Funky Friday, Pre-Rapture Edition

I decided not to worry about getting back on my diet just yet -- not that I expect to be Raptured or anything, but I know the owner of my favorite bakery is a pretty devout Christian, and I would like one more cinnamon roll, just in case...

Wienerdog Wednesday, Welcome Home Edition

Scooter Pie at the kennel doggy camp.

It's good to be home, although it means returning to work tomorrow. The Road Trip Without a Name went well, high cost of gasoline aside. I survived the first difficult leg of the trip: 400+ miles in the car with my mother, 3 mostly sleepless nights on The World's Most Uncomfortable Couch, and even avoided eating my way through Central Market, although a peanut butter whoopie pie did find its way into my basket somehow.

Boston was good, too -- reunited with intellikid Thursday evening, she treated me to a belated birthday dinner and then, since my knee was behaving, we walked around Brookline's Coolidge Corner neighborhood. If money and job and karma ever so dictate it, I'd move there instantly! In the meantime, I've got 2 more years of daughter dear's college career to make bi-annual pilgrimages to Beantown and environs.

M isn't just for "Meh"

Happy Mother's Day

Alas, no breakfast in bed for me this Mother's Day -- intellikid is busily preparing for finals (I hope), while I prepare to pack for the trip Bostonward to retrieve her. Last year at this time I was wrapping up the Magical Mystery Midlife Tour, a solo sojourn that was celebratory in nature. This trip, my mother will accompany me as far as Pennsylvania, where she'll have some time to spend with family there, and likely make a sad final visit to her sister Lois's house, where Mom spent every summer for the past 6 years. I hope there will be moments of celebration for her, too.

If you've been following along here for a while, you already know that I share a house with my mother, and of course intellikid still parks here during school breaks. The 3 generation household (plus one dog) has suited us fairly well, although there have been minor power struggles between my mother and I, who differ ideologically on many matters. For some time, though, I've been working on honing that unconditional love thing, trying to be more accepting of the differences that in the end don't really matter. It's a good thing, too, because I think I'll need all the self-control and inner strength I can muster to keep sane while spending the day in the car with Mom tomorrow.

I hope I have 6 hours' worth of Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach, and Chopin ...

I said, enough already....

RIP Grandpa.
95 years young.

Hope, Redux

I wasn't sure if intellikid would be a participant in the revelry that broke out on many college campuses early Monday morning following the news of Osama Bin Laden's capture. But there she is, along with several thousand other students from BU and other schools, taking to the streets of Boston in a . . . what? What was it they were taking part in, exactly? Another BU student explains:

We have been given reasons to be cynical, and the rally represented a brief departure from that. We were not celebrating the death of an enemy. We were celebrating because, ten years later, after a childhood spent being told that our futures looked bleak, we have something to celebrate about.

Monday Meh, Enough Already Edition

May Basket, by Andrew Wyeth

In light of the late night news yesterday, maybe a Surrealist painting would have been more appropriate this morning...

Any celebratory impulse has been tempered by the loss my family experienced - a dear Aunt, my mother's eldest sister, passed away Sunday morning. This is the aunt whose son died of cancer earlier this year. I believe that she put her own needs on hold while dealing with my cousin's illness, and it was just too late when she finally sought attention for the ills that had been troubling her.

Her death is going to leave a huge hole in my mother's life -- the two of them talked on the phone at least once a day, and my mother would spend several months each summer at Lois's place in Pennsylvania. I had been planning to make the time to visit when intellikid and I drive through on our way back from Boston in a couple weeks...damn.

I know that I would be inconsolable if anything happened to my sister, so I'm keeping within hugging distance of my mom.