Past Blogs

Thank goodness people have an infinite capacity for self deception. Every year I’m hopeful that a season called “Spring” will come.

You have heard the phrase, the promise of spring. I am starting to have a sinking feeling that we northerners should take this phrase more literally. After all, no one is saying that this particular promise will be kept. All frogs don’t turn into princes. For that matter, most tadpoles don’t turn into frogs.

And then there’s the groundhog. I think we should let the guy sleep in. His predictions have the accuracy of a Ouija board.

Here are the cold, hard facts. It is March. The air is freezing; the wind is cutting. The ground is hard as in frozen solid. Ice balls are falling from the leaden sky. The operative adjective is bleak not springlike.

But there is hope! April is coming. I will follow the advice of the poet, A. E. Housman. “About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.”

I will completely forget that for most of my springs the snow on the cherries was the real thing.

(The complete A. E. Housman poem is here.)

One week last November when I was feeling particularly unloved by the world at large, I suggested the obvious cure to my husband. “Let’s get a kitten.” Face it, pet lovers, we have our animals for the unconditional love they give us.

The following Sunday we visited our animal shelter’s mobile pet adoption site and gravitated to the scrawniest bit of grey fluff they had. He was six months old, the runt of his litter and a mere four pounds. Obviously, this tiny guy needed lots of T.L.C. We took him home.

Unwilling to burden such a small creature with a long name, we christened him “Pi”.

Our plan was to introduce Pi to our five resident cats slowly. So we put him alone in our screened “cat safe” room. This lasted exactly two minutes when he commenced yowling at the top of his little kitty lungs. We opened the door, and Pi instantly became a member of the Tooley cat clan.

A few days later our 26 pound cat, Gato, was eating his cat kibble. I might note that every attempt to restrict Gato’s food intake has gone down in flames. Pi marched up to him, quickly stuck his paw in Gato’s dish and pulled the dish to himself. That was the end of Gato’s lunch and the start of Gato’s diet!

Pi has gained one pound each month he has lived with us. He is our new alpha cat. Unconditional love is not his thing. We love him dearly, but we probably should be thinking about getting a dog.

The people of Chicago have spoken, or more accurately, 30% of them have. The reign of the Daleys will continue.

Last week Chicago re-elected Richard M. Daley for a 6th term with over 70% of the vote. I laughed out loud when hearing the election results, but I’m thrilled, too. Chicago without a Daley is like a St. Patrick’s Day parade without the Irish.

Political pundits had predicted that this time around hizzoner was in serious trouble. But scandals, indictments and shady deals have always swirled around the Daley clan. The smoke rises, and they remain standing.

The simple truth is that Chicago has never looked better. It is one of the most exciting, forward-looking and award winning cities in America. The voters knew who to thank.

Who but a Daley could have pulled off the urban miracle called Millennium Park? And then there are the flowers. The entire town is resplendent with cascades of seasonal flowers and grasses.

I recently saw a map which ranked American cities by the quantity of their green architecture, i.e., grass roofs, sustainable building materials, etc. Little green pin head or pea sized dots indicated the cities’ greenness. Chicago’s green dot was the size of a ping pong ball. Thanks to Mayor Daley, Chicago has 2 million square feet of green roofs.

As the kids would say, “Chicago rocks”. Mayor Daley is one urban legend who’s the real thing.

One of my life goals is to understand the equation E=mc². I’m smart enough to know that only a brain like Einstein’s could come up with the equation, but I also know that many more ordinary people can grasp its meaning… people like my son, husband, nephews, nieces, assorted friends and countless others.

I have come tantalizingly close to getting it. If energy and matter are the same thing, then I, who have lots of energy and also mass, have the potential to go nuclear… right?

I think the key here is that I can’t go fast enough. The speed of light is staggering. Granted, I move quickly, but there’s that troublesome gravity. If only I could get in a weightless situation, I might be able to seriously speed up and create some fusion. Or should that be fission?

I keep reading Richard Feynman and Brian Greene. My son, Christopher, keeps trying his best to explain it all to me. He sees it so clearly. He can bring me just to the brink of understanding. And then bang, I’m back into my black hole of ignorance.

If anybody out there in the universe can clear up this matter, I’m here waiting for your e-mail or comment to this blog.

Once again St. Patrick’s Day is creeping closer, and I have a closet crisis. I own no green clothes.

My ancestors never set foot on the old sod. They were too busy being Bohemians in Bohemia. But loyalty to my husband’s ancestors and my Irish friends behooves me to don green for a day.

My wardrobe tends to a wide range of purple hues. As I explain to my art students, purple is a weird color. Since it is a combination of red, a hot color, and blue, a decidedly cool color, purple can go either way. Emotionally, purple is AC/DC.

Purple was also the color of royalty. Although I’ve never aspired to be a queen (a rotten job in my opinion) I do like the aura of classiness purple conveys.

So it’s time for me to rent some green clothes. I rent all my clothes from Goodwill and other thrift stores. After a year or two, I return the garments to be re-rented.

Fortunately for me, all my favorite thrift stores arrange clothes by color, not size. I confess that it will be hard to walk right past an entire aisle of clothes in gorgeous shades of purple and continue on to the green aisle, but I will. I owe it to the Irish!