There's No Place Like Home

I never am so glad to be back in Philadelphia than when I return from Utah.

Steve and I went for a few days to visit Mo. I bravely wore my Obama pin throughout our stay there, wanting childishly perhaps to show my colors and fully expecting to see a landscape dotted with huge McCain/Palin signs. Surprisingly, there were none. I guess there's no need to spend the money and spread the word in a state that is so solidly in the Republican camp. I didn't experience any dirty looks or hostile comments. Instead, a few courageous souls in Salt Lake City whispered that they liked the button.

Ogden, a suburb of SLC, where Mo lives, is a weird place. The mountains are just 10-15 minutes away and everywhere you go there's a spectacular view of them pasted against a brilliant blue sky. (We didn't see a cloud for the three days we were there.) But the city and its environs are a series of featureless, cookie cutter developments strung together by strip malls and big box retail outlets. It's only when we drove through the canyons or over the North Ogden Divide where the houses are set apart with ample space to breathe that you get a sense of what might have been before the super highways changed things forever.

Mo lives in a tidy house in a development of tidy houses that all look the same. There are children--mostly blond, it seems--playing everywhere, bikes strewn across the lawns, dogs barking in the back yards. All the garages seem to hold at least two cars--one of which is a large SUV or truck--motorcycles or dirt bikes and a full complement of sporting gear. Many of the houses, Mo's included, have basketball nets in the back. One afternoon, I strolled through the development and saw just one vegetable garden but that had a compost bin, a promising sign. Most houses have green, well tended lawns with tame little islands of shrubbery and flowers set carefully within or along the houses.

Mo and Steve shot baskets and I sat on the deck reading. I looked out over his back yard to a landscape of identical rooftops all sprouting direct TV dishes set against the rugged and majestic mountains that loomed on all sides.

Like I said, Utah is a weird place.

I Love My New Car Sooooooo Much

Isn't she adorable? I've been waiting for her since early June. And today, at last, Giul kindly drove me to the dealership and it was love at first sight for Chessie and me. I've named her after a similarly adorable car that Liz and I drove through Sicily about four years ago. Of course, this Chessie is totally up to date, politically correct and environmentally friendly. She's a Prius but she'll always be my baby.

Am I Going Crazy?

I am trying to make sense of this whole Sarah Palin thing. Ok, everyone agrees she's a ruthless, scheming politician, the ticket's designated attack dog, a real "barracuda." Yet because she's a Republican and an evangelical Christian passionately opposed to abortion, nobody's calling her a bitchy feminist, nobody's asking her who wears the pants in her house.

This is really where it gets weird to me. Does this mean, ladies, that we have truly come a long way, baby, now that there is a vice presidential candidate who happens to be a female but is a consummate political hack with no obvious credentials except her fierce ambition and her ability to shamelessly but effectively lie, distort and misrepresent the issues?

Have women made it now that we have our very own Dan Quayle?

I need help!

A Night on the Town

Summer in the city. The nights are warm and the streets are full of all sorts of people.

Last night I went out to dinner with Liz and Amira. Along the way we met a roving troubadour in a motorized wheelchair who serenaded me on Market Street. He had a great smile and an even better voice. What a lovely way to start the evening.

Politics can be sooooooo depressing.

We are governed by crazy people. Literally crazy people. I tried watching the convention in St. Paul--why I don't know--but turned it off after a few minutes each time not in disgust, more in disbelief. Those people are truly insane.

I'm voting for Obama--I'm praying for Obama--I but the process is so horrible and distorted and evil that I wonder how anything good can come out of it.

I scour the blogs each day in search of hope but this paragraph from Charles Pierce, a regular contributor to Eric Alterman's site says it all to me:

"I have no hope for the next 56 days. None whatsoever. Reality's relevance was lost somewhere between Invesco Field and the Xcel Center. We're going to get lofty post-partisan dreariness from both presidential candidates, and a vicious 1992 culture-war brawl under the radar, which will be thoroughly deplored in public by the people who profit from it most. I shouldn't have to watch Karl Rove tell me about the American people and how they vote. I should get to watch Karl Rove being hauled off in chains to Danbury. The major television networks will curl up into a ball roughly five minutes from the start of the first presidential debate. The whole campaign is now going to be conducted on the level of pure mythology. If they had any intellectual honesty whatsoever, the people on TV would dress in white robes and divine the campaign through the movement of waves and the burning of laurel leaves. For a minute back in the spring, it seemed like the country was ready to admit to itself that it poisoned itself with bull***t over the past seven years and was prepared to issue itself a corrective. Not any more. We're back to "personality" and "character" and "narratives" and all the other stuff that keeps anyone from thinking about what's really at stake here."

I need a drink.

What the...

Check out this blog from P Diddy. And, yes, folks, I know who P. Diddy is...

Arriverderci Otisfield

My last day in Maine this summer was absolutely the best day in Maine this summer. A brilliant blue sky with not a cloud in sight. A brisk breeze from the north--fresh Canadian air--causing white caps on the lake. Sitting on the deck, listening to the trees in the wind felt like I was on the deck of a ship going on a happy journey to a beautiful place where Sarah Palin wouldn't force her 17 year old daughter to get married!!!!

Bob and Jane and Steve and I played tennis...if you can call it that. Jane's hip was bothering her, Bob's bum knee kept him from running and Steve swaddled himself in a wide elastic belt that supposedly would protect his back but that made him look like some kind of weird sumo wrestler. Not a pretty picture. Well, there are worse ways to waste time than to play a set of geezer tennis on a gorgeous Maine day with our best friends.