Last Friday I officiated at the wedding of a cook and waitress I used to work with at Pegasus in Castle Rock. It was a good time. They held it in the old log cabin that used to be the Northwoods Inn. I wrote about it in June, 2006, A picture of the gardens at the site is at the top of the page. Anyway, it turned out to be a great place for a wedding.

I wore a black suit, and felt a bit like Ellen Degeneres because all the other ladies were dressed in dresses, but boy was it comfortable, especially with flat shoes.

The final shot is of two little guys, the bride's nephews. They were so cute and were getting pretty antsy before the wedding, so I asked them to help me take pictures and they got to be in one. They are in front of one of the two fireplaces there.

It was a lot of fun to see my old work friends, including my boss who I had double flipped off when I quit. We're friends now too. Some of the teenagers have changed so much in 3 years that I didn't recognize them. But they remembered me. There were a lot of hugs and smiles.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

My husband lived in a desegregated area of Denver when I met him. It was a mix of large, really nice houses along 17th avenue, with a garden/park/grassed median between the two sides of the roads in front of the mansions. On the feeder streets perpendicular to 17th Avenue there were big houses to the north and smaller houses to the south.

I was pretty young and then away in isolated college/self absorption non tv pre-adulthood when all the desegregation movement grew in Denver. I remember the mandatory busing of the schools. My niece who was 12 years younger than I was bused to a black area in the inner city.

The house Dave and I lived in before and after we got married was on the south, smaller house side. Since he's an architect, he really was entranced with the house because it was made of stone blocks, finished on the front street side and roughly cut on the sides. The roughly cut sides were really neat. We found a secret Mason rite and ritual book and some Confederate money in the basement. It made sense that a mason had built the house, affording what he could, which was not a big house.

Anyway, the neighborhood had all kinds of races and it was a good experience to become familiar with other cultures. We had a wild druggy guy's mother next to us, and he lived kitty corner a few blocks away. His face had that wasted look, like when you're losing your teeth. His sons got into drugs, shooting off guns, breaking into cars, and stealing bikes from the nice gay couple across the street, who had the audacity to leave their garage door open. They were Caucasian and a real pain in the butt.

The mom, who was pretty trim and tidy, and did a lot of gardening and lawn mowing, rented to a black mom and her son who lived in the duplex in front of the druggy's mother half of the house.. They were very unobtrusive, sometimes you could hear the junior high son practicing rap lyrics. He also called Dave, Mr. Dave.

On the other side was a bustling black family, a sister and her siblings, all in their early twenties. They were working and coming and going at all times. They were normally pretty quiet except when friends would come over and everyone started talking really loud, and in that singsong voice Oprah uses when she's with a brother or sister. Then their friends would honk their car goodbye at 3:00 in the morning, and they did leave the tv on pretty loud all through the night.

The one thing I noted that was different with this family is the hats the women wore to church, they were great, and they went with their outfits really nicely. I don't even know where you would buy hats like that. I guess I do remember some nice hat departments in stores when I was younger. But these were silky and shiny and just looked really cool.

There were all kinds of churches on 17th Avenue between the mansions and some smaller houses. Some referenced the desegregation like "Unity on the Avenue". Our friends got married in one that had brochures on reincarnation in the front hallway. But you could tell an effort was made to bring people together, and to respect different folks.

I'm glad the desegregation started. I do remember feeling guilty when we'd drive by the bus stop at busy Colfax and Colorado Boulevard, and see that most of the people waiting for a bus were black or Hispanic. I felt isolated and sheltered in my heated or air conditioned, glassed in car.

I think society has to evolve to the point where everyone, as Immanuel Kant said, treats each other as an end in themself, not a means to an end. It's the golden rule, treat others as you would chose to be treated. Don't use, exploit or feel superior to anyone else. And remember, we all have our struggles in life, respect that that may be why your neighbor isn't thinking straight at times, and try to exhibit patience and compassion.

I first posted this on my Vox site and got a reply about the hats, here's a quote from James Baldwin:



"Our crowns have already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear them."
-James Baldwin

HEY MARY THIS BLOG'S FOR YOU!


Thanks for the gifts. The lap comforter is great. It's been so cold here that I've been using it while reading in front of the full spectrum lamp Dave got for me to keep away the winter doldrums andin doing craft projects.

We'll have to send you some of our pressed flower works that we've been doing with some of the flowers Lucy, our neighbor, has given us. She's started giving away her things, anticipating that she won't be here that much longer, but at 96, she's still doing so well. Every day she does two or three different types of exercises. But the weather is keeping her from hiking. She really enjoys coming to a weekly coffee/tea I've started having for the neighbors who are home during the day. Her son drives her here and we usually have a lot of things to talk about.

The girls clothes fit. Emma is thinking she's too cool to wear pink now, but who knows how soon that will change. We love the Frango mints, the first time we opened them we noticed that 11 or 12 were gone already. Emma was going to allot them to her friends. We stopped that by putting a note in the box warning her that Santa is watching. But she's figured out Dave is Santa because he was commenting Christmas morning about how the big candy cane wouldn't fit in the stocking. Busted.

A few years ago she commented on how the tooth fairy has a bald head. Busted.

The pj's I got you are for slinking around in your urban condo, once it gets finished. When they were just starting to develop the LODO area around here, we visited some friends near the train station and they called themselves urban homesteaders. That was over 20 years ago, and now Coors Field has really set the tone of the area.

Hope all the kids are doing well, Dave mentioned a skit that Jess and Adrianne were in in Chicago. Hope it went well.

You are probably back to the grind of teaching school. Although with your personality it's probably not so much a grind for your students, and I already know that their personalities brighten your day. Take care, and keep warm. Betsy.

I'm listening to KUNC.org, they're playing Terrence Blanchard's A Tale of God's Will, a Requiem for Katrina. Our library had a copy. It's really good. Plus there is a track called Ghost of Betsy. It won the station's best jazz cd for the year, if you like jazz I think you would enjoy a listen.

Good Music Day

Yesterday was a great day at the library again. Ana wanted a Ben Folds cd for getting straight A's on her report card. There wasn't one to choose from from the local stores, so I looked at the library and found the Songs for Silverman cd with a dvd and booklet. She's been enjoying listening.

I had reserved the Amy Winehouse, Back to Black cd, so I picked it up, and while looking for Ben Folds I found an enjoyable Between the Covers cd, with a lot of favorites, including David Bowie and Mick Jagger singing Dancing in the Streets together. It's an album compiled to raise money for cancer,leukemia and AIDS research. The songs are great, as are the artists.

Also found a best of The Replacements. I didn't think it was fair to judge them by the only song I had heard, The Best Day Ever, which was included on the Sponge Bob Square Pants movie soundtrack. I've picked out my favorite songs, which tend to be in their later albums. Paul Westerberg does have a great singing voice.

I've been following bloggers on Vox and after seeing the Egypt photos from Miss Scotch and Pants Party's trip, I had to comment, and to do so, had to join. So now I can be a multiple blogger.

New Stove!

The old one had uneven burners, the oven knob had broken so you had to guess what the temperature was and then back it up with a thermometer inside, and one knob on the stove top had broken off as well, not just snapped off but snapped apart so super glue wouldn't hold it together to snap it back on.

It's ironic that the stove we replaced was bought a day before Thanksgiving in 1989, when the old stove at Dave's house broke. The 1989 stove did last 18 years. We tried to see if we could replace the heating coil in it this time, but it was configured so you couldn't just pull the coil out and replace it. Our new one allows you to unscrew the bracket holding the coil in, so in the future we may be more lucky. We waited until after Christmas to buy it and you may have read about our grilling fiasco of the Christmas roast.

The old stove was almond, the one before at this house I got as a cast off from the mother of a secretary down the hall, and it was avocado green. Now our choices were black, white or stainless steel. Almond was not available, neither was avocado nor harvest gold.

We felt bad that we were just buying a new one rather than trying to save the old one, but Dave felt reassured that besides the oven no longer working,it was time to get a new one when the light wouldn't work anymore when the burners were on. When you have a third grader cooking on the stove top, you want her to know that the burner is still on and she should turn it off. Our third grader loves to fry herself egg whites, a habit she started in second grade.

So we bit the bullet and went for another new one. Dave is excited because there is a window to the oven and you can view inside with the oven light, without having to open the door and changing the temperature.

This one even has a way of turning the whole thing off for Sabbath, which we don't do, but it is amazing all the things it can do, like start a frozen casserole in the middle of the afternoon, even if you aren't there, bake it to specification and then turn itself down to keep it warm for an hour. And the cooktop surface is flat, so the pans heat more evenly, which will hopefully save a little bit of energy.

There was too much snow for the delivery guys to get the big 40 foot box truck up the winding drive, so they brought the old one down and took the new one up on a dolly. The drivers were so nice that Dave gave them an extra $20.00 for their efforts. I did have a neighbor ready to bring his pickup truck to help us, if need be, which meant I had to call him at 6:40 am (the drivers called at 6:25 to say they were on the way). When they didn't come for half an hour past when they said they'd come, I drove up the hill and found them and had them follow me down into the valley and showed them where the turn around was. They were cheerful and polite. Our dog kissed them on the cheek as they were strapping the stove on the dolly.

May it last many years.