Marco Polo

Got a Mikey Dog Travel Log update. He's reached the high top of the Italy boot, in the Cinque Terre region of Italy, east of Monaco, south of Genoa. On my map puzzle, Italy is orange. Britain is pink. France is green. Monterossa is a beautiful small town by the sea, he says. Tomorrow he'll hike a trail connecting five small towns along the sea. Monterossa is a "bit touristy", he says. I smile reading his email.


I should have known Mikey Dog would be a world traveler. In kindergarten he was fascinated by maps and aerial perspectives, making drawings of the streets from a hotel window in San Antonio, and of the terrain below his airplane window near Albuquerque. In first grade he wrote that if he won the lottery he would go back to Washington, D.C. to see more of the museums and play with Linky the cocker spaniel. A few years later, he was so fascinated with Marco Polo he convinced a children's theatre director to create a play about Marco Polo. Genghis Khan was another of his fascinations. Soon he will study international business in Italy. Maybe he will travel the Silk Road.

Grab that case of shoestring potatoes!

First thing this morning I turned on the t.v. to check on Hurricane Katrina and the evacuees inside the Superdome like many folks all over the country. New Orleans is one place I've actually been in person, not just through the eyes of some fictional caterer/amateur detective. New Orleans is a foreign, wondrous, decadent, humid city of fascinating history and insects the size and weight of a bowling bag. It is also the site of national Whiz Quiz tournaments which, despite their popularity and importance, have never been held in the Superdome.

The Superdome is even bigger than the insects. Sure, it was many years ago when my then-spouse insisted we go for a run around the Superdome SEVERAL times, but I bet it hasn't shrunk. That sucker is monstrous, and jogging in New Orleans is like doing water aerobics in a kettle of boiling crawdads. I hold New Orleans in my fond memory. I'm mostly over wanting to put my ex in a kettle of boiling crawdads.

Sunday night I watched footage of the evacuees waiting in lines to get into the Superdome carrying their trashbags of food and clothing. Then this morning they had dim light but NO A/C! Those poor people, I thought, remembering my eldest's high school graduation held inside sweltering Texas Stadium. If I felt trapped sitting through the ceremony for the largest high school class to ever graduate in Texas, with concession stands selling H2O for $3/bottle, imagine how they must feel sitting out the storm. I had the luxury of knowing that the parade of students across the platform would eventually reach the Z's, although I did have on pantyhose, which counted double for suffering. Please don't let any folks in the hot, muggy Superdome have on pantyhose!

I had just worn nylons for the first time at my sixth grade promotion in late May of 1967. The nylons were "Suntan", and my dress for the occasion was a lovely Monet blue and lavender voile. My mantra was, "Don't lock your knees. Don't lock your knees. You won't faint and fall off the risers if you don't lock your knees."


1967 was Nebraska's statehood centennial. My pal and I were going to attend the Nebraska Camp Fire Girls Centennial Camporee in Lincoln's lovely, shady Pioneers Park. It was going to be "real" tent camping for hundreds of girls, with educational bus trips to the major sites of the Capitol City.

There's a definite lack on web information on this event, despite my best search efforts. Using the rainfall statistics for Lancaster County at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's High Plains Climate Center, along with the perpetual calendar in my loyal World Almanac, I suspect that the Camporee began on Sunday, June fourth. On the first full day of the week-long event, all the campers rode school buses into town to visit the Historical Society Museum, the State Capitol building with its Unicameral Chamber, the Governor's Mansion, the Folsom Children's Zoo, and the Sunken Gardens. After about the second educational tourist attraction this adventure had become a torture of searing bus seats and delays for hungry, thirsty, bored, irritable girls in navy shorts and white blouses.



Finally we boarded the buses to ride back out to the campsite. Recognition had dawned that we would continue to be hot, sweaty, bored, irritable, and itchy inside the canvas tents while counselors stirred big pots of hamburger stew made with Lipton dried soup packets, mixed the Tang, and got out loaves of Wonder Bread. The darkening sky matched our moods.

The storm came in suddenly, whipping the tent flaps and pouring down rain. The rain felt pretty good, but then the tents started falling down on us. The counselors couldn't make supper. They had to herd all the girls into the concrete park restrooms at the back of the concession stand. We could hear the tornado sirens. A couple adults held transistor radios to their ears. We kept packing closer together, standing inside the restrooms, scared, still itchy, thirsty, and hungry, and horrified about being in the MENS. Sirens, lightning, thunder, loose pieces of clothes and paper flying around. Then a lull. A brave young woman ran out through the rain, wind, and mud to what was left of the mess tent. She was bringing us provisions! She was bringing us a case of canned shoestring potatoes! It was just like a chapter from Little House on the Prairie or On the Banks of Plum Creek! We were going to huddle together budgeting our precious, limited supply of salty, greasy, potato sticks as the rain poured down even harder. We would gradually rotate so that each member of the group would get a turn to sip a bit of water from their cupped hand at the dirty sink of the MENS restroom.

In those primitive days there were no cell phones. Somehow, someone sort of in charge managed to get word to the city that the camp was a wreck. The Lincoln National Guard sent buses to load all the campers and the rest of the shoestring potatoes to ride to the armory. We each got a cot, and a PB sandwich. We didn't sleep well, still being soggy, and not knowing where we were.

After a few days at the armory, and a volunteer work detail back out to the campsite to load all the wet belongings into National Guard buses, I found a way to contact my parents so they could pick me up. All organization for the Camporee had broken down. No FEMA, no Plan B. And not enough shoestring potatoes!

Sending visualizations of shoestring potatoes to everyone in the Superdome tonight...

Home Decorating 101

What location is to real estate, balance and harmony are to interior design. Some people have a natural gift for creating balance and harmony in their spaces. Others consult feng shui experts. Many check out the large, heavy, gorgeously illustrated interior design books from the library about French kitchens and Santa Fe living rooms as a guide. Some use computer programs to rearrange without sweat.

In my own unbalanced way, I strive to move the pieces in my home to achieve a harmony of color, pattern, density, openness,antique, and contemporary. I like a variety of textures, which means some surfaces aren't covered with dust just to act as accent contrasts to the rest of the arrangement.

What sets me off fenging the schwee all around the condo is cords. Cords AND cables. They make me nuts. I can't sit down and watch a movie in my "home entertainment center" if I can see the electrical cords squirreling around in my peripheral vision. My plan for the day was to do the mountain of ironing while watching some tv and videos in the living room, but the cords behind the tv were taunting me.

Before long I had all the books off the shelves, all the entertainment devices unplugged and on the floor, the aquarium drained and headed to the dumpster, and a cold Miller Genuine Draft to aid the search for balance and harmony. At least I don't have a couch any more. And, by the way, complaining about the lack of a couch gave my two sons and their friends a safe, harmless, meaningful teen activity this summer when they could have been out on the streets rabble-rousing and leaving chewed bubble gum under the table at Taco Bueno! Just another free parenting tip...

After a couple hours I reached living room nirvana. Every chair, table, and framed photo was perfectly positioned to exude sheer bliss to anyone who enters. Unfortunately, I missed Lesson One of the class. Lesson One was when I should have learned not to achieve balance with the ironing board in the corner and the pile of wrinkly clothes plunked in the middle of the floor as part of the serene equation!

Put your finger on the string

Mailing a package used to be simpler. All packages were wrapped in brown paper and tied with string--used and saved string. The brown paper was likely reused, too, or may have been a cut up grocery sack. The box was certainly reused.

You put a slip of paper in with whatever you were mailing (preferably homemade cookies) with the destination address "just in case". Then you wrapped the box tightly in brown paper. You were allowed three small pieces of expensive Scotch tape, one in the middle, and one at each neatly folded end. Then you would use the saved string to tie the paper on. When you got ready to make a knot, you would call upon the small child, who had been quietly watching this major process, to hold the string with one finger while you pulled the knot tight. The excitement was in learning just when to pull the finger away from the string so as not to be stuck in the knot.

You wrote the address on the brown paper, and walked to the post office to mail the package. When you got to the counter, you told the postmistress "parcel post". She did a complicated calculation of weight and destination, all the while talking about whether it would rain in time to save this year's crop, and about how many jars of watermelon pickles you were putting up. She might let you lick the postage stamps. Then you would walk home, stopping in at the library for a new Nancy Drew mystery.

I am very pleased to report that Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. That means you can read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" with just one click of the mouse. I won't tell you how it turns out, but I will say listening to Sherlock Holmes cassettes in the car improved the quality of many road trips with the boys!

Today I learned the hard way that you can't reuse a Priority Mail box unless you want to pay Priority Mail postage. I wish I had covered the box with used brown paper. Then I wouldn't have to make another trip to the post office. I couldn't have used string, though!

The Box: Select a strong box with room for cushioning. On recycled boxes, cover all previous labels and markings with a heavy black marker or adhesive labels.

Sealing: Tape the opening of the box and reinforce all seams with 2 inch wide tape. Use clear or brown packaging tape, reinforced packing tape or paper tape. Do not use cord, string or twine.

If you are easily amused--let's say you think pulling your finger away from the string before it's caught in the knot is exciting--you might want to read this brief history of the U. S. Postal Service from 1775 to the present. And I sure hope there are homemade cookies in the present!

The Fruit That Won the West

Hot, hot, hot, hot as I crawl forward on my belly across the Death Valley sands toward the mirage...

My magnetic material is melting in the heat of another North Texas August day. My mental disks are feeling fragile and desensitized, too. Thank heaven I'm not riding the trail behind a herd of cattle, rounding up the stray dogies.

Maybe I'm anemic, my fevered imagination worries. The heat zaps me more than it used to. Maybe I need dried apricots. My mom was a big believer in the benefits of consuming dried apricots. She made sure they were one of my four basic food groups when I lived in the dorm in college (along with Triscuits, machine-dispensed coffee (fifteen cents/cup), and yogurt).

Mom convinced my little brother that all cowboys ate dried apricots to stay regular when they were riding the range. When I bite into a dried apricot, I still hear the Sons of the Pioneers singing, "All day I face the barren waste without the taste of water, Cool water." That was my brother's cowboy music album, and pretty enjoyable still.

The taste of water is foul these days in the Metroplex, due to the annual algae bloom. This is the only time of the year anyone really needs to buy bottled water. I'm all for taxing bottled water, if nothing else to pay the expense of cleaning up the littered bottles along every sports field, trail, park, parking lot, and roadway in the state. But I would request the tax not apply in August!

We take so much for granted here. In much of the world tap water is unsafe to drink without boiling, if there's even a tap at all.


My mail art first attempt.

Do the Laminator With Me

I'm in the last mad dash to prepare lesson plans and materials for the fall semester. The photo images will survive if and only if I laminate them.

Everybody's doin' a brand new dance now
Come on, baby, do the locomotion
I know you'll get to like it if you give it a chance now
Come on, baby, do the locomotion
My little baby sister can do it with ease
It's easier than learning your ABC's
So come on, come on, do the locomotion with me

How can it be that Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote the Locomotion song in 1962?

All Quiet on the Laundry Front

"It's quiet out there...too quiet," I remarked. When the jungle, the city, or the battlefield becomes too quiet, the reader knows all hell is about to break lose with an enemy offensive. I am conditioned to wait and to fear the worst is one breath away.

My washer and dryer are idle. So is the dishwasher. It's eerie. I don't think this has ever happened before. For twenty-three years my major appliances have been running like an involuntary household heartbeat. Now they are standing silent, waiting for the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unmatched Sock.

Brought a few dingy puppets and dress-up clothes home from work just to cheer up the Kenmores. For one cycle they felt useful and needed again. Tonight at bedtime I'm going to read them The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge. And speaking of lighthouses, check out these photos: Lighthouses, a Photographic Journey.

Bucking the Trends...

...or confessions of a non-Foodie.

Twenty years ago I met a professor at a Christmas party where we were playing some sort of trivia game. He announced proudly that he had dropped out of contemporary culture twenty years earlier. I remembered the conversation because I had just realized that I couldn't converse with the preteen babysitter we had enlisted for the evening because I didn't know anything about Michael Jackson's Moonwalk, Madonna, or OP clothes. I didn't intentionally drop out of contemporary culture, but vice versa. As a harried, broke, sleep-deprived mother of toddlers my name had been dropped from the membership roll of The Hip & In The Know. These things happen when your every single car drive is accompanied by Raffi or Wee Sing tapes.

I drive around in my seriously un-sexy Buick these days listening to NPR or the classical music radio station. I use the word "groovy" in conversation. I wonder why so many people at the mall look like they are wearing their pajamas, or just their underwear. I call graphic novels "comic books" and think they should cost a quarter at Ben Franklin's. And so, I have missed the food fad.

There are a lot of folks out there sampling exotic olives and making Crème Brûlée, which sounds like a good name for a teenage cave man. I have to apologize for ordering "a just plain regular black coffee", and get haggis and hummus mixed up.

With no sons at home, I am tempted to eat nuked hot dogs with French's mustard three meals a day. Driving home from work I had a little chat with myself (for the amusement of the driver ahead of me) about eating better. So I went to Central Market. I'm probably the only Planoite who's never been. Had a nice time wandering around looking at fresh veggies and fruits, and an amazing array of sausages. Started zoning out reading labels in the salad dressing aisle in my continuing search for onionless dressings. Suddenly someone was asking me in a very shrill, singsong voice if I needed any help. I turned around to find a woman who looked like a Sixties troll doll wearing a green and white striped apron and a nametag identifying her as a "Foodie". She had a pink lamb puppet, which was apparently the reason for the odd voice. I said I was fine, but the lamb was quite insistent that she could help me, so I asked the lamb which dressings didn't contain onions. The lamb was stumped, and scurried off to the bulk organic whole grains department. I talk to puppets often in both my jobs, but I don't want to do it in the grocery store!

Big Board in the Dumpster

You'll be happy to know this is not an analysis of trading on the NYSE. Yes, I listen to Marketplace on NPR on the drive home from work most days. Yes, I stood in line at the post office today watching the tv infomercial about putting twenty percent of my retirement investments into gold. I suppose that is about right. I have a leftover gold wedding ring that could best be considered a retirement investment!

This Big Board is the dry erase board hung over the kitchen sink for eight years. It served as the Master Logistical and Grocery Store Calendar for our household, and highest transportation coordination authority. We all equated it with the map in the Strangelove War Room. Many times we quoted, "Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!", as a guiding rule in our post-divorce family make-over. My efforts to organize my crew sometimes led to quotes of Jack Ryan imitating Admiral Painter in The Hunt for Red October:

"The average Rooskie, son, don't take a dump without a plan." Wait a minute. We don't have to figure out how to get the crew off the sub. He's already done that, he would have had to. All we gotta do is figure out what he's gonna do. So how's he gonna get the crew of the sub. They have to want to get off. How do you get a crew to want to get off a submarine? How do you get a crew to want to get off a nuclear sub...

My crew is off the sub now. I should have taken a picture before I dumped the Big Board in the trash. It's a strange feeling not being the Condo Concierge/Recording Secretary/Mission Commander for the family. Rats. I suppose I have to manage my own life now!

But first, let's do the numbers... Enjoy the Larry Carlton music that's been showing up during NPR show breaks lately.

Saying Goodbye to Sgt. Bradley

I broke it to him as gently as I could. The Marine recruiter who has left hundreds of messages on my voice mail over the past seven years does not need to call here anymore. There is no chance whatsoever that I am going to enlist.

Without Sgt. Bradley, I will have only the Plano Public Library's automated calling system, and some pesky UT alumni directory salespitchers to leave me messages. Only the Maytag repairman will have fewer Call Notes.

Travel Light

Mikey Dog is heading off for his junior year of study abroad with this red backpack and blue duffel. I'm going to ship him the box by the foot of the ironing board that has some winter necessities. That's it. Everything he needs, he has to take along and be able to carry.

What do we really need? We are accustomed to having so much stuff. Does it really enhance our lives? Just wondering what would happen if each of us individually, and as a nation, decided to travel lighter, taking only what we really need...

My middle son first got the nickname "Mikey Dog" when he was smitten with my sister's cocker spaniel, Lincoln. Mike and Linky seemed a matched set--comparatively easy-going, comfortable in their own skins, and appreciative of life's simple pleasures. The nickname still fits, as Mike is very protective of his old mom, rarely perturbed, happy to chase a frisbee, or to just snooze by the fire. He's a big dog now, and I wish him the very best on his great adventure.

Clearance! Everything Must Go!

FEMA take note:

This condo is a disaster. One son brought all his worldly goods back from his apartment and is now packing everything essential for the next two semesters into one backpack for life overseas. Another threw a massive amount of stuff together for the next two semesters for life in the next state. My territory is just as messy, and I have no excuse. Don't know whether to rent a backhoe or a flame-thrower!

Not Driving Miss Daisy

Not driving Mary Kay Cosmetics, either. The Caddies of "Cadillac Ranch" are looking a lovely shade of pink right now to promote breast cancer awareness, and the September Amarillo "Race For the Cure". Stanley Marsh 3's ten nose-planted Cadillacs have been painted and graffitied many times in the thirty-one years of the installation.

It seems very appropriate that this road art icon on the "Mother Road" of historic Route 66, is now honoring our mothers, sisters, and friends who are victims or survivors of breast cancer. My good friend, JP, loves old cars and license plates, follows Route 66, and is in remission. Surviving breast cancer has made her stronger and clearer in her goals. That girl is a V-8 engine now! She is a rosy gift of inspiration for everyone she meets.

Charles Loloma

The large drowsing animal and I were reconnected by our shared awe at the Loloma exhibit at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe. Charles Loloma (1921-1991) created beautiful jewelry that elegantly combines Hopi traditions and materials with compositions akin to Frank Lloyd Wright and Piet Mondrian. Akin as well to paper collages made by the large drowsing animal's mom, who shall remain nameless. I am inspired and energized....just as soon as I finish the guerilla Tonka Truck/Zen condo clean-up.

This was my second visit to the Wheelwright, and I encourage anyone headed to Santa Fe to visit. Examples of Loloma's jewelry can be seen at Blue Rain Gallery, and at eNewMexican.

Highway 287

Taking my youngest to college. Maybe this will turn into an emotional trip, but all I feel now is exasperation over the car-loading, and anxiety about the bike on the trunk carrier and the inability to see much out the rear window.

The large drowsing animal in the passenger seat has spent a great deal of time saying farewell to his pals. He has not invested much thought or energy into packing and organizing for the move to the dorm. His belongings are not alphabetized, color-coded, or marked with indelible ink. No checklists were created, let alone harmed in this experiment. This child who can be so much like his mother sometimes, is being completely unlike her today.

The rain is coming down so hard I may have to stop under an overpass. What if the bike falls off the carrier, or the carrier falls off the trunk? The instructions for the new carrier were not user-friendly in the cloudy six a.m. light.

Three cars are in the ditch. I grip the wheel tighter, not wanting to join them. The large drowsing animal stirs enough to change the Ipod music from Miles to Coltrane. Have to cut him some slack for choosing music we both love.

Last drove this highway through Wichita Falls alone during a March snowstorm. Years ago now, but a major moment in my journey to being a strong, happily-divorced woman. The current downpour on 287 marks the next transition.