Sideways Glances Friday Round-Up

I can only look at the news out of the side of my eye. Looking at it straight on is like staring at the sun during an eclipse. I don’t even have to specify what I can’t bear. It’s basically all of it. And it’s not like I haven’t seen some dreadful things in my 77 years, but these things, these current things with masked men and armored vehicles rolling down residential streets and American landmarks being bulldozed with absolutely no fuss from anyone. La-dee-da. I have to protect my precious, ancient sensibilities. I’ll look at the words, not the pictures.

The British Baking Show got us through the pandemic and now it’s chauffeuring us through the destruction of American democracy. Could I, if I wanted to, build a roller coaster and little people screaming with their arms held over their heads all from meringue? Would Prue think it was tasty? Would Paul, the gorgeous Paul with the amazing blue eyes, give me a handshake? We don’t know. I made meringue about ten years ago for a lemon pie. It was pretty okay.

Some places don’t have trees. I learned that today doing a walk audit of a city neighborhood for a project called Livable Communities, an AARP initiative to work on making cities and towns easier for older adults to live in. Well, here in Milwaukee, in very dense neighborhoods, there’s no space between the sidewalks and the street, no place to plant trees. Those neighborhoods are called heat domes and they’re 20% hotter than neighborhoods with trees. On my side of town, we have trees everywhere. In fact, we had the tree trimmers come today to hack back our giant trees so we could see the sky in our backyard. We are always in the shade. What a luxury.

Tomorrow, I don’t have anything to do except go protest. Since I have now outsourced house cleaning, I can wake up on Saturday morning without a running list of chores. Maybe I’ll make a new sign, maybe not. What’s new is old, isn’t that what they say? The signs I made in March still apply. What a mess.

I decided on the spur of the moment to say I was going to walk a hundred miles in thirty days and it’s Day #2 and this is already kicking my ass. The idea was to generate a little attention for my annual fundraiser for my beloved Street Angels but clearly, even at this early point, it’s clear that my eyes were bigger than my stomach. It sounded like such an easy round number. One step at a time, right? Pray for me.