Who can find the cardinal in our crape myrtle tree with the same pose as the always stoic cardinal impostor on our bird bath?
summertime sleepover fun on a June weekend with granddaughters Ella and Molly who prefer to decorate their Naynay (me) with magical stickers
sleepover finally adds sleep with Ella clearly exhausted, Molly content with her place between Ella and Nana (aka Pretty) who was happy as she always is with granddaughters
Woody Woodpecker has tough job but attacks with vigor
while I watch on my early morning June walk
to add excitement for the month of June, Nana rescued three little kittens who had lost much more than their mittens which makes for high drama for Naynay who is allergic – help!
Please contact me for adoption screening
smortex@aol.com or 803-348-2767
***************
Wimbledon starts Monday – hooray for indoor TV that mitigates the horrendous heat! Hopefully it will be easier to watch than Roland Garros which required millennial intervention to follow along. Bless our technically challenged hearts.
Knock, knock said someone who was outside the situation room.
Who’s there? shouted President Humpty Dumpty who sat in the middle of a long oak conference table, surrounded by old white men he knew best – those he could trust implicitly to maintain secrecy for the matters involving the country’s current directions under consideration. Maga, Maga, Magoos. Hey, hey.
McDonald’s delivery, Mr. President, replied the young male voice on the other side of the door to the situation room. I have your two Big Macs, two orders of fries, plus eight Heinz ketchup packages, extra salt. One chocolate shake. The same order I brought you yesterday.
Somebody let this guy in, said President Dumpty in his loud voice. Bring me the food, bring me the food. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.
Dr. Wizard interrupted as a quiet murmur circulated throughout the group of twenty faithful MAGOOS who were shaking their heads. Mr. President, I don’t think this food is good for you at your age. We just celebrated your 79th. birthday over the weekend. Your diet is much more important now for your overall health to get a beautiful medical report.
Hey, Wizard, I count on you for the beautiful medical reports, answered President Dumpty. If my report isn’t as beautiful as the one we used before the election, you’re fired. Everyone at the table changed their head shakes to emphatic nods.
Tom Sawyer had opened the door to the situation room and retrieved two McDonald’s food bags from the delivery boy who waited in vain for a tip, sighed, and closed the door behind him. Sawyer took the food to President Dumpty who immediately began to eat. The aroma of cheeseburgers and fries filled the room while Sawyer sat down next to his friend Huckleberry Finn. The two exchanged glances.
All of a sudden President Dumpty threw a Heinz ketchup pouch at Dr. Wizard. What the holy f–k is this? he shouted. Whoever heard of pink ketchup? Smells like RFK Jr. BS to me. I let that freak get away with the vaccine drama because I could care less about measles, but when he starts messing with my ketchup, he’s gone too far. I want him gone. Somebody make a note.
No one moved until Atticus Finch remarked there could be legal repercussions with firing RFK Jr. this early in the administration. The President threw another ketchup package at Finch who dodged successfully.
You people annoy the hell out of me, President Dumpty said. I’ve had a beautiful idea of how to improve security to keep criminals and rapists from crossing along the southern border. Tomorrow I’m flying down to Texas to inspect the wall personally. I’ve asked the military to set me at the top of the highest section and plan to wave at the losers trying to cross from Mexico. No one understands our national security like I do. Meeting adjourned.
The next day, true to his word, President Humpty Dumpty flew to Texas and a Marine helicopter lowered him to a small chair at the top of the wall. Unfortunately, when he turned around to address the throngs of people below on the Mexican side, his beautiful plan became a disaster as he fell to his death on the American side. President Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and no one could put him back together again.
Dr. Wizard became President. RFK Jr. was allowed to continue his war on vaccines and food dyes.
Ten years ago today the mass murder of nine individuals gathered in their church for a bible study and prayer meeting struck closer to our home than prior atrocities. A twenty-one-year-old young man from Columbia, South Carolina, where Pretty and I live, drove 115 miles to Charleston, South Carolina, attended the prayer meeting in the Mother Emanuel AME Church, and proceeded to slay nine people who meant no harm to him. Lest we forget I’m reminding myself and you with my original post on June 17, 2015.
*********************
The Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut. An army training center in Fort Hood, Texas. The Washington, DC Navy Yard. A movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Tucson, Arizona, and the resilience of Rep. Gabby Giffords. An immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Geneva County, Alabama. Seal Beach in Orange County, California. Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina.
Massacre. Mass slaughter, indiscriminate killing, mass murder, mass execution – all of these are words that define massacre according to the Oxford American Thesaurus.
Today as President Barack Obama addressed the country on national television, he did so for the fourteenth time in his presidency to try to offer words of comfort to a bereaved community and a bewildered country in the midst of the horrors of massacres within our own borders. To borrow a phrase from a former American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was speaking one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1945, today is a “date which will live in infamy.” Yesterday in a sister city in the lowcountry of our state, the unspeakable happened; and we joined the names that will live in infamy in this country and around the world for years to come.
I have watched President Obama in these televised messages to the nation on too many occasions, and I was usually struck by the powerful personal images of hope and comfort that he offered. Today, however, I witnessed an additional layer of anger and frustration as he once again spoke about our lack of ability as a nation to give up our guns. I saw a President whose hair is almost totally snow-white and a man whose face looks much older than his years. I wondered if this president’s legacy was going to be Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke’s character’s classic lines: What we have here is a failure to communicate.
We have a President who rode into town as a new sheriff committed to compromise who found a posse determined to derail him. They just never mixed. And gun control? Well, that has always been just some people talking.
We grieved for the massacres in the east and the west and states in-between. We truly grieved for these losses and for the families and friends that lost people they loved…people they never even had an opportunity to say goodbye to. But the closer the tragedies are – and this one couldn’t be much closer since the suspect is from the greater Columbia metropolitan area – the deeper the anguish and the anger.
The world continues to rotate on its axis, but it seems slightly tilted to me. We are off track somehow. We have taught falsehoods to our children through our messages at home in the words we speak and the silences we allow. For example, it’s okay to hate people who are different from us. Nelson Mandela said we are not born hating, and he was right. We learn to hate as surely as we learn to ride a tricycle. Our parents teach us to hate. Our friends encourage us to be bullies. Our heroes send us conflicting images of who the good guys and bad guys are. We have national leaders in highly visible positions who don’t play well together in their houses of Congress. Shame on you. Shame on me for re-electing you year after year to continue cycles of contention and confrontation.
And so tonight I am in mourning for the survivors of The Charleston Massacre, and I find no words to adequately express my sorrow for them, for their church family, for the city of Charleston, for my state and for my nation.
“We’re an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy.” The documentary Breaking the News was shown at The Nickelodeon theater in Columbia, South Carolina, on June 10th. Shout out to our friend Francie Kleckley for making sure Pretty and I were there to watch. She does her best to support both the Nick and women in politics!
The Nick promo promised “A powerful documentary about the women and LGBTQ+ journalists behind The 19th*, a newsroom rewriting the rules of who holds the mic in media.” Sisters and brothers, I’m here to tell you this film didn’t disappoint. If you missed the screening of Breaking the News this week, search PBS Documentaries to watch at home.
In a national atmosphere of authoritarian histrionics, blatant mendacity in the media, corruption ignored by blind eyes unwilling to see – I have embraced despair as a coping mechanism. Despair is not productive, and I have longed for hope that would inspire me to have faith in the future for my family, my community, my country.
As we exited the Nick Tuesday night, I told Pretty these young people of the 19th* cracked my personal glass ceiling with their collective brain power dedicated to truth telling. Hallelujah! I have been redeemed and am a believer again.
Whenever we have a big rain, I have to check our swimming pool skimmer at night and early in the morning to make sure none of the frogs that come out to talk to each other and to us get caught in it. I call it my Frog Rescue program. The following is from a post I wrote five years ago, but the frogs are as noisy as ever.
***********************
You can blame this on the frogs
While Pretty and I talked on our porch last night, I tried to explain to her what was going through my head on this first day of my 74th. summer. The sounds from our porch were connected to the sounds of my earliest memories of summer when I slept in a small double bed with my maternal grandmother while a cheap oscillating fan turned slowly from side to side as it valiantly tried to cool us in the hot humidity of an East Texas heat a thousand miles away from South Carolina, a heat that would not be relieved by opening every window on the porch where we slept or the random whisper of cool air from the small oscillating fan made by Westinghouse. The sheets were always clean but never actually cool.
I never trusted the sheets anyway after discovering a scorpion hiding between them one night.
But it was the sound of the frogs around our pool here on Cardinal Drive – particularly after a rain – that drew me to those hot muggy nights of Grimes County, Texas where I was raised. My grandmother’s wooden house made from a retail catalog blueprint had many design flaws, but its one awesome feature which had nothing to do with the design really, was the magical pond (or tank, as we called it in East Texas) behind her house.
The tank was the focal point of my only-child imagination play stories during the day, but it was the tank’s music of those summer nights I hope will never be erased from my memory. Specifically, it was the frogs, or bull frogs as my grandmother used to call them just before we drifted off to sleep. The low guttural sounds were always behind the house and were somewhat subdued until every light was turned off at night. But then, those frogs got louder and louder until they hit a mighty crescendo. My grandmother and I laughed out loud when we heard them.
The frogs who live in our backyard on Cardinal Drive are rarely as raucous as the bull frogs in my tank in Richards – I think they are smaller frogs. But occasionally I hear one of those loud guttural sounds looking for something, probably safer water supplies, and I am transported to different days. To a grandmother who guided me with her wisdom – now to a woman who loves sharing another summer solstice with me.
*******************************
I was blessed with a loving, eccentric (translate close to dysfunctional), family who in the end gave me what they could – so much more than I realized. What I wouldn’t give to see them all again, but Lawdy, Lawdy, I sure am thankful for our air conditioning. Frogs or no frogs.
I'll Call It Like I See It 
You must be logged in to post a comment.