Neanderpundit

The wife walked in the Chicago 3 mile race to fight breast cancer this morning. Not wanting to deal with parking etc. downtown, we took the South Shore to a station close to Grant Park (van buren) and walked to the race, where she checked in, got her shirt, etc.

We left the house around five. We spent the better part of the day in the city, then came home to clean house to have a mother’s day dinner here.

My task was that of pack mule. I carried the extra water, I took the daughter when the wife was walking, we sat in the Grant Park grass and ate bananas.

It felt good. Yeah, it was a kind of a pain lugging all the stuff around, but it was a cause past politics. There were the usual folk singers etc. there, but they weren’t annoying unless you got stuck in front of one of the huge speakers.

Next year I’ll walk too. And I’ll still carry all the stuff. Maybe we’ll have to have someone come along and sit in the grass with the daughter, or maybe she can spend the day with her cousin. It was nice doing something good for a good reason and not being surrounded by politics for once. It made for a good mother’s day.

Oh, yeah. Happy mother’s day. To My mom, my wife’s mum, to my grandmothers and those who stood in for them, for the mothers of all the people I know. We just don’t want to know what it’s like to be without you.

I work in an office where we aren’t allowed to wear jeans.

The norm is Dockers or dress pants, even though there is rarely a visitor to our engineering area, and I’ve destroyed countless pairs of pants going out onto the shop floor wearing them.

I wear jeans. I’ve worn jeans since the diapers came off. I wore them because they were tough and lasted a long time, and I outgrew them before they wore out.

Oh, sure, at school we wore uniforms, at mass we wore the best we had. It was the 60’s, and our small town culture was still stuck in the 40’s. Men wore hats, women dresses, always.

Still, I wore jeans. I wore jeans to work, i wore jeans to play, I wore jeans to school whenever we had a uniform free day (Once a year!!) All through seminary I had to wear a suit, and tie, every day, all year, for six years. I RAN home to put on jeans. Oh, it wasn’t allways that they were more comfortable- shit, Gramma made jeans for me until I was ten or twelve, and the denim she used would have been at home as the cord in radial tires. I often chafed so much that I had to grease myself.

Then, denim became the uniform of the hippie, and frankly, that sucked. The moment people started associating hippies with denim, I was pissed.
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Hey, now, Rachel Lucas is back. It’s a small beginning, but she was one of my favorite bloggers. Hell, don’t bother with ME, but add HER to your bookmarks and read every new post!!!