Where Have You Been?!?!

OK, so I’ll be getting like a C+ in blogging, what with the infrequent updates and all. Maybe there’ll be extra points for excessive verbosity.

Maybe not. OK, probably not.

Any hoo, back to the keys.

It’s a couple of days after Labor Day, and the race for the White House (or perhaps we should call it, more aptly, “The Race to Prevent The End of Civilization As We Know It,” or more positively, “The Race to Save the World From a US Fascist Dictator”), is on full bore. Most recently, the “Vice President” laid it out to the American people pretty straight: Vote for Kerry and you’ll probably get blown up by terrorists. That should simplify things for many of my fellow voters. Bush=Life, Kerry=Death. E-Z.

This past August 22, my dear beloved mother passed away, succumbing to the liver disease she had been struggling with for some time. The medicos all say it isn’t painful, but she thought it was – at least that’s what she said, and I for one believed her. I know in her final weeks, when she was not conscious and increasingly unable to ingest any food, she didn’t seem to be all that comfortable. I wonder what those final weeks were like for her. I can only pray that they were sleep-like, full of wonderful thoughts and dreams. And now, I can only pray that she is re-united with her beloved family members who had gone before her – her parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins, aunts – even the unborn child we lost to miscarriage. (I can’t help thinking of my mother united with a spirit in the after-life who will be perpetually a baby – truly, my mother’s idea of heaven. She loved babies.)

Meantime, perhaps provoked by the shock of the loss, but clearly predating it, my impulses to somehow re-invent myself and my life are raging. Let’s move to France. Let’s buy a business. Let’s move to the country. Something. Anything. More than ever, I’m feeling the urge to cut my losses and get a fresh hand from the dealer. Who know where it will lead? Given the realities of family life, the commitments to our community, etc., I suspect it will all lead absolutely nowhere. Maybe end up with a useless overpriced red sports car. Who knows. Or, perhaps we’ll end up in Alaska! Or France!

So, here’s a paragraph for the autobiography:
I was born in 1960, but my earliest memories are about 1964. I can remember receiving at my 4th Birthday party a pair of yellow plastic cups that you turned upside down, each one strung through with a length of plastic tubing to be used as handles, so that you could walk on them and be about three inches higher. Neat.

I can certainly remember my 4-year-old kindergarten teachers, Mrs. Krauss and Mrs. Stone. Krauss was the jovial vaguely German one, Stone a bit more reserved, perhaps even a bit stern. We had great fun, played with big green wooden blocks and did plenty of finger painting. Thus began an academic career that would ultimately lead to a J.D. degree, and include decreasing levels of blocks and finger-painting, to the point where there were virtually no blocks nor finger-painting in law school. (Hard to see why anyone would attend law school given these kinds of deficiencies.)

More early memories later…