A Hairy Situation

A grooming ritual turned into a nightmare one day.  I was looking in my hand-held mirror one morning expecting to pluck my eye brows as I have done for nearly half a century.  My mirror these days is a heavy duty magnifying mirror. With failing eye sight that comes with age, so comes the need for magnification.

I was plucking away when all of a sudden I noticed a really long hair.  I was surprised.  I knew that it had been a while since I plucked my eye brows.  But I know I would have noticed this long, renegade hair even in a regular mirror.  I took to grasping it with my tweezers and began to pull and pull and pull. While making ready to do the final pluck, I noticed that the feel of the tug wasn’t around my eye.  I began to follow the length of the hair to find its origin. 

To my surprise, I followed it to a mole growing on my cheek.  I wanted to scream.  “How the hell did this long-ass hair grow out of there?”   “Why didn’t I see this before now?”  Then my mind exploded with questions. “Oh my god, who else has seen this hair growing out of my mole?”  “How many people have I repulsed with this witchy-looking hair growing out of my face?”

Then I began to panic and paranoia set in.  Were there more?   I frantically moved my big heavy duty magnifying glass around my face searching for other renegade hairs.  The lonesome, long, mole hair was a wake- up call for me. Not that I didn’t know that there would be new challenges with age but I never expected to have to do watch duty on my face for witchy- looking mole hairs.  

So, while I keep a watchful eye on my new mole hairs, I am also diligent in my efforts to rid my face of other unwanted hairs growing out of other unlikely places.  It’s not pretty and it certainly doesn’t make you feel pretty. So, what to do?  I have opted to poke fun at myself and laugh.

Ah, the joys of aging. Gotta laugh or you’ll go crazy. 

Love thy gun.

When did we get so angry? When did we get so selfish? When did we get so hateful? When did we draw the line in the sand and decide our side was “the” side?

When those little, innocent kindergardeners at Sandy Hook Elementary were gunned down, it should have brought us to our knees. It should have gotten our attention.  We should have been eager to talk about what we can do as a loving nation to make sure that this never happens again. Our babies deserve protecting. Instead of taking up the cause, we took up more arms. Instead of trying to understand how this could happen, we started to blame each other.  We blamed evil. We blamed the mentally ill. We blamed everyone and everything but guns. The truth is that we probably won’t be able to stop this from happening again. We will bury more of our children because we have created a gun culture in this country that is growing by leaps and bounds. Do we love our guns more than we love our children?  It certainly appears so. We believe more guns and more ammunition and more arguments as to why we should protect our right to carry assault weapons trumps the rights of our babies to live in a safe and loving country.

We have nurtured a culture of violence in our country and it’s killing our innocent.  Where does it end? When will we have exceeded the number of assault weapons we can own and then want or ‘need’ more? Will we seek out bigger and badder guns?  Will we then need to lift the ban on bazookas and tanks? What’s next? When will we as a nation have enough in our arsenals to feel safe again?

My prayer is that we can all open our hearts and our minds to understanding how we got to this point and do whatever we can go change it.  I’d like us to replace our arguments with respectful dialog.  I'd like to see us replace our love for our guns with our love for each other. 

 And may we replace our ‘piece’ with peace.