Don’t Forget Virtual Christmas Giving
December 13, 2010 Saturday as was looking for the Christmas lights we adorn the garage door with, I came across a big white bag that had a surprise inside it that made me cry. I don’t remember when I bought this beautiful doll at a yard sale, thinking I’d save it for Anne, thinking it […]
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Rapunsel … you go girl! See TANGLED!
Treat yourself to TANGLED this holiday season. In the theatre, in 3D if you can! It’s 98 minutes of pure scintillating visual fun! Strongest gutsy-est female protagonist I’ve seen in a Disney movie yet! GO! I loved the drama, the music and the most expressive animated animals and ruffians I’ve ever seen. Mr. Right, though […]
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Holidays are Hard for Invisible Grandparents
December 4, 2010 Dear Anne & Carter, no, actually this is for Suzie: Anne’s mother: Holiday seasons are hard on invisible grandparents! Do you realize that? Is there room for me, the biological grandmother of your firstborn, in that mind and memory of yours? Oh how I wish that were the case. I am taking […]
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Let’s hear it for functional families!
Well I didn’t have to cook for three days straight, but I can count on one hand the times I got to sit down and breathe on Thanksgiving Day! The 2.8 year old great grandchild going on six, stole the show, as did his dad’s turkey egg roll appetizers. I feel so lucky merely to […]
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A Trans Siberian Orchestra gift to Myself!
I probably just destroyed a few more cells in my already damaged ear drums from a rock opera/light show like none I’ve ever seen. As a day after Thanksgiving treat for myself, when I heard they’d be in town only one day, I was able to get one ticket to the Trans Siberian Orchestra in […]
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A Thanksgiving Reprieve?
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you chefs out there. As I told you: Halloween is my favorite holiday. Thanksgiving sort-of comes next, because of the spiritual gratitude part of it, but it is so exhausting! Three days of constant food shopping, baking and cooking, and in less than two hours, happy hour included, everyone sits […]
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Pope approves condoms … thru the back door?
November 21, 2010 Did anyone but me see the irony in the front-page AP headline in our local newspaper today? ‘POPE OPENS DOOR ON CONDOMS – He Calls Use by Male Prostitutes a Moral Responsibility.” What door are they alluding to? The back door of course. Well from behind or not, whether done by men […]
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A Christmas Trip to Radio City NYC
Dear Anne & Carter, Ooooh! I just finished reading the Arts & Leisure section of The Sunday New York Times. I always read that first, before that paper’s steaming intelligent analysis of current events. I swear reading it raises my IQ ten points. But somehow ‘the arts’ draw my attention first, before all the depressing […]
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Snow White, me now? Why?
Nothing like friends from out of town coming over to get you to pick up and clean house! Since Larry went back to work, I’ve felt myself slipping back into what they used to call the ‘Cinderella Complex.’ The Disney movies were famous for indoctrinating women into cleaning up after men, in fact in Snow […]
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A Home Ec Major who can’t boil eggs?
One of my best kept secrets is that I was a Home Economics major back when I entered college in 1962. Yup, cookin’ and sewin’ was what most people thought it was back then. Taught in most public schools too. “A good career you can combine with having a family,” my mother said, “and besides […]
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Halloween at the D.C. Rally for Sanity/Fear! With my son!
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, and this one topped them all. My 27 year old son called to say he’d be at a conference at the Pentagon, and my wonderful now working HUSband gave me his United Mileage Plus miles, and whoosh! there I was staying with one of my best friends and […]
...read moreBetter Living? Part 5 Swallowing it Still
October 21, 2010 Better Living? Agreed but Still Skeptical So I googled ‘trileptal & alcohol.’ It took me a while to even find their interaction mentioned on all of the websites that came up. You never know which are written by the pharmaceutical companies themselves, and which are government funded supposedly ‘objective’ sources anyway. The […]
...read moreBetter Living … Part 4 – Agreed but Still Skeptical
October 20, 2010 I’d been on “The Medication” only three weeks at the time of my ‘follow-up’ with the doc-tor. The MD Psychiatrist I let ‘evaluate me.’ The old guy. I told him about my initial reluctance, and he assured me the side effects listed on pharmacy printouts were printed for liability reasons, affected only […]
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Blushing Barefoot Burlesque
What a weekend! First the Beach Boys on Friday night, and then Saturday I won tickets on our favorite radio station K-P-I-G, for a show at The Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz called Smitten. It was billed as Blushing Barefoot Burlesque by twenty lovely ladies from Garberville CA. Couldn’t be bad we told ourselves. The […]
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Me at a Beach Boys Concert? Nah …. Oh no, Ye-ahh!
I woke up with the tune of this Beach Boys song running through my head: “Help me Rhonda, help help me Rhonda Help me Rhonda, help help me Rhonda Help me Rhonda, get her out of my hea-rrt.” Now I probably hadn’t heard a Beach Boy’s song on the radio in years, and I don’t […]
...read moreNewspaper Headline: Eight Year Old Escapes Abduction!
O-mi-god! “That could’ve been Anne” my mind raced as I read the newspaper this morning about a kidnapping incident in the town she lives in. But, I told myself, my beautiful blonde haired blue eyed grandchild would never have let herself be seduced away from a game she was playing with her friends. She would’ve […]
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Pat’s Rising New Career – Stand-up Comedy
I did it! ‘had 200 crones (a.k.a. older women) rolling in the aisles! Without much training or preparation either. ‘cept knew I follies was coming and kept scribbling notes on 3×5 cards all week. ‘Aging Positively – Question Mark’ was my second stab at stand-up, the first being ‘Living Life Lubricated,’ two years ago same […]
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Flooding Back East & A Talk w My Grandkid!
Last week as I sunbathed and swam in the 82-degree sunshine in Albuquerque, New Mexico altitude 6000,’ my i-phone had those tiny pictures of rain in New York on it when I checked the weather. When I came home on the train it was 113 in LA! This isn’t about what we HU-mans have done […]
...read moreBetter Living thru Chemistry? Part Three
September 30, 2010 Long story short, when I picked up THE MEDICATION at Cost-Co and read the insert about possible side effects: dizziness (it was even on that tiny flap they put on the container), fatigue, nausea, constipation, (it was already hard enough for me to ‘eliminate’ most mornings!), depression, suicidal thoughts, mental or mood […]
...read moreBetter Living Through Chemistry? Moi? Part Two
September 14th, 2010 When I arrived at Community Hospital’s Behavioral something-or-other center, and the MD/Psychiatrist came out of his office in a walker to get me, I knew he was old school! (Actually that’s a lie, his walk was quite spry for someone pushing 80). During the intake history about family dysfunction and my overachieving […]
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My Kinda Camping!
I just drove 567 miles from California’s central coast down thru it’s ugly dry belly (Bakersfield) and ended up at Arizona’s edge in Needles as sun was setting casting shadows on the desert mountains and a full moon was rising! Whoopee … a road trip! And am I glad I convinced my traveling companion on […]
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Better Comedy Day
I drove two hours up to San Francisco for this festival billed as “the comedy version of Woodstock! ” Found a parking spot near Sharon Meadow in Golden Gate park as the fog turned to rain then lifted and a crowds of a few hundred, not quite thousands tripping out, sat in the mud and […]
...read morePaper or Cloth? Do we have a choice?
For my mother’s 89th birthday I wrapped up four cloth napkins for my mother, whose green and pink begonias will match her placemats perfectly. I got them at a thrift store hopefully to replace the very thin paper Marcal napkins that I have come to hate. I’ve been on a rant lately nagging her and […]
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Life Flutters By … 90 Memories of Mary
I just put a 36 page birthday card in the mail to my mother who turns 90! on Thursday. My sisters and I sent letters to all her children, grandchildren, and remaining friends. With a little dictation over the phone, scans of pictures of her early years, and a lot of collage & artwork, we […]
...read moreDon’t Focus on the Missing
This morning’s meditation in the Science of Mind Magazine my husband and I start the day with was spot on: “When we focus on what we are missing, we are focusing on lack, loneliness, longing and loss of some kind. The energy of that focus is really poisonous, diminishes our relationships, makes us sad, and […]
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Sick of other Grandparents Bragging? Forgive your Self!
September 9, 2010 – Sick of Other Grandparents Bragging? Forgive Yourself! This time of year around Labor day, as school season begins, when I run into my friends with ‘real’ grandchildren, it seems all they do is brag about how well their grownup children are doing and how smart the grandkids are. They complain about […]
...read moreBetter Living thru Chemistry? Moi?
September 8, 2010 Better Living Through Chemistry? Moi? In July and August I was de-pressed. Really really down. In June quite by accident resulting from bug that flew in my eye, I found out I had a serious case of ‘ago=e-related wet macular degeneration.’ I had a case of irreverseable blindness in my left eye, […]
...read moreWhat if everyone blogged as if their grandkids were reading?
What everyone who blogged did it with the mindset that it would be read by their grandchildren? Would what they say reflect anything different, if they knew it was a legacy they were leaving behind? Would their message have any greater sense of urgency? Would what they report about be any different? Would there be […]
...read moreFear of Blogging
I was so freaked out last week that I sought a new therapist. I told her I wanted a sanity check. After 45 minutes of giving her a laundry list of past issues still needing work after all these years , I found myself mentioning the big one. Funny that often happens in therapy sessions […]
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Mothers Day Twenty-ten
MOTHERS DAY 2010 Mothers Day Twenty-ten Dear Brad: I am in Palm Springs alone. Alone by choice, with my writing and my thoughts on Mother’s Day. And I just “got” that I need to write the most difficult letter I needed to, and it is to you. My firstborn son. Right now Larry is trying […]
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‘Getting OLD’
February 16th Twenty-ten! Dear Anne & Carter: Tonight I’m teaching a class on “Aging Positively” in other words “Getting OLD!” I wonder what “old” means to you? Food in the refrigerator that’s gotten moldy? Bigger kids who are teenagers? People over 30? Or 60? Or as I now see it: over 90!? I used to […]
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Where Is The Love?
Dear _________, I feel so left out! I understand you’re hormonally challenged and you want your space; but I haven’t seen you or _________ for weeks just to visit and connect with, and honestly I wish you were someone else. After buying a fancy car with super life-saving devices so your child would be safe […]
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Control Does Not Equal Love
Dear _________ How dare you, you f______g bitch, keeping my grandkids from me! The ones I practically raised for three years before you snuck back in the door. I once told you I believed any difference we had could be resolved through love and respect. However I didn’t know what a controlling bitch you are! […]
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Get Over It!
Dear _________ We were always so close, had such a nice relationship. I never imagined a riff like this could come between us. Although you have explained your reasons to me why you can’t have us as part of your life, I still don’t get it. At first I respected your wish for ‘space’ believing […]
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Hairs on My Chinny Chin Chin?
March 9, 2010 Dear Anne … Yikes! You really feel old when you look in the mirror and notice those nasty little hairs that pop up unexpectedly on your chinny chin chin’ are white! Egads. I guess I really am 65! All my adult life, perhaps since my mid-twenties, although I was naturally blonde like […]
...read moreThings I Love About Larry
February 14th, 2010 Dear Anne and Carter: In honor of Valentine’s Day I’m going to make a list for you of “Things I Love about Larry.” I’ve learned a lot from my experience with men over the years. I’ve been married to three and lived with two others. I felt I was “in-love” with a […]
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You were married three times Grandma?
January 26th, 2010 Dear Anne and Carter: I can hear you asking me “You were married three times Grandma, why?” “Great question,” I’d reply, “How much time do you have and what would you like to know?” Well, since this is to the seven year old you, and shorter is better, I’ll give you the […]
...read moreSleeping Beauty
January 4th 2010 Dear Anne and Carter: Today I went to a theatrical performance of Sleeping Beauty all by myself. I wanted to be with children and watch how they’d react to seeing real people act out that famous fairy tale. I wanted to feel like a child again myself. I think that is why […]
...read moreWhere The Wild Things Are
January 20, 2010 Dear Anne & Carter, I just saw a movie that I thought it would be fun to take you to, if you were around. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE was a picture book that your father and Uncle Ted and probably every kid on the block had and loved. It was written […]
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Great Grandma Wilkin’s Memories
January 13th 2010 Dear Anne and Carter: I’ve told you about how I’ve always wanted to be a writer, right? Actually my mother, your great grandmother who is still alive at 89 and living in a retirement home in New Jersey, did too. When my sisters and I were in grade school, she was an […]
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