Weekend winners

Every so often No. 2 daughter gives us cause for a real nice party. She ran the Twin Cities Marathon yesterday. It may be "the most beautiful urban marathon in America," but the 2007 edition earned "sweatiest" honors. It was 73 degrees at race time, and by the time we strolled up to watch around 11 a.m., runners were already dropping like flies. Actually, at Mile 23 I saw few runners but lots of haggard walkers. A spectator with a huge mastiff caught the eye of an exhausted runner toward the end of the race. The tired marathoner quipped, "Ya think we could ride him?" Also heard from an entrant on the course, near race end: "When IS that fucking bus coming by?"

Congrats to Emily for finishing, much to the relief of her mother, in under five hours. And congrats to her sister, Nicole, for going beyond the call of duty in the Sister Support Department, entertaining her twin toddlers along the course for two hours while we waited. (Note to readers: A marathon will interest a 2-year-old for about 5 minutes. A marathon will interest a 2-year-old on a sugar high for about 3 minutes.)

Special thanks go to our favoritest niece and nephew-in-law, Amy and Kurt, for a marathon party (read: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) to mark the occasion. There's something special about a day that starts with mimosas and Bloody Marys at 9, continues with strawberry daquiris and ends with Johnny Walker. I won't go into what that something is, but ... a belated toast to our No. 3 child, Nate, who just nabbed his first real job. Here's to gainful employment and another marathon: the repayment of student loans! Huzzah!

Mundane musings

Sorry I haven't been blogging very regularly over the past few weeks. School's back in session, which means I'm actually working in my office all day long. I'm so busy that I come in around 8:30 in the morning, look up at 4 p.m. and wonder what happened. It's kind of like being on another planet for much of the day, then driving home and discovering that everything is sort of like I left it. Which is disappointing, sort of.

So call me a loser, but I recently discovered that I can watch all the TV shows I really like (but, in our house, are pre-empted by the guy who holds the remote) online if I decide to take a lunch break. Woo-hoo! So I can watch "Ugly Betty," "Grey's Anatomy," "Desperate Housewives," "Brothers & Sisters" and all those chick shows for which I regularly earn my husband's scorn. I love the Internet!

Fade to black

My office windows overlook the beautiful Mississippi River, interrupted only by the Mankato stone of the St. Paul Seminary. The seminary's oldest, turn-of-the-century buildings are beautiful and stately, but the administration building and student residence, circa 1985 or '86, have some kind of toxic-looking mold growing on them. Maybe it's from pollution or lack of sunlight on the east side of the building or whatever, but every time I look up, I see these golden stone buildings, blackening. It's a little weird because I feel like it's some kind of sign. Time for a sandblasting, I guess. In more ways than one.

Annals of the unemployed

I'm in the prayer mode for all my unemployed relatives: my recent-college-graduate-with-school-loans-to-pay son, my baby-on-the-way nephew-in-law, my long-unemployed nephew who has been living off the earnings of his now-unemployed girlfriend. Sheesh. What's with all of this joblessness? How's a person supposed to eat? For some, like my nephew-in-law, job loss leads to great offers from competitors. For others, like my son, the luster of that shiny new degree is starting to fade with the reality of the crappy job market; he'd probably shovel shit if you paid him and you can't lose what you didn't have, but it hurts just the same. So say a little prayer, hum a little OMM or remove a pin from the voodoo doll, would ya?

What's your name?

Someone I know has a penchant for calling one of her buddies, who's a little spacey but of normal intelligence, "Retard." The other day, I asked her, "Why do you do that? You wouldn't call another friend, who has skin darker than yours, 'Nigger."" She was pretty mad at me.

"How can you even equate the two words like that?" she railed. I stood my ground.

When I was a kid, we used to call stupid kids "retarded." That was before we knew much about real mental disabilities, and we called the people who had them "retarded." Like they could catch up if they only hurried. We also had great fun telling "hair lip" stories until one of our mothers had a new baby born with a cleft palate. He couldn't nurse and had to be tube fed until he had surgery. Our mothers shushed our "hair lip" imitations, so we turned the "hair lip" jokes to "retard" jokes.

A few years later, I learned that "Mary," a sister of one of my mother's friends, was "retarded." I was shocked. Hadn't a clue she couldn't add numbers, drive a car, read a map and do other grown-up things. I always thought Mary was just a friendly, funny and kind woman who enjoyed hanging out with her older sister.

Fast forward about 20 years. My son had to do some volunteering (I know, that's kind of contradictory) during confirmation class in middle school. One of his friend's parents invited him to help his Special Olympics swim team. I learned a lot about mentally challenged kids that year, and so did my son. He was lucky to have one of my "Mary" experiences.

Do we ever grow out of our human penchant for making light of others' misfortunes, weakness, difference? Maybe not. Witness what we still make fun of here in Minnesota: Iowans, drunks, Indians, immigrants ("Ole and Lena" now are "Ahmad and Muhammad"). Do we laugh? You betcha. We're sooooo not perfect here. But maybe we can work a little harder to care about the folks at the butt of our jokes, and we'll eventually grow out of the name-calling years.

If I had money I'd be as annoying as Martha Stewart

I'm all about preventative medicine. I've always been good about scheduling an annual physical, getting regular oil changes, replacing batteries on smoke detectors and writing new addresses in my address book. I balance the family checkbook to the penny. I look up words I don't know in a dictionary rather than just figuring a reader will understand my phonetics. I sew on buttons rather than throwing shirts away. If they didn't make so much noise, I'd still have cleats put on my shoes.

There's a certain sense of peace -- and some might say it's because I'm a control freak -- that I get when chaos doesn't reign. I love crawling into a neatly made bed and never searching for lost keys and glasses. But am I wasting my energy? With the time it takes to keep track of my life, I could be throwing a kick-ass party.

Buh-bye

Funerals are such interesting phenomena. Family funerals are even more interesting. Last week I retrieved my mother and joined in the funeral rituals for my 89-year-old uncle, her last brother-in-law.

Depending on whom you talked to, Fred was a genius; a wonderful, giving soul; a kind old alchoholic; a lonely packrat; a gay man so closeted he couldn't even admit homosexuality to himself; or just a cranky, selfish soul who never grew out of his father's house. I've heard he was a nice guy, but that I rarely experienced personally, other than as the delighted recipient of a birthday or Christmas gift. Mostly, I remember being a little scared of him, even in my adulthood. He was a very large man with a booming voice. He didn't much like little girls like me -- especially nonathletic little girls who hated camping, couldn't paddle canoes and flunked out of the Girl Scouts. He didn't like my mom, either, because she was one of those "Feminazis" who spoke her mind and thought we should get out of Vietnam.

So, as I listened to my uncle's friends eulogizing him that day, I couldn't help but wonder who they were talking about. I never met that guy.

Fred's funeral was a combination of overt Catholicism drawing together in communion the devout and the irreligious -- the traditional and evangelical in the same pew with the very nearly atheist. Seated in the front row of Holy Rosary Cathedral were my quite-Republican Aunt Pink and her like-minded daughters, with whom I very nearly incited a political riot before Mass (oops, sorry, y'all), and my West Coast and Duluth cousins, whom I'd describe as progressive but whom the ironically nicknamed Pink labeled "bleeding heart liberals," hippies still. Guess it depends on what you'd smoke if you could still smoke, huh?

Seated in the second row in this impressively displayed caste system were my mother and me. But that's OK. Being invisible had its benefits: we didn't have to recite the readings or bring up the gifts or participate in any other liturgical folderol that made the hippie-cousins feel like hypocrites. Oh, well. At least I knew the prayers and songs at Mass so I didn't embarrass anybody. Being relegated to the second row was a bit like being stuck in the middle.

Afterwards, we drove up to the cemetery for the obligatory prayers at the gravesite, then drove out to my cousin's place on Duluth's Park Point for an unplanned family gathering. We had a nice time -- some got reaquainted and the rest of us got quite drunk. So Fred would have been pleased either way, and this day really was a memorial to him in that regard. He didn't much like social gatherings for the pure pleasure of social gatherings. He was all about purpose. Then again, he liked, as my cousin Sissy so ruefully pointed out in a eulogaic limerick, his Old Crow. So sitting around drinking while gazing upon Lake Superior seemed apropos on the day of his memorial.

Buh-bye, Fred. Oddly, I'll miss you.