And our heroine is plunged into the world of nannydom...

But a good day actually. I tuckered the little tykes out by two thirty (talk about alliteration!) and they slept until their mom came home. Who knew a trip to the park in the wagon could be so exhausting? Then it was time for Banjo class, which I was nervous about since I missed a session last week while in MN. Not too bad though, and I got to try out my i-talk recorder-do-da. My co-banjo-ists were duly impressed with my technological wizardry (sure have them fooled, don't I?) I just need to practice extra hard this week. My fingertips are actually quite tender as I am typing this, I hope I get some real callouses. That would be soooo cool.

While the kids were sleeping I started reading "A Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. I am ashamed to say I had never read her before and now I know that I have to read her other books. It is so moving. She looses her husband unexpectedly and then has to deal with her daughter's sudden illness and possible brain damage. I have never experienced the death of someone really close to me, and it seems unfathomable. My best friend's mother passed away not long ago, and my friend's grief is as close as I have ever been to understanding what it would be like to loose someone so essential. One paragraph I found especially fascinating had to do with how we deal with death in America:

"Phillipe Aries...[author of] Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to Present noted that beginning about 1930 there had in most Western countries and
particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. "Death," he
wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden. "

It is as though we as a Nation became so wealthy and super powerful we forgot that we all die someday, or we decided to hide the fact. It certainly became removed from our lives in the sense that most people don't die at home. They go to hospitals for treatment and sometimes don't come back home again. I'm not sure that I am advocating having a wake in your living room as people used to do, I am just agreeing with Didion's view that death is something we try to avoid facing in our culture. And in some ways that makes death very difficult to come to terms with when it inevitably happens.