Alternate Post Title: The Day I Saved My Mother From the Giant Bug.

After spending the evening with my brother and sister and their families, swapping funny stories from our childhood, my brother encouraged me to post this story on my blog. Since it involved my mother I agreed. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom….I’m sorry.

I was roughly 11 or 12 years old when I woke up one morning and walked into my parents’ bedroom. I don’t remember if my mother was already sitting up in bed or if she sat up as I came into the room. My mother was wearing her peach, silky pajamas which had a keyhole neckline (for those of you who don’t know this was a little oblong circle that buttoned at the top, located right in the middle of the neckline). As I looked at her I was taken aback to see a rather large bug in the center of her chest right smack dab in the keyhole of her nightgown. I cried out “there’s a big bug on you!” and rushed to her bedside. She looked frantically saying “where? where?” and I jumped into bed, brave young soul that I was, and proceeded to grab the bug rather forcefully in an attempt to wrest it from its death grip on my precious mother. It was at that instant that my mother cried out in pain. You see, her pajama top had shifted ever so slightly and the keyhole, which from my perspective was in the middle of her chest, had moved to the side thus exposing the bug…her nipple! Needless to say we were both quite embarrassed and yet we all laughed heartily…as we did tonight when I was recounting this tale.

I love you dearly, mom…you’re the best mother a boy and a man could ever have. And I love you Mary, mother of my child, as you continually prove your amazing talent in raising up our child.

“I did not bare myself deliberately, but I tell you, I wish now that I had! Because it is not me that has been exposed, but you! For I have seen the nipple on your soul!” ~Elaine Benes (Seinfeld)

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.
~ Lope de Vega

A good deal later than I would have preferred we have started with our spring gardening. A trip to the nursery is an exciting and unfortunately expensive affair. Just as an arts supply store contains many of the tools of an artists’ trade, a nursery is a place filled with all the tools necessary to make a masterpiece…plants, flowers, containers of all shapes and sizes, borders, trellis, rocks, soil…it is all there and waiting merely for the creativity of the gardener to put it all together. I love the thrill of the first nursery trip of the season!

We began landscaping in earnest last year with a few small projects and this year will see a few more as well as an attempt to establish some lasting perrenials that we can enjoy each year. Today we started with flowers and herbs, the vegetables will begin later this week. We continued our tradition of planting Impatiens in pots on the front steps. We will add Frost Fire Dianthus

and Speedwell (Veronica ‘Waterperry’)

to the front beds. We like to do container gardening on the back deck and this will be our second year of growing herbs in pots there. We planted lemon balm and cilantro today but did not find parsely or lavendar so will have to make a trip to another nursery. The lemon balms smells fantastic! Tori picked out a beautiful orange/red flower for a deck pot, the Fiery Red Gazania.

In addition to these we planted an autumn fern and relocated some of our hosta to a bed we created last year around one of our Bradford Pear trees. Our Iris, planted a few years ago, are blooming and everything is so green and lush. It was a wonderful afternoon to dig in the earth and drink in the scents of spring. There is so much more to do but it was a good start and I’m excited to have flowers growing again.

He who is born with a silver spoon in his mouth is generally considered a fortunate person, but his good fortune is small compared to that of the happy mortal who enters this world with a passion for flowers in his soul.
~ Celia Thaxter

If the smell of fresh air isn’t enough to inspire you to do a little gardening I would suggest the movie Greenfingers.

Greenfingers is a wonderful little movie that was given to me as a Christmas gift a few years ago (thanks Pat!). It is inspired by the true events of a prison program in England that uses gardening as a source of rehabilitation and therapy. The movie stars Clive Owen (Sin City, Closer, King Arthur) as a prisoner with no purpose who begins to see the seeds of a new life with a little help from David Kelly (Waking Ned Devine) and some gardening inspiration from Helen Mirren (Calendar Girls, Raising Helen). Despite beginning his love of flowers with a double violet it is a Primrose (Natasha Little) who captures his heart. All the cast in this movie are wonderful. Clive Owen is quickly becoming a favorite and it was refreshing to see Natasha Little as a female love interest who dresses modestly and wears little make-up and yet looks naturally beautiful. I really highly recommend this film. You can click on this link to watch a poorly done trailer for the movie.

Watch the movie and go do a little gardening.

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?
~ G.K. Chesterton

For those of you who are interested the Extreme Home Makeover show featuring the Kansas City firefighter’s house that James, his father, his crew, my brother-in-law Mike, and yours truly installed cabinets in will air this Sunday, May 8th at 7 p.m. central standard time. The How Did They Do that show will air Monday, May 9th at 7 p.m. CST.

As I’ve said before, the chances are slim that we will be on air and the chances that anyone would recognize us in a sea of blue shirts is even more remote. The thing you will notice, however, is kitchen cabinets, laundry room cabinets, bathroom cabinets, and bookcases next to the fireplace that we both hauled around and installed.

I’m excited that this is finally being aired and am still very thrilled that I had the opportunity to work on this house. It was a very special moment and is a very special memory. Thanks again James for letting me tag along!

No doubt you have read or heard about the fireman who was recently ‘recalled to life’ after being comatose for 10 years. After a decade of being nonresponsive he asked to talk to his wife and then had conversations with many family members. He appears to be doing well and had thought that he was “under” for only 3 months.

This got me thinking, as these things do, about what I would do if I was in this situation. He obviously has physical recovery issues to overcome but lets say for the sake of argument that you awoke from a 10 year nap and were physically and mentally fit and ready to go. What would you do? Obviously family reconnection would be an ongoing priority but what else?

I think the first thing I would want to do would be to spend some time with my wife….wink wink, nudge nudge. Its sad to say but I’m not sure that discovering the political events of the last decade would be a priority. I’d want to catch up on the movies that I had missed….the DVD would be a technical marvel! (at least I didn’t have a DVD player 10 years ago!) And books! My favorite authors would seem like writing machines after a ten year span!

Which leads to another interesting question: would you remember the last pages of books that you had read or the last tv shows that you watched? If your brain only registered a 3 month absence could you just pick up your last novel and dive right in?….assuming of course that you can regularly remember things you read 3 months later! 🙂 And what would it do to your psyche to see your spouse, yourself, friends, family, and most importantly your kids after a decade of aging? There has to be some literature out about this or at least a cheesy made-for-tv documentary of some kind. This isn’t the first person to ‘wake up’ after a long period of time in a coma. Fascinating stuff!

Speaking of comas there is a wonderful looking movie that completely slipped under my radar when it was in theatres that my brother in law pointed me to yesterday. It is called Goodbye, Lenin.

It is a German film that looks fantastic. The idea is that this woman fell into a coma before the Berlin wall fell and she wakes up after the wall has fallen and commercialism has run rampant through the nation. Her family is warned that she shouldn’t receive any shocks so they recreate her room at home and proceed to pretend that all is as it was until the day she discovers that the world is not what she had believed. It looks very, very good! I have it coming on Netflix and will do a review when the time comes. You can check out the trailer here.

Now that I have sufficiently put all of you reading this into a coma, any thoughts?

I was 18 when it dawned on me that I really, really liked musicals. I was attending a performance of My Fair Lady at a local high school. This was a really big school and the production was fairly lavish for high school theatre. I loved the musical so much that I went home and rented My Fair Lady on video. While watching it I realized that I had acquired two new loves…musical theatre and Audrey Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn had a style and grace that is unmatched in today’s Hollywood.

Born on this date in Brussels, Belgium in 1929 to a wealthy English banker and a Dutch baroness, Audrey was destined for greatness. Her privileged upbringing and private school education were doubtless influential in fashioning the woman whose name would come to be synonymous with class and sophistication, and yet this privilege did not hinder Audrey Hepburn from giving of herself to those in need. More on this later. While vacationing with her mother in Arnhem, Holland, Hitler’s forces took over the town and Audrey and her mother lived for a time under Nazi occupation. After the city was liberated Audrey attended ballet school and then took up modeling before being ‘discovered’ by a movie producer.

Audrey started with a few small roles in European films but it was after she moved to America that she burst on the scene in the film Roman Holiday. This film was extremely successful, winning Audrey Hepburn a best actress Oscar and establishing her as the new darling in film. Her waif-like elegance was such a contrast to the sex-goddess images of the time that she gained immediate popularity. In her lifetime Audrey made 31 films and received 4 Oscar nominations in addition to her Oscar win.

I’m not sure exactly why Audrey Hepburn is my favorite actress. I suspect that a great deal of it has to do with the fact that she was the first ‘classic’ actress that I remember noticing. It was odd to think, at age 18, that I had a crush on a preserved-in-film image of this beautiful woman who was actually much older. I believe it also has something to do with the fact that I so closely associate her with my love of musical theatre both live and on film and thus her image generates a great deal of nostalgia. In addition Audrey has starred in so many great films. My favorites include My Fair Lady, Funny Face, Wait Until Dark, and Charade. Audrey Hepburn personified a type of classy, beautiful, sophisticated elegance coupled with a genuine concern for the less fortunate that is rare if not non-existent in Hollywood.

In 1988 Audrey became a special ambassador to the United Nations UNICEF fund helping children in Latin America and Africa, a position she retained until 1993. From her official site: “Audrey traveled for UNICEF with acclaimed photographer John Isaac on behalf of UNICEF. Together they presented to the world a provocative visual context in which to see the urgency of Audrey’s message. For five years, until her death in 1993, Audrey devoted all her energy to working with UNICEF. Her field missions were often physically and emotionally demanding and sometimes undertaken at great personal risk. Audrey learned first hand about the plight of poor and displaced children in countries all over the world. Audrey made over fifty field research visits to UNICEF-assisted projects in Sudan, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia. . These trips enabled her to witness first-hand the distressing conditions of children living in war-torn and drought-ridden areas of the world. Determined to raise awareness and badly needed funds, Audrey applied her first-hand knowledge to inform Special Assemblies at the U.N., shared details with various Press Associations, and lobbied on behalf of children to World Parliaments.”

Audrey Hepburn’s poise, demeanor, and beauty may have been the catalyst for her classy image but the way that she lived the later years of her life is what solidified that image for all time.

I’d like to close this by sharing this poem that was a favorite of Audrey’s and that I feel is a perfect description of her:

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge you’ll never walk alone …

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived,
reclaimed and redeemed and redeemed and redeemed. Never throw out anybody. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm. As you grow older you will discover that you have two hands. One for helping yourself, the other for helping others
~Sam Levenson

Happy Birthday, Audrey…

(1929-1993)