I have figured out the ultimate solution to my footwear needs. Only two items are needed, sandals and cowboy boots.

Despite my parents’ best efforts, I spent most of my childhood and teen years with bandages on my bleeding feet. Tender skin is standard equipment for redheads.

Shortly after I married, my husband valiantly tried to end my foot agony. He took me to an upscale shoe store and plunked down two weeks of grocery money for the “perfect fitting” shoes. One hour later, I was limping to the bandage box.

It took many years, but now my feet are always happy. From May to Halloween, I only wear sandals. All of them come from thrift stores so someone else has broken them in. A little scrub, and they’re good for many comfortable miles.

Winter in Wisconsin requires me to enclose my feet. A gorgeous solution presented itself one lucky day at Goodwill. Someone had deacquisitioned a pair of  red leather Dingos, genuine cowboy boots. “They’ll tear your feet to ribbons,” my brain warned me.

I slipped one on. The arch support was high as a skyscraper and my toes weren’t anywhere near the pointy front. The leather felt like velvet.

I wore those boots every day (November to May) for the next eight years. Finally, I wore a hole right through the leather uppers. After their demise, a parent at my school questioned if I could really be Mrs. Tooley without my red boots.

My current  cowboy boots, a tooled black pair, and I will part ways for a while in a few weeks. But spring has been slow to arrive this year, and I set off to school this morning shod in cowboy boots. When they go in the closet, that’s when spring begins for me.

We’re spinning, and it’s not a lazy twirl. Zipping around at 700 to 900 miles per hour at mid-latitudes is major travel.

Each dawn our rock spins toward the sun; each dusk it spins away into darkness. Being the most egotistical species on the planet, we say the sun rises and sets, implying that our star ascends and falls in the heavens to create our days and nights.

Intellectually, we know that the sun isn’t doing the moving and “rise” is a stunningly inaccurate word.

Diane Ackerman in her elegant book, Dawn Light, tells the true scenario:

“Night falls, we say, as if it were the closing curtain in a one-act play. But, really, day falls – we fall toward and roll away from the sun.”

I understood that earth is spinning like a top by age four. I had to wait until I was forty to internalize that fact. My husband and I were sitting in O’Hare Airport and drinking coffee waiting to board a plane to Europe, a long flight from east to west. The conversation veered to the implications of flying fast against the earth’s west to east revolution. I could sense the disorientation that was about to occur to my body’s circadian rhythms. I’ve felt like a space traveler ever since.

As we become more and more interactive with technology, we become less and less in touch with the natural forces that dictate our lives. Magical thinking sets in, and it’s not good magic…global warming is denied, nuclear plants are built over fault lines, water is polluted and resources recklessly squandered.

Would we be jolted out of our stupor if one morning our little, blue planet failed to spin into the sun?

Here is one simple idea to help us reconnect. It’s a question I ask my elementary school students when we study the solar system, and it refers to a bigger trip than our daily spin. “How many times have you personally gone around the sun?”

I am usually greeted with puzzled stares or denials that this feat is possible. But then one child connects and blurts out their age.

So on your next birthday, ponder the number of trips you have taken around our star. It’s enlightening.

It appears as though I have become a pariah to 50% of my fellow Americans. Strangely, it’s the same old me: I haven’t changed. But to half of America, it’s now a sin to be a Democrat.

I don’t intend to change. Inside I’m still the little girl who listened to her father talk about being beaten up by the company thugs at the foundry where he worked as a young man. His offense? He was on strike for a five day, forty hour workweek. The factory owners weren’t Democrats.

I married into a Republican family. Forty-seven years ago, political affiliations were of little or no concern. My husband’s family were from a small farming community in northern Wisconsin, and they were more concerned that I could not tell a Guernsey from a Holstein, and that I would not be able to feed their son properly.

My husband and I lived on the unfashionable south side of Milwaukee for over thirty years. The south side is the epicenter for all things Democratic. Our monthly party meetings were held at Serb Hall which in addition to Democrats featured fish fries on Friday (both regular and Serbian), bowling alleys, a wedding hall and a bar. A sign hung behind the bar which read,”No standing on the jukebox.”

Our kids are Democrats, too. I think I know why. When we went to our monthly party meeting at Serb Hall, their Great Aunt Vi came over to babysit. They adored her and couldn’t wait for us to leave. Aunt Vi was on a par with the Cat in a Hat. On several occasions our meetings were canceled, but we didn’t tell anyone. Aunt Vi and the kids would have been too disappointed. We just left and had coffee for three hours.

Besides the fact that I was born with Democratic genes, I think I would have chosen the Party anyway. Democrats have more fun. Sure we mess up, fight among ourselves and air our differences for all to see. But we can also laugh with each other and at ourselves. Along with Will Rogers I am proud to say,”I am not a member of any organized political party…I am a Democrat.”

And for any Republicans out there, how can you hate a person who has to be told not to stand on a jukebox?

I married into a family that is famous for throwing away the directions. From faucets to furniture assembly, the instructions get ditched.

Early on in our marriage, I naively asked,”Why are the instructions in the garbage?”

“We need to figure this out ourselves,” my husband replied. “That’s the way to learn how to fix stuff.”

How logical, and how lovely to be the recipient of my husband’s handiness. My guy can fix anything. Broken computers, dripping faucets, strange noises coming from my car’s engine, he can tackle any job and invariably succeed. I estimate we have saved about two million in repair bills in the course of our marriage.

I believe genetics plays a role here. My husband’s grandfather invented the V8 tractor, a dandy cherry pitter and a high tech apple picker.

My father-in-law could repair anything; cars, roofs, swamp coolers and unicycles to name but a few. But I must admit he was also a first rate jerry-rigger. After his death, his widow was visited by an electrical inspector. “Who wired this house?” he inquired. It suddenly dawned on my mother-in-law why her electric bills always had been so amazingly low.

The younger generation is carrying on the  figure it out yourself tradition with flair. Our son is working on a solar heated hot tub. His cousin has sent several satellites into space. I doubt that NASA had a stock instruction booklet for their assembly.

Having recently seen an exuberant production of Hairspray, my thoughts wandered to hair. Unlike those girls in that 60’s era musical, I am hair illiterate. I don’t even know how to operate a can of hairspray. The only time a can of hairspray has ever been on our property, it was being used to ignite a potato cannon.

Growing up lacking sisters and a Barbie doll, I never played “hair” when I was little. My mother chose sensible braids and bangs for me. I was an active kid, and those braids were always a mass of tangles. Hair and torture were synonyms for me as a child.

The braids morphed into a ponytail which required a rubber band and minimum hair skills. By college, ponytails were woefully out of fashion, but I remained faithful to the style. Being an art major, I did not want hair flopping in my eyes and getting into paint, clay, power tools and printing presses.

Somewhere in my twenties, I finally freed my hair and gradually shortened it up. And it has remained that way ever since with one addition… I intend to remain a redhead. I may be prejudiced, but I’m inclined to agree with Mark Twain who said that,”While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.” I like cats.

After a disastrous experience with a hairdresser who turned me into a brunet, I found my current stylist. Mary is a very glamorous, stylish grandma who understands that I can’t benefit from all the unique and lovely hairstyles she is capable of creating. She knows that the most fantastic hairstyle in the world is useless if its owner can’t duplicate it after the first wind gust or trip to the shower. Mary keeps me looking like me, a wash and wear redhead, and for that I am exceedingly grateful.

Hairspray, The Musical

Potato Cannon