A Million Dollars or Peppers or Moments on the Porch Friday Round-Up

Daily writing prompt

If you had a million dollars to give away, who would you give it to?

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That’s easy. I’d give it to the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) so their lawyers could show up in every instance where somebody has been wrongly detained and unnecessarily roughed up by ICE, and they could push back against the erosion of First (free speech) and Fourteenth (due process) Amendments to the Constitution. Protests and phone calls are important, but money gets the suits in court, the site of our last best hope.

It is a truism and the perfect metaphor for life that if you cut peppers, you will rub your eyes soon thereafter. This will happen even if you haven’t rubbed your eyes for two weeks. It’s a humility check, a reminder that you aren’t that special no matter your press releases to the contrary.

Speaking of peppers, I bought a couple dozen giant peppers at the farmer’s market because they were pretty. Sweet peppers and poblanos, both irresistible, piled in huge mounds in little baskets. Give me the whole basket, I said, and now we are putting peppers in everything, everywhere, all the time. And stuffing them, with other peppers. Life is so circular. On that note, I made a spectacular hash last night with leftover roast beef, onions, garlic, and, yes, a red pepper! I have a meat grinder in my office (really, it’s true) but I didn’t use it, choosing just to carefully chop the roast instead. My mother would have been puzzled by all of this.

The Brewers lost two games to the Cubs in Chicago. Tomorrow, they are back in Milwaukee for Game 5 of their division series. I have come to hate the postseason. It’s like the joy of baseball has been wrung out and now we sit fraught with worry, not wanting to budge from our chairs, while a Brewer pitcher throws Ball 4 and yet another Cubs player saunters off to first base. Whoever wins the most games in the regular season should just get all the special hats and be done with it.

In the morning, after we feed the ravenous dogs, we have coffee on the back porch with our dogs. We pet them and watch the birds. My husband talks to me in his pidgin-sign language because I haven’t yet put on my cochlear implant receivers. A thousand sparrows come by along with a solitary cardinal. By then, Durant has thrown his beloved Alaska bowl over the fence, and it’s already been retrieved. The dogs are sleepy, taking turns under the tree and inside the doghouse. Everything is right with the world for that half hour. And then we go inside and read the news.