Birthday Watermelon

Today is my birthday.


The people who live in the same house as I do have gone camping for a few days. Seems like there’s a joke there somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is.


I’m not the type of girl who is tweaky about her birthday. I am exactly the age I feel at any given moment. Sometimes I feel twenty-nine, sometimes I feel thirty-nine. I mostly feel twelve. A good age to be, if you ask me. (And since you’re here reading my blog, I’m pretending that you've asked me.) I haven't felt older than my official age in years.


Chronologically, I am forty-six today. I have no problem with this. It feels great. I’m thinking I’m about mid-way along. This may sound optimistic, but I am pretty sure my drop-dead age is ninety. Or there abouts. So I’m about halfway started. (Not halfway done, mind you.)



Though out the early years, I was quite busy learning some important stuff: walking, talking, peeing appropriately, reading, bike riding, coloring and kissing. So I'm thinking that not all of those years count against my total. It's been only in the last ten years or so that my self-awareness learning has begun. Therefore, I’m completely confident that the best is yet to come. And babe, won’t it be fine.



My first birthday memory is of my third birthday. My uncle’s birthday is two days after mine. I remember sitting at a picnic table at the home of my grandparents. One pink cake for me. One brown cake for my uncle. And a baby basket at the end of the table in which lay an alien creature with much dark hair. My new sister born a couple of days before my third birthday. Happy Birthday Barbie! I wanted to name her Hoss, my least favorite character from Bonanza, but they wouldn’t let me. And that was the beginning of the end of the Reign of Barbie. We entered, the Dark Ice Age. This was a combination of the Ice age and the Dark ages, in the microcosm of my world. Until that day, I was the first born child, first born grandchild, toe-head, blue-eyed angel of the family. The center of the known universe. Man, those were the days.


You know I was perfectly feeling fine when I started this blog, a few minutes ago, but now I’m starting to get a little depressed.



My next birthday memory was of a surprise party. Five or six years old. I came home from somewhere, with someone, and my house was full of children. It was crazy. Seemed like there must have been fifty kids in my house. It was probably only eight. It’s one of the only childhood birthdays I remember not having to share with my sister. SURPRISE!

When your birthday is just a couple of days from that of your sister, you end up having your parties together. You end up getting a lot of matching gifts. We got matching stuffed animals, matching homemade outfits. We shared a cake. We shared party guests. I was, quite frankly, robbed. It is no wonder I’ve never really liked her much.



You know, I think I could use a drink. Scotch, please.


Barbie Birthday Trivia:

• I grew up where it was quite HOT in the summer, so I usually got a Birthday Watermelon instead of a Birthday cake (too hot to bake a cake).


• My 14th birthday was one of my favorites but if I gave you the details, you might think I should have notified the authorities.


• On my 16th birthday, I got into an accident on the way to take my driver's test. (And I totally passed.)


• I've repressed the gory details but there was forced camping involved in a few birthdays between twelve and seventeen. (I tried to report THAT to the authorities but they asked me to please stop calling.)


• My 19th birthday was spent sleeping in a tent along the river for the Columbia Cup hydroplane races in the Tri-Cities. (Wait a minute, sleeping in a tent by the river? That's camping. Holy Crow! All this time I thought it was a cool, four day long, drunken party without bathroom facilities. That one slipped right past me.)


• I let someone set me up on a blind date for my 21st birthday. It was the worst way to celebrate a 21st birthday EVER. Idiot!


• For my 22nd birthday, I threw myself a big fat party to make up for the fiasco 21st, the year before. If you want something done right, let me take care of it.


• I turned 23 in Anchorage.


• The next few birthdays were quite a blur of domestic life.


• One of my least favorites was my 30th. Not because of the age thing, but where my life was at the time.


• I remember my 40th was a good one. This was another perfect example of "If you want things done right...." Drinks by the water. A designated driver and almost a week to myself
  

My birthdays get better and better from there because the fog of adulthood begins to lift. Life shines again, for some years now. And I, with her. I awoke from my 'Compulsive Parenting' coma and am now, much better equipped to enjoy my children and for them to enjoy me.
Whew. Win, win.

By this time next year, I'll be Gigi to my new grand child. I can't wait.

Weather for the Watching

I must have been a very good girl in a past life.

The Weather Gods are raining generosity and happiness down upon my 2008. Literally raining down upon me.

Plus (bonus!) thunder, lightening, hail and wind. An abundance of weather to watch! Score for me!

You know how the Chinese have the Year of the Rat, the Dog, the Snake.

Well, this must be the Year of the Barbie.

I love where I live. Western Washington. I love the gray, rainy, mild-temperature days. It's why I continue to live here, after originally moving here for a completely inferior, stupid-girl reason.

I was raised where it is perpetually brown and dusty. And HOT, three out of four seasons. The closest thing we would get by way of watchable weather was the wind blowing the dust around. If we were really lucky, the dust would blow with a rolling, tumbling tumbleweed thrown in, once in a while. It was really all we had before MTV came to town in the early eighties. The residents of this area appear to have really nice tans all spring, summer and fall but really it's just the dust sticking to their sweaty bodies.

Now I live where it is reputed, and perceived by those in other lands, to rain a great deal. And I am, indeed, all gratitude for every drop we get. (Did you hear me, Weather Gods? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.)

But I must say, I would love for it to rain even more. This I've found, in spite of where my neighbors choose to live, is not a popular notion in these parts. Which begs the question, "Why, then, do you live here?" (Another blog for another time. Titled: Weather Wimps.)

I love the fall and winter around here, along with the beginning of spring. But in most years, as spring moves into summer I only tolerate the weather with the thought that 'This too shall pass' and a self-written permission slip to complain at will.

This spring, and now beginning of summer, has been the best ever. Cool, cold, wet, gray, blustery. Happy, happy Barbie. There have been a few days of boring, uneventful warm, hot, empty blue sky days but I've been languishing in the glow of the Barbie weather so fully that I took it pretty well. Even appreciating the change, for a day or two.

The past week or so, however, it's been pretty warm and sticky. And I was starting to creep toward the edge of outright weather hostility, when last night on my way home from work around 9:00 p.m. I saw a bolt of lightening flash in the steel gray sky and I squealed! YEAH! Stormy weather! I was so happy. Then a few seconds later, another squeal after another flash. And then a third! I could have wept with delight! But settled instead, with giggling uncontrollably into my hands-free cell phone device. It was a very good Barbie moment.

There were a dozen more flashes before I pulled into my drive way. In the car I had been unable to hear the thunder, but after kicking off my shoes, I laid down on the porch swing of my deck and watched the weather. It was glorious! I watched until the flashes and rumbling were far away. Then I went into the house for a slice of chocolate-mousse-torte-something before I lay me down to sleep.

My daughter arrived home about then from an adventure in driving, in honor of her three month anniversary with her beau and asked me if I saw the lightening. She said she and J were going to go out to the deck and watch the weather. (The DNA apparently does not stray far from the Doppler Radar in my meteorological tree.)

I supported her plan but thought it was too bad she had missed the best of it. Then a renewed flash. Close and bright. Another storm came rolling over my house. I opened all the window of the house in the now dark night and turned off every noise-producing appliance device thing we owned to better hear and feel the thunder. She and her guy cuddled on the porch swing, even as the rain began. I ate my chocolate in the dark, better to see the flashes. The curtains blew freely with the damp warm summer breeze. It was the most perfect weather I could imagine.

After a bit, the weather passed and I heard the eighteen year old boy's car pull away. My daughter came in to say goodnight after she told me all about getting lost on the downtown streets of Tacoma, earlier in the evening. I read for a little bit, preparing to sleep, when it began again. Another storm. I was, by now too sleepy to stay up for the whole thing but thought rhetorically, "What better way to fall asleep." And so I drifted off. But the storm did not.

There must have been some type of wrinkle in the weather-time-space continuum directly over my house. Some kind of environmental loop.

All through the night, I would stir awake to rumbles of thunder, flashes of light.

All night.

I've never been given a storm that lingered over me all night long. It was sweet, sensual and surreal.

I think of myself as pretty articulate, but I can't accurately or adequately convey the wonder of the weather love I was granted as I slept, off and on all night. Each time I awoke, the weather spoke to me. And in between, I had the sweetest dreams. My sleep was disturbed in the most delicious manner possible, all courtesy of the Gods of Weather over Western Washington last night.

Steel Belted Radials

One of the ways that parents have been known to torture their children is to drag them along on blatantly non-child-friendly errands.

Unless you’ve managed to successfully repress such memories, I’d venture that if you dig deep, you’ll recall at least one really terrible experience as an unassuming, angelic child cherub standing in some patently adult venue waiting for time to stop its stand-still so you can get on with your child life.

If you had a particularly cruel parent or two, you may have even been subject to such trauma in an habitually or tag team fashion. Some parents just can’t seem to help themselves.

One friend of mine said it was the fabric store.
Long, torturous, brutal sessions of textile HELL.


I can see the face of this child as the mother debates this red fabric’s qualities against the characteristics and virtues of this other red fabric which, by the way, looks EXACTLY like the first bolt of RED fabric.

Now this may be a gender thing, but I, personally, didn’t mind the fabric store, at all.

My mother or grandmother, would shop and select cloth for really practical and mundane purposes (like making me a homemade dress, which is a completely different form of child abuse if you were raised in the sixties/seventies, pre-Martha Stewart era and obviously homemade clothing was the curse of social death at your grade school). I would take their dreary intent to purchase fabric and turn it into Barbie Fantasyland.

The gold satin fabric draped across the top of my head became my luxurious long pretend princess hair.

The glittery, opalescence of pink velvet became my pretend cape/gown.

The heavy deep burgundy fabric was my pretend royal bedspread and pretend matching drapes for the pretend master suite of my pretend country castle. (Not to be confused with my pretend city castle.)

Pearly, silver white tulle was my royal, pretend princess bridal veil.

You get the picture.



Yes, in fact, in many ways I was a predictable girly-girl. Shut up. I was six, give me a break.


No, for me it was not the fabric store.

It was the . . . . . . . tire store.

My dad was a tire obsessive. Probably still is, I wouldn't know. I ran away long ago.

Why I was required to go to the tire store with my Dad, I'll never know. I do know that it was torturous each and every time, but there was this one particular day that probably violated some or all of the Geneva Convention.

I was sick: cough, cold, earache, scratchy sore throat. I felt terrible. Now I believe I let him know how bad I was feeling, (as any responsible, considerate six year old would) and his response was "It'll just be a few more minutes." He was already there and was all-in with this tire sales man and wouldn't dream of leaving now.

It was terrible.

How long did I have to endure this tire store agony?
The number FOUR comes to mind.

Now it may not have been that I had to wait there, with my completely non-interactive father, for four full hours.

It may have been the stack of four tires I sat on, while I had to wait.

It may be that it took four days to get the new rubber smell out of my hair and jacket afterward.

FOUR? It may be the number of times the sales person wanted to shoot my father for being such a jerk customer.

It may have been how many meals I missed in the time I was there.

It may be the number of years I lost from the other end of my life after inhaling those toxic tire fumes. (Four, count them. Four good years!)

It was probably the number of criminal codes my father violated by making me go with him that day.

Hard feelings? More than four, I can tell you that much.



This week I was driving up to Edmonds with my daughter, when I noticed my car was feeling funny. Now my car is like fifteen years old so it has a few noisy, rattly parts and it takes a discriminating driver to notice such nuance.

I pulled over for a quick visual inspection and besides a large screw sticking out of the tread, there was a bulge in the side of my tire.

Now the screw actually looked pretty cool. Like an automotive fashion statement. A piercing.

But the bulge? This was a bit worrisome.



The trip to Edmonds was off. My daughter and I spent a good part of the morning tire shopping. (Will the cycle of abuse never end?)

I kept telling her how sorry I was. To my parenting credit, my daughter is a high school senior and it was the very first time I had ever subjected her to the tire store trip, so she looked at me with confusion. I wore this proudly.



And I continued to wear it proudly as I, immediately after leaving the tire store:

• took her to lunch at Red Robin, onion rings, pomegranate lemonade
• took her shopping at her favorite clothing store, two Ts and a pair of jeans,
• and bought her a new car on the way home, to make up for the tire store exposure.

I'll spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to her. Well, all except the last four years.

The Phantom Restaurant

Who hasn't thought about how great it would be to be a restaurant critic? Oh, to be paid to eat out and then to be paid to give opinion.

With the wave of blogging, now I too can be a restaurant critic. But there must be thousands, millions of people (read and unread) who are busy eating, than blogging about it. So how am I to set myself apart? Hmmmm, let's see.

How about "Name that Restaurant!"

Here are your hints. This is an independent, one of a kind establishment. It's in Pierce county, not far from I-5. It's in an inconspicuous store front location where a Mexican restaurant used to be. The 'genre' is diner, greasy-spoon-esque in nature. They are closed Sundays & Mondays. And they are only open for breakfast and lunch.

The atmosphere was a bit plain. I couldn't help thinking that it was almost cool. I could imagine a few small decor changes that would help tip it over into the world of cool.

I ordered the biscuits and gravy with both kinds of potato: hash browns and home fries. Letting the server know that I was researching the local potato situation. She was a good server: friendly but not bothersome with a good sense of humor and not so pretty that I had to hate her. Whew! I never ran dry of water or coffee. And she asked which potato version I decided was my favorite.

The gravy was about as good as sausage gravy gets. But even so I always wish it were more sausage-flavored. (Alas, kind of like always wishing the chowder part of clam chowder had more clam flavor.)

The potatoes were unspecial but not terrible. They both needed salt and I am not a big salt user. So all in all the food quality was okay. Nothing bad, nothing great.

I breakfasted alone and read my book (The Red Tent) through out my meal. But the seating arrangement of the restaurant made it hard to concentrate on reading and lent itself, instead, to people-watching. No terribly interesting ones to watch, but even so.

As I was finishing up the 'way too much food' that I ordered, I noticed standing between the salt & pepper shakers, the room temperature ketchup and the paper menus on my table was a thin junior paperback. Something by Cynthia Rylant. I thought this was a nice, unusual touch. Just in case someone needed some light reading.

I looked around and noticed there was one paperback or another on each table. I liked this. Sweetness. Then I noticed on one of these other tables a small spiral style notebook standing next to the paperback. This struck me as odd. Did a customer leave this behind one day? My curiosity is piqued.

Then I notice there is a small, inconspicuous notebook on my own table. With a pen sticking out of the spiral binding. Wow, this smells of coolness.

I picked up the notebook and flipped through. There was notes of thanks to the restaurant and the servers. There were illustrations drawn by small fingers. There were notes to other customers. Notes sent out into the universe. There are notes of people marketing their various local retail establishments and such.

I didn't choose to write anything on this visit but realized that my initial impression of the place only verging on coolness was probably a pre-judgment. It's coolness may not have been instantly obvious but here it was waiting for me to notice. I knew it was a good place when I kept thinking of who I wanted to bring back with me next time. This is a pretty good sign, I've decided.

Can you guess what restaurant this is?



Happy Friday June Thirteenth!

This year, my idea of a good Mother’s Day consists of quiet time. Working on some self-care.

I give my bedroom, my sanctuary, a brief but relaxing straightening. I light incense, sip a cup of something warm, paint my nails and settle in to do a bit of writing. Fiction. Just some fun, relaxing storytelling. Weaving and spinning. No pricey invest of soul here, just some literary dessert, if you will.

I set out to write a love-story-type vignette. Maybe even attempt a bit of erotica. (Some of you might be groaning, "Oh no, again?")

I’ve made this a temporary, transitory goal a couple of times, in the past. Kind of challenging my comfort here, testing my default. Besides love scenes, I also am not proficient at nor partial to writing violence. Just not in the natural flow of my writing.

So, typically, as far as my writing is concerned, no sex and no violence, and you may now be asking yourself,

“What else is there?”

And my well-rehearsed answer to that is,

“There’s human drama, I tell you! The stuff of the heart, don’t you know.”

Melodrama, dialogue, humor and smart-assery. This is where my natural 'talents' lie. But occasionally, I do like to challenge this about myself and reach into the dark abyss for the erotic and the intense, the physical.

“How’s that working for ya, so far?” you might be wondering.
Well, I’m here to tell you, “Not so much.”

What historically ends up happening is that I’ll start some shadowy, romantical, steamy scene but by the third or fourth sentence, instead of telling how his hands are moving across her flesh, or what sensuous sounds are can be heard coming from the ruby lips of whomever, I’m busy describing the texture of the dog collar on the neck of the terrier that belongs to the kid who lives three houses down from our main character. You know, the blue house with the white fence around it.

Sex and violence are ideally action-oriented. But I’m known to get caught up in the story telling, the history of my location, the color of the apples on the table, the maiden name of the babysitter’s grandmother on her stepfather’s side.

As you might have guessed, self care via fiction writing didn't last too long. I moved on to other things. Like brownies without nuts. A scoop of vanilla on the side.


And I flipped on the *telly, to see what was on this Mother’s Day of perfect weather. (*This appliance seems somehow less worthless and less heinous if I use the British slang instead.) How's that for questionable Mother's Day self-care.

Let’s see, we have here:

Air Force One,

NBA playoffs (times two),

Rawhide,

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,

baseball (for what that's worth, lately),

NASCAR,

Stephen King’s Carrie,

Deadliest Catch,

one of the twelve Alien sequels,

bowling,

American Idol reruns (not for this mother),

PGA,

fishing,

Alien v. Predator (not included in the aforementioned sequels)

and Saving Private Ryan.

Not that I don’t enjoy a good Deadliest Catch once in a while, but seriously do television execs not have mothers?

Did they not get that memo about Mother’s Day that all the retailers, restaurants, florists and spas sent out?

I guess I shouldn't complain. At some point, the old school Willie Wonka movie was on (my preference) and then Mary Poppins. (Impossible to get to much 'Spoon Full of Sugar' in my book.)

I guess I'll have to be brave and dig back into the love scene that I started writing earlier.

Or maybe just one more brownie. No nuts.

Fairy Dust & Ruby Slippers

I believe in magic. I do.

There, I said it. Whew, load off.

I believe in the unexplainable, in the mystical, in the mythical.

I believe in wonder, in marvel.

I believe.

I don’t know if I believe magic can inhabit us bodily, as much as I believe it floats around us.

It swirls and sparkles and shines all around.

Like glittery feathers on currents of wind. Fireflies and pixies.

Or maybe just like the wind itself.

Because you can’t actually ‘see’ the wind, but the effects of it are clear, if we are watching for it.

Maybe we can’t actually ‘see’ magic, but the results are all around. IF we take the time, slow down and pay attention.

I believe. I do.

This being true, that I believe, you might think my life would be filled with wonder and whimsy and reflections of light. But alas. No. The reason this ‘no’ is so, is because I am SO. Mostly, we are all SO. (To say this ‘SO’ properly, you have to say it as you let out all the air in your lungs. Try this.)

We are heavy with SO. We are SO busy living, thinking, planning, scheming, meaning to get to this and to that. We are SO busy reflecting and analyzing and remembering and prophesying and whining and the magic is missed.

Even knowing this, even with this (pardon me for saying so, but. . . . .) amazing insight, I still miss it, most of the time. I seem to, mostly, be SO busy looking ahead and SO busy looking behind. Foolish. Particularly foolish, because I’m aware of a better way and still fall short.

My inexcusably lame excuse is ‘habit.’ I’ve always done it this way. It’s hard (and maybe a bit scary) to even think about doing life a different way. I am in the habit of missing the magic.

For me the magic is in the calm. It’s in the peace and breathing. For me, magic is in the smallest, least planned moments of my life. I love to look for magic in the coincidence, in the serendipity, in the space between other things. I want to share a little list of examples here, but somehow, feel doing so, would trivialize the magic.

I’m also thinking, that some people are more likely to beget magic than others. There are some people in my life with whom magic is simply more likely to happen. In fact, now that I think about it, I seem to have a disproportionately high amount of people in my life who are not exactly the magic-spawning types.

Boy, wouldn’t that make a great title: Spawn of the Magic Lagoon

Maybe it’s a chemistry thing. My daughter and I, together, seem to walk in a multitude of magical moments. Like her idea of magic, matches up very well with my idea of magic.

We have great magic chemistry.

Or it may also be a proximity thing, because my two sons no longer live at home and so, we have much less opportunity to experience shared magic. It definitely happens, but is less frequent.

Funny but the more I go on here about magic, the less magic seems to be floating around me.

So, off I go.

I may have a long way to go until I am regularly breathing in magic, but I think I’m one-step closer because . . . . .

I believe.

I BELIEVE!

Violets are not blue

Apparently April is National Poetry Month.

I confess I wouldn't have any idea what National Month we are in, except that I work in a library and finding out such things seems to be an occupational hazard. Oh well, you take the bad with the good.

I am not a poet. And am, in point of fact, quite easily annoyed by poetry.

Poetry bothers me in the same way that fine art bothers me.
I do not know enough about what's good,
what's bad,
what's classic,
what's contemporary,
what's edgy and whatever.
So my participating in an intelligent discussion is astronomically unlikely. I find this annoying.

The cliche, "I know what I like" is true of me in fine art and in poetry. And mostly what I like is Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. As you can tell, I'm quite the connoisseur.

Now if you're a poet, plug your ears during this next part.

Poets themselves, tend to annoy me. Sometimes I think they TRY to be obscure and confusing in their work. I think they might actually enjoy that blank stare they get from most people after hearing their poetry. If they read one of their poems and the listener instantly 'get's the meaning, actually understands the point, then they've failed and it must be bad poetry. Because if it were a superior poem, no one would have the first clue what the hell it's about. It's this smug, arrogant sniff that turns me off.

This is not to say that I do not appreciate other people's love of poetry.
Just like I appreciate other people's love of dogs, just keep them off my property, off my leg and make sure they keep their fleas to themselves. No offense.

Okay, so I believe I've clearly established that I am no poet and I have very little appreciation for poetry. So I really have no reason to be celebrating National Poetry Month.... Or so I thought......

Because when I think about it more closely, I realize that my dislike for poems does not equal my love of lyrics. I love reading lyrics, quoting lyrics, posting lyrics here and there. And I think we'd all agree that a good majority of lyrics are poetry put to music.

So is it the musical part that softens my poetry hating spirit? Maybe.

Or maybe instead, when I hear verse set to music, as opposed to standing alone, I can feel the heart's cry in the lyrics. Cries of joy, jealously, grief, elation, longing. When put to music, the same exact words seems to speaks to me instead of aggravating me. It doesn't feel conceited, condescending and grating on my nerves with music attached. Is my soul savage and needing to be soothed by song? Yes, I think there is something to this. There is surely some deep, profound, difficult to understand philosophical reason why I love lyrics but do not like poems.

Maybe.

Or maybe .....

I just like lyrics better because they usually rhyme. Like Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein.

Anyway, in honor of National Poetry Month, or NPM as some of us call it, I am including here bits and pieces of some of my favorite lyrical poems:

Helplessly hoping her harlequin hovers nearby
Awaiting a word
Gasping at glimpses of gentle true spirit
He runs
Wishing he could fly
Only to trip at the sound of good-bye

Wordlessly watching he waits by the window
And wonders
At the empty place inside

Heartlessly helping himself to her bad dreams
He worries
Did he hear a good-bye
or even Hello

They are one person
They are too alone
They are three together
They are for each other

Helplessly Hoping:
Written and performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
___________________________________________

Once divided...nothing left to subtract...
Some words when spoken...can't be taken back...
Walks on his own...with thoughts he can't help thinking...
Future's above...but in the past he's slow and sinking...
Caught a bolt 'a lightnin'...cursed the day he let it go...
Nothingman... nothingman... isn't it something?
Nothingman...

She once believed...in every story he had to tell...
One day she stiffened...took the other side...
Empty stares...from each corner of a shared prison cell...
One just escapes...one's left inside the well...
And he who forgets...will be destined to remember...

Nothingman by Pearl Jam
___________________________________

Your day breaks, your mind aches
There will be time when all the things she said will fill your head
You won't forget her
And in her eyes you see nothing
No sign of love behind the tears
Cried for no one
A love that should have lasted years

For No One
from the Revolver album by The Beatles
___________________________________

She calls me just to talk
She's my lover, she's a friend of mine
She says Hey mister you wanna take a walk
In the wild west end sometime?

And I get trouble with my breathing
She says Boys don't know anything
But I know what I want
I want everything

Expresso Love (on Dire Straits' Alchemy album):
written by Mark Knopfler (and no, it's not about some guy with a crush on a nasty bikini barista.)

There are many many more.
Blackbird by the Beatles.
All Apologies by Nirvana.
Promises by Eric Clapton.

Happy NPM! Or is it Merry? Anyway....

Send me your favorite poem if you want to,

as long as it rhymes.....

and it's not about a dog. . . . .

( AND as long as it doesn't start with 'There once was a girl from.....')