My Favorite Thanksgiving 2003

My Favorite Thanksgiving 2003

Alex and I went to Richmond that year to celebrate Thanksgiving with Julian in his awesomely shabby chic Monument Avenue balcony apartment. Having given up cooking I decided to take them out for a lovely buffet at a lovely restaurant. There was no plan here but rather we were just going to go out and ride around and find one and be happy with it. Time passed. Nothing open. Not one. Up an down Broad Street and thereabouts until finally it was decided that the only sensible thing to do was to go to Krispy Kreme because it was open and the neon sign was telling us hot doughnuts were up and ready.

So we went through the drive-through and ordered two dozen doughnuts and went back to the apartment and that was our Thanksgiving dinner. Best time ever – we spent the time with each other, enjoying one another’s company, which is what it is supposed to be about anyway.

After the sugar-induced coma wore off sometime late afternoon, one of Julian’s friends, Annie, came up and I decided to do a little experiment. The reason for the experiment was that “The Da Vinci Code” was lying on the sofa and hot to be read and I wanted some quiet. So I gave each of them $100 dollars to go to Wal-Mart (this was during Mr. Greenspan’s “Irrational Exuberance” period, so I irrationally did this.) There were no strings attached, just go to Wal-Mart and spend the money. Well, actually I did suggest that there could be some thoughts about doing something nice for a child who would not have a good Christmas without their benevolence.

Several hours passed and I was speed-reading Da Vinci with a vengeance. Then they returned. What an interesting choice of spending patterns they displayed.

End of Part One

One Blonde

One blonde... wow

Stand and Deliver: Tom Perriello comes to Martinsville... Again!

Pictures show Mr. Perriello's aides, Nicholas and Ebony

As promised, our 5th District Representative in Congress, Rep. Tom Perriello, was in Martinsville early Monday morning to meet with my business partner, Doris Berry, and me, along with many others to discuss whatever concerns we may have about anything.

Even though the announcement was buried on page 5(C) of the local newspaper we already knew that he was coming so we were there. When we arrived at 8 am, he was already there , early in fact (!) and met all of us in 10 minute increments so that we could discuss what was on our minds.

Currently we are trying to juggle selling real estate with trying to save people's homes and we hope to be able to contribute what we can in both those efforts. So far we have met with considerable resistance from lenders we have spoken with on behalf of beleaguered homeowners. The technique seems to be a rope-a-dope routine: put us on hold, make us talk with this person and then that one, promise to call us back (then they don't), and ultimately their remedy is to give the homeowner paperwork that would make the most pedantic of us shrink into a fetal position were we not just damned determined to follow the Rube Goldbergesque gauntlet of forms to the end and to get answers.

We will persevere. Our citizens are a tough group of people. Some of them may be barely literate but they are survivors and they are not stupid. While others enjoyed the fake economy of the past few years citizens here soldiered on, pretty much forgotten except for the occasional embarrasing headlines concerning, among other things: the highest unemployment in Virginia (currently 18.5%; the Henry County Sheriff and several deputies disgraced and imprisoned for various crimes; the MZM mess that tainted Virgil Goode; the Henry County Administrator embezzling over $800,000 from the taxpayers... I could go on, but I expect most readers already know all of these debacles.

People here don't even seem to react anymore to bad news and it was no shock or at least shouldn't have been to people outside our area that the economy unraveled with such rapidity. We have been there. We were the first to experience the amazing joy of free trade - our industries, primarily textiles and later furniture, were bought out in many cases, downsized and then shut down while greedy free traders without any social conscience freely chased cheap labor all over the globe, leaving in their wake workers who had no work and no prospects for finding any.

Previously the paternalistic, generational promise for nearly a hundred years had been that education was not all that important when you could get a job, buy a Trans Am, buy a single-wide, get drunk and perhaps beat up various family members, maybe do drugs, get absolution on Sunday, rinse and repeat. Once that lifestyle was gone we were given various forms of hope, but hope tastes bitter when you live on it for over twenty years without respite, as many have found when we were forgotten except during election time.

Elections are over now, except in Minnesota, so the task of repairing our economy has begun, but this time is different because we here are not alone-it now involves the entire world. Ebony and Nicholas, pictured above, were two of the people we met yesterday-gracious, kind, and caring. They took their notes on Blackberries and notepads and remained respectful and kept time so that all could be heard.

Meeting Mr. Perriello was like having someone take a psychic reading - I nearly felt he peeked into my soul and I didn't feel like I was speaking with a politician and nor did he seem anything other than completely engaged in his constituents' stories. Either he is the best politician I have ever met or he is the genuine article. His background of service more than suggests the latter and I expect he will deliver on his promise to help.

It will take all of us, however, to help him to help us. No one can do all of this alone and we are going to figure this puzzle out one person, one family at a time. And we will keep on doing this. It is what we do.

Let's get cracking... together... again.

 

Cat Hair

Aleister. The source of joy and pain. And cat hair. Piles of it...tumbleweeds of gray kitty hair here, there and everywhere. It may not be such a good thing to live alone with three cats as they do not give a fluff whether or not their hair is all over the place. We are, of course, only here to serve their needs and I willingly signed on for the job. I did not imagine, since I already had two kitties, Blanche and Miss Kitty, and they only produced small quantities of ladylike hair, that Aleister was the culprit, the main offender. But this boy! Ooh-I can brush him every hour and still come up with prodigious amounts of hair. Sometime in mid-March it began to look like my entire house had a gray cast to it-upon closer inspection I realized it was just Aleister's fur everywhere. Rather depressing. Then last week I was in the basement (I feel certain most of you will have signed out of here by now) when I had an Oprah moment. There, next to the washing machine, was the Libman sponge/scrub mop-an answered prayer! I nearly leaped upstairs to try it out. Sure enough, one damp sponge stroke followed by a gentle scrape of the bristle brush and I could find my dhurrie rug again. There it was-yay! For those who aren't clued into this, it is genius! Or alternatively you already know this and I am brain dead. So a couple of hours later it was nearly done, which means that by Christmas the entire house will be clean. By the way, if you want to remove cat hair from upholstered furniture, put on a latex glove, dampen it, sweep in long strokes and soon you, too, will be horrified to see what you have been sitting on. I don't know a thing about dog hair anymore but my guess is it works for that too. It is still boring though...can't help you with that one!

Titanic-sized Greed + Bad Judgment = Countrywide?

Ok, just read this little gem courtesy of Eric Lipton at the New York Times:

Ex-Leaders of Countrywide Profit From Bad Loans

I posted a comment after reading this article this morning and the last time I looked there were over 400 comments and counting. Do you remember in "The Titanic" that the architect of the finest passenger ship of its time took a cowardly leap into one of the last lifeboats? Sound familiar? I just cannot believe this one. I would say "enjoy" but that is impossible. The lunatics are once again in charge of the asylum and all of us are "guests."

FIVE

I was terrified of my oldest sister. She taught me to swim way before age 5, because by then I was swimming laps doing a beautiful American crawl and had nearly perfected a dive from the low board. One day Betty said it was time for the high dive. I was not ready but she was and sometimes I later wondered if she wanted to kill me. At the time all I could do was obey. This was the same sister who made me watch televised baseball games that I hated, mostly because she made me stand at attention, hand over heart, during the National Anthem. In our den. Not at a live game in a stadium but in our den. It struck me as odd that I had to do this while she was languidly parked on the sofa smoking a cigarette but I was too frightened of her to balk. Her every wish my command, I just did whatever I was told.

Back to the HIGH diving board. Probably twelve steps to the top and then a dramatic walk to the end. That was all it needed to be, but halfway up the climb there was my first stomach grabbing sense of mortality and I silently balked by pausing. She, reading me correctly, said absolutely not, no way to come down so just DO IT! Time slowed down at this point as I knew that I was surely going to die that day, whatever that meant, and there was not even time for a "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayer. I tried to remember all that she had told me about diving and then properly approached the end of the board. Both feet together, bounce up and away and down. Down indeed, after completing one of the most glorious it-started-as-a-swan-dive-then-turned-pancake-belly-flops of all time. I hit the water with the force of smacking into a brick wall, stunned into paralysis, and began to float to the bottom. There was no "WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" moment here but rather a completely third person observer status of the situation. Going down, lots of water, looking at thrashing, plaid-clad half-torsos in the shallow end, wondering if anyone would notice. Then I saw the drain below me growing larger and realized I was nearly at the bottom. There was not a whit of fear-it was just so interesting that I was drowning and that it didn't seem to be such a bad thing. Surrounded by the so-blue, warm and heavily chlorinated June water, and the reflections from people, clothing, lounge chairs-all mixed in the water to wash over me with prisms to die for. Literally. I was really good at holding my breath but it did seem like a long time was passing and I supposed I would fade to black and that was just fine with me.

On the way out of this world, all of a sudden there was a huge amount of turmoil in the water and I felt myself being scooped up by a being that seemed like a dolphin and then up, up to the surface. From death to chaos again, there I was, spread out on a towel, in my brand new yellow bathing suit (one-piece of course), being gawked at and inspected by all, much like one might look at meat or fish before deeming it worthy of purchase. Smiles passed all around after a bit-cheers; she'll live. I wish I could tell you I had one of those amazing tales to tell of my life flashing before me. There wasn't even one. After all, at five years old what could have flashed? Toddling in the front yard, my older sister pinching me just for the hell of it? Throwing food under the table for the dogs and getting caught? Making my grandmother cry because I told her she should not take me out in a boat when she couldn't swim? None of that showed up in the pool; it was all just beautiful serenity and rainbow ribbons of water. And then I lived to dive another day.

Photo Courtesy of Julian Mei

I'll Never Get That Time Back

I don't have the patience I used to about some things, especially when people who are employed to be helpful treat others like garbage. So I felt like having a flamed Apple.