January 29, 2006
Are Child Hunters in the Bag?
Good news for Wisconsin's dwindeling number of deer hunters: There's a push on for fresh, er, blood.
Or as AP explains, "Rep. Scott Gunderson’s proposal would lower the hunting age from 12 to 8. 'It’s important to get kids involved in hunting at a younger age. If they are not engaged in hunting by 12 or 13, they probably won’t be,' said Gunderson, R-Waterford."
Tragically, the article fails to explain why teens who fail to hunt is a problem but does note that some people aren't excited about third-grade hunters, even though "under Gunderson’s bill, parents or guardians could designate an adult mentor who must stay within arm’s length of the 8- to 11-year-old child, and the two must share a weapon." (Sounds kinky and not in a good way.)
"...The idea of a lower hunting age horrifies Joe Slattery, whose 14-year-old son was accidentally shot and killed by a 12-year-old while deer hunting in Marinette County last year. 'This is a child safety issue,' Slattery said. 'Eight-year-olds don’t have the coordination or attention span or physical ability to handle a gun. They are learning cursive writing and some of them believe in Santa Claus.'
"The state Assembly already approved Gunderson’s bill on a 74-19 vote. The measure still needs approval from the state Senate and Gov. Jim Doyle to become law."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:48 PM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
Class Struggle: Grade School Edition
In Sweden, at least in our local grade school, the same group of kids stay together from the age of six to eleven. Woeful is the lot of any late arrivals who have to fit it several years after the class dynamics have been established. The kids are ten this year and the queen bee of the class was absent from school when it started this fall after being accepted into some kind of art or music school. Her absence has created a vaccum in the coolest-girl department and has sparked a power struggle that, months later, is still being played out.
The former queen's power was undeniable: she was tallest, thinnest and had modeled clothes in a catalog for a department store. Virtually all of the girls in this class are attractive and many, including my child, are beautiful. But none have the departed queen's credentials, as it were, and another girl's attempts to claim the throne--which, as far as I can tell mostly consists of demanding the right to boss the other girls around--are being rebuffed. One day at dinner my kid announced that a friend I'll call A had defected from a recess club my daughter had started to the wannabe queen's group. "They wear makeup," she said scornfully. "Why would A want to be with them?"
My kid responded to this perceived betrayal by asking another girl, B, to join her club. B accepted, my kid told me, so now A couldn't be in the club even if she changed her mind and wanted by in. Why not, I wondered. "Because there are only three members," my kid said, and ticked off herself, another good friend, and B now that A was gone. Why only three, I asked. "Because," she said, and started laughing. "Just because." Whenever the wannabe queen tries to boss her around, my kid said, she just tells her to shut up. "She doesn't like it very much."
I know my daughter is torn. Although she says she doesn't want to be one of the popular girls--it's not her style, she claims--she says this as though it were a prison sentence or a birth defect. She has dubbed me, rightfully, a dork, and wonders why I can't wear makeup or shave my legs more often or at least get trendier clothes. She asks me if I was ever popular. When I tell her I was the head of the drama club in high school and had plenty of friends in college, she's disappointed. That isn't the kind of popularity she means. She means the kind of popularity enjoyed by the former queen bee in her class. And the kind of popularity portrayed in movies like Mean Girls and Bring It On, in which the most popular girls are enshrined as Bitch Goddesses who can do anything and say anything and basically get away with it because they're Popular.
I never got the girlie look down, despite experiments in eighth grade with frosted blue eye shadow and mini skirts. It's not my style and it's not a problem. Not anymore. It used to matter. It used to matter a lot. Now I watch my daughter gaze at the scantily clad women on billboards and see music videos and ask, out loud, why women are always taking off their clothes in these things and men aren't. She parrots our discussions about sexism like the good little student she is. But I don't think sexism troubles her in the slightest, I don't think it really registers as anything but the world she's in, like water to a fish.
So she's torn because some of her classmates are wearing make up and crop tops and trying their hardest to look like sixteen-year-olds at ten as part of the popularity sweepstakes. Her dad and I don't let her do that. That limitation is partly a relief and partly infuriating. Given a choice, my daughter would choose the MTV-inspired sexy femme style over mom's dorky style any day of the week. (She doesn't understand yet that there's a choice between the two.) At the same time, she doesn't really want to grow up. Not yet. Not in the way those clothes imply.
I hate the way commercial culture has embedded itself in my daughter's consciousness, that she views herself though its distorted lens and finds her wonderful, thoughtful, beautiful, creative self lacking and lacking greatly.
Today Swedes celebrate Lucia. There's no better time for a festival of lights. The sun set more than an hour ago, at 2:47 pm.
That breaks my heart.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:11 PM | Comments (1)
December 08, 2005
When Bipolar Turns Deadly
According to the BBC News and the CNN report I watched this morning, the American shot by air marshals in Florida after claiming to have a bomb was mentally ill, probably suffering from bipolar disorder.
As Rigoberto Alpizar "ran down the aisle of the plane, a woman assumed to be his wife shouted for him to stop. Witnesses interviewed after the shooting described how Alpizar's companion tried to tell fellow passengers or air marshals that he suffered from bipolar disorder, or manic depression.
" 'I did hear the lady say her husband was bipolar and had not had his medication,' said Mary Gardner, another passenger.
" 'I saw the woman... she was hysterical.'"
No wonder. I'm no expert but it seems that people with severe cases of bipolar disorder may become reckless, impulsive and/or violent during certain phases of the illness. That's never a good combination and sometimes turns deadly. Family and friends may be assalted by an ill person or an ill person may commit suicide or be killed. If Rigoberto Alpizar was bipolar, he's certainly not the only bipolar person to be killed by law officials in Florida.
I'm not questioning the actions of the air marshals. All I really want to point out is the hell that mental illness creates for sufferers and their families. A friend has coped, many years now, with an ill spouse incapable of parenting or anything else. My friend works full-time, raises the kids and tries to stay sane in the face of enormous challenges that include utterly inadquate medical treatment from the family's HMO and callous indifference by society at large.
When it comes to mental illness, America is practically in the dark ages still. Study after study after study demonstrates that crazy people are crazy for a reason that has nothing to do with character or moral fiber or class or education. But not so very deep down, we don't want to believe that brain chemistry can be faulty and create an illness that affects thoughts and emotions, those intimate experiences that seem to define our very being. We prefer to think that crazy people and their families some how asked for their condition. We ignore them, whenever possible, and allow insurance companies, the medical establishment and society at large to treat mental illness as a faux illness and mentally ill people as second-class citizens who don't deserve the respect and treatment accorded to those suffering from more familiar, less scary illnesses such as diabetes.
What will it take to remove the stigma from mental illness so people can get treatment (and acceptance) as a matter of course? I wish I knew. My heart goes out to the family of Rigoberto Alpizar, to the air marshals who shot him and to the airplane passingers who witnessed it. The air marshalls didn't mean to kill an ill, unarmed man. They were protecting the passingers by doing what they were trained to do. I don't know how this particular tragedy could have been prevented. I do know that other, less visible tragedies are being enacted each day in homes all across America because mentally ill people--and their familes--aren't getting the help they so desperately need.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2005
Online Sales = Big Butts?
Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury, among others, has reported on the new Pew Internet and American Life Project survey, which estimates that one in six American adults online has sold something through an Internet classified ad or auction site. (The word estimate is mine, btw. Why doesn't every journalist add that qualifier to survey items--what, it's too obvious? I think not.)
"The number of visitors to online classified sites jumped 80 percent from September 2004 to this September, according to data from comScore Media Metrix that was released as part of the Pew study. Craigslist was the most popular classified ads site, with 8.7 million visitors in September. Close behind was Trader Publishing Co., which operates nearly four dozen vehicle, merchandise, housing and employment sites, such as BargainTraderOnline.com and ForRent.com."
As Bazeley notes, "Much has been made about the effect that craigslist has had on newspaper classified advertising" but as far as I can tell, no one has considered the effect that Craigslist, eBay and other online sites may have had on the expanding American waistline. The so-called obesity epidemic has been linked to many factors, including excessive TV, a lack of exercise, the growing size of food portions and even movements in personal income tax rate and in the gender wage gap. So why can't online sales be a contributing factor?
Big butts are unhealthy, however we got them. And now, it turns out, they're unhealthy in an unexpected way. As Jessica Heslam writes in the Boston Herald,"Rapping about big behinds made Sir Mix-A-Lot famous, but a new medical study says those plump rumps don’t do women any good when it comes to getting a shot in the traditional spot. Researchers say a majority of people, especially women, aren’t getting the proper dosage from backside shots because the needle can’t get through the blubber. As few as one in 10 women (and six in 10 men) may be getting proper dosages from injections, said Dr. Victoria Chan of Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin."
CBS News explains why this matters: "The medicine gets injected into the buttock muscles, then filters into nearby blood vessels. Such shots are used for a variety of medicines, including vaccines, painkillers, contraceptives, and antinausea drugs." I may be joking about the online sales-obesity connection but drugs that can't do their job are no fun, especially for women who end up with pregnant or ill as a result.
At least there's one bright spot on the horizon: the obesity rate in Mexico is expected overtake the U.S. rate soon. Alas, no word yet on how their pets rank compared to our pets.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)
November 28, 2005
Snow Falling on Tech Dreams & Harried Parents
"What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work." Be balanced is the tenth rule of Evan Williams' rules for executives of Web startups. Finding balance, or at least trying to allow employees to find it, is excellent advice for all Silicon Valley companies, web-related or not. Over many years the Valley work ethic and the cell/pager mentality of constant access has dramatically transformed home life for many residents and not for the better.
"As information technology allows households and communities to become places of production, it also changes the way such social institutions think of themselves. Families and communities, like upgraded software can be 'refreshed' or 'reinvented.' Families can then become a kind of product. Finally, the pivotal assumption that work is done at a workplace and family life is lived at home is much too simplistic. Many forces, not the least of which is the technical ability to work from home, have blurred the domains. If time at the workplace does not really reflect the time spent working, how does that effect family leaves or the length of a work week?"
That's a rhetorical question from one of the anthropologists at the Silicon Valley Cultures Project. Dr. J.A. English-Lueck knows exactly what that does to the length of a work week and offers examples:
"John is a middle-aged product development manager at a high tech company in Silicon Valley. ... He tries very hard not to take too much work home with him, preferring to work late on site, but the international nature of his work means he is on the phone at midnight and at dawn. He is grateful for E-mail and voicemail since they can fit his schedule. Realistically, he thinks about work problems constantly, in his garden, and in his car. He talks about his work all the time with his wife and volunteers to install network servers at his daughter’s school on NetDay.
"Meanwhile, his administrative assistant, Sharon, complains that her work load is overwhelming, even to the point where she is expected to move furniture and take out trash. She is expected to learn new programs and upgrades on her own time. Both John and Sharon now take work and worry home. Sharon checks her E-mail and voicemail in the predawn hours before her children wake to prepare for any tasks that may need to be addressed immediately. She carries a pager and a cell phone so that she can stay in contact with her teenaged children after they come home from school."
The modern work grind is no news to most people but that doesn't make the challenge of balancing work and family life any less real or important. I haven't read Po Bronson's new book, Why Do I Love These People, but I'm always interested in the drama of families: what brings them together and what pulls them apart. When it comes to family life, is balance even possible?
I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure I ever will. I can say that Sweden seems like a more promising venue to create a more balanced family life. Which does not mean the three members of my family hew to a party line on, well, anything. The snow has returned. My kid, ever gracious, muttered "I hate snow" and rolled back into the bedcovers when I delivered the news this morning. But I was happy then and I'm happy now. The grim winter lanscape has become a paradise of white and black line art punctuated by occasional flashes of color.
There may be something more beautiful than tree branches laced with fresh snow but, offhand, I can't think of what it might be.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2005
Give Thanks If No Bone-Eating Snot-Flower Worms Are In View
Thanksgiving greetings. Both my husband and my daughter came into my life in mysterious, unexpected ways that prove I'm one lucky gal. I have a long list of things I am grateful for today: family, friends, health--you know the drill. And I'm also--net addict that I am--way thankful for the Internet and all the people responsible for many wonders that developed as a result, including Tim Berners-Lee, Vincent Cerf, Robert E. Kahn and Ray Tomlinson.
I remember editing Steven Levy's 1994 column on the World Wide Web for Macworld, which described an addictive online experience using Mosaic. Today I'm still excited by the Internet and happy to have my own small home in cyberspace thanks to Dave Winer (who graciously hosted my first blog and held my hand as I got started) and Doc Searls (who inspired my blogging and whose own writing inspires me still). I feel incredibly lucky to live in a time when I can connect with people I know and people I hope to know even though they are thousands of miles beyond Stockholm. Not that it's a habit to express my thanks. As Garrison Keillor explains in Salon, "Truly we should be thankful. And we do try to be. But the English language is so rich in terms of complaint and insult and groaning and rather sparse in the Exaltation Dept., so the Lord doesn't get praised as He should. Instead, we bellyache, we kvetch, we get our undies in a bunch. After all, we're descended from people who considered rejoicing to be bad luck: It tempts fate."
I won't be eating my turkey until Saturday. Between now and then I'll tempt fate by pondering a few of my many blessings, which include a complete absence of bombs and toxic chemicals. My family has also been spared the difficulties faced by many others, including a refugee from Sudan and a solider beaten and robbed on American soil.
So I'm part of a lucky bunch. I hope you are, too. And should our luck come to an abrupt end, at least we don't have to worry about bone-eating snot-flower worms inhabiting our bones. Some other worms may find a home there but not those. Happy holiday!
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2005
Stockholm: The Darkest Season
We had a lovely autumn but autumn is over. I took the photo above on November 7. On Saturday the first snow arrived, a glittery respite from the gray gray gray atmosphere created by the skeletal trees and the sun's stubborn refusal to rise at a decent hour and its unseemly haste to disappear entirely too early. Did I mention how gray it is? (And now the snow is melting. Yuck.)
The change in season means the national candle fetish is in full swing. This morning my kid and I munched our cereal by candlelight. I think it's the Swedish way of transforming an environment that could termed suicidally depressing into "cosy" and "warm." Swedes don't usually string up Christmas lights anywhere but on a tree. But I saw white Christmas lights everywhere during a February visit to Anchorage once and it was a swell idea. So this week I'll be stringing lights on just about anything not moving, so consider yourself warned.
With winter comes the need for winter boots, natch. The kid's boots are busted so we'll be buying new ones this afternoon. My old boots were fine--except for the zippers. The pull tabs were crap and disintegrated last season. (This despite the fact that in 1913 a Swede, Gideon Sundback, developed the modern zipper, the one with metal teeth. Where's the national pride in Sweden's rich zipper history?) Paper clips make lousy pull tabs, it turns out, and fall apart quickly but not before poking holes in your fingers when you pull up the zippers. Mr. Too Tall, my better half, suggested key rings. It will never work, I thought, but I tried it this morning and he was right.
There's an advantage to such wacky pull tabs. When you visit a friend and leave your boots in the hall (in the big pile of boots that are heaped in hallways in homes and schools all over Sweden this time of year), it's much easier to find them again on your way out. One time I had to find my boots in a collection of twelve or so pairs of black footware at a student performance and it was a bigger pain than you might imagine. Think black carry-on on an airport carosel of black carry-ons and you've got the idea. I'm ridiculously pleased that I won't have that problem now. Assuming the rest of the boots hold up!
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:36 AM | Comments (1)
May 28, 2005
Five Facts About Robbie Branscum
My mother died eight years ago today, a few weeks shy of her sixty-third birthday. (When she was close to forty, mom decided to cut three years off her age so I had a funny conversation with the kind New York Time reporter who wrote her obituary. I hadn't realized mom had fudged her birthday, while he was surprised to discover a reference book on authors had the wrong date.) Eight years ago my grief was so fresh and sharp I felt nearly blinded but the pain has eased into a dull throb. I think of my mother nearly every day. It's hard not to feel cheated but at least mom had the luxury of dying at home during a nap, perhaps dreaming of a luscious meal since she drifted off to sleep during one of KQED's Saturday cooking shows.
At mom's funeral, one of her friends thought I was disrespectful by highlighting the fact that she had never finished eighth grade. He didn't understand that I was amazed and proud of the self-described hillbilly from the sticks, a self-taught single mother on welfare who transformed a powerful storytelling talent into twenty-one published novels. That's a fact to be proud of, not hide.
Here are five facts about Robbie Branscum.
1. She was a kick-ass mom. My mother loved me fiercely and did what she could to meet my needs even though we were poor. Here's one example: When I was 13, my plastic glasses were the opposite of fashionable. All the cool kids--hell, all the kids--had groovy wire rims but we were welfare trash with no money, and the state would only pay for new glasses if there was something wrong with the ones I had. Gotta say, that seems like a reasonable policy to me now that I'm a middle-aged taxpayer. At the time, though, I was convinced my outsider status would worsen. So one day after school I sat on mom's bed in the living room to explain the problem, then wallowed in a teary hole of self-pity.
"Let me have your glasses," mom said. I gave her my glasses. She put them on the floor, stepped down hard, then handed me the pieces. "Let's go get you some new ones," she said. My mother became my hero that afternoon. I am a good girl: I color inside the lines, I stop at red lights, I keep the mattress tag intact. It would never, ever occur to me to stage an eyewear accident. But my mother had suffered from a childhood of poverty herself, a much more damaging poverty in the Arkansas hills where she was raised by a resentful grandmother who preferred other grandkids and gave mom ugly dark granny boots instead of the dreamy white majorette boots she craved for so long. This was mom's chance to rewrite that story. (Thanks, mom.)
2. She had a generous heart and was deeply religious. My mom would give people practically everything she had (and sometimes stuff that I had, which I didn't much appreciate at the time) if they were needier than we were. As a young married couple, my parents used to pick up hobos, bring them home for a good meal, then send them off with a camp quilt to keep them warm during the cold winter months. Mom befriended fans and would-be writers and lavished them with support and attention. And mom was thoughtful. When she had a stroke just before the birth of my daughter, who happens to be adopted, mom kept it a secret and made my sisters and other family members promise not to tell me so my husband and I could concentrate on our new baby instead of worrying about her health.
3. Mom was funny and laughed hard and often. She was happy to be the butt of her own jokes. "Remember, beauty is only skin deep but ugly goes clear to the bone," she would say and then burst into laughter. After the stroke impaired her short-term memory mom told me, "it's been a real money-saver. I read the same book over and over again and enjoy it every time."
4. Elevators, escalators, didn't matter: mom was afraid of anything that went up. As a country gal who grew up barefoot, she was never comfortable in cities, formal clothing, or places more than two floors high. Once she traveled to San Francisco for a meeting with an editor on one of the top floors of a downtown skyscraper but never made it. She fled the elevator on the second or third floor and the editor had to come down and meet with her in the ladies room.
5. She was a kick-ass writer. Mom never forgot how it felt to be a child. She remembered every slight, every insult, every joy, and every pleasure and communicated all of it so vividly that her books are like a direct flight back to childhood. Also, it's impossible to read one of mom's books and not get hungry. The rich descriptions of the food in her books makes your mouth water, even if you've never ever craved pinto beans and corn bread in buttermilk.
A few critics thought her prose too purple but not the folks who gave her awards, not the kids who eagerly read her books, and not the teachers who still recommend them. (I just found this from a 1990 review of a different author: "At its best, Grove's tale calls to mind the poignant, pithy novels of Robbie Branscum and Zilpha Keatley Snyder.")
Here's the preface to "The Girl." This autobiographical novel, about an abused and nameless eleven-year-old girl, is her finest work:
"The sun beat down hot orange, turning the red dirt clay blood color. The hollow was a bowl of steam where sweat ran down you day and night, your clothes in the day wet and clinging, the nights you'd be naked. Frogs croaked in unceasing supplication for rain. Trees rustled dryly, dust floating in little lazy puffs from their dusty leaves.
"From the knee-high, thirsty dead grass came the rattle of an angry snake. Other snakes, water moccasin and diamondback, dripped poison, blindly striking at all who came near them. Dogs dug deep in the earth to find coolness, tongues red, dripping, sides heaving, and sometimes they went mad from rabies or the heat. Fat hens made dust beds in the yard with their wings. Roosters halfheartedly looked for worms. Two black tumblebugs rolled a ball of cow shit between them, one pulling, the other pushing. Inside the small ball were their eggs, and they'd roll the ball until the eggs were hatched.
"Old women with arthritic knees knelt stiffly to pray. Men with skins burned to whang leather lifted red-rimmed eyes worriedly to the sky. It wasn't hell, just another dog-days August summer in Arkansas."
Want to read more? Nearly all of her books are out of print but many can still be found in school and public libraries all across the country. (Of course, you can also buy used copies online.) Happy reading!
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 11, 2005
How to Travel: A Three-Part Tutorial
Part I: Stockholm to Newark on SAS
Unzip the turquoise Gulf Air flight kit a friend gave you and pull out yellow foam ear plugs and turquoise ear phones. Stuff the foam plugs as deeply into your ears as possible. Put on the ear phones and plug them into the arm rest. Find the Classical Light channel and adjust it to full volume. Put on your turquoise eye mask to block terror-producing glimpses of airplane parts that move during flight.
As the plane prepares to take off, run through your repertoire of calming slogans:
Airplanes sound like this during takeoff.
Everything is normal.
It’s not fun if you can’t feel it.
Remember to exhale and inhale and exhale again before passing out. When a loud ping indicates that seat belts are no longer required, keep your belt on but relax for the next several hours. Panic at seven hours into the eight-and-a-half-hour flight when the plane descends abruptly. Return internal organs to their proper positions as pilot explains that unexpected 150-knot winds caused the dip. Refuse to join Swedish passengers in mild chuckles of relief. As pilot prepares to land, tighten seatbelt to create 25-inch hips and brace feet against floor. Crank up music again in hopes of drowning out sounds of inevitable crash landing. After wheels hit ground, unclench jaw, open eyes, embrace rush of gratitude for yet another miraculous escape from near-certain death.
Part 2: Newark to Salt Lake City on Delta
Frantically try to locate soothing classical music. Settle for Beatles channel. Curse Delta for inexplicable dead air during most taxing part of takeoff. Bitterly regret decision to leave newly purchased copy of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life in Brooklyn and wonder if the breathing exercise supposedly contained in the book actually quells anxiety as advertised. Begin emergency calming action by visualizing a rushing river. Silently chant "yellow raft on blue water" over and over and over. When Beatles channel restarts, start breathing again. Rue the banality of your fear. Bemoan your lack of originality. Exhausted, give up berating yourself and relax until angst-ridden landing.
Part 3: Salt Lake City to Grand Junction on Sky West
Wonder how twenty passengers can fit into an airplane the size of a bath toy. Feel dismay deepen at realization there is no music system to ease nerve-wracking ascent. Stuff ears with foam, cover ears with hands, close eyes, then do best Bill Gates impression by moaning slightly and rocking from side to side. Marvel that foam-and-hand combination blocks out much of the engine roar but none of the loud, annoying chatter by a woman who speaks nonstop for the entire 45-minute flight to a man you think is her husband but turns out to be a saintly stranger named Richard.
Have your fears about small planes confirmed as toy vehicle lurches or staggers or stutters or whatever the hell it is that balsa-and-rubber-band concoctions do after they’re wound up and spun off. Miss your husband and daughter very much and wonder what kind of memorial service they will give you. Regret inability to document pithy last words. Recall recent trip to water park and imagine daughter on lap. In your mind’s eye, the two of you rush down a water slide, squealing. The image makes you laugh. The plane shudders and your smile flickers briefly but does not disappear. "It’s no fun if you can’t feel it," you tell yourself. And, for a moment, you believe it.
Optional Travel Accessories
*Six genial laughing gals, middle-aged New Jersey residents and members of Outdoor Singles on their way to a Hawaiian cruise.
*A thirteen-month-old baby with tiny, perfect teeth and a solemn way of shaking her head in agreement with anything you say.
*Two tiny blue flowers your dad plucks from his front yard and hands you in the car on the way to the airport. Once there, he gives you a big hug goodbye. Your dad is nearly 75 and still handsome. His white hair is straight and hangs past his shoulders. His head is obscured by the Sheraton baseball cap you gave him the first day in Grand Junction. He's worn it nonstop ever since. "Come again," your dad says, and grins. "Next time, bring lots of money."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack