The Russian judge gave it a 10, but you know those Russians!

I finished The Crappy One and Only. It ended the way I knew it would, with the Walker team winning the big game, and Shea and elderly Coach Hottie getting together. Even though we are told over and over again that Coach “looks ten years younger than his 55 years,” his age didn’t matter to me. What mattered was that he had watched her grow up. It was like a girl falling in creepy incestuous love with the stepfather who raised her from infancy. YUK. I was skeeved.

My grade: D- I am going to stay far away from Giffen from now on. I will say that she’s not a bad writer, which is why I did not give this an F. Story was an F but the prose was a solid B.

Now I’m listening to the mournfully beautiful The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman. I first read this book years ago; I chose it because I needed something I knew would not disappoint. It is not a traditional novel, but a collection of stories set in the same place: the town of Blackwell, Mass. Starting with the coming of white people to the icy, bear-filled wilderness of the Berkshires, going forward in jumps of 16 or 20 or 45 years. The same families show up again and again, and characters often refer to their parents and grandparents, the protagonists of previous stories.

I find the stories beautiful, though they are strange and full of loss and sadness. Johnny Appleseed shows up, and gives a suicidal widow the gift of knowing she is alive. A strange, plain young girl from Amherst meets a blind man, and although they only know each other for a few days, he gives her a dog named Carlo and she plants a scented garden for him.

A young girl drowns in a surprising summer snowstorm, in a cold year where one of Johnny Appleseed’s trees saves the lives of the town. A murderess’ daughter remembers sadly the execution, by electrocution, of an elephant named Topsy. I don’t know why I love Hoffman’s books as I do, I have friends who do not think much of her, but I find her writing so beautiful, clear and yet with a sense of how much wonder there is in the world. This book is full of beautiful descriptions of nature. 

I need things right now that help me forget the stuff that is going on in the world. So much awful stuff. I may have to put myself on a news diet, because two solid days of obsessively reading and listening to the news about San Bernadino is not good for me.

Here's a guilty secret: when I feel as scared and upset by the world as I do right now, I read children's books (especially old favorites) and Regency romances. Excuse me while I head off to an evening of extremely light reading.

The Princess of Peeved

It rained Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and today here in soggy Baltimore. I am looking forward to a less damp Thursday.

Still listening to the crappy The One and Only. It's still bad, but in a good way. I'm so aggravated by Shea, the main character, that it distracts me from how boring scanning documents for hours is!

Wearing her nerdly green sweater that kept her from being too cold. Styling!

 Here is something that has happened to me recently. The Monday before Thanksgiving we had to have our little Cocker Spaniel, Punkin, put down. The poor thing was frail and had become senile and incontinent. It hurt to lose her, but her quality of life was down to about nothing, and I am afraid things were about to get worse, as she had a big infection. It was time.

Punkin, like one of my other favorite dogs (Dru), was not your stereotypical sweet/cute/happy dog. Frankly, she looked at life with a jaundiced eye, not that I blame her. She had one owner from the time she was a puppy. She and another dog lived with that man for 10 years, and when he died, the family took them to a shelter. The rescue we volunteer with took both dogs, but could not find a home for the two of them together, and the other dog was adopted first.

First, Punkin was in a kennel at a boarding facility, but then she went to a foster home. The foster told us that the first few days at her house, poor old Punkin was so upset she basically hid under furniture, growling and snapping at everyone who passed by. Then she settled in for four months. When this woman was getting ready to go away for the summer and asked for another foster family to take her (just for the summer or until she was adopted). I volunteered.

I won't forget the first time I saw this dog. I was told to look for a woman in a red convertible with an orange dog. And let me tell you, she was ORANGE. I said, "You weren't kidding about her being orange!" The woman sheepishly told me that Punkins's coat was really a reddish buff, but she had washed her with a special "brightening" shampoo for red dogs, like Irish Setters, etc. It seems the phone rang while Punkin was marinating in orange dye...and twenty minutes later she was the canine equivalent of Lucille Ball.

When I got her home, Punkin got herself up in the corner of our couch and commenced to glare balefully at us and our other dogs. She wasn't having any of us. She'd been ripped out of her home, her dog friend had been taken away, she got settled into a good home, and now she had to start over...to which she said, "Not just no, HELL NO." Four four days she curled up in an angry ball, snapping at the dogs, snapping at us. The only reason she left the couch was to go outside to pee. She would not eat.

Thomas finally could not take it anymore, and on day four he got a bunch of kibble and boiled chicken, and started hand feeding her. She deigned to eat if he would feed  her. Eventually, she settled in and started eating out of a bowl and nosing around the yard. After three months, she was doing pretty good. Standoffish and a little snippy, but we all understood each other.

Then the time came for 1st foster mom to come home and she emailed me to ask when she could get Punkin back. I asked if she was adopting her or just fostering again. Just fostering, I was told.

I got to thinking about something my friend Christine said about fostering dogs. It is a good thing, because it keeps the dogs out of kill shelters, and in a home situation where they keep their house training and good manners...but the dogs don't know it's just temporary. They settle in and love you. Every time we move a dog from one home to another, we take a little piece of their heart, their trust, away. It's for a good reason, but we do some damage.

"Screw that," I told Thomas, "we're keeping her. She's a little pain in the butt, but she's our pain in the butt, and I'm not going to make her move again." And Punkin was a member of the family.

Our friends just learned to leave her alone. She didn't want you to pick her up, or pet her, or fuss with her at all. She would take food, if she felt like it, but she was not food motivated like our other dogs. We hardly knew what to do with a Cocker Spaniel who wouldn't readily sell her good will for food! She was a tiny little thing, barely 21 lbs at her heaviest. By the time she died she was about 16 lbs of toughness. Like the Energizer Bunny, she kept on ticking, but she'd failed badly since the end of the summer. Monday we knew the time had come.

So, Punkin, Princess of Peeved, we loved you and will miss you. We hope you are running through the fields of heaven, at peace. 

More like a June - September romance - but still gross

These last few months, I’ve been listening to a bunch of books on CD and playaway (www.playaway.com) while at work. My job is now tedious in the extreme; I sit at a desk and scan page after page of old forms, and then organize/save them. Trust me, this is the type of thing that requires something entertaining books.

I am currently listening to The One and Only, by Emily Giffin. I have seen her books on the shelves for years, but it’s been a long time since I tried one. The choice of audiobooks at the BCPL is heavy on scary murder mysteries and romance novels, neither of which I want to read at work, so Emily Giffin seemed like a reasonable choice.

Be prepared. Spoilers ahead! This story is about a woman who works for the fictional Walker University, a football school near Dallas. Walker is a football school in a football state…and the main character, Shea, is in love with her home town, her alma mater, and on many levels, the head coach of the football team. Coach Carr is her best friend’s father, and has always been Shea’s hero. In many ways, he has always been her male role model, since her father left her mother to go back to his first wife and daughter.

I myself happen to be from a beautiful, small town that happens to have a beautiful state university. It’s also a football school that has a Coach Carr-like coach. Everyone in Clemson has Dabo Fever; he’s not just a good coach, everyone loves him for his open Christian faith, the compelling backstory of his difficult childhood and rise from poverty, and his super-earnest, shucks-ma’am-Southern-shtick. I recently read an interesting article about the difference between Dabo Swinney and Steve Spurrier. Swinney sounds like a nice person, but I would probably prefer to attend a dinner party with Spurrier, who would be more entertaining. Because I am somewhat cynical about life, the universe, and everything, I find people like Coach Swinney hard to understand, and maybe, a little simple. Life is not simple, there are no easy answers, and to act like there are, is disingenuous.

I recognize a lot about the kinds of football fans who Shea represents. Football is her game, and Walker is her school, and as far as she is concerned, anything about them is good. I have friends like that, although that’s never been my way. I love Clemson (the town) and Clemson (the school), but I am not obsessed with sports. If Clemson loses a football game, hell, if they have a sucky season, I don't love town and school any less. I love them in their entirety.

Anyway, this book has me thinking about all this because I do know people who are obsessed with Clemson football. Or with their own alma mater's team. When they talk about it, they say, "We won," or "We lost." I look at them with my jaundiced, cynical eye and think, "I'm sure you weren't out running your 50 year old ass around on that field." It's a game people, and in the end not a terribly important one. It is not a metaphor for life, or something that give it meaning, it's a fun way to spend an afternoon cheering on your team. But if your team loses...it was still a good thing to do, and then you go home and throw some steaks on the grill or play a game of Charades and life still has savor.

I am somewhere in the middle on this. I don't play sports, and I don't really care about wins/losses, but I do enjoy the occasional game. I don't hate sports like some people do; but they are not my life like they are for Shea Rigsby in this book. 

At chapter 18 or so, she's sleeping with the fictional QB of the Dallas Cowboys, she's yearning for her best friend's 55 year old recently widowed dad, and lying to her boss that she can be objective about the Walker football team. I see tears ahead. TEARS, I tell you, because when the best friend finds out about Shea and Coach Daddy, things are not going to be pretty. And a 33 year old woman leching on a man who has known her since the day she was born ought to be seeing a therapist about her Daddy Issues...

Eating my way through New Orleans

Heading off to The Big Easy to meet up with my Mom and a bunch of her first cousins and their kids. So...my cousins too. Just a lot of them are cousins I have not met yet.

Not a lot of advanced planning. I think some of us are taking a Segway Tour of the City, and maybe a bus tour. My Mom cannot walk long distances, so both of those things will be fun for her.

A lot of my goals for the trip are gustatory. I intend to try:

A biegnet

A muffuletto sandwich

A real New Orleans praline

And with this crowd, there will definitely be a few adult beverages put away. The thing about this trip is that we are getting together just to have fun, rather than getting together at a funeral...which is where we have seen each other these past 10 years or so. And so we are celebrating family, rather than the loss of family.

And that makes me glad.

Hey, hey, hey - Fat Albert wouldn't do that, would he?

Do you remember the cartoon Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids? It showed on Saturday morning when I was a kid. It was about a bunch of kids in inner-city Philadelphia, who ran into trouble each week, but then learned some lesson about how to a better friend or a kinder, stronger person. Fat Albert (voiced by Bill Cosby) was the moral compass of the group, and he always helped people stand up to the bully, ask for help from a responsible adult, and do the right thing. He taught kids to be kind.

I really loved it when I was a kid. I looked it up and the show started when I was in 3nd grade and went off the air after I graduated from high school, so it had a good run.

I'll be honest, it has been a hard couple of months. Last month was the one year anniversary of my friend Toni's death. She is never far from my thoughts. Earlier this spring, a friend's young wife, in the midst of a terrible depression, took her own life, leaving a shattered husband and a young daughter behind. The news is full of murder and mayhem. I was pulled over by a police officer today for a broken taillight, and my thoughts went immediately to my brothers and sisters who might reasonably fear that this could be the traffic stop that lead to their incarceration or death just for having brown skin. I am a mess.

Yesterday I read the horribly disturbing article in New York magazine that Bill Cosby, who in real life was NO Fat Albert, in between making movies, starring in tv shows, doing comedy tours, and making Jello commercials, was also giving women drugs and raping them. I'll never think about Fat Albert in the same way again. Dr. Huxtable, with all those young daughters, now seems creepily suspect.

I am trying to hold on to the words of Mr. Rogers, another person who tried to help kids be kind:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

But some days, it is hard to see the helpers when it seems like the world is mad and getting madder.