YEAH, I'M BACK....

.....kinda, sorta back, anyway.  I couldn't resist Scalzi's weekend assignment, and it kicked me back into wanting to connect.  This coming week I'm heading a drive to get incoming Del Tech students registered to vote, while they're registering for classes and buying their books.  I'll also have three faculty meetings on Thursday - from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.   Certainly wish I was a knitter or crocheter.  I'll have to sit way in the back and bring a good book, or write letters for the Big One, from 6 to 8.   By the third hour my brain will be fried anyway.  And then, next Sunday is the Hispanic Festival, where I am in charge of Kerry volunteers and information.

But, life moves on.  I'm mourning the passing of Julia Child, who taught several generations of Americans that food is more than meatloaf and mashed potatoes.  Well, they don't know that here in Sussex Cty, DE yet, where chicken n' dumplins is still haute cuisine - but a lot of Americans, anyway.  I gave her cookbooks to my mother, and wonder now which of my sisters ended up with them when Mama died.  Julia was a pioneer in so many ways, and her shows were so wonderful.  I loved Dan Ackroyd's parodies, only because they were so close to the real thing.  I used to do a pretty mean Julia Child myself, on occasion.

Thanks to all of you who left such caring comments on my "overwhelmed" entry, or emailed or IM'd.  It's so comforting to know how many wonderful friends are out there.  Kind of like angels, or fairies, or.....no, not ghosts.  When I was a kid the idea of my Guardian Angel was the most comforting of the many Catholic notions I tried to take in and understand.  The G.A. I could easily grasp - I had a holy card showing a kid in some dangerous situation, a bridge over a ravine I think, and the big radiant lovely angel right behind him/her (?), arms outstretched, taking ultimate care.  So, I loved my angel, and always imagined him  (and yes, the angel was male, I hadn't yet gone through feminism 101)  right there with me, watching over me and taking care of me.  In my grade school for a while there was a fad of "saving a place" for your G.A. beside you...in the lunchroom, on benches in the playground, etc.   Wait, how did I get here?  Oh yes,angels.  So, now I have virtual G.A.'s out there in cyberspace, watching over me and sending me caring words. 

And we're waiting for the much-diminished Charley to blow through Delaware this evening or tonight.  I need to get out in the yard and take down bird feeders and so on.  50 mph winds are forecast.  Which is nothing compared to what my friends who live in Port Charlotte itself have suffered.  I'm waiting to hear how their house fared - since it's right on the water, they are expecting the worst.

Can't end this ramble without some political text, can I?  And I won't.  This is Arianna Huffington's take on Jim McGreevey's situation - the governor of my neighboring state of New Jersey, stepping down because he is gay, and will be involved in some legal and political messes for perhaps quite some time.  I didn't know that Arianna's ex-husband came out as gay - I need to find out more about this.  This column is so right on, so very to the point.  I have actually thought many times in my adult life of running for a local office - I should have begun when we lived in Massachusetts.  Here in Delaware it would be hopeless to run as an openly lesbian candidate.  We plan to move to New Mexico in the very near future.  I don't know what the chances there would be of running - and winning.  Any thoughts from those of you who are there?   Arianna's column:

JIM MCGREEVEY: "I AM A GAY AMERICAN"

By Arianna Huffington

On Thursday, my day started at eight in the morning speaking together with New Jersey Senator John Corzine at a breakfast sponsored by ANGLE -- an organization consisting of the gay and lesbian leadership of Southern
California and a magnet for political candidates running for office and raising funds.  A couple of hours after I had left the breakfast, where I had been surrounded by successful gay men and women -- businesspeople,
politicians, accountants, even a priest -- my phone started ringing off the hook.  New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey had just resigned and announced that he is gay, and it seemed as if the bookers from every
television talk show in America -- from CNN’s “American Morning” to ABC’s “Nightline” -- had simultaneously had the exact same thought:  “Let's get Arianna Huffington."  I was the proverbial two birds being killed with one
stone -- a political commentator whose ex-husband had come out as gay.

As the day progressed, it became clear that this was a story unfolding on so many levels only a Shakespearean drama or a Verdi opera could do justice to it. There was the personal, the political, possibly the legal,and who knows what else to be revealed by the time we get to Act Five.

But we are still in Act One. And in Act One the spotlight is on the nexus of the personal and the political.  McGreevey’s resignation announcement was undoubtedly the best political speech he’s ever made. It was powerful, compelling, emotional, and in sharp contrast to the pre-packaged speechifying we are so accustomed to hearing from politicians. At this
profound crisis point in his political and personal lives he sounded almost liberated. It's hard to resist playing armchair psychoanalyst and wondering: Did McGreevey unconsciously make certain choices -- like putting his lover on the government payroll in a high-profile position he was not qualified for -- in order to force upon himself Thursday's public announcement: "I am a gay American"?

We can't, of course, know what was going on in McGreevey's psyche, but hiring his lover, Golan Cipel -- an Israeli foreign national unable to obtain a federal security clearance to be the homeland security czar of
New Jersey (and at a salary of $110,000 a year, no less) -- is the height of recklessness, and only makes sense as a taxpayer-funded cry for help. Clearly no good could come of such an appointment -- unless the governor
was unconsciously hoping that the appointment would eventually force his hand.  Otherwise, he would not have flaunted his closeness to Cipel, leading him to self-destructive acts such as accompanying Cipel and a
realtor on a walkthrough of a townhouse the newly arrived Israeli was about to rent a short distance from McGreevey's house. It's textbook human behavior: the harder you try to suppress the truth, the more inevitable it is that it will find a way to come out.

“Thinking that I was doing the right thing,” he said, “I forced what I thought was an acceptable reality onto myself, a reality which is layered and layered with all the, quote, 'good things,' and all the, quote, 'right
things' of typical adolescent and adult behavior." It’s worth noting that McGreevey made this statement on the same day that the California Supreme
Court annulled the state's 4000 same-sex marriages, raising the question: What if the world were a more welcoming place where gay people could have
in their lives all the "good things" and the "right things" without having to pretend they're straight? After all, does anyone doubt that it's exponentially harder to attain elective office if you're openly gay? How
else do you explain that we have no gay senators, only three gay members of Congress, and an openly gay governor of New Jersey only until Nov. 15?

But even if Jim McGreevey did not want to hold public office, if he just wanted a marriage and children -- natural urges, perhaps as powerful as the sexual one -- the easiest (and indeed the only legal way) to do so
remains opting for a heterosexual relationship. So the human costs we only got a glimpse of on Thursday -- a shattered marriage, the anguish inflicted on his parents, his wife, his daughters -- are not just the result of his personal choices but of the roadblocks society continues to place in the path of the complete acceptance of gay men and women.

By the time the curtain comes up on this drama’s Act Five we could be in the middle of a serious political scandal that may force McGreevey to step down even before Nov. 15. Or we may be in the middle of his political resurrection, looking not at a tortured politician with a secret draining away precious energy but a free man fully -- and finally -- accepting himself. Either way, he had to practically drive the car right off the cliff in order to put himself on the road to Thursday’s declaration. And that's an indictment of our society and our political culture wars.

So until the final curtain falls, let’s seize the moment to reaffirm, loudly and without reservation, that to be gay is to be normal -- whether you’re a governor or a gardener, a public figure or a very private one.