A few days ago I hiked up the Marin hill to an Obama precinct-leader’s house, where I picked up some promotional materials: “Women for Obama” bumper stickers for Lulu and her friend Esmeralda, a sign for my front yard, and a poster for the gecko’s cage. Gecka, normally complacent, got all excited about her new decoration. For a full five minutes she cruised back and forth trying to climb it. I’ve never seen her get so excited about a presidential candidate.
Unlike Gecka and me, my sister has been actively supporting Obama since the earliest days. Yesterday she took this photo of him in southeastern Pennsylvania, where the moment of truth has almost arrived. “I shook his hand, while holding a diaper, so he might touch it for posterity. I told him, ‘it’s clean’ and he laughed…” The other photo shows her with grandson Ryan at her local Obama HQ.
As I’ve told you, my younger daughter is minoring in animal science at college. Today in the livestock and dairy judging class, they did a unit on breeding-cattle. I asked her what she learned.
Lulu: I didn’t really learn anything new. Just changing priorities for what we want in our cows.
Ginna: How can I change my priorities for my cows if I don’t have any priorities or cows?
L: You don’t need to, because I changed my own priorities. For you.
G: What HAD your priorities been?
L: Muscle and finish (fat). That’s for market steers — the ones you wanna EAT.
G: And now?
L: With the female cattle, you want decent balance and structure and depth.
G: Why do I want a deep cow? I guess I’d want a balanced cow because I hate when they fall over. And structure is good, else they’re all floppy. Do we eat cows and bulls, both?
L: Presumably. The market steers were all guy cows though.
G: You’re, uh, studying animal science, you say?
L: I’m not using technical terms because I don’t WANNA. I would say bull, except the edible cattle we’d been looking at were fixed, so they weren’t too manly anymore.
Thirty years ago today I got married. I wonder if things would have turned out differently had we picked a more auspicious date than April Fool’s Day.
Yesterday I painted a little picture for my sister. It’s of a sad guinea pig. I love guinea pig lips. So does my sister.
Why is this pig sad? I don’t know. It’s just how it fell off my brush. Maybe it wishes it were a wrinkle-lipped bat. Possibly it doesn’t like what’s happening to Tibetan protesters and is bemused at the Chinese government’s accusation that the Dalai Lama is a “terrorist,” or grieving because the US death toll in Iraq has risen above 4000 and who knows how many Iraqis are dead. Maybe it wonders why we care that Elliot Spitzer kept his socks on. It could be discouraged that it’s odd-looking, that it hasn’t met a young fella with an accent, that it can’t speak Spanish, that it isn’t svelte even though it runs on its wheel all the time, that it can no longer point its toes properly when Irish dancing… Who can know what goes on inside the mind of a guinea pig?
But let’s talk about me: here’s a picture of a recent conference call I had with Noah and Stephen. Isn’t technology amazing? (Except the system crashed shortly after I snapped this photo.)
Mamma Ginna called me from West Virginia yesterday. She’s 94 now. She sounded very weak.
I’m hangin’ on, slowly, but I don’t know for how long — none of us know for how long — but I know mine can’t be too much longer. So I wanted to call you and tell you how I appreciate you thinking about me so often and so much. So I’m not gonna say ‘goodbye.’ I’m gonna say ’so long, we’ll talk to you later.’
Here’s a story Mamma Ginna told me last year, about Molly and the caterpillar:
