Category: Things that make you go “hmmmm”.

How would you spend your time if you were going to spend a couple of hours on the boardwalk in Atlantic City?  Would you visit a casino?  Would you spend some time on the beach?  Maybe you’d check out the large selection of factory outlet stores or indulge in the continual feast of beach food down the older section of the boardwalk and buy some beach souvenirs.

Would you believe Dave and I spent last Saturday morning on the boardwalk in Atlantic City and didn’t do any of these things?  Instead, after walking in the hot sun for forty-five minutes, we chose to spend $12 a piece (with a military discount) to tour the Ripley Museum; believe it or not!

The reason we were in town had nothing to do with Atlantic City except that it was near the home of a college buddy who was hosting a party for a whole crew of folks, many of whom hadn’t seen each other in almost forty years.  After spending almost seven hours in the car on Friday crawling around DC and Baltimore we were ready to stretch our legs a bit and the Boardwalk seemed a likely place.

We were big fans of Boardwalk Empire so the thought of retracing Nucky Thompson’s footsteps seemed like an appropriate way to spend our time.  However, the modern day boardwalk bears little resemblance to that of the twenties and thirties.  The wooden facades are long gone, replaced by modern casinos with “themed” fronts facing the ocean.

In one spot there was a small park with a replica of a covered wagon.  It may have been part of a casino, otherwise I’m not sure of its significance.  Certainly if folks in New Jersey loaded up covered wagons some time in history, it was to go somewhere else, and definitely not Atlantic City!

Poles along the beach side are topped with TV’s broadcasting commercials and playing popular music so you can’t even look out at the ocean without having your thoughts interrupted.  In fact, the benches faced the Boardwalk and were conveniently situated near charging stations, so visitors never had to worry about waning battery life on smart phones.  God forbid!

Also gone are the natty dressers.  It would have been nice to see men in crisp linen suits and straw hats escorting women in loose fitting lawn frocks, but they, like Nucky, there too are from a time long past.  Replacing them are hoards of the beach-clad from all nations; most of them revealing much more of their bodies than I’d prefer to see.

So, with a lack of things worth looking at on the Boardwalk, Dave decided to humor me and we retreated into the air-conditioned world of Robert Ripley where it wasn’t impolite to stare at oddities. Believe it or not!

For the past several weeks, Dave and I have been trying to choose a new color for the walls in our family room.  From the first time I saw the pale blue walls, I knew the blue had to go.  Although the color was part of a pallet chosen by the decorators at Lowe’s and marketed as such on a little card, pale blue didn’t seem an appropriate color for a family room.

And, even after we moved in and placed our furnishings, which all complemented the blue nicely, I was determined that at some point in the future, we’d have to choose a more neutral color, more fitting for the space.

After almost four years of my griping about the wall color, we went to Lowe’s and had a couple of samples mixed to test on our walls.  Dave painted swatches of the two taupey-beiges in a couple of places to carefully consider different light plays in the room and we spent many days comparing the two to our room only to decide that neither were the “right” color.  I went back to Lowe’s, picked up a couple more chips and we decided to try a pale grey.

One morning I bought my sample and tried it in another spot on the wall.  After weeks of pondering, we were fairly certain the grey was what we wanted, although we’d have to change the picture over the fireplace to bring a little more color.  Fairly certain of our decision, we determined to paint the room the next time we had a free weekend.

As always, our life is pretty full and our weekends especially seem to be loaded with stuff.  For the past two weekends, we’ve had houseguests, which is the best kind of stuff to have.  With the taupey-beige and grey test spots still on the blue walls, conversation with both sets of guests naturally turned to our wall color.  First, it was my sister Barb who said she’d always liked the blue and didn’t understand why we’d want to change it.  Then, last weekend, my friend Lori, who is an interior designer, after careful consideration rendered her opinion that indeed the blue worked in that room.  The one thing I was right about was we needed more color over the fireplace.

Isn’t that just how it goes?  All the while I knew there was something not quite right in that room but instead of looking at one minor correction, I was convinced that a drastic change had to be made.  Truth be told, I actually like the blue.  My motivation for changing the color was that it seemed inappropriate.  What’s that all about?  I didn’t worry about appropriateness when I painted the bathroom in our last house purple or our kitchen turquoise.  Who was I trying to please?

Anyone who knows me knows that I tend to march to the beat of my own drum, so why would I even worry about what anyone else thinks about my choices in decor?  Sometimes I think those of us who appear to march to our own beat are partially just plain unable to catch the beat of ground and march along so we make the best of our awkwardness.  We can’t keep step so we create our own cadence.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just a thing.

So, our next free weekend, I’ll be repainting the family room the same color it already is and searching for the perfect picture to put over the fireplace.  Who knows, it may be something I already have.  Wouldn’t that be a kick?

This morning I saw a piece on NBC’s Today about a growing trend of young women public proclaiming why they are not feminists on social media.  Their reasons ranged from their love of  God or their boyfriends; that feminism is another word for lesbianism, to most interestingly a feeling that they just don’t need to because the fight for equality is over.  This put my mind in gear to decide where I stand on the whole, feminist/non-feminist question.

I was born smack in the middle of the last century, a mere 36 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. My mother was born sixteen short years later. In fact, both of my grandmothers and my mother-in-law were born before women could vote.  Young women today can choose not to vote; but they can vote.  How do they suppose this right was obtained?  Did legislators simply wake up one morning, realize there was an outstanding injustice to the women in this county and put the item up for referendum?  Certainly not!  It was the long and hard-fought fight of generations of women and men, calling themselves “Feminists” who helped bring equal rights for women to the forefront.

Women’s suffrage didn’t simply give women the right to vote in this country, it began to allow women to more easily stand on their own two feet as individuals capable of managing their own affairs.  Prior to obtaining suffrage, women were not only treated as the weaker sex physically; they were considered mentally inferior.  As a result they were denied entry into most of the major colleges and universities in the US.

In my own lifetime, (and I don’t feel that old)  feminists worked to gain entry for women into almost all of the colleges and universities in this county. Keep in mind that Princeton University didn’t go coed until 1969 and they were one of the first!  My own alma mater, Rutgers College only began to admit women in 1972,  the year prior to my arrival.  The simple fact is that the choices of where I could study were greatly expanded by the time I went to school and continued to expand throughout the remainder of the end of the twentieth century.  Again, this was not a simple matter of someone changing their mind; it was a long, drawn out campaign to open people’s minds; men and women to the reality that women were capable to studying on the same level as men.  The whole notion that they couldn’t seem silly now, but then it was anything but silly.

Prior to Women’s suffrage, women were excluded from professions considered too harsh for the more delicate sex.  Even if they managed to achieve professional status, they received a fraction of the pay their male counterparts and were viewed as inferior.  Today young woman can choose to do almost anything they want; from astronauts to zoologists, with the exception of becoming a Catholic priest, there were few things my daughter couldn’t choose to do or be.  That didn’t just happen without feminists working to make it happen.

Okay, so maybe politics aren’t a big issue in young women’s lives. Perhaps since they can vote, they just take the work of those feminists from almost 100 years ago for granted.  So what have feminists done for women in this country lately?

Well, for one thing women are now able to decide how they wish to dress with fewer restrictions.  Women are not required to dress covered and confined.  As a school girl, I was required to wear skirts or dresses to school.  Skirt lengths were monitored, sleeveless shirts were not permitted and girls were even sent home for improper dress.  I admit that sometimes I wish there were “fashion police” out on the prowl when I see some of the outfits people wear; women and men, but again, the fact is that the reason fashion has changed and women have the choice to wear what they want in this country has a lot to do with feminists all through the last century from the flappers to the bra burning hippies.  Today, women can choose to wear body-suits or berkas, spiked heals or berkenstocks; the important thing is not what you wear but that you can choose what you wear. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

I guess the way I see it, being a feminist is not about whether you have a career or stay at home with your kids; whether you wear flashy or conservative clothing, stand up publicly for injustice or just work quietly doing you own thing behind the scenes.  Being a feminist is about an awareness that women in this county have the right to choose where they live, how they will spend their money, what they will wear, what they will study, where they will work, if they will work, will they be mothers and wives, or professionals.  It’s all about the right to choose.  Feminists are a big part of why we enjoy these freedoms.

And yes, you even have the right to choose not to be a feminist.  But if you do, just keep this in mind:  the fact you can choose was long fought by men and women in generations past who proudly called themselves feminists.

Last week Dave and I travelled to Pullman, Washington to visit our son, Andy, who is a visiting professor in the political science department at Washington State University.  In my mind’s eye, I have always envisioned Washington as a lush place with thick forests of green surrounded by green fields so you can imagine how surprised I was when I found myself in a land of rolling fields as far as the eye could see; almost like land locked dunes, with sparse groups of evergreens, few and far between.  In fact, the only place I’ve been where I’ve experienced this vastness of nothingness was when we drove through the southernmost lava fields on the Big Island in Hawaii.  The major difference between the two places was that while the lava field were barren, the fields in Washington were merely sleeping.  As we drove south from Spokane to Pullman on US 195, the first fields we saw were freshly turned, dark and damp but as we continued, where the fields had been tilled earlier, a faint tinge of green covered the land.  And yet further south, the green became more vibrant.  There were very few signs of human life along the eighty some miles to Pullman.  Occasionally we would see a farm tucked in the hollow where the hills met but mostly there was only the evidence that men had been there, not that they’d stayed.  I almost expected to see herds of buffalo along the way.

And it was windy!  The little Nissan Versa we’d leased was put to the test as Dave drove through the cross wind.  With nothing to slow its progress, the gusts shook and rocked us; not the best of conditions to be driving in a strange place at the end of a long day of air travel.

We only drove through one real town between Spokane and Pullman; a good-sized place called Colfax.  As we passed down the main street, I noticed the Washington State road signs with the route numbers displayed within silhouettes of George Washington.  My jet lagged brain wondered how this place came to be named after the father of our country.  We were a long way from Virginia and this place seemed so much younger than the Old Dominion.  Almost immediately I answered my own question – of course, this was the land first explored by Lewis and Clark with their Corps of Discovery!  I’d even seen some of the treasures sent back from the expedition on display at Monticello.

I felt an instant kinship with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.  After all, I live just miles from where Lewis was born and Thomas Jefferson, who was President at the time they set out to explore the new land and like them, I’d begun my journey in Virginia.  The major difference between our trips was that it only took me about twelve hours to reach my destination while it took Lewis and Clark more than a year.

Sure, compared to the Corps of Discovery, my journey was easy but the breath-taking panoramas were certainly something we shared.  While we were on the “Palouse”, the name given to this fertile region that stretches from WallaWalla into Idaho, we had a warm sunny morning to take a hike up to the top of the Kamiak Butte, a rise of almost a thousand feet above the fields.  The views from up there were outstanding.  I’m not sure how far we could see, but it was far.  Not long after reaching the top, the clouds began to roll in across the plains and soon it was snowing.  (Again with the snow. Really?)

As we headed down the path I spotted a tiny sign of spring; a tiny buttercup peaking from the leaves and pine needles.

My trip to southeastern Washington was an experience that I will remember and revisit for a long time.  When we moved to Ruckersville almost three years ago, it seemed like we were moving to a place that was vast and uninhabited; the population seemed so sparse compared to Virginia Beach.  All three places do have one thing in common that I find necessary for survival; a glimpse of the eternal.  The Virginia shoreline which leads your eye from the beach over the ocean to the horizon, the Blue Ridge Mountains that lead you to the sky, and the Palouse leading across the plains; all remind me of my place in this world.  I am just a small part of something so much greater than myself.  My hope and challenge is to be that little buttercup along the path, a bright spot providing hope and a smile to those who come across me on their path.