By: Ann Brown

The setting for my dreams is always outer space now. I float, free-falling in the vast darkness, surfing uneasily on undulating gusts of wind. Sometimes I am dressed in a space suit, but a dorky, homemade  space suit – the kind we used to make at summer camp during “Astronaut Week”: A helmet made from half a Clorox jug covered in aluminum foil, a mask of swimming goggles and a tissue paper-covered Slinky for an air hose.

Note to self: it’s your dream. Why must you scrimp, always going with the schmatte bargain wardrobe in it? Spend a little on the damn spacesuit; you’re worth it. Get Edith Head to design something fabulous. But nothing tucked in. I am an “apple” shape and – dream, shmeam, subconscious, shmubconscious -Mama don’t do tuck in.

I haven’t had an Earthly dream all week. I close my eyes at night and slowly hover above the ground, surfing away from my spaceship, drifting into the nothingness. I am lost, untethered, in both my waking and sleeping lives.  This morning, I stood in front of my bedroom window and wrote please help me in the frost. The “p” in “help” started to melt and ran down the glass to the sill in little frost tear drops.

I have been cut off from Facebook.

On Monday morning I received a notice that due to being phished, FB has disabled me. If you think that term, disabled, sounds a tad violent, let me just tell you that it pretty much describes the situation perfectly. I feel as violated, as pulled apart and subsequently, as marginalized as if Facebook thugs had come directly to my home in the middle of night, yanked me out of bed, wiped the Regenerist Night Repair serum right off my face, broke my bite guard in half, poked holes in my Breathe Right strip and left the toilet seat up. And then, oh cruel coda, came back to force me to tuck my pajama top into my pajama bottoms.

Where is Victim’s Assistance when you need it? God, I should have voted for the Republican Sheriff and Attorney General when I had the chance. What good are the bleeding heart, soft on crime Democratic  candidates to me now? I want revenge.

I got no Facebook wall to write on. No Facebook fan page. No daily Facebook salon with my girls. (Do you even remember me???) I got no Facebook Pathwords game at which – with a score of 1620; 1620! – I was number 2 of all my friends. No Facebook Scrabble at which I regularly get my ass kicked by my LA cousins and various online friends. Has someone started a “bring dr. strangemom back to Facebook” Facebook fan page? Did anyone even join????  How will I know what is going on in the world without my friends’ status updates? Is Barbara taking her dog for a walk today? Did Susan get my private message about Gary? Is Erika having salmon for dinner??? I will never know. I mean, you can’t count on Newsweek to report the essential shit.

If my blog had a soundtrack, right now it would be playing, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town”. I don’t know why.

It is so fucking weird, being cut off from Facebook until they determine if I can be invited back. I imagine that before I am released of my persona non grata status I will have to take some sort of Karen Silkwood cyber shower, you know, scrub me down to my private password, put all my belongings in a plastic gray bucket, take off my shoes and my earrings and pass through the scam detector. With my luck, Facebook probably has one of the new “I-can-see-you-naked” machines which will surely set off alarms as they notice that full frontal me, nekked, bears absolutely no resemblance to the from-the-neck-up photos of my profile pictures, taken, oh, a million years ago. That’ll put the nail on my coffin.

For now, I am stuck here; waiting, as it were, in the hallway outside the Facebook Principal’s office, not knowing if this is a suspension or an expulsion. And I didn’t even do anything wrong, although my son suspects I missed a few early signs that I was being phished. It’s all so unfair. The last time I was in this situation was high school, when I was a part of a group that took over the Administration Building in order to end the war in Viet Nam. (Are you snickering at our hubris? Really? Well, did the war end or not? I’m just asking.) We were one scary, badass militant gang back there at Ulysses S. Grant High School. Stormed the Administration building, yes we did. Locked the motherfucker administrators out. I joined arms with Nina and Katherine and Davia and Rina and Allan and we sang “We Shall Not Be Moved”. Or maybe we sang “Sweet Baby James” because, let’s face it, that is a totally better song. We sang and chanted “get your asses out of classes” and we roared our terrible roars and gnashed our terrible teeth and we laughed our scary badass laughter when we got the word they were calling the pigs on us. Well, actually, we opened the doors and quickly filed outta there when we got the word they were calling the police, but that’s not the point.

The point is, I am bereft without Facebook.

And never mind the upside, which is that I suddenly have found, like, a gajillion more hours in the day to get shit done. In the time it used to take me to come up a pithy status such as, “Ann is…..going to get shit done today”, I can actually clean out the droppings of petrified lettuce and cabbage from the refrigerator crisper, wash all of Molly’s forty thousand dog beds which are scattered throughout our two thousand square foot house, add my name to the MoveOn.org and Humane Society petitions filling up my email Inbox, schedule a mammogram, cancel a colonoscopy,  and run out to get a bowl of Pho from that hidden joint in Southeast. Not that I did any of those things. I’ve mostly just been sitting here at the computer, robotically typing in my old username and password over and over again, and despairing at the “you have been disabled” notice I get every time. It’s like pushing the “replay” button on those old answering machines just to keep hearing, “you have no new messages”.

Thank God it’s Girl Scout cookie delivery week; otherwise, there’d be absolutely no reason to go on living.

If you are on Facebook, tell the others I have a new post out. Speak of me kindly.

I’ll be out by the spaceship, catching the waves. Cowabunga dudes.

By: Tosha Woronov

I am having an affair.
A love affair.
With my house.
We are about to move – to a better school district, a sweeter kindergarten, and it’s a good thing. The right decision. But I cannot focus on that now.

I am in love.

I stare longingly at my fruit trees: grapefruit, orange, lemon. Hundreds of full and giant grapefruit hang overhead, the biggest deep within branches taller than the house, fruit that can never- should never?- be reached. The persimmon tree stands stark and naked now against the spring sky, for not until November will its deep orange, heart-shaped fruit appear. I won’t be here to see it, and will miss delivering boxes of the spicy stuff to Leo’s preschool, or to my friend Julie, who loves them. I have a recipe for persimmon cookies, but never got around to testing it. The crepe myrtle tree is not only my outdoor shelving unit – bird feeders, hummingbird nectar, and potted geraniums hang from her branches – but also the squirrels’ escape route, should our dog decide to give them a chase. She has no off-season, as pretty now -absent of foliage, all twisted, white, “petrified” wood -as in the summer, adorned in pink blossoms.  In the fall, a twinkling noise can be heard, like tiny copper coins. Tink tink tinkly tink. It is the sound of the crepe myrtle’s leaves, falling like rain on the patio, and it lasts for two days.

Inside, the affair continues. I take inventory of what we are leaving: the antique crystal doorknobs. Good morning, doorknobs. I will miss you. Our bedroom, warm light pouring in from the French door. Of all the rooms in which I’ve lain, this one rested me –me and my boys –best. I no longer curse the kitchen cabinets, which hang so low and close to the counters as to give me no cooking space at all.  Today I peer with gratitude into their cavernous insides, holding my ever-growing collection of holiday dishes and wonder where will I store those pieces now? Leo’s bathtub, toys scattered within. He fell in it once, reaching for the bubbles. Just toppled in, head heavier than legs, scaring me half to death. Now he’s a big boy and simply climbs in and out on his own. The stairs.  Stairs that no longer require the baby gate that was once the most important item on Peter’s To Do list. Turned out the baby gate was needed as much by our dog, who, not used to indoor stairs in the beginning, would throw himself off of the fourth-from-the-bottom step, slide dangerously fast on the wood floors below, and bodyslam into the front door. He eventually figured it out.

We’ve celebrated in this house: Thanksgiving feasts, Christmas Eve cocktail parties, a “dark purple dinosaur party” on Leo’s 3rd birthday, easter egg hunts. One Christmas, both sets of families stayed here -four grandparents, two aunts, one uncle, and us -all together under the same roof.  I doubt it will ever happen again, not because we drove each other crazy (we didn’t!), but because the new house just isn’t as big.

Peter gently points out that I’ve been through this before, that I had a love affair with the house prior to this one. At that time, I cried about leaving West Hollywood.  I cried over the lineoleum floors in this kitchen (those I will not miss). I cried about the new backyard that needed so much –so much –work.

But we did the work, didn’t we? We planted tomatoes, and peas, and basil, and gerberas. We tilled the soil, put up a fence, assembled and stained a picnic table. We drew a bath, threw a party, framed a painting, scrubbed the floors, hung a growth chart, laid a rug, baked some cupcakes.

I put my heart into this house.

And, like my crystal stemware, it’s time to pack it up, and take it with me.

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

On Friday afternoon, my son shouted at me because I wouldn’t buy him any more books at the school book sale.

“But, I gave you a budget,” I said.  “We talked about it.”

“You didn’t give me a big enough budget,” he returned.  “It was a stupid budget.”

Ouch.  I took a breath and then I gave THE SPEECH – the one about how some kids don’t get to buy any books, the speech that crescendos with the fact that “some kids don’t even have houses.”

The speech was met with stony silence.  Sure there was a moment when he looked up at me with what almost looked like compassion, but that quickly turned to need.  Whiny need.

“But I only got three books.  Three books is hardly any.”

Three books is three books and sometimes three isn’t enough.  Mostly, it seems, when you’re seven and a half, three isn’t enough.  Twenty isn’t enough.  Fifty isn’t enough.  And this makes me crazy.  It sometimes makes me want to give all the books and toys away.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote movingly about being given a real doll for Christmas.  Before she got the doll, she played with a corncob wrapped in a rag.  Yes, a dried corncob.  This corncob was enough and when she traded up for a soft doll with an embroidered smile, this new doll was enough, too.  When we read this section, I looked up from the page to gauge the reaction of my son.  Would he be happy with a corncob?

“But we have stores,” he said.  “I’m saving for an X-Box.”

We do have stores.  We have book sales and catalogs and online shopping and all of these things are as alluring to my kids as I think they would have been to Laura Ingalls Wilder if she’d only known about them.

Kids are born wanting more.  It’s nature’s way of making sure they survive.  Sure, an X-Box probably didn’t figure prominently in the original conception of survival of the fittest, but we can only adapt so fast.  Kids want it all because if they were alone on the prairie or the tundra or the veldt, they’d need it to get by.

My BIG SPEECH didn’t make much of an impression.  Instead, I asked my son to sleep on it.

“If you wake up wanting this book as much as you want it right now, we’ll see what we can do,” I said.

And the next morning he was on to something else.

Tanya Ward Goodman also writes at http://youdearestyou.blogspot.com and http://twgoodman.blogspot.com Most recently, her work has been published in the anthology “A Cup of Comfort for a Better World.”

By: Amy Forstadt

I’ve noticed there’s been a lot of TV talk around here lately, so I thought I’d weigh in with a handy-dandy guide to popular kids’ tv shows. And when I say “popular,” I mean “ones we watch at our house.”  Enjoy!

Arthur Arthur is the most emotionally evolved aardvark there ever was. I find his company extremely soothing. He’s deliberate, thoughtful, and more mature than most people I know. Arthur may not be the life of the party (leave that to D.W.) but he’s the one who’ll make sure you get home okay and hold your hair while you puke.

Blues Clues Like my seventh grade boyfriend, Blues Clues started out really irritating but eventually won me over through sheer persistence. Sure, no grown man should have Steve’s haircut, Blue makes weird guttural sounds like a choking dolphin, and the salt and pepper shakers have some sort of illicit relationship. But still, it’s kinda cute.

Bob the Builder The anthropomorphic construction vehicles kind of give me the creeps, but aside from that Bob the Builder is just fine with me. I enjoy watching him ride the tension/anger/guilt rollercoaster when his father comes to visit. And as for his obvious attempts to woo Wendy, well, let’s just say her cement mixer might spin the other way, if you know what I mean.

Calliou Oh how I hate that little mofo. This goddamn show is so fucking wholesome it makes me want to yell obscenities at the tv as loud as I possibly can. Also, have you ever seen the one where they go to the beach? No-one in the family has nipples! Goddamn wholesome no-nippled Canadians. I won’t expose my son to that kind of element.

Curious George I am mesmerized by Curious George. But it’s not because of the antics of everyone’s favorite monkey. No, it’s the apartment. That fabulous, fabulous apartment. What does the Man in the Yellow Hat do that he can afford such an incredible place? Those arched windows! The doorman! The rooms and rooms and rooms! It’s probably a rent-controlled, pre-war building on the Upper East Side. Some monkeys get all the luck.

Dora the Explorer This one I don’t get at all. Crappy animation. Some sort of video game theme with no context whatsoever. A random band of little creatures that shows up and plays music for no reason.  But someone, somewhere must have read that this is the toddler power trifecta, because my kid is hooked.

Elmo How do I love Elmo? Let me count the ways. First of all, the shows are entertaining and adorable. Second, all the characters have New York accents. Do you know how funny it is to hear a muppet refer to itself as a “mon-stah?” And third, most of Elmo’s cohorts seem Jewish, gay, or both.  It’s awesome. There’s even an episode with a big, fruity tiger who just can’t contain himself during the final song and yells out “And remember! Stripes go with everything!”  I dare you not to love it.

The Wiggles Bunch o’ freaks. You’re on your own for this one. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Happy watching everybody! Or happy reading books or playing educational games or mandarin-flashcarding or whatever it is you non-tv families do.  If you need me, I’ll be singing along with Elmo.

Amy also have a podcast The Because Show

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By: Ann Brown

This is our four-year anniversary, Molly and me. As you know, I adopted her from the animal shelter on the day Michelle Kwan dropped out of the Olympics so the Winter Olympics will always remind me of my dog.

Speaking of which, where IS Michelle K? I haven’t seen her in the stands at the Pacific Coliseum, so unless she is being hidden from the camera by the obscuring presence of that ridiculous bong-totin’ galoot, Michael Phelps, I guess she’s not in Vancouver. I hope she is okay. I hope she is doing better – four years later – than Molly is right now.

Poor Molly. She is not doing great. She’s old, lame and incapable of sleeping for more than two hours at a time. I am back to living the life of a new mommy – up every hour, stumbling and lurching my way towards the back door to let Molly out and then falling asleep on the kitchen counter while I wait for her to come back. Not that I put my newborns out in the back yard to pee while I slept on the kitchen counter, no sireeee. I stayed awake back then. And had headaches all the time. And I was very bitchy. Very bitchy. In fact, Robin once said to me, “I guess the beauty of you being a bitch every day is that no one will ever accuse you of having PMS.”

And now, almost thirty years later, here I am back in the world of the sleep-deprived, only without a baby. In fact, come to think of it, I am the one who sleeps like a baby these days, not Molly:  I wake up every two hours, cry, and then eat until I fall asleep again. All night long. If my pants get any tighter, I am going to have to take to wearing those stretchy Onesies with the snaps on the crotch.

It’s totally fucked up that at the two stages of life when everyone around us most needs their rest – babyhood and infirm old age – we are the worst sleepers. And exhausting the people who are in charge of our very survival is probably not the smartest thing to do. Robin once put that red-hued, gum-numbing medicine in our son’s nose because he was too tired to keep his eyes open while taking his turn soothing our teething baby.  He did it, like, four times during the night and when I saw the poor kid in the morning, he looked like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.  My friend Julie once got her baby’s toe fungus medicine mixed up with the pink-eye medicine.  You’d think that squirting toe fungus ointment into your baby’s eyes would sober one into paying closer attention, but it just so happens that a few years later, Julie ignored her daughter’s complaints about boogers bothering her nose -ignored her for days – before realizing that the booger in there was actually one of Julie’s pearl earrings.  Oh, and my friend Wade once left his newborn baby in the car after dropping off his wife at a restaurant before he went searching for a free parking place. Which was five blocks away. Which was where he left the car – and the baby – and sprinted to the restaurant, ready to enjoy a nice dinner. Until his wife asked him where the baby was. I bet after that, it wasn’t such a nice dinner with the wife.

I was halfway through a vitamin C tablet at four o’clock this morning while waiting for Molly to finish peeing outside before I realized that it wasn’t a vitamin C tablet at all; it was seven Wheat Thins with Laughing Cow cheese on them. Okay, well, I guess I knew about that, but who can blame me? When you are tired, you do not make good decisions.

I’ve been through this before. Blacky was an old cat, and for most of her life she needed nothing from us. The kids found her when we lived in LA – she was a stray; self-sufficient and completely independent. It was a relationship that knew no demands. When we moved to Oregon, Blacky came with us and adjusted to her new life by settling herself in the upstairs of our new house and never setting foot outside – or downstairs – again.

By the end of her life, I hated Blacky.  I loved her, too, because sometimes even after she’d shit on my carpet and barfed up a bloody hairball in my bed, and even after we had to have all her teeth extracted  (to the tune of a thousand dollars) so all she could eat was baby food, I could still look at that dainty cat face of hers and feel my heart stretch out and soften. But I was exhausted all the time and she cried all night long. She needed a spoonful of food at 3 AM, and then another spoonful at 3:30 and then she pooped and then she meowed that mournful, primal meow for about a half hour.

I used to lie in bed and listen to her calls. Murr-ahow it began, in a soft guttural clearing of her throat. Murr-OHWHW it crescendo-ed, louder and more alien, but I pretended not to hear her. Once, I swear, she jumped on my bed and over-articulated her meows right into my ear, the way we speak loudly and slowly to non-English speakers. Me-ow. Do-you-understand-this, you idiot American human? ME-OW.

A few years ago I complained to my mom about how Blacky was taking over my life. “It’s not worth it, you’re exhausted” she said. “Put her to sleep. You need your sleep.”

I was aghast. My mom just laughed.  “Oh, come on. Stick a little poison in some brisket and give it to her. She’ll eat it right up.”  I didn’t know if she was joking or not.

But either way, I still make sure my mom eats the first bite of her brisket at Passover. I mean, I used to keep Mom up a lot when I was a baby. She might be holding a grudge.

By: Danny Thomas

I spent the better part of the last week as a single parent…

needless to say this blog entry is a little more off the cuff than my prior two.

I haven’t had a lot of time, or inclination to sit around reflecting…

any reflecting time has been spent reflecting on Bushmill’s and Reese’s  Pieces.

Jennifer, went to Cleveland for a Theater Conference – the hoity toity academic was presenting a paper there – and managed to use the time to connect with a few long lost friends and colleagues, as well as get some fabulous intellectual stimulation, and, I think, come home ready to charge into the last few dissertation battles.

Some amazing and interesting things happened while Jen was gone.

I streamlined, I stayed calm, my rope or fuse or whatever was longer.  I set limits and boundaries and followed thru with the consequences. I had no problems ending a meal when it was obvious it was going to lead further into chaos. I had no doubts handing out a serious consequence or determining when it was required.

I found a balance between planned activities and spontaneity. Lil’ Chaos put herself to bed, and got herself dressed in the morning, she was self-sufficient in a lot of ways, as a matter of fact.

I got to put Wobzilla to bed!

I guess as the sole resource, I found reserves of patience I didn’t know I had.

I guess when there was no one around to come in and bat clean up I was able to find the strength or fortitude or determination to follow thru to the end of the game.

I guess on my own I was able and willing to set the bar a little higher for the 4 year old, out of necessity.

It’s amazing how the chemistry of a family is so interwoven – and that when one element is missing it can change the dynamic dramatically.  Amazing too that while we all felt like we were missing a limb and needed Momma terribly, we got by.

Now the challenge remains; how to integrate some of what I learned and did now that Jen is back. It is so easy and reflexive to fall back into old patterns and habits, I mean they don’t even feel like habits and patterns, they just feel like “how it is…” But I know a little something more now, about myself as a father, and it feels good.

It also feels good to have Jen home!

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

Last night, when I opened the door to greet my daughter as she arrived home from school she looked up at me and said, “When our friends and family members die, my heart will break open.”

She is five and a half going on thirty.  Part Hello Kitty, part Sarah Bernhardt.  She is devastatingly sad and ragingly angry and her heart (broken or not) is huge and juicy and filled with passion.  She is clearly the child of my womb.

I moved aside, to let her walk into the house.

“Did something happen to make you sad?”  I asked.

“Just thinking about death,” she replied, skipping into the dining room and doing a little twirl.  “Look what I’ve got.”

She held out a white paper tub.  Beneath a circle of mesh on the lid a mass of small black bodies moved together — shiny black legs and abdomens and an occasional flash of enameled red wings.

“Ladybugs!  They’re ready for an aphid buffet.”

As Sadie made plans to set the ladybugs free in our cauliflower bed where they would decimate the population of aphids, I went back to stirring the risotto on the stove.  My kids have been to several funerals and memorial services.  They are interested in cemeteries and know what a casket is for.  Sadie will often tell people that we have three pets and three graves, which, though slightly disconcerting, is true.  We’ve lost an old cat, a hamster and a fish and we’ve still got an old cat, a hamster and a fish, so chances are this loss is not going to stop.

My dad died just over seven years ago.  When Sadie was three she could not stop asking, “So your Dad is dead, right?”  At first this question brought tears to my eyes, but after awhile, I kept answering and answering and it opened the way to a lot of long conversations.

“Yes, my Dad is dead,” I said.  And Sadie and her brother wondered what happened next.  We talked about heaven and reincarnation and the possibility that this life, here and now, is all we’ve got.  Theo likes the idea of heaven because he wants to know he will continue to move around and Sadie hopes there are angels because they have beautiful wings.  We talked about how dinosaurs might be reincarnated into people, but how they most likely evolved into birds.  We all think it’s nice to imagine that there is a kind of observatory where our loved ones can train telescopes on our lives and gaze at us for a few minutes.

The risotto finished cooking, my son hopped out of the bath and Sadie returned from the garden smiling.  She’d tipped out her little bucket of live things and now she was set on making a necklace for the cat.  Sometimes the workings of her mind are so fluid, it’s hard to keep up.  My dad was this way.  I hope he’s watching.

By: Ann Brown

I may have mentioned I have this little, er, quirk wherein I imagine kicking the butt of a man near me. As I said before, I believe this is solely a function of wondering about my own strength and not a sign of any latent violent tendencies within me. Still, I am not unaware of the reaction my confession evokes. I see you scooting your chairs away from me as you read this.

And I feel a need to explain myself.

I read somewhere that the most important thing women over fifty can do to keep themselves healthy is stretch every day. As a woman over fifty, I generally discard the advice I read because so much of it  centers around changing my negative attitude about aging and, frankly, my negative attitude about aging is all I have left of my youth so I want to hold on to it.

But this stretching thing got me to thinking. They’re right. We rarely stretch ourselves. We don’t use all we’ve got.

After The Revolution, when we all live on my commune in side-by-side yurts and grow hemp, stretching ourselves to our limits will be a regular part of daily life. I mean, just chopping wood and folk dancing to the water hole will fulfill the 10,000 steps a day quota that the makers of New Lifestyles pedometers warn we all need to stave off premature death. And I bet our children would be perfectly well- behaved because after a day of using up all they’ve got, they’d be tired. In fact, we’d all be tired. The good tired. Not the tired I usually am, bitchy and distracted by afternoon, licking the morning coffee grounds from the compost pail for a buzz, and updating my list of transgressions the world has committed against me (most recent: water in my ear that is making me dizzy when I look down to type. Ow.)

I took a lot of dance classes in college. Mexican couples dances, Indonesian Gamelan dancing, Greek dancing, every day was filled with dance classes. (Note to the college bound: be an Ethnology of Non-Western Music and Dance major. Totally rocks. And when you graduate, the world will offer you a smorgasbord of jobs. Bitchin jobs. Like, once I sang Jewish folk songs in a maximum security prison in Tracy, California. Try to land that gig with a degree in, say, medicine.)

What was my point?

Oh, right. Dance classes. At the end of a day, I was wonderfully, satisfyingly, deliciously spent. I slept like a log (as opposed to these days when I sleep like a baby: wake up every two hours and cry until I eat). I believe that when we move to the commune, there will be no fighting, no bitchiness, no whining, no interrupted sleep because we will all – children, adults, parents – be well used up. Also, because we can smoke our hemp tunics when life gets stressful.

But in modern life, here in suburbia, we live such contained lives. We have to share armrests in movie theaters. We have to refrain from jumping onto the moving clothes rack at the dry cleaners and taking a ride. We are not even allowed to finger wrestle prospective employers when they shake our hands. And we are left with a bunch of leftover energy that has nowhere to go. We are left wondering just how strong, fast, loud, obnoxious, fearless and mighty we can be.

So I check out the men in my classes. I take in their upper body strength, the contour of their forearms, their overall look and I fantasize bopping them on the nose, kneeing their groins and, occasionally, swinging them over my head and twirling them round and round like Brutus used to do to Popeye before the can of spinach magically appeared.  I have no reason to feel threatened by men. I’ve never been in a situation that would warrant a need to hurt them or get away fast. Well, once a guy forgot to pay me for a parenting consult but he remembered as soon as he got home and he came back. With a ten dollar tip, as apology. No need to break his kneecaps.

My point being, there is no rational reason to fantasize about this. And, let’s be honest, unless a man was in the middle of a serious heart attack, I’d probably not be the victor. I mean, I am no weakling but my 45 minute daily stroll in the park with my dog and the occasional foray into Curves isn’t gonna get the job done against a forty-something dad. I suppose I could just sit on him and that would be that, but I am too vain to use my weight as a weapon because what if he lived, and told everyone, “she fucking sat on me and she weighs a ton. I thought I was dead” and then the papers would sleuth out my actual weight and report it and, yikes. Yikes.

Still, I crave real-life experience. Tae-Bo with TV Billy Blanks in my bedroom is like practice- kissing your pillow, you know? So with my late-fifties around the corner, I am going to do a little more stretching in my life.

I believe I will begin by reaching over my computer to that glass of wine.

Ow, my ear. Damn it.

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Ann Brown

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

My Mom is headed back to New Mexico.  A couple of hours ago, she walked through a set of airport sliding doors, the sunlight turning her silver hair to a spill of mercury down her back.  In almost no time, she will walk out a similar set of sliding doors into the cold, dark evening of Albuquerque.  This morning, she gasped at the beauty of a flowering acacia, each yellow bud like a fairy’s powder puff, and tonight, she might slip and fall on the icy walk to her front door.

Because it’s still winter where my mother lives, we spent the last five days in search of spring.  At Descanso Gardens in La Canada, winter and spring are just beginning the changing of the guard.  Spent camellias fall to the ground, some still bright as blood, others the brownish color of a squeezed tea bag, while in the big flower beds, tulips nudge their green noses toward the light.

Mom brings her binoculars wherever we go and pauses to stare off in the direction of a particularly interesting tweet or whir.  If she waits long enough, looks hard enough, a bird will appear where at first glance there was only a tangle of bare branches.  We see a Spotted Towhee doing a little jitterbug in the fallen leaves. Mom tells me that the little bird with the brilliant red wings was once known as the Rufus Towhee.

“It drives me crazy when things change,” she says.

Her and me both.  But what can we do?

Mom has been visiting me in Los Angeles for nearly eighteen years, though if I asked her to drive us around, she would look at me as though I asked her to tour the unfamiliar terrain of Mars.  She loves L.A, but is often overwhelmed by it and so over the course of all of these years, we have found a kind of familiar route for her visits.  Despite our best efforts at keeping things constant, we can’t seem to stop things from changing.  When I pick her up at the airport, we almost always go directly to the Rose Café in Venice where she has the quiche and I have the poached salmon.  After lunch, we take a peek at the gift shop and then we walk to the beach.  Mom’s legs are bothering her and so on our last trip to the beach, we did not walk across the sand to the water’s edge, but instead stayed on the sidewalk and looked out at the sea.  Years ago, we might have walked a mile or more, stopping to pick up stones or watch a particularly silly seagull.

We always make a trip to a nursery, even if only to visit the plants.  We like the Sunset Nursery in Silverlake with its cramped aisles and proximity to Pioneer Chicken.  We’ve never eaten the chicken, but it’s funny when the wind shifts and the aroma of scented geraniums or mint mixes suddenly with fried chicken. Lincoln Nursery in Pasadena is wonderful because of their wall of Italian seed packets and vast array of ceramic pots and a trip to Theodore Payne is almost like returning to New Mexico, so drastic is the change in landscape from Los Feliz to Sun Valley.  Over the years, Mom chose plants for pots on the porch of my first apartment and helped transform the weed-choked yard of another apartment into an approximation of an English garden.  She encouraged me to buy a butterfly bush and to start composting.  On this most recent visit, my son harvested little carrots from our raised beds and put them into Mom’s hand and she laughed and showed him how to rub the dirt from the orange root.

Antique stores are another staple in a typical Mom Visit itinerary.  In the past, we’ve wandered the streets of Orange, and Ventura ducking in and out of crowded antique malls until we couldn’t handle the sight of one more Bauer bowl.   On this trip, we headed to Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena, where in four blocks, we found Japanese table lamps just like the ones on my Grandma’s side table (marked at $800!), enamel Catherine Holm bowls like the ones in my kitchen cabinet and a life-sized wax figure of an elderly man asleep in a wheelchair.  His price wasn’t marked, and so I said “hello,” before I realized he wasn’t real.

As at the garden and the nursery, we reach out to touch a beautiful thing.  Mom and I spent the last five days running our fingers over leaves, leaning in to smell flowers or cupping our hands around a perfectly round ceramic pitcher.

“I’ve got enough to last until the snow melts,” Mom said when I dropped her at the airport  “I think I can make it, now.”

The light is fading now as I write and when I look out the window, the big Sycamore in my neighbor’s yard looks like an ink drawing, it’s bare branches stark against a bright pink sky.  Mom’s plane is just landing and as she makes her way out into the cold, the last five days will be tucked inside her heart like a tight bud waiting to unfurl.

Tanya Ward Goodman also writes at http://youdearestyou.blogspot.com and http://twgoodman.blogspot.com

By: Ann Brown

Well, it’s all over but for hockey. And downhill. And short track. Oh, and the closing ceremony. But women’s figure skating is finished so there’s really nothing left for me. I feel pretty sure that my exit from televised Olympic coverage won’t be noticed; I mean, I get it – I get it – that life does go on without me although when I stopped watching “Deadliest Catch”, Captain Phil died. I’m just saying.

All in all, I was underwhelmed by Olympic figure skating this year. My mind wandered during most of the event. Oh, I started out glued to the tube, of course, but after a few seconds it suddenly seemed extremely important that I get a tangerine. Or check my emails. During the short programs I even hand stitched a hem in my beige pants, so unglued to the television was I.

I did perk up, however, when a Canadian won anything because I got to sing along with their national anthem. I know all the lyrics, you know, having spent a summer in the wilds of Quebec.

It was the summer of, approximately, 1972 and I took off to be a counselor for an Outward Bound kind of deal in Canada. If you know me at all, you would know that if given the choice between leading a camping trip and pouring hot tar up my nose, I’d reach for the tar and start snorting – and doin’ it, as they say in Quebec, TOOT SWEET. It would take a court order to force me to camp for an entire summer but I was following something stronger than the law: I was following a boyfriend. I am an outdoorsy sort of person in only the loosest definition of the term: I like being tan. I love the whole back-to-nature, outdoorsy experience of getting tan – the comfy chaise lounge, the paperback novel, mango iced tea, the way my silver bangles look against my sun-kissed arms as I dip my chip into guacamole and reach for another mojito. You know, nature.

Clearly, I was a natural for the counselor gig. Heaven help the kids whose survival was to depend on moi that summer. Thank God my boyfriend, Chris, and my friends, Donny and Joanie, were waaay more skilled in camping than I, in that Donny could play all of Jessie Colin Young’s songs on his guitar, Joanie knew how to batik and Chris brought pot. It was going to be fine.

As it turned out, the campers didn’t need us for their survival. Or much else. They were pretty much a self-sufficient group, many of them, ironically, having actually been court-ordered to the program. My job, basically, was to wake them up at the crack of o’ dark hundred and get them gathering and chopping firewood for breakfast, and even at that small task I was not a stellar success with those kids. They ignored me, they mocked me, one young man responded to my daily request that he get up and find the  wood for the morning, by showing me his penis and saying, “hey, Ann, I got your morning wood right here.” I only recently got the joke.

But we could sing. And sing we did every morning upon arising.

“Oh Canada, our home and native land.…”

I sang loudly, feeling a rush of militant activism. Those were challenging years for the two of us – America and me- those Nixon/Agnew years, and I was pissed off most of the time. It felt good to cheat on “The Star Spangled Banner” and climb into bed, musically speaking, with “Oh  Canada.” Every morning, when that  big red maple leaf flag was raised, I was stickin’ it to Tricky Dick.

These days, at least since the presidential election of 2008, I am feeling better about my country but I still love to sing, “Oh Canada”. And that is the song I sang during the medals ceremony for women’s figure skating last Thursday night, even though the Korean flag was being raised. It wasn’t just that I was not wowed by Gold Medalist Kim Ju-Na; she’s perfectly fine, but let’s just be honest, her mother did not die of a heart attack two days before she had to skate the short program so fuck her. Points, shmoints, give the gold to Joannie Rochette. The girl with the saddest story wins.

Kim Ju-Na did cry a little on the podium, however, and that warmed me a bit to her. But I wonder if she was faking, squeezing out a tear or two so she’d be more likable. Tying to think about a cat she once loved that was run over, perhaps, or about the fact that she clearly did not know the lyrics to her own national anthem and she was gonna catch shit when she got home. And I really don’t mean to sound bitchy but it’s not like trying to memorize the fucking Periodic Table.

The pine tree atop fore mountain

stands firmly unchanged under wind and frost as if wrapped in armor

As is our resilient spirit.

I mean, shit, I remembered it by heart just after looking it up on Wikipedia. I think that girl needs some more fat in her diet.

Oh, and little silver-medaled Mao Asada. She cried as she watched the Japanese flag wave. But I bet she was crying because she was afraid to go back to Japan without the gold. I am a little bit worried for her.  I think I saw her coach pinch her when she came off the ice.

Snow White and the Three Figure Skaters: Sad. Glad. Scared. I smell a Disney hit.

So, my Olympic coverage has come to an end. It’s time for me to put my socks back in the drawer and hang up my costume until 2014.

I hope by then I’ll be able to zip it all the way up.