Barrack's Bodacious Broads

I don't remember when it started, exactly. Joan and I had been playing Scrabble for awhile, we'd had some e-mail exchanges prompted by some of my journal entries and our growing frustration with George Bush.

One day Nancy suggested we get together for tea or coffee. I think it was just that we were all neighborhood people who never get together and it would be fun to enjoy the sun porch and get caught up.

"Getting caught up" ended up involving a lot of emotional outbursts about things that Bush was doing at the moment and at the end of the morning we'd had such a good time that we decided to do it again.

Nancy is rarely in town, so our get together were few and far between, but over the course of many months we started to call our get togethers our Bush Bashing Breakfasts.

Well, all that ended, of course, in January when the former president slunk out of town, never to be heard from again (oh why couldn't his VP follow suit...?).

We hadn't gotten together since Obama took office, but Nancy was going to be in town and suggested that not only the three of us get together, but that we bring our husbands into it, and we could have a pot luck instead of a daytime coffee.

I had known Joan's husband, Ed, for several years. He's a pilot and teaches flying at the local airport. In the year when I went to the gym faithfully every morning, Ed usually went at the same time and especially whenever Joan was having some sort of health problem we would chat for a bit.

I knew Nancy's husband John was an ophthalmologist, and I had seen him at many events, but I don't know that I had ever actually talked with him before. I don't think Walt had spoken with either of them either.

So Nancy set up a pot luck dinner at her house. And, she said, one of the requirements was that we had to bring three suggestions for what to call our Bush Bashing Breakfast now that GWB was no longer in office (handy that his successor's first name also started with a "B"!)

John cooked some delicious beef, Joan made a fantastic orzo and farfalle salad and delicious cheese-stuffed peppers for hors d'oeuvres, and I made this terrific strawberry dessert.

I was very pleased with how my dessert turned out, after the not-quite-right olive oil cake I had taken to the ACIS dinner last night. This was very simple and very light, just using egg whites, mashed strawberries, lemon juice and sugar, beating the hell out of it until it was very light but thick, then layering it in a bowl with lady fingers and freezing it. It tasted like ice cream, but had no milk in it and, as I said, was very light and refreshing, unlike the olive oil cake which, while it tasted good, was very, very dense.

And we had a delightful time talking about everything from the recent crash of the Air France flight (Ed explained how things work in a cockpit) to the problem with health care in this country (John explained how we got so screwed up and why it's so difficult to fix). We talked about Obama's recent speech to the Muslim world and Cheney's "Honest, I never said that" tour to change history. And we talked about dogs we have all loved and lost. Trips we have taken. Our kids and grandkids.

And we voted on the new name for our group. The three finalists were Bisecting Biden's Buddy, something else and Barrack's Bodacious Babes. We liked the last one, but decided that "Broads" was more "us" than Babes, so our group is now "Barrack's Bodacious Broads." We think it fits perfectly.

It was just a fun, fun evening, the kind we almost never have in this town. I absolutely loved it. Perhaps when we get the urine-soaked carpet out of the living room and things organized, I can start reciprocating a night like this.

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The only down side of the evening came right before we left, when Walt had a call from his sister saying that their mother had another fall and had fractured her clavacle. Apparently when she first wakes up she is disoriented and she had been napping in her recliner and went to get up, not realizing that her walker wasn't where she expected it to be, and down she went. She wasn't wearing her call button, so lay on the floor until someone came to check on her and found her there.

They rushed her to the emergency room, but when Walt talked with his sister, she was back in her apartment and her caregiver was getting ready to take her to dinner. Her arm is in a sling. She has such a hard time getting around under the best of circumstances that I can imagine that not being able to use her walker is going to add just another layer of frustration (and physical hardship) for her.

For now we're just hanging in there and waiting to see what happens next.

A Couple of Backpacks

I have two very nice new back packs, and I probably won't use either of them.

Pat and I drove down to the Bay Area for the second meeting of our trip group. Pat had missed the first meeting because she was out of town, so this was her first encounter with the group. I had been to the first meeting a couple of months ago, so had seen all the group before. We talked about France on that trip and ate French food.

It was our understanding that we would cover Italy in this meeting, so we were kind of confused when we were told to bring something "Franco-American" as our contribution to the dinner.

Last time we had a slide show and a map and an in-depth discussion of all the thing we would do in France and Monaco, so I kind of expected the same sort of presentation this time, but, in fact, the tour organizer didn't seem to have any additional information or adivce about Italy, went over pretty much the same information that she had given us the first time, and spent most of the time telling us about all the thing we could do in Paris on our free time and showing us the things she had bought in the south of France on her recent trip and telling us how to shop for things.

huh?

In other words, I didn't learn anything about the actual trip itinerary that I hadn't known before (except that I now have the names of all the places where we'll be staying, as well as the phone numbers). She seemed a bit less organized this time than she had been last time. (But then she is just a teacher who gets these groups together and accompanies them from the U.S. We meet our official tour guide in Paris.)

She did hand out back packs to everyone, nicely monogrammed with the name of the group (ACIS) and huge yellow baggage tags, so we can easily spot our group's luggage. She didn't know if the ACIS office would have sent that stuff to Jeri (who is flying from Boston and meeting us in Paris), so she gave me a backpack for her, in case they did not. But they had, I learned this morning, so I now have two backpacks, in addition to the bag I bought from Rick Steeves, which is the backpack I will be taking on the trip.

The nice thing, for me, about the trip was that I started to get to know people and I think I can put names to faces yet (though perhaps not from memory--I now have a typed list). Stan and his wife Thea hosted the dinner. They have a lovely home (with a "pig" theme--ceramic, decorative pigs everywhere--very cute), and a very nice old dog, Cider, who is losing his fur and was, we were warned many times "very smelly." Cider and I became such good friends that he wouldn't even leave my side when Thea called him.

I remembered Sherri from the last time. She used to work with Char and has been reading this journal for a long time (hi, Sherri!). I'd link to her journal, but she may not want me to, so I won't. But we've been in communication back and forth since the last meeting and it was fun to see her, and meet her daughter Ashley. who will turn 16 in Nice. I had once mentioned in a journal entry that I liked U-No candy bars and that you couldn't get them any more. She said she knew where you could buy them and would go shopping for me. She made good on her promise (thank you, Sherri!)

I had started following Jennifer on Facebook, when I put in her e-mail address from one of the organizer's e-mails and found her on Facebook. We've exchanged a couple of messages and greeted each other with hugs last night, like we're long lost buddies. (She made the best tiramisu for dessert!) Her sister, who was not at the dinner will be traveling with her on the trip.

And then there were all the others. I talked with several people and watched others from a distance. There is going to be another gathering on the 19th. The tour organizer admitted she would have nothing new to tell us, but that if we wanted to get together to socialize, we could--and I think many of us decided to do that.

I'm starting to get excited. I called Jeri this morning to report on the dinner and bring her up to speed with what I know and compare with what she knows. We both want to tour the Paris opera house, which is about a 10 min. walk from our hotel, I learned (though for me that will probably be 20 minutes!). And Jeri is interested in renting a bike and going biking in Paris. I told her I'd be willing to try it and see if my knee would complain or not. I think that even if I can only last a short time, the idea of having biked in Paris will be very cool indeed.

I also came home and ordered some packing cubes that you can compress so that you can fit more into your bag, also from Rick Steeves, as well as a electric currency converter so I can recharge the camera and iPod (they were on sale for $1, so it didn't seem such an extravagance!)

The trip hasn't really seemed real up to now but with only 15 days left before we leave (on Air France ... ahem), I'm starting to think about getting (somewhat) organized.

I'm also worried (again) about sleeping. If I slept at all last night, I was not aware of it. From the times I saw on the clock at Char's house, I know I was awake during part of every hour from 11 p.m. until I finally got up to read at 4:30. Based on past experience, I am fairly certain this will be par for the course in hotels on the trip.

The Piano

The piano is leaving next weekend. It's a piece of our family history and it's going to be strange to see it go.

I still remember the night we bought it. We had gone to dinner at the home of our friends Andrij and Lilea (either that or we went to a restaurant and went back to their apartment afterwards). I remember they lived near the railroad tracks in Berkeley. They were moving and had to sell their piano and wondred if we wanted to buy it. I think we had bought our house in Oakland by that time. I don't remember having the piano in our rented house. That would mean that I was pregnant with Paul at the time. I remember that we paid $100 for it.

I can still see our kids, very small, pounding on the piano, where it sat in our dining room in the house in Oakland. I remember trying to pick out pieces from books of sheet music, dusting off whatever I remembered of my 2 years of piano lessons.

It's been in our living room here in Davis since 1973. I have many times wanted to chop it up and throw it out because it takes up SO much space in the room and is hardly payed at all any more.

Jeri got lots of use out of it during her 12 years of piano lessons. Walt would occasionally sit down at it and play the finale of Iolanthe (I think that is the only thing I've heard him play on it).

I remember the kids using it for Egg Nog Galas at Christmas time (check the first part of the video).

As the kids got older, the piano solos turned into combos with everyone playing the instruments s/he could play.

I remember Jeri and our guest from England, Fiona, playing duets on it while Fiona was staying with us. In the foreign student years, when our house was usually filled with young people from all over the world invariably somebody would sit down and play...or a couple of people would pound out an energetic "Heart and Soul" duet.

I remember Paul spending hours creating music on the piano. He never took lessons because he wasn't patient enough to learn music, but music was just in him and it eventually had to spill out onto the keyboard of the piano. Nothing complex, but simple tunes that he would play over and over again.

I remember the time my father got his friend, the piano tuner, to come and tune the piano. He had decided to give us the tuning as a gift. What a nightmare! The piano tuner had had a stroke and only had the use of one arm, so my father was going to be his second hand, but my father had very poor fine motor skills, so it was like getting help for watch repair from Oscar the Grouch. The two men were at it all day and so late into the night that I finally went to bed and left them at it. They were gone in the morning (I think I heard later that they left around 3 a.m.). The piano got tuned, but I don't think the two men ever spoke to each other again. The problem was that the piano was so old that every time the guy went to tune a string, it would pop and he'd have to replace it.

I had it tuned again sometime within the last ten years. It was when Steve was coming to Davis to give a concert and was going to be staying with us. I knew I had to have a well tuned piano for him.

I don't think the piano has been touched, much less played, since that time. As you can see from the photo, it is used today more as a place to display photos!

Getting rid of the piano is the first step toward finally tearing up the puppy urine soaked rug and replacing it with Pergo. I can hardly wait. I don't dare invite anybody into the house because it smells so bad, but it's gone way beyond simply shampooing the rug.

The piano is going to a good home. And it's actually staying in the family. Ned's sister-in-law, who has two small children, is taking the piano and I hope that the instrument will give them as much pleasure as it has given us over the years.

Ramon

What's the old saying...? "I don't know art, but I know what I like."

I love going to people's homes and seeing "art" hanging on the walls in tasteful combinations. We don't have "art" here. We have photos of the kids, photos of dogs, old Lawsuit posters, pictures of Judy Garland and a couple of things that could loosely be called "art." I have no walls for "art," no knowledge of what to buy, no sense of home decoration, and no money even if I did.

I was lying on the couch this morning, as I woke up, looking at a somewhat small framed lithograph of Beethoven that hangs over our piano. It was our very first wedding present. Nobody actually gave us a picture of Beethoven, but our first gift was a check and that night we walked past a store that displayed the picture in the window. I told Walt I wanted to buy it as our first wedding gift.

We've added a very few pieces of "art" to the house since then. We have a set of four Vanity Fair prints that I bought during the height of our Gilbert & Sullivan involvement. They are of Gilbert, Sullivan, Richard D'Oyly Carte (their producer) and George Grosmith (the first patterman). Actually I bought 2 or 3 of them and my wonderful friend Alison filled out the set, which was incredibly generous of her. And when Peggy was here she bought me a lovely little Thomas Kincade painting at a Kincade gallery when we were on an island in Puget Sound with our friend Diane (she bought one for Diane too).

Just before we moved here to Davis, Walt and I went to one of those huge art warehouses where you can buy large size mass produced art for your office or house. Not "art" in the Van Gogh / Rembrandt / Picasso kinda way, but "art" in that someone put paint to canvas and painted it, whether any art critic would ever give it high marks or not. The kind of art that that soft-speaking guy used to make in a half an hour on public television back before he died.

At the end of a long aisle of floral arrangements and dogs playing cards and sea scapes I saw the painting at the left. I fell in love with it. I think it cost the whopping sum of $125 (which to us was a whopping amount for something as frivolous as a painting I already knew I had no room for). It is meant for a large room and what you see there is just about the entire width between the fireplace and the wall and 3/4 of the height of the wall. But I was leaving my beloved Bay Area and desperately wanted this. When I miss San Francisco, all I have to do is lie on the couch, put my feet up and look at the painting. I still love it.

And then there's Ramon's Wife and Daughter.

We met "Ramon" at a silent auction that Tiny Tots nursery school was having as a fund raiser. Someone had donated the untitled painting that, as I remember, was mostly a dark background with an Hispanic man painted on it and "Ramon" as the painter's signature.

Char's husband Mike bid on the painting and won it. We had many laughs over "Ramon" over the years (I wonder where it is now....). We made up stories about him and how the painting had come to be painted. We thought of using him as a dart board.

In 1986, my friend Gilbert died and I ended up in possession of the contents of his house. I distributed a lot of his things to his friends, but I ended up bringing home a huge painting that had hung in his living room. It wasn't a particularly good painting and he and I had never discussed it. But he was a man who knew things about art and I always assumed he'd purchased it. We hung it on the landing of our stairs (the only wall big enough to hold it) and, when Char saw it, she decided it was Ramon's wife and daughter. So we've always called it Ramon's wife and daughter.

Some years after Gilbert died I found out --I don't know how-- that the painting had been painted by a mutual Lamplighter friend, who had spent some time in Mexico. She contacted me and told me that she would be happy to take the painting off my hands, but by then I had gotten used to having "Ramon's wife and daughter" hanging around and I told her that I'd like to keep it. I promised to give it to her if I ever wanted to get rid of it.

I have long since lost her contact information (and would have to probe the depths of my memory banks to remember which Lamplighter person it was, actually), but I still have a kind of fondness for Ramon's Wife and Daughter.

So we don't collect high fallutin' "art," but what we have all has special meaning for us ... and that's probably what artists have in mind in the first place.

Cruel Summer

With all the regular season television shows now either in reruns or off until God knows when (24 won't be back until next year, nor will Lost...and who knows about Desperate Housewives?), it's slim pickings for a TV addict at night. It's really pathetic when you find that you're counting the days until the start of I'm a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here and wondering who is going to win Top Groomer on Animal Planet.

(Yes, I'm really THAT pathetic. I planned to watch I'm a Celebrity just to watch the return of American Idol's Sanjaya....

...and I couldn't in my wildest dreams, even in desperation, see myself watching it regularly, but then found (most of) those celebrities so ridiculously annoying that I got hooked, at least for one more episode. What the hell is The Hills anyway and why would anybody watch Heidi and Spencer do anything?)

(Not that I think anybody reading this -- except possibly Ned -- watched this stupid show, but FWIW, I think the two spoiled brats are crazy like foxes and playing this thing to the hilt for ratings)

However, there are some up sides to the dearth of quality prime time television shows...it's time to reacquaint myself with nature.

Quite by accident, I stumbled upon the last two episodes (of five) of Nature's Most Amazing Events on the Discovery Channel last night and sat here mesmerized for two hours. Lemme tell ya -- if you think man has dominion over beasts, or that man is the only "intelligent" being in God's universe, just see if you can find this series being replayed and watch it. If you are not a regular viewer of nature videos, this will make you marvel at all of the beasts around us, from the smallest speck of sea life to the largest mammals.

Anybody watching the video of a mother seal trying to lift her dead baby, holding it in her mouth over and over again and then crying, and then picking it up again and trying again, or watching the reaction of elephants to the death of one of their own will never again say that animals don't feel the same emotions that humans do.

The scenes of the blossoming of the arctic spring are amazing, how everything works together to continue the species. Watching the murs (birds) corral herring into a ball and push them to the top of the water where the gulls can get them, and the gulls and murs keeping the herring into a ball that the whales devour was incredible...and later, watching humpback whales work in groups to form a bubble "net" around herring and then, when the fish were frenzied by the increasingly loud whale sounds and not able to leave the surrounding bubbles, a whole pod of whales leaping up like a bunch of synchronized swimmers to swallow the fish...well, it is just breathtaking.

(This is someone else's video, not from the series)

The photography is incredible...and be sure to stick around for the "how they did it" clips and watch how the shot of the whale eating a ball of herring got on film. Those photographers deserve some sort of medal for hazard pay!

An Apology

I don't intend to turn this journal over to a place to publish other people's stuff, but, as someone who worked for twelve years in a medical office where abortions were performed and as someone who has seen the struggle of some friends over the issue of abortion, I feel strongly about the murder of Dr. Tiller but feel that I can't say it better than former pro-life leader Frank Schaeffer says in this article, talking about how the emotions of the far right are leading to an atmosphere of violence in this country.

No matter what your stance on abortion is, Dr. Tiller was performing a legal medical procedure, and he was gunned down in cold blood while he was worshipping in church. That is so very wrong. If you disapprove of the legal medical procedure, get the law changed, don't murder the doctors who are legally providing the service to women in need.

The following article appeared in the Huffington Post, and I hope that Arianna will forgive me for reprinting it here....

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My late father and I share the blame (with many others) for the murder of Dr. George Tiller the abortion doctor gunned down on Sunday. Until I got out of the religious right (in the mid-1980s) and repented of my former hate-filled rhetoric I was both a leader of the so-called pro-life movement and a part of a Republican Party hate machine masquerading as the moral conscience of America.

In the late 1970s my evangelical pro-life leader father Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop (who soon become Surgeon General in the Reagan administration) went on the road with me taking the documentary antiabortion film series I produced and directed ( Whatever Happened to the Human Race?) to the evangelical public. The series and companion book eventually brought millions of heretofore non-political evangelical Americans into the antiabortion crusade. We personally also got people like Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan and countless Republican leaders involved in the "issue."

In the early 80s my father followed up with a book that sold over a million copies called A Christian Manifesto. In certain passages he advocated force if all other methods for rolling back the abortion ruling of Roe v. Wade failed. He compared America and its legalized abortion to Hitler's Germany and said that whatever tactics would have been morally justified in removing Hitler would be justified in trying to stop abortion. I said the same thing in a book I wrote (A Time For Anger) that right wing evangelicals made into a best seller. For instance Dr. James Dobson (of the Focus On the Family radio show) gave away over 100,000 copies.

Like many writers of moral/political/religious theories my father and I would have been shocked that someone took us at our word, walked into a Lutheran Church and pulled the trigger on an abortionist. But even if the murderer never read Dad's or my words we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen.

In fact that very thing has happened before. In 1994, Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts were shot and killed outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Paul Hill, a former minister, was convicted of the killings and executed in 2003. Paul Hill was an avid follower of my father's.

Hyperbole from the pulpit from religious leaders, be it from my father or from President Obama's former pastor the Rev. Wright, is par for the course. But once in a while someone "does something" about it and then everyone says that they were only speaking metaphorically or "spiritually" when they called for violence or for the overthrow the state or when they said things like "God damn America!" or that "abortionists are murderers like Hitler!"

Angry speech has become the norm in American religion from both the right and the left. Words are spoken which -- when taken seriously -- lead directly to violence by the unhinged and/or the truly committed.

When evangelicals on the right call President Obama a socialist, a racist, anti-American, an abortionist, not a real American, and, echoing the former Vice President, someone who is weakening America's defenses and making us less safe, the logical conclusion is violence. If you take these words literally you might pull the trigger to "make America safe" and/or free us from communism or to even protect us from -- what some "Christian" leaders claim -- Obama as the Antichrist.

Contributing to an extreme and sometimes violent climate has not only been the fault of the antiabortion crusaders. The Roe v. Wade decision went too far, too fast and was too sweeping. I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It's the late term abortions that horrify most people. And for the sake of keeping abortion legal adjustments need to be made. Roe is far too all or nothing (as I explain in my book Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All -- or Almost All -- of It Back). As I say in my book today I believe that abortion should be legal but more regulated than Roe allows. I also think that we should do what President Obama calls for: use sex education and contraceptive distribution and programs to help women and children in a way that results in less abortions.

But the reason this issue will never go away is that the Roe ruling was an over broad court decision that makes abortion legal even in the last weeks of pregnancy. Take away the pictures of all those dead late term fetuses and everything changes emotionally. Democracy and civil debate is messy but if abortion had been argued state-by-state abortion would be legal in almost all our states today and probably the laws would be written more like those of Europe, where late-term abortions (of the kind Dr. Tiller specialized in performing) are illegal and/or highly discouraged.

The same hate machine I was part of is still attacking all abortionists as "murderers." And today once again the "pro-life" leaders are busy ducking their personal responsibility for people acting on their words. The people who stir up the fringe never take responsibility. But I'd like to say on this day after a man was murdered in cold blood for performing abortions that I -- and the people I worked with in the religious right, the Republican Party, the pro-life movement and the Roman Catholic Church, all contributed to this killing by our foolish and incendiary words.

I am very sorry.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. He is author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and also author of the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism)

Wasn't It Yesterday When We Were Young?

Last night we drove to Santa Rosa to help our friends Dick and Gerry celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary. I hadn't seen them in over a year, but Walt had dinner with them twice while he was down taking care of his mother and they talked about the anniversary celebration at that time (Gerry had sent me an e-mail about it earlier).

The original plan was to get together with us and with the woman who had been Gerry's maid-of-honor for her wedding (Walt and I were both in the wedding party). But it ended up just being the four of us for dinner.

We met them at their motel and I asked Gerry where we were going to dinner and she mentioned some restaurant in downtown Santa Rosa. As we started looking for the restaurant, I suddenly realized it was all familiar and as we passed the restaurant, I realized that it was so familiar because I had actually eaten in that restaurant when my friend Mary was here visiting from Wisconsin last year. I know one restaurant in the whole city and that's where we were going. I was actually delighted because I remember that it was a great restaurant.

We started with sparkling rose and gave a toast to the anniversary:

(Funny that it's Dick and Gerry's anniversary and the only person who shows in this picture is Walt!)

We went on to have a fantastic dinner. Dick and Walt each had some seafood stuff, Gerry had duck ravioli

and I had butternut ravioli, which I discovered when I read my previous entry about this place, was exactly what I had ordered the last time too. It didn't disappoint the second time around.

It was a lovely dinner, nicely avoiding all the hot button topics that sometimes get us into trouble.

(What's in her hand is their wedding book...
I had one just like it for our wedding)

Then, because we are all crazy for used book stores, we stopped at one which was just across the street and browsed for awhile.

I picked up a couple of coloring books for Pedro. The information about him says that he is interested in art. You can't send an envelope that is more than 1/4" thick, so I found a coloring book with lots and lots of intricate shapes and can send him several pages at once over the coming months. I also found a coloring book about the history of California that I thought he might like as well.

I also found some Albert Payson Terhune books. I collect them--not passionately, but I loved them as a kid and have several. This was not one that I already had, and I recognized a couple of beloved stories in it, so I bought it too.

We finally ended the night by driving back to the hotel and retrieving our car. It was really a lovely evening. But surely it can't have been 45 years since their wedding! Wasn't it only like...yesterday?