The Greatest American Moment in American History

I'm a firmly middle-aged white woman living in southern California, born fifty years and one day ago, the one day, today, that the great Martin Luther King stood up in front of the Lincoln Memorial and let loose one of, if not the most, amazing speeches in the history of my country. I listened to the speech today while I folded clothes warm from the laundry. The hair on my white arms rose, tears pricked at my eyes, I wondered again at the preternatural magic that man possessed, how he wove history, the present and the future into words -- that glorious cadence of his oratory. As sabers rattle and metal machines lie in wait to drop bombs, yet again, in desolate places across the globe, I wonder, too, whether the words he spoke of, that dream, will ever be realized fully, whether the principles of nonviolence will ever take utterly and completely. I know better. They will not. But I know that I will take those principles into my own heart and teach them to my children and hope that by so doing we will be that many more added to the peacemakers.

Here's the speech:




And here's an excellent article for those of you, like me, who struggle with so-called patriotism and honoring soldiers and killing and dying for liberty. 

It's also for those of you who don't understand people like me.

No, thanks: Stop saying "support the troops."

A Good Lord Birthday Food Blog

Last night, I had dinner with D, one of my oldest friends, and my oldest son, Henry. I've known D now for thirty years, and no one currently makes me laugh harder. You will never see a photo of D either, because that's how he rolls, and since I love him to death -- well -- I'm banking he'll always be with me in some form or another anyway, so who needs a photo? In any case, he's got the body of a god and the face of an intellectual which is just about perfect (even if he does put on his trousers backwards sometimes) and I hope he's reading this. We went to a new restaurant in West Hollywood called Connie and Ted's that we could only get a reservation for at 5:15 (perfect when you're beginning the next half century and might need to segue into the early bird special time earlier rather than later). We ate an assortment of raw oysters first.

Good lord, they were icy cold, salty and perfect.

 Next, came a trio of chowda samplers: Manhattan, Boston and Rhode Island. Good lord, each was better than the next. The Boston tasted like it had a stick of the finest butter on the planet melted into it, and the Rhode Island made me remember when I was twenty years old (thirty years ago!) and spent the summer in Newport with ten of my college girlfriends. We ate a lot of chowdah that summer, hung out on the docks with America's Cup sailors, fell into and out of love -- but I digress.

That's what good food does, I think.

My main course was Mediterranean mussels and clams with little bricks of buttery, spicy toast.

Good lord, it was hearty:

Henry ordered fried clams. He said that they were perfect.

Good lord, they were:

I had a slice of peach pie for dessert, blew out a candle after making a wish, and laughed uproariously because D kept teasing me about my encroaching age-related daffiness. The sentence I need a birthday candle plate, pronto!, yelled in my old waiter voice will become part of D's and my stored collection of mutual mockery until the day we drop dead with no pain whatsoever.

Good lord, I hope my wish comes true:

We drove home in a seafood haze, blasting Eva Cassidy singing Lennon's Imagine (and you must listen to that if you want to feel like the troubles of the world have disappeared and what is left is warm and hysterically funny and fifty years are ahead of you, the same, light, wistful, filled up) as the golden light of Los Angeles softened into the sultry air.

Good lord, I'm blessed.
















Thank you, D.


P.S. I'm still shopping around for tattoo artists, so nothing to show you, yet!

How the day whiled

There was make-your-own-sub-sandwich lunch time:

and there was play Monopoly time

There was a long walk on the beach with my father, under stormy skies:

There were pelicans doing synchronized acrobatics in the sky:

There was a surprise for those of turning forty years old (my little sister, Jennifer) and those of us turning 50 years old (yours truly)

Then there was sunset on the beach --

There was the usual high drama, too, but I'll leave you with the illusion of perfection. Usually, it's the fine line between them where most of family relationships lie, and our family is like most, I imagine, in that respect.

My Half Century Plan

via apartment therapy

So, in exactly one month, I'll be fifty years old. I love a birthday, mine included. I'm decidedly not the no gifts, please girl. So. This is what I want for my birthday:

1. Two weeks in the above little house on the Isle of Wight.
2. A trip to County Sligo, along the paths that Yeats walked 
3. A paddle board lesson in a slimming wet-suit with a cute surfer guy of any age
4. A tiny, perfect mermaid tattoo on my left inner wrist
5. A car tour through Badlands National Park, perhaps tripping on a tiny amount of an hallucinogenic

Reader, don't you wonder which of these I'll do?

Shaking things up

Remember my intention to read War and Peace by my fiftieth birthday in late August? I'm working on it. It's sitting on my bed right now, and I've fallen behind. At the rate I'm reading it, I might have to shoot for my sixtieth birthday in late August of 2023. As you might recall, I took up the tome in lieu of losing fifty pounds by my fiftieth birthday, and I'm now considering getting back on that bandwagon through Prancercise.



Reader, what do you think? Who wants to join me in donning white stretch pants and a tiny jacket?

The morning after

The world is changed on the morning after dancing until the late hours the night before. One of my closest friends celebrated her 50th birthday last night by throwing a karaoke party with a 1970s theme. I put on some sparkly blue eye-shadow and wide-legged jeans, carried a pink Goody comb that I have miraculously saved from my childhood, and danced, literally, the night away. There was onion dip and potato chips, green bean and tuna casserole. There were meat-loaf sandwiches and crab dip with Triscuits. There were Leaping Lizard drinks, and I had several. At some point, I broke out clog dancing and later, when we recounted it, I nearly wet my pants laughing. So, it's a beautiful morning and my heart feels so much lighter this morning that I can only attribute it to the dancing and friendship and laughter from last night. I highly recommend a karaoke machine and some music from the glory days to right the world.

Girls, the real ones, not the ones on television**

I am on a plane, again, when you read this and am heading back to the east coast to see some of my oldest and best friends from, probably, one of the happiest times in my life. Those were the four years I spent at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the above women, all ten of them plus one who is mysteriously NOT in that photo, will be together this weekend. We're celebrating fiftieth birthdays -- most of us are turning fifty this year and some -- sadly, some -- have already turned fifty.

Oh, my lord, I'm so excited I can hardly stand it! I know I'm going to cry when I see them, especially those  I haven't seen in nearly 25 years. And I know I'm going to laugh as hard as I've ever laughed over the next three days as we remember our time together and share memories about then and stories from now. I think we look about as cute in 1985 as we could have in the mid-eighties, and I'm certain that everyone will look more beautiful in our half-century year, given the lives we've all lived.

Like I said, I'm so excited that I can hardly stand it.

**And those girls on television? I just don't get what all the hubbub is about. I paid nearly $20 to download the first season and found it boring, superficial and not even remotely interesting. Maybe that's because I'm almost fifty and no longer a girl?