Word-Whacked

Hello all. I'm back from a long, leisurely vacation in Michigan. Upper lower Michigan. Just outside of Elk Rapids, to be more precise. On Grand Traverse Bay, to be even more exacting. Ahhh.

My parents have retired to this area after our family vacationed here for most of the past 35+ years. This area has always seemed like my geographical home. In my dreams, I still see (with alarming regularity) the landscape across the Bay from the cottages we rented every year. Didn't really mind when my parents sold the home they raised us in last year. Losing the Bay, losing up north? That I'd mind.

Each summer, we spent three weeks at Pine Hollow. Often, the same families rent cottages, year after year. Days were gloriously the same: breakfast, play in the water, lunch, play in the water, dinner, play in the water, bonfire, bed. The grownups seemed to spend all of their time on the beach, too. Working on your tan wasn't politically incorrect, nor considered dangerous. So that's what they did, in addition to reading copious amounts of books.

I've turned into my parents, which is no surprise to most of us as we age. I spend my vacations doing the same thing: reading and sitting in the sun. Only difference between my summer and my parent's summer? I wear sun screen and pretend to be unhappy when I brown.

So I am word-whacked. Book-dazed. Drunk on the written word--and I don't mean The Word. The whole world seems fuzzy after a week or two of constant reading. And I confess to spending very little time contemplating the world during this paper frenzy. So it was a bit crushing to my teeny weeny fuzzy-headed little spirit to encounter this week's stupidities: Pat Robertson and the Return of the War on Terror.

Apparently Pat apologized today, after calling for the assassination of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez earlier this week. That was after he denied saying "assassination", despite the fact it was caught on video tape. Always nice to catch the right wing looking as stupid as they sound to me.

Then your President takes a brief sabbatical from his sabbatical to speak to a group of vets, telling them we must stay the course to keep faith with those who have already died over there. "We owe them something," Mr. Bush said. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for." We owe soldiers who died in an errant war based on information full of lies and misdirection a continuation of that war with more deaths?

Is that the kind of logic they teach at Yale?

Well, I've been shaken out of my semantic stupor. I'm home and have bought groceries, registered children for school, sent teenage boy to driver's ed, and read my newsreader. Ah well. So summer goes. And so, too, goes my sense of calm and well-being.

Until tomorrow (truly!),
Liz