. They want to be veterinarians, dancers, teachers, doctors, astronauts.
They love what they truly love: horseback riding, sports, cars, books, writing stories, cooking, making paintings, animals.
Ten years olds love birthday parties. They laugh when the pinata breaks and candy spills out all over the ground. They have best friends. They love magic tricks and jokes and silly riddles, pies and puddles and painting.
Jan and I, grandmothers to Makken and Elena, can barely stand to see the pictures of the nineteen children now dead. Tears flow when you imagine the forever broken hearts of these children's grandparents. We say, all of us, over and over, "The world of our grandchildren is such a different world from the one we knew at their age!"
These children trust grown ups. Their teachers and other adults will take care of them.
While our spineless Texas governor sends "thoughts and prayers," he records a pro-gun video for the NRA convention. He blames mental illness, refusing to name the real problem: the easy availability of AR-15s to 18-year-old boys. (Our governor said this killer had no history of mental illness--but stands by his mental illness talking points.)
One man from England, now an American citizen, said that his family and friends in England ask him, "What's wrong with America? How can they let boys buy these terrible weapons on their 18th birthday?"
I don't know yet if Elena and Makken know what happened in Uvalde two days ago. I can't imagine how parents explain this horror to innocent 10-year-olds. I can't imagine having Bad Man Drills at school.
Just a few minutes ago, they believed in Santa Clause! Now they have to believe in Bad Men barging into their schools with assault weapons? I can't believe that there are men who--like Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, and Donald Trump--don't give a damn about ten-year-olds.
Greg Abbott, you actually had the audacity to say you couldn't make it in person to the NRA "because you're busy healing the hearts of the people of Uvalde." Your healing powers are worthless. Nobody wants your thoughts and prayers. What the world wants is a truly strong man who has the courage to do something to stop this uniquely American madness!
"Into each life some rain must fall" came to mind during the rain last night. I looked it up, remembering a song in the 50s, and found that that phrase actually goes all the way back to American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 180 years ago.
In my childhood, I probably never read the actual Longfellow poem, but I knew that phrase. Carlene and Mimi both had books of poems and aphorisms (Leaves of Gold) and I loved reading them--so I may have encountered this line in one of their books. Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots popularized the words of Longfellow, but we've all heard variants of it.
Rain in this poem signifies dark and bleak. By the time he was 35, the poet had lost his first wife to a miscarriage and his second wife to a fire.
Yesterday's tragedy in Texas was the largest and most terrible school shooting in Texas history. Most Texans would never use the analogy of rain (or even storms) to describe horror. We live in a place that knows drought and extreme heat, and rain is something we always welcome. When it rains, especially after weeks of triple-digit days, we meet each other in the streets and stores and comment on the rain: "How about this rain?" strangers say to each other. "Oh, we really needed this!" we say.
When I used to visit Minnesota, people always commented on their gratitude for the sunshine. Texans take sunny days for granted, at least in terms of weather.
In spite of the unthinkable horror of yesterday, it also brought different kinds of rain and showers to me:
Jan sent Lorraine and me a 2014 essay by Roger Angell written at the age of 93. "This Old Man," re-published at his death last week at 101, is about the perils (and pleasures) of aging.
In response, Lorraine wrote these two beautiful lines: "I feel my age more and more. I also feel spurts of renewal, wisdom, connection, wholeness and letting go."
Two gifts of writing felt like invigorating rain, in spite of everything.
My day had begun with a painful flare of sciatica. Freda came to give Luci a walk--another shower of goodness. Luci met Freda with whimpers of pleasure and delight at the prospect of walking together.
Later, Bonnie brought me soup for dinner and stayed to visit. We watched the news of the Uvalde shootings in horror, and we also talked of happier things--like her upcoming trip to Vermont.
What would we do without the showers that come from friendships, every single day?
As I was about to close this piece, I saw a remarkable thing in the news.
As our governor, surrounded by people who share his point of view, was waxing on about the tragedy, sending smug promises of prayers, blaming the murders on mental illness, Beto O'Rourke appeared out of the assembly of people to confront our arrogant supported-by-NRA governor. I couldn't hear all of O-Rourke's words, but it included the word, predictable!
He was called a "son of a bitch" who only wanted to make it political--while the governor and his men doggedly stuck to the mental-illness narrative, avoiding any mention of the easy access to guns. Beto was ordered to leave, but he continued talking to his supporters outside.
What a brilliant courageous expression of his right to freedom of speech--a downpour of truth! In a nation that has more guns than people and more school murders than any other, it's obvious that unless people in power have the courage to name the real causes, these horrendous shootings will (predictably) continue to shatter us all.
Meanwhile, off our governor and his followers will go--to the NRA Convention in Texas. They will yammer on and on about "abortion as murder." But they will do little if anything to protect living children in classrooms.
In this drought of truth-telling, Beto danced us some rain!
Michael Moore said "Americans love their guns more than their children"--anticipating the unanimous response: "Oh no! No way!"
The same ones who refuse to get rid of guns are the ones crying their crocodile tears over abortion. Republicans who decry choice in reproduction issues are doing everything they can to protect the rights of people to carry guns into restaurants and churches and schools.
"It's time, "Moore said, "To get rid of the almighty Second Amendment. The founding fathers who wrote that had no idea what kind of guns we'd have in the 21st century." If the founding fathers were to return to America today they would be appalled at what is happening to our living children who die from gunshots more than any other cause of death.
We are so entrenched in our beliefs about the Constitution that was written before our great-grandparents were born. What if guns were absolutely banned? Moore asks. Unthinkable! say the current party of protection of the Second Amendment above saving our children.
Legislators will send thoughts and prayers and look shocked--the party who refuses to make changes in gun laws. They will vote above all to protect fetuses, even newly fertilized eggs by rape or incest. Many of them voted against appropriating funds to feed babies already born. But banning guns is unthinkable.
"What are we doing?" Chris Murphy asked Congress. Is your job and power more important than traumatizing children and grocery shoppers and church-goes?
I agree with Michael Moore. If we love our children more than anything--which we do--how can we not do everything in our power to stop these senseless massacres?
"When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?" Biden asked today. "Don't tell me we can't have an impact on this carnage!"
