sam is coming home

sam, my amazing, awesome, incredible son, is homeward bound. he's been in norway studying for the past six months and traveling through europe and having an other-continent experience. i can't wait to see how he's changed and what his perceptions are once he returns to the states. he said a few weeks back in an email that he couldn't wait to get home because it's 'so cheap.' With gas prices over $4 a gallon it's hard for me to believe he thinks it is cheap here but compared to the way the dollar has been going against the euro never mind the kroner which is the norwegian currency, he has a point. in any case, now i have to clean his blinds and air out his room and get ready for the sound of drums all the time. did i mention he's a big fan of metal rock? should be a fun, noisy summer. 

whatsamatter with me?

dear blog,

i am so depressed. a woman who saw me writing in a very twee Indian journal where the paper's all handmade and pressed with bits of flowers said to me very sweetly, "Oh, writing in your journal?" I said something awful in response, like i don't write in journals and in fact don't believe in journaling, she said why and i said "Cos you can't make any money off it." 

now really, the truth is that i am, by profession, a Journalist, which to me means that i get paid to organize my thoughts that would otherwise be random journal notes into journalism. like journalism with a capital J. and besides, i have my column and if that isn't a naked journal that i get paid for, i don't know what is. 

it occurs to me that this blog is an on line journal. i know my friend the poet christine kluge told me that she uses hers as a kind of website so that editors and such can see her work easily on line and i guess that's purposeful. but so far i don't know how to make that work for me, so this is just a blog, a silly blog, to be taken no more seriously than someone writing in their diary. 

whatever.

long live the internet. and besides, my hands are so stiff now from encroaching arthritis that i can no longer hand write any thing and have to type all the time. Ha ha ha.

farewell to duke

Duke, our big orange tabby, died today. I took him to our vet and had him euthanized. He had a huge tumor growing in his throat that made it in the last few days impossible for him to breathe or drink or eat. Nonetheless, he put up a good fight going into the carrying crate. Duke was a strong willed animal to the end.

We had him for 16 years. I got him the day before Thanksgiving when my son was in first grade. He had been tossed from a moving car that was flying through the parking lot of my gym. He was a young cat, about six months old. He came right over to me when I called him and he lived very happily with us ever since.

Duke was what they call an outdoor cat because he didn't love staying in the house. He was out in all weathers, including blizzards. For years he loved killing things, chipmunks, squirrels, mice, voles, birds. He broke my heart a few times with his murdering and it angered me that he didn't always eat what he killed. But that's a cat for you. With us, he was always a model of affection. He was always very loving and deeply enjoyed being petted. 

I don't think we'll get another cat for awhile. We still have our dogs, Gigi and Basil,  and we have Leo, the Turkish Van cat who appeared at the edge of our woods many years ago. Leo is old, as well, although exactly how old I cannot say. He loved Duke, and undoubtedly will miss him, but I don't think he'd cotton that well now to another feline. 

I asked to have Duke cremated and they'll call me when his ashes are ready. I'll have to find the right place in the yard to bury them. It hasn't hit me yet that Duke is really gone. For years I've said how great it will be to get through a night without having to open or close the front door for him, but I wonder if I'll be able to sleep as I will still be listening for him.

the bedford bob

In my guise as girl reporter, I covered an event at the John Jay Homestead last evening on the topic of slavery. The speaker was Fergus Bordwich, author of "Bound For Canaan," a book about the Underground Railroad, and another, newer book called "Washington: The Making of the American Capital." It was a very entertaining and illuminating lecture and Bordwich is a good speaker, which helps, but I couldn't help be struck by the fact that he was giving this entire spiel to an audience full of white people. Very white people. 

He said that in the 1790's and for decades after, the Hudson Valley, the place where I live, was the largest region of slaveholders in the entire northern part of the newly formed United States. And no wonder, since this is where the farms were that supplied milk and other farm produced goods to New York City. I thought about the old cemeteries and the old illustrious family names and how proud old Bedfordites are to have families that go back so long here. Some of those families, especially the ones who owned acres and acres, must have been slave owners. Gee. 

Then I noticed how so many female heads in the audience looked the same. There is a hair do in Bedford I have grown to refer to as, "The Bedford Bob." It's a chin length cut, no layers, no bangs, wisps, no fringe; usually blond but often that funny, unemphatic shade of gray that blond goes when it's not blond any longer. It would be called Remembrance of Blond if anyone took the trouble to bottle it.  Half the women in the room, maybe more than half, were sporting the 'do. They were also wearing boxy little silk suits in pastel shades, bare legs, and kitten heels, tiny miniature heels that are easy to walk in but add a half inch to one's height. Dressed in white jeans, boots, and a sleeveless chocolate colored silk top from Banana Republic, my flat ironed collar bone grazing hair frizzing in the humidity, you might say I felt just a shade out of place. More like an octoroon, or one of the slaves who must at one time have lived in Bedford. Hopefully if I was a slave in a past life here, at least I was a house slave who got the special privilege of sleeping in the house. 

kick ass ride in the woods today

My son asked me not long ago if a day could go by that i didn't mention something about riding or my horse. the answer is no, actually. today i took a wild, galloping, heart pounding 3 hour ride through the woods and fields and hills and dales and through a couple of deep streams of bedford new york, which is where my horse and I live, and it was breathtaking. We were going so fast that I have to say I did not do my usual bird watching (hawks and other big birds of prey mostly), nor did I comment much about the weather or the deer or any other thing since mostly it was just ride for your life. In a few weeks I'll be doing the Dogwood Ride of Greenwich (known to some as "a private tour of the best back yards of Greenwich") and on Memorial Day weekend, the Bedford Riding Lanes Association Spring Pace, which begins (and ends) at the John Jay Homestead. They ain't for sissies.

A woman on the ride today who keeps her horse in North Salem asked me if it was true that I am the "Carrie Bradshaw" of Bedford. "You should really capitalize on that," she advised, a cig dangling between two fingers of her ungloved hand. You don't see that many women riding sans gloves let alone people smoking on horseback. I liked it. She said a movie is due out on Sex in the City and I said that I thought sex in the suburbs on some essential level was less interesting. But maybe it isn't. Please do if you're reading this, weigh in.