Happy Birthday

Today is my birthday. I’m 51. I don’t look it. I say that with more relief than ego, though anyone who knows me realizes just how relieved my ego actually is. When people who don’t know me, learn my age, they usually ask in amazement, how I look as young as I do. I tell them, honestly, I don’t really know. My parents both looked very young well into their 50’s. My grandmother, at 94, has few wrinkles. I have always taken good care of myself and I truly believe that my children and the love I’m given by my husband contribute heavily to whatever youthful countenance I possess. I stay out of the sun and use good moisturizing products, drink lots of water, exercise, blah, blah, blah.
Plus, I told God, years ago, after all the shit He allowed to happen in my life the least He could do was keep my face and body intact. People say The Almighty doesn’t make deals and probably doesn’t appreciate swearing, but I disagree. He’s used to my mouth and he damn well knows what I’ve been through better than anyone else. He’s doing me a solid, that’s all.
Do you want to know what I believe the real fountain of youth is? Being able to roll with it. Reinvention. The ability to welcome change and live in each and every moment.
On Thanksgiving, one of my sweet cousins, whose two youngest children are around the ages of my two youngest, expressed her bewilderment at the passage of time and how swiftly her children had grown. I saw the same look on her face that I know has played on mine. A mixture of grief and wonderment. Pride in who her children are and sadness in that they are no longer who they were. My heart ached for her – and for myself.
In the next breath we were talking about how we want to shape our lives, our careers from here on out. Life is not stagnant and neither are we. It’s not about youth. It’s about living and being true to oneself in any given moment.
I hear every day about how bad things are in the world. I know all about that. “Those things,” people talk about. The, “I don’t know what I’d do if that happened to me,” things. Lots of them have happened. To me. To those I love. Sometimes when I look back at the events of which I speak, I picture myself doing a tuck and roll through a mine field. I can laugh at some of what took place. Other parts, decades later, make me weep with sadness, frustrated still, about my inability to have prevented or at least controlled one situation or another. I was stupid here, naïve there. Selfish that time? Too young to know better? Who knows? Shit happens and that which does not kill us makes us stronger, right? There are a few times I just wished it had killed me.
And maybe it did. At least a part of me.
What has lived on is some sort of intrinsic strength and belief in the goodness in the universe. Some kind of perpetual stubbornness that is tied up in positivity and light, that, when combined with the twisted sense of humor I inherited from my Scots/Irish grandfather, shines through and twinkles in my eyes – as long as I’ve had enough sleep and use my allergy eye drops.
Look, I’m an old soul. Like many, I’ve been beaten and battered and loved and adored. I give and I take and I try to give again.
Eventually, my looks will fade, I realize. But my face is not who I am.
Neither is 51.
Bring on the years. The moments. The life.
I can take them – and so can my facial products.
Happy Birthday.
To me.

Headlines this week........

Penn State, head football coach Joe Paterno is fired because he didn’t report that he knew Sandusky was raping kids. Students riot in support of, “Joe Pa.”
Seriously?
Children – God only knows how many – were raped by a coach at one of the largest universities in the country. Paterno knew about it but didn’t call the police. He got fired. We’re done. The latter was the natural consequence of the former.
Will it tarnish Joe Pa’s legacy?
Let me make this very clear.
I DON’T CARE.
Nor should anyone else, frankly.
Let me say it again – though it makes my stomach turn violently – CHILDREN WERE RAPED.
Beyond that, beyond seeing that justice is done for those victims and their families, and making damned sure this doesn’t happen ever again, not a thing matters.


Rick Perry speaking during the GOP debate to the three offices of the federal government he’d close as president, forgets one. It was funny. It was human. He was goofy and sorta charming about it. It’s the first thing he’s done that hasn’t made me roll my eyes. I wouldn’t beat him up too badly about it because you know his wife did. Perry is only still in this mess because Mrs. Perry is at him every day.
“I want that (White)house, Rick! Get me that house!”


The GOP race. Is it as big a mess as it looks like? I don’t pay that much attention really. I read articles on line and pieces in the newspaper. Not enough to be well informed, probably, but at least I no longer totally depend exclusively on The View and Dave Letterman’s Top Ten for my politics du jour.
Though I would never underestimate a stupidity circus and the entertainment it provides, it would be so nice if the GOP was not mentioned in the same breath as the Kardashians. I'm a Democrat, so I suppose I shouldn't care. I'm also an American and these guys are starting to look like Curly, Larry and Moe.


Drinking, in any amount raises a woman’s risk of breast cancer significantly. I heard this. I also heard that it still means a woman has a 1 in 36 chance of dying from breast cancer. She has a 1 in, I believe, 3 chance of dying from heart disease, which can be positively impacted by drinking moderate amounts of red wine. Thank you Dr. Goodmorning America for relating the whole story for once. If I hadn’t been informed of the entire story I wouldn’t have stopped drinking. In fact I’d have had to drink more to forget about my increased chance of contracting cancer. Now, in light of the truth, I drink without fear and my heart is happy.

Bil Keane, creator of the Family Circus cartoon, died at 89. What a happy life he lived. What a blessing he and his work were to all of us. The cartoon will carry on through his son. Lucky us.

Two storms collide..........

November 7, 2011

No mountain trip. A storm system moved through Arizona the day before we were supposed to go, leaving ugly white shit covering the higher elevations. Someone said, “But it’ll be so nice and cozy inside and you’ll get to see snow.”
Like I don’t still have nightmares where I’m trapped in the middle of a Buffalo blizzard.
Plus I got sick.
Well, Liv came down with an intestinal bug first – on Thursday. I got it Friday, while she was getting better, leaving me with hope that Saturday would be the day I recovered. I was wrong about that. Let me just say, it’s Monday now and my stomach – and other parts of me - are still making noises I’ve never heard before in nature. Mom got it as well and Mark is fighting it off. Only Brandon, whose immune system is fortified by Lays potato chips and Vitamin Water, has thus far escaped unscathed. We’ve laid the blame for this virus that took us down like dominoes at the feet of the shortest member of the family and, no I don’t mean Kimmy – who, by the way, was ill as well.
Kache. The little two-year-old carrier is the only common denominator. His daddy brought him over on Wednesday for me to watch and wanted to know if I thought Kache had a fever. His torso was warm, but the rest of him was fine and, though his eyes were a little droopy and glassy, he ran around like a wild man as per usual, so I really thought nothing more of it.
Livi crumpled like a cheap suit the very next day. Same feverish symptoms, plus severe aches and pains and all the stomach fun you can think of.
I didn’t put two and two together till the next day, while in the middle of a bout of, “Oh my God, whhyyyyyyy me,” Kimmy called, whining about the exact same thing. She and I put our heads together and figured out it was the kid’s fault.
When we confronted Loran, Kache’s completely healthy mother, her response was to tell us to quit belly-aching (an incredibly poor choice of words if you ask me), then wonder who was going to watch the little disease monger if both his aunts and all his grandparents were out of commission.
Now that we’re all either well or well on our way, nobody’s plotting to dress our little punkin’ up like a girl or shave his mother’s head for revenge. Liv and I are satisfied that we’ve dropped visible weight – after all, one is never more than a good stomach flu away from fitting into something or other in one’s closet that’s been out of reach since the invention of the Klondike Bar. And anyway, who could possibly stay mad at a two and a half foot being with eyes so blue they’re almost purple and whose favorite new saying is, “I not a little baby. I a little angel?”
Mark did remind me throughout all of this that, “If we’d gotten our flu shots,” like he said we should, “we’d never have gotten sick.” I’m not completely sure that’s true, however. How do we know this was the flu? It could be just some virus. I remember a couple of years ago, when Liv got sick. I took her to the doc and she was convinced – even pre-blood test – that it was swine flu. We’d held Loran’s baby shower the day she came down with it, so I had to call every person who’d attended and let them know to go get shots. Only to have Livi’s blood work come back negative for Swine Flu. I really have doubts about the validity of the effectiveness of a flu shot or the medical community’s ability to tell us what is flu and what is some other microbe they can’t quite identify.
That was Friday morning.
Today?
Here’s what I’m thinking. The mountains are still there and will remain, at least through the middle of next August, when Mark will be needing, desperately, to get me out of the desert before I spontaneously combust. Till then I’ll be here, hanging out with Kache. Over at Walgreen’s. In line for my flu shot.

Hiking - day one......

Mark and I took our first hike in the desert yesterday. I love to hike and have been begging him to accompany me for years. It was a difficult prospect as when we were younger there were small children who either did not like to hike (Livi and Loran), were too damn wild to let loose someplace where there were no walls (Kimmy & Matthew), or would slow us down by stopping and discussing all aspects of every piece of nature he observed (Brandon).
It’s different now that we have successfully thrown nearly all of them out of the abode and are working furiously on the ones left. Those still in residence require minimal daily care, can feed themselves and dial 911. That frees Mark and me up a lot.
Getting my husband out for a hike was easier this time, as well, because we are now hiking in the desert. Mark loooooves the desert. I always have too – in a, let’s look at all the beauty from a scenic vista point we can drive to, sort of way. After surviving four Buffalo, NY winters, however, the beauty of the Arizona desert appeals to me in a manner I’d never have believed. The warmth is, of course, a plus, but it goes far beyond that. The land touches something in me that is deeper than my thoughts or anything I can describe. Heading out in the cool stillness of a morning sounded like just what we needed.
We chose Sunday for our first hike, but discounted the power packed by the Margaritas poured at Nando’s Mexican Café on Saturday night. I only had one – and maybe a couple sips of another – which meant that Mark had his plus most of my second and all of his second. He hit the snooze button on the five o’clock alarm so hard Sunday morning that it didn’t freaking dare go off a second time and I never even heard it the first. We rescheduled for Monday.
Monday morning we made it to the trailhead at 7:30. We got up at five and moved like a herd of turtles toward our destination. Once there, though we were jammin’ down that trail. I made Mark go first, of course. His vision is better than mine and I knew he’d be better at keeping an eye on the trail. He and my dad did a lot of desert camping and Javelina hunting back in the days I mentioned above, when taking our kids out into the desert would have turned into a tragedy – for the desert. Anyway, Mark had lots of experience.
After about half an hour I’d grown confident enough to take the lead. I had my hiking boots protecting my feet and my walking stick – made out of a shillelagh – to assist at the steepest points along the path. Plus, it’s a weapon and just right for killing zombies……. Yes, I watched, THE WALKING DEAD, again on Sunday night… and felt dirty afterward…… I figured the shillelagh would come in handy if I did run into a snake. Though, really, what are you supposed to do with it if you come across one? It’s just a stick. It’s not something you can hide behind. I got to thinking (nearly always a mistake) that maybe my particular stick, as it is a little thicker than your usual walking stick, and black with sharp, pointy little nubs sticking out of it, might look like one of those kinds of snakes that are good to have around to keep rattle snakes in line. As not one single rattler showed its diamond-backed head along our way, my confidence in the stick, and my trail vision increased.
We came out into a clearing that another hiker we talked to along the way called, “Garden Valley.” It’s a place that was once occupied by Native Americans. They farmed the land and grazed cattle there, from about 700 A.D. to 1300 A.D. At which point they simply disappeared.
“Nobody knows what happened to them,” our new friend told us.
After the guy left I told Mark it was probably aliens who took them. He gave me a look, just like I knew he would. But, really, there we were in this great big area, flat and sitting between a bunch of mountains in, what back then would have been the middle of absolutely nowhere and these people just disappeared. They went with aliens or…….. Or they frigging moved to Phoenix, just like everyone else……
We moved on.
About 20 minutes later, we were walking through a sandy wash.
“Woah!” Mark’s exclamation wasn’t alarmed – more amazed. I thought maybe he saw an alien. I turned around and followed his gaze to the ground, afraid I would not like what I found there.
“It’s a stick,” I said.
“It’s a snake,” he corrected. “You stepped right over it.”
I didn’t faint, because I had to squint to realize that he was right, it was, indeed, a skinny little, sand colored rat snake, frozen in place in his instinctive abject terror.
“Huh,” I said. “My stick works.”
We’re headed to the mountains for more hiking this weekend. I wonder if the shillelagh works on bears.