Unkindness

The First Raven

This piece was written for the second “Night of the Radish” — the theme was crows.  I decided to challenge myself to write something serious.  Don’t look for a punch line.

In the first frozen hours of the morning, the stark white stillness was shattered by an unkindness of ravens.   It was not a family, nor was it a flock.  There is a reason they refer to a group of ravens as “unkindness”.  They have earned that name because that is what they are.  That is what I saw.

The bag of seed scattered along my garden walls and heaped atop the birdbath was buried beneath a foot of fresh powder.  The world was still and silent and brutal.  That is when they came.  First one, then ten, and soon there were more than I could count.  They were each a foot and a half tall with glassy eyes, steel sharp claws and black anvil beaks.

They plunged themselves headfirst into the fluff, disappearing completely for a moment then resurfacing with their bounty.  The pristine landscape was soon littered with tiny specks of seed as black as the birds themselves.   The once smooth velvet blanket of snow was scratched and dented and devoured.

Newcomers fought for access to the piles exposed by the work of the early arrivals.  Wings flapped, throats screeched and claws slashed in a mad frenzy for domination.  It was primitive and violent and most certainly unkind.

I was shaken and did not care to watch them for long, but I could not help but be awed by their instinct to survive.

I had never seen birds like that near our house.  We were accustomed to sparrows, finch, robins and woodpeckers.  Hawks would soar high above the tree canopy and wild turkeys might waddle through on occasion.  But crows of this sort had no reason to visit our oak forest — not until that morning.  They had not come two days earlier when the seeds were first laid out fresh, exposed and easy to reach.   It was only on this desperate day, when there was no other sign of life in the woods that they appeared.

When they came, they did not hesitate.  It was as if an invisible beacon had called them to this specific location for the singular purpose of uncovering the life sustaining treasure hidden deep beneath the snow.  There was no easy explanation for how they found their way here or how they knew precisely where to look when they arrived.  They just did.

I admired and feared them at once.  It was eminently clear why so many ancient cultures revered them as gods.   I was relieved when they left.

Later in the day, when the sun finally broke through, I watched with joy as a flock of scarlet red cardinals brightened a tree in the same garden space that had been so darkly ravaged just hours before.  These regal birds delighted me.  Their silky red plumage begged admiration and their manners were reminiscent of a royal court.   Unlike the savage ravens, the sophisticated cardinals took turns feeding.  One or two would perch and eat and then fly back to the tree, allowing time and space for others to take their fair share.   They seemed noble and decent.

But as I watched, I wondered how those lovely, polite little birds would have fared on such a stark day had the shrewd and brutal fowl I watched earlier not fought so hard to unearth the seed that these more refined birds could now enjoy without a struggle.

It saddened me to know that the peace, beauty and civility of the afternoon would not have been possible without the unkindness of the early hours.

Rubber Band Jan

Some people are “yo-yo” dieters – weight goes down, but right back up.  Story of my life, but now I am trying the rubber band diet.  I wear a rubber band around my wrist to remind me of the perils of stretching the elastic too far.

I have never really been in shape.  I was thinner when I was younger, but never a hard body.  I am barely 5’ 3” and I won’t tell you what I weigh, but it is substantially more than I should.  I’ve never crossed over into the true “plus” size world, but I have been a solid size 14 for most of my adult life.  Well, I am really squishier than I am solid.

I have given up on ever wearing a bikini, but I do occasionally dream of the possibilities when I see before and after shots of people like Valerie Bertonelli. Problem is, all of those people seem to have some deep psychological issues that drive them to eat, so once they deal with their issues, they mange to not only push the plate back, but also train for a marathon.  I am not one of those people.  I eat because food is yummy and I am always hungry.  I don’t exercise because it is hard and I am lazy.

Every so often, I get on a kick where I decide I am going to eat healthy and exercise, but I can usually only focus on one of those challenges at a time.  Regulating the calories-in part has been more immediately gratifying when I’ve tried it.  I’ve found ways to change what and how I eat for long enough stretches to see real movement on the scale.   I tried the no-carb thing once and lost 20 pounds fast.  I put it back on just as fast.  I lost 25 pounds on Weight Watchers.  That took longer to put back on, but I worked really hard at it and it all came back.  I lost 15 doing a low-estrogen diet.  There was a very complicated science behind it that had something to do with our primitive hunter-gatherer genetics being overloaded with hormones.  I loved being able to blame hormones for my chubbiness as well as my crankiness!  Damn hormones.  But, when I thought about it, the diet was really just about limiting calories.  Seriously, if all you eat is veggies, fish and a little rice, you’ll lose weight.  Even if the fish is swimming in hormone-infested waters contaminated by birth control pills and estrogen-laced insecticides, you will lose weight.

Exercising has never delivered quick enough results for me to stay motivated.  I might have seen increases in strength and endurance, but that still doesn’t look good in a bathing suit.  As I get older, I focus more on the health attributes of exercise.  Even if I am not losing weight, I figure I must be healthier when I am exercising, so I keep trying different things.

I hate to run, so that never sticks.  I am terribly uncoordinated, so aerobics classes are a disaster.  I won’t even try Zumba, whatever that is.   Circuit training seems to be the best fit for me.  There are lots of great DVDs, so I can do it in the safety and privacy of my own home, but the peer pressure thing is a pretty strong motivator, so I stepped outside of my comfort zone and signed up for a class.

It was three days a week in our humble community center.  No gym bunnies there – just moms like me.  Some were more fit than I, and others were less so.   The instructor looked like she was one of us, but she was the “after” shot without the surgery and airbrushing.  She looked great, but real.  I told myself that if she could do it, I could too.  She went easy on us the first class or two and then ramped us up quickly to burpees and planks and jump squats.  We sweated and groaned, but we did it.  Three days a week for three months.  I didn’t lose a pound, but I felt good.  I could do real push-ups (not the girly, cheater kind).  I could hold a plank for more than a minute.  I could do mountain climbers without passing out.  I knew I should probably start running on the off days if I really wanted to lose weight, but I never did.

The holidays hit and our trainer got a job at a gym 30-minutes away, too far for me to stay motivated.   A new instructor greeted us in January and I knew I was doomed.  She was tall and skinny and had clearly always been skinny.  She was not prissy, but she was not one of us.  She drove a Mercedes and ran marathons and somehow did all of that with three kids.  I immediately hated her.

She was a life-long athlete and clearly could not relate to women who had let themselves go.   She didn’t laugh at our jokes or even try to make us laugh.  She was all business.  She knew we had taken a couple of weeks off and wanted us to pay for it.  She added intensive cardio to our routine, which we needed but weren’t quite ready to do just days after holiday gorging.  We panted and poured sweat and grimaced to one another in solidarity.  The New Year resolution newbies only lasted one class.   The rest of us were determined to not let her break us, but we did take unauthorized breaks, especially when jumping rope pushed our bladders as well as our lungs to their breaking point.  She brought new equipment and new challenges every day.  She’d set up stations around the room and we’d circulate, doing 2-5 minute intervals at each.  Some were better than others.  Some were just awful.   We soldiered on, cursing our new drill sergeant behind her back.

One day, she set up a station where we had to strap an elastic band to a belt around our waists.  We were supposed to jog in place, pulling against her resistance.  This would focus intensely on our quads or something.  I made sure I was the last one to try that.  I could picture that belt with my fat spilling out over the top of it.    I didn’t like the idea of looking like a mule pulling little Blondie like a plow across the gym.  When it was finally my turn, I decided to give it my all, so I honored her command to “dig deep” and I felt my quads burn.  She commented on my strength (or was it just my weight) that was pulling hard on her.  “Keep going,” she yelled.  I pictured myself overpowering her, with the band catapulting her over my head and into the wall – splat!.  I would show her!

Suddenly, I heard a loud crack and it was me who was plunging forward toward the wall.  I managed to stay on my feet, but stumbled like a wounded moose.  When I regained my balance and looked back, she was on her knees, holding her hands to her stomach as dark blood soaked her white t-shirt.  Her face went grey.  I felt immediately ill.  That beautiful woman, mother of three, was going to die because some fat chick broke the rubber band.  I was the fat chick.  My wicked thoughts had come true.  I had taken Blondie down and she wasn’t getting up.

We all rushed over to help her and someone ran to the office for help.  I was afraid to look too closely, certain we would find the metal clip from the belt lodged like a ninja’s throwing star into her flat abs.

Thankfully, there was no metal clip; it was still on my belt.  Her gorgeous abs were unscathed.  The band had actually just hit her finger and sliced it clean open.  This was clearly not a mortal wound, but there was so much blood that EMTs had to be called to the scene.  As she explained to them what happened, I stood sheepishly in the background, the fat chick who broke the rubber band.  She kept brushing off my apologies, claiming it was my strength and not my size that snapped the band.  The EMTs and I knew better.  They got the bleeding to stop, but she was going to need stitches so they sent her to the ER.

Being an iron woman, she showed up for our next session.  Her hand was splinted and bandaged.  She would need to give up her tennis game for a few weeks, but otherwise was good to go.  She told us that the other trainers at her company had gotten a good chuckle at her expense.   Who gets hurt by a rubber band? I knew their laughter was really at my expense.  Who was the fat girl that broke the band?  Do you have video we can post on YouTube?

She set up our stations, including a new band thing.  Really?! She said that she had gotten some tips to avoid another disaster, not the least of which was that she had used the wrong kind of band.  The one that broke was for arm resistance exercises, not full-body-weight mule-plowing maneuvers!  I was feeling less guilty by the second.  The new band was thick and blue, and she didn’t attach it to a belt – it was probably the friction of the metal clip that had weakened the band.  This time, she would just wrap the band directly around our waist.  She told me I had to go first.

As the band dug into my waist like the tourniquet it was, and the fat layer bulged above and below the elastic blubber dividing line, my humiliation set in.  I peered over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of her grin.  The skinny chick was enjoying her revenge.

From now on, the only rubber band I’ll be wearing will be on my wrist.  If I see that woman again, I’ll shoot it straight at her eye.

High Tech Tanning Bed

Every spring I have the urge to go to a tanning bed.  I am not one of those forever bronze people who looks like an Oompah Loompah.  I do, however, feel better with a tan and thus I have been known to fake-n-bake.  It helps get me out of a winter funk and into an exercise regime.  I know that lying in a tanning bed does not count as exercise, but it does help mask fat dimples, so I feel like whatever exercise I am doing might be making a difference.

Last spring I was lured into a slick new tanning place to get a base tan before a family vacation that would put me in a bathing suit long before I was mentally prepared to wear one.

In my college days, I would tan in the seedy back room of any cut-rate hair salon or nail factory that offered a good deal.  But I am older now, and I think about germs and faulty equipment and bulbs exploding, so the newness of this place attracted me.

It was clean and bright.  In casinos, they keep it bright so you don’t know what time it really is.  In tanning places, they keep it bright and sunny so you fool yourself into thinking it is completely normal to get a tan in the middle of a snow storm.  The lobby was adorned with posters of very young and attractive people with beautiful tans having lots of fun in their bathing suits.  The young and attractive people working at the place did not look like they were having very much fun, but they did look very tan.  Very, very tan.

After I signed up, they had me place my finger on a little gizmo that recorded my fingerprint.  The gizmo checks your print every time you come so you don’t tan on somebody else’s account.  I wondered how much tanning bed fraud could possibly occur, but I was nonetheless impressed with the security measures they take to prevent it.  Then, despite the bright lights and orange walls, my thoughts turned dark.

What security measures are they using to protect that record of my fingerprint?  How are they using it?  Is this bright, clean tanning place really a front for some kind of identity theft factory where they steal fingerprints and sell them on the black market?  What is the going rate for a fingerprint?  Thank goodness I paid cash or they’d have my credit card information too.  Then I looked at those posters and wondered if those young, attractive tan people were really spies like in La Femme Nakita or the Bourne Identity.  Or, maybe they were just people having a great time on some middle-aged schmuck’s credit card.

I snapped out of it when the very tan young man at the desk told me I could go to room number 19.  Room 19?  Could there really be 19 rooms in this place?  No, there were actually more.  This place can hold 30 people at a time.  That is a lot of tan people.

I chose a standard bed.  They offered a standup spray thing with an exotic name, but that just seemed too fake.  If I’m going get a tan, I should at least get hot and suffer the UV damage.  For a price, you can opt for a bed that separates out the UVA or the UVB rays, but that conversation was way too complicated so I chose the cheaper, standard bed with all the bad rays that go into a real tan.  I told myself I should suffer the long term consequences of my vanity.

Room 19 was clean and had everything a person might need for tanning enjoyment.  A fresh towel and a sign on the bed told me it had been sanitized.  Little goggles were laying there too.  In my college days those goggles were offered but never used.  This time, I used them. A personal speaker offered a variety of music options that young, attractive, tan people might listen to.  Fans blew so I hardly felt the heat of the bulbs burning my flesh.  The digital timer counted down each second of my tanning experience.

I felt good lying there, listening to the buzz of the lamps and the whirr of the fans and pretending I recognized the music that the young, attractive, tan people listen to.  I stopped thinking about fingerprint theft and thought about my upcoming vacation.  I relaxed and forgot about all the stuff I should be doing with that 20 minutes instead of lying there in an artificial bed of light.  That white light absorbed me and all my worries.

I didn’t sign up to stay in too long — another change from the college days.  As the last seconds ticked off, I felt calm.  This had been a good experience.  I was glad I had let myself indulge in this bright new world.

Then, the lamps cut off and I jolted back to reality.  I felt oddly violated as I changed out of my bathing suit and slid my clothes back on over my slightly sweaty body.  I felt sleazy.  I slunk out past the front desk feeling like I should say goodbye, but then not really wanting to make eye contact with those young, attractive tan people who had conned me out of my fingerprint and were probably in the process of uploading new video of a fat middle-aged lady in a tanning bed and posting it on You Tube.

I felt dirty and used.  I rushed back to my car, hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew on my walk of shame out of the bright world of tanning and into the overcast world of reality.  I didn’t want anyone to know that I was just another vain sucker willing to surrender my privacy and my fingerprint for a tan.

A few hours later, the tan stated to show.  I waited two days and went back for more.

40-Year-Old Virgin Cougars

Half a dozen men in space suits were walking down the street.  It was about 9 p.m. and there weren’t many people out on the streets in the business district.  At first, we thought they were hazmat suits.  Given that it was September 10th and we were about two blocks from Ground Zero, we were worried something terrible might have just happened.  But they weren’t hurried or really doing anything.  They were just kind of sauntering along.  Men in space suits with bubble helmets were just walking down the street.  That’s New York. And it was just the first of many out-of-this-world scenes we would witness that night.

Five of us had driven to New York for a girls weekend – a chance for some moms to get away from the 24/7 cycle of parenting to let loose and have fun.  We did.

We got in really late after a mistake with the GPS led us through Manhattan (past the men in space suits) and into a tunnel that took us to the far, far reaches of Brooklyn.  I’m not talking about hip fun up-and-coming neighborhoods in Brooklyn either.  I’m talking about decaying roads lined with abandoned warehouses, strip clubs and junkies.  We held painfully full bladders to avoid puling over, laughingly mocking-up headlines that would follow our certain demise if we did stop.  “Five Virginia women found slaughtered at strip club.”  “Country girls didn’t last 30 minutes in the city.”  “Volvo SUV found in the Hudson – women still missing.”

The unfortunate detour delayed our arrival, but it also got our adrenalin pumping enough to rally for an 11 p.m. dinner.   It was civilized, with wine and friendly banter with the waiter.  We sat outside for dessert, enviously eyeing 20-somethings across the street.  They had outrageously high-heeled shoes strapped to outrageously toned legs that were barely covered by outrageously short skirts.  We mocked our own outfits, previously judged by one another and deemed to have been NYC-worthy.  A few hours in the city had changed our outlook.  We sucked in our stomaches as we voiced worries for our tween daughters who would aspire to those same fashion standards all too soon.

We stopped couples passing by to ask about neighborhood hotspots.  We teased about how late it was and shouldn’t people be headed home to bed?  We learned that everyone stays out until 3 or 4 and that there were lots of fun places just steps away where we too could be convinced that 1 a.m. was really just a starting point.  So, we chugged back our drinks and soldiered on out of respect for our newfound role models.

We decided to check out the rooftop bar scene across the street.  Watching all the comings and goings had already been thoroughly entertaining, so it could only get better inside.  But, there was a scuffle at the door, where a scrawny swami-looking guy with a ponytail wrapped into a bun on top of his head was screaming at a clearly drunk guy who wanted desperately to get back in.  Swami was the worst bouncer on earth, but he was backed by a huge black guy who didn’t need to raise his voice to command respect.  Drunk Guy was pleading with him about how it was really his friend who had been the asshole and that he (drunk as he was) was really cool and absolutely needed to get back in.

Our feeling of superiority to Drunk Guy evaporated when Swami denied us entry as well, saying that the club was full.   He claimed that 1 a.m. was late (despite what everyone on the streets had told us) and offered, “You ladies should come back tomorrow at lunchtime and check out the view.”  He had eyed us up and immediately pegged us as “ladies” who were better suited for lunching than late-night dancing.  WTF?!  We’d show him!  We trotted off to find the hottest, happeningest place we could.

We found just that in a club called “Tonic”.  Outside was a Hummer limo where a couple was getting down and dirty with each other thinking the windows were tinted, which they weren’t.  People clearly noticed, but no one (other than us) seemed phased or even amused by the scene.  There was a roped-off waiting line to get into the club, but my friends cut the line and marched through the door to escape the curbside peep show.  They didn’t dare turn us away here.  It was all about attitude, and we had it.

Inside, re-mixed 80s music videos blaring on large screen tvs signaled to us that this place was indeed our destiny.  We ordered beers, grabbed a table and checked out the scene.  We saw more short skirts and tippity shoes, but also sports jerseys and plaid shirts.  It was a sports bar.  Or maybe it was a dance club.  It was a meat market.

We stood out like the 40-year-old housewives that we were.  To break us into the scene, one friend challenged us to play Truth or Dare.  I was dared to dance with an exotic young girl who was in a crowd near the bar.  Encouraged by squeals and a group “whoooo”, I jumped up and went for it.  I whispered to the girl that it was my friend’s birthday and they had dared me to dance with them.  She and her friends were eager to play along, so they circled with me and we got our jiggy on.

That was it.  That was all the young men in the bar needed to feel comfortable approaching us.  The sequins blouse on one friend and the glamour-girl shimmer tank on another didn’t hurt.  But it wasn’t just one or two – we must have met 30 guys that night.  We laughed that if our husbands ever cheated on us, we’d know where to go for immediate revenge.  But we were more than a little surprised at how easy it would have been, despite our expanding waistlines.  We were new to the cougar world where 20-something boys are completely comfortable with the idea of hooking-up with someone that could be their mother.  We were 40-year-old Virgin Cougars, and they liked it!

We treated them like our nephews, grilling them about why they were out so late. We complained that young people today are too free with their sexuality – pointing to the extracurricular activities in the Hummer outside.  We asked with genuine concern about how they could afford to live in Manhattan and if they used protection.  We consoled the guy who had been stood up earlier that night.  We sloughed off any attempts to really dance with us, pulling in others from our group for a collective dance party instead.  We were very good girls and we had a blast rocking out to everything from A-Ha to Flo-Rid-A.

A couple of people pulled up stools and acted like they were our friends, even if just for that night.  There was the guy who claimed to have tried out for Dancing with the Stars.  His “Rubik’s Cube” move clearly didn’t impress their judges any more than it had us.  Then there was the brother and sister dynamic duo that we never did figure out.  She spent most of the night jumping up and down and clapping like a seal (dancing?) to get the attention of the bartender.  Every now and then, her “brother” (dressed in a suit and tie) would swoop in and lift her up, and she would straddle him for her little bounce, bounce.   No matter how much we scolded them for this routine, they didn’t see what was wrong with it.

The fun and games started to crash and burn a bit when one guy got really pissed at my friend when she told him he was wasting his time.  He claimed that we had violated some unwritten rules of this bar where dancing with your girlfriends was a direct come-on to any guy within eyeshot.  We gave him the finger (flashing the wedding bands too) and went back to dancing, celebrating that we had made it to 3 a.m.

As last call approached, more and more people were pairing up for the night and we turned our attention to critiquing their choices.  He was way t0o cute for that sleaze ball.  She was way too young to be at the bar.  She didn’t stand a shot with the cute bartender.  That guy should not be dancing with his sister like that!  Maybe she wasn’t really his sister?  Couldn’t be.

The final signal to leave was when two friends went to the ladies room.  Inside they found a guy we had danced with to LaBamba earlier.  Only now, he had his pants around his ankles, granting access to one of the clearly underage girls.  My friends were stunned, shocked and far too descriptive with their accounts of what they saw.  This was no longer harmless fun – it was sad and gross and we were mothers, for God’s sake!

Our conversations moved to why girls let themselves be victimized that way and how do you ever have enough conversations with your daughter so that never happens to her?  How to you impress on your son that that kind of behavior is never ok?  When is the sex talk in school?  Is that this year?  Are we ready?  What were we doing there?

Just as we had given up completely on this lost generation, some seemingly normal kids approached us and started up a conversation.  We were pretty sure the cute guy who claimed to have his PhD was gay.  The girl was preppy and funny and never would have found herself in that bathroom scene.  The tall guy was buzzed but not obnoxious.  They were laughing at the bar closing scene as well and were just as judgmental about the blatant obscenities and desperate attempts to hook-up surrounding us.  They were more like how we hoped out kids would grow up.  They invited us to join them at someone’s apartment on the East Side.   A couple of us, refreshed at meeting normal people, were seriously thinking about it.  What harm could come of it?

Fortunately, someone in our group was a grown-up and told the cabbie to take us home rather than to the East Side where who knows what additional horrors of the city would have unfolded in front of us.   It was, after all, already 5 a.m., and why would those “normal” kids want to hang out with a bunch of 40-year-old housewives?  We congratulated ourselves for making it home alive.  We took off our ridiculous shoes and tended to our blisters.  We were awakened a few hours later by calls from our sweet kids, and we were thankful that the meat market scene was just a tourist stop for us rather than a real part of our lives.

We giggled over coffee and checked our cameras.  No photos had truly captured the essence of what we had witnessed.  Maybe the guys in space suits had wiped our memory cards clean of any proof of that alien world.

You Can Learn a Lot From a Radish

There is a different kind of radish for every season.  Spring and summer radishes are the ones we all recognize.  They grow quickly, but they are generally small and not terribly interesting.  The winter varieties are far more exciting.  They have exotic names like the “Black Spanish” and the French “Gors Noir d’Hiver”.  They have dark, rough skin and “hot-flavored” flesh.  They can be big and round or pear-shaped and are very hearty.  Radishes are the garden metaphor for women.  When in our “winter” season, we may be bigger or pear-shaped, but we are still “hot” at our core and far superior to the premature spring and summer versions.

One woman was dressed as a radish.  More interpretive than literal, but definitely radish.  The dark red paint smeared on her face and the tuft of salad greens rubber-banded to the top of her head put me strangely at ease.  Her shameless interpretation of the theme was the reminder I needed to not take the evening’s challenge or myself too seriously.

The Facebook invitation was titled, “The Night of the Radish.”  Some of the creative-types from my old book club had decided to host an evening to “share our reflections and artistic interpretations on a theme.”  The theme was a radish.  I’m not kidding.

The idea was that with enough creative mojo, even a radish could be interesting, and maybe even beautiful.  They even created an adorable illustrated logo for the night, knowing it would be the first of many such gatherings.

I knew it would be a fun night, but I was intimidated. I didn’t have anything to share.  I wasn’t like them.  I didn’t make anything.  I never have made anything.   I was just a mom who, in an effort to fit in, professed that I liked to write.  I was a fraud.

These women were artists. They had converted their garages or basements or barns into working studios where they could paint or throw clay or weave.  They hosted workshops, taught classes and successfully sold their wares at shows and online.  I wasted time pecking out essays now and again when I was bored or contemplating therapy.  My writing was just for my own amusement and had remained safely hidden on my hard drive.  It was definitely not art.

The Radish challenged me to step outside of my comfort zone and write something that I would have to share.  Scary.

When I made my way past Radish Lady, I saw an amazing display of multi-media salad fixins’.  The room was filled with canvases, small and large, featuring the signature red root in oil, acrylic, watercolor and ink.  There were clay sculptures and hand-carved print blocks.  The hostesses’ kids got into the act, creating poems, crayon drawings, a song and even a lego radish.

We looked at each piece and talked about the colors, the concepts and the techniques involved.  Some pieces were rich and sophisticated.  Others were whimsical and fresh.

We swayed along to a Blues song written and sung by the wood-worker in the bunch. She had recently been exploring her range in the performing arts – stand-up comedy, jazz singer, acoustic guitar.

The ceramic artisan stole the show with her culinary talents, offering a killer radish dip.  What’s not to love about edible art?

My contribution was basically a sideways glance at a Google search about radishes.  It was sprinkled with self-absorbed reflections about leaving my go-go career to be a stay-at-home mom, but it hit home with some people.  It felt great to finally share something that I had written.

The Night of the Radish gave us each the opportunity to find a way, any way, to create something — anything.  But, more importantly, it forced us to share our creations.  And it was that act of sharing that made it art.