Dusting Off Barber This Week

In April my friend Brian died fighting a fire. No one likes a whiner, so I'll just say that I've never in my life wanted so badly for something to not have happened. Google grief cycle if you want, but here it is nearly eight months later and Sunday night I have this dream. I remember how it(my dream) felt more than anything, but I remember that Brian had died but was able to put off leaving for a day so we could all say goodbye to him. It's Wednesday now, and I can't quite shake it.

And maybe that's all I have to say. I've tried like hell not to wallow in it since April, but sometimes...

More Election Stuff

I'm with it enough to recognize the historical significance of what happened Tuesday night. I got chills watching the celebrations (and also a little sick every time I had to look at Al Sharpton) but I can't pretend to have felt it the way some of my friends have. I asked one of them yesterday what Tuesday night had been like for her, trying to ask an open-ended enough question that she'd have room to let me as inside as she wanted to, and we had a good talk. (Or she did, and I had a good listen.) As she spoke her eyes welled up and again, I got chills.

When I asked her what the election had changed for her, she talked about her pre-teen son, and then she told me that she knew that lots of white people had to have voted for Obama too. That the black vote alone wouldn't have been enough to win it. "White people voted for one of us," she whispered and her eyes narrowed as she leaned in closer to me. "Now when I walk past a white person," (and she was talking about her co-workers -- people she's been close to for a long time,) "I think, maybe they don't think we're all stupid."

Broke my heart.

Hail to the Chief?

We have video footage of Gehrig, who is three, at his second birthday party rattling off all forty-three presidents. I'm not saying he's particularly smart -- kids are wired to learn at a ridiculous pace, and Gehrig is already light years behind his kid brother in the useful, common-sense kind of smart -- but that's the kind of smart he is and it's been a riot (in kind of a creepy way) over the past couple years to watch this flaky wisp of a child recognize the Millard Fillmore and Benjamin Harrison biographies as we've pulled them out of the mail together.

So we're watching the election Tuesday night and I say to the boy, "You're gonna have to learn another president after tonight, Buddy. There's gonna be a new one." And his eyes get big and hopeful like only a child's can and he says, "Is it Boba Fett?"

*ahem*

the world may now continue. I (dana) have made things easy for ben (it wasn't that difficult!) and he can now continue blogging without much effort going to the login aspect of things.

oh, how i've missed the blogging. :)

you may have to gently urge him to post again. i'd even buy him some sheesha if it came down to it.

~dana