Shitting in the woods

I have a friend who likes to shit in the woods.

I don't know if she's told this to anyone else.

I'm reminded of her confession after contemplating what all the deer hunters are doing when compelled to relieve their bowels.

The hills and dales of rural Wisconsin have to be filled with hunter's shit right about now.

My friend is a walker and it seems to happen to her more often than not - the morning ritual walk gets everything moving and churning along in the old digestive system and she begins to search frantically for a tall oak, but often has to settle for the nearest scrub line or leaf pile.

I've been there to witness her suddenly turn and run pell-mell down a hill - toilet paper flying in hand. (She keeps her pocket stuffed just in case)

I wonder about runners, just pounding along in the wee hours before daylight. That has got to come up.

I'm not adverse to the idea and I admit I've done it on occasion. There is something very earthy about it - communing with nature - genetic memory of primitive ancestors - cool wind on the ass. I do get why she likes it.

Except for the time - and my kids just can't let this go - when I was deep into a five mile walk in the winter in my snow suit - and the zipper was stuck.

I feel like I'm channeling Andy Rooney today.

Why I will stick to real books

My books are dusty, piled in boxes just waiting to tell someone the story of my life.

I visit them from time to time - stroke the jacket covers and flip through pages, the smell of places I've lived lingering on the paper.

I know I should part with them - I have a boxful ready for Goodwill but I don't have the strength of heart to say goodbye. There have been too many painful partings already in my life.

The inside cover of a book of horse stories is dated 1969 and signed by my Aunt Ann. Inside are all the imaginations of a young girl: horses with flowing manes and fierce devotion, heroes and happy endings, the wonder of possibility. I lay in my twin bed -book propped on coltish legs - lost in the feel of wind as it whips through my hair.

My stolen books from junior high: "No Particular Place to Go - The Making of a Free High School," a book on weaving and the "Complete Works of Gilbert and Sullivan."

Dog-eared paperbacks, "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger's "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters," "Troutfishing in America" by the sad poet Richard Brautigan - I still live inside their yellowed pages. All these characters - Billy Pilgrim, Elliot Rosewater, Seymour Glass- once knew me better than I knew myself.

Did Carlos Casteneda's Don Juan really exit? Don't tell me any different, I know it's true, just as I know Middle Earth will someday herald my return, Frodo and Bilbo welcoming me home.

Spiritual books on Edgar Cayce, reincarnation, dreams, Atlantis and astrology, crystals and prophecies - how grateful I am to be unlocked from the chains of sin and hell, although I still have my Martin Luther book from confirmation with the cheat sheet pasted on the inside cover.

My college textbooks introduced to me to all the great photographers documenting moments through images: human suffering, the Battle at Wounded Knee, the Dust Bowl, bread lines, civil rights marches, John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's casket, the Vietnam War reflected in a young soldier's eyes.

I could show you all my collie books in hardcover from my foray into the world of dog shows, tell of Albert Payson-Terhune's dogs: the famous Lad and Buff and Gray Wolf and Bruce and what it feels like to bury your hands in a magnificent ruff of collie fur, to watch them run with wild abandon, all the while seeking your face.

There are so many more - the inherited books: My grandmother's English-Slovenian dictionary and all her notes, beginning at age 16 when she came to America. My other grandmother's tattered Bible with pages falling out. My mother's dictionary in large print and her book of birds both she and my father inscribed with the species they spotted at their backyard feeder: a blue jay, mourning dove, nuthatch, four guinea hens, a squirrel they named "Red Devil."

I see them sitting in their matching Lazyboy recliners, after dinner, watching the feeder fill with birds as evening falls.

My father's handwriting is like chicken scratching, my mother's round with full loops.

Our books are filled with memories that tell the story of who we are.

The best laid plans....

A downed power pole in Milwaukee has closed down the interstate for several hours, the news interrupting Dr. Phil and his intervention of four boys who tattooed slurs on another boy's ass.

In 90-degree heat cars and trucks are piled pell-mell on I-94 downtown, near College Avenue. Truckers are trapped and bloating like beached whales as we speak.

I've vowed to not leave the house for three days this long holiday weekend to heal a bum knee, living in a tricot nylon nightgown, the only kind of sleepwear my mother would wear because "it moves with the body."

The kitchen table is piled high with cast-aside paperwork and there's no excuse to look away: review the car insurance, think about writing a will, find a new doctor, tackle the pile of bills.

I drop a pen and bend down to pick it up - then muffle a scream/gasp/partial upchuck.

The carpet is moving, and it isn't from LSD.

Gazillions of miniscule ants are marching, horror-movie stye, in a line from the cat food bowl to the patio door. Worker teams carry tiny bits of cat food, left on the floor by Dreamer, who stuffs food in her mouth like a chipmunk, then chucks it out onto the carpet like kids blowing spitballs.

This is all her fault.

I panic, spraying Windex all over the carpet. The interstate of ants scatter. I run for the vacuum, dragging my bum knee. They smell my fear.

I suck up, by accident, the fur covered toy weasel. It's stuck in the vacuum hose. I pull it out - piece by piece - with a pair of pliers.

By now I'm whimpering a little from the creepy-crawly feeling traveling up my spine to the base of my neck. Oprah has come on - it's the story of the girl who was locked in a dog cage, revisiting, as a grown woman, the dark basement she was kept in.

Cayenne pepper - I'm spilling it around the base of the patio door. I spy a tiny hole - a portal of hell - and douse it with some old rose spray I found under the kitchen sink. OMG - why is there no poison in this house, where is the chemical warfare when you need it?

The cats have been watching this ant debauchle for who knows how long. I've wondered about their distain, they are usually much better at hiding it, but lately it's been so blatent.

The hole in the wood is now temporarily filled with putty - it's smeared on the carpet and up the woodwork - a whitish-reddish peppery concoction, covered in several layers of duct tape.

I'm poised to rip up the carpeting. This could take me well into late-night reruns of "Everybody Loves Raymond."

And Dreamer's cheeks are suspiciously puffed out...

According to the Urban on-line dictionary an ear worm refers to any song that is so catchy, and at the same time so extremely annoying, that it feels like a worm has crawled into your ear and eaten the intelligent parts of your brain so that you hum the song all day long, no matter how much you hate it.

Well I’ve had that problem lately with Todd Rundgren’s “Hello it’s Me.”

Not that that’s a bad thing, it could be worse, much worse. Once I had “Take a Chance on Me” by Abba stuffed in my head for one entire, sleepless night. Another time it was “Once Upon a Dream,” from Walt Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty.”

Lest I have to write about myself again, which is beginning to repulse me, I asked co-workers (some now former) to share their earworm horror stories.

I think Gary’s may be the worst. He is so terrified of “You’re Having My Baby” by Paul Anka getting stuck in his head again that we aren’t allowed to even say the name of the song. He had to write it down on a slip of paper and hand it to me.

So here it goes:

"Stuck in the Middle With You" by Steeler's Wheel

“One of the worst songs ever to be stuck in my head actually contains the word, stuck... So naturally, now that you mention it, there it is in my head again.... Thanks a lot”
April Showers (really)


The worst: “The Barney Song.”

“I managed to avoid this until I had kids, but even though neither of my kids ever got real attached to this show, they did sing the song from time to time, I even joined in once or twice, Yuk!”
The best: "Open Your Eyes" by Snow Patrol
Peggy Breister
City editor

“Da Da Da” by The Trio.

“That would have to be the worst one. There were others, but they don't reach the level of annoying that this song achieves.”

The best: “‘Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts’ (sung together with her family???????????????????)
Heather Stanek


“Turkey Song” By Adam Sandler
Ruth Schoenbeck


“Dead skunk in the middle of the road, Dead skunk in the middle of the road and it’s stinking to high heaven.”
Jeff Reader


Worst: “Believe” by Cher

“'Do you believe in love after love,’ ughhh....”
Best: “Sweetness,” by Jimmy Eat World
Amie Jo Schaenzer


Worst : “I was driving to work late one night and the ABBA song ‘Take a Chance on Me’ came on the radio. For my entire 10-hour shift I kept hearing 'take a chance, take a chance, take a chance on me' until I felt like running out of the building screaming.”

Best: “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger

“The chorus ‘I'm not sick but I'm not well, and I'm so hot cause I'm in hell’ just goes around and around in your head until you finally adopt it as your credo, especially on a bad day.”
Colleen Kottke


Worst: “You’re Having My Baby,” “Rocky,” “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” and “Indiana Wants Me.”

Best: “Too Many People” by Paul and Linda McCartney.
Gary Clausius

Worst: “Wheels on the Bus.”
Katie Hullin


Worst: “There was a stupid song on Barney that went…’If all the rain were lemon drops and gum drops, Oh what a rain that would be. Standing outside with my mouth open wide (now comes the really bad part…you tip your head back, open your mouth and sing) augh, augh, augh, augh, augh, augh, augh, augh, augh, augh’. It’ll be stuck in my head the rest of the day…thanks a lot!”
Joan Brezinsky

"The Final Countdown" by Europe. (The theme to which G.O.B. from "Arrested Development" performs his magic acts. (Heavy on the synthesizer...) The worst part is, I know only three words to this '80s rock anthem ... you guessed it: "the final countdown."
David Williams

Worst: “You Light Up My Life” by Debbie Boone
Best: AC/DC's “Thunderstruck”
Avi Stern


Worst: “I'm Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred
Best: "It's Raining Men" by The Weather Girls
Doug Whitely

The following columns ran in The Reporter.

New writings should be forthcoming, when I get my head out of my ass.

My earliest memory of the horrors of homemade crafts happened at my late Aunt Helen’s house in Franklin, a rural setting with weathered-barn board outbuildings, a large raspberry patch and a root cellar with jars and jars of put up preserves.

It’s the same place where my sister said I scarred her for life by locking the door when the neighborhood St. Bernard was running loose.

Those were the days when women still wore aprons they made and embroidered dish towels and pillowcases, but that’s not the hideous part.

It was the crocheted doll-head toilet roll cover that sat atop the toilet lid, covering, you guessed it, a roll of toilet paper.

There was a matching toilet seat cover so thick it was hard to put the seat down, so it stayed open a crack.

I couldn’t understand who would do such a thing and why. I felt somehow my childhood might possibly be impaired if this was the norm, and we didn’t have anything like it at our house that even came close.

The only craft in our minimalist house was the burned matchstick cross on the wall made by my brother as some Scout project, so to this day I have this aversion to crafty clutter, including lawn ornaments and knitted dish towels you button to the oven handle.

My friend insists that as a public confession, I tell the story of the day in high school when I opened all my presents before Christmas and then rewrapped them. We were maybe 16 years old at the time, suffering from some kind of defiant syndrome, or maybe that was just me. It was the year my family decided to make all our gifts for Christmas, and we were sure we’d get a kick out of looking at some corny stuff.

I myself had taken empty Chianti wine bottles and dripped multi-colored candle wax all over them — Italian-restaurant-style — and stuck a candle at the top. When my mother discovered the mess, I spent days on my knees, scraping wax off the basement floor.

In a dress box marked with a Gimbels-Schusters label was the worst homemade item I’ve ever seen.

It was a knitted or crocheted mustard-colored skirt and top, with a vest included. The entire ensemble had been lined with satiny material, in the same mustard color.
Nothing was right, the arms were off and the skirt was crooked and lumpy, with half the lining showing around the hem.

This was my gift from my older sister, a recent college graduate, just married and poor.
I thought of all the hours she put into it and cringed.

Somehow, opening all my gifts was no longer funny.

I got back at her one year by making family portraits out of stuffed pantyhose. You’d have to see it to believe it.

It’s right up there with handmade purses made of pipe cleaners and an empty milk jug.

That we disagreed about Kathy Lee Gifford is telling, perhaps says it all.

“She’s so fake, so self-righteous and could she please shut up about Cody?” I yelled to my sister, who was in the kitchen basting a turkey.

“She’s a good Christian who defends family values!” she fired back.

That cracks me up, the memory of two sisters born a decade apart, bickering back and forth about the co-host of the then “Regis and Kathy Lee” TV show, my sister’s new daughter-in-law looking on in first holiday-with-family horror.

My older sister and I had nothing in common back then but the Slovenian genes that made for thick calves and cravings for ethnic bakery, like potica, with butter.

She was born in 1947, a year so prosperous the demand for consumer goods outstripped U.S. supplies. She was the first in the family to graduate from college, as a scientist no less, in an age when women still wore aprons and girdles. She was geeky and never dated in high school, preferring to stay in her room, studying the periodic tables and theses by Martin Luther. She was most passionate about her science and her God.

I, on the other hand, skipped classes, shunned organized religion, and lived just this side of the fringe. I played iconoclast to her sacraments.

For years, maybe 20, our sisterhood was marked by little more than special occasions, bar-be-ques and birthdays and babies being born.

Then came the devastating news that her ongoing flu-like symptoms was really stage 3 ovarian cancer.

“Why shouldn’t it be me,” was her science-based answer to the standard cancer question.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. It was autumn and within six months my mother would be dead. My sister would have to leave her own hospital bed to attend the funeral, wearing a god-awful wig, and bright red lipstick against her pale skin.

“I was talking about me,” I wanted to tell her. “Why should I be left in a world without the sister I never took the time to get to know?”

For the next six years our sisterhood, once based on petty differences, found common-ground. By then, of course, Kathy Lee was brought down off her perfect pedestal when her husband had a sordid affair. I didn’t even say “I told you so.”

When it came time to plan her funeral, she told me not to make a scene if her hair wasn’t done just right, making sure to include a photo of herself in the pre-arranged funeral planner. That was our last good laugh, remembering how, gathered around my mother’s coffin, I exclaimed loud enough for everyone to hear, “MY GOD, SHE HAS NO BANGS.”

“So Sharon doesn’t freak out again,” read the little post-it note stuck to the photo of her hair.

Our last meal together was grilled cheese. By then her calves had grown thin, and she told me that now I had to be the one in the family who makes the potica for Christmas. But I would never make it again, not without her.

I’m proud to say I knew her as my sister, and figure she probably spends her time now grilling Archimedes and Albert Einstein instead.

I just hope when the time comes, someone loves me enough, like a sister, to make sure my hair is poofy, with the right amount of frizz.

I am a believer in Dr. Darold Treffert’s theory of genetic memory because somewhere way back in the Neandrathal branch of the Roznik family a gene mutated…for good.

This dent in the DNA chain could be among several, knowing my family, but for conversation’s sake let’s isolate and identify it as the one that allows for the “fortitude and patience it takes to see a project through.”

Growing up, I don’t recall people investing much time in do-it-yourself projects, so there wasn’t a lot of role-modeling going on.

Things were built to last forever. The turquoise tile in the bathroom was there to stay. Same with the thick, checkered linoleum kitchen floor, the plaster walls, and the heavy oak doors. All indestructible.

Neighbors living on Bobolink Drive resided in houses where nothing much changed in 30 years. Maybe a sandbox was added, a little aluminum shed, a horseshoe pit.

Gravel driveways sufficed, porches were concrete, and a room was considered “remodeled” if it got a fresh coat of lead paint.

Back in the early 70s a crazy twist of luck landed me a 1969 Camero SS convertible with a 350 engine. I am not a car person, but it was pretty, white with orange stripes, checkered upholstery, and a spoiler.

Car stereos were the latest rage, replacing the a.m. car radios that came standard in the muscle cars. My greaser friends, the gear heads, were pulling out the 8-tracks and installing cassette players with speakers set into the ledge between the back seat and the rear window (is there a name for that?).

Sheesh. If guys can do it, piece of cake. I purchased a Pioneer a.m./f.m./cassette car stereo system, put the hood down on a gorgeous summer day, and tried to find one of my dad’s screwdrivers. His work bench was like a foreign land.

I probably had on the paisley halter top made out of a kerchief, some Sun-in sprayed in my hair, sandals made by the hippie guy who ran the Leather Shop down on Brady Street.

Piece.
Of.
Cake.
What a relief when, endless hours and lots of tears (crybaby) later my dad came to the rescue, and I admitted to myself that the male species had talents that I couldn’t touch.

I still see it clearly, I come walking out of the house and see my dad with a crowbar and sledgehammer, pounding, pounding, two huge, jagged holes into that back window ledge.

“No one will notice. We’ll just put duct tape around the speakers to hold them in,” he said.

I throw up a little in my mouth when people tell me they don’t own a television.

Or only watch public television stations, maybe the MacNeil/Lehrer hour if they are feeling particularly slovenly.

I am of the first generation of humans plopped down in front of a television set to be entertained.

Whenever our mothers weren’t looking, we sat too close, heedless of the radiation that was slowly melting our brains and making us go blind at the same time.

We believed with all our hearts that Miss Diane from Romper Room could see us through the television set, our first fix of what we thought was reality TV.

Etched somewhere in my unconscious brain, where the brain cells have been destroyed so there is lots of room, are TV test patterns, the NBC Peacock, the “Star Spangled Banner” that signed off the last station at night, and all the characters with X’d-out eyes — the endless stream of violent cartoon victims.

Weaned on black and white shows my mom watched during the day — “Art Linkletter’s House Party,” “Queen for a Day,” “General Hospital” — and later, graduating to evenings with the family in pajama sets watching “Bonanza” (my brother wearing his cowboy hat and holster), there wasn’t such a thing as “bad television.”

Or if there was, you just sat there and watched it anyway, in ignorant bliss.

It is in this state of mindlessness that I escape from my Type-A job through reality television shows.

In 2000, “Survivor” had me hooked when the evil Richard Hatch played everyone to take home $1 million.

This wasn’t a villainous actor, it was a real-life lech.

How utterly decadent!

I don’t know if it is evolution, or maybe de-evolution of television through reality shows, but this is my partial list of sins:

“I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.”
“Greatest American Dog.”
“Here Come the Newlyweds.”
“High School Reunion.”
“The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette.”
“Beauty and Geek.”
“Pussycat Dolls: Search for Girlicious” (I know…).
“Farmer Takes a Wife.”
"America’s Next Top Model.”
“So You Think You Can Dance.”
“The Surreal Life.”
“Big Brother.”

Sadly, it goes on.

This is what happens when you only get basic cable.

In 1975, Wisconsin’s only tattoo parlor was in Lake Geneva, and that’s where I was headed on my 18th birthday.
I can’t recall where the force behind this wild desire came from, but I remember its strength.
Decades later it took someone shaking me awake to finally understand why my adolescent son would always answer “I don’t know!” to my endless “What were you thinking?”
“They don’t know why they do things, they just do them,” some expert told me, explaining the latest disorder, it must have been reactive-compulsive neurosis.
As if some blow to my brain had blocked out what it’s like to be young and utterly unconcerned, oblivious to consequence.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were like that too. I always thought there was something wrong with me,” my son said to me the other day.
I just knew I had to get a tattoo.
The trip took a friend and I down country roads to what seemed like a sleepy town, except for maybe the Playboy Club. We were liberated women then, so even the famous den of feminine playthings for male egos was of no consequence to us. We had boyfriends, what did we care what horny old people did?
I remember a guy with a pony tail, walls full of designs, and pain that felt like someone was dragging a lit cigarette across my skin.
I picked out a butterfly, to be placed at the nape of my neck. I’ve always worn my hair long, so for most of its 34-year existence this tiny tattoo has been hidden from view.
My mom wasn’t happy when she found out, especially when she discovered on my wedding day, that my younger sister also had one - a small bird with a vine in its mouth, and a heart at the end. That freaked me out because she is what I call a “Jockaholic.”
According to Diane my mother said: “If God intended you to have a tattoo you would have been born with one.”
Neither of us regret it, and to the tattoo naysayers who believe someday there will be an epidemic of nursing home residents, with sagging, distorted tattoos, I have to say if we are sagging that badly all over, would it really even matter?

I wasn’t born yesterday.

I hear the collective sigh whenever I mention the perpetual plastic tub full of cemetery flowers that I haul around in my car, the motif changing with the seasons.

“She’s not going to mention all her dead relatives AGAIN, is she?” the plaintive glances indicate, my boss’s eyes wild and lolling backward in his head.

I didn’t raise my hand and volunteer for the job, but it’s been passed down to me through three generations of female grave-tenders, and I’m the last one left.

A connoisseur or plastic flowers and Styrofoam crosses, I can admit without hesitation that the cemetery culture and its freshly-lawned landscape have a way of sucking you into the vortex of past guilt. You know what I mean, like the time you snapped back at your sick mother and then before you could make amends she was dead, found at the kitchen table with a half-finished cup of morning coffee.

It was that kind of penitent flame, burning brightly atop some tiny altar near my psyche, that lead me to John, his widow’s directions to the gravestone written on the back of my hand.

I’d been taken aback during a Christmas past, when after John died she sent me a bundle of letters he and I had written each other back in the days when he called me “Babs” and I called him “Babs” for no apparent reason. At the time it seemed the more nonsensical we made life, the better.

Among the “Meet me at the Hayloft Bar on Greenfield” notes that were rescued from car windshields was a long diatribe I’d typed on single-spaced pages that ended with the line: “Do me one last favor – when you see me pretend you don’t know me.” Maybe it was that letter that lead John’s wife to think he and I had been romantically involved.

“Are you kidding me?” I blurted out, and refrained from telling her about the time we decided to kiss once, a long passionate kiss that ended with us swiping our mouths with the back of our hands while agreeing that we could only be together, if in the end, no one else wanted us.

John was a former boyfriend’s older brother and my best friend during a period in my life when all my friends were married and he lived, post-divorce, with his elderly parents. Perhaps our common bond was both of us wondering what I ever saw in his brother, who drove a broken down Chevy Nova, lived on Campbell’s cream of shrimp soup, and lacked social skills.

I can still see John clearly in his threadbare 34-inch inseam bellbottoms and Eric Clapton shag, tiny wire-rims perched on his nose. “Listen to this,” he’d say as his lead-in to the latest import album played at ear-shattering decibels. I can still hear how his voice sounded during all those late-night phone calls during which we watched television, he in his room, me in mine, laughing together at “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

On my desk at home is a black and white Poloroid of John doing dishes at a party in 1973, him looking over his shoulder at me into the camera. This was an hour or two before he called the fire department because he though the stove wouldn’t turn off. Somehow he failed to tell the other partygoers, who fled out windows and over the rooftop as flashing red lights pulled into the driveway.

I walked out of John’s life one night when I saw him shooting up heroin, and never spoke to him again until years later, on his wedding day, when he married a woman he’d met in recovery.

“I know you’re sad I’m not available anymore, just in case,” he whispered to me, holding me tight in his arms.

I wanted to tell him I was sorry that I wasn’t available to him all those years he struggled with addiction. As with all guilt, one can only wonder at the omnipotent “what if” and try not to let it be too “all powerful.”

I placed some plastic poinsettias on his grave this week, along with the "Guru Guru" album he bought for me one Christmas when our youth seemed immortal. His favorite song by the German rock band was "Immer Lustig," which means "Always Happy."

“Be ‘immer lustig’ Babs, and wherever you are, save a space for me."

It was a “click” heard around the world.

Actually the real distance was a suburban block in the mid-’60s, when neighborhood kids bolted pell-mell out the back door at the exact same time every morning, after a bowl of Malt-o-Meal, and mothers closed the doors in unison.

Some locked them, like my mother, during certain days of the week when she claimed to be “washing the floor,” but I think she was watching “All My Children” or maybe lying down in a dark room to get a couple hours of peace, not bothering to remove her apron or girdle or nylon stockings.

“Get outside and stay outside!” was the mother’s rule, and that meant not coming back before dinner, unless you were bleeding profusely or there was a major accident, like the time my friend Jane fell head first off the monkey bars on the school playground, cracked her head open, and kept seeing “wiener dogs” everywhere.

Growing up in the sprawl of new suburbs that continued to multiply after World War II, the neighborhood kids were a melting pot of ethnic and economic diversity. We formed a random pecking order based on meaningless details like who had a dog, who did or didn’t brush their hair in the morning, who knew all the Beatles, their girlfriend’s names and the B side of their latest single, who had a basket on their bicycle and fringes on the handlebars, and whose mother actually brought out Kool-Aid and Popsicles when it was 105 degrees in the shade.

We were essentially good kids because we lived such sheltered lives in these suburbs away from the city, and because the hoods and the greasers were all living on the other side of the highway we weren’t allowed to cross, near the railroad tracks where they say a young girl was murdered by a crazed hobo. Our mothers told us the drifter was most likely looking to kill children who disobeyed and crossed the street.

Because the boys on our block were all older and had their own agendas — baseball and bike riding — we girls were free to stretch out in our own feminine imaginations. We pretended to be horses and drank pond water, shaking our hair like manes. We made stews out of leaves and dirt and made our younger sisters eat them. We sometimes lived all day in tree tops, hidden by great waterfalls of weeping willow, our limbs strewn over branches, languid from heat.

We hardened our feet by going barefoot all summer, the mark of a real pioneer woman, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, or of wild independence, like the moppet Pippi Longstocking, who lived alone with a monkey and a horse.

Most often my sister and I hung out with the Laabs kids who lived across the street. They all had flaming red hair, freckles and names that started with an L.

Mrs. Laabs was an enigma in the neighborhood, someone who drank diet Pepsi, chain-smoked, gardened in a bikini, and was most remembered among homemakers for wearing a mini skirt and matching white go-go boots to the grade school’s spring concert. (I’m sure the husbands remembered, too.)

It was the one house we could sneak back into during the day because Mrs. Laabs liked to watch television in her bedroom, with the door closed. We’d tiptoe up the stairs and stare in wonder at the oldest girl’s bedroom with its walls painted black and the hanging “love beads,” fake fur rugs, fishnet stockings and tubes of eyeliner and mascara. It was rumored she was a hippie, who was once sent home from high school for sitting crossed-legged on the library floor in protest against the dress code, which forbid women from wearing pants.

On the last Sunday night before the start of school after a lazy, but too-short summer vacation, my parents would invite all the neighborhood kids over — wearing their pajamas — and haul the old console television out onto the front porch.

Our now browned bodies laid out on blankets dotting the front lawn, we watched “Bonanza” and “The Wonderful World of Disney” underneath the stars, like we were at a drive-in movie show. My dad passed around pink Tupperware bowls filled with popcorn, then just stood among us like a sentinel, smoking his pipe and breathing in the night air.

We were on top of the world, and thought nothing in life could ever get better than this.

I'm reviving a blog that was started in 2007.
It's nice not to have to start from the beginning.
Join me.

Everyone - I will not be blogging through The Reporter Web site anymore, at least for now.

They decided to change the blogs, and honestly, I can't figure out how to even work it, so consider this my personal blog where you and I can continue to converse.

So if you want to keep reading Rustnevrsleeps you cannot link through The Reporter Website anymore.

Just tune in at http://rustnevrsleeps.blogspot.com/

Bookmark that people.

The Hmong funeral I attended Saturday for 16-year-old Fue Vang, one of three teenage friends killed in a car crash last week, put Christian death rites to shame in terms of openness, a sense of family and community and seeing death as a journey in which everyone becomes an active participant.

Believe me, I've been to enough family funerals to be a viable source.

And the way the Hmong community treated the press, as honored guests even in their time of sorrow, left me humbled, my head bowed, considering the circumstances.

Covering funerals is not high on my list of journalistic events I look forward to. Try explaining to someone we are going to show the world their deepest grief, suffering and sorrow.It's hard for them to see, and understandably, we are also sharing the celebration of a life.


Steeped in tradition, Fue's journey to the afterlife was attended by 300-some family and friends to make sure their loved one was never left alone for 3 days straight. Rituals included the playing of music, almost continually, on a bamboo instrument called a qeej, drumming, and tradition based on a belief in reincarnation.

A butchered chicken was placed near Fue's head. When his spirit visits his birthplace the chicken will help him dig up the placenta, which provides a connection between the spirit and physical worlds and allows him to be reborn.

Shiny decorations, burned intermittently, represented the money he will need in the next world. A crossbow will protect him from his enemies. A knife will be used to draw a line between this world and the next, so he can't come back. Food and drink are offered to the body to keep up his strength during the journey.

And that just touches briefly on the detail of spiritual preparation which requires, I was told by many of his family, "sleeping very little" during those three days,

"You are so welcome to be here and we thank you. We want everyone to know how much we are doing to help my son on his journey to the other world. Everyone is invited to come," said Fue's father.

To think I was hesitant, scared even, to attend the visitation after the treatment members of this press received from the non-Hmong community involved in Fue's life. Believe me, I never want to make anyone feel bad.

At a memorial service for the trio of young Hmong men sponsored by the Fond du Lac Ministerial Association Thursday held at First Presbyterian Church (which was a beautiful gesture on their part, don't get me wrong), it took some finagling for us to even be there. Our photographer was told, in very abrupt terms, he could stay briefly, not take photos of any faces, and then leave. I could write about the service but not approach anyone or interview them.

It was as if I had to avert my eyes to the grief and pain that stood this night alongside the joy friendship. As if somehow by writing about it and sharing it with our readers it would somehow violate very personal and private emotions.

The thing was it was a public, community event.

I had asked the school district if I could come into Fond du Lac High School and talk to kids about the loss of their friends, invite them to share stories and memories of Fue and his cousin, Jerry Vang, and Peng Thao, the 18-year-old driver.

In light of the tragic circumstances surrounding the deaths, a high-speed car crash, I wanted to give their friends a palette in which they could paint a picture of why these three young men were so loved.

The school district said no.

At the death of these students Monday the district went so far as to "have no comment." It wasn't until I contacted the school superintendent the next day and suggested he make a comment that he agreed to do so.

Compared to the Hmong culture's perspective on death the whole experience for me reflects America's view of death, the shame and privacy of grief, the abhorrence to showing emotion, crying, expressing how we feel, unless it is in a controlled setting, behind closed doors.

My best friend agreed it should be private, citing the pain of Jackie Kennedy's face at the funeral of her husband and our beloved president.

But to me, grief shared through the community's newspaper, only enhances the life of the loved one and spreads collective emotion to every parent, brother, sister, and friend.

Who doesn't nod their head, feel a catch in their throat and think to themselves "I feel your loss. I've experienced it too."

Isn't that what community is all about?

I come away from the experience at Fue's funeral, and I hope our readers do too, with a profound sense of the deep love they share, their incredibly painful loss, and an understanding that the need to be comforted transcends all language barriers.

"The buildings reach up to the sky,
the traffic thunders down the busy street,
the pavement slips beneath my feet,
I walk alone and wonder...


Who

Am

I??????????"


I can still hear my first crush, John Davidson, posing that age-old question on one of his many records. I was 12 and laid in bed staring at his boy-next-door face on the album cover, his blue eyes....please don't get me started on John, a guilty pleasure whom I readily admit is out of character for me to love taking into consideration my hippie persona.

Sometimes you just can't choose who you fall in love with, now can you? ;-D


This long lead-in is to tell you that at age 50, I know who I am, at least one-quarter of what makes up SHARON ROZNIK.

My daughter participated in the National Geographic Genographic Project in which for $99 you send in a hair sample and they trace your mother's maternal DNA line from the journey out of Africa to, in our case, western Europe.

It is beyond cool. The results will blow your mind, and allow you to be a trail blazer in a five-year project that is a grand effort to understand genetics and the human journey.

Here's the premise, according to their Web site:

The fossil record fixes human origins in Africa, but little is known about the great journey that took Homo sapiens to the far reaches of the Earth. How did we, each of us, end up where we are? Why do we appear in such a wide array of different colors and features?

Such questions are even more amazing in light of genetic evidence that we are all related—descended from a common African ancestor who lived only 60,000 years ago.

Though eons have passed, the full story remains clearly written in our genes—if only we can read it. With your help, we can.

When DNA is passed from one generation to the next, most of it is recombined by the processes that give each of us our individuality.

But some parts of the DNA chain remain largely intact through the generations, altered only occasionally by mutations which become "genetic markers." These markers allow geneticists like Spencer Wells to trace our common evolutionary timeline back through the ages.

Different populations carry distinct markers. Following them through the generations reveals a genetic tree on which today's many diverse branches may be followed ever backward to their common African root.

Our genes allow us to chart the ancient human migrations from Africa across the continents. Through one path, we can see living evidence of an ancient African trek, through India, to populate even isolated Australia.

But to fully complete the picture we must greatly expand the pool of genetic samples available from around the world. Time is short.

In a shrinking world, mixing populations are scrambling genetic signals. The key to this puzzle is acquiring genetic samples from the world's remaining indigenous and traditional peoples whose ethnic and genetic identities are isolated.

But such distinct peoples, languages, and cultures are quickly vanishing into a 21st century global melting pot.

That's why the Genographic Project has established ten research laboratories around the globe. Scientists are visiting Earth's remote regions in a comprehensive effort to complete the planet's genetic atlas.

But we don't just need genetic information from Inuit and San Bushmen—we need yours as well. If you choose to participate and add your data to the global research database, you'll help to delineate our common genetic tree, giving detailed shape to its many twigs and branches.

Together we can tell the ancient story of our shared human journey.

My mother's maternal line, which comes from Czechoslovakia, is part of a group called haplogroup H.

Apparently, these people took a very direct route from Ethiopia, through the Middle East to western Europe.

That's about it. It's not very detailed at this point, but the more people particiapte, the more missing pieces of the genetic puzzle will start to get filled in, for example, we'll learn about which groups of people actually traveled this route.

I tried to find out how many people participated so far in the project, I know over 200,000, but when I tried to open the document on this stinking computer, that alien language came up, you know the one: gibberish out the assish.

Anyway, I'm picturing this ancient hippie woman ancestor heading down the road playing a flute made from a bird's leg, somewhere near Moravia, long funky, ethnic robes, OK, maybe some teeth missing and because they didn't wear bras, ever, time has taken it's toll, but when she looks at you with her grey-blue eyes, you feel it deep down in your soul, and it makes you throw back your head and laugh out loud.

A pinch of fair
A pinch of foul
And bad and good make best of all.
Beware the moderated soul
That climbs no fractional inch to fall.
Nonsense Rhymes
Elinor Wylie

To me that means perhaps there are others in this world who have runny egg yoke melded between the keys on their keyboard......

ghygghghgdfesddddddasdasssssasawewrtgiu2344523456789-weryuioqaweroytytr245678njh

And that's what you get when you try to get it out using wet Q-tips.

Once it reaches 70 degrees outside I tremble a bit when the sun starts beating through the windows.

Yes, I'm afraid it's another childhood trauma I need to let out of the closet.

It starts with my mother, who could only tolerate a temperature of 70 degrees, with no more than two degrees latitude in either direction.

And this before the days of air conditioners or even fans, which were considered a frivolous luxury.

My siblings and I spent summers in darkness unless we were outside, prisoners of "Shade Duty," which entailed pulling window shades up and down according to the movement of the sun.

"THE WEST SHADES! PULL THE WEST SHADES!" She'd cry out, as the light crept along the side of the fieldstone house, sinister, in search of vampires like us.

"Why are you always squinting," my friends would say when I came out to play.

Later in life, much later, my parents were the proud owners of a central air-conditioner and we lived all summer in flannel shirts, shivering under wool balnkets, but that's a whole 'nother story, which now that I think of it, coincides with my mother reaching age 50. Need I say more?

You don't think I could get away with telling you this story without confessing...
Especially with my sister watching.
Fine, I do it too, just not to that degree.

Blame it on ancestral memory.

Once the summer solstice hits I don't think my daughter pulls the shades up at all. :-D

I feel terrible you haven't heard from me in what?????
Something like 17 days.
Actually, it was an experiment to see if anyone really cared.
Thanks to the one person who asked...:-)

Sometimes nothing comes out.
Sometimes the spewing forth dries up.
Sometimes you just get so tired of writing you can't.
Sometimes you can't even read words and books just lay there, spread-eagled on your lap in bed and you find yourself staring for hours into some fantasy void, making up your own make believe worlds to live in instead of reading someone else's tedious ideas.

Instead I've been:


Walking...walking...walking....
You're thinking "Dead Man Walking."
This is "Sharon of the Hill People" walking.

That expression was coined by our photographer Justin. One day out of nowhere he starts chanting, in sing-song, drawn out tones that flow out from the photo room:

"Shhhhaaaaarrroooonnnnn........
of the Hill Peoppplllle......."

My heart melted like a child with a puppy plopped in her arms.

So what if Justin meant gape-toothed with long yellow finger nails, scabby knees and untanned clothing stained with juices from raw meat?

I pictured a wild-eyed woman, tan and tall, flowing hair down to her knees, wearing skins from a white deer that are so soft because they were made the ancient way, when the hides were soaked in urine, and wild animals are following her because they beckon to her call.....

Which actually does bring me to my point of how I walked all winter, if it was at least above 8 degrees and for the most part I was alone because what idiots would be out there, but now that the weather is nice the city has suddenly been repopulated with outdoor enthusiasts and I'm chagrin to face the fact I have to look presentable.

I haven't lived in a city for 23 years, so I thought nothing of getting out of bed, throwing several layers of clothes on and heading out the door.

Now there are humans everywhere needing to say hello and wanting you to pet their hairy pampered, panting dogs (unlike the wolves of the Hill People) and I've come to realize I've been scaring them, really.

What? I thought until I looked in the mirror.

If you've ever seen my hair imagine it post REM stage: Picture an Afro, but standing straight out.

Black rings of mascara circle my eyes.

And for some reason my eye brows look like they need brushing.

And my fingernails were all stained yellow from the cheese popcorn I had eaten before falling asleep.

There was a Sunday I talked with two nice white-haired ladies for at least five minutes and it wasn't until I got home I saw there was a red line drawn down the entire side of my face from when I had fallen asleep on a ink pen that leaked.

Now I grudgingly wash my face and at least try to get a brush through the surface layer of hair, but damn it, Justin, I really like being:

"Shhhaarrrrrooonnnnn
of the Hill Peoooooopppppplllllle."

To Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.:

It was 6 a.m. and I was lounging in bed with a fresh-brewed cup of coffee listening to NPR this morning and watching a hawk sit on her nest in a big tree anchored in the center of the field behind my condo.

As the news came over the radio: "Kurt Vonnegut has died," the hawk spread her wings and took to the air.

My hands covered my eyes.

Oh geez, Mr. Vonnegut, how you got me through my high school years. Your sad, mixed up characters were me: Kilgore Trout, Billy Pilgrim, Elliot Rosewater, Montana Wildhack.

When Billy Pilgrim got “Unstuck” in time, so did I. Your stories fit like a missing puzzle piece in the space right between adolescent angst and young adulthood.

Your semi-autobiographical account of life as a prisoner of war during World War II in "Slaughterhouse Five” and the scene that unfolds before the eyes of your character Billy as he is released after the bombing of Dresden is as clear today in my mind as when I first read it.

I heard you in an interview, describing this surreal world where nothing made sense, the bombed city, the animals running free from the Dresden zoo, a young prisoner of war staring at a world gone mad.

The last line of the novel is a bird's nonsensical singing, singing that is posed as a question that to me translates to “What the hell?”

“Poo-te-weet?” it calls.

How fitting for a life-changing story that teaches us how impossible it is to make sense of the insanity of war and massacre. The book came out in 1969, in the midst of the turmoil of the Vietnam War.

Vonnegut’s chirping bird lets us know that sometimes in life it is impossible to even ask questions that make sense.

“What the hell?” is about all you can say.

I loved you so.

God bless you, Kurt Vonnegut. I wonder if today you are wandering in a world that finally makes sense.

My 87-year-old aunt, who has always been like a mother to me, recently poured out her heart to me about what it is like to be a covert atheist in her retirement community.

"If anyone knew I'd be shunned," she said in a whisper.

I say this because Easter and Passover is being celebrated this month and it made me think about her, along with my grandmother, who was an agnostic, and my father, who said he wished he could believe in something, but just couldn't because it didn't make any sense.

The irony is they were, are, the most spiritual people I ever had the privilege of sharing my life with. Kind, compassionate, giving, non-judgemental, they opened their homes to everyone with a kind of immeasurable, unconditional love that astounds me when I think about it.

I never felt worthy in the face of such pureness of heart but that never seemed to matter.

New-agers call it the "Christ-consciousness" that transcends denominations and religious affiliations.

"You aren't an atheist," I tried to tell my aunt. "You believe that when you die you become one with the universe, remember? That our energy force joins forces with the cosmos. That's believing in something."

"No, no, don't mix me up with your grandmother. She thought there might be an afterlife. I know there isn't," she maintained.

My grandmother was a devout Catholic back in the old country and one of the best singers in the church choir until she witnessed at age 16 the priest brutally beating some of the girls who sang off key. The last straw, the stinging blow that severed her ties with organized religion came in America when the priest wouldn't baptize her son because she had no money to pay the church fee.

It seems like our country has been struggling with a variety of religious identities lately as people arm themselves with dogmas and take sides over right and wrong.

As painful as it is to watch I couldn't be more thrilled. It's like watching birth pains of a new nation. We've seen the outcome of a conservative faction armed with a so-called religious right and now people have to decide whether or not it's what they want to see continue.

There's a smell of change in the wind,a pull in the opposite direction as people feel out a different approach.

I like to pretend I'm an observer from an alien planet, watching it all unfold.

Many are saving the year 2012 is the beginning of "Heaven on earth."

NASA predicts that the Sun will reverse its own magnetic poles during 2012 as aresult of reaching the end of current 11-year sunspot cycle. Some believe this will amplify the effects of retarding magnetic field on earth, as harmful charged particles blasted away from the sun would more easily penetrate the earth's atmosphere.

Check out The Year 2012 and you'll see the predictions, originating from many ancient sources (that's eerie in itself!) including the Mayan calendar, which stops on Dec. 21, 2012.

* The book "The Nostradamus Code" speaks of a series of natural disasters caused by a comet which will allow the third anti-Christ to disperse his troops around the globe under the guise of aid in preparation for a possible nuclear war, although in the strictest sense it is unspecific as to nuclear war or some other natural or man caused destruction.

* "The Orion Prophecy" claims that the Earth's magnetic field will reverse that year.

*"The Return of Quetzalcoatl" by Daniel Pinchbeck discusses theories of a possible global awakening to psychic connection by the year 2012.

*Terence McKenna's mathematical novelty theory suggests a point of singularity in which a great number of things could happen, including "hyperspatial breakthrough", planetesimal impact, alien contact, historical metamorphosis, metamorphosis of natural law, solar explosion and "quasar ignition at the galactic core," whatever that means.

*The Prophecy of the Popes, attributed to Saint Malachy, speculated that Pope Benedict XVI would reign during the beginning of the tribulation of which Jesus spoke, and sometime later a future pope described in the prophecy as "Peter the Roman", the last in this prophetic list, would appear, bringing as a result the destruction of the city of Rome and the Last Judgment.


*Many new age spiritualists and philosophers believe humankind will enter an age of enlightenment in 2012.

I'll be 55, and I don't know about you, but good or bad, I can't wait.