I don’t know how many of my old close friends will be there — tonight, as my graduating class from Sacred Heart High School celebrates it 50th. But I will be.
A half-century ago I graduated from high school, escaped the confines of a parochial education and launched myself into a much more reasonable world. At least it was a co-ed school.
There were two separate groups of kids who went to Sacred Heart: the Irish kids who came from the parish’s grade school, and the rest of us (mainly Poles and Italians) who came from the other Catholic ethnic parish grade schools. It’s not that there was discrimination, but it was the Irish kids who were the most popular. After all, it was their inherited territory.
While I achieved no academic honors in high school (my biggest claim to academic fame were my high nineties’ Regents Exam grades in English and French), I had an energetic social life that had no ethnic boundaries. Apparently, according to a few comments in my yearbook, I also drank a lot – probably because I liked feeling uninhibited, although not enough to loosen the high moral sexual standards ingrained in me since birth.
But I did have fun, my circle of girlfriends sharing my party-going personality. One of them, I remember, had a little Nash Rambler that six of was would squeeze into. We practiced dancing with each other, and that’s when I taught myself how to lead the Lindy.
Here are four of us, overshadowing our dates, gathered at my house to leave together for our Senior Prom. I am on the left, and I remember that my date’s name was Bobby Kennedy and he had graduated the year before. Of us four, one died in a tragic house fire. One owned the Nash Rambler and ultimately married my cousin. I haven’t seen the fourth since graduation. I hope that she will be there tonight.

I don’t actually remember this high school date at Rye Beach/Playland, so I am glad I saved this photo. I do, however, remember the guys. I’m the “pistol packin’ mama;” I don’t remember who the other girl was. I think that my selective memories are telling.

I’m going alone, and I’m a little nervous about tonight, although I am looking forward to it all. I do know that my old friend who married my cousin will be there with her husband. I know that one woman (widowed) with whom I went through grade school and high school will be there. I think that at least one guy I dated will be there. I wonder if I will be the only heretic. The only divorcee. The only blogger. I’m not going to the mass that’s being held before the cocktail hour (odd joining of events, doncha’ think?)
Fifty years. How different was the world in 1957, both Big Picture and little picture.
I’m going to take pictures. It’s how I remember.
I’m staying overnight at the hotel where the reunion is being held. It’s only about 45 minutes from here, but I don’t like driving in the dark. These old eyes, you know.
As I throw stuff in an overnight bag, I realize just how impossible it is these days to travel light. In addition to the usual makeup, deoderant, and toothbrush etc., I have to take my meds, stuff to make sure my hair looks good, allergy nose spray, the stuff to soak my partial denture in at night, reading glasses (in addition to my regular seeing/driving glasses), saline nasal spray (because the air in hotel rooms always dries out my sinuses), my mp3 player so that I can listen to the audio book to help me fall asleep……
And, of course, my digital camera. It’s how I remember.

A reddish fox trotted across our forest-lined driveway as I walked down to get the mail today. The same color as the shadows in this autumn-leafed woodland, he seemed to magically appear in my peripheral vision. I managed to focus on him quickly enough to catch his disinterested lope across my path into the dappled tangled of trees and weeds on the other side. I wished he had found a reason to loiter a while, as did the bear we had in our back yard recently.
No lions and tigers around here. Just bear and fox and raccoons and groundhog (which has managed to eat up whatever remaining vegetation there was on the potted plants I had so cleverly arranged on an old wooden pallet at the edge of the woods).

I’ve been doing light writing lately. All too aware of the many disasters overwhelming the Big Picture, I write of deer and dear.
But this current article in an Albany publication deserves careful notice:

The Chill Factor
Slave labor, a mercenary army, vulture funds, and the ongoing onslaught against the Constitution—here is Project Censored’s list of the biggest stories the media missed last year

[snip]

This year’s Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren’t paying attention.

[snip]

As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti says, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. “Every day they’re checking out what we think,” he says. “The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy.”

Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. “I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here,” he says.

And as I sit here blogging I am also watching a news program reporting on Rudy Guilliani’s trip to England to raise money for his presidential campaign. While I recognize that we are all part of a global community, it just doesn’t seem right to let other countries help to elect the person who will be in charge of our country.
And so I create my own realities.

We saw it through the screened window and didn’t want to scare it away by moving.

It seemed young enough to be traveling with its mother, but she was nowhere around. We had seen a doe and a fawn come through the property several times before. This time, the little one was obviously on its own.
We’ve had raccoons (which I was never able to catch with a camera) and a bear (which I did). This young deer — long skinny legs, ears it hasn’t yet grown into, gentle brown eyes — reminded me of the movie The Yearling. We stood and watched it for almost twenty minutes as it grazed on the grasses that never get mowed, always alert and responsive to any odd sound or movement. Sometimes it seemed to look straight at us through the window.
Soon, the hunters will be out. I wonder if we will see it again.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
NUMBERS GAME
This will be fairly short and not at all sweet. Why short? Because at its heart is an unsubstantiated assertion. If the assertion’s true, that’s one thing, but if not, it would best just disappear since there’s enough b.s. in the political air already.
Okay, Saturday in a local paper was a letter from a woman who for several years has been using the stockade fence of her property along a busy side street to “lament the U.S. military dead.” At first, she simply used a plastic grocery bag to represent each death, but now she puts up antiwar posters and tiny photos of the dead, all thus far up to some 3750. She also has the number itself posted on the fence.
Recently, she related, a young man in a truck stopped to examine the photos, noting he was veteran of the Iraq war. He studied the pix and found several he knew, the deaths of some of them news to him. Then he pointed at the number and told her it was wrong. And here’s where we meet the unsubstantiated assertion.
The number displayed, he told her, was only the total of those who died in Iraq. If others were wounded there but flown to Germany or the U.S. and THEN died, why they’re not counted in the official number. Even though they’re dead from the war. If they were, he asserted, the count would be closer to 10,000.
10,000. True number or not? True policy or not? Where do we turn for substantiation or repudiation? Media’s too busy covering O.J. Simpson and predators and party girls. Our government wouldn’t tell us the truth if the young man is right and its word couldn’t be trusted if it purported to do so anyway. So where do we turn?
We rightly lament the deaths of over 3700, but what if we’re not remembering another 6300 or so? Does it matter? Of course.
But where do we turn for the hard truth?

I never get enough of stacking them up so that he can knock them down.

I remember when I used to go out ballroom dancing every Saturday night. I had a regular dance partner, then, and he was as eager to dance every dance as I was.
I have a regular Saturday night dance partner now, too: my mother (91 years old and demented). I’ve blogged before about how amazing it is that she remembers how to dance the Polka, the Oberek, and the Waltz, and she can even take the lead. She can follow me if I lead her in the Box Step and the Night Club Two Step.
A friend of mine emailed this poem:
“Meadowbrook Nursing Home” by Alice N. Persons, from Don’t Be A Stranger. © Sheltering Pines Press, 2007.
Meadowbrook Nursing Home
On our last visit, when Lucy was fifteen
And getting creaky herself,
One of the nurses said to me,
“Why don’t you take the cat to Mrs. Harris’ room
— poor thing lost her leg to diabetes last fall —
she’s ninety, and blind, and no one comes to see her.”
The door was open. I asked the tiny woman in the bed
if she would like me to bring Lucy in, and she turned her head
toward us. “Oh, yes, I want to touch her.”
“I had a cat called Lily — she was so pretty, all white.
She was with me for twenty years, after my husband died too.
She slept with me every night — I loved her very much.
It’s hard, in here, since I can’t get around.”
Lucy was settling in on the bed.
“You won’t believe it, but I used to love to dance.
I was a fool for it! I even won contests.
I wish I had danced more.
It’s funny, what you miss when everything…..is gone.”
This last was a murmur. She’d fallen asleep.
I lifted the cat
from the bed, tiptoed out, and drove home.
I tried to do some desk work
but couldn’t focus.
I went downstairs, pulled the shades,
put on Tina Turner
and cranked it up loud
and I danced.
I danced.

While in Albany, I stayed with a friend who recently bought her first house. And so I gave her a gift for her new home — a mandala/talisman for peace and prosperity as she embarks on the next stage of her life. The center is crocheted all in one piece, the circle is make of willow and vines layered and twisted together.
I like combining natural materials and fibers. I have everything I need now to start the piece I want to make with the yarn that Andrea spun, dyed, and sent to me from Australia.
But it’s going to take some powerful magic to give me the time I need to work on something that creative.
It’s raining today. She’s sleeping. I still haven’t unpacked from my glorious four nights away from here.
Time. Time. Time. Time alone. To create.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
911
Tomorrow is the 6th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It’s a time to remember again/still those who died and to recognize again those first responders who tried to make rescues at the cost of their own lives. They are deserving of our attention and honor.
But it’s also a time to remember and condemn those who since 9/11 have used that day for political advantage and dragged this country down into a morass of a war having nothing to do with 9/11, and while doing so have also launched major assaults on the freedoms our democracy guarantees us. While purporting to be fighting to protect them.
Who are these scoundrels? Not bin Laden. Not muslim terrorists. No…our own Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rove: the Fatal Five. We didn’t know that the date, 9/11, would take on the additional significance of another emergency in our land — that 9/11 would also become the symbol of a 911 call to all of us. The call telling us that we were under attack by the Fatal Five: our Constitutional rights, our reputation in the world community — all being dragged down the tubes because of the incredibly ignorant audacity of the Fatal Five.
Terrorism is not defeated by war as we have known it (as we should have learned in Vietnam) because there’s no visible enemy as in a war as we’ve known it. Terrorism arises out of uniform and apart from armies from people feeling and being done grievous wrong (like the Jewish underground in WWII Poland and later against the British in the yet-to-be Israel). Or out of pure hatred, which is harder yet to combat or change. Terrorists will always achieve their vengeful or murderous or righteous goals — if not today, then tomorrow. They will wait, they will choose numerous targets, and successful completion of ANY of them is satisfactory. They have no intention of rolling over their enemy in some kind of blitzkrieg. Only dumbheads like the Fatal Five think the latter is what they’re fighting. Terrorism is reduced only by changing conditions that foster it, and through diplomacy (a foreign word to the Fatal Five).
At this time, the Fatal Five has shrunk. The others having bailed out, we’re now left with the DD, i.e. the Dreadful Duo (or Dumbya and Darth), namely Bush and Cheney. The latter, as in most of his time in office, is hiding in his unknown location. While the former, having made the world an incredibly more dangerous place, is reduced (if reduction were possible) to sneaking out of America and into Iraq or Afghanistan. He calls them surprise visits, but in truth, he’s sneaking out and in and out. Not risking his cowardly butt with open visits. Risk is for those he sends to war in his chicken place. Imagine: an American president having to sneak around the world.
So on tomorrow’s 6th anniversary, honor those we’ve lost: take time to write or email the Dreadful Duo, those 2 sniveling cowards who evaded military and combat service themselves but send others’ loved ones, and who keep using 9/11 for their own advantage (like timing the upcoming so-called Petraeus report release for the week of the anniversary), and who continue only to lie and equivocate and make a further mess of what already seems as bad as it can get. Tell them what you think of their stupidity. Tell them they are far and away the most shameful administration in our country’s history. Tell them that in some very real respects, they have been treasonous to our nation. Tell them how, most of all, they have dishonored those who lost their lives on 9/11 and since. Tell them they should recognize their shame and remember and live with and be haunted by it all the rest of their miserable, cowardly, dishonorable lives.
That may be the best we can do with them. Unfortunately.
If by chance, you’d worry that writing such things to them might somehow rebound badlly on you, then understand that such a feeling means they have achieved their goals: they’ve squeezed your Constitutional rights out of you. C’mon, suck it up, call your personal, internal 911. Take those rights back — if only out respect for those who lost everything on 9/11 and since.

Even as so many pieces of the Big Picture seem to be on the road to the big garbage dump, it’s hard not to appreciate days like this here in the mountains, with the sky a perfect summer blue over miles of sunflowers lining the road to and from where I travel.
I am eating tomatoes from my garden. The daily flocks of birds are back at the feeders in hopes that the bear will not return. And, on Monday, I will set out for five whole days away from caregiving. I have not had that stretch of time away from my mother in six or more years.
It’s supposed to rain most of those five days, but I will take the sense of this sunflower day with me as I visit my grandson (who just started kindergarten) and his parents, and then go on to spend a few days with my women friends in Albany.
I don’t know how my brother is going to manage our mother by himself while I’m gone. He has agreed to have a friend who is a home health aide come in on one day to give him a break. I don’t think that’s going to be enough, and I am willing to pay to bring someone in every day. He makes his choices and he takes his chances.
Meanwhile, the open road less traveled is waiting for me. It will all be here when I get back. Although the sunflowers might be getting droopy headed. Summer is, after all, over.