I am discovering that I really (really really) enjoy watching dance. I had tickets to the Texas Ballet Theater last week, Titus this week. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OmRpF5ufVg I left the theater last night smiling, feeling as if I had really participated in something worth doing. Today I have been processing that feeling. ( Read more... )

I haven't posted for a month. There are so many moving parts in my life that 12-hour updates really are necessary. Let me know if you need me to get a white-board and diagram these relationships. I keep one handy to make that possible.

#2 child and his spouse have produced their first child. This is grandchild #7. Meanwhile, my #2 child has been in court with his first wife because she up and moved out-of-state without notice, taking my oldest grandchild with her. The court has ordered that child returned to Texas by November 1. My son was shocked that the court sided with him. He had trouble believing that the court saw through his ex-wifes posturing. I explained that there is a chance the judge was fooled the first 7 to 10 times he heard this story, but that by now he doesn't even have to listen to know how this story plays out.

The ex-daughter-in-law and her new spouse have fired one lawyer and hired another one. And, for the first time ever, they are being helpful and receptive. For the first time ever, my son is getting phone calls from his child.

Part of the process was that I got to sit in a conference room with my son and his lawyer (my divorce lawyer) and my Ex. We had an hour and a half conference on how to play this situation.

#8 grandchild is on the way this spring. I may or may not get to have a relationship with that child. That household is entirely too unstable to make any predictions. The father of that grandchild, my #4 child, officially doesn't speak to me. Bless his heart. His sweet little wife doesn't know just how emotionally unbalanced he is. I do. The rest of my family does. We aren't telling her. We figure that she will find out without our having to tell her.

#3 child has been told that she needs to move by the end of this month. She has been living in the back of a duplex that belongs to me. She hasn't been paying rent since April. If I try and talk with her in person, she just yells at me. The only way I can communicate with her is text message. The Holidays are going to be interesting.

Blond Sister's pitbull was shot by a cop after the dog went for the cop. This was in the middle of a neighborhood disturbance involving everyone who lives on the cul du sac where my sister lives. Have I mentioned recently that a predictable indicator of addiction is drama? Now the sister is in the hospital because she has overdosed on her drugs of choice, prescription painkillers. I spent about 30 minutes on the phone yesterday, having frank discussions about her attempts at killing herself and the hole her death will leave in the fabric of our family. As is always the case when she overdoses, she is repentant, contrite. She is planning on going to meetings. That may or may not happen. She has trouble not veering off into the point of view of a victim every 3 to 5 minutes. When she goes there again, I just point out to her that the conversation just shifted again to a place where she is no longer responsible for herself.

Addiction is so intrinsically narcissistic.

It is pouring down rain. I am due at the office in 42 minutes. It is time to end this.

Some how I have managed to be the sibling who has ended up with the six-drawer box filled with the color transparencies that my Dad took in the 1950s and 1960s. I am having them transfered over to digital format. The first 400 images got delivered today. I am being pulled into those images with a combination of nostalgia and horror, fascination and disgust. The things in the background can be as interesting as the people in the foreground.

Some of these images are things that I have spent my entire life seeing. Most of these images are things that I have no memory of ever having seen before. My Dad traveled a lot. He tended to see road-side disasters. An sports car in the ditch, its occupants being cared for along side. Images of tornado damage to buildings. A wrecked farm truck with its load of watermelons spilled out on the road.

I was one of 5 children. There are lots of pictures of us as children. Pictures of my mother, her face never the same from one picture to another. Pictures of my dead brother. Pictures of lots of now-dead people.

Oil field pictures. Buildings. Landscapes taken through the windows of airplanes.

Some of the pictures are just good art. There is a picture of a half-finished meal in a restaurant in some European hotel that is almost a watercolor. If people asked my Dad what did he do for a living, he liked to tell them that the took photographs. It wasn't what he did to make money. But, he did take good pictures.

I got tickets to see "Sarah Plain and Tall" again. My red-headed sister is in town. We went. Afterward, I got a hankering to go downtown and see the new theater building that is almost open. We went down there, too. I was driving. There are advantages to being the driver.

And, there was that building that has caused me to almost have so many wrecks. Hunt Oil Building. In honor of Memorial Day, they have red, white and blue cascading stars rolling down the north end of the building. They had the silhouette of an American Revolutionary Minuteman, in black against a red, white and blue background.

This building is so incredibly and impossibly tacky that it is all the way over into entertaining. It red-lines bad taste to the point that I can't look away. I find myself being drawn into the middle of it in spite of my better judgement. Tonight, we parked across the street and watched it go through the programed cycles of the display.

I looked for something about that light display on-line but the only thing I could find about the building is that it has been given awards for energy efficiency.

I just sit here, shaking my head.....

I went to see a dance troupe from San Francisco performing at McFarlin Auditorium tonight. The more dance I see, the more I want to see. It is so remarkably physical. Here I am, having never ever been particularly flexible. And, there they are and Oh My Goodness. The sculptural quality of what they were doing made me wish for the ability to freeze-frame the movements.

The dance troop tonight was more men than women. Most of the evening, the men danced in nothing more than a pair of trunks. I sat there in a darkened theater, wondering how on earth the costume designer got those trunks to ride so snugly in back.

The Meadows is a wonderful museum on the south side of SMU. Once you figure out where it is and where to park, going there is fast and easy. Thursday after 5 p.m. it is also free (my personal favorite price). About a third of the exhibit space is for short-term exhibits. The rest of the space is for the permanent installations.

The museum began as a private collection of Spanish art. Mr Meadows was a Texas Oil Man, home-grown here in Dallas. He went to Spain in the early 1950s looking for oil because he decided that it was impossible for an entire nation to be without any kind of oil-bearing sands. Spain is. At the Meadows, they like to say that Mr. Meadows found oil alright.....oil paintings.

The current exhibit is GREAT. Etruscan artifacts. If you can go, you will be glad you did. I was really glad I stopped in this evening. The show will be there for about another 5 weeks. http://smu.edu/meadows/museum/about_Etruscans.htm

It isn't always easy to talk myself into going to places that are "good for you". Sometimes I have to romance myself into it. The internal dialog goes something along the lines of "we don't have to stay long...we will just take a fast look...what can it hurt to just stop in?". At The Meadows, half the time it really just is a walk through but not always. Several times I have encountered heart-stopping beauty, things so emotionally moving that I just stand there struggling to get my breathing started again. There was a John Singer Sargent that did that to me. There was an exhibit of paints that belong to a Cell-phone Czar from Mexico, 19th Century Western Art with lots of pre-Raphaelites. That entire exhibit did it for me. And, today, there was a terracotta bust of a woman...well...it was emotional.

There are three mid-rise office buildings about a block west of where I live. They are what I have in the way of a landscape, the view from all the rooms on the west side of my condo. There isn't anything all that wonderful about the structures, at least not during the day. At night, there is a certain magic that emerges. The lighted windows twinkle and sparkle and speak of urban allurements, evoking the mystique of Big City Life. It is one of the recurring pleasures of my life, summer and winter.

I played Hooky this afternoon. I went to the Arboretum with a friend. We sketched. She officially is an artist. I officially needed a cover story for sitting in the shade on a bench and looking at the flowers and enjoying the fresh air and the birds.

And, now I am at home. The light is golden. I don't have anything scheduled to do tonight. I'm not working. I'm not going to any sort of meeting. My house is clean. I may just stay home and commune with the cat. Maybe I'll go for a walk later. I thought about cooking myself something entertaining for dinner, but I may just go get a rotisserie chicken and call that dinner.

Right now I think I will play some WoW.

There is a member of my extended family who currently is the focus of an intense medical drama. Lets call him "C". C lives 1,000 miles away from the Metroplex, has never married, is in his early 40s and is a bad alcoholic (I am sitting here thinking about that last part...is there such a thing as a "good" alcoholic?). Because of the gross dysfunctionality of my birthfamily, I have not been a part of C's life since he was a small child. Not all gifts come wrapped in shiny red paper. Some come disguised as tragedies.

C's condition isn't good. I ran the medical details past sttatus_quo. I asked her if he had a 5% chance of living. sttatus_quo said the odds aren't that high.

Earlier in the day, I talked briefly with C's brother, my pet nephew, "H". H just sounds hollow and distracted. H loves people freely and openly. He gives of himself without agenda or self-serving.

I have spent several hours tonight on the phone with C's Dad. Things are bad enough that C's Dad is going to be physically in the presence of his truly-crazy Ex-spouse, C's Mama, my ex-sister. I talked funeral plans with C's Dad and then we talked about the power of Prayer. And we talked about how irrational and crazy his ex-wife is and what a bully she is and how afraid of her he is.

C's Mama doesn't deal well with funerals. When the first phone call went out that my 89-year-old mother was in the hospital and not expected to make it, C's Mama got out her passport and bought a ticket to China. She was gone for 2 weeks. And, then there was another funeral where C's Mom chugged a bottle of Heaven Hill Whiskey and had to be taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.

Being a good daughter of The South, I have a fair number of Funeral Stories. If you have a taste for that sort of thing, come sit next to me sometimes and just ask me to tell them to you. I will. I am the family member who gets the assignment of planning the funeral. I don't do the medical details but I know how to deal with the funeral home, the cemetery and the priest.

H isn't speaking to my other two sisters, so they hadn't heard about this disaster. I phoned them. C is most likely going to die. I thought they needed to hear about it. People tend to take it personally when blood-kin has lingered for weeks in the hospital and no one bothered to phone until the funeral plans have been finalized. The blond sister wanted to talk about the fight she is having with my red-headed sister. The fight is over who is going to pay to replace a taillight on a 1996 Crown Vic. I had to remind her that dead was worse than a busted tail light.

You know, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. I have never had to make up stuff. I have them to provide me with all the raw material anyone could possibly use. Wall-eyed-crazy.

The red-headed sister told me that there is a good chance that her husband may have finally given up on living, too. We have been waiting for him to die for several years now. He has lost a leg and his vision and he has been on maintenance dose chemo for over two years. She said that he has stopped eating and he won't get out of bed and when their son goes in there to try and get him to do something, his Daddy gets mean. He does mean better than most.

So, we could have a race to the grave yard going on here.

Whine Warning...

The condo below me is occupied by two young men who may have graduated from college but they certainly haven't finished using up that energy. They drink way too much. It is common for me to be able to smell the liquor in the air in the hallway, or stale beer outside the next day. Thursday is Poker Night downstairs. I have only had to go bang on the door once about noise after midnight. Other than the fact that I suspect that they drink too much, they do a fair job of being unobtrusive.

The sound of 6 or 8 full-throated young men bellowing "OHHHHHHHH" to the point that the sound penetrates the 2" of cement firebreak between the floors....well...I am glad I don't have to hear that noise up close and personal. All that testosterone, all those hang-overs.

I just wanted to share the moment.

Another component of Communal Living... I have a new downstairs neighbor. She has dogs. The dogs have always lived in a house with a yard. Now they live in a condo. She works and is gone from home all day. The dogs are in a new environment and I feel sorry for them. Guess what happens next..... The dogs moved in and immediately begin crapping inside the unit at their back door. I get to smell dog do-do as I walk through the back hallway. Last night, leaving my place to go to Central Market and buy oatmeal and bananas, I stepped on a small dog turd right in the middle of the sidewalk, right by the back door.

I went through almost two years of someone in the same unit who was too lazy to walk his dog so he would just turn the animal out into the back hallway to pee. I only found the dog out there once, but I knew what was going on. The one time I found the dog, my first thought was to open the back door and let the dog run away. I didn't act on that thought. But, it pulled me, it begged me with its seductive ways.

Golly...the boys aren't playing poker. They are shooting pool. I forget about the pool table they have in the den directly below where I am sitting. One of these young men just tapped their ceiling with a pool cue.

Ahhhhh, youth.....

Appearing today on my poem-of-the-day calendar
____________________________________________

From "Lincoln, The Man of the People"

Up from the log cabin to the Capitol,
One fire was on his spirit, one resolve--
To send the keen ax to the root of wrong,
Clearing a free way for the feet of God,
The eyes of conscience testing every stroke,
To make his deed the measure of a man.
He built the rail-pile as he built the State,
Pouring his splendid strength through every blow;

The grip that swung the ax in Illinois
Was on the pen that set a people free.

---Edwin Markham

I don't know why I am so terrified that Stupidity is going to be Contagious. It isn't. It frequently is irritating. It can be dangerous. It may result in hurting a fairly broad spectrum of bystanders. But, it is NOT contagious.

I only had one listing when I changed offices. The Broker frequently keeps the listings when agents move. I really didn't mind loosing this listing. On many levels it is a brown paper bag full of problems and troubles.

It is one thing to say that the old company was going to keep the listing. Getting them to finish the paperwork on it has been an on-going process. I have been trying to get my keybox off the place for 3 weeks. On Monday I was promised that the new listing agent would take care of it. She sent me an e-mail saying that she would let me know when she had placed a new keybox on the place and I could tell her what she needed to do to move the key. I wrote her back. I gave her step by step instructions. First open my keybox. Second, take the key out of my keybox. Third, put the key in the new keybox.

I just got off the phone with the agent. She couldn't find the keybox. No, I didn't ask if she had tried using both hands and a flashlight.

The condo is accessed from a common 2nd floor landing that is shared by two units. The agent asked me which of the door was to the unit. I held my breath and counted to two before answering. I told her that it was going to be the door that the key unlocked, pretty much every time.

I have never read any vampire book, lite or otherwise. The gold standard in my world for scary are the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Anything beyond that, please count me out.

I listen to Jane Austen novels on tape because anything that might stir the blood more than that isn't going to allow me to drift off to sleep. Besides, I know how it turns out. That helps, too.

The #3 child has said that I can read the first 2 books in the Twilight series, but not past that.....She says that it gets "too scary" for me after that. She knows what I can tolerate in the way of "scary".

I love going to the movies with my kids. They know when the scary parts are coming and they will warn me to shut my eyes. There is something fundamentally wrong with this arrangement in terms of who is supposed to be looking out for whom...but, I find it endearing. Endearing and sweet in a twisted kind of way...

I have this life-long friend who needs a code name I suppose. She shows up on a regular basis in my life. She was here at Christmas, catching a cold from my 9-month-old grandchild. Her hostess gift was a jar a pears she canned. Her 88-year-old-and-still-golfing retired-military father has a pear tree that stands on the boundary between his back yard and the golf course. Texas pears have a way of not being all that good. Every year my friend takes her share of that crop and makes something that she puts into jars. Some years the results are better than others. This year's efforts came into my house on Christmas day. I just opened a jar. This year's crop and the resulting canning efforts are very good. It is just fruit in a light syrup with fresh ginger and several whole cardamom seeds.

As I stood in my kitchen, reading a novel and eating preserved pears one small slice at a time, I thought about my friend's style of cooking. She does these marvelous things with food that end up being like a jazz riff on one's tastebuds. There is an ethereal and intellectual quality to her cooking. She thinks about the things she does with food. She thinks about almost everything she does.

I opened that jar and saw the whole cardamom seed and I thought to myself, Golly, what a gift. And, then I thought about what a gift she represents, a gift that is even better than fresh ginger, cardamom and Texas pears.

I haven't been able to keep up with the content of my e-mail in-box since the trip to California at the end of OCTOBER. I would get the various in-boxes knocked down to where I could reasonably have hope of getting the last 500 e-mails cleared out...and I would go off-line again for a period of days and it would be right back where things had started. I got the work e-mail box emptied this afternoon. E-M-P-T-Y. I just finished emptying out my "personal" in-box. The thing that I hate most about the e-mail getting that out of control is that something always gets buried down under the pleas from the Nigerian Consulate. Sure enough, there was news of some one having died in an e-mail from 6 weeks ago. It wasn't someone where I needed to have been at the funeral. But, it was a situation where the sender may well have been wondering why I hadn't offered any type of consolation.

But, everything is all tidy now.

Another thing is that my #3 child, the hair-dresser, gave me a color and cut on Saturday. She really cut it. Really cut it. I have gone from having more hair than I have had in 20+ years to having less hair than I have had for quite some time. It is a good haircut. It was just startling to see it.

#3 is clearly my child. She just says things. When I suggested that perhaps my haircut was perhaps maybe just a little more extreme than I had expected, she said not to worry, that all hair cuts look better in about two weeks. That is the truth, perhaps more brutally put than might be good for business, but the truth none the less.

I picked up an armload of photos I had printed last night. In the case of most of the prints, I had 5 prints made to put into albums (one for each of my kids, one for me) as well as one 5x7 print to frame. Then I had single prints made of things that have meaning to me or that I just liked, where the subject matter wasn't going to mean anything at all to my kids.

And, tonight I have been working on labeling the prints. I have written and printed over 300 labels at this point. About half way into the process, I realized that I wasn't 100% certain of the dates or locations of about half the pictures. So, I have the pictures divided into two piles. One pile I am certain that the printed description is correct. Those will get put into the packages that are going under the tree. The other pile I am going to hold back until I have had a chance to get consensus as to the information that I am uncertain about. Those floating details are only going to become fuzzier in the years to come. This way, my kids will remember that we came to an agreement as to the written dates.

In August, a miricle happened and I was accepted as a patient at Baylor Dental School. Being a patient down there really is about being patient. The work takes forever. First the student dentist has to do a step of the work. Then they have to get a professor to come sign off on that step before they can progress to the next step in a proceedure. It has taken 90 days and multiple visits just to get an official treatment plan. Admittedly, there wasn't an easy solution for what I need done and the work really is beyond the scope of what a 3rd year dental student needs to be doing. There were several points at which I almost got booted out of the program. My cute little dental student is committed to me and she wanted to do the work, so she kept working on getting a plan put together that would make her professors happy.

Finally we came up with a plan. Work has commenced. I had 3 "extractions" yesterday, all in different parts of my mouth. Two of the teeth required the assistance of two professors. It took 3 hours. It was pretty brutal. The student dentist who was assisting lost style points when he lost control of the tools and busted me in the chops. Another time he slipped and stuck a tool into my nose. Style points matter. He was also really rough on my jaw.

The good part is that I don't look or feel as bad as I was afraid I was going to look and feel. The bad part is that it will be months and months before I will have enough molars to eat normally again.

The student dentist is a precious little person. She obviously views me as a grandmotherly figure. I am sure that it is the knitting that causes that. It can't be that I have to be at least an entire decade older than her mother. She picked out a pink toothbrush to give me after she cleaned my teeth. That new toothbrush is now the official at-the-office toothbrush. Pink. For Grandmothers.

Early Voting began yesterday and will continue through Friday October 24th. Voting is too important to risk forgetting to do it on November 4th. Go now. If you have heard on the news that there were lines at the Early Voting locations yesterday when the polls opened, don't let that stop you from Early Voting. I waited perhaps 10 minutes to vote yesterday. I have waited 2 hours on the day of a General Election in a Presidential Election year.

For information on the where and how of early voting, just go Google it. For Texas Voters, you can go to any Early Voting Polling place. You don't have to try and figure out where your precinct votes. Dallas County Early Voting Information can be found at http://www.dalcoelections.org/nov42008/EVLocations.htm

Please go vote. Please. Do it tomorrow. Polls in Texas are open from 8 until 5.

I worked out with Vlad the Trainer this afternoon. While that was happening, I thought about how much I don't want to talk to anyone while I am at the gym. I just want to be in my body, lifting weights, ignoring the fact that there is a sweat mark on the front of my teeshirt (something inconsistent with ladylike behavior). I don't want someone telling me how good I am doing it. I don't want to high-five anyone just because I finished a set. The way I work out is not what is remarkable. What is remarkable is that I do it at all.

This evening, on my way home, I went by Borders to pick out my calendar for next year. I have to go through the same process every year. I look at all the calendars in the store and then I selected the same calendar I always get but in a different color. It looks as if I am going to have a Hot Pink year next year.