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I’m no longer working a paid job. I had a career that I loved for decades, but that ended in late November.
Related post: Work update 4
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Photography
From Sea to Shining Sea
One thing that makes me feel patriotic is beautiful, sweeping American vistas. I have been known to break out singing “America, the Beautiful” in public. I think it should be our national anthem. The words are better than the “Star Spangled Banner.” And most people can sing it. It’s not as hard.
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountains majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
I’m also a big fan of “This Land is your Land.” I can – and will – join in singing harmony whenever I hear it.
This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me.
Here’s the Woody Guthrie original version from 1940.
Other countries have spectacular scenery too, but ours is so vast and varied—from sea to shining sea.
🎵 🇺🇸 🎶
LAST ONE: the iconic Grand Canyon, Arizona, 2023. Pictures don’t really do it justice. There’s a quiet awe to the place that perhaps this video captures just a tiny bit.
If you made it to the end of this post, THANK YOU for looking at all my pics. I loved taking them.
🇺🇸
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GenX Mom Not Calm
If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?
According to my son the subtitle of this blog—GenX Mom Keeps Calm & Carries On—is not accurate. According to him, I am not calm or “chill.” He says his father’s the calm one.
I started this blog shortly after I turned 50, in the fall of 2015. The name seemed about right at the time. I wrote six posts about regular mom/life stuff in 2015-16. Then all hell broke loose. The pussy-grabbing star of “Celebrity Apprentice” won the presidential election over a highly-qualified former Secretary of State and US Senator, even though she got 2,864,974 more votes than he did. Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in the popular vote by more than the population of the City of Chicago, which has 2.66 million people. I’ve been to Chicago. It’s huge. It’s a huge city. Hillary Clinton beat Trump by more than a Chicago. Think about it.
Clearly I was traumatized by the election of Donald J. Trump and all that followed, including learning that I had Trump supporters among my nearest and dearest.
Blogging suddenly seemed pointless. I didn’t even think about blogging regularly again until Trump was safely out of DC and Biden was sworn in.
That whole time period after the 2020 election, when the networks took forever to declare Biden the winner and Trump kept saying the election was rigged and would not concede, was SO F***ED UP. Those crazy images of “Stop the Steal” rallies in Arizona and endless, needless recounts in Georgia with Trump caught on tape telling officials to “find him 11,780 more votes” like a mafia boss. WTF. We are the United States of America. This doesn’t happen here.
And then…and THEN…two weeks before Biden’s inauguration a fucking RIOT inside the United States Capitol while Congress convened to certify Joe Biden’s electoral win—a perfunctory, procedural, ceremonial event that never caused a stir before in my entire life. And now we’ve got Senators hiding under benches and Vice Presidents being whisked away by the secret service?!?
OK, so clearly I’m not calm anymore. I may never have been. It’s sad that I’ve been like this for so much of my son’s life. He was just 15 when Trump won, and now he’s a senior in college.
I probably won’t change the name of my blog (because I’m not sure how to do it and I’d probably end up deleting the whole thing by accident), but I’ll try to find a more accurate title for my imaginary forthcoming biography. Suggestions welcomed.
Here are a few more pictures of my one and only trip to Chicago. I went with high school friends not long after we reunited for our 20th reunion. We were 40. We liked it!
Protest photos: then & now
Daily writing prompt
If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?
As a proud feminist and longtime supporter of abortion rights, I’m still struggling to understand what the fuck happened in the United States on November 8, 2016. The last seven years have been extremely tough to watch. And there’s no end in sight. Unbelievably, both Trump and Trumpism are alive and well. All three of his Supreme Court appointees are younger than me (actually Brett Kavanaugh and I are the same age). I’ll probably outlive Trump, but not his legacy. In many ways, it’s just really depressing. All these years of protesting and donating and voting, and we’ve gone backwards.
Here are some black and white photos I took at a Pro-Choice Rally in Washington DC in 1989. I used my 35mm Canon camera.
Here are some photos from the Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017—the day after Trump’s inauguration. It was the largest single-day protest in US history.
The Forced Birth Movement is terrifying and misogynist. Abortion is essential healthcare. Healthcare is a human right. Federal law should protect that right.
Swimming with Sharks
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
I can’t think of anything I’m scared to do that I actually want to do. I’m scared to jump out of an airplane, but fortunately, I don’t have a burning desire to go skydiving.
Hmmmm….
I love the ocean and have been snorkeling a few times. I guess scuba diving would be cool, but it also seems scary. What if your air tank fails? What exactly are “the bends” anyway?
I remember I couldn’t get myself back onto the boat fast enough when our guide pointed out a shark on a snorkeling excursion in the Bahamas. (I whacked my leg on the boat’s ladder so hard that I had a huge bruise on my shin for weeks.) I did NOT enjoy seeing a real shark without 4-5 inches of plexiglass between us. I prefer aquarium sharks.
In order for me to go scuba diving, I would need to feel very safe and have a highly qualified instructor. In addition, I would need one of those shark-repelling electronic shields, like Annette Bening had in Nyad. If all that could be arranged, I think scuba diving would be amazing.
Family Road Trip: Colorado edition
Think back on your most memorable road trip.
In summer 2009, we took the kids on a fairly epic road trip in Colorado. They were eight and fourteen at the time and it was their first trip to the Great American West. We covered a lot of ground. After flying to Denver from Boston, we visited friends in Evergreen (who had recently relocated from Massachusetts), then visited Boulder and Rocky Mountain National Park. From there, we went to Red Rock Canyon and Colorado Springs to visit my cousin Andy and his family–some of whom I’d never met. After that, we headed to Creede, an old silver mining town in the San Juan Mountains, to visit my Aunt Mary and her boyfriend Harold, a real Western mountain man if ever there was. Along the way, we visited the Great Sand Dunes National Park and a few other sites, including a giant thermal swimming pool and an alligator farm, before returning to Denver for the flight home.
I remember it as being a really good trip. We saw a lot, including friends and family, and everyone got along well. When you’ve spent your entire life on the East Coast, it’s quite an experience to see those giant open skies and magnificent mountains for the first time. I hope my kids remember the feeling of it. It even smells different out there.
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TO READ list
Daily writing prompt
You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?
I’ve read some nice posts from other bloggers this morning referencing famous writers. Their posts reminded me how Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own once affected me. It encouraged me to move into my own studio apartment, when I was just out of college. Living without roommates was a little scary, but somehow Woolf’s words from 1928 helped give me courage to live all by myself. I need to re-read that. I liked I.V. Greco’s post, which mentions Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a book I’ve been meaning to read since my friend Kathy recommended it while I was in Paris. I was never a Hemingway fan, but I’m going to give his Paris memoir a shot. Also, Rebuilding Rob wrote about Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond in his response to this prompt. Another book I need to read.
Now that I’m unemployed/retired, I need to read more books. Perhaps that will be my New Year’s resolution. In addition to Walden, A Moveable Feast, and A Room of One’s Own, I’ve got a lovely book of poetry waiting for me to pick it up. I can tell by the poems that she’s shared in her blog that Ever So Gently by Lauren Scott will be a treat.
Here are a few photos from my most recent trip to Walden Pond in Concord, MA. It was an unusually warm day in very late October. I wonder if Thoreau ever could’ve imagined his Walden would become such a popular, though still pristine, destination for people from around the world. Less than 20 miles from Boston, Walden is an especially popular spot for city residents who just want to get out in nature for the day. I saw several folks perched in quiet spots along the pond reading books, all by themselves.
Merry Christmas
How are you creative?
I’m up early (7:30am) thinking of all the parents of all the young children around the world who have probably been up for two hours already. Santa came! Woo hoo! Enjoy it…these years are a lot of work, but will fly by in the blink of an eye. (Sorry, I’m sure you’ve heard this once or twice – or like ten thousand times – before.)
I think my main creative outlet these days, besides singing and this blog, is photography. And I don’t even use a real (35mm) camera anymore, just my iPhone. Here’s a shot I got the other night on my way home from choir. I thought this deer was a holiday lawn ornament, then I realized he was real. I backed up my car, opened my window, and said “hey deer.” This made him stop munching the neighbor’s shrub and look up at me.
We’re not having a white Christmas here in New England, but at least we’ve got (rein)deer.
Europe calls me – still
I’ve been lucky to visit and travel in Europe several times since the 1980s (especially Italy), but I’d still like to visit some cities that I’ve never been to including Stockholm, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Lisbon, Dublin, Edinburgh, Vienna, Berlin and Athens.
And I’d like to go back to Europe’s greatest city – Paris. I loved it in the holiday season, but I want to go back in warmer weather. Also, I want to see Notre-Dame when it reopens. Here’s how it looked last week, still under scaffolding. What a massive and complex restoration!
Street scenes
What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?
This is similar to a recent prompt. Of the big three (walking, swimming, biking), walking is the easiest—no helmet or bathing suit required.
It’s really fun to walk around a new city, or a neighborhood you’ve never been to before in your own city. I had no problem closing my Apple Watch rings in Paris. (Yes, more Paris, sorry. I don’t travel that much, so this trip was a big deal.) Here are some street scenes from our walks around Paris.
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