Stolen minutes

James Taylor was singing on the television as we were cleaning up from dinner tonight.. ahh, there's a way to get ladies to support public television.  Where do I send the check?   Ladies like me, raised up on JT's sentimental crooning, songs sung with girlfriends with arms slung around each other's shoulders and usually a few beers under our belts.  Then, ten years later singing those same songs quietly in the dark to my dozing babies because the lyrics came automatically in my own foggy brain.  I was weepy tonight and I grabbed Ally as if to dip her, instead cradling her head and shoulders and we stood swaying as I rocked her and sang Sweet Baby James along with the TV.

"Do you remember me singing this song to you?"   Nope.  But she let me hold that portion of her that I can still fit in my arms and she didn't pull away.  I grabbed Olivia as she walked out of the bathroom still fixing her hair and I squeezed them both very hard one in each arm, kissing their foreheads and telling them how much I loved them. A little weird but they're used to the odd grab and kiss so not sure it registered how badly I needed to hold them at that moment.

I blogged in September about Ally and her friends doing a benefit walk for cancer in honor of their friend battling leukemia.  That friend lost her fight this weekend.  Her mom blogged during the last nine months and reflected this weekend that this arduous walk with leukemia took the same amount of time it took to bring M. into the world--a crushing and ironic connection of the dots that felt for me suddenly like I was walking on the floor of a cruel fun house--how does a parent stay upright through all of it?  Her posts were written with raw and sublime honesty so that we could be witness to the purity of her love, the agony of her fear and in the very end those final moments as her daughter slipped peacefully away.  As for M, I mostly knew her through the funny stories I heard from Ally and Chip and then lately   from her own mother's words.  M. was fierce and funny, honest and original, a tomboy and a princess.  She was the quintessential daughter, sugar and salt and fire.

I find retreat these days in being as thoroughly present in my own happy life as I can be in as many minutes of the day as I can remember to be.  It's not easy to always be grateful and present, but it's sort of like yoga in that it can't ever be bad for me to try.  Much of the good stuff in my life is within my control, the rest is simply luck.  What I can control, I can strive to honor.  I can hug my kids and my husband willy nilly and enjoy every minute with them when I'm not yelling at them.  I can express my love whenever I feel it and that may get weird for the occasional stranger who treats me right.   I can take the odd minute each day to enjoy a moment of sun on my face, stroke a baby's cheek in a hallway at work, listen to the birds as I sip my morning coffee and smell the flowers soon to come.  It's a small offering of karma to the universe in the name of a girl who unjustly lost the luxury of spending her own stolen minutes.

So much stuff going on

The early March scene in Madison is upon us, when winter is not really over but we're all kind of getting a bit done with cold weather activities and therefore, the cold weather.  The snow is old and crunchy.   My XC skis lean with a detached mood against the side of the garage, without much appeal to me or me to them I think.   The temperatures will keep popping up into the high thirties from now on and so the occasional flurries or freshening snow here and there won't do much except turn what's left of the snow into a dirty ice pack that will melt and freeze into a composite similar to the surface of Neptune.  So much for the snow.

Minnie didn't know whether to bark at it or pee on it.  She did neither in the end.

Cheese or pepperoni?

The past three years I have played host to hundreds of hungry teenagers at the home forensics tournament at the high school.  Rounding up enough parent donations of fruit and drinks to augment two pieces of pizza and charge 5 bucks without the kids complaining of the value.  It was my calling these three years as it turns out.   And so once again, I spent an exhausting day off (precious this year) waiting on children who are old enough to wait on themselves.  I'm done volunteering for this event as my senior is outta there and my sophomore doesn't see a future in the spoken word.  So much for forensics.

The first year I was freaked out by hundreds of kids talking to the walls.  This year I barely noticed them.

We've welcomed back our Wisconsin 14 but our state is angry and divided, the many now without collective bargaining, a fundamental human right btwubs, against the few on a raging power grab against the middle class to further line pockets that don't even sit in Sconnie pants.  I don't know how all them rich guys can even fit all their money in their pockets with so much fleece in there.

Social media can be both instructive and informative but also repetitive, reactionary, inaccurate and at times in need of spellcheck. Capitol, Capital, capital.  C'mon folks. You're teachers for God's sake!  Facebook has become a sea of armchair postulation as activism.  I'm bored of it as my kids used to say. So much for politics.

It is fun attending the protests and seeing friends even in a crowd of 85,000.
Tony Shalhoub and I exchanged two thumbs up but obviously with my
thumbs up, I couldn't take his picture.  We had a moment though.

My 30th high school reunion in New Orleans is teed up for ten days from now.  They're not the kids I cut my teeth with but they are the ones with whom I stepped out into the world back in 1981.   I'm perhaps a little thicker around the middle than I'd like to be and well, not sure there's anything to be done about that before next Thursday.  But two of my three buddies are headed back with me and that will be just fine to sip a few drinks on the porch of the Columns Hotel as the streetcars vzzzzzz by and their metallic smell mixes with the sweet olive and the night blooming jasmine and whatever other brilliant things might be blooming .  So much for caring about being thin.

Thanks Cath and Nat for kicking me in the ass to get this written.  It needed saying and I couldn't find the words.

A capital post indeed, or is that capitol?

I just can't seem to concoct an interesting post about how the ice in the driveway keeps freezing and melting, freezing and melting so I'll have to turn to the topic of my state recently being sold to the Koch Brothers.

We're all a little freaked out, angry, confused, divided and unsure about the future.  Not exactly fertile ground for a feel-good blog that generally tries to make thoughtful but lighthearted observations about life in Sconnie Nation.  Here I sit.

I got my first hostile comment from a crabby anonymous after my last post, so that was a very exciting new twist after four years of blogging.  I started to consider my response to the comment and then contemplated briefly that while my blog is not a plutocracy like Wisconsin, it is a monarchy and I'm the queen... so I just deleted it.

My kids have returned to school with a renewed energy after boredom had set in with their time off protesting and sleeping at the Capitol and watching reruns of Jersey Shore.  Teachers and kids in catch-up mode is a good thing in the winter doldrums of February and early March.  There's energy in the air and it's unsettling but at least it's something to feel.  Usually, we're deep in our frozen cups by now just hunkering in hopes for spring.

Cookies for the Oscar party sent by beloved NYC uncles to offset the drama in our own lives

Governor Walker is not honorable.  He's got an agenda set by some very rich and connected guys who don't even live in Wisconsin to dismantle the Democratic base by vilifying those in public service, while the bankers and the hedge funders and the wall street guys all roam free.  It's entirely laughable each night as we are greeted by new pieces of mail from non-profits, quality of life programs and public service anythings as they sound their death knells by postcard and letter.   Bike Federation, PBS, Planned Parenthood, farmers markets, kitties, bunnies...basically anything a hippie might like.  Many teachers are on facebook hourly with updates about Walker's dishonorable tactics and I think it helps to keep morale up.  But I wish more of these teachers would spell Capitol correctly and/or refer to the capital of our state.  Bad grammar, even ironically, does not help the cause.

It really shouldn't be a surprise that I immediately tucked into Colin Firth

Work is weird.  Represented and non-represented workers sitting side by side in team rooms, carefully moving their chairs around the elephant in the room.  I was a union member in the school district who paid my dues but didn't pay much attention and that characterizes probably too many people in unions. I feel like maybe there's been some overreaching over the past decade, holding out for raises in pay and benefits even during difficult economic choices.  I hear mumblings even from those sympathetic to unions that it's time for them to stop being so grabby.  But the misplaced vitriol on twitter and in the editorial sections of the paper aimed at teachers, of all people, is crazy.  Public sector unions didn't get us into this global financial mess--that's just smoke covering the real fire.  I want to say to these private sector cry babies in the editorial pages, who have had opportunities and will again to make bonuses and set their own hours and move up the corporate ladder or fire at will, you are free and encouraged to go back to school and become a teacher or a nurse or a cop if the private sector isn't treating you right.  And earn a whopping 65K after twenty years on the job and drive a Ford Fiesta.

In homage to my friend Karen, we played Oscar bingo and of course she was with me so I won

Tonight the Capitol is empty for the first time in almost three weeks.  But the protesters are outside camping for the night and intend to return to the rotunda in the morning.  The fight continues and we are all weary and worried about poor ol' 83 year old Fred Risser.

Collectively we stand

Not much going on here this week, just good old democracy in action.

Whatever the outcome of the governor's harsh and sneakily swift attempt to bust up Wisconsin's unions, this week has been a living, breathing history lesson.  I'm "the man" now so it's been off to work for me every morning.  But as the sun came up Wednesday and I headed out, I whispered in their sleepy ears that watching bad TV all day would be a poor tribute to their teachers and to freedom.  But they were on it long before I said anything, via Facebook and Twitter.  Students at both high schools had amassed virtually on Tuesday night to plan their march to the Capitol.  They arranged rides, assembled at appointed locations, made clever signs and marched peacefully with teachers, friends and strangers to the Capitol to participate in a sit-in, chanting "Kill the Bill!"   Gyros and ice cream and a bit of State Street shopping also turned out to be part of the plan as the unusually warm weather this week has created a festival atmosphere.  Lost mittens and frozen fingers have not been a part of the peaceful demonstrations.

War paint still visible

After two days of protests, their feet are tired and their minds are truly engaged in the world outside the walls of their high school.  They've been watching the news from Cairo.  Even with the distractions of Bieber fever and impending spring training, the power to the people part of democracy has penetrated the teen consciousness.  And Governor Walker doesn't seem like a very democratic guy to them or me this week.

At minimum, they come away knowing the name of Wisconsin's governor and about their right to freely assemble and that's definitely more than I knew about the government when I was their age.

we were just kids

My bedside table reading is Patty Smith's biography, Just Kids, about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe.  Almost frighteningly exposed in the world, she and Mapplethorpe stumbled through late teenage life together in NYC in the early seventies without food, money or places to sleep, but with an abiding dependence on one another in the feral vulnerability and intimacy of stray kittens.  The book is surprisingly detailed given the many years that have passed, maybe because it describes a time in life when we all are still made of clay--malleable, changeable, able to fold all sorts of things in to ourselves--and the experiences of that time remain vivid because they are actually part of us.  And as artists, Smith's and Mapplethorpe's influences on one another were profound and tangible.  I reflect deeply on this as I now face walking in this world without my childhood friend, Karen, who passed away unexpectedly last week.

Travel (never together, as it turned out) was so much a part of our lives and reminscences, so I imagined myself this past week standing alone on a train platform holding a suitcase full of comically poor decisions and thousands of random memories, inside jokes and stories over countless days and years spent together.  What am I supposed to do with this suitcase now?  It's too heavy to carry by myself.  I'm surprised how vulnerable I feel.  There was obviously more dependence for me than I realized and I think she was in touch with that fact more than I was. She was an authority about me.  She knew me long before my internal Captain Picard issued the order for shields up.   She was the friend that sat with me the night before my wedding and asked the bold best-friend question, "...are you sure?" (I was), she was the friend who didn't pooh-pooh my insecurities and without judgment or drama told me to get over myself lots of times, she was the friend who held my parents accountable for their crap because she was there, too.  In summary, she was one of those friends who probably cared more about me than I care to care about myself.

I was the jester over our life together and I loved the sport of undoing her against her will.   I would pepper her like a pitching machine on its highest setting, throwing jokey balls relentlessly until she succumbed to my comedic strong arm.  She would tell me to stop and try to get us back on track with whatever we were doing, or discussing, but I was relentless because it was simply fun to make her dissolve into laughter.  We spent thousands of hours alone together for good or bad of the universe.  We ate our weights in raw cookie dough and tore up the Franklin Institute more than any two kids in Philadelphia.  As young adults we crossed paths lots and as middle-agers settled a thousand miles away from each other, we fell into the regular calls and occasional visits of adulthood.  There was certainly no danger of losing touch and it was comforting just knowing she was out there. And if there is tangible proof of her artistry in my life, it is the tapestry of friends she crafted thirty years ago, one that I still carry with me today.

What is so powerful about childhood friendship?  I have no other explanation than it has got to be love. Clearly Facebook appreciates that power and has built an empire upon it.  Is it imprinting when the brain and the heart are uncluttered? Or is it the access to a powerful filter, which gets gummed up as we age, that bypasses all the insecurity and duty and "shoulds" and bullshit that constitute too many relationships in adulthood and instead sifts and sorts for the very essence of real connection with another person?  Kids zero in efficiently, looking past failings and imperfections and even logic if it feels right.  I think some childhood friendships, romances even, are matches-made-in-heaven that get broken by mere physical distance or a perception that diverging paths means having to say goodbye.  Karen and I obviously chose to reject the conventional drifting our separate ways, but we've reached a fork in the road abruptly and I wasn't prepared.  I miss her terribly.  I'll be standing here awhile trying to figure out which way to go without her.  

Agreements

otto's

Well, it's a blizzard.  Might as well blog it out.  So far I'm the only one still scheduled to leave the house tomorrow.  Madison schools and unbelievably the University are already closed.

different agreements are brokered at otto's...usually involving cosmos

So I've been doing a little emotional growth lately, what the hell, it's winter.  A group of roughly ten of us have met weekly for a month working together through the principles outlined in an almost too obvious self-help book called The Four Agreements.  I was dubious at first.  Really, I paid ten bucks and ventured out into the frigid night to discuss "doing my best"?  But the book has taken on a load of meaning for me both personally and professionally under the unassuming guidance of a man who felt the the four agreements held so many answers for him he wanted to share it and learn from others.  At first glance it seems simple enough to follow the four agreements: be impeccable with your word, don't take things personally, don't make assumptions and do your best.   The concepts are simple, but after a lot of thought and discussion in our group it feels to me that putting them into consistent practice takes time and thoughtful endeavor.

night falls on our neighborhood as the wind picks up tonight

I've been working on not taking things personally for a few years now.  My failing estrogen has made it a pretty dangerous slide into a carefree attitude about what others think of me, so I would say middle age has nudged this agreement into practice pretty seamlessly.  Being impeccable with my word, however, that's going to take some work.  I still do a lot of talking before thinking and as Sipowicz would reflect, I still get myself jammed up on occasion.  This agreement unfortunately bears monitoring along with that of not making assumptions...I do so enjoy judging others borne out of assumptions about motives and general characters flaws.  It will take real spiritual digging on my part to put this agreement into action.

my locust tree stands firmly at the ready

Finally, to do my best but not more than my best.  That means not feeling guilty for pushing back my chair for a long chin-wag with my office mate, reading People instead of my book before bed and swinging through McDonalds drive-thru to pick up dinner for the fam every once in awhile.  That's my best and it's better than good.

Northwoods dream



You can't beat home for a good vista

 We hopped into the car at 5am Saturday and drove north in darkness for three hours toward Minocqua, WI.  We were greeted by our realtor, a great gal with high hair and a big heart at the gas station at the corner of 51 and K.  She jumped out of her car with open arms and an embrace at our first meeting…familiar and friendly in contrast to Madison’s smiling cool and careful.   She brought her husband to help read the GPS and shovel us in to the six properties we arranged to see.  Turns out my peeps are up nort'.  What’s the Norwegian word for “mensch”?

How I wished this could have been a lager at lunch

Helmet table by the trail map.  Drain one or two and it's off to the next bar en route. Sure, feels totally safe.

Our search for a lake house has begun.  I’ve wrestled with location, location, location for a couple of years and come to the conclusion that a house in the middle of East Jabip, cheap and peaceful as it might be, is not where I want to spend my weekends and summer vacations.   Packing groceries and toilet paper for a trip to the lake house is not relaxing.  It’s camping.  And so the busy and developed Northwoods town of Minocqua will serve as anchor for our search.  I’ve let the lake house move into the place in my heart long reserved for my Jersey shore house--no longer a practical goal.  Too far and too beastly a drive.  I’m over it. Snooki, Pauly D and the gang in Seaside Heights will have to fill any remaining void.

Snowmobilers in January : Boaters in ___________

Winter sports are about as popular as summer sports in northern Wisconsin.  The Thirsty Whale had a full and happy bar full of snowmobilers and had it not been for the helmet table and jumpsuits it would have been hard to distinguish the patrons from those on a summer Saturday.   We ate lunch, a Wisconsin po’boy made with fried perch, overlooking Lake Minocqua as snowmobiles zoomed by at top speeds. 

As one would suspect, I now want a snowmobile.

I asked the realtor if these were rentals, to which she gently explained as one might to a child
that no, these were actually driven to and parked at the restaurant.  Newbie miscalculation.

In continuous prep for my northwoods recreational life, I'm working on my cross-country skiing.  Today I set out for one rigorous loop of the golf course, Pleasant View, which is aptly named.  There are some pleasant views atop hills that are a bit tough to get on top of in golf shoes, let alone skis.  My XC skiing is improving especially on the downhills which have kicked my ass until now. All credit goes to my friends Amy and Ann for impressing upon me the need to lean forward on the fronts of my feet and also for acknowledging that free boot heels feel like skiing on spaghetti noodles.  Only one topple today while standing still, as is customary of my style.  I’ve just got to keep moving.