Thinking big

This spring, I visited the World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things Traveling Roadside Attraction and Museum. Or rather, it visited me.


Note the jaunty artificial turf accents in green and blue. The spikes on the seats of the bouncy horses are a thoughtful touch.


WLCoWSVoWLT curator and founder Erika Nelson drives this pickup around Kansas -- as well as further afield -- and if you’re lucky, she’ll stop long enough to give a talk.

She has a snappy slideshow that she accompanies with a carnival barker patter. Seeing and hearing about the sights -- the huge fiberglass dinosaurs in California, the mammoth pecan in Missouri, and who can forget the world’s largest ball of twine right here in Kansas? -- was a hoot, and adding to the fun were audience members who would occasionally pipe up with, “Hey, I’ve seen that!” (In fact, I was one of them when the enormous ketchup bottle of Collinsville, Illinois, popped up.)


Nelson not only tracks down and takes pictures of giant roadside attractions, but also makes teeny models of them when she gets home. The ultimate goal is to take the teeny model back to the giant original and photograph them together.

For a better idea of what the WLCoWSVoWLT entails, visit its Web site, or better yet, browse the Flicker photo stream. There’s a blog, too, which is worth looking at just for the bowling ball story. I feel a bike trip coming on….

Memorial Day

StoryCorps is my single favorite piece of NPR broadcasting, and being a sentimental sort, it’s not unheard of for me to tear up a bit while listening. It had gotten to the point when Sidney would notice it was 7:29 on a Friday morning and say, “Oh no, here it comes.”

Well, for today’s segment I couldn’t even pretend at composure:

After his son was killed in Iraq four years ago, Allen Hoe decided to spend Memorial Day at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. He was not expecting to meet the nurse who tried to save his son's life.

I very much doubt anyone who is reading this needs a lecture on how to observe Memorial Day. We are all aware -- perhaps painfully so -- of the day’s meaning. We may indeed be grilling and enjoying a long weekend, but we’ll also be visiting cemeteries and taking quiet moments to reflect on the sacrifices of others.

I hate it when people say Happy Memorial Day, so instead: Meaningful Memorial Day. We will not forget.

Giving a shirt

There are some people who have a knack for giving exactly the right gift at exactly the right time. I’m lucky enough to have a friend like that, and this dear woman thought I might need some bucking up, with a fresh deployment and all.

So she sent me a shirt with an Erin Smith design on it.


Somber dark-eyed girl? Check.

Motorcycle with American flag? Check.

Completely appropriate sentiment? Check.

It did more than cheer me up; I was howling. Here’s to friends who give a shirt.

Screen test

Now what?

Damn you, chili pepper lights! Damn you!

Note to R. Kelly: I no longer believe I can fly.

That’s the last time I eat the Fancy Feast with Peyote Gravy.

Big Guy’ll be pissed when he sees this.

The vet’s right; I need to lose weight.

I wonder if she’ll bring me food up here.

Surely you can come up with better captions than these. Feel free to share.

Appreciated

For the past 25 years, the Friday before Mother’s Day has been Military Spouse Appreciation Day. For the past four years, I’ve been rather grumpy about the day, because it was another reminder that unmarried significant others don’t count.

It didn’t matter that I had waited out a yearlong deployment and undertaken two Army-related moves, or that my sweetie and I were serious as a heart attack (which I would’ve been able to incur, since I’d managed to hang on to my job and thus my own health insurance). We did not have that one piece of paper, so I did not exist.

This year is different. Thanks to the 10 minutes we spent at an Arkansas courthouse last summer, I’m in the system. I have the EZPass to everything -- my military ID (with my husband’s rank on it, which I still think is highly weird) -- and I’ve been invited to our local festivities to mark the day. I’m the same person, in the same relationship, but suddenly I count. It doesn’t seem right.

If I had firm principles, I suppose I’d avoid the hoopla. But I’m learning that one thing military significant others are good at is playing the hand they’re dealt, and if a decent live band is coming to post, I’m not going to fold and stay home to pout. That would be drinking the poison and expecting the other guy to die, as Mom puts it.

I might carry some residual bitterness, but really, my issue was resolved with the stroke of a pen. There are others for whom it isn’t as easy. Some life partners of service members aren’t acknowledged on any day of the year. They can’t go to the unit barbecue or the division ball; they have to be careful about being seen together in public at all. They certainly aren’t entitled to benefits, and if the worst happens, they’ll hear about it secondhand; being listed as next of kin might raise the suspicions of someone who follows every article of the Uniform Code of Military Justice to the letter.

I will appreciate all military significant others this Friday -- I’ve met some amazing ones in the past few years -- but the ones we’re not supposed to talk about will get an extra helping of compassion. They could use it.

Orchestrating a comeback

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds
you that you have one.” Stella Adler

I’m cheering for these musicians, who have survived Taliban rule and the destruction of their instruments and keep trying to make art. And I appreciate my piano even more now.