Sacred Pool

Pools are central to some of the best memories I have of being a kid.  The indoor pool at Anna Hiss Gymnasium at UT with its tile wall mosaic of goldfish and seaweed was my first church.  Floating on my back near the bottom of Northwest Pool and looking up through my goggles at the pebbled surface of the water under a sudden summer shower is the closest I've ever gotten to complete, other-worldly peace.  The pool was an escape from heat and gravity and the long, boring stretches of summer afternoons, and underwater I felt like I shed the too-tight skin of awkward childhood and became a perfect expression of light, sound, and movement.  Because of this, dirty or otherwise unpleasant pool experiences offend me on an almost religious level.  They are blasphemous, and I leave them feeling indignant and more than a little hurt.

Yesterday was such an experience.  The lap pool at the base is lovely and long, one end lying in the shade of an awning in the late afternoon and the other stretching out toward the arched green glass of the gym's panoramic windows.  Its water is most often clear and cool, the better to watch all the elaborate tattoos slice by on the muscled backs of sailors preparing for their swim qualifications.

But lately the air has been a dirty, woolen brown from wildfires in other parts of the state, and since the Central Valley sits low between two mountain ranges everything settles here like silt at the bottom of an ashtray.  Usually Pants and I leave the bedroom window open at night to let in the cool desert breeze, but we've had to stop this month because now the nights are hot and the mornings smell like a cheap, roadside motel.  I had hoped that the pool would provide some relief from this overwhelming sense of suffocation.  Instead, I found myself sliding into a tepid, cloudy greenness that felt exactly like the air, only flabbier.  Beneath the surface, I saw nothing with clarity except the motes in my eyes and the fog collecting beneath my goggle lenses, and back on the surface I found myself coated in a greasy film of sunscreen and muck.  Fat red wasps lighted on the surface of my lane as I paddled back and forth, trying to get up some speed so that at least the air would cool me when my head and arms popped up.

That's when the little boy hopping in and out of the first lap lane trying to learn to dive caught my attention.  He was summer brown, gangly, and had light blond hair buzzed close to his over-sized head like velvet, and he was afraid.  His mom sat in the shade of a table umbrella nearby and his sisters, two brunettes, one older and one younger, leapt in and out of the water in rotation with him, except they both dove straight and beautiful from the racing platform and he tipped stiffly and hesitantly from the concrete.  Soon, mom and the girls were ready to go, but the boy wailed from the pool's side that he wanted to stay until he could dive.  I stopped my laps and lounged with Pants at the shady shallow end of our lane for a while and when I started swimming again, I noticed that mom and the girls were gone and now a giant man with a blond buzz cut stood on the shore behind the boy with his hands on his hips.  He looked like his shirt was stuffed with couch cushions, and the green glaze of the pool reflected from his steel-framed glasses.  

"Oh my God!" he shouted, "What is the problem here?  Just put your head down and jump!" 

I slowed my pace and watched.  In between dips beneath the surface and the roar of bubbles, I caught more of the one-sided exchange.

Man: Jump!

Boy: [arms pointed overhead]...

Man: JUMP!

Boy: ...

Man: I've had a long day here and I'm tired and I'm in no mood to play games, so let's go!  Come on!

Boy: ...

Man: CHRIST!  It's not hard.  There's nothing to be afraid of.  Do I need to hang you over the water by your ankles to show you that?

Boy: [tentative, creaking jump, more of a belly flop]

Man: No!  That's not a dive!  You have to jump out first.  Do it again!

Boy: I'm scared.

Man: Why?

Boy: I don't know.

At this point I've pulled up short at the pool's opposite end again and stopped Pants to watch the exchange.  He has a sense of shame and privacy and is less the voyeur, and so quickly resumes swimming, but I stand and watch.

Man: If you're really scared you should be able to tell me clearly what you're afraid of.  You should have the words for that.  'I don't know' isn't good enough.  'I don't know' [high, sissy voice] isn't an answer!

Boy: [on the bank again, head hanging, continuously wiping his face] ...

Man: God.  We're going to be here all night.

Boy: ...

Man: Go on!  You've got to learn this! You're not going to split your head open!  You could dive all the way straight down and you'd never hit your head.  Go!

Boy: [tentative jump, curved belly flop.]

The Boy continues to dive at least ten more times, each time the same jump, each time the same loud criticism.  Finally:

Man: JESUS!  Let's go.  C'mon, get out.  This is useless. [Man stomps over to table and grabs Boy's towel and returns to throw it over boy's head, covering his face completely as he comes out of the pool.  Boy stands for a long moment covered by the towel and Man stomps off.  My heart breaks.]

All this time I've been thinking about having kids and making tiny little plans in a secret room in my mind about what I'll name them and what nicknames I'll come up with for those names and stories I'll tell them and places I'll try to take them on vacation.  I know the last thing an exasperated parent wants to hear is advice or criticism from the childless, but I wanted so much to erase that whole scene, to call the boy "kiddo" and give him a hug and tell him it's OK not to learn it all in one day, that leaping headfirst off something is scary because it's an evolutionary thing-- people wouldn't have been around long if that felt natural and fun right away.  I guess I could see the man's twisted little point too-- kids need to learn to be tough, or face their fears or something.  But how he thought screaming and bullying was going to do it is beyond me.  

Mostly I saw that exchange and worried for my future kids.  Pants and I have our weaknesses--though not screaming asshole bullies, we are pretty high-achieving stressed out people.  We're perfectionists.  He sees it more clearly in me than himself, and I see it more in him, but we'll both agree it's there.  I know we'll try very hard not to pressure our kids, or get all hyper-involved in their development and activities, but nobody's perfect and patterns tend to repeat.

I just don't want to ruin the pool for my kid.  That at least should be sacred.

2 Summer Wrongs

Yesterday on the drive home two wrong things happened, and both were perpetrated by the afternoon public radio host who sounds exactly like Rowlf, the piano playing dog from the Muppets.  (Click on that link and imagine him saying "Temperatures for the Central Valley tonight and tomorrow night..." and then a long string of Native American names and 3-digit numbers). First, he played Camille Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre, which I've always gleefully associated with the month of October and Halloween, but here he was playing it in July in the middle of a smoke-choked, reddish brown afternoon in the desert with the sky so hazy and flat that the sun was a big bloody eye glaring down at us all.  Wrong.  The second was to follow the music with an "Excessive Heat Advisory" effective until six o'clock the next morning.  112 apparently qualifies as excessive, which was news to me since I'd had heat rash in a ring around my neck for a week and wake up every morning in a glaze of sweat.

Back to the music.  Of all the things I've forgotten from elementary school, like basic math and how to avoid girl bullies, I've never forgotten music education.  I had two teachers, appropriately named for their personalities, Mrs. Rust and Miss Bell.  Mrs. Rust had black hair, a beaked Roman nose, hissed her s's and played the violin like she had rigor mortis.  Miss Bell was soft, cerebral, and giggly, and used to get teared up when she'd play us certain pieces of classical music on the record player.  

Both played classical pieces for us and explained their history, but Mrs. Rust stopped at teaching us annoyingly unforgettable memory lyrics to the main themes, (example for the Danse Macabre's main theme: "H, A, double L, O, W, double E, N spells Halloween!"  Saint-Saens would have puked.)  Miss Bell, though far from immune to the memory lyrics charge (Handel's Water Music Suite was thusly raped: "This.  Is.  The horn pipe!  From Water Mu-sic!  From Water Mu-sic!  By George Frederic Handel... drip-drip-drip-drop it goes, drip-drip-drip-drop it goes!"), made more of an effort to tell us about the sordid and twisted lives of the composers.  

I became one of devoted pack of nerds under Miss Bell's sway and was entered into the city-wide Music Memory competition, the chief benefits of which were after-school music history lessons and free mix tapes of classical music to memorize.  I found I had a knack for this because of my natural tendency to close my eyes and picture an accompanying story to any music I heard.  My mother played records in the house quite a bit for anything from cleaning binges to afternoon quiet time, and she had favorites for particular moods.  I remember lots of Robert Cray blues, Linda Ronstadt's "You're No Good," the Police album Synchronicity, The Pointer Sisters, and lots of Gershwin, and I used to walk my Barbie dolls along the window sills and make them dance and fly to the music.

So I made up long stories for each piece that had little to do with their titles or themes.  Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was a favorite, but difficult to memorize because each segment was different from the next (here, Mussorgsky would snort with derision and point out that that was the whole point).  Edvard Grieg's Pier Gynt: Mountain King came with such a completely fucked up folk lore story about goblins and ripped out eyes and that I decided I couldn't do any better and devoted myself to imagining empty sockets and feeling your way in the dark while being chased.  Aaron Copland's Rodeo was easily my favorite and lent itself to a detailed vision of my personal conquering of the West, but in a way that edited out Indian murders and included long galloping scenes through golden fields.  Occasionally I would rope something, and staid pioneer mothers would clutch their throats in awe.

Despite weeks of preparation spacing out with my Walkman, I performed less than memorably at the Music Memory competition.  The event was held at the university auditorium, and for some reason I was not properly briefed (or was wrapped in fantasy during the briefing), and thus was not expecting an actual live orchestra to play us little snippets of the pieces.  I couldn't stop gawking at the musicians and wanting to go up and poke their instruments, and so I had trouble actually listening.  When I finally did close my eyes, I discovered for the first time my intense irritation with individual conductors' interpretations of tempo and dynamics.  That part's supposed to be faster!  This should be quieter!  Now you're rushing it!  Damn it, stop!  It was like seeing the lame movie version of your favorite book.

The problem was that most of the renditions I'd memorized were conducted by Leonard Bernstein, whose style I've loved even after listening to many others over the years.  He's histrionic.  He slashes at the air and pushes the trumpet section to the edge of control during accelerandos in Rodeo and then just as suddenly slams the lid on it and picks out a tiny oboe melody like he's knitting lace.  Hearing a piece he's conducted and then hearing the same one conducted by someone else is like looking at a whole gallery of high-saturation photographs and then having to sit through someone's tour of their frayed wallet photos.  It's frustrating.  It feels like violence has been done to the original piece, which, ironically, is probably the impression many of the composers had if they lived long enough to hear Bernstein get a hold of one of their pieces.  

This frustration with interpretation was part of the reason I started playing the clarinet.  Partly I loved music so much that I wanted to be in it, and sitting in the front row of a huge band or orchestra is a great way to do that.  You feel the louder parts vibrating up the legs of your chair, and there's a smell to it, too-- valve oil for brass instruments smells sharp and metallic, cork grease for the joints in woodwinds smells woody, and the taste of a good reed is somewhere between pasta and wood glue.  But you can also be as cheesy and dramatic as you want to be when you can actually play the notes and understand all the weird little ticks and slashes and apostrophes that denote grace notes and pauses and read the Italian directions-- pianissimo (very quiet), allegro (walking speed), ritardando (gradually slowing down), fortissimo (very strongly), saltando (jumping), and one of my favorites, sussurando (lightly, whispering).  

In fact, this was one of my greater strengths as a musician.  I was never as technically precise or skilled as other musicians I played with, mostly because I got bored with repetition and scales and theory, but I learned to play up my strengths of clear tone and dynamic interpretation.  Soulful, but not particularly skilled-- that's me.

Anyway, I heard the Danse Macabre on public radio in the strangling heat of a red-brown afternoon, and then the way too permissive definition of "excessive," and both of these things inspired me to retreat to the base lap pool for the first time this summer in an effort to rinse off the wrongness.  What happened there gets a whole separate post.

Otter Escape

Some snapshots from the glorious Monterey weekend:

On a windy, fog-swept curve of Highway 1 on Friday morning, we passed a sign that said something about elephant seals and the possibility of viewing them, and I shouted for the first of many times over the course of the weekend, "Holy shit!  Pull over!"  Pants and I spent the next half hour standing like little kids on the slats of a wooden boardwalk fence and gawking at a beach full of elephant seals.  Rather, spaced out clots of elephant seals with one massive, flabby nosed male per group, presiding noisily over a harem of bored, sleepy females.  Less fortunate males bumped chests in the surf and angled stubby yellow teeth at each other's necks, or just hollered mournfully into the waves.  Little ground squirrels skittered in the sand around the sleeping females and yellow flowers bobbed in the breeze.  Off to the north, the fires of Big Sur burned apace and would block our trek to the state beach with the 80-foot waterfall and the sea caves, but we didn't know that for sure yet and instead just enjoyed scrolling along the coast under a thin gray scrim of boiling fog.

We checked into our hotel, where the Indian proprietor made a series of heavily accented nudge-nudge wink-wink comments about us enjoying our honeymoon, and we quickly figured out that something had been lost in translation when my mom was making her long-distance bail out on our reservation, but we did get a couple of free synthetic logs for the room's little fireplace out of it.  That night, delicious fried pub food and fireworks and a late night viewing of Jaws on HBO in advance of our kayak trip at Monterey Bay Kayaks.

The next morning we missed our wake-up call and woke in a panic, throwing on clothes and grabbing wallets, Pants inhaling a free continental breakfast muffin while I scrolled through recent calls on my phone trying to find the number for the kayak tour place.  We got there, miraculously, in plenty of time, but I made my sleepy "we're on our way!" call anyway.  The tour was easily the best thing that's happened to us in years.  Pants and I found ourselves remarkably adept at maneuvering a two-person kayak except for several moments when one or both of us got so excited at seeing an otter or a harbor up close that we nearly whacked each other with the paddles or tipped the boat trying to scootch around in our seats to alert the other.

One thing I learned from our guide about otters that I didn't know is that they basically live in a skin bag that's only attached at the face and the feet.  In other words, if an otter has an itch on its back, it can tug its fur around to the front and scratch it.  We saw quite a few engaged in this task and it was even more creepily human and cloyingly cute than when they smash clams against rocks on their chests.  Also, they've figured out how to make an armpit pouch out of loose skin in which to store their favorite clam-bashing rock or even extra clams they're too sleepy to eat, and learning this detail nearly made me yank out my kayak skirt and tip into the water to try and join them.  I could wrap my foot in a twist of kelp and float on my back napping all day.  I think my otter resume is really impressive.

Also on the tour, the guide scooped up a little slug-like thing called a nudibranch, which I've found is a term that describes any number of crazy looking sea slugs, but out of the water this one looked like something you'd cough up after a long night in a smoky club.  In the water, though, it suddenly bloomed into a tiny yellow forest of spiny tentacles and had an electric blue racing stripe along its sides.  I was enchanted and spent the next 20 minutes paddling with my face hanging inches from the water looking for more of them and trying out different memory devices to remember the slug's name.  (I finally came up with this one: A naked person bearing a pine bough = nudey branch.  Done.)  

Also spotted and mentally tagged on our wildlife tour: harbor seals in all different colors (apparently they've given up camouflage since their last major predator, the grizzly bear, got chased off by encroaching highways and strip malls and are developing ever more flamboyant coats), sea lions, cormorants (black diving ducks who can reach alarming depths in their search for crabs, and who then come topside to paint coastal rocks white with their poo), brown pelicans... wait, I have to stop in the list to talk about the pelicans because there's no way it'll fit into a parenthetical aside.  The brown pelican is a diving bird, but this appears to be a stubborn lifestyle choice rather than a function for which nature has designed them.  A whole row of them sat on the bank preening and making leathery, dinosaur noises as our guide continued in his thick Australian accent to tell me one of the coolest bits of animal trivia I've ever heard.  In order not to break bones in their poorly built faces and heads, pelicans learn through their rough adolescence to close one eye while diving to offset the pressure of the impact on their skulls.  Over time, the eye left open goes blind, and the pelican has to switch.  Younger ones who are slow on the uptake often show evidence of many facial breaks before they finally catch on to the eye trick, and ancient pelicans are often completely blind.  

I listened to all of this with Pants in the back of the kayak quietly saying Al Pacino's great drunk-ass line from Scarface, "Fly, pelican!" even though he's sitting in his bubble bath watching flamingos on TV.  It nearly made me snort laughing.

The tour was fabulous, and later when we made it to the Monterey Aquarium, the throngs of dazed looking people using their mega-strollers like cattle guards and leaving the flash on in their photos didn't even make me hyperventilate, which is new.  We'd already seen the animals we really wanted to see, only out in the water next to us.  Don't get me wrong, I'd love to go back to the Aquarium and really take my time through the jellyfish exhibit, but I might just wait for the next flu pandemic or Super Bowl to do it.

Next up was wine tasting at a place with incredible harbor views, but Pants and I are classless and refuse to accept that you would pay to spit out alcohol.  We got goofy and pointed loudly at dolphins leaping in the harbor, but everyone else managed to miss them and the bartender started pouring smaller samples.  We left to wander around along the coast to a place called Lover's Point where Pants suddenly got anti-Hallmark and refused to climb out on the rocks with me for shmoopy photos.  I went anyway and took pictures of the fat yellow starfish clinging to the bottom of a rock near the surf's edge.  I wanted to climb around more, but after surprising my second couple in a rather advanced embrace, I scuttled back ashore, and Pants and I continued on to look at a lighthouse on Point Pinos, which quickly morphed into Point Penis jokes.  Dinner that night was at a steakhouse; sea life suddenly looked way too friendly and familiar.

The Old Monterey Cafe on Alvarado Street is the place to go for breakfast.  I had a spinach, avocado, and sun-dried tomato omelette and Pants had eggs Benedict with the eggs poached open in boiling water the old-fashioned way so that they had white comet tails.  Like the ridiculous gluttons we are, we also split cinnamon raisin pecan pancakes bigger than both of our faces.  Every flavor was bright and distinct and perfect, but part of that may have been the cool harbor breeze coming in through their front window.  If you ever get the chance to eat breakfast with little wisps of fog coming in by your feet, do it.

On our way home, we did the famous 17 Mile Drive through Pebble Beach, but the experience was marred by our own shouts of "Assholes!  How can these people live here all the time?  I bet they get bored with massive views of the Pacific and seals in their back yards."  

Back out on HWY 68 heading to Salinas it was Pants's turn to insist suddenly on pulling over, and this time it was for the Laguna Seca Raceway, which I'd never heard of.  We climbed a 16% grade in my little grumbling little Honda and popped out over an incredible winding race track carved into the golden hills that hunch over Monterey and mark the dividing line between coastal fog and blazing bright California sun.  There's apparently a summer camp for grown men here called the Skip Barber Racing School where they reach in and yank out the 11-year-old boy buried inside and teach him how to be a race car driver.  Pants and I stood at one of the hillside campgrounds directly overhanging the track and watched these lucky men zip backwards in time to before the belly fat and the gray hair.  I was about to make some snarky comment about this, but then I caught sight of Pants clinging to the chain link fence with both hands, wide-eyed and baring his teeth in that way that says, "MUST.  DO.  THIS."  Maybe once he's got his own little spare tire and our phantom children are out of college.

The rest of the drive home was a windy race through the coastal mountain range on 198 that we'd skimmed south of on the way to Monterey.  Laguna Seca was still beating in his veins because Pants chirped the tires a few times until I reminded him mountain lions would probably find our bodies first if we launched into the canyon.  Another two hours and then suddenly, it happened: the road slammed down flat and refused to curve or rise even a little and the thick, stinky wool sweater of air pollution drew itself tightly over us.  Back in the Central Valley.  106 degrees.  Crops and right angles and monster pick-ups as far as the eye can see.

But we soon recovered Abby from the "dog jail" (her term), and surprised Linus that we had neither died not abandoned him, and soon we were covered again in a light haze of sweat and dog lick and pet fur, and after such a great vacation, even that felt OK.  Since then, Pants has been in the best mood I've seen him in for a long, long time.  He makes up more songs and yesterday I came in from the run from hell to see him making me dinner and cuing up newly pirated music for me on the iPod.  A little escape together made all the difference in the world.

Theft and Independence

I'm trying to imagine the look on the face of whoever stole my credit card number as they roll up to the Selma, California Wienerschnitzel this morning for what has become an almost daily pilgrimage.  Their likely agenda, based on Pants's and my recent profanity-laced examination of the last three weeks of our online credit card statement:

11:30 a.m.: roll out of bed and throw on some flip-flops for a hearty drive-through breakfast at Wienerschnitzel.

Noon: hit up Walmart for the day's first $400 shopping spree.  [Suspected purchases: stacks of bad Top 40 cd's, XL yellow tube top, power tools, crate of Huggies for miscellaneous spawn, Natural Lite beer]

2:00: stop by Valero to gas up the monster truck and buy cigs and Slim Jims

2:30: lunch at Wendy's-- mmm, Baconater!

3:00: refresh the deodorant for the $300 trip to Bed, Bath, & Beyond. [Suspected purchases: grilling tools, black satin sheets, industrial strength margarita blender and mix, Waterford crystal goblets from which to quaff Boone's Strawberry Hill]

4:00: snack at Taco Bell

5:00: nap back at the apartment, followed by unintelligible text message flirting with cousin's ex-husband, followed by romantic tryst with same when he delivers three large Domino's pizzas

7:00: big night out for two at neighboring town's Walmart for another $350. [Suspected purchases: pregnancy tests and more power tools]

It's gone on like this nearly every day since mid-June, when I made my mid-month payment and gave myself a little pat on the back for almost having the balance of our debt completely paid down.  When I skipped into the study last night to make our July 1st payment, the one that should have killed the debt-gorgon once and for all, I did a cartoon double-take at the ridiculous number sitting right next to "Outstanding Balance."  And my first thought wasn't even "fraud," but rather "Wow, I suck!  How could I have spent so much at Starbucks?"  I mean, I know my coffee is overpriced, but to mistake thousands of dollars of outright theft for a few lattes shows just how deep my corporate coffee guilt runs.

Then came my second thought, which did an even bigger swan dive off the logic cliff: "Pants has a secret life!"  The slimy bass thumpings of titty bars echoed in my ears for two awful seconds before my brain finally let go of its first-line fiction impulses and picked up the blunter, homelier tool of Factual Examination.  Together, he and I clicked through the pages of account activity and put together the story of a truly pathetic thief, one whose diet will likely kill her before the consequences of her actions catch up to her.  We called and had the account closed, and Pants struggled to control the rage in his voice as he ticked off each fraudulent amount.

I have a Virgin Mary figurine in my kitchen window, partly to remind me of my mom and grandmother, and partly as a reminder of the Austrian mobile shrine operators I interviewed this spring when they set up shop on an intersection by the highway.  After we killed the card, I went out to scrub off a cookie sheet and rinse out some wine glasses and I asked Mary quietly if she could help me be sincere in forgiving the person who had stolen our credit.  I mean, how low must things be if you're eating fast food three times a day and stealing from Walmart?  I know times are rough, people are losing their homes, and gas prices are high.  But things have to change in this country, everything from the way we farm and ship our foods all over the place to the way we fund public transportation, healthcare, and childcare.  Change is never comfortable, and it can push some people to the edge before they learn to adapt.

Then Pants came out with the bad news: we may have to cancel our weekend trip to Monterey, the one I've been planning and looking forward to since before he left for the last month-long detachment.  The one I've been squirreling money away for, the one I've been picturing cinematically in my head, the first one we would have taken alone together since before we were married.  The new credit cards won't be here for another week, and there's no way we'd have enough cash to cover all the first-of-the-month expenses and a trip to the coast.  We've put off taking a honeymoon for nearly four years now because flight school and finances have kept us from it, and this little trip to the coast was going to be my way of nudging us back toward that goal.  Very few things can make me hiccup cry like a four-year-old, but this was one.  I put my head in my lap and bawled.

Then I thought of the thief again and my conversation with Mary and totally wanted to take it all back.  Liberal guilt be damned!  I was going to get to kayak with otters and now this hot dog-eating Walmart-scamming scum bag was going to make me spend the weekend in our white hot, dusty town watching tiny fireworks obscured by the smoke from wildfires miles away and drinking myself stupid.  It was too much.  So I did what I've always done when life sits on my chest and threatens to let its loogie drop on my face: I called my mom and cried.

Then heaven opened and she fronted me a loan until our new cards show up, and the film reel of Highway 1, crashing ocean waves, sea caves, and Cannery Row started up again.

Breathing easier and wiping away tears, I find myself eyeing my liberal guilt iron maiden again.  Maybe my thief doesn't have generous, financially secure parents who can make emergency loans.  Maybe my thief just has hungry kids and no education.  I could climb back in and start wedging myself up against the spikes of being privileged again in a world where many people aren't-- but then I realized how much easier, how much more automatic, this feels when I know I'm still going to get to go to Monterey on Friday.  I'll bet if I was staying home and drinking budget beer in 110 degree, smoky-sky heat I'd feel a lot less charitable. I might even start hanging out at the Wienerschnitzel, angrily smoking Camels and looking for the fake Rachel.

Maybe it really is easier to forgive when we're lucky enough not to have to feel the injury too deeply or for too long-- and is that really forgiveness?  What about the karmic balance between a pick-up load of stolen goods and months of working and budgeting for a vacation?  I know this weekend is for celebrating our country's independence and waving the flag and feeling good about our fellow Americans, but I think I may narrow my scope a bit.  So happy Independence Day, my fellow countrymen, but mostly to those of you bearing up honestly under economic strain.

As for my thief: get some exercise-- that junk food'll kill you.