This is kissy-face Tie o’ the Day’s first venture out of the Tie Room and into the public eye. It’s a proper piece o’ neckwear for Valentine’s Day Eve. It is also a reminder to me of all the times I have walked around with similar kiss evidence on my face—having forgotten it was there before I left the house. Fortunately, that kind of social faux pas is the kind of thing strangers find amusing even as they gently let me know I’ve got lipstick on my cheek. People who know me don’t give me a heads-up about a set of lipstick lips on my face because they assume I left it there on purpose. They assume it’s just another fashion and/or political statement from yours truly. Nah, I just get busy thinking or working on something and I forget the lip-marks are there for all to see. Needless to say, I know I am loved and wanted every day.
Also, after many years of enjoying wearing my collection of Sloggers garden shoes almost every day and in every situation, I woke up one morning a month ago and wanted new shoes. I haven’t bought new shoes for years and years, but my Sloggers weren’t striking my style bell any longer. They had a good run, but wanted to retire. I’m turning over a new shoe leaf. Doc Martens to the rescue. I’ve had some before—in my younger days—and I have always thought fondly of them. So I hopped onto the Dr. Martens website and I found a pair or two (or five) of shoes which fit my style vibe. They pair well with neckwear of any type. The Doc Martens shoes I’m wearing in this selfie are dang dandy. When I’m in them, I’m wearing art on my feet. This design is based on a section of Georges Seurat’s painting, BATHERS AT ASNIERES. My only regret about these fab shoes is that the shoemaker did not use the section of Seurat’s painting with the red dog in it. Putting that dog on the shoes is the only thing which could have improved on this pair.👞🐕
In my position as Chief Fashion Goddess here at TIE O’ THE DAY, I am often consulted about topics of style and attire. Recently, I was asked if a person can ever go overboard by wearing too much peacock garb at one time. My answer is a resounding, “No! It is not humanly possible to wear an overabundance of peacock paraphernalia. Too much is never enough—where the peacock theme is concerned.” These selfies are my proof. I mean—really, does it look like I’m overly peacocked? Do I look like a lunatic? Do I appear to be off my clothing rocker? Of course not. I look like the redneck poet that I am. 😜🤡
FYI My peacock Bow Tie o’ the Day was made with genuine peacock feathers.
I got only half-dressed today, but I think I’m looking fine. You can’t go wrong with Grinch pajama bottoms and what I call my book-writing Tie o’ the Day. I’m wearing my cow Sloggers boots because my feet are cold. Anyhoo…
I’m riled and snarky about this attempt to ban books in Delta. I will be both serious and sarcastic in this post, I’m sure. First, let me be clear about a few things. I do think that some books are not age-appropriate for high schoolers and should not be available in a high school library. In fact, I think there are books which have no place in any library—for example, books whose sole aim is to be pornographic. They certainly do not belong on any school library shelf. Personally, I would prefer those books didn’t exist at all. But I live in the United States of America, where I have the right and responsibility to respect other people’s reading rights—whether or not I agree with their choices in reading material.
With the internet giving us the ability to download books to our phones and computers in less than a second, we have to be honest about how difficult it is to actually ban a book. If you think removing a “bad” book from the library is exiling it to the garbage dump, you are sorely mistaken. I can guarantee you the best way to get a high school student to read a specific book is to ban it from the shelves of the library. I can also guarantee you that the borrowing and online buying of the books mentioned in the The Chronicle article about someone wanting to pull books from the DHS library’s shelves caused many Millard County people of all ages to borrow, download, or order online Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, just to see what all the hub-bub is about. For that unintended consequence that all you book-banning advocates make happen, I thank you. Over the years, you Book Busybodies have caused millions of people to read incredible and majestic books they never would have thought to read without your efforts to get those books off the shelves of school/public libraries. Like I said, I thank the Book Police for that, but not for their know-it-all, puritanical, busybody attitudes, or their thick inability to recognize literary merit and the reality of the messy stories of all humanity. It lowers a book-banner’s credibility to talk about a single scene or paragraph, because a book is an entirety. You cannot properly judge a book by one paragraph or one scene. Or because it has that one F-word in it. A book is whole, true in its own context—and it must be read and understood as such.
I know these things by knowing human nature; by raising two boys; and by listening to the stories of what thousands of my students told me they had read so far, in their young book-lives. For years, I taught writing at the University of Utah, at Salt Lake Community College, and at a public middle school in Baltimore. On more than one occasion, I had recent high school graduates and returned missionaries come up to me in class holding a “banned” book and asking questions like, “Why did this book get banned? I’ve read it and there were some parts that were a little graphic, but they were important parts of the story.” Yup. Just the other day, I did some research on why some folks once wanted to ban the children’s book, Stuart Little. Yes, the tiny mouse/boy. The reason? Bestiality. Because there’s only one way you can get a mouse/boy. I kid you not. That is ridiculous, and it says more about the abhorrent mind of the reader and the school board which banned it than it says about the book itself. Fortunately, the Stuart Little ban did not last long.
If you desire to pull The Bluest Eye off the DHS shelf, make sure you pull everything Toni Morrison has ever written. Her main characters all experience challenging situations (just as characters in any book do, or else we wouldn’t read them). Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature almost 30 years ago. So what would she know about telling a story? To heck with books that are meritorious and true to not-always-white, unfortunate characters. If we read Morrison’s books, we might learn something about art and language and culture and families who endure racism, poverty, and lack of education—people who start life already defeated. We might learn compassion.
In The Bluest Eye, the rape of a child—by the child’s own father—happens in a two-page scene , and it is not easy to get through. The scene always makes me feel repulsed, brokenhearted, and angry. When I read it, I usually have to close the book for a time before I can finish reading the rest of the story. I sometimes choose to skip the scene altogether. See that—I have the agency to choose what I read. The passage is in no way pornographic, and to suggest so is to belittle the child who is raped. The passage is not prurient in any way. It is a devastating scene, deserving of our empathy and regard. There is a lot of feeling to be dealt with, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be on a high school library shelf. We all have to wrestle with life’s vicissitudes. We all need to learn something about dealing with tragedy, loss, and complicated love. We shouldn’t be sheltered from reading about it when we are young, so that it smacks us in the face and drops us to our knees when we finally encounter it when we graduate, leave home, and enter the larger world. To keep age-appropriate hard things from kids is to cripple them just when they are seeking to establish their independence. When faced with a situation they’ve been sheltered from, they haven’t been taught the tools they will need to have in order to make good choices about what to do, or they might just run back home where the too-constant shelter has made them narrow and ill-equipped for independence. That’s a decimating kind of defeat for a new adult.
If you want to ban The Bluest Eye from the DHS library, be prepared to get rid of the Bible wherever you find it, because there’s child rape in there, too—as well as incest, domestic abuse, infidelity, drunkenness, and on and on. Also, you better move completely out of Millard County because all of those things happen in your towns. But, of course, they happen in every town, so I guess you might as well stay. You would be surprised to know how much the kids know about the adult hijinks that goes on around them in a small town. I knew about plenty when I was growing up there, and I didn’t hear it from my parents. I usually told them the news, and then we would talk and they would help me understand the repercussions of the hijinks. (I was lucky we could talk like that.) That was before we had the internet or iPhones. The kids find out even more quickly now. Some kids, but probably not most, might tell their parents about what they know and read. If they do talk to you about what goes on or what they read, don’t pontificate. Ask them questions about what they think about things. Tell them humbly what you think about those same things. They are trying to figure out how to handle the knowing.
I find it interesting that what those who would ban The Bluest Eye cite as the reason for it usually this one particular scene. They don’t seem to have any problem with the ingrained racism, the beatings, the destitute poverty, or any of the other trials that are part of the story. None of that offends them. So I guess those things are okay. We can have books that realistically show those things in the library. Hey, I have an idea: let’s rip those few pages of the child-rape scene out and keep the rest of The Bluest Eye on the high school library shelf.
I have never been inside the new DHS library, but I have no doubt I could walk between the shelves and pull out a book at random, and find something in it somebody somewhere would find objectionable. Banning books ends up being arbitrary—someone doesn’t like or understand something they saw in a book, so they want to save all the kids from it—even as you can hear profanity and bullying in the halls between classes. If you want to ban something, do the students a favor and dedicate yourself to banning the bullying at DHS. That is a grave daily danger to students, certainly more harmful to bullied kids than any book. With school districts in Utah worrying about lawsuits and bad press, all it takes is a very-tiny-but-obnoxiously-loud fuss for a school district to crumble to the unreasonable whims of a few fussers. Look, I haven’t lived in Delta for five years now, so I have no idea who the members of the school board even are. I probably even know and like them. I know of the woman spear-heading the ban, but I do not know her personally. I write this post on principle, without regard to the persons involved, when I say I am disappointed that, according The Chronicle, some of the board members showed support for pulling literature off the shelves of a public school. I am disgusted that any school board member would support the narrowing of students’ education. Unfortunately, however, I am not surprised by their support. I love me my Delta and my DHS and my Delta family and friends, but there is far too much giving-in to certain squeaky wheels just to keep any kind of noise down.
As far as what books you read, you can decide for yourself. I can too. The Constitution says so. You can tell your kids what books you will allow them to read, but know that they likely will read exactly whatever they want.: you just won’t know about it. That’s it. Nobody gave a loud person or loud small group the right to decide for everybody else in the community what is available for them to read. So who should decide what goes in a high school library? I see nothing wrong if we leave that to the professionals. It’s the school librarian’s job to ultimately choose and manage books that can educate and speak to the experience of all students, regardless of the librarian’s faith or political party. So you better pick an extraordinary librarian who puts the student population’s wide-ranging educational needs first. If a school district hires a lazy librarian, it’s the kids who will suffer. If librarians are doing their jobs correctly they should be reading book reviews and books, looking at book award winners, and then obtaining library books that represent all of the school’s students, not just the majority. Add to that a balanced community committee of readers who are representative of the entire community, not just the majority. ALL of those asking for a book to be tossed should have to read that book AND participate in an open-forum discussion of said book with people who advocate for keeping the book on the shelf. Never, ever, ever advocate for banning a book you have not read. Don’t let anyone get away with that crapola either. Banning books that are superbly written and make the reader think makes a mockery of the 1st Amendment. You might as well ban that.
FYI I promise, the personal stuff I have to say about this topic will show up tomorrow. I don’t know how juicy it is, but if I wrote a book about it, I don’t think it could show up in the DHS library. It will have that word “gay” in it, and that might make anything I publish unacceptable for teen consumption. I wonder how I handled actually being that word as a teenager at DHS. 🤔
We hadn’t been out to a movie for quite a while, until yesterday when we saw the documentary, GABBY GIFFORDS WON’T BACK DOWN. You might remember that Giffords—a Congresswoman from Arizona—was the target of an assassination attempt in January of 2011. It happened at a meet-and-greet outside a grocery store, where Giffords was meeting with constituents who wanted to speak to their representative. 6 people were killed that day, and 13 more were wounded. Giffords was shot in the head. Even as some news reports incorrectly claimed she was dead, she fought to stay alive. This documentary is primarily about her complicated recovery, from Day 1 to now. You can see her grit, grief, and humor throughout all the stages of her rehab, even when she could barely communicate. Yes, there are some gun politics in the film, but not much. She is a life-long gun owner, as well as the victim of a mass murderer with a gun, so it makes sense that she has something to say on the subject. We ought to at least listen. But again, the bulk of the film is about her long recovery. She is still partially paralyzed, and it takes Giffords great effort to speak. Singing has seemed to come easier to her than speaking. Her mind is still sharp, but often her brain won’t let her say the words she’s thinking. She has also lost about 50% of her vision in both eyes. And still, she sings! I recommend the movie to anyone who wants to witness an indomitable person right while they’re being indomitable. If you need a pick-me-up, this is it. If you don’t need a pick-me-up, you’ll still be glad you saw it.
BTW We had the theater to ourselves, at least until the movie started. Look closely to see the Saddle Purse hanging around. Suzanne is eating popcorn, and I am wearing my caped Superman Socks o’ the Day. We reclined the entire movie.
Mom is as fragile as she is tough. She’s needed a little extra care the past few days, so she’s been getting some rest at the hospital, next door from Millard Care and Rehab. We kids have all been doing our best to bother her in small doses by spending time with her there, which is just as she seems to like it. She got shrimp with her salad at lunch on this day, and you’d have thought it was Christmas at Rockefeller Center. That’s another bigly lesson Mom has consistently taught us: it doesn’t take much to be happy—if you wanna be happy.
BTW For this visit with Mom, I wore some of my animal-print accessories: pink Bow Tie o’ the Day, brown Sloggers, and orange print face mask (not shown), so Mom would be inspired to reach down into her deep animal instincts to get well and get back to her digs at the care center soon. I threw on my Bernie socks just cuz he’s old and still thriving. Bernie’s always good for a laugh.
I finally got to give Mom her birthday hugs, a few days after her actual birthaversary. Mom loves sunflowers, and I was able to find a snazzy Shirt Full o’ Sunflowers to wear for her. It only made sense for me to wear my bees Face Mask o’ the Day with it. In honor of Mom’s fun belief that she is a witch with always-sharpened broom, I donned my flying witches Tie o’ the Day. Mom also liked my pig earrings and my chicken Sloggers shoes, which I chose just for her. She’s such a farm girl.
I managed to find a soft batch of marshmallow Circus Peanuts, which is one of Mom’s fave store-bought treats. We opted to stick a birthday candle in one, so we could sing to Mom. She blew it out like a pro, despite her oxygen difficulties. Of course, she’s had 91 years of practice at blowing out birthday candles.
Mom was more “with it” and energetic than she has been recently. Even Skitter noticed it. Suzanne and I had a wonderful few hours of conversation with the old dame. I was so pleased with Mom’s improvement, and I give credit to the fine cast o’ folks at Millard Care and Rehab. They look out for Mom like she’s family, and it shows.
I often say that Mom was my first blessing, and it is still true. My gratitude for having Mom runneth over—still and always.
It’s time for a trip to Delta to visit Mom. I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to make the drive, but it will be soon. I like to plan my travel attire ahead of time, and today I came up with this outfit that seems appropriate to the current Delta weather. Fortunately, I have an umbrella-covered Face Mask o’ the Day and a raindrop and umbrella-covered Tie o’ the Day. My cow Sloggers boots should come in handy for wading through puddles and newly formed lakes, and my bigly floppy hat will keep the rain off my bald head. Yes, I think this will suit me well on my next trip to my hometown.
Bat signal Bow Tie o’ the Day seemed an appropriate piece of neckwear to be the cherry on top of my Superman tank and my Suzanne-made harlequin cape—along with my madras shorts. My cow Sloggers boots are deceptively fast. Even as an old broad, I can run fast enough in them to cause my cape to fly. If you put together a truly fantastic outfit, you’ll be amazed at the powers you can utilize. I learned this fact one morning when I was 12, when I woke up late for softball practice. Practice was at 8, and I woke up at 8:07. I scurried to get dressed and grab my mitt. On the way out of the front door, I was putting an old, broken set of spurs on my tennis shoes—just for the style of it. Spurs on, I jumped on my bike with all my fashion superpowers, pedaling so fast to the softball field that I was able to get there at 7:59. I kid you not.
My dreamy nephew, Brandon Tucker, turned 50 today. He was born to my oldest sister, Mercedes, and her hubby, Nuk, way back in 1970. You know—way back before time and dirt even existed.
When I was in college at Weber State in the 80’s, I lived with the Tucker’s a couple of times. I saw Brandon and his siblings be kids, up-close and loud. I remember Brandon often going outside to practice sports. He practiced football by practicing spiking the ball and choreographing end zone dances. He practiced running by practicing breaking the ribbon at the finish line. How could I not admire his fervor for winning?! He was dedicated to being triumphant, no matter his chosen sport. Now, he’s a Yankees fan and a Patriots fan, but I have learned to forgive him for that.
Around three years ago, Brandon’s right foot had to be amputated. Since that time, I think of him as my own personal peg-leg pirate. Losing his foot did not stop him from playing golf, as one of these photos shows. Another photo shows his flip-flop foot. And, so importantly, yet another photo shows Brandon with his granddaughter, Jolee, who graces us with her head Bow Tie o’ the Day.
So what did I actually do with my time while I wasn’t writing TIE O’ THE DAY posts during my recent bout of bipolar depression? Well, most of what I did was try to make it through one hour at a time. I’m sure I’ll fill you in on some of my murkier activities, which—to be more accurate—were more like non-activities. But I’ve dealt with the swing of this bipolar pendulum all my life, and I know one way to make it through is to make appointments and show up—no matter how I’m feeling. I made an appointment with Gracie.
A few days earlier, Suzanne and I had participated in an annual silent auction benefitting Davis Schools. It’s usually a bigly dinner event where we dress up and make a night of it. COVID-19 put the brakes on that sort of event this year, so we sat at home and bid on items by iPhone while watching tv. The oddest thing happened! Every auction item I bid on that night—and eventually won—was for someone Gracie’s age. How weird is that? I didn’t see that coming.
I texted Gracie’s Mom, the beauteous Bishopette Collette, to set up a time I could deliver the haul. She said she’d check with Bishop Travis, my nephew supreme, for a workable drop-off time when they would all be around.
In honor of Bishop Travis and Bishopette Collette, I wore my BYU Tie o’ the Day when I made the delivery. They appreciated it. Grace, however, didn’t remember me at all. I mean—I hadn’t seen her since right before X-mas, which means I hadn’t seen her for half of her one-year life! I was glad I wore my cow shoes. Grace warmed up to them and kept trying to take them off my feet. I’ll wear my chicken shoes next time, and she’ll never forget me again.
I delivered Gracie some stuffed beasts to hug, a play vet kit, and something called a Cottage Playhouse, which needed to be assembled. I apologized to Travis and Collette about bringing something in need of assembly. I have known Bishop Travis his entire life, and he is a man o’ many talents. Putting things together is not one of them. When I apologized about the cottage’s unassembled state, Travis and Collette—almost in unison—said, “That’s why we have Lela.” Lela is Collette’s neice, who takes care of Grace when Travis and Collette are working. I was glad Lela was there with them the day I delivered the gifts, and I was especially glad to know she would be the official General Contractor of the playhouse. You can see Lela in one of the pics here, actually smiling while assembling. I bet Lela whistles while she works too.
On my drive home, after I left the Blackwelder’s with a new house to build, I realized that I can forever brag that I bought Gracie her first house. And Lela can brag that she built it.
