Summer School -- it is a reality here, and love is a ball by me

photo: "balls" by me (actually mini apples) but I like the mood. blurry or not.

WOW! I HAVE SO MUCH I I WANT TO DO RIGHT NOW!

It is crazy! So many things I choose to wish to do. Not things I have to do! What a great thing!

here is one:

I just entertained mself going back in time on another blog I write ( yes, as I have mentioned, I write elsewhere). I have been writing on this one since 1999 or 2000. I found a couple of entries I felt like posting here. The second part of this entry, posted in the same week, I particularly like. It is all of who I am and how we live. I wonder if I have posted it before, here. Don't tell me if I have. hahah!

So here goes:


DON'T KID YOURSELF: WE'RE ALL GOING BACK TO SCHOOL.

We all have figurative new backbacks and lunchboxes, and brand new pencils we are laying out and examining. We are all smelling the new paper smell of empty notebooks as it wafts toward our noses, and we are all getting sad...overexcited...overwhelmed...discombobulated.
This is so much harder than New Year's Eve--all that nonsense about "making New Year's resolutions": my New Year's resolution is always just to freaking MAKE IT THROUGH THE WINTER.
But this--THIS: THIS IS HARD, AND GOOD AT THE SAME TIME.
Go ahead--pick up that three pound weight and do a bicep curl...start writing that novel you have been putting off...clean the bedroom...
Oh, screw it. Forget the cleaning. hahaha
Anyway, even my doctors are calling and rescheduling and messing up right now in the excitement of the changing seasons.
Why, I just got a call from my gynecologist right before I sat down to type this. It went like this:
"Jean? This is Dr. K---r's nurse."
Jean: "And Dr. K---r would be...whom?" hahahaha.
We have a lot of doctors here. Apparently she is my gynecologist. Her nurse now knows point blank and baldly, the high esteem in which I hold her. Ahhh ptui.
She needed to reschedule. Oh fine, fine. Let them do as they wish. The last time this happened was when my pediatrician had a bad back. YooHoo, they are human!
I like this about them.
The docs have back to school-itis too...I am sure.

My kids have the new backpacks, yeah, with their intials on them this year. In athletic block type. Athletic block type is sturdy and square and perfrct for monograms.
I am not a monogram person, but backpacks are easy to lose, so I figured this was a good call...
When I was a kid, we carried our books in a pile to school...we didn't have backpacks. And all we had was a cigarbox for our rulers and pencils. But we decorated our personal cigarboxes and doodled on them over the year...
One year I DID get a bookcase to carry my books--it was a gift from my grandfather. He said to me: "All the models carry their shoes in bags like these in New York!"
It was supple, it was black kidskin, it was not meant for a 12 year old kid's books...it WAS meant for stillettos of the sort Audrey Hepburn would wear...and it was monogrammed, in gold.
I trashed it in one year, dammit.
I wish I had it, now.

I would, no doubt, load those books right back into it and start on back to school the same way I did then, so long ago, because in some ways, I HAVEN'T LEARNED A THING.

AND YOU KNOW WHAT? I AM STILL READY AND WAITING.

song for today:
summmer dreams, ripped at the seams...
but oh, oh those summer niiiiiiiiiiiiights...
from "GREASE "

Jean, hopelessly devoted to you all

LOVE IS A BALL

You throw it and it comes bouncing back.
If the other person can't throw it back for whatever reason, you get up and walk over and get it,
and you throw it again.
If they are incapable of throwing it back AGAIN,
you get up and go over and throw it to them again.
Over and over.
You always hope the person will learn to throw, but sometimes they simply can't
Two of my children can't throw terribly well, for example.
but they can SEE the ball.
And they would throw it if they could--this I know, for a fact.
I know a man whose son can barely even SEE the ball but the man throws the ball over and over and over
and retrieves it over and over and over.
feeling a little blue today, thinking about that,
but I know this feeling will pass.
Thinking today I am not Xena, Queen of the Warrior World, even if I like to think I am.
but
I am a woman with plenty of love and
I like to throw.
And I have no problem retrieving when it is required of me.
I can do this.

song for today:
I love you,
You love me
We're a happy family...

note on song for today:

one of my kids used to know that this song meant "bedtime", and as I held him and tenderly sang it to him (it's the "Barney Song") he would scratch the heck out of my face
hahahahhaha !

Jean the Bean