Filed under: Matthew McConaughey
Two weeks ago Tiggerlane and I attended the wedding of one of my former students. The bride also happens to be the daughter of the superintendent of the school district I work for. The church was beautifully decorated with candles and flowers. The music was very nice. The bride and groom made a lovely couple. The reception was fun. Lots of good food and I got to visit with a lot of people I hadn’t seen for a while.
The whole wedding experience made me think of my own weddings. Yep, I’ve had two weddings and two divorces. The first divorce was painful, but the second one was a relief. Anyway, in my nostalgic frame of mind that little bride’s verse popped into my head. You know the one……something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And I had an epiphany right there at the wedding. My whole less-than-perfect marital experiences stemmed from the fact that I did not have the correct ’something blue.’
Filed under: Life in the South
There are a lot of things in this old world that upset me because I am a tenderhearted soul, but I absolutely can’t abide the mistreatment of children and animals.
My mom’s truck has been in the shop and she called me this afternoon telling me the truck was repaired and could I please take her to pick it up. As I drove to her house, I passed a large, white box sitting in the ditch by the side of the road. I drove on by because Mom was expecting me, but I kept thinking about that box. It was preying on my mind because sometimes people dump puppies or kittens out on our rural dirt roads. I told Mom about it and said I was going to stop by that box on the way home and check it out. Mom decided that she would help me do the checking. Sure enough when we got back to the box it was tipped over. There was crumpled newspaper and two bath towels laying in some water in the ditch. We walked up and down both sides of the road for a ways and we didn’t see or hear anything. No tracks, nothing. We picked the trash up and went back to our respective homes.
Later in the afternoon, I was settin’ on the front porch watching it rain when my phone rang. It was one of my fifth grade students who lives in my country ‘neighborhood.’ He asked me if my mom had any puppies because he and his dad were in their truck near her house and there were two puppies in the road. Aha! I just knew that box had had puppies in it. I told my student about the box and said that someone had probably dumped the puppies. He told me that he and his dad were going to take the puppies home with them. We hung up. I wanted to see those pups so Jasper and I jumped in the car and headed out to intercept my neighbors on the road as they drove home. I must have missed them because I drove all the way to Mom’s house without meeting a single vehicle. Mom wasn’t home so I left her a note telling her what had happened, loaded Jasper back in the car and started back home. As I rounded a curve about a quarter mile from her house, there they sat in the middle of the road. Two painfully thin, tiny beagle puppies.
Jasper started barking and my temper started heating up. I couldn’t believe my neighbor just left those pups by the side of the road. Now let me take a moment to remind you that I had just jumped in my car on a whim wanting to see those puppies. I was barefoot and wearing an old pair of cut-off shorts and a ratty old T-shirt. I got out of my car with the intention of rescuing those pups and I quickly understood why they were still by the side of the road. Those puppies were scared to death and the second my bare feet hit the muddy road they took off running as fast as their scrawny little legs could carry them. One of them took off into the underbrush of the woods and I just couldn’t follow him with bare feet. The other one ran right up the middle of the road. I squatted down hoping that I would appear less threatening and tried calling to it. It paused for a moment then started hollerin’ at the top of its lungs and kept right on running. What was I to do? I started chasing it down the middle of the road. Jasper started barking again, the puppy in the woods started hollerin’ and the other pup just kept running and hollerin’ like I was the devil himself chasing after it. It finally ran into a briar patch and cowered, but I just couldn’t get to it.
Time for a new plan. I took Jasper home, put on shoes and socks, grabbed some ham out of the fridge for enticement and a blanket to protect the interior of my car from muddy pups because I WAS GOING BACK TO CATCH THOSE LITTLE BOOGERS.
When I got back to the dumped puppy location, my neighbor’s truck was parked by the side of the road. He and his son had been on their way to town to pick up his daughter after softball practice. My neighbor had run into the same problem I did with trying to catch the puppies. He didn’t want to be late picking up his daughter so he had left the puppy chasing for the return trip home. They already had one of the little fellers in the back of their truck and my neighbor was stomping around out in the woods trying to catch the other one. I won’t write what he was saying, but my neighbor used a lot of the same words that Willowtree uses on his blog. Regardless, my neighbor caught the little critter and I am happy to report that the puppies will have a good home with lots of love and attention from an eleven year old boy and his fourteen year old sister.
Filed under: Books
I finished this book several days ago and it is still weighing heavy on my mind. It is a fictional legal thriller set in the very real struggle that is taking place in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank even as I write. David Wolfe, an affluent American of Jewish descent, and Hana Arif, a Palestinian exile, meet and become involved as students at Harvard. After their graduation, Hana returns to the refugee camp in Lebanon where she was raised. She marries a Palestinian man from the same settlement and they move to the West Bank where they both teach at a university. Thirteen years later, David is practicing law in San Francisco and is engaged to Carole Shorr, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Hana, her husband and child have traveled to San Francisco and she calls David. Interspersed within the narrative of David’s and Hana’s lives, the author weaves the stories of two young Palestinian men who are preparing to become martyrs in a shocking event that will change the course of history.
The story is gripping, well-researched and full of factual and historical information concerning the struggle between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples. Both sides of the struggle are well represented through dialogue among the fictional characters. The author describes atrocities suffered by the Palestinians at the hands of the Jews. There are also descriptions and accounts of the horrific suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Palestinians and during the Holocaust. As I read the book it became much easier to understand why peace seems to be such a distant and unreachable goal in the Middle East.
On the day that I finished reading Exile, I received the July 2 edition of Time. Within its pages I found an article entitled “How to Deal With Hamas.” A large picture, almost two full pages, accompanies the article. In the photo, a militant in Gaza is seated behind a desk in a Fatah office seized by Hamas on June 14, 2007. The militant is wearing a black ski mask and holding a gun. Even more chilling is the reflection in mirrors along the wall behind the desk. The photographer is reflected quite clearly and in the shadows near him are what appear to be several more masked militants.
I leave you with a quote from the Time article. “Crushing Hamas may be a chimerical goal, but reforming it need not be, if the U.S., Israel and its allies can devise ways to work with the Islamists in areas of mutual interest…..That kind of engagement holds at least as much potential for progress as the U.S. policy of weeding out extremists and dealing only with pliable, so-called moderates. Reaching out to Hamas could curb the militants’ extremist behavior toward Israel. Or may end in failure. In the Middle East today those odds are about as much as you can hope for.”
