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Posts Tagged ‘Family’

Fast Forward

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on August 28, 2018| 1 Comment »

We all hate to say good-bye to summer, although in the South summer does linger. Gardens get droopy as children wait for school buses at sunrise. Leaves begin their inevitable transformation while the last crepe myrtle blossoms rain down on my car. But instead of slowing down as temperatures cool, things speed up in our family. We are entering the season of the Birthday Party!

Or as I like to call us, those Christmas Party babies.

Most all of my family birthdays span August and September. And although Martha Stewart I am certainly not, I love to plan the celebration. One year the young Rocker had a treasure hunt on the beach for hundreds of rocks I’d painted gold. Because his birthday is in August, his classmates combined with beach club friends to make a mob scene. Another year, they all played roller hockey at the end of our street.

The Bride’s birthday would fall at the beginning of the school year and one year (around 10 or 11) we rounded up all her friends and stopped by the nearest beauty school for fun makeovers. Before that, we’d had clowns and games in our Berkshire backyard. I remember a Strawberry Shortcake cake. There was a certain New England pride some of us moms felt in doing the deed at home – a leftover martyr complex from our parent’s generation.

This year the Bride took the Love Bug to her first Taylor Swift concert for her birthday present, a rite of passage she is continuing since Bob started bringing our young daughter to Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour at Madison Square Garden. I was not a big concert or band fanatic. I was never a groupie or a Dead Head or a Parrot Top for that matter. But Bob’s identity was forged at Woodstock, and so the tradition continues.

I listened to friends talk about the Jay-Z and Beyonce concert this past week, had coffee with a cousin who was attending the Keith Urban Graffiti U tour at the Bridgestone, and then last night heard all about Tay Tay from my grand daughter. That was this past weekend in Nashville!

Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on something. And I’d always like to slow down time. But over the years, I have seen the Yardbirds, the Stones, the Boss, Bob Dylan and Billy Joel and Sting as back-to-back piano men, and so my life is complete. The concerts I’ve cherished were at Tanglewood over a picnic supper. For now I’ll just tune my Sonos to Mozart and plan our 70th birthday trip to Italy. Wait SEVENTY? Ciao baby!

And what do you mean I’m the last birthday of the year?

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#SeniorCitizensDay

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on August 21, 2018| 1 Comment »

Today is National and International Senior Citizen’s Day. I’m not sure what that means exactly, since it’s a new holiday to me. Our generation changed the Early Bird Special to Happy Hours; maybe the cafes in our neighborhood will be having half price sales? That would make a glass of wine and a plate of wings $5! Or maybe BarcaLoungers will go on sale? I remember when our local animal shelter was giving senior dogs away free to seniors! Live out your last years together snuggling on Golden Pond.

Maybe someone will give me a flower?

The Flapper hated being called a “senior;” just when she was getting grey the term “elderly” changed to “senior.” Her mind was just fine and she abhorred being categorized like the latest marketing scheme. I remember when the “elder” George Bush started Desert Storm, she was the first to say it’s all about the oil. She never dyed her hair purple or did the tiny Queen-like curls that littered the heads of most of her contemporaries. She proudly swirled her long grey hair into a perfect chignon every day.

Great Grandma Gi (aka the Flapper) had a purrfectly beautiful cat and lived on Lake Minnetonka in the Land of Lakes. At one point, she befriended the “old” (as opposed to the “new”) Mrs Pillsbury, checking in on her during snow storms. My brother, Dr Jim, just sent me an article about “Southways,” the gracious Grand Home that sits at the point of the peninsula. It seems the Pillsbury estate is scheduled for demolition, a sad end to the Gatsby era.

“The estate, originally built as a summer house for John S. and Eleanor Pillsbury and their six children, has seen its price slashed several times in recent years. When listed in 2007 at $53.5 million, it was the most expensive house in Minnesota. After it failed to attract a buyer, the price was reduced to $24 million. Still no takers. Recently, the original 13-acre site was subdivided into five homesites. The 32,461-square-foot house and its remaining 3.3 acres and 415 feet of prime shoreline on Brown’s Bay was relisted at $7.9 million.”

http://www.startribune.com/lake-minnetonka-pillsbury-mansion-slated-for-teardown/491230621/

It’s a shame the historical association couldn’t save that home. But everything must change.

Moving Great Grandma Ada out of her home of 50 years was not an easy task. However, she has regained her strength and is moving more than she ever did in that big house on a hill. Some one asked if she needed anything shipped to her, and she realized she has everything she needs. Well, actually she does need some of her beads since she started me stringing! And her purpose in life is still the same, to help others. Yesterday, a young man asked if she’d like to sit on a panel about aging. Of course! And a few days ago she delivered a painting of a totem pole to a friend’s daughter for a birthday present! Now she is a Commissioned Artiste!

On this Senior Citizen’s Day Ada’s calendar is filling up. Today we are celebrating in Nordstrom’s, after a visit to the dentist. The next round of visitors should be starting very soon. She feels as if she is slightly sixty, maybe, and is aghast about hitting her hundredth decade! We need a new name for these seniors, maybe “Super Duper Seniors!”

 

 

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Greed, Lies and Manipulation

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2018| Leave a Comment »

The Prosecution of Paul Manafort rests, and I’ve heard that Judge Ellis III doesn’t just swing a gavel, he swings a battering ram with nails. Soon enough a jury of his “peers” will decide if this friend and former campaign manager of Mr T deserves a jail sentence for tax fraud. Oh how I wish I was at the beach last week with the Groom’s family since his father just retired from a government career holding such people accountable… Grandpa Mike might have been able to shed some light on the world of financial crime.

A world full of greed, lies and manipulation as another tax attorney described it. So, as an antidote to the escalating breaking news of the day, I offer you my two cents:

Instead of greed, altruism. I spent a good part of yesterday with The Love Bug, and on our morning Ms Bean walk she happened to find some pennies. In a few weeks she will turn 6, and so she is starting to learn about money. Later, in the car with her Mama, she asked me to look for homeless people so we could give them some money! That was the sweet news, but unfortunately in Nashville, we have our fair share of homeless.

Instead of lies, truth. Differentiating between lying and truth-telling begins at about this age, which is why the Catholic Church chose 7 as the age for Communion. But some people never quite get it, they conflate and exaggerate the truth, or ignore it altogether. Our L’il Pumpkin is almost 4 and loves super heroes, so whenever I play Wonder Woman to his Batman I throw my invisible lasso of truth around the bad guys (usually a big stuffed bear). I believe in brutal honesty, and so does that bear!

Instead of manipulation, role-modeling. If you want someone to change their behavior, particularly a child, bribery does help but modeling the behavior you desire works best. I would always bring soup to new moms when the Bride was little, and I was happy to see she has continued this tiny tradition with her friends. Whenever I watch the Love Bug pick tomatoes from their garden, I think back to the Berkshires and the short growing season our tomatoes endured – the love of garden “candy,” of eating healthy, real food is being passed down to the next generation.

I could care less what Omorosa has to say, but I DO care that Mr T called her a “dog” this morning in a Tweet. Do you remember when a radio personality lost his job for calling the hair of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “kinky?” Can the racist, misogynistic hate please stop! It seems like our level of discourse may never recover from this presidency.

But for a final bit of good news, did you know there’s a large group of “Grannies” who have made their way to the Texas/Mexico border to protest the separation of families? They boarded two big vans in NY and picked up almost 2,000 more seniors heading south!

Like most others on board, Ms Mellen’s motivation for joining – a belief in the “designed, intentional cruelty” of the administration’s immigration policies – was deepened by maternal experience.

“Being a mother and a grandmother I know the incredible connection I feel toward my children and my grandbabies, and you put their faces on these children,” Ms. Mellen said.

“I can’t imagine the pain.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45174891

No human is illegal, and every grandma is a gift.  IMG_3121

 

 

 

 

 

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A New Niece

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on August 10, 2018| 1 Comment »

Ever since Great Grandma Ada and Hudson moved to Nashville, Bob and I have been busy with the myriad friends and relatives who have come to visit them. First it was Hudson’s son-in-law, then his daughter from Arkansas.  Next up, Kathy and her ex from NC went to the museum with all of us. Then an old friend, Toni from FL came by, and she and Ada Facetimed with Toni’s new grandbaby.  But the last visitor stole the show!

We finally met Dickie’s daughter, Tamara.

When Ada first heard the news during rehab she was ecstatic. It made all her hard work after hip surgery bearable. Dickie was her middle son, the handsome desperado who went to Mexico for medical school and in some ways never returned. He died too young. In fact, the Rocker’s Bar Mitzvah was just a few weeks later. His very first band played at the beach party we threw for all the Eighth Grade! Dickie would have loved that evening.

Why he didn’t tell us about Tamara we’ll never know. He wrote to her, and her birth mother Kathy, once she found him. By that time his daughter was in her early 20s. Maybe he just wasn’t ready to meet Tammy; it must have been a shock to find out that twenty years ago you went to Woodstock but somewhere in NC, in one of those horrible homes for young pregnant girls, your baby was born. And against Kathy’s wishes, Tammy was given up just days later for adoption.

I’d been on pins and needles, waiting to meet her. We saw pictures of Tammy and her family – Ada now has two new Great Grandsons – and I kept trying to see Dickie in their eyes. I just wasn’t sure, until I walked into Ada’s new apartment and looked at both of them, Grandmother and Grand Daughter together. I realized Tammy takes after Ada’s family, like Bob and Jeff. Dickie looked like his father, blonde and fair, it didn’t occur to me that of course DNA can do extraordinary things!

She has Dickie’s wavy hair and his smile, but the rest is pure Ada. Those dark Russian eyes, and the sparkle to go along with them. She loves history and music. Her voice is honeyed by her Southern roots. She is beautiful, smart and sensible, and lucky for her, she grew up in a loving, intact home. Unlike most adopted children, Tammy didn’t seek out her birth parents, so this rag-tag team of Yankee Jewish relatives was a big surprise. For most of her life she thought she was Italian!

We laughed, we ate, we shopped at Talbots, we talked, we celebrated our good fortune. We added another link to our family totem; our tree of life has sprouted a new branch.

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The First

Posted in an expository essay, Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on August 1, 2018| 3 Comments »

First of all, Happy Happy Birthday to my firstborn son. He is kind, talented and fearless. He’s been laser-focused on all-things-music since he was seven years old. Last year he married his first love, then won two Cleos, and then, this year, he started his own company! If we parents can’t brag about our own children, well who will? Sorry Sister Mary Claire, being humble had its place once upon a time.

IF I’d thought of it, I would have put up a “Happy Birthday” billboard in LA.

Because we Americans can say whatever the heck we please in public right? Well, not exactly – that First Amendment is tricky. It uses an archaic verb to say what the government can’t do to our freedom of speech; it cannot “abridge” speech…which doesn’t mean legislators can stop a person from speaking.

Abridge comes from the word abbreviate, so it refers to: shortening/omitting/diminishing/depriving.

In other words, let’s have a civil discourse and not interrupt each other with opinions that at times might fly far from facts, and incite violence. I’ll be watching closely the court case this week against Alex Jones, the Austin based mogul of Infowars media. He spread rumors that the Sandy Hook massacre of elementary school children and their teachers was a hoax, causing the parents of Noah Pozner to move SEVEN times because Jones also reported their new address to his conspiracy-obsessed-gun-toting followers.         https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/alex-jones-defamation-suit-sandy-hook.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

And in Germany, the government has decided to send out Holocaust educators and bullying experts into its schools since it has seen a rise in Anti-Semitic, Holocaust denier rhetoric, something that country takes very, very seriously. In this case it seems that, unlike Mark Zuckerberg, hate speech will not be tolerated.

“…a brutalised climate now, in which more people feel emboldened to say anti-Semitic things on the internet and in the street”. “Previously that was unthinkable, but the threshold has dropped.”  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44725066T

We walk a serpentine line today as the soap box in the town square has turned into the world wide web – every paranoid schizophrenic or malicious Neo-Nazi can broadcast their misleading, patently false, absurd speech to anyone with a phone. And today, we came very close to being able to 3-D print a gun anywhere at anytime without a background check.

Let’s raise the threshold this November. Look for the “Gun Sense” symbol of approval on a candidate’s resume. And don’t be fooled by the GOP’s “I’m not a politician” rhetoric, that just means they will do Mr T’s bidding. It’s like saying, hey he’s not a brain surgeon but I want him to operate on my brain anyway. I borrowed that from Bob, my first love!

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A Day at the Museum

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on July 20, 2018| 4 Comments »

“You have a beautiful family,” the guard at the Frist Museum said, as she opened the door to a hot summer day in Nashville. And I remembered maitre d’s in NYC saying the same thing to the Flapper as we’d exit a swanky restaurant. A family I felt barely belonged to me; I was all of thirteen but my big brother Dr Jim was studying at Columbia and my stunning Upper-East-Side sister Kay would smile warmly. Now I know how my Mother felt surrounded by her brood. She’d done it – she raised them right, despite the poverty and the challenges.

“From 94 to 5,” I said. What the museum guard didn’t know was that yesterday our family turned a corner. We found the amazing woman, Kathy, who had given up her child back in the 60s, only to create an amazing life apart from my late Brother-in-Law. And now she’d completed the circle, searching always for her adopted daughter and finding out that our sweet Dickie, her first love, had died.

We women had few choices back then; many of my friends became sterile after illegal abortions. A good friend joined a cult.

It was incredible to watch my “Soul Sister” connect with Great Grandma Ada. They held each other’s hands for the longest time. They whispered secrets. My late Brother-in-Law was present, with his long hair and his big smile. It was an accident, he didn’t mean to die.

The Docent had us all look at a painting by an Israeli artist. Her parents had survived the Holocaust, but we didn’t know any of this. The Exhibition was titled “Chaos and Awe, Painting for the 21st Century.” The Love Bug was pointing to the sky, and the birds. I felt the fractured light. And Ada said that when a child dies, Jews cut a limb off a tree in the cemetery. In the middle there was blood, but nobody talked about that. It was a solemn time, a sacred visit. A newly-connected family in the presence of Art.

Maybe because I was separated from my biological family as an infant, I could relate to Kathy’s story. Still I knew both of my mothers. And my Daddy Jim was a hard act to follow! We cannot wait to meet Dickie’s daughter, and Ada’s two new Great Grandsons!

http://fristartmuseum.org/calendar/detail/chaos-and-awe-painting-for-the-21st-century

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Redheads, Lies and please God

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on July 18, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Videotapes?

As pundits are aTwitter over Mr T’s comments in Helsinki – and don’t get me wrong, they were outrageous, even traitorous – on Monday a 29 year old Russian spy named Maria Butina was arrested, or should I say indicted and taken into custody by a federal grand jury. She’s a pretty young thing, with as luck would have it, red hair. And one of the things mentioned in the slew of papers is that she attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast. TWICE.

The National Prayer Breakfast was initiated in 1953 by a Methodist minister, Abraham Vereide, who had been leading Congressional prayer groups for a decade. The annual breakfast now attracts close to 4,000 participants and is hosted by members of Congress. But the real force behind the event remains Mr. Vereide’s Fellowship Foundation, also known as “The Family,” whose fundamental mission is to create a ruling consortium of Christ-centered political and community leaders. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/opinion/maria-butina-putin-infiltration.html

Interesting right? To read about the far-reaching effects of this secretive, leave no notes behind “Family,” I give you this: “The Secret Political Reach of the Family” https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120746516

It’s enough to make a conspiracy theorist out of me! Remember that men-only/drum/circle/weekend/campout President Underwood attended in House of Cards on Netflix? That series was getting stale mostly because our reality star president was thought to be more entertaining. When he threw a soccer ball via Vlad like a hot potato to Melania on Monday, I was wondering if the secret service had pre-approved the move. And if Baron would actually ever hold that ball.

But why ask Vlad if he would deport those 12 Russian agents to America, when he already offered to send over his special cyber-security team to help us out. I hope the State Department confiscated Butina’s passport.

The intersection of a world-wide anti-LGBTQ agenda (fueled by nationalist extreme Christian right politicians) with lobbying efforts of the NRA has resulted in the spectacle we saw in Helsinki. Mr T is in Russia’s pocket, and it’s lined with sable, or maybe chinchilla? And if he’d like the American people to believe he “misspoke” about believing Putin had nothing to do with the hacking of over 500,000 votes… I am reminded of the phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  Only in this case, I’m hoping there’s an independent voter who can spot a sociopathic liar in Finland.

Meanwhile, back in the Music City, I’ll be going to the museum today with the Bride, the Bug, Great Grandma Ada and our newly-found friend Kathy – the redhead will be in pre-school!

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Baby Zeppelin

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on July 13, 2018| 4 Comments »

What a week. I’ve got two broken ribs, nearly fifty immigrants infants can’t find their parents, and Mr T meets with the Queen while his baby image in a diaper floats above London like it’s the Macy’s Parade!

But first, let’s discuss Kylie Jenner on the cover of Forbes magazine. She is sneaking up on becoming one of the youngest American Billionaires since Mark Zuckerberg. Everyone, including Dictionary.com, is taking issue with the magazine’s assertion that Kylie is a “self-made” entrepreneur. So I thought, let’s dig into this one!

Horatio Alger Jr is the fictional writer we often equate with the myth of a “self-made-man.” We can thank Harvard for this, because even though his lineage dates back to the Pilgrims, when Alger was studying at Harvard he was denied entrance into the Hasty Pudding Club due to his “…genteel poverty and less-than-aristocratic heritage.” So what did this son of a Unitarian minister do in the mid 1800s?

He wrote about young boys who pulled themselves up out of poverty through hard work and or some act of courage or honesty – thereby making the big leap, almost unheard of in Europe, of becoming solidly middle-class. Strangely enough, he was living in New York and always interested in the plight of “street boys,” immigrants fresh off the boat from Ireland or Italy and orphans who had been left roaming the Lower East Side after the Civil War. He even adopted three boys.

To be honest, we’ve all relied on the kindness of strangers or a loan from a great aunt at some point in our lives. It really does take a village to raise a child, and in the case of Kylie, it took a whole social media, world-wide circus! Still, I’d come to her defense because she didn’t just invent an App, or create an avatar of herself for some video game. She took a risk, and instead of bemoaning her accusers for using fillers on her lips, she turned that into her business model.

She made lemonade out of lemons.

Sure she came from an already famous and wealthy family, poor thing, but she figured out a way to actually create something – granted it’s not a cure for cancer but you too can have pouty rosebud lips!

I mean look at another child of privilege, Mr T. He was handed the keys to his kingdom by his father, and he turned NYC into his personal playground. Unfortunately today, he’s cozying up to dictators, and trampling on our allies while padding the SCOTUS with ultra-conservative white men; all the while concurrently dismantling our government and destroying our reputation throughout the world.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if such an entrepreneur should turn out to have squandered his family fortune and be in debt to Russia? Our serial-liar-in-chief is one smooth operator. Like Alger, who was fired from his first job as a minister for molesting young boys, I sense something dark and foreboding lurking in president-bone-spurs past.

I’d love to see Mr T baby balloons take-off over here, maybe a Halloween costume? By October those immigrant babies will have been deported back to their parents I hope…and it shouldn’t hurt when I laugh, or sneeze right? We all need a little push while growing up!

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Confinement

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on July 10, 2018| 4 Comments »

We’re invited to a baby shower! My “Total eclipse of the sun” friend’s daughter, who happened to train at Vandy with the Bride, is having a baby. The new mama-to-be is a Pediatric Orthopedist who has gone on hunting trips with her father. I wonder if anyone is going to ask her how long her “confinement” will be?

That’s what Great Aunt Bertha wanted to know when I was waiting for the Bride to come into this world. And even today, in some cultures, cocooning the new mom/baby couple at home for the first month is de rigeur. A rite of passage when grandparents and aunties lived in the same village, or around the block.

While finally watching The Handmaid’s Tale on Netflix, I’ve found myself drawn to certain news stories about the myriad ways women have been constrained throughout herstory: binding the feet of high caste Chinese girls to resemble hooves; ever increasing chokers to lengthen the necks of African women; and the latest tortuous injustice in Nepal – banishing menstruating women to a small hut every month because of a superstition that they will bring bad luck to their families.

Young women have died from the cold, from a snakebite, from smoke inhalation. Last year Nepal passed a law criminalizing this practice, yet it is rarely enforced. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/world/asia/nepal-women-menstruation-period.html

  • In many world religions, women are seen as impure during their periods
  • They are restricted from entering places of worship and following religious rites
  • The chhaupadi tradition followed by Hindus in western Nepal is the most extreme version where women are banished outside during their monthly cycle
  • In India, women are not allowed to enter some Hindu temples and Muslim mosques while menstruating but there have been court cases to overturn this
  • In southern India, a girl reaching puberty is celebrated with a party and presents
  • In the Dogon tribe in Mali, women of the village also live in a hut during their periods

So this morning, as the world celebrates the rescue of all 12 pre-pubescent Thai boys and their soccer coach from a cave, I can’t help noticing that buried at the bottom of the NYT’s front page is a small piece about immigration. Today is the deadline imposed by a San Diego federal judge for the Trump administration to reunite all migrant families with their children who are less than 5 years of age.

The reunions will be carried out today for about HALF of the children under extreme secrecy with the Department of Homeland Security. As we look away, as we turn to Thailand, some South American families will be reunited and immediately deported. But what about the other children under 5, where are their parents? Where are they? What about the children over 6? The Love Bug will turn 6 this summer.

I never thought my country would break up families and put children in cages on our Southern border. And today, as this administration defies a court order of reunification because (insert some reason here for losing about 50 children and babies) I wonder what our legislators will do. Because doing nothing is no longer an option.

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Cars and Stars

Posted in an expository essay, Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, journal, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 6, 2018| Leave a Comment »

Hope y’all had a Happy Fourth! The Bride and Groom imported an 8′ bouncy water slide onto their lawn, so that even on a 96 degree day all the kids had outside fun! I whipped up a pesto pasta primavera and Great Grandma Ada helped bake some mini-white-chocolate-lemon cheesecakes adorned with strawberries, blueberries and bits of broken white choco-lusciousness. Sprinkled amidst the watermelon and hot dogs were voter registration forms, just in case!

Because as we were celebrating our first Fourth with all the Grands in Nashville, the Rocker and Aunt KiKi were visiting two museums in Amsterdam, and this was his takeaway: “incredibly powerful visit to the national holocaust museum and memorial and the dutch resistance museum today on our last day in amsterdam. some sobering reminders of the dangers of fascism and what human beings are capable of. the dutch resistance museum was particularly intriguing, as it continually asks you, what would you do in the face of a rising wave of fascism? adapt and ignore, collaborate, or actively resist?”  

Could this just be the last, gasping, dying breath of racism dressed up as white nationalism? Yesterday, James Fields Jr pled “Not Guilty” in a Charlottesville courtroom to multiple federal hate crime charges. He was the Ohio man who decided he would drive his car into a group of counter-protestors at the “Unite the Right” rally last August on the Historic Downtown Mall. The very weekend we were moving from the Blue Ridge, Fields injured many and killed Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old young woman who believed in love and not hate.

The judge asked him if he suffered from mental illness… is that because if you’re white and run into a group of people with your car you couldn’t possibly be a terrorist? Fields said he suffers from depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety and ADHD…and I nearly choked on the bile of his audacity.

That, and the news about Justice Kennedy had us all wondering when this assault on democracy might end; if we are going to resist, NOW is the time. Block a vote on filling the Supreme Court vacancy – there should be NO vote until Mr T is no longer the subject of a federal investigation! Here is what Cory Booker had to say :

“If we’re not going to thoroughly discuss what it means to have a president with this ongoing investigation happening, who is now going to interview Supreme Court justices, and potentially continue with his tradition of doing litmus tests, loyalty tests, for that person, we could be participating in a process that could undermine that criminal investigation,” Booker said yesterday. “I do not believe [the Senate Judiciary Committee] should or can in good conscience consider a nominee put forward by this president until that investigation is concluded.”   http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/booker-no-supreme-court-vote-until-resolution-trump-investigation

But the best thing about this last week, to end on a high note, is that Bob and I bought a new car! As many of you know, I dread driving on the Fourth of July, because that was the holiday that found my family fractured by a drunk driver in 1949. We had just lost our father to brain cancer, and now our mother, the Flapper, and Nana were hospitalized leaving baby me in the care of their friends. I’m a nervous wreck generally in any car, but Bob’s old Acura had lived a good, long life. It was time, it was past time.

We now have so many driver-assist doo dads, I’m feeling almost comfortable driving again. So keep the faith, register young voters, and start calling your legislators again people! Get on the Booker train, it’s time to pick your torch – the one in our Lady’s hand on Liberty Island, or the Tikki torches that marched on Thomas Jefferson’s campus. Patriotism is an active noun.

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