Scout Moves

We walked at the park today. We pass the playground, circle the pond, up the hill, down the road to the school where the seventh-grade band plays. Their march tune leaks through the door seams. At midday, joggers tracing their routes, fishermen casting for catch and release, boisterous boys chasing mothers on short legs. The train whistle we hear is the sound of commerce passing through without stopping. And the small-engine-putter we hear is the sound of regular maintenance— an earnest woman rides a tractor to cut the grass. She rounds the ball diamonds and turns on a dime. Sniff the tree trunks, sniff the tall grass, sniff the dirt clumps left by muddy tires. We follow the creek and aim for the car.

March's version of spring was no lion and it was no lamb. It was a hybrid, a beast with great slapping paws dressed in heavy boots so you could hear it coming up the stairs. It flung open the doors, threw back its head and bellowed, "WELL, HELLOOOOO!" Then it settled down for a nap under blue and soft white, just the sky a beast would request for napping if it could. It breathed slow and steady as it rested, and its fur, all green grass and pink buds, rippled with the warm breeze. Every day this happened, and I worried the surprise beast would up and run. And now it has, taking its careless panting and clunky shoes into hiding.

Well, I've done it. After nearly three years of writing a weekly column for my local newspaper, I have finally decided to take a hiatus. "Finally," I say, because I have been thinking about doing this for a few months but couldn't bring myself to actually follow through. I love having a column—there are things I'd like to say to my community, and this space on the editorial page has allowed me to speak up. For the most part, I have avoided politics and only touched on it in vague terms. During the 2008 election, I wrote generally about how I don't want a "Joe Six Pack" character as my president. I want someone with an education, with nuanced thoughts and capable of eloquence representing my country to the world and minding the store at home. And that column branded me a left-winger in the minds of the local right-wingers, as did my occasional rant against Ohio's penchant for the death penalty. When I wrote on that subject, a few locals called m...

I discovered Manteresting.com the other day—it's a website that launched in February with 5,000 hits the first day and increasingly more every day since. Manteresting is the male response to Pinterest, because the founding men decided Pinterest is too girly. It is pretty girly, although not by design. The homepage and masthead are neutral, and the logo is a red generic font. But 80 to 95 percent of the users are women, so quite a few of the images they post are a little feminine. Not all, but many. You know what would affect that situation?—interesting to note, I just backspaced over the question "You know what would solve that problem" because I realized the feminine bent of Pinterest isn't a problem but a circumstance. Having more men using the site and posting more "manly" images would balance out the feel of Pinterest. But instead of leading the way, two guys started Manteresting because you can't make money or a name for yourself if you're ...

Have you ever been so frustrated that you just wanted to break glass? Here’s what I mean: For the last couple of months, I have been working a few hours a day typesetting for Husband’s company. I take existing books already set and reset them for e-publication, and I have a system down that allows me to complete one every 30 minutes or so. It’s detailed work because e-files have limitations in the same way website have. You can only use certain kinds of fonts, for example, and you can’t use tabs or small caps or double-spaced lines. Because e-files will be custom-sized by each reader, text must flow in a variety of settings, so you can’t break lines manually as you would when setting text for a page, and you can’t hyphenate words in justified text. When you reset existing books, you can do a quick find-and-replace to eliminate the forced line breaks, but you can’t quickly eliminate any manually placed hyphens put in place to break words. Eliminating all the hyphens would never ...

Last weekend, a friend texted and asked if I wanted to go out for dinner and a movie with some other women—our husbands, it seems, were going to be playing poker, so let’s go. We saw a Reese Witherspoon flick that was unremarkable, as all Reese Witherspoon flicks are, but I did find something remarkable in the previews. Next Wednesday, March 21, theaters around the country will be showing Casablanca , the original classic from 1942 in honor of its 70th anniversary. Everything is about marketing, though, so I have to acknowledge this one-day screening is also about promoting the release of the digitized DVD coming out from Turner Classic Movies. I was so excited, I pulled out my silenced cell phone to make note of the event. The woman sitting beside me laughed at me for doing that, but that’s just because she doesn’t understand my connection with classic movies. They aren’t just films. They’re living, breathing things that are woven into my very being. If you cut me, I bleed cell...

I got sucked in, and I’ve yet to determine if I’ve been sucked into something ridiculous or something not so bad. My neighbor-friend Jane wears a lovely shade of lipstick, a Clinique brand with “black” in the name. Not the Black Honey in the Almost Lipstick line, but something else. I have admired her lip shade for some time, so this afternoon when I found myself traveling very near a store with a Clinique counter, I stopped by. I was in the process of trying out different lipstick shades, having determined the black-something my friend uses to be too dark for me. For those of you unfamiliar with the process of sampling lipstick, you don’t actually put the samples on your lips after a hundred other people have sampled them. You dab them on the back of your hand to check the color. Just so you know. I was interrupted by a violinist I know who happened by, and she told me all about what Small Town’s library looked like in the 1940s in such a way that I felt as if I were there, wi...

I will have my dinner party if I have to drag people off the street to sit at the table! That’s the level of determination that drove me yesterday as I prepared for an evening meal. There is a new musician in our community orchestra, an engineer/violinist from Brazil who is working for a local company. He’ll only be here for a year, so we wanted to invite him for dinner, given our own Brazilian connection. We also invited his boss and wife, who we know, Conductor Eric and another couple of friends connected to the orchestra. We set the date a couple of weeks ago and confirmed with everyone invited—Saturday, March 10 at 6:30. But on Friday at 6:30, the Brazilian guest arrived ready for dinner when there was none. Apparently, my email to him said Friday, March 10, and in the confusion, he decided I must have meant Friday and not the 10th. How embarrassing for everyone as we stood in the doorway stammering and apologizing. We invited him in anyway and had a nice chat, although I had n...

Do you ever just get tired? I do. When I reflect on subjects we (and by we, I mean the constipated elements who seem to have missed the first go around) hash and then re-hash, I just get tired. We're really still talking about contraception? At least in the U.S., we decided to make them legal in the 60s, so why are we still even talking about them and whether or not women deserve to have them covered by insurance?  And why, in 2012, do we still need a Black History Month—why haven't we thoroughly incorporated the black race into our history books already? Same goes for Women In History Month, which we're in the middle of as I write. And specifically, today is International Women's Day. Why, for the love of all that is right, do we still need a day to remind the world that millions of women on this planet are just barely hanging on by a thread because the society they happened to have been born in thinks they are of little value and heaps suffering down upon their head...

Months and months ago, Eustacia would say things like, "I saw that on Pinterest," or "I want to make the things I found on Pinterest." I had no idea what she was talking about, and when she described this new website she was spending time with, I couldn't picture it. And honestly, I didn't want to. I didn't think I had room in my day or in my head for another website to check in with every day. But I finally gave in. I was afraid it would become an obsession, a thing to glue me to my chair as I scrolled the endless posting of photographs. At first I would pop in hoping for an interesting recipe, and two hours later, I would find I hadn't blinked for too long, and my jaw had gone slack. I've managed to be disciplined about how I use Pinterest, though, and only stop on the postings that I find particularly interesting. I discovered something yesterday that I hope does not become a trend, because I think it would completely alter the site and ru...