Sunday, May 20, 2007

It was small town, gossipy, like a fish bowl.
It was slow paced, friendly, and loving.
It was not much to do, creative, hot in the summer, tule fog in the winter.
There was hope for the future.

It was football on Friday nights, baseball in the spring, first love, first kiss.
It was friends, family, and homemade ice cream.
It was sanity and groundedness, and insanity and drunkenness.
There was love and forgiveness.

It was Grandma Esta, aunts and uncles, and great stories.
It was the smell of new mowed alfalfa on a summer night.
It was the first day of kindergarten and graduation from high school.
There was change and growth.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

A Fictitious Story--Many people felt that it was strange that she spent so much time sitting in a tree but Mary loved being a bird watcher. She could name 15 different varieties of wrens and when she turned 22 she became a forest ranger in Yosemite National Park. It was a quiet yet stimulating existence because she loved bird watching so much and spent her time off watching them. When she retired in 1992 she became the President of the Lodi Audubon Society and once went on the Tonight Show and Johnny Carson had her do bird calls for five minutes. Ed McMahon was so excited that he had a two year affair with her and they would have secret rendezvous’ at the Waunakee Lodge in Yosemite and she would do bird calls while they were having sex. She had an unfortunate accident in 2001 when she fell out of a tree when she thought she spotted a red breasted finch. It turned out to be a pigeon. After that Ed McMahon had little to do with her. Was she that professional if she couldn’t tell a pigeon from a red breasted finch? She felt cheated by life and she died a bitter, broken woman in 2004…

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

One of the only movies I remember seeing when I was growing up was “Moby Dick” which was a story about a guy obsessed to kill a whale or that’s what I remember. My dad took me and he kept going out to the theatre lobby to smoke cigarettes. You could do that in those days and it seemed that my dad was as obsessed with smoking as the guy in the movie was to get the whale. “Moby Dick” always seemed like a funny name for a movie. I know because every time my 5th grade teacher mentioned “Moby Dick” everyone in the class would laugh…