What a strange feeling; March is almost over. You know that movie, "The Bucket List"? I'm not sure that I have a large list of things I want to do before I die, but I feel the need, as I get older, to simply live as honestly and deeply as possible.
This morning, I made blueberry pancakes with turkey sausage and orange juice, the girls underfoot, pointing their inquisitive snouts toward the source of the delightful smell. It's a dark and rainy Sunday and there were deer out in the woods, sniffing around in the fallen leaves.
Deer have this unearthly beauty, this wildness about them. They come and go almost silently, they lift their heads with fluid grace and watch with dark, unfathomably eyes. We see them sometimes leaping across the golf course in packs, turning suddenly to this side or the other.
Yesterday Keith and I went to a platoon picnic. I was completely dreading this. We arrived around three to a small, charming house in a little neighborhood off of the highway. It was a sunny, bright day with a cool wind blowing. The hostess was busy chopping tomatoes and so laughingly offered me her left hand to shake.
I liked her immediately, like, in that very moment. I recognized a kindred soul, a completely sincere and eccentric soul who had come to terms with herself a long time ago with good humor, though there remained a slight edge of defensiveness, just enough to highlight how much her forthright grace had cost her.
I sat at her kitchen table drinking ice water and laughing, just laughing, at her stories. I couldn't tell how old she was, she seemed my age, but she had an equally delightful teenage daughter. Both of them were very talented story tellers and with perfectly timed gestures and inflection, their tales came alive. I wonder if they know how good they are.
My nerd flag flew high and joyful. There was no effort to the conversation. I have never met such friendly, open people.
We stayed for hours, I met all the guys. They all shook my hand and called me by my married name; they called Keith "sergeant," which jolted me a little each time to hear it. Whenever I called him Sweetie, there would be this little pause, as everyone waited to see if Keith would bristle manful at this. He doesn't. He called me Kitten and would come creeping up to me with a little grin, to grab me by my waist and get kisses.
The guys got exuberantly drunk and played corn hole. A few got brave and had shy conversations with me. One was undergoing reconstructive ear surgery from an IED explosion; he was cheerful and wry.
I hope and hope and hope that my hostess will become a friend. We'll see. Maybe it was just a fluke, how we clicked. I still remember thinking I had clicked with Keith's staff sergeant's wife in CO and later knowing that she had talked me down to Keith later on. That kind of burned me; I don't trust my friend making instincts quite so much anymore.
My sewing has ground to a stop. I reached the zipper, tried it, botched it, undid it and left it. But I'll be damned if I give up now. Once I put the zipper in, I'll have completed all the steps. The dress bodice is inside out, all the seams have been ripped out and redone at least once, strings dangle here and there, the gathers are a little off and it's three sizes too small.
But, I will have made a dress. And as soon as I do, I'm going out, buying a new pattern of the exact same dress, cut that one out to fit a size ten and starting all over again. That one I'm determined to be able to wear.
All that stands between me and victory is a zipper. Not for long, my friends, not for long.
On Saturday, Sarah Palin spoke to a gathering of ten thousand people in Nevada. Ten thousand people. On the campaign trail, Obama drew 11,000 in Las Vegas in '08.
I read an article about a pro choice woman who was mourning the fact that health care passed at the expense of the pro choice rights. I read the comments; every single comment but one was pro life. I was stunned. Three or four of the women who commented said that they had been very liberal and pro choice until they had their own children, specifically until they had seen their babies through the three dimensional ultrasound pictures or heard their baby's heart beat.
There continues this controversy over "hate speech," stirred up by Democrats. It's so frustrating. Public conservatives have been the object of hate speech by the Left for as long as they've been speaking publicly. It crosses the political spectrum, it's nothing new.
And this business of people at the Tea Party rally using the N-word when the Democrats walked through them to vote on health care...I have seen the videos, more than one, of that walk. If people called that word several times as was reported, why wasn't it captured on the videos?
Because if it had been captured, we would have seen it on the news thousands of times by now, as Andrew Breitbart pointed out in his article. He's offering ten thousand dollars of his own money for any evidence that anyone in that protest actually hurled that word at the politicians.
The opposition to the health care bill is not rooted in hate or racism. Democrats want to portray it as such because it discredits the Tea Party movement and by extenstion, any American who expresses criticism of their policies. I'm sure that there are racists and violent extremists in this country, of course there are. But to say that those aspects define the Tea Party movement is, first of all, inaccurate and secondly, cowardly. Why not debate their politics instead of impugning their character?
I venture to suggest it is because the Democrats know their policies are largely indefensible.
Their strategy appears to be two pronged, smear the opposition and church up their health care fiasco. We are shortly going to be subject to some of the mostly heavily funded, feel good propaganda ever as the Democrats attempt to sell their faulty health care bill.
Despite all the money that will be poured into advertising, selling the bill going to be is hard, as the bill is already costing American companies money and didn't actually drop pre-existing conditions for children as they had said it would, which now they are scrambling to fix. Apparently they hadn't actually read the bill. Go figure.
In light of this, it must look so much easier to portray Americans who oppose this bill as hate filled racists ready at the drop of the hate to explode. It's a sad, new low for our politicians in Washington.
