While encouraged by the reported draw down of troops in Iraq from 170,000 US Army military in October 2007 to the current level of 83,970 and the planned reduction to 50,000 by the end of August, one has to counter those numbers with the planned increase from 10,000 to 30,000 by year end in Afghanistan and face the reported 350 per cent increase in casualties in Iraq for the first two months of 2009 in contrast to those for January and February of this year . . .85 v. 381.   

In an odd world, at an odd time, one can only hope that any long strides forward toward peace in the Middle East remain unobliterated by backward slides.

I did the math. It looked encouraging . . . until I reminded myself there's more to the math than numbers only.

RMR in Po-Town 

I go away for a few days, and what do we have? Not only a National Health Care Law, but also the passage of the Reconciliation Bill in the Senate by a vote of 56 to 43. What lovely news!

When we were kids there was no such thing as health insurance. Doctors . . . if one could afford to go to one . . . were precious few and often involved trips across the city by bus only to find frequently as a female patient, a doctor with a patronizing attitude. .

So my mother had a list of home cures that rivaled a magicians'. For lesser illnesses, the treatments were as follows: Sore throats: Gargle every half hour with warm salt and water and/or rub on Vicks. And you might also rub Vicks wherever it hurt or was congested. For chest congestion, you could also put some in a pan of water, boiled it, and breathe in the Vicks-scented steam. For medium-bad colds, you could even swallow a teaspoonful before bed.

Years later, when my younger sisters were growing up, the doctor suggested to Mom that it might have done us just as much good if she'd rubbed the Vicks on a bedpost. By that time we could afford a regular pediatrician, so she laughed. But not too hard.

But, we did get better. (If only because to stay ill meant watching our mother worry and fret for a longer time. Life was hard enough without making it worse.)

But for really bad coughs there was always dried mustard, flour and water for our chest. When it was that bad, my mother chose to adopt a kind of half-hearted denial from which state she would command my father, "Biily, you have to make a mustard plaster. I can't do it. I just can't do it." 

So my dad'd step up to the plate with his magic ratios that permitted him to titrate the dose (degree of burn) to the size and age of the child (or adult) and the severity of the cough. Ratios were given in water to mustard to flour. There were 2:2:3 and 2:2:2 and such with the results that the higher the percentage of mustard and the lower the percentage of flour the higher the potency of the plaster. Or vice-versa. He'd announce the ratio. My mother would say, "If you think so."

And so a sticky, wet, dirty-yellow plaster would then be placed over the offending breast-bone . . .  although I do recall them also being placed on the forehead for sinusitis.

But someplace along the way, our family lost my baby brother to mastoiditis. The doctor had told my twenty-seven year old mother just that day that she was nothing but an old mother who worried too much when all the boy had was a common cold.

But tonight, someplace out there, my father's playing his trumpet and my mother's dancing. They're celebrating our new health care law and how the reconciliation bill passed the Senate 56-43. And they're singing, "We don't miss you at all . . . all you other guys. Where were you then? When we needed you? But we got Obama now. And the Dems. And our grandbabies will grow up safer and more strong. Where were all you other guys when we needed you? Where were you then?"

Roberta in Po-Town, Tappin' out rhythm

*For details on the National Health Care Law go to http://www.harryreid.com/ee/index.php/landing/whatdoeshcrmean




  

St. Patrick's day, and a real spring day it was with people out in droves crossing the Walkway over the Hudson River and enjoying Waryas Park along its shore. Every pub in town looked filled with people drinking green beer and edging in for their servings of corned beef and Irish soda bread. In the county today they must have sold thousands of pounds of beef.

There was no place to park so we must have spent a good twenty minutes looking while one of the dancer's mothers wound up paying a gate watcher to let her into an area reserved for a private party.

Usually I'm just half Irish, but for today, I'm fully so. So I followed my niece, the champion Irish step dancer for a bit of a pub crawl--Broessler school of Irish Step Dancing. Precision dancing at its best. And fun.

The kids had fun talking and dancing and chowing down on chicken legs and corned beef sandwiches and drinking diet sodas. The adults had fun just watching them. And the kids sold raffle tickets to support scholarships to help those in the school with talent and need.

We were there for a bit of the crawl. We missed it at Mahoney's, hit it at The Brown Derby, and left it before they went to Mulligan's . . . to get our own servings of corned beef, cabbage and boiled potatoes. Then home.

School tomorrow. For me that is. (I suppose I should say speech-language therapy treatments tomorrow--except people relate more easily to going to school. I do myself.)

And as it's Wednesday night, after the dinner hours things began to thin and I'm home in time to wish you a Happy St. Patrick's Day, hoping that spring is here to stay.

An Irish blessing:

"May the wind always be on your back and the sun upon your face and may the winds of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.”

Roberta in Po-Town

Eighty-something years of Academy Awards for Best Directors before one was to be finally claimed by a woman, Kathryn Bigelow. Almost an embarassment that I had not seen her films. Here she was, awarded the 2010 Academy Award for Best Director, and me, unaware even of her standing in the world of film. I write her name along with that of the movie: Kathryn Bigelow, Hurt Locker. 

Lovely . . . the sounds . . . they sing to me.

I feel proud, happy for her. I look at her photo. She's noble in appearance. Gracious. Singular. 

A sense a loss that I had not followed her career fleetingly passes through me. And then, the audacity . . . to dare to write about her with so little hard information. 

While I understand that Bigelow eschew's the notion of recognizing the importance of her success as a step for women, from my point of view, specifically because she is a woman, I feel strongly that not to mention her success here would be remiss.

So, Kathryn Bigelow, you do us proud. Your effort and success are appreciated. We are sisters. All of us.

Roberta in Po-Town, In struggle