roses are just as nice today

It's been more than a week since my last update, which I just know threw all both of you my faithful readers into a tailspin. My apologies. Actually, the passage of time washed under me mostly unnoticed during the great END OF SCHOOL YEAR AND BASEBALL SEASON week, while I was up to my eyebrows making party cookies and buying gifts and attending ceremonies. On the last day of school, I picked my two kids up after tearfully clinging to their teachers and begging them to move up a grade next year (quit laughing, sister and mom teachers), then walked them out to the van admist lines of teachers and staff blowing bubbles and party horns. LOL. I love this school. We then had our own personal celebration with K and her two kids at Ben and Jerry's ice cream. It was raining, so Q finished up his milk shake then spent 30 minutes dancing with his umbrella on the sidewalk in the rain. I was waiting for the musical to kick in, but it didn't. It's too bad life really isn't a musical. Some moments are just made for that.

Our summer break activities thus far include sleeping in until after 9:30 (gasp - even ME!), and having late breakfasts of chocolate chip waffles (Four for Q, three for E, and, with great restraint, zero for myself, while I try to figure out how it is possible for me to be gaining weight while eating next to nothing...well, not counting movie popcorn or pizza). We've been mountain biking in the state park, which, in hindsight, wasn't quite the best age-appropriate activity for E, and had water play at a friend's house, which included a gy-normous water slide that a friend bought for anyone's use throughout the summer - how cool will that be??? I love the slower moving days of summer.

Last night I took the kids to see the movie Cars. It was cute, though not "Nemo on the race-track," like I've read in some reviews. There just aren't many Nemo or Shreks that come along. Anyway, one of the underlying themes of the movie was the loss of small towns with the development of the big bad Interstates, and how we have changed from friendly, helping your neighbor, stop-and-smell-the-roses types to fast-lane movers with the single-minded focus of getting to our destination, thus losing a big part of our "humanity" in the modern world.

This kind of stuff does not sit so well with me. I have never really bought into grousing for the "good old days." You cannot convince me that people of the past were better off or friendlier or had better morals than we do today. There are certainly components of past eras that we can look back on and see that were nice, but it's not fair or accurate to take those components in isolation. Small-town America wouldn't seem so nice if you were magically plunked there by a time machine as a woman who was limited to being a homemaker (which isn't a bad thing to be except that you had NO CHOICE) with an abusive husband who spent all day desperately trying to juggle keeping a home clean and raise a bunch of kids without modern day appliances, maybe with a baby on a hip, and no way to make things right. You may or may not have even had the right to VOTE (it hasn't even been 100 years since we've had that, you know). How about being a man with a large family struggling to feed your children? The things I worry about now are whether I'm enrolling my kids in too many after-school classes, not whether I will be able to find another potato for the table. You know, things like rape, child abuse and spousal abuse existed back then, as they do now. It's just that back then, you'd not talk about it. I wonder how many rape victims were able to be helped afterward by counseling? If we go back too far, then we've gotten ourselves into a world of bitter discrimination against those folks unfortunate enough to have been born with dark skin. I wouldn't want to live in the "good old days" as a black man.

Here's an article I found that addresses those who think "yesteryear" is the place to be.

I don't think people are essentially different in a moral sense today than from any time in the past. I think we have more opportunities to be better educated, and more opportunities for travel, and more opportunities to help not only our neighbors, but also our global neighbors. I find the friendliness of "small-town America" in my neighborhood, and at my kids' school. When one of my friends got diagnosed with breast cancer and is undergoing treatment (a treatment which, btw, would not have existed in small-town America of the past), the way her circle of friends has banded together to provide support, both organizational and emotional, is no less heart-warming than those types of circles of yesteryear.

One good thing that can come from remembering the past is the opportunity to learn from it. I have no problem with finding components of the past that worked and finding ways to make them work in the present. Actually, that's kind of what Cars did. In the end, the small town was reinvigorated and they all lived happily ever after even with SUVs and today's media madness (oops - hope I didn't ruin the plot for anyone).

So there you are. In the meantime, I'm happy to be living in the era that I am, despite worries like global warming and climate change and AIDS and terrorism. It's never going to be a ideal world. There are always challenges and sadness, and evil. It's part of the whole picture of life. But you know what? It's the only world we have, and this is the time we're in. There's nothing to stop us from smelling the roses that have grown during this present year. I think they probably smell just as wonderful as the ones did from the past.