Pirate for Congress

Some of you may have already seen this out there, but my coworkers have been all abuzz lately about James Hill's run for Congress in Iowa. This is a candidate who is willing to expose his personal history and private convictions (or lack thereof) to public scrutiny. He's apparently someone who is so fed up by the corruption of politicians, he includes choice phrases in his site like, "Every day I fight the urge to drink, debauch women out of wed-lock and beat people on the street. One urge I do not have is to sell myself to the highest bidder."

He may offend many, but his honesty and ability to stand tall and say, "ARRRRR!" just in time for the upcoming Talk Like a Pirate Day have won the admiration of others.

And speaking of the admiration of others (not coy, I), I was blessed this evening by the inspirational and inspired gifts and really, really good chocolate from my colleagues Julia & Suzanne. I call it a writer's group. And it is that. But it's so much more as well! Thanks for spoiling me, gals.

For Nothing

As my sister says, I've reached the big "four nothing," or 40.
And you know, what? That's okay.

I've had more than one forty-plus friend tell me about the liberation that can come with reaching a milestone birthday like this - where you find that in spite of your keenest aspirations and best intentions, you haven't, after all, conquered the world or found a cure for cancer or written the Great American Novel by the time you were forty. And so the pressure is off now.

Whew.
Thank goodness for that.

It's been a splendid day. Just enough people acknowledged my birthday to make me feel special (which I love) without feeling like the Center of Attention (which I abhor).



Here's a shot for posterity, taken in Las Vegas at the end of last month, while at a tech conference for work. Dinner out at Nobu sushi. Yum.




Had sushi again tonight, followed by the obligatory birthday chocolate. The girls are in bed, and I'm ready to settle down to watch an episode of Friends with D. - we've come to the sitcom only now, via DVDs, having never had TV while it ran. And it's just plain silly fun for us, a good way to close out the day.

Onward with the journey...

The Gift

So, I realize that every day is a gift, but today feels like a real pre-birthday whiz-bang package all tied up with a big bow and a card with my name in fancy calligraphy.

I took the day off work even though I have pretty much NO personal time left because it's the girls' first day of school. R. is now in 6th grade, S. is in 1st. D. took the requisite First Day of School photo, which I will post as soon as I can borrow his camera to upload the shot.

And although I could have gone back to work for a few hours, I'm taking the entire day off instead. To do whatever, including (in no particular order):
jettison more paperwork
write (case in point)
go to the gym
garden
send my sister her late birthday present
balance my checkbook, pay the bills, fold the laundry, mow the lawn...

I know what some of you are thinking. Some of you are thinking that today should be about doing whatever I want, not about doing chores. Others of you already know that those "chores" are just what I do want to do.

I remember as a child that my friends would call me to come over and play whenever their mothers told them to clean their rooms. It was because they knew that I really liked organizing other people's stuff, turning chaos into cosmos, a disaster into some form of order. (And dear Suzy Woodward, wherever you are, I still remember that 4-year old Nilla Wafer we found in your Uncle Wiggly tree stump display.)

I'm not one to scrub the toilet daily. I'm not great about dusting and vacuuming. But I like things tidy, and although some mess is "good" for me, a lesson that the little things don't matter but relationships with people do - so have the guests over even if the house isn't clean, anyway - too much mess crosses the line into being just plain bad for my psyche.

So I'm going to pretend I'm visiting my friend's house, and that I have no weird (and unnecessary) attachments to the piles of papers everywhere, the travel guides from my grandmother's trips to Alaska and Greece in the '70s, the receipts from Christmas purchases ten years ago, the multiple drafts of the same short story. I'm going to have the recycle bin and a shredder and a good cup of coffee and I'm going to have some FUN, blast it all!

I'm also going to write down the goals I have before I reach the age of 40. I have until Monday to reach them, so I'll make them realistic.

Scratch off "marathon" but add "say no to babysitting someone else's child once a week for free for the third year in a row."

Omit "get a book of poetry published" but add "compile the manuscript and see where the holes are, and write one more poem to fill one of those holes."

Nevermind "weigh 150 pounds." Stick to "continue to eat healthily and exercise regularly, and be happy with the slow road to fit."

Instead of "finish remodel of bedroom" I'm putting down "find the bedroom floor."

I'm replacing "dig out adobe for path through front landscaping" with "water the vegetable garden."

Bird by bird, as Anne Lamott would say.

Meme thang

Ok, so I found this because I read Julie who discovered it through Josh.
If you'd like to see mine, it's here. Please feel free to contribute. I'll reciprocate.

R. is off at camp in the sierras until Saturday. We've received 2 postcards: one to the dog: "Bark Bark! I [heart] you all" and one to her sister, on the top of which she gives me instructions to have S. read: "I love you so much! Love, love R."

I guess we can see where parents rate in the whole ranking of correspondence. But I'm so glad to hear from her. I checked carefully, too, and there was no "I hate camp and you are cruel heartless parents for sending me here and you must come get me right now or consider the entirety of my childhood one long Oprah special in the making" anywhere to be found on the pre-stamped, pre-addressed card.

I've said it before. The world is rife with small mercies.

Gratuitous Celebrity Obsession Post

Some of you may already know this, but Jean Reno just re-married. And it wasn't to me.

Dang.

What was he thinking?

I mean, HELLO?
Pick me! Pick me!

Ahem.

Don't get me wrong.

If Jean Reno really showed up at my door and proposed to me on bended knee I'd refuse his offer, even if he had a diamond ring for me.

Because I don't like diamonds.

And. Okay, yes. And because I've already got someone better than he'll ever be. And I wouldn't trade my current, only, forever husband for ANYONE else.

But still. I wouldn't have minded the chance to turn down the proposal.

Let's see if I remember how this works...

So, I think the idea is that I get over the "it has to be perfect" or "it will take too long" whine and dawdle shuffle, and move straight to the "put your fingers to the keyboard and post a blog entry" sashay.

Like, before yet another month makes an appearance, already.

It's been hard to blog. It's been hard to do a lot of things, although I manage them well enough that I'm not sure I need to officially complain.

Except that I feel like I'm off my game, frankly. As though I just can't think straight.

I wonder if it's possible that I'm in some sort of perpetual fog because the death of a close family member does that to you. I'm hoping that's the case. I've certainly heard now from a number of people that the inability to concentrate, and general confusion, are very common symptoms of grief. And it's not like I'm talking about London pea-soup fog, or tule fog, exactly. Sometimes it's only a wispy haze. But I definitely feel impaired. More than usual, that is.

I think.

In fact, what's tricky about this fogginess is that I'm not at all sure that it isn't the way I've always been. Maybe I've been cloudy-brained for a long, long time, and I'm actually only clear enough now to recognize it. Maybe this is me better than I've been because I actually now recognize how bad off I am. Sound confusing? It is to me, too.

So I'm giving myself whatever time it takes, hoping (because I am by nature an optimist, in spite of being paranoid at the same time) that I will pull out of this into the clear sunlight and be able to count to ten again without stopping at six to wonder what I came into the kitchen to get.

And speaking of paranoid - thanks to Julia for the compliment. Tonight after our writers group meeting, when we couldn't set the alarm at first because of a fault with an unknown area in the building, I'd offered to scout out the dark, secluded warehouse section of the place in case someone had propped open a door or something - since we had, after all, seen cars drive through the otherwise empty parking lot earlier, and people could have been casing the joint. I had even suggested I could take of my boots so I would be in my socks, and better able to run if necessary. And Julia, bless her, said to me, "I like the way you think of everything."

That's just about the nicest way to call someone paranoid that I can imagine.

The rough outline of the last month (or at least the highlights):

S. turned 7 on Friday. The same day, my oldest brother turned 47, and D's father turned 76. And that's only 3/5ths of the Leos in our immediate family. Much royalty.

S. had a roller skating party. I never knew I had it in me to disco dance to The YMCA while skating.

I was in Las Vegas last week. My first real non-slots gambling experience. Perhaps worth a blog entry, but perhaps not as worthy to write about as my Road Warrior post-apocalyptic fantasies about what would happen to Vegas if the power failed.

I wrote a new poem. Or at least the first few drafts. (Not related to Vegas. Or the YMCA.)

D and I are remodeling our bedroom to look like a traditional Japanese room - complete with a new closet with custom shelves behind hand-made (D-made) shoji screens, a platform bed, tatami mats, and lots of space and light, sans clutter. It's full of clutter mid-process, of course, which is hard to live with, but it'll be a slice of Japan in Northern California when we're done.

Sound true?

So Josh tagged me to write 8 THINGS about myself, but it's easier to paste this little quiz engine response than to actually put thought and energy into prose. So the 8 THINGS will have to wait, and here's this for now. It might be a *little* tiny bit true, I suppose. Maybe.

Your Birthdate: August 28

You have a Type A personality so big it makes other Type A's shrink away in shame. You never shy away from adversity - and you love to tackle impossible problems. Failure is not an option for you, and more than a few people are put off by your ego. You tend to be controlling, and you hate leaving anything up to chance. Your strength: Your bold approach to life Your weakness: You don't accept help Your power color: Bronze Your power symbol: Pyramid Your power month: October

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

The only thing is, it appears that this quiz spits out the same blurb for whatever DAY of the month you enter, regardless of the month. A little disappointing. It's not the all-seeing Oracle I thought it was. (But it does confirm the fact that I don't really like leaving things up to chance...)

The Quick Recap

Consider this a post card scribbled on a bus between stops in a journey.

I've had a lot of proud-mama time lately. The girls have between them performed a gymnastics show, a school play, a ballet recital, and a horse show - and they did beautifully in all of them.

They're out of school for the summer, and are wrapping up their first two weeks of swim lessons.

I'm training a bit for another half marathon, which means I spend more of the week jogging & sweating.

I still write when I'm able (or am compelled by Writer's Group deadlines) to do so, and have a poem coming out in the next issue of The American Poetry Journal.

Tomorrow, my husband's sister is getting married. The girls are flower girls in the wedding. Tonight is the rehearsal dinner followed by a luau, complete with Polynesian dancers. The girls haven't even tried on the dresses that someone my sister-in-law knows has made for them, so if the fitting doesn't go well, there will be some night-before-the-wedding sewing, I'm afraid.

The day after the wedding, family from out of state (and out of country - an aunt and cousin from Montreal) will come to the house for a party. Is the house ready? No. Is the yard weeded? No. Has the menu been drawn up? Not really. Do I care? Well, I'm trying not to.

Also on my mind is that the party is on Sunday, and Monday I'm to be in Hemet to meet my oldest brother and sister to sort through Mom's things. I'm taking D's big truck down so I can bring back some furniture and boxes. My other brother, in Colorado, has a container that will be delivered to Mom's house for the few things he wants of what she'd left to him. The distribution of belongings has been very kind & gentle & civil. I just wish my siblings' schedules had enabled us to time it better, considering the frenzy of the next 3 days!

Yes, I'm Still Here

For what it's worth, I've thought about blogging.

That's all for now.

More later today.

Honest.

Mom

This is the post I didn't want to write, as though putting it off kept at bay the reality that has, in spite of it all, been sinking in.

I offer sincere apologies to anyone who is only now learning this news. My mom, Allison Fadeley Blauer, passed away April 23rd. An online obit can be found through Legacy.com's service for either the Denver Post or the Post Enterprise. (Search for last name Blauer.)

This is the first of what will be a forever of Mother's Days without Mom. A white carnation Mother's Day. And it's not just Mother's Day that will remind me of the loss of my mother and friend. It's those other days, those other moments, that I expect will sideswipe me with grief. I have tons of great memories of my mom to call up, but the tricky part, the part that will pang, will be all the future memories that I won't share with her.



There is plenty of writing that has already come out of this death. It's personal, it's my way of working through these early stages of mourning. It's not fit for public consumption.

But I couldn't put off updating my blog any longer. This is the first step of me moving away from the point of demarcation her death brings and into this next phase of my life.


So here's to the woman who raised me and my three siblings with a love that we're only now starting to fathom. To someone who was able to laugh even when times were extraordinarily hard. Mom was quiet and humble to a fault, and the one characteristic that those who knew her unanimously recall is that she was a "nice person" (which is, as my brother pointed out, a terribly undervalued virtue these days). She showed me what loving unconditionally means. She showed me the strength of finding humor in adversity. She spoiled my kids rotten. And I will miss her, every day, for a long, long time.


















Nothing was more important to Mom than her children.






She held each of us when we were small, and her death has brought us together as adults and held us again, in the space left by her leaving. We spent last weekend celebrating her life at her home with family, friends and neighbors. On Sunday, we gave her ashes to the Pacific Ocean according to her will. Her handwriting in the will shows that her first thought was to have her remains scattered "in the Colorado Mts" but she had scratched this out and modified it to read a Southern California beach. We dropped daises and roses in the waves. We saw sea lions sunning themselves on a buoy. A single dolphin splashed like a messenger in and out of the water as the boat returned to the harbor.







It was the first time the four of us children have been together for more than a day in nearly thirty years. Whatever differences we might have, we're united in this love, this loss.

Easter Eve

The single parent Easter bunny is hitting the hay.

After 4 hours in the car, and several more hours at the nursing home interrupted only by a very long walk in the neighborhood & dinner out (where they had to continue to behave), then grocery shopping and dying eggs after 9:30 pm, I think the girls were asleep ten seconds after their heads hit their pillows.

I'm going to follow suit.

Haven't worked on novel in days, owe emails to everyone & haven't even gone to look at my email account since yesterday mid-day. But I'm going to Scarlett O'Hara it, and leave it for tomorrow. Until then....

South for the holiday

The girls and I will leave shortly for Southern California, and as I don't expect to have internet access between now and tomorrow, I am posting something now.

SOMETHING.

There's been DRAMA! at work and DRAMA! at the girls' school. It will be nice to get away and spend time with family, and with the familial drama to which I have become accustomed.

In case you were wondering

"ACHTUNG!

Setdownthis may actually be a spider-human hybrid

Username:

From Go-Quiz.com


Thanks to Kate for the link to the above fun. I know a few Spidy fans who might appreciate the random results. And please note that the link on the sidebar to Kate's blog has been updated, and that I've added a link to Chris, Deneene & Wilder's blog. I am fortunate enough to know some truly amazing people who are living truly authentic lives. And although I am just not someone who has the habit (yet?) of spending much time in the blogosphere, let alone much time online (or even on the computer) once I'm home, I've got links to blogs that are great reads.

Enjoy!

And L, you're right. The importance of sushi for last year's work outweighs future sushi anyday.

Happy soggy April

April is National Poetry Month.

I'm thinking I should find a few words to rhyme with "deluge."
There's no end of the rain in sight.

National Poetry Month. Hmm. We mark days so that everyone will recognize them. But I think it's a little ironic that we should take something we honor, or something that looms large in our minds, and go to great lengths to have it officially recognized. I mean, If you have to remind people to remember it, how great can it be? I understand that we don't want future generations to forget what we know. I understand this personally, even. For example, we have daguerreotypes of relatives on my mother's father's side of the family whom I may never identify. They were surely important to someone while they lived, and probably for a generation or more after they lived. And they each have a story to tell. But it's lost because we did not honor or commemorate it. But I'm not suggesting we should have a National Day or Month to recognize my great-great-grand relatives.

Actually, this late at night, I'm not sure *what* I'm suggesting.

But a truly EVIL coworker double-dog dared me to blog daily for a year for another sushi dinner. This is not the same coworker who dared me into doing the same in 2005.

Will I give in to the pressure....?

It may be like child birth. Nature allows you to forget the agony so that you'll be SUCKERED into pushing another incongruously large, screaming animal out of your pain-wracked body. The hurt fades (for some mothers, anyway) and you find yourself ordering another round of the hair of the dog that bit you.

So I'm not exactly picking up the gauntlet (see, Julie, you're not the only person to mix metaphors with wild abandon) - but I am looking at it.

See the gauntlet.
"Pick me up!" say the gauntlet.
"I dare you!" says the gauntlet.
"I double dog dare you!" says the gauntlet.

I nudge the gauntlet with my toe.



Did I mention that my coworker was EVIL?

More progress

I returned yesterday morning from spending three full days with Mom. I got her moved from the hospital to a rehab center, aka a "skilled nursing facility" or "SNiF," a name which I personally think should be abandoned, as it's only one letter away from Snuf.

The nursing home is good, though, and the staff for the most part very good. In particular, the physical therapists are excellent. Within two days, mom went from being completely unable to assist us in transferring her from a wheelchair to the passenger seat of my rental car, to being able to walk about twenty feet with a walker - from her room to the dining room where I'd been waiting while she had her PT. After two weeks of inactivity, and weeks before that of declining health and lousy nutrition (she says only jello and orange slices tasted good), she is getting her strength back. The staff seems to know just how to encourage her to work, and just when to back off, when to allow for her weakness or the wound pain.

Much more significantly, she says she actually can imagine getting well now. To me, this is the most optimistic sign. She admitted that even when we'd visited her in February, she hadn't cared about anything. And while in the hospital, she'd felt so bad (and foggy from the drugs), that she had no real will to pull through.

We had some really good talks and lots of laughs while I was there, and Mom emphatically labeled it "such a nice visit."

There's still no saying how well things will continue to go, and I think everyone is "guardedly optimistic." She will always have congestive heart failure (35% functionality, the chart said), and fairly advanced kidney disease (IV), and right now, her wound is deep enough that it's like an anatomy lesson in itself (a whole chunk of muscle is just plain gone, and let me tell you, tendons are really white). But her spirits are so improved, and the time we've spent together was so good (for her, too - not just for me), that I feel like every day she's still around is a bright gift, instead of a roller coaster ride in the dark.

An update on Mom

Thanks to all of you who have offered support and get well wishes for my mother. She was in ICU for a few days last week because of an "incident" with her heart, then she was moved to a telemetry room where they could monitor her to see if she needed to have a defibrillator installed. In the meantime, though, she is not a candidate for surgery of any kind. Her blood pressure has occasionally been very low (80/33, for example), they've given her another 2 pints of blood, and her leg wound is no better (although it's also no worse, thank goodness). They're running more tests (biopsy on the leg, just in case, and the dreaded colonoscopy), and are trying to get her healthier in order to transfer her to a rehab center nursing home, and then later, to do a skin graft. I'm sure she's sick of being in the hospital, but her spirits are better, and her sense of humor is as healthy as ever. I fly down to see her early Thursday morning.

In the last week or so, I've had the great good fortune of a few heart-to-hearts with other women who are going through, or have just gone through, similar health crises with parents. We've talked about the importance of spending time with mom, of communicating with her as often as I can when I can't actually be there in person. We've discussed me talking to the kids about grandma's illness - and about mortality in general. These are obvious things, but I need to hear them. This is a moment in my life when I most need to be *present* but instead find myself using my standard defense mechanism against stress - distraction, distance, and denial. I'm detached, but not in any spiritually healthy way. This self-analysis is a prime example of my MO. Don't be fooled by it. I'm less a writer turning to the craft for comfort than I am a bundle of unfelt, unprocessed emotions. Hiding fluently behind prose.

I mean, I'm nearly 3 years divested from any spiritual system, feeling the need to talk to mom about the possibility of her death, but not knowing what I believe anymore. I wish she were willing to talk about it - about either death or faith. I don't know her current thoughts on either. I plan on broaching the subject when I see her, but for now, we're not missing an opportunity to tell each other how much we love each other. I know that she thinks I'm a wonderful daughter. She knows that I think she's the best mom and grandmother in the world, and the kindest person I have ever met, and that all sorts of people in my life are sharing their love and concern for her. For now, that will have to do, and for now, that's enough.

Unexpected travels

I spent last weekend in southern California, visiting my mother in the hospital. She's still there, and will probably be there for a few more days, but I am back home and going through the usual routines, while I wait to hear how she's doing. It's the waiting, 500 miles away, that is most difficult.

Mom has so many things going on with her, there's no short or simple way to explain why she's in the hospital. Her heart works at about 33%, but that's been the case for 7 years since her bypass surgery. Her kidney function is around 26%, but that's been true for about 2 years. As long as she stayed active - which she did, walking and swimming daily - and as long as she watched her diet, she was fine. A little slow-moving, but trim and happy and for the most part, really fine. What has brought her low is very minor surgery she had at the end of December for a squamous cell on her lower leg which has become a horrible, enormous wound that is excruciatingly painful. I'm told it looks and acts just like a diabetic ulcer (which may well never heal), with the exception that she can feel it, while a diabetic person might not. So she stopped being able to get around, and she was on pain meds that didn't exactly work, and she was too intimated by the pain to care for the wound correctly to begin with, and she had no appetite and didn't eat, and lost 10 pounds that she could ill afford to lose. Then she had another infection they had to locate, and blood loss they had to figure out, and the morphine they put her on for the pain and the 2 pints of blood they gave her helped, but not enough, etc. etc.

Her nurses have been excellent, as have most of the team of doctors (cardiology, nephrologist, wound care specialist, hospital drs). Yesterday, she was transferred to ICU for the first time because she had a cardiac "incident" - either a heart attack, or a response to all the meds she's been on, but she seems better in ICU than she did before. (She has been allowed to eat again, and snuck an "illegal" cell phone call to me from her bed.)

I'm glad I went to visit her, and I hope to go again soon, possibly with R., who really wants to see her. But it's a day-by-day, hour-by-hour wait, now, to see what happens next. This is hard for me, and harder for my sister, who, as primary care giver living near my mom has had to put her life, and the new career she's trying to start, on the back burner while she spends as much of her day as she can with Mom or making arrangements for what happens once she's out of the hospital.

As always, there is so much more to say here, so much more to write (which has always been my best tool for "processing" things), but limited time in which to compose.

So that's all the news, for now.

Dydd Dewi Sant

It is St. David's Day. St. David, the patron saint of Wales. I don't care much one way or another about saints (apart from the fact that we are all saints), but I do care about Wales.

The novel progresses slowly, all too often shoved aside while life gets big and hairy.

I've had about 50 minutes of sleep in the last 41 hours - a 10 minute nap at work this morning, a 40 minute nap this afternoon. I feel like I'm in an altered state, but one not entirely unwelcome. This is what drama queens and crisis junkies crave - the tilting priorities, the teeter-tottering significances, and emotional kaleidoscope. In a sense, you are left with nothing mattering because you really might actually already be dead. Everything is surreal in this way. In another sense, things have never mattered so much, or been so clear. And you want to remember this.
It's probably the exhaustion that makes you drop the baggage and just BE. It would be a great trick to master after a full night's sleep. Come to think of it.

The catalog for the girls' school auction is finished and was printed this afternoon. In case you were wondering why I pulled an all-nighter.

For the first time in seven years, I did not celebrate St. David's day by bringing pastries to work and forcing Welsh words on my colleagues.

My mother's surgery wound is now an ulcer that may take 2 years to heal.
My sister is fried from taking care of her.
My oldest brother is worried that this could turn into hospital bills that he can't afford to help pay for.

I think I will make a business card that states that I am a writer.
I think it will be square.

Vacation approacheth

The girls and I will head out of town in just over a week, with D. to follow later. Off to see family in Southern California and then go to the Magic Kingdom. (Really, what's the most magic about it is that I won't have to plan and cook a meal or answer a phone for 3 days.)

I did survive the half marathon Sunday, and in fact trimmed more minutes off my time. I can now officially run 13.1 miles in under 11 minutes per mile. A personal accomplishment, and best not compared with the runners who do the same distance at twice the speed. However, on the bright side, if I take 5 minutes off my time each of these runs, I figure, by the time I'm 80 or so, I'll be crossing the finish line before I cross the start line.

I have decided that I most likely will NOT try to run a marathon before I'm 40. Or ever. I think the half marathon distance is just about right for me.

What does that mean? That means time spent not training but hanging out with family and friends. Time spent in the garden. Time spent writing. Right? Write.

Culture

You know, it has taken me 5 days to write this tiny post, primarily because I want to give it a longer stretch of time and more depth, more detail. This is something I've seen other bloggers struggle with - one's desire to do something justice coming up hard against one's time constraints - resulting in no post at all rather than a partial or sketchy post.

But since web log silence is not something I want any longer, I'll just give you what I've got.





Last Sunday we had a spontaneous adventure - a trip to the deYoung Museum to see the Hatshepsut Exhibition. We brought one of R's riding buddies to make it more fun for all of us.

After having run 10 miles in the morning (my last long run before Sunday's Half), the walking from parking to the museum, and then all over the museum, and then back to the car, I felt like I'd had my exercise for the week. But the girls were real troopers, and I was gratified to see that S (who just officially turned six-and-a-half) really wanted to know all about all of the Egyptian artifacts.

The older girls' experience with museums had been fairly limited to hands-on childrens' museums like the Exploratorium, so they were a little frustrated by the lack of touchable, experimental exhibits. After we'd been there about 90 minutes and had left the Hatshepsut rooms, R's friend said to me, "You know, I didn't know there's be so much art here."

I pointed out it was, after all, an art museum, which she agreed explained the emphasis.

It was an educational experience, anyway. The older girls, examining the museum's map, insisted that we go to the African rooms. When we got there, and they saw the scores of dark wood carvings with, in many cases, prominent or exaggerated anatomy, there were cries of, "Oh! Don't look at that, S!" and "Don't look at that either!" until they beat a hasty and disillusioned retreat out of the area with hands to the sides of their eyes to avoid any other surprises. I would have happily strolled through slowly with them, reading about the art and discussing it, but they wouldn't hear of it. I explained that people in different parts of the world express themselves artistically in ways that are new to us, and that some other cultures just feel differently about the human body than people in our culture do. I pointed out that different doesn't mean bad - just different. They said they understood all that, and I think they did. But they were still clearly embarrassed as only pre-teen girls can be. Since they had been so hot to see the African art to begin with, I asked them what they thought the rooms would be like, and they admitted they'd been hoping for something that looked like Africa. I think they were expecting to step into a stage setting. Or maybe they were hoping the second floor of the deYoung had a Savannah tucked away in it.

We also made the mistake of starting to enter the photography exhibits, which were even more explicit than the African rooms had been, and weren't going to fly with my underage companions.

The girls were happier to see the 18th and 19th century paintings and portraits - especially because the rooms were more brightly lit. And of course, they really liked the little original Remington bucking bronco statue, although they had comments on the lack of realism (!) in the horse's build and pose.

Jeez. Everyone's a critic.