Breaking Down

A couple of months ago, I departed a Walgreens parking lot that was the anchor of a larger strip mall. As I reversed the car out of the parking lot; I halted suddenly hearing a spate of loud yelling. A woman's yell... more of a frenzied shriek actually. My first thought, was

"Oh my God, I've hit her!"

But as I checked the views (again) in the rearview mirror and the side windows, with a deep sigh of relief that came from the depths of my being, I realized that she was actually about 6 cars away, she had also begun reversing her car, when from around the corner, a Jimmy Johns delivery driver who thinking he had enough time and space to continue the turn without harming her, had driven around the corner. The woman in the car just went beserk, she actually jerked the car out horizontally and deliberately blocked the driver, basically trapping him where he couldn't move his truck at all, and when I say she unloaded on him, she unloaded on him, screaming, cursing and flailing her arms about. The driver repeatedly tried to apologize, tried to explain, but she was having none of it. The thing I remember her saying most often, when she wasn't dropping the f-bomb, is, 'Why, why couldn't you JUST HAVE WAITED'  'COULDN'T YOU JUST HAVE (insert curse with ing) WAITED' 'WHY ARE YOU SO (insert curse with ing) IN A HURRY'.

For me, it was obvious, he was trying to get food out to customers and was racing the clock. And I suspect once the woman simmered down, she would have realized it too. But it also occurred to me that her diatribe wasn't necessarily aimed at THAT delivery driver at THAT particular time, it could have been anyone at any time. He just happened to be there, a convenient scapegoat.  She'd just had enough. A tiny part of me sympathized, countless times I've felt the same way inside, but just never reached the point where my anger overcame my inherent shyness, my extreme dislike of 'scenes', the horror of confrontation.

I've thought of this scene again and again in my mind over the last few months since I witnessed it. For me, it seems to be sort of a visual metaphor for our society of late.

You can say all you want about how tragedies on the order of the Sandy Hook School Shooting, the Colorado Movie Theatre Massacre, etc. have been happening all throughout the whole scope of human history. You can conveniently explain it away, that it's just recently that we've had 24-hour news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, etc., but I'm sensing something deeper, more malevolent lately. Just watching people break down more and more every day.

I didn't say a great deal about the New Town tragedy when it happened because it occurred at the same time as the deaths of my uncle and grandmother. There comes a point when it's just more than the human heart can bear.

The faces of the children... I remember standing in the breakroom at Noncompany watching a few moments of a memorial for the slain schoolchildren. I had taken my customary 5 mins away from my desk to dash in for hot water to prepare my morning chamomile and just happened to be there as it began. With me at that moment was an immigrant woman who takes care of the janitorial needs at the company and while there is enough of a language barrier that mostly I smile at her and nod a lot, and we say "Hi" because she knows that word, there came a moment when I learned more about her character than words can ever say. There as we stood looking up at the TV monitor and I was biting the inside of my lip to keep myself from tearing up, she simply leaned her arms onto the yellow cart she pushes, bowed her head, closed her eyes and I watched her lips moving in words of silent prayer. Perhaps for the children who lost their lives, perhaps for their parents who lost their legacy, their immortality...perhaps for me because I was too full of pride to cry the tears that overflowed inside me.

It happened again yesterday...another senseless tragedy. A road of marathon runners, suddenly strewn with limbs, the stench of blood, the anguished cries of victims, the shriek of ambulances. Another 8 year old boy who was there to watch his father fulfill a dream, cut down before he can play the piano, become a football star, go to his high school prom, fall in love, marry. Gone. Gone at 8.  There were others of course, but it's this young boy that I can't get out of my head.

I am weary of hearing the debates over what constitutes an act of terrorism, is it domestic, is it foreign? How did they do it? Who did it?  Tired of the politics...the speculation, the endless talking...

All I know tonight is that an eight year old and 2 adults died and scores of others were wounded and maimed.

And that our society just broke down a little further.

Siblings

Uncle Bob would have been 73 today.

Funnily enough, I discovered coincidentally today is also National Sibling Day.

My uncle left behind a sister and a brother. I haven't experienced it, but the loss of a sibling must be a different sort of grief. My uncle was not just my uncle, he was someone's brother.

I'm never sure what the design is or why it sometimes happens, but last night, before I discovered that we even had a National Sibling Day, I was thinking of my siblings and feeling the miles that stretch between us both literally and sometimes figuratively.

Thinking in an abstract way of what their loss would mean to me. I don't mean this in a macabre way, but the loss of a close family member sometimes draws everything together in a finite, more urgent sense of meaning. You just begin to think differently.

Last night I sat wordlessly looking at a photo of my sister and her new-born son. The memories crowded in, flashbacks of her. Erin. Fearless, tomboy, scarily coordinated in a way I could never dream of being. Oozing self-confidence and a pragmatism that has never ceased to amaze me. We couldn't be more different. To think of Erin is to see a flash of pink and purple, perpetually in motion, as if life were a race that you feared lagging behind. The scabs on your arms and knees, the broken arm when you were 7, and the gap-toothed urchin grin (before your braces) your ribbons at the finish line. When I think of you, it is us racing to get our roller skates on so we could be sure of being on the floor when 'Mr. Roboto' was played, it is you deliberately licking all of the tomato sauce off your Spaghettio Meatballs so you wouldn't have to share, it's the time when I was tired of your trantrums so I shoved you into an elevator in the County Courthouse downtown and listened to you screaming up 12 floors, it's me driving like a mad woman hell for leather to your bedside when you were in labor with my niece and you telling me before I could say a word, 'don't worry, I've got drugs I can't feel a thing' because you knew I'd be worrying, it's the two of us weeping together at Grandpa's grave, and it's the photo of you and I when we were little where I've got my arm around you protectively because back then you'd let me.

This one's for you Erin...


It's for my brother, David. We've had our differences and while we aren't miles apart literally, figuratively our lives could not be more different. Still, when I think of you, I see a grey Subaru sportscar and I can still smell the mingled odors of cologne, mexican food, and stale cigarette smoke, you in your Chi-Chi's uniform and me in my Chick-Fil-A visor, barrelling down the road to our jobs with the radio all the way up, U2's 'Achtung Baby' vibrating the windows. It's when you lied and told me the Beverly Cleary book I'd unearthed by your bed was a library book and I wasn't allowed to read it. I yelled at you telling you how mean you were, only one week later to find that book wrapped in a package on the dining room table for my birthday. On another birthday, you used your Albertson's courtesy clerk salary to buy me the Julian Lennon cassette that I still have (it's the only one I kept), sitting up late at midnight watching MTV with you when I was supposed to be in bed and you didn't rat me out, the time when I had a panic attack on the way to the airport at nearly 11 p.m. and you left your home and comfortable bed and followed me all the way there and back in your car so I wouldn't be alone.

This one's for you David...


It's for my brother Doug. You were always so much older than me and as such, a mystery. We've been miles apart in geography and years. To think of you, is to think of the Summer of 1982, where you taught me the song 'You get a line and I'll get a pole honey', it's you insisting that hot water made ice cubes freeze faster, watching you in your white jeans and red polo shirt helping kids at the Little 500 Go-Cart Track-your first summer job... you were so cool, unflappable. I used to like to try and see if I could make you mad, because it seemed inconceivable that anybody could be that low-key, that slow to anger. I remember you liked Ataris, soccer and model airplanes. But some of the best memories I have are of you as an adult seeing the way you treat your wife, how in love you still are even after these 20 years, it gives me renewed faith in relationships. To see how you've become such a devout man of God, how strongly you hold your beliefs, but mostly it's your enigmatic character and economy of speech that are the things I think most of when I look back.

This one's for you Doug...


And for Laura. You were kind of a bonus, a treat, because we didn't meet and become sisters until you were 6. To think of you then, is actually to see your daughter now. She's your mini-me.  Like her, you were always so shy and petite. I remember being much amused when we first met because you'd named your gerbil, Jill. Actually, I probably had more fun with you than any of the others because I was so much older (and had a car). My best memories of you are when you made me face my fears of roller coasters at Disney, dared me and we went on all of them but one in a day, eating churros in Epcot with a maraiachi band in the distance that wouldn't go away, you dragging me to all the Pauly Shore movies, us laughing at our rented copy of Dumb and Dumber until we literally fell off the bed! Picking you up from school on every other Friday stopping and ruining our dinner by having a snack at McDonalds on the way home, Saturday nights at Fun World, etc. Mostly though when I see you, the word grace is what immediately comes to mind, it's in everything you do, the way you raise your kids, the kindness that you exhibit to everyone you meet, the effortless way you seem to deflect life's slings and arrows. I'm so glad that God brought you into my life.

This one's for you Laura...

It's sad that so often we wait until funerals to tell people what we think of them, it isn't until death parts us that we realize how dear our brothers and sisters' and our memories of them really are.

So I thought I'd tell you today...that I think of you, that I cherish the memories, how thankful I am that you're part of my life.

Sick...

  Once more, I find myself sitting at this laptop sick... a cold this time. Thankfully, not flu. Just under the weather, drippy nose, sore throat, uproareous sneezing and a general malaise of fatigue and giddiness brought on by a mix of over the counter meds and constant and unrelenting anxiety.

 I've been wondering what I do or don't do that seems to constantly bring on these spates of illness. In the not too distant past, I've spent considerable amounts of cash (to me, I realise considerable is a relative term) on vitamin/mineral supplements of the gummy, one a day, women's health specific and antioxidant variety. A plethora of medicaments promising to eradicate fatigue, boost my immune system, my metabolism, and give me a shiner coat hair and skin. I admit I've been a sucker for every TV shill that promised to somehow change my life the better living through chemistry route.

If I really stopped long enough to think about it, I'd be downright angry at the fact that all these things have really given me, is colorful and expensive urine. But I am far too tired to be angry. I'm just flat tired, worn out with a slipping down kind of life.

Once, many years ago, I think I was about seven or eight or so, I got a rare and lingering cold with a cough that wouldn't go away. I say rare because I can count on the fingers of my left hand how many times I was sick in my childhood.  We just weren't. My parents expressed a broad contempt of the children in our neighbourhood who lived on Dimetapp and made constant visits to the doctor. We seemed to boast in our household how we 'never went to the doctor' as if it were some badge of honor. But that one time, I had a cough serious enough to warrant a rare trip to the doctor. It was exciting. I got a note to be picked up by my mother from school. A normally unthinkable thing..leaving school before the day was over. And it just got better from there, after the visit from the doctor, and a stop at Eckerd Drugs for a glass(!!) bottle of cough syrup that tasted like cherry and a bottle of the Pepto-Bismol pink antibotic that tasted like bubble gum, my mother made a totally out of character decision and instead of going back to school, we stopped off at a Showbiz Pizza (like Chuck E Cheese in the 80's) and I was allowed to have pizza and play some video games in the arcade.

I've always wondered in later years if it wasn't that break from the norm that really caused the cough to subside, more than the antibotics or the cough syrup (although being laced with codeine never hurts!) That maybe I just needed a break, some TLC, some one on one time with a parent having fun.

And now as my 38 year old self, I often wonder if my illnesses aren't my body forcing me to take a break. Maybe it's saying I need to eat pizza and play video games a little more instead of the flat out work that seems to be the tempo of my life.

The problem is that I am always subject to severe guilt about any appearance of 'shirking'. Even now as I sit here in my bed with a bedside table full of the over-the-counter medicaments my parents have such contempt for, I am trying to race the clock, trying to get better quickly because I am feeling such guilt at not being at my desk at Non-Company-I-Work-For-But-Am-Not-Really-One-Of-Them. Not being there for them to yell over to me, 'Schedule a Meeting for us in the Apex Conference Room', worrying about the 80-90+ emails or more that are just mounting up in my inboxes, my monthly reports that are unfinished and on and on it goes.

Non-Company itself is part of the problem. I guess it's having nothing to look forward to, except weeks and weeks of monotonous routine. The same spate of problems, following endless intractible, yet mostly meaningless procedures. The labyrinth of office politics. Never having a day of vacation, a day off, unless I am sick and that is unpaid.

I guess on a day like this, I would give anything for my Mom to show up with a get-out-of-work note and a trip to the arcade for some video games and pizza.

Everyday is a gift...

No, this title is not a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that three of my family members have died in the last 6 months or so. It's not really meant to be as touchy-feely as it sounds, but lately I've found, it is the truest thing I know.

One of my work colleagues is going through cancer, and when I say 'going through cancer', he IS. They've put him under the knife twice, subjected him to countless rounds of chemotherapy, and next week, he's undergoing radiation. The cancer has taken away body weight, his energy and made his voice as raspy as emery boards. What cancer hasn't taken away is his sense of humor, his devotion to Nascar and his unflagging optimism. Everytime I ask him tenatively, "How are you Rick?", without fail he'll say, "Well, I'm still on this side of the dirt!"

A few months earlier, I sat in the auditorium of a local high school attending a benefit for children afflicted by cancer and rare blood diseases. One by one, parents came and described...so matter of factly what they are up against, named diseases I'd never heard of, how many rounds of chemo their child had endured, how many procedures, how many sleepless nights in strange hospital rooms. It's a good thing the auditorium was darkened, there was barely a dry eye in the place. But again, what struck me was, not one of these parents or the children, children with shaved heads and twigs where arms and legs should be, ever lost their optimism. They enthused about the cancer society, they talked about upcoming birthdays, family vacations, detailed plans for 'after cancer' or 'for when they finally beat this cancer'. Not if...when.

A few years before that, I sat weeping on the phone as my mother told me in a bemused voice, that the diagnosis was in, 'it was cancer'. The words floored me with disbelief, 'my mother has cancer' (HAD) I could barely accept hearing it. I watched her go through the chemo, the fatigue, watched as the body weight dropped off to nothing leaving her looking more like a victim of Auschwitz than my mother. But through it all, she never accepted defeat, never gave way to pity, and only rarely did she even miss a day of work. Not if...when. When I beat this cancer.

It got me thinking. Really thinking.

If it isn't cancer, sometimes it's depression, it's fear, it's anxiety, it's living a life that is so centered around yourself that you forget, you forget to be grateful for the true gift that life is. 

I know...I did.

A few years ago, I dropped out of life. To think about where I was a few years ago is to try and remember a stranger. A person cloaked in fear. Like many 30-somethings, and I daresay many Gen X'ers, I experienced panic-attacks. And then one day I found that my entire life was one big panic attack and for some years after that, I literally hid at home and shut out life. There were years that I only went out for basic necessities. The details aren't all that important. You can pick up almost any medical journal, or Google 'agoraphobia' and you will have a portrait of my life and many other sufferers.

I gave into the defeat, into the pity, I wallowed in it until my fingers and toes were pruney. I rejected the gift that I had been given.

And then slowly but miraculously, the fear began to recede. It's a great story how that happened, but I'll leave that for another time, that isn't what this is about. I began to embrace life again, I went outside, I went out of my comfort zone, and for the first time in a long while, I realized I was okay. I embraced the gift of everyday.

Sometimes, the gift is, for me, driving in my little black Miata, with the radio up and singing with all of my might! It's me being at a Beach Boys concert in huge outdoor ampitheater as I was the other weekend packed with people and not being catatonic with fear. Sometimes I look at other people and almost feel bad for them because they have no idea how great liberty really is. You can't know what true liberation is if you've never been captive.

And while I do not equate recovering from agoraphobia with defeating cancer, what is true is both of them require an attitude shift. Researchers are now quite clear in their belief that attitude is a major contributing factor toward the recovery of disease, whether the disease be mental or physical.

Your life can change with your next breath.
I urge you, don't reject the gift.

Letting Go

I'm sitting here in Central Florida on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of February. Outside, it could not be more beautiful, it's balmy, the air is full of sunshine and breezes. The azaleas are blooming and the palm trees are as a high as an elephant's eye...It's the kind of weather Jimmy Buffet conjures up when he's 'wasting away in Margaritaville' or eating his 'cheeseburgers in paradise'. It's so damn perfect, it makes you blink.

And yet, I'm sitting inside here, and I'm trying to come to grips with the past. Trying to let go.

Something as seemingly innocuous as getting new carpets and I'm knee deep in a blue funk. Allow me to expound a bit. My current floor coverings would not look out of place in Bob and Emily's all mod-cons Chicago apartment from Season One of 'The Bob Newhart Show', we NEED new carpet. It's time, heck, it was time 20 years ago!

But new carpets mean emptying the closets.  Emptying bureaus, drawers...full of photos, books, old clothes, hmmm...a concert program that shows I saw Dwight Yoakam in 1993, 'I saw Dwight Yoakam?' In short my entire life.  And just like my life, it's overcrowded with memories.

Just as am I starting to obsess about becoming next week's subject of a whole new episode of Hoarders, it hits me hard. Grief. Once again, it jumps up and well, there's no other way to put it, bitch slaps me in the face. I find a photograph of me, and my grandparents and Uncle Bob.

Uncle Bob died in December. Less the 48 hours later, my Grandma K. died.  It's a lot to absorb in such a small amount of time. You see, Uncle Bob was a big part of my life, he was the tangible link to my past. A great guy, you'd of liked him. Everybody did. He never met a stranger. You know those Saturday Night Car Shows, where folks drive their old Fords and Chevys' to Steak and Shake and everybody stands around and gawks? Well, there's always that old guy who speaks fluent Mopar, that old guy was probably my Uncle Bob. You want to know about stock colors, options, hemis, or mpg, he's your man.  He would reserve space in a fleabag of a motel a year in advance for Labor Day Car Shows as his summer vacation. That was my Uncle Bob, he never met an engine he didn't like. He was Wayne Carini on a budget.

He was the guy who told me that it really was like 'Happy Days' in the old days, a born racounteur who loved to talk about the good old days. 'Life really was that good,' he was forever telling me. A walking contradiction, a guy who stayed so locked in the past that he had his whole Florida mobile home decked out in 50's era photos with a jukebox and diner style napkins and straws on his 50's art-deco table, yet he loved the Clash, was a devotee of Craigslist and Ebay, and even had a Facebook account, I'm told.

I guess we have that in common Uncle Bob and I, that love of that past. The thing that makes it so hard to let go. You're afraid of losing the memories, because you feel you might forget the person or maybe who you are.

So I wrote this today sending it out into cyberspace, so I can let it go and the world will know he was here and I won't have to hoard some more junk I don't need so that I don't forget. 

I like to think he would like that. On this glorious Florida day he would have loved, probably at some car show or antique fair somewhere, I'm memoralizing him so I can let go.

Where Have I Been....

Some of you reading this title will think it a statement, some a question. And you'd be right on both accounts.

Where...have...I...been. The simple answer is of course, right here. My writer's voice though, has not been translated through this medium for several months. It's been dormant, elusive...hiding, depressed, ill and exhausted. Many times I called up this site and sat staring at a blank page, a blinking cursor a tiny island in a sea of white.

I beg your indulgence, this may meander a bit. After so many dry months, my thoughts are bursting through my typing fingers like a deluge during an August Florida thunderstorm where raindrops strike the scorched asphalt so hard and with such fury, steam rises up like a wraith.

I can claim many excuses for my absence. In the last of weeks of August, a very dear aunt lost her battle with cancer and I've been absolutely heartsick and depressed. It came as quite a shock, until the very last, my mind refused to accept the chance of defeat and I truly believed she would recover. The greatest compliment I could pay her is the fact that she had such a sweetness and gentleness of character that she put me in mind several times of my own grandmother. As the pattern often goes, grief turned to depression and depression turned to a stony and unrelenting anger. The childhood anger of, 'it isn't fair'.

I guess, 'it isn't fair' would be the recurring theme of my thought patterns of late...

I have hesitated so many times over what to write in these blogs, how deeply I would share, fearing that my true nature or inclinations would 'turn off' my readership. And then this morning, as is my wont, I had an epiphany...'do I really even have a readership'? So why the hell am I so afraid of offending 'them', if there is even a 'them'. So here goes...

I was very invested in this election. I am a 38 year old single, childless woman and an ardent conservative. I guess those words in of themselves are a contradiction. Despite all this, I've never supported a candidate to the extent I backed Mitt Romney. In my case, it's personal. If you've ever read this blog, you know about my nearly 4 year employment odyssey. Just the other day, I agreed to another 6 month contract extension of a nearly 2 1/2 year  (if you count my former assignment there in a different department) assignment at my company. So I can honestly say that the four years Barack Hussein Obama, aka Barry Sotero or whatever the hell his name is, has been the leader of this country have been the four worst of my entire life.

Yes, I know that I am amongst the fortunate who have a job at all. However, I had the audacity to hope that maybe just maybe if we elected different leadership in this country, that I might have the chance of securing a more permanent situation where my salary might be closer to the +25% higher pay rate I earned just 6 years ago! I am frequently told that I 'just have to accept that things are different now' 'companies just aren't going to hire anymore when they can contract out labor and save themselves tax and insurance costs'.

What I have been the most devastated about, is the loss of my hope, my inherent belief in the American Dream.  To get even more personal and uncomfortable, because of my salary losses, and lack of insurance, I've been living with my 65 year old father. And my father, because of the fact that he cannot exist on the small amount social security pays him, is still running after business and trying to work the hours that most 20 year olds would balk at! In the years where I should be looking after him, I can barely afford to keep myself.

I really thought Mitt Romney was the solution to this countries' woes. This is not about party, or sour grapes in anyway. It is about my inherent fears about the defecit we have incurred, the raiding of my father and mother's medicare and social security to fund Obamacare. It is the fact that as a country, we don't seem to mind when our leadership sits back and watches the assasination, and subsequent torture and sodomization of our Libyan Ambassador and the brave men of our armed forces who defied orders to try and come to his aid. When we just stay quiet and accept the status quo.

It is having to sit by and watch as these things happen while most of my fellow countrymen put more time and thought into drafting their fantasy football team and worry more about who is getting kicked off what reality show, than to think the fact that our country is drifting into economic penury, that our children are going to inherit an unsustainable crushing debt, that is if there is even an America left once the Islamic groups in this country one by one become radicalized and overcome our increasingly reduced military.

So many times, everything inside of me, is crying out, 'Why...Why don't you Care? People will say, 'I'm busy', or 'I am just one person, what can I do?' or worse, 'Oh, it's not really that bad...we've survived worse things'.  Then they marginalize you and make you feel that if you really express all of these 'gloomy' thoughts that you are some kind of a weirdo, an alarmist. Just another opininated wacko....now go away, 'the Steelers are about to meet the Patriots' and I've got $50.00 riding on this game.'

I hope that will still be a comfort when your employer pays you in rice noodles and a few paltry yuan, and you get on your bicycle and peddle to your government apartment to watch state sponsored football which by the way...is what you call soccer...

Where I've been...the buses are afraid to run.

Against the Grain

So, a couple of things. First of all, where have I been?

Well...I can't tell you the number of times I have written a truly great, possibly life-changing blog piece in my head on my drive home from work, only to have it dissolve sometime between eating dinner and zoning out in front of the television watching re-runs of 'The Big Bang Theory!

Secondly, I don't like the new Google Blogger format. I truly detest Google Chrome and I miss my big template area.  I am one of 'those' people. You know, the ones that are frantically searching the net for discontinued products because they have separation 'issues'.  I still haven't completely recovered from the loss of Clearly Canadian Loganberry flavored water sometime in the mid 1990's. In short, I intensely dislike change. You know how you develop a liking for a certain pen... You become attached to the heft of it, the way it feels against your fingers and the way the ink comes out properly and evenly. You live in fear of someone 'accidentally' picking it up and losing it.  That's the way I felt about the previous 'Blogger' template, and frankly this new format makes me uneasy.

Here is one of those blog pieces that I mentally wrote somewhere between Lake Mary, Longwood and Winter Springs Florida:

As the aunt of several nieces and nephews, I've definitely been to a few youth sporting events in my day. Full disclosure is, having no children of my own, makes it less easy to come up with excuses as to why I can't come. I mean, I've gotten better at it, but there have been times where I've been forced to load up on vitamins, pack the car with bottles of water, sunscreen and spend the better part of a Saturday morning or afternoon watching kids play sports of some kind.

There is a kind of pleasure in being only a spectator and not actually a parent anxiously watching my progeny to be sure that they behave correctly and hoping against hope they will actually be a soccer, softball, basketball, or pee-wee football prodigy. Of course being related to this kid makes me hope that they won't disgrace the family name in anyway, but other than that, to use a British expression I love, 'I could give a toss!'

You can always tell the kids that are natural athletes by simply watching the demeanor of their parents, they're the relaxed ones, leisurely seated in low slung net lawn chairs with their bottle of water neatly held by the built in cup holder. Their whole expression seems to say, 'I am the mother or father of the next LeBron, Kobe, Beckham or Ronaldo and I know it!' They barely even seem to break a sweat in humid Florida summer weather.

Then there are the other parents... They're easy to spot. They are the ones who never actually sit down. They walk, they pace, stalking the sideline of the soccer field (or football pitch depending on where you come from) they are the ones hovering around the vestiges of the fence that divides the baseball diamond from the bleachers, eyes rolled back in their head, flecks of foam at the corner of their mouths shouting out encouragement and or abuse in equal quantities because their kid is...not...a natural athlete. They are the ones that fall apart when their kid is benched, the ones you see 'coaching' their kid on the walk from the parking lot to the field and then on the walk of shame back to the car at the end of the game.

Sometimes I wonder what actually goes on in their minds...Do they think that the kid will develop some kind of sporting prowess purely on the strength of their will for them to be athletes? I ponder what it is in our culture all of the sudden that has taken kids' activities from fun family leisure time to a breeding ground for the former NBA, NFL, or MLS stars of tomorrow. And don't even get me started on the scholarship hunters..

Some of these kids simply aren't cut out for it.

I know. I was, am one.

I guess the first stirrings that I didn't actually have any sort of hand eye coordination came when I was in the 5th grade and the kids began calling me 'weedwacker' when I came up to bat. I just never could make any sort of connection with the bat to the ball.  When I was fourteen I developed a mania for tennis, how much of it was due to my crush on Andre Agassi is still a matter of conjecture, but I tried, oh Lord how I tried! I would force myself out on the court in 90 degree temperatures and practice serves over and over again until I became dizzy with heatstroke. But the fact remains, no matter how much I practiced, I just wasn't good. By comparison, my younger sister (one of the natural athlete types) would take my racket and hit stroke after stroke without error and she never even practiced!

The truth is, I was out of high school, and a young adult before I found my true passion. Looking back, I guess I was always going against the grain. I found the love of my 'recreational' life when I was eighteen. Finally ignoring the critics, realising that I was never going to fulfill the societal norms, I did something that I had always wanted to do. I stepped out onto a polished parquet floor in a pair of high-heeled shoes and for the first time in my life, my body did what I asked it to do when I asked it to do it. I didn't have to struggle like I always had with team sports, my feet just naturally seemed to feel and understand music. While it's a fact that you will always have to learn the rules and shibboleths of any sort of 'game' or skill,  it's wonderful when you actually WANT to learn and feel that you can.

Ballroom dancing isn't exactly the easiest or most popular pursuit from a social standpoint. When I got my first 'real' office job and was allowed to decorate and put my own stamp on my work space, while the other ladies in my office decked their walls with racy photos of Brad Pitt and male Chippendale dancer calendars, I had a black and white photo of Fred Astaire in his top hat and tails on mine. I've never dated a male who actually would partner me in a dance. Many people outright laughed at me when I expressed my love for ballroom dance. I once mentioned to an office 'friend' that I was excited about the prospect of Ballroom becoming a Olympic sanctioned event, and she snorted derisively and said, "No way, won't happen!" "Believe me no one wants to sit around and watch ballroom dancing, it's as exciting as watching paint dry!" I have to admit experiencing the slightest bit of schadenfreude while watching 'Dancing with the Stars' dominate the TV ratings over the last few years. Apparently, many people enjoy watching ballroom dance just like I thought they would.

No, it's never easy going against the grain. But it's worth it. Not every kid can be an athlete, but everyone has a talent. I bet many of those kids taking the 'walk of shame' with their incensed parent back to the car after a lost game where they failed to be the athlete their parent demands they should be, are natural scientists, or future editors, fantastic chefs, artists, geniuses who can actually work with the sophisticated equipment on today's new automobiles. Some of them may even be ballroom dancers.

But none of them will know, if they aren't allowed to go against the grain.  Which brings me to the third reason you haven't been seeing my blog as frequently.

I've been out ballroom dancing...