Remember those Saturdays as a teenager when it was so wonderful to sleep in after a hard week at school? There were times when I didn’t lift my head until noon or even one in the afternoon. Back then I had no trouble sleeping. I didn’t need a good mattress or ambient sound to fall asleep. If there was a flat surface I was good to go. It wasn’t until I became a mom that my slumber habits began to change. Those feedings in the middle of the night roused me just enough that I was able to find my way to the crib and then to a rocking chair that my mother-in-law had given me. I’d sit there in the dark listening to music and nursing my baby girl sometimes wondering if I was dreaming, sleep walking or actually in the process of taking care of my child. I often believe that my children actually began sleeping through the night at some point because I was so sleep deprived that one night I simply did not hear their cries and so their habit of waiting until morning to demand food was born. Continue reading “Mr. Sandman”
Month: April 2016
The Alternative Right
Ba
ck when I was in high school my mother encountered a man who had once lived across the street from her family home. He and his brother had rented rooms there. Mama said that she had developed a crush on this man’s brother mostly because he was a student at Rice University and she always had a thing for highly intelligent men. Nothing ever came of her fantasies and she moved on into adulthood only to one day have a chance meeting with the old neighbor. She learned that the man was a widower, having lost his wife to cancer. He was lonely and raising children much like Mama. I suppose it was inevitable that he would eventually ask her out on a date. It seemed as though they had much in common but nothing might have been further from the truth.
After their first outing together my mom came home and insisted that she was never going to see this guy again. He was totally not her type even though he was quite handsome. He had not been particularly successful in life, never even attending college and constantly moving from one dead end job to another. Mama saw no future for them and that seemed to be the end of that. Unfortunately the man was quite persistent and my mama was far too kind to keep putting him off. Before she was even able to explain what had happened he had become a constant fixture around our house and not a particularly welcome one. In fact, I disliked him intensely mostly because of his politics. Continue reading “The Alternative Right”
Where Dreams May Come True
The annual frenzy known as March Madness is now over and a new national championship team wears the crown. The tournament comes by its frenetic name quite naturally because year after year virtually anything might happen as one college battles another. Unlike football that has become somewhat predictable and mostly the domain of universities with large amounts of money to spend, basketball is a sport that is still open to even small somewhat unknown schools. Whether public or private, it doesn’t seem to matter because as the minutes on the clock tick down nothing about the ending is ever certain. More than one Cinderella team has scored a victory in the final seconds making the game of round ball perhaps the most exciting sport on the planet.
Last night Villanova proved once again that all it takes is one sensational play just before the buzzer to humble giants. In an historic victory the team surprised North Carolina by scoring the first ever three point buzzer beater to become the national championship team in the men’s Division I with a score of 77 to 74. Ironically another Villanova team had won the national title way back in 1985 in another stunning upset over then ten point favorite, Georgetown University. It was not their first time to be a spoiler. Continue reading “Where Dreams May Come True”
Thoughts from a Waiting Room
I’m sitting in a waiting room at Methodist Hospital while Mike has some minor surgery. He tends to get cysts in his back that grow until they are pressing on nerves and they sometimes get infected opening the possibility of MRSA. He’s had a couple of the culprits removed over the years so it is a somewhat routine procedure but as we all know anything can happen whenever someone receives an anesthetic and goes under the knife. I suspect that we’ll be headed home in a few hours but I don’t take the process lightly given the seriousness of the pre-operative paperwork and preparation involved.
The family waiting room where I am is much more lighthearted than those where I have kept watch while loved ones were dying in ICU. Here nobody is particularly worried. There are no tears or anxious faces, no signs of people getting really bad news. I suspect that there are other areas in the hospital where those things are happening even as we speak. Coming to a hospital always reminds me to have gratitude for the good health that I mostly enjoy. It also helps me to have much more sympathy for families that are enduring very serious situations. Continue reading “Thoughts from a Waiting Room”
The Brave One
There are a great number of people complaining about the state of the world these days and admittedly we have a mess or two on our hands but in the grand scheme of things our fate is actually less difficult than that which mankind has endured in the past. A brief look at the history of the world confirms my grandfather’s favorite witticism that “these are the good old days.” We sometimes forget about the hardships and discriminations that people who came before us bore. We talk of a war on women but even the worst chauvinist pigs can’t compare with the treatment of our grandmothers and great grandmothers, not to mention a sizable number of ladies in other parts of the world even in modern times. It wasn’t that long ago that African Americans were slaves or that their children were prohibited from staying in hotels or eating in restaurants that were open to those of us lucky enough to have white skin. I’m Sharron Burnett rather than Sharron Gonzalez because when my father-in-law adopted my husband he insisted that Mike keep the name with which he was born lest he encounter prejudice. We still have much to improve but in general the world and our country in particular is a far better place than it was when I was still a young girl. Continue reading “The Brave One”
All It Takes Is A Little Love 