Just wanted to let you all know I finished my eight rounds of chemo yesterday and I’m happy about it, of course, (Yay!) but I won’t know what comes next for a couple of weeks. Will the MRI show no cancer? If it does, will I still need surgery? If it shows a remaining spot of tumor how extensive will the surgery be? How soon before my hair grows back? Will my blood sugar go back to normal? Will my magnesium levels rise enough so I don’t have to take the dreaded diarrhea-inducing supplements? What will ‘normal’ feel like?

On top of that, I’m being weaned off of the steroids I’ve been taking after my second bout with temporal arteritis. I hope my energy levels aren’t all based on the artificial high from the steroids. I like how I’m feeling now, and I’m going to try and maintain it.

And on top of all of that, I’m nervous about the flu going around. It’s reaching near-epidemic rates in some areas (not ours at the moment, though the hospital staff tells me it’s pretty bad there), and I’m particularly vulnerable now, with my age and my condition. So, even though I’ve had the flu shot, I’m staying away from people as much as possible, and with our foul winter weather, that means I’m staying indoors. Too much. I’m not getting enough exercise and I’m getting bored.

I binge-watched all seven seasons of “Gilmore Girls”, that’s how bored I was, but I wanted something happy. I found some of it too predictable and irritating and some of it not quite wonderful, but good.

Now I’m watching “The Pitt”, a show I’d been avoiding because it’s a hospital setting and I’ve really had enough of that. More gore than I would like, but I’ve come to love it and Noah Wyle and all of the wonderful characters. It’s like the grown-up version of “Grey’s Anatomy”.

And the new season of “Shrinking” is maybe even better than the last. (I’m avoiding anything with violence this year. There’s enough of that in the news.)

But I love that I’m done with chemo. It’ll be interesting to see if I really had ‘chemo brain’ or if this is how it is now, and me with no excuses! I’ll be working on my writing, getting busy with those books I keep saying I’m going to finish, and of course I’ll still be trying to save the world, so stay with me, okay? Maybe we can do that last part together.

Constant Commoner revolves around my thoughts as a woman who has aged and grown and learned by a process that feels miraculous considering I have no formal education or unique abilities. We the people are all commoners. We believe based on our own past and our own feelings. We choose a path we can live with and if we’re lucky we get to share our lives with people who care, who understand.

That’s what I aim to do here. I want to build a community where anyone can come and sit on our porch and grow along with the rest of us.

***You can join the paying ranks (Thank you, paying ranks!) through Substack below, or you can support my work by tipping any amount at any time at Ko-Fi or at Paypal. Much appreciated!

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I awoke from a nap the afternoon of this Christmas Eve day craving cheesecake. It was just after three and I knew Aldi, a little more than a half mile away, would close at four. As I lay there weighing my choices—stay abed or dress for the Up North outdoors—I had to laugh. Really? Cheesecake? It’s not a Christmas Eve tradition. Not really. But maybe that’s the point.

I thought about what it would feel like if I let four o’clock get past me without going out for cheesecake. How miffed I would be when night fell and it became ‘Christmas Eve’ and I had craved cheesecake without indulging.

When I absolutely had the chance.

I was already grabbing socks out of my drawer, thinking about what else I might like for Christmas Eve—chips, dip, maybe some of Aldi’s famous chicken salad—gauging how much time I’d have to shop. Because—I laughed again—this would be a Christmas Eve like no other. Not in my entire lifetime.

I would be alone for Christmas Eve. For the first time ever.

I mean, ever.

It’s a milestone I never expected, something I’d never anticipated, but here I am, at my desk, writing about it, because it feels odd and when something feels odd I often have to write it out in order to understand what it means to me.

So I bought four slices of cheesecake, two New York style and two Strawberry Swirl. (Because if I’d bought a whole cheesecake I would have eaten a whole cheesecake. And yes, I did note those calories.) And when that night came, that Christmas Eve night, I almost forgot to eat any of it!

I was getting ready to turn out the lights when I remembered, and because I’d made such an effort to get it I stopped everything, ignored my chemo exhaustion, that feeling that comes over me with a rush, causing me to hurry into my bed before I collapse—which I never actually do—and ate a few insanely delicious bites of Strawberry Swirl cheesecake while standing over the sink.

Before that, on this Christmas Eve I watched a silly movie called ‘Hope Springs’, only because it starred the beautiful Colin Firth. It occurred to me as I watched it that Colin has made some dreadful movies—including, and you may disagree, ‘Mama Mia’ and ‘Mama Mia, Here We Go Again’, in which the male protagonists, including the beauteous Colin, come off as just clownish in nearly every scene.

But his “The King’s Speech” has more than made up for it. A perfect movie, which, silly me, I should have chosen instead.

I guess I wanted a mindless romance as an antidote to being alone on Christmas Eve, and I got one. I stayed to the end, even though I sensed from the start that the character, also named Colin, would never have chosen either Heather Graham or Minnie Driver as his true mate.

And if any of them had any sense, they never would have chosen this movie after reading that stupid script.

Because the night was still young, I went from ‘Hope Springs’ to ‘Notting Hill’, which I’d seen before, and really should have known better here, too. Let’s just say it didn’t play well the second time. The plot—an American movie star in her absolute prime, bringing in millions per film, falls in love with a practically impoverished British bookseller who can barely get a word out, being so in awe and all—never made sense and never will. It spells disaster right from the start. Instead of that sappy ending, if there is any justice, I predict divorce ahead. And not any too soon.

What fascinated me most about ‘Notting Hill’ was how mean the cameraman was to Julia Roberts. At times she did look like a beautiful movie star, but too often she looked, well—odd. Her nose, still perky at the beginning, grew longer as the story went on. Her mouth, already wide, grew wider. Weirdly wider. By the end she looked tired, like she didn’t want to be in that movie anymore, let alone at Notting Hill. And since Hugh Grant, even then, in 1999, had already lost his looks, this was another match that was never going to work.

Or maybe it was just that I was alone on Christmas Eve and being the in-house movie critic when possibly everyone else was being of good cheer felt perversely satisfying.

I admit I was nervous going into this Christmas Eve. In the morning, when the day ahead seemed long and the ‘eve’ even longer, I remembered Christmas Eves past—big family gatherings, Candlelight services, food preparation, last minute shopping, dressing for the occasion—and an unwelcome sting of sadness came over me.

It hit me in the stomach when I thought of all those who had once been there with me and were now gone from my life forever. People I dearly loved and still do. Did I want those Christmas Eves back? I’m shocked that I didn’t. Did I want those people back? Most of them, yes. But all at once?

No.

So I settled in and turned myself over to a Christmas Eve that felt right for me at a time when it was as much as I could handle. Or wanted to. Tradition be hanged.

I slept well.

And when Christmas breakfast rolled around, I remembered the cheesecake.

Find me at Writer Everlasting

I was surprised and happy to see CBS Sunday Morning’s segment on Wordle. (See video at the end.) It’s no secret that we Wordle addicts are too often looked down on, as if finding a five-letter word in six tries is not exactly Olympics material. What’s the big deal? Stop the damned bragging!

For those of us who love words and think we know a lot of them, how hard could it be to come up with a five letter word in six tries? Well, it’s hard. Often it’s not just hard, it’s near impossible, and that’s the challenge.

Thanks to that diabolical crew at Wordle, those five letters can repeat, as in ‘eerie’ or ‘sassy’. (It’s true. See photo above.) Or four of the five letters can be the same, but either the first or last letter is different. As in ‘ditch’, ‘hitch’, ‘witch’, ‘bitch’… (No, they wouldn’t use ‘bitch’. But maybe I would.)

After all this time playing and still maintaining a 99% win rate (see below), I’m more than a casual Wordle player. I do it first thing in the morning, with my first cup of coffee, and I take it seriously enough that I keep track of the words and how I got there. Here, for example, is the page from January 18 to the 22nd. (The boxed letters are where they belong in the word. The underlined letters are in the word but not in the right spots.)

You’ll see on the 18th that I got nothing in my first two words. Not a single letter! (Serves me right for using words with only one vowel each. That’s a big no-no in Wordle World.)

So no letters. That’s a bad thing, right? Well, not necessarily. Now I know which letters I can’t use. Ten whole letters I can’t use. It means my word is in among the remaining 16, and I’ve used up two vowels. My word almost certainly includes an O, an E, or a U, if not more than one. So I tried ‘stove’. Aagh! One letter off!

It could have been ‘stone’. It could have been ‘store’. (Note the words on the 22nd. That’s how that works.) Good thing I didn’t think of them, and thought of ‘stole’, instead. So I got it in four tries. Not bad. In fact, if you look at my stats below, you’ll see most of my wins are four-try wins. I don’t know if that’s average, but any win is a win while I’m trying to keep my 99 percent. (Wish it was still 100. Now it never will be. Forevermore a 99 percenter. Hopefully.)

Notice a few things here: I’ve only guessed it on the first try once. I’ve guessed it on the second try 40 times—And I do mean ‘guess’ in the true sense of the word. I’ve squeaked by with six tries 42 times. (I’ve only lost a few, but they’re painful so I don’t keep count.)

It says my ‘current streak’ is 17. That’s not 17 wins before a loss, it means 17 tries in a row. If I miss a day, and I have a few times, the streak counter goes back to one. I marvel that I kept a streak going 80 days in a row, but it’s nothing to brag about. It’s the words that count in Wordle.

Some of you are already bored with this, and that’s okay. It’s not for everyone, though I suspect most writers are drawn to it. Anyone who works with words would have to find it irresistible. (I’ll ask over at Writer Everlasting, where I’m going to cross-post a variation of this. Sorry for the repeat if you subscribe to both.)

Over at Facebook, many of us post our Wordle scores nearly every day. We talk about it without giving the word away, and gripe when the word is nuts— and especially when we lose. We feel a camaraderie because we’re Wordle nerds and we love it. There’s a bond there.

Who knew what an impact a simple game of trying to guess a five-letter word could make? Certainly not software engineer Josh Wardel, who invented the game as a diversion for his partner during the COVID lockdown. He sold the rights to the New York Times in 2022, marveling at the popularity but no doubt happy to be out from under the constant pressure to keep it going. (Happier still about the money, I’m guessing, purported to be in seven figures.)

Yesterday ‘Sunday Morning’ got into it, legitimizing Wordle, giving it some glory, so I’m here telling the world, “Me too!” I’m proud to be a Wordle nerd. I say that because there are those people who gripe when we post our Wordle scores, letting us know that nobody cares.

Except they do. WE do. We care. Millions of us.

Are you with us? No judgement if you’re not, but why the heck not??

Thank you for your support, paid or unpaid. If you can see your way to a paid subscription, it helps to keep this place going. Thank you! If you want to support my work in other ways, you can donate any amount at any time at Ko-Fi or at Paypal. I’m so glad you’re here!

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Hi CC friends. I published a piece over at my other Substack, Writer Everlasting, this morning and I thought about cross-posting it here, but I decided to link to it instead. That way those of you who have never visited over there might want to take a look around. I love both of my spaces and the people who come to visit. I love that some of you are one and the same—you’ve subscribed to both! And I thank you!

I’ve been thinking lately about how often I tend to search out programs that show creative people at work. I love cooking shows—too many to list here—but I really love shows like The Great Pottery Throwdown, Landscape Artist of the Year, Portrait Artist of the Year, The Voice, and even Bob Ross. I want to see how their minds work and I’m almost always in awe of their talent. How do they do it? I don’t have an answer to that at the end any more than I did at the beginning, but I find such satisfaction in watching them do the thing they love, not necessarily calling it ‘work’ but working at it until they think they’ve got it right.

This entire PBS series, Craft in America, starting way back in 2007, is like creative work on steroids. As I was watching it, I was already thinking, ‘I’m going to write about this!’ But I put it off because everything I was feeling about it was just too overwhelming. Watching those creative artisans at work is simply breathtaking.

Well, instead of going on about it, how about I just show you what I mean? Here it is. I hope it will inspire you to watch these people at work, and then maybe go on to do your own thing.

And of course the comment section is open over there, as well as here. We’ve already started a conversation, so come on over and join in!

Writer Everlasting

The Absolute Need for Art and Craft

I’ve been binge-watching Craft in America on PBS Passport (also available on YouTube) and as much as I’m enjoying the heck out of it, it finally hit me that a big part of my delight at finding this not-so-hidden treasure—and why I can spend so many guilt-free hours watching it—is becau…

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2 years ago · 7 likes · 6 comments · Ramona Grigg

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​Here it is April 1, and I totally missed writing anything for Women’s History Month. It ended yesterday. If I hadn’t procrastinated, I could have published this before midnight, and it would have been legit.

But really—women still have a history, right?

The theme this year was ‘Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories’. I love that! And I missed it.

I love all of the women pictured above. I love women who have achieved and who give back. Most of my inspiration comes from women and, in a climate like this one, which has been going on for countless millennia, when one succeeds we all benefit.

The National Women’s History Alliance describes their goal this way:

Throughout 2023, the NWHA will encourage recognition of women, past and present, who have been active in all forms of media and storytelling including print, radio, TV, stage, screen, blogs, podcasts, and more. The timely theme honors women in every community who have devoted their lives and talents to producing art, pursuing truth, and reflecting the human condition decade after decade.

From the earliest storytellers through pioneering journalists, our experiences have been captured by a wide variety of artists and teachers.  These include authors, songwriters, scholars, playwrights, performers, and grandmothers throughout time. Women have long been instrumental in passing on our heritage in word and in print to communicate the lessons of those who came before us. Women’s stories, and the larger human story, expand our understanding and strengthen our connections with each other.

I see the word ‘blogs’ in there, I sometimes tell stories, and it does say ‘2023’ and not just ‘March’, so I feel included.

Many of us don’t. And we should.

From the time I gave up my job as a long-distance telephone operator to become a housewife at 18 and a mother at 19, I’ve always felt that taint—as if those two roles would never be enough. Any woman could do it, and most didn’t want to. That was the prevailing notion.

I must have felt it, too. As the kids grew older, I ventured into real estate, became a paraprofessional at a high school, and had a stint as an executive secretary, not because I had any real skills but because the woman who hired me liked having me around. (Biggest perk: I got to type on an IBM Selectric. I wrote stories on it when nobody was looking.)

I became a writer through more flukes. I asked and they let me. I wrote for newspapers and magazines—articles and columns—and ended up teaching creative writing and lecturing at conferences. I met people with big names in Michigan and outside. I won a few awards. Me! I loved every bit of it.

I volunteered and was on the local library board, the historical commission, was an elected Democratic delegate, and was at one time the president of a hundred-year-old professional writers’ organization in Detroit.

But they were peripheral to my real job—that of housewife and mother. They both came first. My choice.

I dipped into the arts—watercolor, oils, acrylics, pottery, macrame, crochet, crewel embroidery—and I could do all of them, including writing, at home.

My longest lasting title is ‘housewife’. The second longest is ‘mother’. I’m a widow now so am I still a housewife? Maybe not. But I’ll be a mother forever. And a grandmother. My three grandchildren are the lights of my life and spending time with them feels like such a privilege.

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Most women who are housewives and mothers have lives outside their homes. We all dream and grow and need other outlets. That’s normal. That’s healthy. We can be clever and interesting and unique and still be that person whose main function is to take care of a home and family.

We’re not giving up our freedom, we’re making a lifestyle choice. Like those ‘successful’ women whose arcs take them in other directions, we can find satisfaction in what we do and where we do it. If we’re doing it at home who’s to say we’re not contributing? If I worked a drudge job I hated, what would be my contribution?

After so many years of juggling these many parts of me, I know where I fit in. I’m a woman, I’m a Mom and a Nana, I’m a Midwesterner, I’m a high school graduate with a few college credits (but not enough to give me any standing), I’m a widow, I’m old, I’m a human rights advocate, and I’m a writer.

I love spending most of my time in the home I’ve established and decorated to my liking, that home that spells comfort to me and is truly where I belong. But those other things are what make me, too.

If I were to start again—adulting at a more reasonable age, maybe—I can’t imagine that my trajectory would have gone any other way. The balance was just right for me. For me.

My mother and my grandmother kept spotless houses. Though they were fascinating women who could keep me enthralled, their mission in life was to combat the scourge of dust and cobwebs and grease. They were proud of their homes and felt they’d accomplished something grand if at the end of the day everything was polished and in its place. (At my grandmother’s we would pretend we were looking for dust, just to irk her.)

I don’t carry that gene. I’ve been known to leave the vacuum cleaner in the living room for days, finding ever so much else to do that’s far more interesting. Once, my husband came into the room, looked at the ever-present vacuum and said, “Still here, huh? Maybe it takes coins…”.

I miss his droll humor. Leaving the vacuum in the living room isn’t nearly as much fun anymore.

(And before you go on a rant about my husband not doing it himself, he did. He cooked, too. The one thing he couldn’t do is change a diaper, but those days are long past. They gave me stories, though, and he never lived it down. I love how the young dads are aghast at that. It gives me hope.)

In this same vein—sort of:

Writer Everlasting

My Marabel Morgan Story is Getting Readers Again and I Don't Know Why.

I first published this story on my now-defunct political blog, Ramona’sVoices long, long ago (In 2012). Then I published it again on Medium in 2018. So it’s been around for a while, mainly languishing—like Marabel might, except she would be doing it in a tub filled with aromatic bubbles in her rose-pink bath. She would be doing it at a precise time, jus…

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4 years ago · 8 likes · 7 comments · Ramona Grigg

Constant Commoner

Listen to the Sisters

When I was growing up in the forties and fifties there weren’t many female role models in our textbooks. I’ve been pondering on this for a while, and the only one I can remember is Madame Curie, the physicist/chemist who, our textbooks said, “worked alongside her husband…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · 6 comments · Ramona Grigg

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So this happened today:

As I was scrolling, I don’t even remember where, I found a clip I couldn’t get past: a street musician was dancing in a beautiful courtyard, playing a black violin; silently, as it happened, since I had the sound turned off, but one look at his movements told me I needed to watch and listen.

I turned up the sound.

OMG. I wanted it to go on and on. It reminded me of that time in Old Town Albuquerque years ago, when a Peruvian musician playing a pan flute wrung me out like a damp dishrag, sending me to the nearby women’s restroom, where I sat in a stall and sobbed. I couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t admit to the other women trying to console me when I finally came out that it was music–just music–that did this to me.

This is the group and this is the very song that did me in. This is the only video I could find. It’s someone else’s taping and it’s not the greatest but it gives you an idea.

Live, gorgeous, spontaneous music—meaning music I just come across—will do that to me.

So back to what originally brought me to write this: This piece.
Enjoy!

So of course, my first thought, as I’m watching and listening and blubbering and blowing my nose, is, who is this? Who are they?

It didn’t say, so I went looking for them myself. I Googled ‘violin buskers street musicians’ and found a link to the top 10 talented violin street performers on YouTube. Their picture was there, but not their names.

What? They have to have names.

I scrolled through the comments and someone just casually mentioned who they are. They’re The Trouble Notes and they’re not just buskers, though they do like to do street performances. They travel all across Europe and do concert tours, as well. And I feel as if I’ve discovered them and now I’m sharing them with you.

There’s something about street performances that seem real and spontaneous and magical, and I fear my life’s mission is to find the very best of them, which isn’t hard to do. I could spend days moving from one performance to another, and if anyone ever tells you YouTube isn’t addictive, they’re damned liars.

But before I end this, I have to share my favorite of all-time favorites. I’m guessing I’ve watched it more than 50 times, and I’ll bet you’ve seen it, too. It’s my go-to when I need this particular kind of lift. It is indeed an Ode to Joy:

So there you are. Please tell me all of these hit you the same way and you’re glad you found this on a gloomy Monday morning when you weren’t expecting this kind of enchantment at all.

If you did and you’re feeling it, we’ll always be friends.

If you didn’t, you might want to keep it to yourself. 😉

I had an appointment with someone (I won’t say who) and she asked me how I was doing with my grieving. As we talked, she mentioned a book she said had helped her, and as she described it, I realized it was a religious book. When I told her I was an atheist, she was visibly shocked. I mean visibly.

I could see the thoughts going through her head: How could she have known me this long and not sense that I was a heathen? How could I not believe in God?

I get that a lot.

So let me assure anyone else who is now visibly shocked: I’m still the person you thought I was before you found this out. I grew up going to church, I’ve been baptized and confirmed, I went to Lutheran School for a couple of years, and I was married in the Lutheran Church. Two of my three children were baptized. (The youngest wasn’t.) For most of those years I knew in my heart I wasn’t a believer, but I went along. I loved some of the rituals, and I love some parts of the bible, but not in the sense that I find them sacred.

I loved certain parts of the rituals and the sense of community—when it all was going well. I loved certain members of the community and still think of many of them fondly. They were good people.

I loved the Christmas Eve candlelight services filled with lots of singing and good will and very little sermonizing.

But it wasn’t enough to keep me from bowing out.

One question this friend asked made me sort of giggle afterwards: “But what do you do about Christmas?”

So here’s my answer, adapted from a piece I wrote several years ago, when Bill O’Reilly first declared his phony War on Christmas:

I say “Merry Christmas” quite a bit at Christmas time.  I’ve been saying “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays” ever since I could say the words, which, I’m guessing, was around December 1939, when I was just over two years old.  Sometimes I say, “Have a great holiday!” without mentioning which holiday I mean when I say that.  There are times when I say, “Happy New Year!”, forgetting to say, “Merry Christmas”, even though it may be several days before Christmas.  I can’t help it.  It just comes out.

It’s Christmas!  Millions of us love this season.  We look forward to it, we read about it, we sing about it, we who are parents can’t wait to experience it with our children.  We plan, we decorate, we bake, we go shopping, we party.  We find a million different excuses to hug each other.  We hang mistletoe just so we can kiss under it.

We fill food baskets and donate money because it’s Christmas and there is nothing sadder than the thought of someone not enjoying the holidays.  Our happiness is so acute we smile at perfect strangers and wish them good tidings.  Joy, my friends, is busting out all over.

Many of us only go into a church at Christmas time; some of us not at all.  I love the story of the baby Jesus.  I love Christmas carols. (Last night I watched the St. Olaf Choir Christmas Concert from Norway on PBS.  It was beautiful–a mix of the sacred and the secular–-like Christmas.) I love the happy faces.  The candles.  Nice.  All nice.

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But let’s talk about Christmas tradition:

December 25 coincides with the Winter Solstice, a pagan celebration, and not with the actual birthdate of Jesus, which, as with much of Jesus’ life, is a mystery.

The Christmas song “O Tannenbaum” was based on a 16th century tune, put to secular lyrics in 1824.

Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” in 1843. While it ends with, “God bless us, every one!”, it’s a morality tale about the rich holding terrible power over the poor.

Irving Berlin, a Jewish songwriter, wrote “White Christmas” in the late 1930s and it became the most popular Christmas song of all time.

Charles Schultz’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was released in 1965 and has been shown every year since. What we remember most is that sad, sad Christmas tree.

We love “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman” and “Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas”.  We love red and green and silver and gold.  We love twinkly lights and Santa and snowmen.  And elves.  We love elves.  WE LOVE CHRISTMAS!

And to those of you who still insist there’s a War on Christmas, you’re spoiling it for us.

It takes all the fun out of it when you think you get to decide for us how we’re supposed to spend Christmas.  For you, Jesus is the reason for the season. Amen to that, and just so you know, I love Matthew’s version of the Christmas story. I have a beautiful creche made up of Italianate figures, and angels decorate my tables and my shelves.

I’m not completely devoid of the Christian Christmas spirit. But for the rest of us, it’s a wonderful, happy holiday, open to so many interpretations you could get the idea it’s mainly about peace on Earth, goodwill toward mankind.

If Christmas means Christ to you, there is no better time than the Yuletide to celebrate him. But you simply cannot butt into our celebrations, Grinch-like, throwing wet blankets all over our happy days.  If there is a war on Christmas, it’s a one-sided battle and it’s coming from you. You can have it. For me, it’s the happiest, happiest time of the year. I feel love in the air and I plan on enjoying every minute of it.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, and a joyous New Year

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Set scene: It’s the Newport Folk Festival, July 2022. After nine years away from the spotlight and an astonishing 53 years after the last time she performed at the Festival, Joni Mitchell, in a surprise appearance, is back on their stage. She’s singing ‘Both Sides Now’, her signature piece, a grueling song not for the faint of heart, but she wrote it, after all, and it’s expected. She begins to sing, unsure and halting at first, as if this might not be a good idea.

She’s 78 years old now. She sits rather than stands, which compresses her chest and her diaphragm. It’ll be much harder to sing in that position and she knows it. She’s drumming her fingers on the chair arms, maybe to keep time with the music, maybe to ease her anxiety. I’m nervous just watching her.

As we age our voices change. They deepen and wobble. It’s rare that you can’t recognize an old person simply by hearing them speak. Our vocal cords lose elasticity and the smooth ride along them becomes bumpy and full of hazards. It’s especially hard for those who sing. The very act of singing abuses vocal cords. They wear out fast.

Singers who are famous understand and dread the irony: they’re accelerating the end of their careers by doing the very thing they’re compelled by their own creative juices to do. Many of them stop before their voices begin to quake and go off key, but, for some, stopping would be like cutting off a life source. Quitting is unthinkable.

I remember a middle-aged Frank Sinatra sneering at older singers, bragging that he’d know when to quit and he’d quit before he lost that easy style, that perfect pitch, whatever it is that made the magic. He didn’t quit. And he still made magic.

Glen Campbell was a victim of Alzheimer’s and it was painful to watch as his memory diminished, making him a sad imitation of himself. But something amazing happened: He didn’t lose his voice. He remembered the tune, knew when to breathe, knew how intonation would affect his audiences. He went on to give concerts until the very end.

The same thing is happening to Tony Bennett, also diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He still has that amazing voice. He still remembers the words. It’s as if their brains know to protect that one glorious part, preserving the last vestige of creative mastery, allowing that person to still stand out from all the others.

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It’s not unusual for me to cry when I hear my favorite singers, old now, trying to bring back the magic, their breathless voices trembling and off-key. The control may be gone but the fire in them still burns. They’re up there giving it their all. For me and for them. Their dedication is so brave, their need so acute, it becomes an honor to watch them.

Seventy-eight-year-old Joni Mitchell did that the other day at the Newport Folk Festival, where, after many years of performing offstage only, after a brain aneurysm in 2015, and more than a half-century after she last performed at the festival, she did an entire set, wowing and enchanting a lucky audience grateful to have been a part of it.

I heard about it yesterday morning, then watched it myself, blubbering through almost every minute of it, wondering why it affected me so viscerally. I’m still not sure, but the rest of this is me trying to sort it out.

It was as if I were watching a rebirth; an unexpected, well-deserved milestone in a life lived long. But the real tears flowed as I watched the younger women up there, Brandi Carlile, Wynonna Judd and the others—hesitant at first and ready with their microphones in case Joni needed help—relax and revel in their friend’s triumph. With each successful note they silently wept, they silently cheered, they filled the air with their own energy, mixing it with hers, and they were together, bonded forever in that moment.

Could she have done it alone on that stage? Maybe. But if she had been alone, I would have felt her vulnerability and every note would have made me anxious. My own worry for her would have ruined it. Will she get through it? I don’t want to look…

But she wasn’t alone. She was surrounded by friends, by love, by the comfort of knowing she couldn’t fail. Nobody, including the audience, cared about the perfection of it; she was the essence. She held the power. And, as you can see in the video, before long she was immersed and nothing else mattered but that she, Joni Mitchell, was up there and she was singing.

There’s a reason we cherish our national treasures in human form: It’s because, while their artistry, their talent, their awesome presence, is truly a gift they’re not required to share, they reward us by opening themselves up and letting us in.

We don’t know them. Not really. But they know us. It’s enough that we come away holding on to something they’ve decided to give. Our lives would be emptier without them.

Update: A FB friend shared this and I have to share it, too. The Magdalene Laundries, 1994.

(Cross-posted at Writer Everlasting, my sister newsletter for writers)

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This is our Independence Day. Are we feeling it? Maybe not at the moment. That word ‘independence’ is fraught with meaning. But we’re a feisty bunch. We’ve come through a lot together and we’re still here.

Key word: Together.

Reflecting on the Fourth of July

 "The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." ~ Samuel Adams

Somewhere along the way we stopped calling our most popular summer holiday "Independence Day" and went simply with "The Fourth of July".  We love our Red, White and Blue, and this is supposed to be the day we pull out all the stops.  Flags flying everywhere, the stars and stripes adorning everything from porches to paper plates to Uncle Sam hats to the holiday advertising pages of every newspaper.  Flags dressing floats and bicycles and baby carriages in every parade in every little town in America.  We love this day--the day to recognize and remember our liberty, our exceptionalism, our prosperity. 

Just this one day. Then we go back to reality. I don’t have to tell you what that means.

Not to be a downer on our favorite summer day, but I can't shake the feeling that "independence" is one of those words we're starting to look back on with nostalgia.   Does anyone even care that we're not that independent anymore?

Our dependence on foreign oil and on anti-American big business and on the production and importation of goods from dubious nations across the globe is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they declared us an independent country and gave us our working papers.

Our dependence on wealth and its corrupting power has brought us to the brink of insurrection—and so much uncertainty about the inviolability of our constitution and our laws, we’re not even sure we can maintain our democracy.

We’ve come a long way from those early days of heady independence, when, as a new country, our founders felt their way toward a new era and tried to think far enough ahead to create a fail-safe document that would protect a growing country and keep every citizen (in theory, anyway) from the threat of tyranny. It hasn’t always worked, and it may never again, but we cling to our founding and our constitution, because this is our country, our nation, our pride, and our sorrow. We belong to it. It belongs to us.

It started on July 4, 1776 when 56 men signed a paper declaring the independence of the thirteen united states of America from Great Britain, the mother country. ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.")

Eleven years later, in 1787, a constitution, the wording hard-fought and brainstormed to death, became the law of the land.   The Preamble didn't start off with, "We, the wealthy landowners, in order to keep our fiefdoms going. . .", or "We, the 39 undersigned, in order to preserve our station and ensure a healthy profit margin. . . ".  

No, they began it like this:

WE, the people. . .of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.  

It came out of a yearning for independence so strong an entire nation was created, and in the course of a couple of centuries we became a model for democracy throughout the world--a force to be reckoned with.  You couldn't find a prouder nation anywhere.  We were going places.

That was then. 

Today, we're in turmoil. It's as if the promises made, the lessons learned, the reasons to form a more perfect union are long gone and long forgotten.  We are as divided as we've ever been since the days of our Civil War, 150 years ago.  We cannot, it seems, find common ground.  We see our America through different eyes, with different fears and different goals. 

We don't like what we see, but from entirely different angles and for entirely different reasons.  We try to interpret what our Founding Fathers had in mind for us, but we come at it with our own biases, our own prejudices, trying to mold our purposely vague constitution to fit our own wants and needs.

But on this one day we come together, and it's our love of this beautiful, challenging, imperfect country that brings us to detente.  The parades are about to start and there is no more beautiful flag in the world than the American flag.

Come Tuesday we'll begin again. Toward a more perfect union. Toward domestic tranquility.  Toward the society we, the people, have promised to promote and preserve.

Until then, be well and be kind on this day that is ours and ours alone.

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I’m going to start this off with two caveats: One, I didn’t watch the entire Depp-Heard trial; only snippets. And two, I’ve never been the perpetrator or the victim of conjugal abuse.

I have no skin in this game, so anything I say here carries about as much weight as the next person who also doesn’t know either Johnny Depp or Amber Heard personally or has ever witnessed them in action together.

I’m not here to make judgement on either of them. The dynamics of any relationship are always complex and not easy to define. It’s clear they’ve done things to hurt each other. It’s clear they’re still wanting to hurt each other. But where do we, the observers, fit it?

We don’t.

“Abuse” is a loaded word. It can mean anything from hurling ugly, hurtful words, from making impossible demands, from isolating the victim from friends and family, to causing physical pain and injury. Some of it is obvious because the abuser doesn’t care who sees it, but most often it isn’t. The bruises don’t always show. There isn’t always a split lip or a black eye. Sometimes the abuse is to the spirit.

I followed an interesting thread on Twitter yesterday, started by someone who had been in a long-term abusive relationship. They said because they’d had enough and finally hit back, if there had been a trial like this one they might have been accused of abuse, too. It opened up the floodgates to other victims who told their stories in much the same way. At some point they had to fight back and because their abusers were masters at manipulation and gaslighting, they’d be hard pressed to convince a jury they were the victims.

Often, they said, revenge was its own sweet victory. They had no regrets. But did that mean they hadn’t been victims? No, it didn’t.

It could be that that’s what made the Depp-Heard trial so interesting to so many people—those grey areas over which of them was the victim—but once it turned into a circus, thanks to the media vultures, it became frivolous and sickening. The jokes were endless and never really funny.

And neither Johnny Depp nor Amber Heard came away unscathed. They both looked less like victims and more like out-of-control monsters. They each had their haters and their supporters. It seems the entire country has an opinion now, and nothing is going to change that.

They’ll never go back to simply being actors. They’ll carry the scars of that trial with them forever. It’s how they’ll be known from now on, and not a single observer will ever know the entire truth. It will always be one’s word against the other, because it’s human nature to defend ourselves against scandal.

We can’t be as bad as it looks. And maybe we aren’t.

What do you think? As always, the comments are open. I just KNOW you have an opinion. Have at it!

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Today is Earth Day in America. The first, 52 years ago, was a big deal. It was 1970. We were in the mood to celebrate the earth and to warn against the destruction of our natural places. Now we’re watching again as our supposed caretakers are licking their lips at the thought of all that land open to rape-for-profit.

The earth is our only home. We owe it to her–and to ourselves–to keep her healthy. At some point we have to heed the warnings. We’re at the stage now where the earth would be better off without us.

Gaylord Nelson, Democratic senator from Wisconsin, founded Earth Day as both a celebration and a warning. He wrote:

On April 22, 1970, 20 million people, 2,000 colleges and universities, 10,000 grammar and high schools and 1,000 communities mobilized for the first nationwide demonstrations on environmental problems. Congress adjourned for the day so members could attend Earth Day events in their districts. The response was nothing short of remarkable, and the modern American environmental movement took off.

My major objective in planning Earth Day 1970 was to organize a nationwide public demonstration so large it would, finally, get the attention of the politicians and force the environmental issue into the political dialogue of the nation. It worked. By the sheer force of its collective action on that one day, the American public forever changed the political landscape respecting environmental issues.

I remember that first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. The scope of it was astonishing and really surprising. It was a grassroots movement in the best sense of the phrase, and we all felt good about it. (Most of us, that is. The day after, The Daughters of the American Revolution branded the Earth Day commemoration “distorted” and “subversive”. It didn’t help that the first Earth Day happened to fall on the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birth.)

What Gaylord Nelson originally proposed was a nationwide teach-in on school campuses. He chose April 22 because it would fall after Easter break but before final exams. It was spring. The earth was renewing itself. Environmentalism was gearing up and in motion, and it was a fine time to give the earth a day.

Richard Nixon was president and, while he didn’t participate in any of the day’s events (likely because a damned Democrat came up with the idea), he was actively talking about attacks on the environment and the steps the government would need to combat them. Pollution was a big issue already, and steps had been taken to de-smog the cities. It was working. (Nelson had actually talked to JFK in the early 60s about the need to draw attention to the environment, and a day to commemorate had been thrown out there then. Nothing happened.)

Industry was king, and the environmentalists, alarmed at water, ground and air pollution levels, were talking to brick walls. When they weren’t batting their heads against them.

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In 1962, the year Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring”, 750 people died in London’s smog. In 1965, four days of inversion held down a cloud of filthy air that killed 80 people in New York City. In 1969, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. Earlier that year, an oil platform six miles out from Santa Barbara, California, blew out, spilling 200,000 gallons of oil, creating an 800 square mile oil slick that settled on 35 miles of California shoreline. Almost 4,000 birds were killed, along with fish, seals and dolphin.

Enough had finally become enough, and under Lyndon Johnson and a congress that could see clearly now (even though the rest of us were still lost in a choking, eye-watering, salmon-colored, man-made smog), we saw a Clean Air Act, a Clean Water act, a National Wilderness Preservation System, a Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, a National Trails System Act, and, for what it was worth, a National Environmental Policy.

That all changed, of course, when Ronald “A tree is a tree” Reagan became president. For the Department of Interior, he chose James Watt, a notorious anti-environmentalist, to head it. He chose Ann Gorsuch, another determined anti-earthling, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. What a laugh that was–or might have been, if it weren’t so serious. They were chosen for the same cynical reasons George W. Bush chose his department heads–so that regulatory agencies could, from the inside, be forced to stop regulating.

Gale Norton, GWB’s choice for Secretary of Interior was called “even worse” than James Watt, by the Defenders of Wildlife. I shuddered over that one. I remembered James Watt, and I thought nobody could cause as much havoc on our little section of the earth as that little man did. I thought we had learned something along the way. I thought all those Arbor Days and Earth Days and global warming warnings had taught us all something. Some of us obviously weren’t listening.

Under Donald Trump, we had David Bernhardt, already under investigation for conflicts of interest, who took over from Ryan Zinke, called “the worst Interior Secretary ever” by the Wilderness Organization.

And who was running the EPA for Trump? Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist.

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Today we seem to be in good hands with Deb Haaland, our first female Secretary of the Interior, and, no small thing, the first Native American to fill a cabinet post. She has called the climate crisis ‘the challenge of our lifetime’. A true breath of fresh air.

This Earth Day, 52 years after the first, is getting a little more play in the news and on the internet, but wouldn’t it be great to see crowds out there giving it their all — marching and chanting in solidarity over saving Earth’s last breath?

What I wouldn’t give for a sea of tie-dyes and peace signs and flower garlands…

The aroma of Pachouli…

All those things I thought were pretty silly back then, in 1970, are looking pretty good to me as I take my annual note of the day we promised to give Earth a chance.

“Sometimes I wonder if Lewis and Clark shouldn’t have been made to file an environmental impact study before they started west, and Columbus before he ever sailed. They might never have got their permits. But then we wouldn’t have been here to learn from our mistakes, either. I really only want to say that we may love a place and still be dangerous to it. We ought to file that environmental impact study before we undertake anything that exploits or alters or endangers the splendid, spacious, varied, magnificent and terribly fragile earth that supports us. If we can’t find an appropriate government agency with which to file it, we can file it where an Indian would have filed it–with our environmental conscience, our slowly maturing sense that the earth is indeed our mother, worthy of our love and deserving of our care.”

Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs

For more reading on this day you can’t beat Rachel Carson:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/04/12/rachel-carson-scripps-college-commencement/?mc_cid=3378db57d5&mc_eid=cf8e7daa68

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I wrote a version of this piece last year, but I wanted to honor her on her day, and this seems to say it all.

My mother was 19 when she had me. I was an only child until my brother Michael came along when I was nine years old, but by that time I was firmly ensconced as my mother’s daughter. She influenced my taste in music, in art, and helped me develop my own love of words.

She came from Finnish parents who barely spoke English, from a community where English was not their first language, and she struggled, with just an eighth grade education, to make sure she spoke well. She took delicious pleasure in finding the meanings of new words. We had encyclopedias and dictionaries in our house and we used them. For a time, she and her sisters made a game of finding a word they didn’t know before, then having to use it for a week in often silly sentences. I remember one word—’crucial’. They cracked themselves up: “It’s crucial to cook chicken before you eat it.”

We shared a need to look at things as if we were looking at them through a magnifier. We studied everything when I was little, from trees to rocks to signs on the sides of streetcars—the colors, the designs, the words—everything enchanted us.

We had a bond that wouldn’t end until she passed too soon at the age of 68. I lost her when I was 49 and it felt as if I’d lost my anchor. I was a grandmother who felt like a little girl again. Vulnerable and lost, reeling from the unfairness of losing her to a vicious, unrelenting lung cancer that literally took her breath away. I heard my mother say many times that she would most hate to die of suffocation. The idea of spending her last minutes struggling for breaths that wouldn’t come terrified her. And that is how I had to watch her die.

When I turned 68 I had no reason to worry that I would die at the same age, but it crossed my mind many times during that year. When I hit that 69th milestone, I felt safe. I felt guilty. I did it and she didn’t.

My mother loved to sing and had a lovely voice. For years I could conjure up her singing voice, and that seemed to be enough. Now that’s fading, too. I can’t pull up her speaking voice, but I thought I would never not hear her singing.

I can still hear my father’s voice, and he’s been gone for more than 30 years. Gruff and gravely, with a distinct Canadian/Italian undertone. He sometimes grunted — his idea of a response — and I can even hear that grunt. I smile when I think of some of the things he said, in such funny ways. I was my father’s little girl, but when I grew into adulthood it was my mom and me. So how is it possible that I can no longer hear her?

Could I conjure up an image of her if I had no pictures? I don’t know. Thankfully, I don’t have to guess. I have a box of pictures ranging from her childhood until just months before her death.

Why is this important now? Why did it come to me one day, out of the blue, that I could no longer remember what my mother’s voice sounded like? It’s been almost 35 years since we talked. Would I expect that I could remember? She died long before we were video-recording with sound, so there’s no chance I’ll ever hear her again. But I can ‘hear’ my father. I want to hear them both.

I will never live so long that I won’t think about wanting them both back, but I’ll never grow so old, either, that I won’t want my mother more. She died while I was still foolishly thinking I was wiser than she was. I didn’t go to her for counsel, I went to her for comfort. Now it seems I need both.

There are younger women in my life who look to me to be their guide, as if my having lived this long gives me certain wisdom or powers they haven’t yet achieved. I want to tell them about my mom. I want to tell them about her mother, my grandmother, who survived poverty, who divorced her violent husband when divorce wasn’t done, who steered us in her broken English with love and kindness and a spirit tough as nails.

I want to tell them that we come from a long line of women who endured in such quiet ways we often couldn’t hear them. But they left their mark and we’re the living proof. Now we can speak for them.

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When I was a senior in high school, I dated the greatest guy. He was cute, smart, a good kisser, and best of all, a good listener. He liked what I had to say, or at least he pretended to. We had things in common and I loved that. We tried not to laugh at our differences — our little romance was still that new — but if he mentioned jazz, I missed it.

On our third date we went to a party at his friend’s house deep in the heart of Detroit. The music was cranked up so loud we could hear it the minute we got out of the car. I looked at him, but he was already on his way, shoulders shaking, fingers snapping, oblivious to me or anything else outside of the sounds bringing him to a weird kind of ecstasy.

I think he called it a “jazz den”. We were in a jazz den and I was supposed to like it. How could I not? Who didn’t like jazz?

How did we get to a third date without knowing each other’s taste in music? I don’t know, but if he had asked I would have told him that of all the forms of music, jazz was my most hated. I despised it with a passion that was hot, that was visceral, that was strong enough to make my toes curl and my fingers form into fists. And now I hated him.

We argued in his friend’s house and we argued all the way home. How could he do that to me? How could I NOT like Dave Brubeck? How could we even think this was going to work? We had mutual friends so we had to run into each other now and then, but we barely nodded. Fine with me. I dodged that bullet, but good.

But if I thought that was the end of my encounters with jazz, I was just too naïve for words. Jazz was everywhere. Jazz is everywhere.

It’s on my phone when I’m put on hold. Scratchy whiny caterwauling designed to make me hang up because they’re too damned busy to bother with me, anyway. And they hate me.

It yowls from the loudspeakers when I’m shopping, it rings in my ears where I’m ‘dining’ (i.e:, not just eating), it invades my space while I’m sitting on the toilet in their restrooms.

It’s so all over NPR I’m not sure it’s worth it anymore. I used to wait until All Things Considered was two minutes in before I turned it on, but now they’ve taken to taunting me with that insane theme music in between segments. And Fresh Air. Don’t even. Because they hate me.

I know people who love jazz. Or I should say, I knew people. If I dare to question their adoration, they’ll first try to school me, then, if I don’t bite, they shun me. Because I’d have to be a complete moron not to love jazz.

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In the 1980s I met Stanley Crouch, the ultimate jazz enthusiast, a giant of a man who had a steady gig writing lofty riffs about jazz using jazzy language that sounded pretty impressive to my admittedly tin ear.

He knew the jazz greats and showed me the liner notes he wrote for Gold and Platinum albums. He was known for his critical writing, but it was those liner notes he seemed to like best. They gave him the chance to be intimate with his passion, to praise the jazz men who gave him such joy, to lay it all out there with love.

When I first met him at a writer’s colony where we both had residencies, I didn’t know who he was. I was new to the whole colony thing and he couldn’t have been kinder. He helped me unload my car and carried the heavy stuff up to my loft room. He showed me around as if the retreat was his own. He took my fears away on that first day, when I was terrified and feeling like the world’s most obvious dilettante.

Early into my two weeks stay, the jazz man and I talked often during our non-writing hours— or he talked during those hours — and at first I was as fascinated as he thought I should be. I really wanted to understand that whole jazz cult. He knew it to its core. I didn’t get it. I would never get it. He could talk until the moon shriveled to nothing but in the end it was all about the sound. Not the theory but the sound.

He dumped me. We shared spring residencies at that colony twice more, but I was invisible thereafter. Except for that time he had to catch a train and I was the only one near the door, so he threw a package at me and told me to make sure the UPS driver got it. 

I seriously had to laugh. I didn’t dislike him at all. It was his music that left me cold. And that was unforgivable.

Jazz hurts. It physically hurts me. And because it hurts, I resent the intrusion, the tyranny that forces my participation in what my brain, my ears, my heart, my gut considers dreadful, unaccountable noise.

So remember that the next time you hear jazz in places where I might be. Someone could be suffering and you’re doing nothing to help. You don’t even hear how painful that deliberate dissonance is.

But I do.

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I hope you like what you read here and feel welcome enough to add to the conversation. My subscriber list is growing, and I would love to get to know all of you. So don’t hurry off. Stick around. And thank you for being here!

I’m not at my home in the north woods and I think that’s my problem. I think better there. Not that that’s an excuse for what’s not been going on here lately, but this lassitude happens every year around this time, when the north is too cold for us old people and we head south, sheep-like.

Except we’re snowbirds.

I saw a bumper sticker down here along the Grand Strand a few years ago that read, “If They’re Snowbirds Can We Shoot Them?”. I laughed at that, but I’ve been wary ever since.

If you’ve read any of my posts lately—and I sincerely hope you have—you know the state of the country is first and foremost on my mind. I try not to get involved, but things keep happening. I’ve lived in this country for what seems like forever, so I have a major stake in what happens here, what with children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and cousins and multitudes of people I love and like, and strangers who seem to need a lot of help and aren’t getting it—all of us trying to avoid a creeping (and creepy) enemy that can’t be caught and refuses to go away.

I can barely think of anything else, and because of where I am (at the beach but in the city full of potential germ throwers who refuse to wear masks), I don’t get out to those places that would normally distract.

COVID still hovers, menacing, even though we’ve been vaxxed and vaxxed and boosted. We’re among the vulnerable and just don’t want to take the chance, so we’ve chosen to stay put, indoors, looking out the windows at the beach and the ocean.

Why, you ask, am I indoors when I could at least be walking on the beach? Because it’s COLD OUT THERE. Yes, even here in the damn Carolina low country, it’s parka weather.

Ugly stuff going on across the country, weatherwise, too, so I’ve been glued to the Weather Channel, watching the progress of the storms from Texas across the breadbasket into the lower Great Lakes and onto the all-important Eastern corridor. Jim Cantori and his amiable cohorts stomp around in the snow, taking to heart the need to describe snow’s properties on any given hour: Wet and heavy (proven by making a snowball), light and fluffy (proven by not being able to make a snowball), more than expected (woo-hoo!), not as much as expected (this comes with a kind of embarrassed apology, as if they had something to do with turning the snowmaking spigot on or off), or right on the money (Aha! See? We CAN be right!).

At the Weather Channel the same car slides across the ice many times an hour. The same truck lies on its side on the freeway, blocking traffic for miles—that same traffic the Weather Channel had been warning not to even think about going out in that storm.

During these ‘Monstrous storms’ (a quote directly from their crawl), the reporters raise their voices a few decibels to TV car salesman level, shouting as if they’re out there in the wind, even when they’re back in the studio.

It’s exhausting.

But every day, first thing in the morning, I choose Wordle and, if it goes right, it calms me down. Or maybe it energizes me. Whatever it does, I love Wordle. It’s plain and pure, it doesn’t take a lot of time, there are no gimmicks, and I can’t spend endless wasted hours going on and on with it because once I’m done, I have to wait until Midnight to play it again.

There’s no app for it. Click on the link in the first sentence in the paragraph above and you’ll be there. You’ll see six rows down, five boxes across. They’re blank. You fill in a five-letter word at the top—any word will do but try to include two or three vowels—and hit ‘enter’. The letters to the word you choose will either be green, yellow, or grey. Green means the letter is where it should be. Yellow means the letter is in the word but not in the right place. Grey means the letter isn’t in the word. (Never use it again. Not in this word, anyway)

Try another word, this time keeping the green letter where it is but finding another place for the yellow. Any grey letters get tossed. But you don’t have to remember any of this because the keyboard at the bottom tells you which letters to use and which not to use. The grey letters you’ve already used are in blue there. Remember not to use them.

And that’s all there is to it. It’s a process of elimination. For a while there I was on a streak where I was getting the word in three tries. Sheer luck, I know now. I haven’t lost yet, after around three weeks of Wordle, but I almost did last week. Six tries. Whew!

After three tries I finally got the last four letters. Only one to go. How hard could it be? Ha!

I tried ‘right’. Wrong!

I tried ‘might’. Wrong!

Then I was sweating it.

It could be ‘tight’ or ‘night’ or ‘sight’ or ‘fight’ or…

I chose ‘light’.

And got it!

The other thing you can do with Wordle is brag about your conquests. This, I’ve heard, drives people crazy 😉, but it’s hard not to do. Once you get the word, Wordle shoves the brag link right in your face. They practically beg you to get out there and brag. It’s how they’ve grown so big without advertising. We do their peddling for them.

And now they’re so big the New York Times has paid big bucks for the rights. So, any day now it won’t be just a pure, simple game but will go the way of other victims of corporate takeover and we’ll either have to pay to play or will barely recognize it.

So, see? Something else to worry about.

I’m going to go bake something from scratch now. Something plain. And pure. And warm. And friendly.

Y’all come back now. Ya hear?

Tips are always welcome!

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On Sunday, October 3, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugan told ‘60 Minutes’ anchor, Scott Pelley, “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they'll click on less ads, they'll make less money”.

She based her comments on the tens of thousands of pages she copied and tucked away while she worked at Facebook, knowing if she ever came forward she would need iron-clad proof of the secret goings-on of a company known to turn a blind eye to safety and security if they think they’re threatening to impact the bottom line.

She went on to talk about the many real instances of young people, especially young girls, who are harmed on Facebook’s sites by the insidious shaming and rage against anyone who might choose to look or act differently. She didn’t back down when she was asked if it could happen without Mark Zuckerberg, the head honcho, knowing about it. No, she said, it could not. (Zuckerberg, you should know, disagrees.)

It was the beginning of the shit hitting the fan, the preface to Monday’s congressional hearing on Facebook practices. Six more hours of compelling testimony (not quite true; much of it was taken up with the usual political grandstanding by committee members speechifying rather than asking legit questions) gave Haugans a chance to solidify her argument: that the entire Facebook company (FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) needs to be regulated and forced to change its ways.

While all of it was compelling and often enraging, no entity was more enraged by it than Twitter. Often it’s what I like best about Twitter—its call to action when the powerless are attacked. What I like least about it happened again: there weren’t just calls for the entire country to quit Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the most vocal were demanding it—shaming anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t see the need to boycott the entire company.

So I weighed in:

"I'm at the point where I'm ready to unfollow anyone who tweets and retweets "Why are you still on Facebook?" 1st, none of your business. 2nd, we don't all use FB the same way. It's useful to some of us. We can be angry over practices w/o quitting. 3rd, none of your business." / Twitter

It brought some interesting comments, including a link to Stonekettle’s blog on the subject. (Stonekettle is a blogger with a huge following on Twitter. He’s known for his no nonsense, no bullshit responses to the news and views of the day.) Whatever I might have wanted to say here about why I won’t be quitting—he said it better.

It's not just old people. 

It's not just disabled people and the shut-ins.

It's not just those who use social media to keep in contact with loved ones deployed overseas and who have family far away. 

It's not just the introverts or those with crippling social anxiety. 

It's not just those who have reason to hide their identity in the real world for fear of violence and hate and who without social media would have no social interaction where they could be themselves. 

It's not just those who find joy in a larger world they would have never known outside of an online global community of people who share their interests -- like birds. 

It's not just people who have built businesses and a living around these platforms. 

It's not just about writing letters or using a phone or reading a book or going outside to meet people. 

It's all of those things and much, much more. 

And if you can't see that, then that says a hell of a lot more about your lack of empathy and imagination than it does about those who use Facebook. 

Can we do better? Can we regulate these companies? Can we limit the power of those like Zuckerberg and Facebook? Can we prevent these platforms from becoming weapons aimed at the head of our Republic? And can we do it without marginalizing those who need it most? 

Of course we can. 

But burning it all down isn't how you do any of that. 

By the way, I forgot to mention—On Monday, as the hearing was taking place, as if that wasn’t dramatic enough, Facebook went dark for a long, long six hours. Went wonky first, then just disappeared. Was it on purpose, to show how necessary the Facebook presence really is? Was it an accident? Were they hacked? We might know the reason why if Facebook weren’t so secretive.

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It’s no secret Mark Zuckerberg keeps secrets at Facebook. He’s been hauled before committees many times, and always asked to explain what goes on there and why he shouldn’t be regulated. Each time he holds his cards close to his chest and refuses to show them. It’s infuriating. So is his wealth. He lost seven billion dollars when Facebook crashed, but he won’t be going on welfare. It’s a drop in the bucket for him.

But there’s that thing about Facebook and what it means to ordinary citizens: it’s a lifeline for many, a social outlet, the closest thing to a community many people have available to them. It’s a great way to keep in touch with family and friends, as we all found during the COVID shutdown.

And it’s more than that. For example: after looking long and hard everywhere else, calling every health service they could think of, my daughters both finally found a place to get their COVID vaccinations through a volunteer Facebook group called ‘Vaccination Hunters’. They sought out and reported on sites that became available, often just minutes after spots on those sites opened up. It was pretty amazing, but it wouldn’t have happened without Facebook’s reach.

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I live on an island. We depend on our two ferries all year long, but now and then wind, weather, or ferry repairs cause one or both to slow or shut down. We islanders need to know that, and the ferry system keeps us informed via Facebook.

Those of us living in the boonies use local Facebook marketplaces to buy and sell goods. Local small businesses can advertise for free on Facebook. Most communities have a Facebook page. Some pages are strictly nostalgic—”Remember when…?”

We build communities on Facebook. Children get their Luddite parents to use it to keep in touch. We find old friends via Facebook but we can keep our pages as private as we want to. There are those times when FB users are hacked but we can avoid that, too, by not falling for every innocent-looking question or intelligence game. We’re not required to play along with everything Facebook offers—and often what it offers is nefarious and dangerous. We have choices.

So, no, I won’t be quitting Facebook, but I’ll be working to get Zuckerberg, et al, to mind their manners and respect the privacy and the needs of their bread and butter. Cut out the bad guys. Stop cheating. Stop lying. Be what you say you’re going to be. We’re on to you now and we’ll be watching. We have a stake in this, too.

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I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it’s true: It’s effing hilarious. (That’s as close as I’m ever going to get. Don’t even…)

So I thought I’d haul out a piece I wrote a couple of years ago. Then maybe you’ll understand what a gigantic leap this is for me. I’m pretty sure this new attitude isn’t permanent, but as long as Roy Kent is around I’ll have to live with it. Not unhappily.

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There’s That Word Again

Can you just give it a rest already?

(First published at Medium/Indelible Ink on April 8, 2019.)

Hard as this might be for you to believe, I’ve gone my entire life without knowingly saying the word that starts with ‘f’ and ends with ‘k’. (There were those times I was under anesthesia, so…) In fact, if this is the kind of thing you like to gloat about, you should feel honored. This marks the first time I’ve talked about it this much, and lucky you — you are here.

Incredible as it seems, over the years I’ve built an entire vocabulary and I completely forgot to include that word.

Well, no, I didn’t forget.

The truth is, I’m as proud of never using that word as others are of using it. I see whole articles devoted to the defense of that one single word, as if it has magical powers, as if, as words go, it’s so golden I will need to be punished for even suggesting it’s not the best word ever in the whole entire world.

When it comes to words, there are no other words to replace it. Not fook, not feck, not fack, not, for God’s sake, fudge.

It’s ubiquitous. It’s invincible. It’s OMFG delicious.

It’s used so often, so carelessly, it should have lost its punch long ago. Its insane over-use should by rights have absolutely killed its popularity, but instead the word assaults my eyes and ears hundreds of times a day. No exaggeration. HUNDREDS. Sometimes multiple times in the same sentence.

I get it that it’s generational and I’m in that out-of-it generation, but show me another word that has such a cult following it needs its own defense. Just one. Even now, as I write this, I’m preparing for the backlash. And you’re already rehearsing the perfect comeback — using that word, of course. I know the drill. There are some things that are sacrosanct and that word is right up there at the tippy top.

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I had hopes that insane overuse would at last cause it to die off, putting it in cliché hell, where all banal anachronisms must eventually go. But, no. It’s out there in prose, in poetry, in song, in rap, in movies, in plays, in graffiti, on tee shirts, in small children’s mouths…

It’s out there in the air and everywhere. It’s here to stay. I know that. But I don’t have to like it. And I don’t have to be polite about it. God knows, it’s in a class where “polite” has no place. It laughs at polite. Laughing at polite is its main reason for being. I’m guessing. I have no idea. It should have lost its shock value billions and billions of utterances ago.

It’s not that I’m a puritan about cuss words. I’m a big fan of a whole lot of them, especially when I hit my shins or crunch my bumper or wake up with bed head on a day when I really need to look human.

If it helps, I like the way shit feels and sounds. But even then, saying it didn’t come easy. It took me a long time to get it right. So long my grandkids didn’t hear it from me until they had jobs.

But bless their dark little hearts, they think it’s cool that they have to remember not to say that other word in front of me. They warn their friends. Their friends go, “Huh?”

They don’t get it, but I’m cool in their eyes.

So there’s that, at least.

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A couple of days ago I went on a bit of a rant on my sister blog, Writer Everlasting, and again at Medium. While I still believe every word of it, I probably should have kept it in my journal where no one would ever see it. Now I have writer/readers feeling sorry for me when that wasn’t ever my intent. Some thought I was going to give up writing altogether, thanks to my incoherence, but others knew exactly why I finally blew.

The upshot is that I’m giving up on political writing for a while. Maybe even forever. And that means this blog will change, too. I can’t say I’ll never bring politics up again, but I hope with all that’s holy that I’ll think twice before investing both my time and my heart into what’s essentially a meaningless exercise.

(Please continue reading the writers on my home page blogroll, however. They’re the best!)

There are other more creative ways of making change and I’ll be exploring them. We’ve had centuries of music, art, poetry and prose that can protest and enlighten by making us feel and ponder without going into such a rage we can’t think straight or get through the day.

Sometimes it’ll be through humor. It’ll be good to laugh again.

I made all of these memes on Google’s Picasa when it was still a thing. I’ve never found a picture editor to match it. It couldn’t have been easier to use and the effects were smart and endless. Why did Google drop it? I have no idea. Another of those things I have no control over and can only rant about its disappearance.

So that was my rant. See how calm I was? I’m working on it.

If you like what you read here please consider subscribing so you won’t miss any of it. I haven’t set a publishing schedule and I probably won’t. Even my Friday Follies won’t appear every Friday. But it’s free and there’s no obligation. I hope it’s interesting, too.

If you’re a writer, my sister blog, Writer Everlasting, is up and going and I’m loving the community we’re building there. The same rules apply. That is, there are no rules. No pressure. No gimmicks. No fees.

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The poll above was inserted into the middle of what is essentially a compassionate opinion piece by Joyce Vance focusing on Britney Spears’ recent court appearance as she tries to break the bonds her father and a conservator have held over her for more than 13 years.

The story is here, and it’s a whopper but that’s not why I’m back today. I was reading Vance’s story, growing more and more horrified, when that poll appeared in the middle of it, like one of those irritating advertisements in the middle of so many website stories. I almost overlooked it, as I usually do, until I saw the hashtag #FreeBritney!

The poll comes from MSNBC and the number of votes is 143 and counting right now, just minutes after I took the screen shot. It’ll go much higher. Because people love to stick their noses into everyone else’s business—especially a fragile celebrity with mental issues.

Just when I think I can no longer be shocked something like this comes along to prove me wrong. This is low. Maybe as low as I’ve ever seen from MSNBC. But other people won’t see it that way. They’ll think they have every right to have a say in what should happen to Britney Spears.

I only hope Joyce Vance, a woman I have great respect for, will see it and find it as odious as I do. I hope she goes after MSNBC over it. And I hope MSNBC pulls it RIGHT NOW.

But I won’t hold my breath. I’m heading over to Twitter to keep this going. I hope it trends. I really do.

Okay then.

And I hope Britney Spears finds someone who will care for her whole self and give her peace.

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I woke up in the middle of the night (not unusual so far) with the words ‘Meshach, (blank), and Abendego’ in my head. What the HELL?? Over and over, as if the most important task of the night was to remember who that other guy was. Who WAS he?

So I got to work on it and as I was trying to think of that third guy I remembered it wasn’t ‘Abendego’, it was ‘Abednego’. That part solved…but how did I know??

Now who was that other guy? I thought of ‘Horshack’. I thought of ‘Rorschach”. Nope. I was in bed trying to sleep, dammit, so there was no way I was going to grab my iPad and Google it. Just forget about it. Who cares, anyway?

Shadrach! That’s IT! It was Shadrach! But who were those guys and why are they in my head in the middle of the damn night? Wasn’t there a song…? I’m NOT going to look them up.

I slept.

So here I am this morning, I’ve looked them up, and it appears they weren’t three wise men, as I had decided they might be, but rather three devout Hebrew men who wouldn’t go along with Nebuchadnezzar’s demands to worship his golden statue, preferring to worship their God in their own way, and were doomed to a fiery death.

Lordy!

But wait! There’s more! They prayed hard and God sent an angel down from heaven to get in the middle of that fire, roaring at seven times the normal pyrotechnical temperature according to the Book of Daniel, to make sure it didn’t singe a single hair on their heads.

It worked!

Nebuchadnezzar couldn’t believe his eyes! He saw that God was more powerful than he was and he became a better person for it. He promoted all three of them, along with Daniel, who was in that story, too. And I guess they all lived happily ever after.

And, yes, there is a song! I knew it! (How did I know it?)

But what were they doing in my head in the wee hours of the morning? You know I’m an atheist, right? But what you couldn’t know is that I’m working on a piece about religion and it’s not friendly to it.

Seriously.

So is this a sign?

I mean…is it?

(To anyone who sees this as a chance to convert me, just don’t. I’m having fun here. Don’t spoil it.)

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When I was a little girl my daddy was my everything. Somewhere there’s a picture of me at a beautiful park, all dressed up for Easter, but I’m pouting, arms crossed, refusing to smile, because I don’t want my picture taken unless my daddy is there with me. I’m probably around seven or eight.

I remember sitting outside in the hallway while my dad was inside a room where a secret ceremony was going on and little kids weren’t allowed. Was it the Elks, the Moose, the Knights of Columbus? I don’t know. I just knew I wasn’t supposed to be there and my dad was sorry he ever got talked into taking me.

I remember standing in line with him as he waited to vote. I remember being inside a curtained voting booth when I was so little I couldn’t see over the counter and he had to lift me up so I could see what he was doing.

When my parents took me with them to gatherings or parties, I wanted to be with my dad and not with the kids. He rarely told me ‘no’, so I was often the only little kid, and surely the only girl, sitting on her daddy’s lap as he chewed the fat and drank beer with the guys.

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I was not a good student. I was a child who daydreamed. As soon as I learned to read I began writing stories in my head, and much of the time they came to me as I sat in a classroom gazing out the window. I didn’t get math at all. My father was good at math and it frustrated him no end that he couldn’t explain it to me. Night after night we sat at the kitchen table working on division or story problems and none of it made any sense to me.

They were the only times I felt his disappointment.

He never got past the 10th grade. He was not well-spoken, nor well-read, and he may not have understood my almost insatiable need for books, considering that no one on either side of my family took much to reading, but he became my dealer anyway.

For a time during and after WW II, on most paydays (when there was a payday), he would surprise me with one of the books I had on a scrawled list of most-wanteds. Many of them were from Whitman Publishing and involved sassy girls with famous names. This was one of them:

When buying a new book wasn’t possible, my father would take me to one of Detroit’s magnificent public libraries and he’d wander around or read newspapers while I searched the stacks for signs of magic. I was never without books, thanks to him.

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When I was in the third grade an encyclopedia salesman came to our door selling the wonderful Book of Knowledge. My father paid five dollars down and shelled out two dollars a week until he paid for the entire set. If I was a book worm before, I was a book hermit after they arrived. It was a children’s encyclopedia but much of it was beyond me. Still, every page was pure enchantment.

I still have Volume 5/6. We didn’t have room for all of them, but I wanted to keep at least one when we broke up my parents’ house. I can look through this book and be transported. I can remember lying tummy down on my bed, poring over them, traveling in different worlds, dreaming of artists and musicians and inventors and children of other lands. It didn’t bother me one bit that all of the pictures were in black and white.

My dad was not a gusher.  He was a toucher, not a hugger.  A pat on the shoulder, a tap on the head. . .that was about as close as he came to showing physical affection after I got too gangly to be sitting on his lap.  But I never doubted that he loved me.

As I grew older, when my periods arrived along with my boobs, he eased away and let my mother take over. When I began dating, he was a nervous wreck but he left it to my mother to pass along his warnings: “Your dad says you need to be in before midnight. . .”

When I announced I was engaged at age 18, he told my mother to tell me I was too young, but seven months later the wedding took place and he was the proud Father of the Bride.

He taught my husband how to wire a socket and how to make Chicken Cacciatore. And how to be a father to his own daughters.

Wishing a Happy Father’s Day to all those dads who give it their all. I salute you. Thank you for your love and your patience (because, yeah, I’ve been that kid).