london music

Tonight I'm listening to The First of a Million Kisses by Fairground Attraction. I first heard it when I spent a semester living in London on college. When I hear it, it reminds me of wandering aimlessly thru Hyde Park and take-out curry near Paddington Station.

they're home!

My two oldest children are home after several weeks in France with their grandparents. They had a great time, but I sure did miss them. Now we have to get packed up and ready to move into our new house next week.

the clinton memoir

So I spent an hour or so flipping thru the book this afternoon and I have to agree with the reviews that say it's badly written. It's just one long narrative ("So then this happened and after that I did this and the next day I did this other thing...." and on and on and on...).

I saw him interviewed on Oprah yesterday and was very disturbed at how flip he was in answering her question as to whether he feels he owes Monica Lewinsky an apology. He laughed the question off.

Hell yes he owes her an apology. Of course he does. She is responsible for her own immoral and unwise choice to get involved with him, but the onus of the blame falls on him, since he's thirty years older than she is and was her boss.

The Lewinsky affair got him a $10 million book deal. All it got her was a ruined life -- before her life had really even begun.

Can you imagine what it must be like to be Monica Lewinsky on a day-to-day basis?

My favorite political memoir is Keeping Faith by Jimmy Carter. I also really like G. Gordon Liddy's autobiography.

comments?

So, ummmmm, I finally added a comments feature to my blog, but so far, no one has commented on anything. Maybe this is because my stuff is too dull, but go ahead, make my day and leave your thoughts.

ronald reagan as father

Although I was not a fan of most of Reagan's policies or social views, I couldn't help but be touched by all the TV and print shots in the last week of tiny, frail, elderly Mrs. Reagan grieving. Her love for her husband was manifest in every look and gesture, and her grief was palpable. Their love story is fabled and the photos of the two of them together over the years make it clear that they meant the world to one another.

All of this is obviously a beautiful thing. I'm all for passionate love, romantic love, enduring marriages and all the rest.

But I also found myself wondering, "what about their children?" They were all present and accounted for, but little attention was given to their relationship with their father -- in life or in death. The family's estrangements with one another over the years has been well documented and thanks to Patti Davis's many, many essays on the subject, everyone knows that they all made their peace in the end.

But still, the lack of deep connection between father, mother, and their adult children was as evident as Mrs. Reagan's misery and loss. In the coverage of the events, and the discussions by people who knew the Reagans over the years, it was as if the Reagan children and grandchildren were sort of an afterthought.

All families are complex in their own way, and no one can really understand intra-family relationships from the outside, but I think it's safe to say, based on the history of the Reagans (much of it verbalized or written about by family members themselves) that Nancy and Ronald Reagan didn't ever really get the hang of developing strong bonds with their kids.

Maybe they were too focused on one another, as Patti Davis has suggested in her writing. Maybe they were too busy running the state of California and then the free world. I don't know. But I know that at my own funeral, I hope that the first thing anyone feels like saying about me is that I loved my children fiercely and that being their mother was the most important role in my life.

As Jackie Kennedy once famously said:

"If you bungle raising your children, nothing else much matters in life.

Books on the nightstand

What I'm reading:

Margaret Mead: A Life

Archers of Loaf

I'm listening to Icky Mettle

The living room in my new house 

The front room in my new house 

Have you ever noticed how much that guy who asks the questions in "Inside the Actors Studio" looks like he's been embalmed? He sort of looks like a bloated Lenin -- the Lenin you see inside the glass box in Red Square...

(note to self: finish assignment for magazine...quit procrastinating on blogger....)

My son Henry,. budding rock god and all-around superkid 

A new house

I bought a house last week after looking for a year or so. It's a really sweet 1930 bungalow in this Knoxville neighborhood. Thanks to all who suggested houses and neighborhoods. Here are some pictures of the house. My children and I will be moving in at the end of June.

The transformative hell that is divorce

"Marriage changed me. Motherhood changed me more. But divorce changed me the most."

Just one of the many painfully astute observations in my friend Jeannie's latest column in the Twin Cities magazine, The Rake.