Boots and Blessings

I was not made for this world. My mother was. She was right before the Boomers, the tail end of the Silent Generation. In some ways, she and I, her late-in-life baby, can relate more to each other than either of us can with my siblings, her Boomer first batch of kids. There are many similarities between the Silents and the Gen X-ers, bridges between larger and louder generational cohorts. But in other ways, we are different. We were made for different worlds. She was raised to be a wife and mother. If she wanted a career, she could be a teacher, nurse, or secretary. White middle class southern culture raised her to wear no white after Labor Day, to accept her place and be grateful for having a good man to provide for her, to adapt her interests to the hobbies of her man, to sit with her ankles crossed and her knees touching. I was raised for a different world than she was. In fact, I was raised for a different world than my 16-years-older-than-me Boomer sister, who grew up wat...

If only certain people had been given a ukulele when they were young. Little Charlie Grassley, plucking out a tune. Young Lindsey Graham, strumming "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Who knows what might have been different? If they'd been given something fun and encouraged to be happy ... Is this an appropriate time to talk about happiness? With all the cruelty we're seeing, all the trauma that is being triggered?  Abso-ukulele-lutely. Happiness can't be something that we put on pause when things get bad. Happiness isn't what we get after we make the world better, it's one of the tools we'll use to make the world better. Our founding fathers enshrined it in the Declaration of Independence, saying that it was self-evident that we all had a right to pursue happiness. Well, actually, they said that men had that right, and what they meant was that white men had that self-evident right, but I'm NOT GOING TO GO THERE THIS WEEK. In setting it...