I don’t know why I’m so jealous of the fact that she can pull this cute hairstyle off, but I am. I won’t cut her out of the will, though. You know, if I had a will. The only thing I could leave her is my hair products.

Dear Leta Mallory,

I am absolutely going to inflict some flattery on a popular writer by this entry and I won’t feel one bit ashamed of it unless that author finds this and demands that I remove it. I’m lucky enough that you’re now old enough to drink so if that happens let’s tie one on and forget this whole thing. Today you turn two hundred sixty-four months old. You are one old broad, kiddo. Lest you make the mistake to call me old I shall use my standby retort, “You’re only 15 years younger than I. Do you really want to go there?” In actuality, I love and adore and cherish you so much because you are ALWAYS willing to go there and be comical and entertaining when I challenge you. That right there is DARN GOOD PARENTING on my part and if my arms were longer I would pat my own back or box with God. I should give credit to your dad, the one you grew up with and who raised you to be spectacular in every sense. I’m so glad you grew up to be a Daddy’s Girl, too, even if life didn’t start out that way for you. Correction: you grew up to be a GOOFY Daddy’s Girl.

Unfortunately, I can’t really claim that you’ve grown UP because you are the shortest person in our entire family dating back about 683 years. It’s quite strange, but we don’t tire of teasing you about it. It’s not something I don’t think about a lot until you can’t reach the large mixing bowl on top of the cabinets or turn on one of the ceiling fans at which point every available family member is invited into the room to watch you jump up and bounce around. We’re not deliberately cruel. We just don’t have much money for expensive hobbies and this one provides endless entertainment.

We should have known that you were starting to feel short when you always took pictures standing behind your youngest brother. After much consideration, we realized that you were simply trying to choke him. He is, after all, your brother and the baby boy of the family. I do ask, though, that you not kill him before he reaches the age to watch a rated R movie on his own at the theater.

You no longer wet your pants or argue about sucking helium from balloons or create booger museums on your bedroom wall and I take pride in that. You’re headed toward gum disease and cholesterol watching. I’m certain that lighting your birthday candles won’t be that traumatic, but hey! Only 8 short years until you’re 30! Have you thought about that? Has that crossed your mind? If not, then you’re quite welcome for that little seed I just planted into your cerebral matter. Ginkgo biloba is just around the corner. Hold your head up, child, and respect the morning stretch.

For the last four years you’ve made us proud as you took university seriously. After your first semester when you asked me why college wasn’t like what you’d seen on television and the movies I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. You weren’t learning to tap kegs or finding where the best bongs were. You worked and studied and behaved admirably. But you also made me cry every single time you got back into that car after a weekend home to return to school. Not one time was it easy to see you go.

It’s enjoyable to watch you come full circle after already having been to college with me once before. The first time you weren’t even able to read until you tired of me studying all the time and I hurriedly taught you as you picked it up on your own because of your impatience. One time in particular I recall how we both went to the university library and I sent you off to find children’s books while I attempted to cram economics into my head and I said, “Mallory! Read on your own!” and you sweetly asked me, “But mommy. What sound does the B plus R make?” Exasperated, I yelled, “BR! BBRRRRR! IT MAKES BBBBBBRRRRRR!” No idea where you get your restless agitation from, kiddo. That one’s a mystery. But after you learned to read, there was no way I could plop you in front of the tv so I could get my homework done unless “Eureeka’s Castle” was playing. You swore that the sun rose and set on that show.

My favorite memory of you is when you picked up on my love of music and started learning the lyrics on your own. To hear you sing them as if you had the soul of Aretha Franklin in your little four year old body was hysterical. But when I went through the phase of only listening to Bob Marley you were a hit. Your frequent performances in front of my friends got us invited to a lot of dinners and since we were so broke that was helpful, but please don’t think of it as my pimping you out. I remember one time when we were walking back to our little apartment and you were sitting on my shoulders since I was also carrying my backpack full of books and I could hear your little sing-song voice. “Tree little birds. Each by my doorstep.” It took a few rounds of that for me to figure out you were trying to sing THREE little birds. Then you morphed quickly into “Steer it up. Little daaaaalen. Steer it up.” Again, I realized you were singing Marley’s “Stir It Up” in his Jamaican accent.

But it was listening to you play with your toys in your room as you sang, “Could You Be Loved” that was heartwarming. Life was simple and you were happy and didn’t know how broke we were. A glass of chocolate milk could make your day, a pair of cowgirl boots were your prized possession, and a visit from your friend Pei Pei was all you longed for even if he did call you Mowree and looked through the front door mail slot to see if you were home to play. After a day of riding your tricycle in your boots and drinking chocolate milk on the porch with Pei Pei you got your nightgown on while singing reggae as I sat listening in the other room.

You could be loved, Mallory. You are. Happiest of birthdays.

Love,

Momma

My Sweet Pea, My Precious Precocious Baby Girl, My Offspring That I Spit Out In Her Mother’s Image had her big Senior Project show on Friday. It was a culmination of four years of work. She did tremendous work and most of that evening was spent with me bending over and picking up pieces of my heart that leaked out onto the floor and also holding back some big, juicy tears.

Enough of the sentimentality.

She did everything right. Almost. Her first mistake was inviting her family, The Cuckoos, to her Senior Show. Second, she didn’t feed us and after the hourlong drive to St. Louis to Mallory’s University (doesn’t that sound like a real school? like some prestigous hoity toity Eastern seaboard school?) I told my whole family that we could probably pick something up from the campus cafe. It was supposed to be chips and snacky foods but we happened upon the university President’s Inaugural Ball (or some such event) where we had prime rib, enormous shrimp, and caviar.

There were elegant desserts.

There were desserts made in white chocolate edible cups. Who is the genius who created that?

It was such a coup to be able to get free cuisine and take pictures of it. Ha! Ha! I got F-R-E-E ice cream and you can’t do anything about it but tuition costs hella money and perhaps I could get some free food after four years of that?

There was a bar where my sister asked my son to fetch her a glass of wine.

My elder sister, Erin, told Mason: Put your hands in your pockets, sidle up there, and just say ‘White zin’ and see if they give it to you.

AND THEY DID. I think he’s entirely ready for college now.

(Hi, DCFS! He was joking. He’s 16 and snarky and being silly. No wine touched his lips unless they were from his lush Granny who pinched his cheeks and slopped wet kisses on him.)

Speaking of Granny: she decided that when we told Mallory that we ate glorious food while she waited for us to appear at her show that she’d just go introduce herself to the president of the university and then, of course, take a picture with him. Only my mother. This is a woman who, after the dignified President Party Crashing, could be seen doing shots of Patron with Mallory and her roommates.

Later there was Mallory’s amazing project which was a winery with an art gallery and a beautiful garden and my thought the entire time was HOLY MOLY, MY KID CAN MAKE SOME COOL STUFF.

Naturally, she posed in front of all her design work.

Some of her photography which was placed over the hors d’ oeuvres. Notice, please, that she didn’t develop one picture of her mother. That’s ok. I got free food earlier.

Grandpa is proud of his eldest grandchild. He beams at that kid like little fairies lift her lithe body and carry her from place to place while sparkly dust comes out of her butt.

Me and Daddy. He knows sparkly dust does NOT come out of my butt, but that a breathtaking soulful girlchild came from my loins.

This is a pretty good shot of Mallory ending the night with MERCIFUL HEAVENS. MY FEET. THEY’RE GOING TO CRUMBLE LIKE THE BERLIN WALL. Mostly I like it because it’s in front of the design library where all the textiles are housed and where she spent a great deal of her time.

This shot looks fuzzy and I didn’t realize Mason had stolen my camera from me for a bit. I might have mentioned that there was delightful wine and my camera apparently drank a lot of it because it makes me look all distorted and woolly.

My mother and I share birthdays close together and by some strange fluke it so happens that Easter falls on our birthdays something like every seventeen years or something. Yesterday was her birthday and she turned 60 years young. She wanted to spend the day with all three of her daughters and that’s exactly what she got. All of us girls spent the day doing whatever she wanted which mostly included chilling with a handful of her grandchildren, eating yellow cake (plus several cupcakes since 60 candles wouldn’t fit on one cake) with cream cheese frosting and fresh strawberries, and having the most fabulous pancake breakfast known to man at the Original House of Pancakes in the Hyde Park area of Chicago where I grew up.

This may not come as a surprise, but Obama’s statement about his “typical white person” grandmother didn’t phase me at all. It didn’t offend. Nor did it occur to me to anyone would pick it up and run with it, but rhetoric makes news. I don’t even know if it’s fair to put that same line to Clinton who might utter “typical black person” because as soon as blacks cross the street from the stereotypical white person who may or may not want to mug them…well, I’m sure you can see where this could go. I care not to encourage anyone to see my side because it can turn into such an ugly argument and quite frankly, I’m on my Spring Break and don’t want to think too much.

If being typical means that my mother once died her hair pink to go to Burning Man, pierced her nose, and attends African drumming circles, so be it. If being typical assumes that my white mother has an incredibly beautiful naked woman tattooed on her back and that she takes Italian classes just to learn, fine. If my typical white mother studies Reiki and reads a 400 page book on salt, then typical she is.

Typically, I pretty much adore her and if she’s not offended by being called typical then I’m ok with it, too. But I know she’s not typical, normal, or conventional by any means. None of us are. So since it doesn’t apply to her then she’s not going to let that stop her from seeing the beauty in humanity, typical as it is.

When I was in college I met a lot of new people and connected with some I neither saw nor heard from for some time. Like when Bobby Soccer called me out of the blue and asked, “Are you the Kelly who went out with me in 4th grade?” and I snorted first because of the thought that I had, indeed, considered myself of dating age when I was 10. So, yes, we went out.

Our conversation had a strange tone to it as he had simply found my name in a phone book, but I knew it was him when he confirmed that while I was sitting in some playground equipment that we called The Hamburger (dome-shaped, you climbed up a ladder through the center, apparently passing the lower bun until you sat in the meat part - why are you judging me, I was 10. And dating.) I noticed that Bobby was leaning forward on The Hill where he played, you guessed it, soccer. There was blood coming from his face as his hands were covering it because he apparently took a soccer ball right to the nose and it broke his glasses which cut his face up.

Why am I telling you this? Why am I leaving that preposition at the end of that sentence?

Because I am a rebel, that’s why.

Not entirely, but bear with me.

Once, while vacationing in Washington, DC with my husband and children and in-laws I was walking down a busy street (Pennsylvania Avenue is busy, no?) and squealed with delight as Roger History and I were passing one another. It hadn’t quite been 10 years since high school where we sat in U.S. History (you didn’t suppose I named him that because we took French together, did you? I took Spanish anyway. I was trying to throw you off your game.) and acted like we knew more about American History than our teacher who kept trying to move us apart because we were such disruptions. Roger was quick-witted, punk-attired, and rather fluent in German as we were seniors and he’d been taking it all four years. That moment, when I had two kids in diapers and a precocious 10 year old (who wasn’t dating yet, as far as I know) I turned into a 17-year old again and we hugged and kissed until my family finally asked Who IS this strange man?

During a family vacation in Tennessee one year I never expected to hear the voice of a former student call out my name while we were waiting to ride go-carts, but I did. We were several hundred miles from home and I ran into someone, yet again, that I know. Even my friend Becky teases me about going anywhere with her because once at that enormous Ikea store in suburban Chicago she joked, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you ran into someone in this store that I get lost in every time.” and within 2 minutes I heard my maiden name called from across the pillow bin. I hadn’t seen her in 12 or so years, but there was Basketball Michelle standing there squinting at me still trying to guess if it really was me. (It was.)

This is all to illustrate the number of people I’ve come across so far in my life. One time I calculated that with the average number of students I have in a year and their parents whom I’ve met at Parent-Teacher conferences as well as their step-parents and siblings I know well over 5,000 people in an educational career spanning 14 short years. Currently, I am reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and he makes mention of the types of people who connect others and connect TO others. There is something about relating to people on a daily basis that is necessary for me. When I meet people I never forget a face and I do very well at names. Mostly, however, I will recall incidents of occurrences to help me make those connections.

There was even a blogger meet-up where I only knew one person who connected me to other people and another blogger who came to the Chicago meet-up simply because I was attending and out of that came folks near and dear to my heart.

All that was to say that I like to connect, that’s all. I’m thinking so much more about how we connect with one another daily like the same people I see at the Farmer’s Market or the scruffy guy at the liquor store who knows I never use their bags (long, slim wine bags are not good for anything else and waste paper). It’s amusing to see these people elsewhere and watch their faces betray their brains which are trying to connect, “Where do I know that woman from?” Whether it’s the mani-pedi gal (Mary) or the kickboxing chica (I just call her StrongBad) or the older gentleman at the bookstore (Gordon), I enjoy my connections. They are familial reminders of who we put our energies into on this earth.

Even today, I got an email from a gal I’ll call Tattoo Seeker who wrote that she’d seen my daughter’s tattoo and wondered if I would write some lyrics on paper to send to her so she could get those lines tattooed on her body. See the amazing beauty in being connected? Someone, a person I’ve never met, wants to have MY WRITING ON HER BODY. Surreal. Not the prosaic requests one gets day to day.

In my effort to learn about my own connectedness I wonder, quite often, how people connect to places like this. What brought them here? Where they on a coffee break and walked by a co-worker reading this thing called a ‘blog’ and then happened to continue reading? Did someone send my writing as a link to someone else who gets this via an e-mail service like Feedblitz? Is my mother telling everyone she meets, “My daughter has a blog! Read it!”?

We connect, we link, we network, we build relationships, we support, we get fired up for indignant behavior, we search for a commonality, we seek invitations to be a part of something. This very moment I consider: Who is even still with me after this long posting? I marvel: How did this reader get here? I ponder: How did I?

For My Homo Homies

Sally Kern must have forgotten all the best movie quotes. As a representative out of Oklahoma, she’s clearly never seen An Officer And A Gentleman and heard this line:

The only two things from Oklahoma are steers and queers, and I don’t see no horns on you, boy.

Incontrovertibly, she does not purport to play for the other team, so she must be the devil. She did a nice job proving that. Somebody please check her head for hornlike projections.

I would think with all my connections out there SOMEone could do that for me.