Saturday Afternoon Friday Round-Up

I wrote an essay on the plane that may be the best thing I ever wrote. I love sitting in a window seat with my laptop on the little fold-down table, all tucked in and cozy, looking at the clouds and sky, the little wee houses below, wondering for the hundredth time how the whole country, that isn’t desert or mountains, got divided up into squares and puzzling about the circles and half circles that slice into the squares like messages from aliens.

The anti-women movement in this country is terrifying. It’s tempting to think that what the Georgia Legislature just did is pretty much a joke, it can’t possibly stand. But that would be a mistake. We thought Donald Trump was a joke, well, I did, and then Presto! Change-O! he’s the fucking president running around the country laughing at jokes about shooting asylum seekers. Think about it: a majority of the Georgia Legislature voted to criminalize abortion to the most extreme degree possible short of the death penalty. Women’s rights are human rights, we can’t forget that. And it starts with having power and control over our own damn bodies.

My dog is saving me from madness. We have had Swirl, whom I have dubbed #SledDogintheCity, for just three weeks. He is very big. Sometimes out of the corner of my eye, it looks like a wolf got into our house and then I remember, oh, that’s our dog. I’m walking 4 to 5 miles a day which itself is a big mental health boost. And I’m in love with this dog. He is beautiful, sweet, innocent, and peaceful. He walks away from conflict at the dog park, a lesson for all of us, I’m sure. He does chew on my wood furniture, making him not perfect.

Out of the blue, my 13-year old granddaughter told me that she has been singing. Not performing or recording, just singing, and she told me the two songs she has been singing and her plan to work with a friend to sing one of the songs as a duet and this seemed as sweet and priceless a thing as I have heard for a long time, to just want to sing a duet with your friend.

Older adults need to really step up in the next eighteen months. More volunteering, more showing up at town halls, more carrying signs, more registering people to vote, more knocking on doors, more calling and texting voters, more speaking up, more resistance. Millennials are swell but they have to work two jobs to make a living. GenXers are too busy building powerhouse careers and trying to keep their teenagers on the straight and narrow. It’s on us, Boomers. We have the brains, time, and fearlessness that no other generation has. It’s time for all of us to show up and get it done in 2020. The insanity in the body politic has got to end.