I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together

My typist firmly believes that the saddest moment in all of literature, the passage she cannot ever read without instantly tearing up, is the ending of A. A. Milne's The House At Pooh Corner.

Christopher Robin is about to start school. Knowing that his childhood life of play is coming to an end, he takes his beloved bear to an enchanted place in the forest and asks him to promise never to forget him and the delights of the time they have spent together. Pooh promises to remember, even if Christopher Robin lives to be a hundred and he lives to be ninety-nine. The vow made, the serious mood lifts and the two run off to nowhere in particular for a final romp. And then, the finest book in children's literature concludes with the following words:

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

My poor typist. She hates working with tears running down her cheeks.

Are you with me, darlings? Close readers that you are, have you figured out what I am trying to say?

It's time, my pretties. After six and a half years and 761 posts, it's time to bring the active phase of this happy experiment in social media to an end. To put it simply, I've been dead for nearly three years. I think it's high time I retired, don't you?

Thank you. Thanks to every single one of you for being a part of this quirky, (un)real place, which the middle-aged broad who brought it into being has always thought of as at least a little bit enchanted -- because of you. Thank you for reading, for caring, for keeping the spirit of play alive in your own selves and in the world. That spirit will never die, because the world and all its critters need it, desperately. If you live to be a hundred, don't ever lose sight of that truth.

As of now, the blogging here will end, but the blog will go on in the sense of being here, always, for you, like some loyal companion animal of Very Little Brain whose love you need and whose insights might suggest that brains are overrated. As of now, Roxie's World is an archive of what we have thought and felt and how we have endured the past six and a half years. Come back from time to time. No one but me will know you've been here, and I will love knowing you stopped by.

Now, put down your hankies, kids, and listen up. I've got some good news, too. Are you ready?

Moose has launched a brand new blog. It's up. It's going. You are invited to head over there. As soon as you finish reading this.

A brand new blog? Yep! I thought she should call it Moose, Unleashed, but for some baffling reason she has opted to call it The Madwoman with a Laptop instead. (Could the name have something to do with the little essay she contributed to this collection? Who knows?) What's the new blog going to be and do? Well, one never quite knows with blogs, but the inaugural post makes it sound as if fans of this here blog will feel right at home with the Madwoman, who promises to offer "commentary on a similar, eclectic mix of subjects from a familiar perspective: queer, feminist, critter-affirming, with a tone that moves between and among irreverence, optimism, and righteous indignation, with occasional unapologetic lapses into sentimentality. I’ll write about higher education, middle age, new media, politics, queer stuff, books I read or teach, the stuff I watch on TV. I will rail about Excellence Without Money (which is still ™RW Enterprises LLC) and wax rhapsodic on college women’s basketball. I’ll offer glimpses of life with my new companion terrier, Ruby, and my companion human of 28+ years, the woman known on Roxie’s World as Goose. There’ll be jokes, recipes, pictures I take. Maybe even pictures I draw."

Pictures I draw? See caricature above. Which proves that there may well be some Madness in the Woman who has launched this new venture. Girl, put the stylus down and step away from the iPad before someone gets hurt!

Anyhoo, kids, speaking of the woman known in these precincts as Goose, we realize there may be some identity challenges ahead for some of this blog's readers as we negotiate the transition to The Madwoman with a Laptop. You'll be pleased to know that the Office of Persona Management will remain open should you need assistance in figuring out who to be. Mark Twain is standing by, Candy Man, and is ready to hand out advice on all matters comical and ontological. Some things never change, I swear.

But some things do change, my darlings, and that isn't necessarily bad. Our ability to adapt to change is a measure of our strength and resilience. Roxie's World has always been a celebration of resilience, hasn't it? Of picking up and carrying on, in every sense of the term.

So, carry on:

• Subscribers: Add The Madwoman to your feed readers. Now. Moose's fragile self-esteem won't survive a crash in readership.
• Blog pals: Put The Madwoman in your blog rolls. Immediately. Please? Looking at you, cowgirl, and you, Crazy. And I know you're on vacay, TR, but hop to, will ya?
• Everybody: Show some love. Leave a comment here and there to let us know we're still a pack and always will be. Pretty please with kibble on top?

My typist has gone through half a box of Kleenex working on this post and still is reluctant to bring it to a close. As I said before, though, it's time. I know in my large and long still heart that it is time. Even my typist is ready, but she's too choked up to speak right now, so we'll let comic genius Carol Burnett have the last word. Seems we just get started and before you know it, comes the time we have to say -- 

Oh, you know the rest. Peace out, my pretties. Thanks for running with us.

Stamp Acts

We're thinking you don't have to be an English major to spot the irony in the above photo. Moose was paying bills this morning and by sheer coinkydink ended up slapping the Sylvia Plath stamp on the gas bill. (Yes, children, Moose still pays the utility bills with paper checks, tucked into envelopes and placed outside for the postal person to pick up and stuff into a large leather bag. She's old fashioned. Don't judge.) When she realized what she'd done, she showed it to Goose and they had a good long guffaw, which they like to think Plath herself would have understood.

Not sure if there are any ironies in putting Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens on the phone bills, but, hey, we are grateful to the U.S. Postal Service for getting the faces of ten great twentieth-century American poets into general circulation. Who knows? Maybe some dutiful, bill-paying citizen will get curious enough about the beguiling face of the pretty young woman on the stamp to go read one of her poems. Something delicate and dainty like, you know, this one. It could happen!

Enjoy your weekend, lovelies. May you find unexpected blog fodder and reasons to laugh wherever you go, whatever you do. The papers will be graded soon, my typist assures me, and we'll get back to something approximating regular blogalicious programming in the very near future. Honor bright. Meantime, if you're in the DC area, you should head downtown tonight or tomorrow to spend some time with this extraordinary 360-degree projection experience by Doug Aitken at the Hirshhorn. The Moms swear it's the coolest, most un-Washington thing they've seen in more than a quarter century of living in the national capital area. Go after dark. Tomorrow is the last night.

Peace out, and don't forget to pay your bills.

(Photo Credits: Moose, 5/19/12)

Remembering Adrienne Rich

As you have no doubt heard by now, another shero has left the building. The poet Adrienne Rich, whom Moose has lovingly described as the fairy godmother of lesbian feminism, died last Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, California. Tuesday, you may recall, was Moose's birthday, which adds an extra bit of poignance to the loss here in Roxie's World. Rich was only 82 years old. Only -- Yes, children, 82 sounds kinda young to the ornery 50-somethings who hang out here. Someday, you'll feel the same way. Swear to dog.

What can we say about Rich that others haven't already said in the outpouring of praise and sorrow that quickly followed news of her death? Simply that her poetry was and is, like certain pieces of music, part of the soundtrack of our lives. It is lodged deep in our heads and hearts. Lines come to us unbidden, in sleep, in crisis, in moments of intimacy. Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine. . . .I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail. . . .With whom do you believe your lot is cast?

The collage above features the autographed title page of Moose's well-worn copy of the book dykes of a certain age all had on their shelves in the 70s and 80s alongside their well-worn copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Moosewood Cookbook. You couldn't get dates back in those days if you couldn't quote most of the "Twenty-One Love Poems" from memory. While changing the oil of your girlfriend's car. Or holding a mirror up to your vajayjay in a circle of your closest friends. (Closest friends: That's lesbian-speak for ex with whom I am still complexly entangled or chick I am hoping to sleep with next.) Just kidding, kinda.

Moose isn't quite sure when she got Rich's autograph on the sacred text. She thinks it must have been at a reading at Womanbooks in New York (which is discussed in this totes excellent Signs article by Kristen Hogan on women's studies and feminist bookstores), when Rich was promoting her next book, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. Yeah: Fall 1981. Moose was the scraggly grad student standing in line clutching the poet's previous book, which she had gotten as a gift from one of her closest friends. She eventually got around to purchasing A Wild Patience and writing a paper comparing it to Dream, because she took a course called Theories of Female Creativity and you could get by with that sort of thing as long as you threw in a dollop or two of French theory to make it all look legit.

Did you really expect this post to be about Rich? Here, let's try again.

We needed a fairy godmother, someone whose words had the power of incantation and a wisdom that seemed ancient. We needed that to counter all the voices in and out of our heads shouting "No!" to our every desire, our dreams, our ambitions, our longings for another kind of world. Rich was important because she gave voice to those dreams, even as she demanded that her readers attend to the world 

as it is     not as we wish it
as it is     not as we work for it
to be 

("The Spirit of Place")

For all the dreamy feminist utopianism of her lush lyricism, Rich always had a foot firmly on the ground of the world "as it is." Yes, she gave us permission to revel in the joys of erotic pleasure and outlaw love, but she also reminded us that the world was always with us and those private pleasures couldn't command all our energy and attention. In the nineteenth of the twenty-one love poems, the speaker reminds her beloved, "I told you from the first I wanted daily life, / this island of Manhattan was island enough for me." The remark is in parentheses, a graphic emblem of the tensions between separateness and connection that are the subject of the final poems in the sequence.

You hear in that "I told you from the first" something of the moral rectitude that could make Rich both annoying and bracing. She was capable of a prescriptivism that could be damaging to both politics and poetry -- and wrote about that risk in poems like "North American Time":

When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies' usage
then I began to wonder

What felt like righteousness, though, was also a consciousness of privilege and of the duties Rich obviously felt as a white, North American, middle-class woman to make use of the power she had to try to effect change. You could say she exaggerated the amount of control women had over their lives, as she seems to do in a line like, "Only she who says / she did not choose, is the loser in the end" (XV, "Twenty-One Love Poems") -- Or you could say she recognized that no amount of oppression ever let one off the hook. We are all to some degree responsible for our lives and accountable to our moment in history -- "the life of your tribe / the breath of your planet," as she puts it in "North American Time."

Adrienne Rich gave voice to our dreams, and she demanded that we work to make those dreams real. Rich has moved on, too soon, alas, but the work, of course, continues. We realize now it isn't just women's work, as we might have supposed in earlier, separatist moments. It's all our work, and we'd better get to it. Because somewhere, we might imagine, Rich and her friend and sister/warrior Audre Lorde are impatiently waiting for us "to perform the needed acts" ("Toward the Solstice"). Let's get started, shall we?

* * *

For other remembrances of Rich, see Katha Pollitt in The New Yorker, our pal Margaret Swedish on her writing blog, another pal over on Gukira, and a poem by Marge Piercy on the Ms. blog.

Remembering Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone, who died November 19 at the age of 96, was a friend of ours. By friend we don't mean we spoke on the phone every day or spent summers at her charmingly decrepit Vermont farm house. Indeed, we hadn't spoken in several years before the National Book Award-winning poet passed away. The friendship we claim is rooted in the depth of our affections, not the amount of time we spent with a fine poet and a feisty woman who toiled in obscurity for decades. We loved Ruth, and she loved all the denizens of Roxie's World.

To Ruth, everything on earth was intensely alive -- full of meaning and worthy of recognition. Thus, in "Vegetables II," she says of an eggplant she contemplates eating, "We put our heads together. / You are so smooth and cool and purple, / I say. Which of us will it be?" In the early days of their friendship, when the Moms were cat lesbians, Ruth would inscribe copies of her books to them and their cats, Spike and Lily, illustrated with adorable little cat cartoons down by her signature. When I came on the scene in the mid-90s, Ruth laughed uproariously at the wild antics of my exuberant puppyhood, but, as the photo anchored to this paragraph shows, she could also calm me down enough to curl up and enjoy some poetry. (Ruth is reading a volume by another of our beloved poet-friends, Alicia Ostriker, in this picture.)

Goose first met Ruth at an epic lady poet-palooza held in May of 1986 to commemorate the centennial of Emily Dickinson's death. Upon that occasion, Ruth spoke movingly of Dickinson's astonishing originality and of the conditions in which her poetry was produced. Much of what she said of Dickinson might have been said of Ruth, too:

When I read her poems, these original, hard as steel poems, and I feel the intensity in every word, words used in new ways, bent to her will, then I think she was self-sufficient, an artist whose mind was never asleep, whose concentration recreated, made fresh all that she saw and felt, as though she saw through the ordinary barriers, not as a visionary, but as a laser beam. But when I think of how little recognition she received in her lifetime, and how devastated she must have felt, though her fierce pride concealed it, then I am angry and sad. Yes, a great artist knows and can work in almost total isolation, but it is a terrible thing to have to do. The original mind seems eccentric, even crazy sometimes. In her cryptic inventions, she broke the tiresome mold of American poetry. We still stand among those shards and splinters.

The original mind seems eccentric, even crazy sometimes. Oh, maybe just a little. Moose's favorite Ruth story involves an afternoon in the late-80s when Goose was at school and she and Ruth were hanging out with the cats in the apartment they lived in back then. Moose was supposed to be working on her still unfinished dissertation. Ruth was supposed to be resting to get ready for an evening reading on campus. At some point, Moose tuned in to the sound of Ruth's voice. Out in the living room, she was muttering something about death. "Oh, dammit. Oh, death," or words to that effect. When Moose ventured out to see what was happening, Ruth was sitting on the couch staring at her hands. "Ruth?" Moose shyly inquired, for she barely knew her elderly houseguest. "Everything okay?" Ruth turned to her, with her large brown eyes open wide, and declared, "Death is after me. Ever since that car accident. I knew it. Dammit." "Uh, okay, Ruth. What makes you think that?"

At that point, America's most obscure great poet held out her hands so Moose could see them. They were bleeding. Not from any visible wound, mind you -- Just bleeding. Two thoughts immediately popped into Moose's dissertation-enfeebled mind. The first was something like, Cool, stigmata -- We can turn this joint into a religious shrine and retire our grad school debts by charging the pilgrims to get a look at Ruth's hands! The second was no less selfish but a little more paranoid: Oh, great. I'll be a footnote in the next edition of the Norton Anthology of Lit by Women: Stone bled to death while Moose agonized over her paradigm-shifting analysis of Sarah Orne Jewett's "An Autumn Holiday."

Then Moose got a grip. She asked Ruth a few questions and quickly ascertained that the poet, lacking health insurance, had likely been overdosing on aspirin to treat neck pain from a recent car accident. She had also been subsisting mostly on candy bars during the long bus trip from Vermont to Maryland. Moose figured the bleeding had to be a side effect of the aspirin and the diet. She fixed Ruth a sandwich and they spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the cats. That night's reading was a spectacular success. Strange postscript to the story: The Moms had a ratty old cloth couch back in those days. Ruth's hands left a couple of blood stains on the couch that never faded. Swear to dog, kids, those stains looked as fresh and bright on the day that couch was finally hauled out to the curb as they did on a sunny afternoon when America's most obscure great poet scared the bejesus out of a befuddled grad student.

Here are Ruth and Moose on a bench outside the Folger Shakespeare Library during that same visit. They had gone there with Goose to see an amazing exhibit of Marianne Moore materials from the Rosenbach Museum and Library's Moore archive:

And here are Ruth and Goose on the same bench:

Oh, dammit. Oh, death. Oh, dammit, indeed. Damn you, death, for taking those we love from our midsts. Damn you for leaving us with nothing but echoes, shadows, fading images of nearly forgotten selves.

But thank you, Ruth, for the gift of your friendship and the consolation of your far from ordinary words. Thank you and dogspeed.

On the Death of Steve Jobs

When news broke the other evening that computer overlord Apple visionary Steve Jobs had died, Moose quickly posted to Facebook:

RIP Steve Jobs. I think we should all go out on our porches and hold our iPhones up to the sky.

Thus, she was pleased to stumble across this photo on the New York Times website:

(Photo Credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi, Bloomberg News, via.)

She was also for some reason deeply moved to read that among the memorial tributes being left to Jobs outside his Palo Alto, CA home were a pile of apples with one strategically removed bite. Sometimes, only metonymy will do. (At least we think that's what the gesture is, rhetorically speaking. That part of our brains is a little rusty, but our highly capable research assistant Wik E. Pedia seems to agree with us on this point.) Bonus bit of poignancy: Jobs died at the height of apple season. There's a lot of apple eating going on. Every crunchy bite is, by a postmodern logic of transubstantiation through branding, a way of remembering Him.

Please note: We're not being sacrilegious or snarky, kids. This post is being typed on a MacBook Pro. This humble blog is full of images snapped on an iPhone 3G that will soon be replaced by an iPhone 4S that Moose has decided to buy as a way of saying, "Apple, we still believe. Also, dammit, we want to have a voice assistant and a video camera in our back pockets at all times."

My typist suspects she might never have become a blogger had Apple products not totally transformed her relationship to technology. The computer was nothing more than a glorified and often baffling typewriter until the day Goose brought a new Mac home from school and gave Moose permission to play with it while she went off to take a shower. Twenty minutes later, Moose had made her first iPhoto slideshow. That was the day she became a Mac person, having experienced for herself what folks meant when they rhapsodized about how intuitive the machines were and how perfect they were for working with images. In less than twenty minutes, she got it and has never looked back.

Our good friend Cathy Davidson offers a marvelous tribute to Jobs that also acknowledges the dark side of the company he built: the shut-down nature of its products, its dependence on sweatshop labor to produce all those shiny, happy toys. It's important to acknowledge that dark side, even as we celebrate the creativity and connectivity Jobs both embodied and enabled. Davidson ends her post with a quotation from Jobs' famous Stanford commencement address. There's a reason the 2005 speech is famous, and we can't think of a better way to conclude these too brief remarks on a guy who transformed the world and left it far too soon:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

You are already naked: Indeed, you are, my pretties, and time is short. Carpe diem -- and, for dog's sake, have an Apple today.

Ten Years and a Day (or Two)

Or, Why We Failed to Blog the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

Like our good friend Keguro, we have been "trying not to write" about what happened in the United States and in our neighborhood ten years ago Sunday. (Go read that post. Keguro is in Kenya right now and reflects eloquently on how location affects memory and on how the events of that day transformed foreignness in the U.S.) Tenured Radical kindly invited us to participate in creating a bloggy archive of 9/11 posts that she set up over at her place, but we failed to produce anything for the actual day.

A major factor in our muteness was simply shortage of time. The Moms were on the road this past weekend at a family wedding and didn't get settled back to home, hearth, and happy dog until late Sunday evening. The 9/11 anniversary was a focus of some conversation during the festivities, part of the way that long lost cousins reestablished bonds and a sense of what time and adulthood had made of folks once known primarily as fellow occupants of the kids' table at holiday gatherings. Still, most of the talk was happy, as suited the occasion: How's that brother of yours? . . . . I'd like you to meet my second husband. . . . . Holy crap, Mom's on the dance floor! . . . . Do come by for breakfast tomorrow before you take off, OK? We'd love to spend some more time with you. Oh, and there was a certain amount of commentary on Moose's weight loss and the girlie-girl ensemble she wore to the wedding. We'll give you just the smallest peek and trust you to imagine the rest:

(Photo Credit and Pedicure: Baby Sister of the Moosians, 9/10/11)

(Yes, we feel a little weird about putting that photo in a post even tangentially related to 9/11, but, well, some of the most serious bloggers we know post regularly about shoez, darn it, so indulge us just this once, will you?)

Another reason for our muteness in regard to the anniversary is that we did a commemoration post in 2008 that recounted the story of 9/11/01 in Roxie's World -- Moose at home, watching the horror unfold on TV, convinced when the Pentagon was hit that World War III had started and was practically in our ridiculously large backyard; Goose on campus, responsible for a work group comprised chiefly of students, ordered by the campus administration not to leave until the students were gone. That story and the feelings it elicits in us have not changed. It remains true that "the unimaginable can happen on an achingly beautiful autumn morning. The world can change in an instant. Individual lives can be lost, shattered, or merely transformed. And all you can say [by way of comfort] is, 'I know.'" What more needs to be said by a humble dog blog typed by a distracted English prof? Nothing, perhaps, but indulge us a little longer.

Moose could not bear to watch the few glimpses of the anniversary coverage she happened to catch on TV over the weekend. It was too much, she said, and it brought up too much sorrow, not only for what was lost on that beautiful morning ten years ago but for all the tragedies and nightmares unleashed in the wake and too often in the name of that morning. The visuals were just too intense. In the car, though, on the way to and from the wedding, the Moms kept the radio tuned to NPR and so heard much of its coverage, made bearable, perhaps, by the soothing voices and the absence of high-definition images of the World Trade Center towers gently -- or so it looks, in slow motion -- sinking to the ground.

And so it was that on their way out of town on Friday afternoon they happened to hear a story about the extraordinary efforts to rebuild and reopen the damaged section of the Pentagon within a year after the attacks. In the middle of the story, which featured Walker Lee Evey, a modest, genial-sounding fellow who managed the reconstruction project, they glanced out the car window and realized they were driving past -- the Pentagon. They marveled at that weird bit of synchronicity and went on their way. On the return trip Sunday evening, they listened to a selection of StoryCorps' 9/11 tributes and recollections. The stories are captivating, of course, recording with gut-wrenching specificity the individuality of lives lost and survivors struggling to carry on. They listened intently to one particularly powerful account by Beverly Eckert, whose husband Sean Rooney spoke to her for more than 30 minutes from the 105th floor of the World Trade Center until the collapse of the building cut off the call and his life. As Eckert's narrative ended, the dulcet-voiced reporter picked up the story -- with the tragic update that Eckert, who became a prominent advocate for those affected by the attacks, was killed in a plane crash in 2009 while flying to an event to honor her late husband. Both Moms gasped as they took in that painful detail, and as they struggled to absorb it the car rounded a curve -- and there again, across several ribbons of highway and in the soft light of a sweet late-summer evening, was the Pentagon.

The Pentagon is about ten miles from the global headquarters of RW Enterprises, LLC. Going south from Roxie's World, it's the first clear sign that a trip is underway, as the federal city and its monuments fade from view. Coming north, it means, Hooray, we're nearly home! One part of our household's 9/11 narrative that didn't make it into the 2008 post is that, on the weekend after the attacks, the Moms felt moved to get in the car and drive down to see the damaged building. It felt necessary and appropriate to do so. They are hardly fans of the military-industrial complex, though Moose has always admitted that in the aftermath of the attacks she took comfort in the sounds of fighter jets constantly passing over the house. In any case, they needed to see for themselves the appalling gash in the massive building, smell the smoke from the barely extinguished fires. They were hardly alone in that impulse. The highway was packed with vehicles that slowed to a crawl as they approached the Pentagon.

Others have written about experiencing 9/11 at some distance from the attacked places. (See, for example, Historiann's comment on TR's post.) The Pentagon is different from the World Trade Center in being geographically separate from its surroundings and in being not a relatively open center of commerce but a closed space designed to be hard to access and even, in some ways, to see. These are points made in a thoughtful piece by Marc Fisher in WaPo a couple of weeks ago on why and how it is that public memory of the 9/11 attacks focuses almost exclusively on New York, with only nominal attention paid to the Pentagon (or Shanksville, PA, for that matter).

"[T]he story of 9/11 has become overwhelmingly a New York story," Fisher notes. He goes on to explore this imbalance by acknowledging the many factors that have given rise to it, including the scale of the losses at the different locations, the lack of video of the plane hitting the Pentagon, the building's architecture and its physical remoteness from its surroundings, and a military culture that favors secrecy and efficiency over openness and prolonged public debate over how to honor the victims of the attacks. Fisher writes without rancor about the skewing of public memory toward New York, refusing to enter into an unseemly game of comparative suffering, but his point should raise concern for those who are interested in having as full and accurate a record as possible of the attacks and their impacts.

The military may not be comfortable having such a devastating assault on the symbolic and actual center of American power be a part of public memory, but the rest of us should insist upon it. The Moms have lived in the Washington area for a quarter century now. Nothing in all those years compares to those terrible hours of uncertainty when the Pentagon was burning and rumors swirled of bombs on the grounds of the Capitol. If history "requires the assembling and collation of memory," then Washington stories, too, must be brought into the account. The Pentagon was on fire. My friend could see the flames from her office window. Goose went to Taco Bell on her way home from campus late in the afternoon because neither of us had eaten. I stayed in my bathrobe and watched TV for 16 hours. In the family calendar she faithfully maintains for the household, Goose wrote on September 11, 2001, simply: "The saddest day." That weekend, we drove down to Arlington and went slowly by the Pentagon. We rolled down the windows and could smell the smoke. I don't remember what we said or if we said anything at all. That was a sad day, too.

(Photo Credit: Bob Houlihan, US Navy, via)

64 Flamingos and an Imaginary Dog

A Meditation on Two Earthquakes

Many readers no doubt felt the shifting of the earth beneath Roxie's World that occurred the other day. The animals at the National Zoo in Washington certainly felt it. The Zoo's Center for Animal Care Sciences released a fascinatingly detailed report on changes in animal behavior that staffers noted just before and during the 5.8 magnitude quake that shook the region on Tuesday afternoon: apes abandoning their food and climbing to the tops of tree-like structures, vocalizing in ways that indicated irritation; snakes (normally inactive during the day) writhing; a pride of lions standing still and facing a building; 64 flamingos rushing around just before the quake and grouping themselves together, staying huddled until the trembling stopped. 64 flamingos: I love that odd bit of numerical precision, don't you? Do flamingos always hang out in square numbers? (Flamingo photo via.)

Wa Po's Joel Achenbach has a good followup on the Zoo's report that explores the question of what it is that animals seem to know in advance of events such as earthquakes and how they know it. Shorter version: Scientists aren't sure, but possible explanations include an ability to hear, feel, or smell things humans can't detect or, more simply, that animals are paying closer attention to the natural world than humans are. Lacking smartphones and large-screen TVs, perhaps apes and flamingos have more room in their smaller brains to notice that the planet is gearing up to rearrange itself. Just a thought.

We don't have especially gripping tales to tell of the Day the Earth Moved, alas. Ms. Ruby, the new embodied dog of Roxie's World, was home alone at the time, so the Moms can't say whether she exhibited signs of preternatural knowledge of what was about to happen or put up a blood-curdling howl when the house began to pitch. (The house doesn't seem to have pitched much. Aside from a few crooked pictures [see photo at left] and a couple of crawl-space doors popped open, there's little evidence of seismic activity or stress.) Moose was in the car when the quake occurred and felt nothing, though she "heard" it by way of "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," which she was listening to on her way to the office. Goose was having lunch at a restaurant on the campus of QTU, which was thoroughly shaken by the quake. (The university's main library, McKeldin, remains closed today, while structural engineers check for damage and workers re-shelve more than 13,000 books that fell to the floor during the episode. Check out these photos of the mess -- and then go find a librarian to hug, OK?)

Funny thing, though, and this will take us to the imaginary dog referred to in the title to this post: Both moms, in the excitement of the day's events and independently of one another, thought back to an itty-bitty earthquake that rattled the Washington area not too long ago. They both remembered it, though they were fuzzy on when it happened. "Summer," Moose said with confidence, "but I'm not sure if it was 2009 or 2008. I'll have to check the blog. We posted on it." They both told a similar story about how I, then embodied, awoke them by starting to bark moments before the rumbling of the quake began. They told this story, independently and with absolute certainty, before they had seen any of the reports about animals at the Zoo seeming agitated in advance of Tuesday's temblor. I am charmed by this tale, flattering as it is to my animal wisdom and the vital work I performed as guardian of two sweet but largely clueless humans for darn near sixteen years.

The only problem with this happy story, as you might have guessed by now, is that it isn't true. The itty-bitty pre-dawn quake the Moms so vividly recall occurred not in 2009 or 2008 but on July 16, 2010 -- seven months after I had moved on to what we might, for lack of a better term, call Heaven. When Moose finally tracked down our post on the earlier quake, she was astonished to realize how utterly mistaken she and Goose had been in their recollection of the event and by how sincerely they believed something that was demonstrably untrue. Moose had told the story a couple of times that afternoon: "Sure, I remember that other quake. It was summer. Roxie was still with us, and she started to bark just before we felt the tremors." Late Tuesday evening, Goose spoke to her brother, a criminal defense attorney, and they had a good laugh about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. "People don't necessarily mean to lie," they agreed. "They often just misjudge or misremember what they saw."

That's true, but Moose is still marveling over the imaginary dog that somehow found its way into her and Goose's memories of the Little Quake of 2010 that came before the Not So Little Quake of 2011. Yes, memory is fallible, but our mistakes may be significant. What psychic need was fulfilled by this particular lapse? she wonders. Last summer, we were still grieving the loss of our much loved and fiercely protective companion. Did we insert her into that memory because at the time she was, psychically, still very much with us? Or is this an instance of the present reshaping the past? We have a new dog now who in many ways strongly resembles the old dog. Did Ruby's presence fill in the blanks created by Roxie's absence from the original earthquake? Was our memory lapse really a case of mistaken identity, as in all those times, in the early months of her being with us, when we would slip and say Roxie instead of Ruby? Is the imaginary dog an instance of seeing Ruby where we once would have seen Roxie?

Grief is funny, sometimes. Sometimes literally. Two weeks ago at the beach, members of the extended pack slipped a few times and said Roxie instead of Ruby. "Roxie is dead," Moose declared when one such slip occurred. "That's Ruby." She said it sardonically but with a twinkle in her eye that let kiwiboy know it was OK to giggle. It was her way of saying, Yes, she is really gone, and that breaks our hearts, but we carry on as best we can and find ways to love and reasons to laugh again. This is one of the two lessons Moose sees it as her duty to teach little children. The other is that grownups get to cuss whenever they want to but kids can't. Hey, Miss Jean Brodie she ain't, but you have to admit that resilience and pragmatism are useful life skills.

So, darlings, consider this an invitation to tell us your quake tales or your stories of real or imagined shaggy dogs. Where were you when the earth moved? We're dying to know.

RIP Clarence Clemons

(Photo Credit: Scott Audette, Reuters [via])

Clarence Clemons, aka "the Big Man," incomparable saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, has died from complications of a stroke he suffered last weekend. Here's how the news was announced in Jersey. And New York. And here's a statement Springsteen put up on his website:

Clarence lived a wonderful life. He carried within him a love of people that made them love him. He created a wondrous and extended family. He loved the saxophone, loved our fans and gave everything he had every night he stepped on stage. His loss is immeasurable and we are honored and thankful to have known him and had the opportunity to stand beside him for nearly forty years. He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music. His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band.

The E Street Band was, is, and ever shall be the official house band of Roxie's World. We are devastated. That is all. Except, of course, for this (a sublime Clemons sax solo starts at 4:20):



Peace out, darlings. And play on.

The Truth Is in the Typo

Brought to you by the American-made blog that once declared, "Close Reading: It's Patriotic."

Look closely, please, at this image of the second paragraph of Dan Balz's story in the print copy of today's WaPo that was tossed on the lawn of Roxie's World this morning:

(Photo Credit: Moose, 5/2/11)

The front-page story, headlined "A moment of national unity at a time of deep divisions," ran underneath a photograph of what the caption termed "revelers" who "descended[ed] upon the White House on Sunday night upon hearing of Osama bin Laden's death" (at the hands of U.S. forces in Pakistan). In the online version of the story in "Today's Paper," the United States is described as "a country still scarred by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," not as a country still scared by those attacks, as we see in the above.

My typist had two reactions to this typo as she made her way through the dead-tree edition of the paper and her first cup of coffee this morning. The first was to go all Scathing Online Schoolmarm on the poor Post for the appalling state of its "editing" in the age of No Copy Editor Left in the Joint. She similarly snorted a couple of days ago while skimming one of the eleventy billion stories on the Royal Wedding when she read that William and Katherine will henceforth be known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge "at the bequest of Queen Elizabeth II," which, since Her Majesty does not appear to be dead, must be a clever portmanteau formed from request and behest, don't you think? Good grief, Moose howled, Doesn't anybody actually read this stuff before it goes into print? (Incredibly, two days later, the latter error persists in the online version of the wedding story.)

Moose's second reaction to the description of the country as "still scared" by the 9/11 attacks was to think that Balz had accidentally gotten it right the first time and to feel disappointed that the error was corrected in subsequent editions. I mean, really, the proof that we are still a nation half-crazed with fear is all around us. It's the odor you smell, along with stinky feet, in every airport. It's the nagging doubt you feel every time someone intones the phrase, cooked up in the immediate, panic-stricken aftermath of 9/11, homeland security. It's the desperate bravado you glimpsed on the faces of the young people who raced to the White House and other public places to puff out their chests and chant, "USA! USA!" late on a Sunday evening. To many, that was a no doubt discomfiting spectacle, a jarring complement to the president's somber, measured announcement of bin Laden's death, which even the non-Obamaniacs of Roxie's World admired for its lack of triumphalism or any sense of vengeance at long last attained.

You can hardly blame the kids, though, for going a little Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead upon hearing the news. For most of their lives, Osama bin Laden has been the bogeyman stalking the corridors -- and skies -- of the nation's fevered, fear-addled mind. Whereabouts unknown but capabilities all too well understood, he might have been anywhere, planning to strike again at any moment. And so he was in effect everywhere, controlling, if not our every move, then certainly some of the more regrettable ones -- in Iraq, in Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, in Florida -- over the past decade. You can't blame the kids for wanting to dance upon the grave of the man who brought such fear into their young lives. No. You have to blame the grownups who stoked those fears and used them in pursuit of their own selfish ends.

The tricky thing about a bogeyman, though, is that killing him won't eliminate the fears he set into motion. You don't stand a prayer of overcoming your fears until you admit you have them. And that, my frightened little chickadees, is why you must acknowledge that the truth is in the typo. Put down your flag, take a deep breath, and say it with me:

We live in a country still scared by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And the death of one man, no matter how evil, won't do anything to change that.

Feel better? I sure as hell do. Thank you, and goodnight.

End of Spring Break Link & Photo Farm

Or, Notes on Stuff We'd Be Blogging About If We Had Time to Blog, Which We Don't Because My Typist Actually Took Something of a Break This Week and Now Has to Spend the Day Doing Everything She Was Pretending She'd Get Done Over "Break"

(Photo Credit: Moose, with Hipstamatic, 3/26/11. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.)

Big Love: Series Finale. It's been a week since (spoiler alert!) the queerest show on television ended its five-year run on HBO not with a whimper but a bang that liberated the three sister-wives of Bill Henrickson to fulfill the dreams of non-Mormon Sapphists from sea to shining sea. You know the burly girls of Roxie's World were pleased with the show's Thelma & Louise & Nicki denouement. Beyond that, we have little to say, except that we will miss a show that stayed so true to its characters and was so deeply intelligent about complex intimacies and, you know, one of the wackier religions ever to have gotten hatched on American soil. There's a lot of great stuff out there on the winding down of the show. Take a listen to Terry Gross's conversation with Big Love's creators, Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer, or check out Allyssa Lee's interview with them in the LA Times. It's kind of cute to see the show's two (gay, male, married [to each other]) chief architects seeming wounded and perplexed that the audience pretty much wanted Bill to die to get him out of the wives' way, while they saw his death as a way to preserve his vision without having to figure out how he would support his large family once he had lost Home Plus. Vision, schmision, the audience seemed to say. Kill Bill, and the sister-wives will figure it all out. Which the final scene, eleven months after Bill's death, makes clear is exactly what happened. You go, Barb, priest-holder you. Whatever the heck a priest-holder is. Margene Without Borders, we heart you. And Nicki, we're pleased to see you found the milk of human kindness we always hoped was flowing somewhere beneath your sociopathic surface.

Anyway, for commentary on Big Love's big ending, click over to Undine, Troy Williams, and, again, Allyssa Lee.

College Basketball: Oh, kids, we have nothing to say but "Go, Butler" (in the non-ladies' tournament) and "Please, Stanford?" (in the women's). We were looking forward to having a big blog trash talk smackdown with UConn-loving Tenured Radical, but our beloved Lady Terps got spanked bad Tuesday night by Georgetown, thus denying the little Turtles their chance to go up against the big bad Huskies in the Sweet 16. See ya next year, TR, when Maya Moore will have finally graduated and gone on to a better place (the WNBA? ESPN? grad school?) and our tender Turtles will, we hope, have toughened up a bit on the defensive end of the court. Also, good thoughts go out to Terps forward Diandra Tchatchouang, who tore her ACL in the Georgetown game. The official French speaker of Roxie's World offers a hearty bon rétablissement to Diandra, who hails from La Courneuve, France, as she recovers from her injury.

Death: Death had another big week in the world. What with new revolutions and civil wars breaking out on a daily basis and the toll from Japan's triple-dip disaster still rising, one feels sheepish even mentioning that the nation's supply of Feisty Old Broads took a couple of significant hits this week with the deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Geraldine Ferraro, but, well, that's the way it is. We raise paws in honor of these gutsy women, pioneers in their different ways and worlds, and thank them for their courage and tenacity. Gina Barreca's got a nice feminist tribute to Taylor up on the Chronicle (H/T Goose) focused on her early, unsung role as Helen Burns in the 1943 version of Jane Eyre. Moose and Goose fondly recall going door-to-door for the Mondale-Ferraro campaign in a small, conservative town on the Jersey Shore back in '84. It was the first but by no means the last time they passionately committed themselves to a losing cause. Twenty-seven years later, they have no regrets.

Who's Reading Your E-Mail? Moose was experiencing fear and loathing of her in-box long before she read the story of University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon being harassed by the state's Republican party, which is using open records laws to gain access to his e-mails since Cronon started writing blog posts and a New York Times op-ed piece focused on the GOP's recent activities in the Badger state. Now, her fear has turned to panic, as she worries that she could get canned for using state resources to mock her state's governor as a fauxgressive pretty boy. Or for her stubborn refusal to use her several different e-mail accounts to separate her professional life from her personal life, her political life, her blog life, and her online shopping life. Historiann has proposed that academics at public universities forward all of their e-mails to Governor Scott Walker and other Republicans in the state. Tenured Radical has a great post up that includes Walker's e-mail address (govgeneral@wisconsin.gov) and lots of terrifying reminders about how e-mail is never private and nothing can ever really be deleted and your university computer can be searched anytime. Moose read that post and has been sitting quietly in a chair ever since. Just staring. And deleting lots and lots of e-mails. See previous paragraph about her fondness for lost causes.

So, kids, how are your brackets holding up? And how did you waste your spring break? Here's another pretty glimpse of how time slipped away in Roxie's World. Peace out, lovelies.

(Photo Credit: JK, Sister of the Goosians, 3/25/11. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC.)

The Art of Losing

One year ago today, something of great value was lost in Roxie's World. I refer, of course, to myself -- or the embodied version of myself, which slipped free of earth and pain and the encircling arms of my heartbroken humans shortly after 7 PM on the penultimate day of 2009. (Read all about it here, but have a hankie or three handy. My typist still can't get through that post without weeping.)

(Photo Credit: Moose, 12/20/09)

"The art of losing isn't hard to master," Elizabeth Bishop insists, repeatedly but not convincingly in her lovely poem "One Art." The poem begins with the trivial losses of objects such as keys and urges readers to "Lose something every day" in order to learn the lesson that "loss is no disaster." It gradually opens out to include objects of great sentimental value -- "my mother's watch" -- and cherished dreams or plans -- "where it was you meant to travel." It ends with the most devastating loss of all, that of a beloved "you," whose voice and gestures are recalled in a poignant parenthetical remark that exposes the speaker's bravado for what it is: an effort to contain and deny the disastrous consequences of loss upon the self. Poetry itself is caught up in the futile endeavor, as the poem ends by asserting yet again that "the art of losing's not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster." That parenthetical "Write it!" is the giveaway, the proof that Bishop's speaker is seeking but not finding the consolation of form, even in the tightly crafted villanelle structure of the poem. Write it! as if that will make it so, but it does not, cannot. The loss does not merely look "like . . . like" disaster. (The poet's tool of analogy is so inadequate here that the word "like" must be repeated.) Loss is a disaster, dammit. Writ[ing] it doesn't change or mitigate that fact.

And yet, sweet humans, you court disaster daily, persisting as you do in attaching yourselves to creatures who will, even if they don't betray or abandon you, eventually be lost to time, slip out of your grasp to a place beyond touch or tummy rub. Loss will master you, and all the art in the world won't protect you from the pain.

Perhaps the wiser course of action is to stop trying to protect yourself from the pain. Stop trying to pretend it isn't a disaster. Call a spade a spade. Accept the fact that the only way to get through it is to go through it. Moose stumbled across a bit of Intertoob wisdom on this very subject this morning, by way of a Facebook friend. It comes from a place called DailyOM, which sounds pretty hippie-dippy, maybe even a little reverb10-y, but its emphasis on the need to "sit with our sadness" really resonated with Moose, because she has found herself so resistant to the compulsory happiness of the holiday season this year --- for some reasons that have been discussed in this space and others that haven't. Believe it or not, we don't tell you everything, darlings. Deal with it.

The point of "sitting with our sadness," according to the (unnamed) poster at DailyOM, is that in doing so we open ourselves up to "deep learning." (Don't roll your eyes. You know that's true.) The post continues:

Sitting with our sadness takes the courage to believe that we can bear the pain and the faith that we will come out the other side. With courage, we can allow ourselves to cycle through the grieving process with full inner permission to experience it. This is a powerful teaching that sadness has to offer us the ability to surrender and the acceptance of change go hand in hand. 

And it concludes with this nifty bonus pearl of wisdom:

Another teaching of sadness is compassion for others who are in pain, because it is only in feeling our own pain that we can really understand and allow for someone else's. Sadness is something we all go through, and we all learn from it and are deepened by its presence in our lives. While our own individual experiences of sadness carry with them unique lessons, the implications of what we learn are universal. The wisdom we gain from going through the process of feeling loss, heartbreak, or deep disappointment gives us access to the heart of humanity.

Yeah, we distrust universals, too, but it's hard to deny that our own losses make us more compassionate toward others reckoning with sadness or sorrow. If we wall ourselves off from the pain of our losses, we reduce our capacities for empathy and connection. Loss is part of what makes us human. To deny loss is to deny the love that made the loss possible and meaningful. Trust me, darlings, you do not want to do that.

"Well now everything dies baby that's a fact," declares Mr. Bruce Springsteen in a little song called "Atlantic City." The next line offers the hope that fuels Springsteen's and this humble blog's stubborn romanticism: "But maybe everything that dies someday comes back."

Maybe everything that dies someday comes back: The proof is right in front of you, isn't it, my pretties? I am here for you, as I said I always would be. Meet me tonight and every night -- in the undying space of Roxie's World. Peace out.

Not Catching the Reverb

Are you curious to know why Roxie's World is not participating in #reverb10, the super-groovy end-of-year online initiative to get folks to reflect on what's happened in the current year and "send out reverberations for the year ahead"? I mean, gosh, we love nothing better than a bit of navel-gazing, especially when it's combined with the blogging equivalent of a group hug. Plus, you know, we've been known to go a little yogic on y'all from time to time, and some of our bestest blog buds have hopped on board the reverb train. (Love you, girls. Mean it. You are doing some great work in connection with this project, and we look forward to reading every single word.)

Here's the thing, kids. We thought about giving #reverb10 a shot, because we get all goose-bumpy over any opportunity to make our blogging part of a communal, collective adventure. I mean, hell, we're a dog blog, dudes -- We wanna be part of a pack! Shoot, we were even willing to consider committing to posting every fricking day for a month -- on prompts designed by total strangers who seem to have consumed quite a bit more herbal tea than we have! -- in an effort to be a part of this endeavor.

And then my typist sat down and looked at the prompts and realized we couldn't attend this party, because if we did we'd end up misbehaving. We'd either be the wiseacre standing in the corner, dumping a poisonous barrel of snarkitude into a babbling brook of earnestness and sincerity, or we'd be the Debbie Downer, killing everybody's buzz by yammering on relentlessly "about a new disease, a car accident or killer bees." Don't believe a dead dog? Well, take a look at the notes my typist made on the first few prompts:

December 1 -- One Word: Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. That's easy: D E A T H.  Because that's what happened every time we turned around this year in Roxie's World. We started the year grieving the end of the embodied life of the beloved critter who inspired this quirky little corner of the blogosphere. Halfway through, we mourned the loss of the equally beloved Mother of the Goosians. And we haven't even bothered to acknowledge in this space the recent death of a dear friend whom many of you may know as the director of the best film the Star Wars franchise, The Empire Strikes Back. We're big into Bonus Moms around here, but we only had one Bonus Dad, and that was Kersh. He's gone. That sucks. Our hope is that the grim reaper will leave us the hell alone in 2011. Enough already, 'k?

December 2 -- Writing. What do you do each day that doesn't contribute to your writing -- and can you eliminate it? Apparently, you're not supposed to count blogging as part of writing, so it would appear that pretty much every thing I do every waking hour of nearly every day of my life does not contribute to my writing. Which is, in its way, like, really impressive!

December 3 -- Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors). Piece of cake: That would be the moment when I felt myself falling forward on a set of concrete stairs, knowing that when I landed something was going to break. That moment is vividly described here.

December 4 -- Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year? By being continually overwhelmed and befuddled, leading me to wonder things like, Who the frack is going to die next? Will Obama and the Dems ever manage to get anything right? Why do I not feel grateful that I broke my left wrist rather than my right one?

December 5 -- Let Go.  What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? A whole lot of dead people and critters, dammit, because that's what the universe seems to have decided I will do.

December 6 -- Make.  What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? A delicious Thanksgiving dinner that was kinda sorta very nearly interrupted by -- Oh, never mind. See prompt for December 1. Yes, the pies helped.

See what I mean, kids? I really don't think you want the surly girls of Roxie's World messing with the happy vibe of #reverb10. Don't worry. They'll recover their equanimity soon. We've ordered a fresh supply of half-full glasses to arrive in time to ring in the New Year. In the meantime, click on over to our forward-looking pals Clio Bluestocking and Dr. Crazy and see what they are planning to (wo)manifest in 2011. You go, girls, while we curl up here by the fire, cover our heads with our paws, and quietly hope we'll get through next year with fewer casualties.

Peace out, darlings, and for dog's sake, stay alive!

In Sorrow and Solidarity

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind. -- Henry James (1902)

(The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River. Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi leaped off the bridge to his death on Sept. 22, after his roommate showed video of him being intimate with another man on the Internet. Photo Credit: Richard Perry, New York Times)

A candlelight vigil will not change the world. A video will not bring down the socio-cultural machinery that encourages violence toward individuals and groups seen as threateningly non-conforming in relation to sex and gender norms. A "Safe Space" sticker on a resident assistant's door won't stop a drunk kid with a baseball bat determined to find a fag to bash in a dorm hallway on a Saturday night -- or a sober kid with a camera, a gay roommate, and the ability to stream live video.

We know that none of these gestures is sufficient to end the violence aimed at sex and gender queers of all ages. Nor do they offer much to the targets of such violence beyond the perhaps hollow comfort of knowing that not everyone wishes them dead. And the dead, of course, are beyond even that hollow comfort.

Nonetheless, we see more in these gestures than salvific wishes and sentimental longings for some easy, individualized way to achieve a feeling of having done something in response to verbal and physical assaults on LGBT persons. Insufficient as they may be, such gestures are nonetheless important, because they demonstrate our determination to be kind rather than unkind. That determination is not nothing, and it is not merely sentimental. Henry James was no fool. He knew that kindness made life bearable and its absence made life unbearable. He knew that if we forget kindness we have forgotten how to be in relationship with others, for kindness is above all being considerate of others. Kindness comes from having the capacity to imagine how one's words or deeds will affect another -- precisely the capacity Tyler Clementi's tormentors seem to have lacked.

Technology hasn't made humans less kind than they were in some non-existent machine-free past. It has only amplified the sound and accelerated the speed at which our unkindnesses circulate. We shouldn't disparage any act of kindness or any effort to foster greater kindness in the world. Instead, we should commit ourselves to creating a world in which kindness travels as quickly and gets as much attention as its opposite. Yes, it's corny and naive to promise that "It gets better," but it's better to be naive than silent  or cynical when kids are killing themselves. (Here's an even better response, though, from another video in the "It Gets Better" campaign, from a young dyke of color who critiques the false assurance of the campaign's slogan while insisting that the victims of bullying will get stronger, more able to love themselves and more equipped to deal with what the world dishes out. Go watch it. H/T)

If we could, we would stand in the rain this evening, on the campus of our alma mater, with students, faculty, and friends, to honor the memory of Tyler Clementi and to protest the brutal unkindness that appears to have led him to take his life. You deserved better, Tyler, as did all the other young queers bullied to death in recent weeks. We stand for all of you, against hatred, fear, and thoughtless violence that calls itself pranksterism. We can't guarantee it will get better, but we promise we will work like hell to try to make it so. Peace out.

Update (early Monday a.m.): Here are some local links on the Sunday night vigil at Rutgers: 1) The report in the Star-Ledger, which says there were close to 1000 people in attendance, and 2) a photo and commentary from our friend Kate, a member of the Rutgers faculty. Send more links if you have them, and we will update as necessary.

The Deer Who Came for Brunch

. . . and helped herself to a prodigious amount of hosta salad before Moose noticed she was out there and ran out into the yard in her nightgown shrieking, "Go away! Get out of my hosta!":

The deer was unperturbed by Moose's histrionics and went out to a remote, shady part of the yard for a postprandial nap, rousing herself only when Moose came back out to capture the moment on her iPhone.

Interestingly, as that last paragraph was being typed, Moose looked out and saw that the pretty yet unwelcome guest had returned for another go at the all-you-can-eat hosta bar. She has now officially become that crazy neighbor who shakes her fist and yells in order to protect the sanctity of her home. I will let you know if copies of American Rifleman start showing up on the doorstep.

Note to the Moms: You know, it's really OK with me if you start looking around for a new dog. Srsly, guys, it's been almost six months since I kicked the bucket. I'm doing fine up here in what we might for lack of a better word call heaven, but it's clear that things have gone straight to hell security-wise out in my ridiculously large backyard. Do it for the hostas and, you know, for what's left of your dignity. Just sayin'.

The moms have been inordinately preoccupied recently with matters domestic. In the last few weeks, they have been dealing with, let's see, well . . .

• an upstairs shower that started leaking water through a light fixture in the kitchen;
• an $800 car repair that required several follow-up conversations with our entirely trustworthy mechanic when Moose realized that the exact same repair had been done less than two years ago;
• a consultation with Raymond, our eccentric yet masterful furniture guy, about how to repair the antique table that UPS smashed to smithereens when shipping it up from Texas;
• appointments first with a trapping service and then with an exterminator to investigate the source of the scary tippy-tappy, scritchy-scratchy noises in the eaves of the moms' bedroom (upshot: bees, now deceased, but Brandon the Mighty but Kinda Dumb Trapper messed up the ceiling [in a futile effort to find nonexistent mice], which will have to be repaired by Orlando, the paint and drywall guy; see next bullet);
• waiting on Orlando, whom we adore and have known for years, to come fix the damage done by the winter's ice dams, which is actually going to involve a fairly significant amount of painting and a little dry wall repair;
• hanging out in the meantime with our beloved Joe, awesome carpenter and all-around fix-it guy, who figured out what caused the leak in the shower and the squeak in the dishwasher door and came up with a fix for a threshold in the basement that kept tripping Moose every time she came out of her study;
• getting Cromcast to figure out what was going on with the suddenly glitchy Interweb connection, which was making my typist want to throw her laptop across the room rather than type for me or work on the Most Overdue Project in the History of American Publishing, which she is, actually, occasionally doing these days.

Wow. That's a long list!

Note to Dr. Crazy, who just bought her first house: I swear to dog, home ownership usually isn't this much of a pain in the a$$ or a drain on the wallet. Do not read this post and get scared. The moral of this tale of temporary woe is that everything can be fixed. It's just a matter of knowing who to call. As time goes on you, too, will develop a long list of reliable guys and gals to call in the event of emergencies or problems beyond your range of expertise. As for the money, well, some things (e.g., the ice dams) are covered by insurance, and some you just have to close your eyes and say, "I will get it all back at tax time, I will get it all back at tax time." Your home is an investment. Keep it in good shape in order to protect or enhance its value. Take it from a couple of fiscally conservative old broads who screwed up the nerve to cash out a decade's worth of equity and re-build the whole damn joint back in '03. You'll be glad you did.

While we are on the subject of housekeeping, Moose has racked up a long list of open tabs in her browser. We'll pass them along to you for your summer weekend reading pleasure:

• The backstory on Charlie Riedel, the photographer who took those amazing photos of birds mired in the oil on the Louisiana coast that everyone, including us, has been talking about;
• Melissa McEwan's eloquent and deeply perceptive take on the separation of Al and Tipper Gore, which we also weighed in on earlier this week;
• Think outside the burqa! Here's a Time report on British research suggesting that Internet use makes people happier -- yes, HAPPIER! -- especially women and people in the developing world;
• On the other hand, here's a WaPo story that raises questions about whether the millions of dollars schools are sinking into high-tech gadgetry actually improves student learning;
• For Marylanders following the rematch between former Gov. Bob Ehrlich and current Gov. Martin "You, Sir, Are No Jack Kennedy" O'Malley, here's a WaPo piece that fact-checks the claims each candidate is making about the other's record on taxing and spending;
• In the mood for a good cry? Eager to relive your own dead-pet experience? Well, then click on over to The Best-Ever Dog (H/T Kelly), for a well-written and heart-rending reflection on "how we repay unconditional love."
  

That's it, kids. A happy Friday to you and yours. Here's hoping the deer and the antelope are staying on the right side of your high fences.