To Spring

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I miss writing. It's been over a month since I wrote last, probably the longest period of time I have ignored this blog since I started it some 5 or so years ago.

But you can't be a full time teacher, a full time artist, a wife, a mother/grandmother/friend without giving something up. And it has been writing and....uh, exercising.

So today is sort of MY "New Year".  I went to the gym is my slightly over tight gym clothes to work out, wondering if there is ANY hope of getting this doughy body into some sort of shape before bathing suit season, which even though we have had a hot spell, is some three months away.  I am going to be putting on a suit next week in Louisiana, but there no one will see me or know me, so I am safe.   I hit the tanning salon too because I have this fantasy that a tan doughy body is sexier than a pale white one. The only problem is that the tanning leads to more wrinkles, which just makes me shake my head and say, "how did this happen? How did I get to be this age and in this condition?" But I guess if I just recently started saying this, life isn't so bad. And I remind myself that at this very moment, I am looking pretty good, as it is downhill from here on in.

Tonight's blog features a photo from 1931 taken in Eastern Europe which I got in an auction lot. When I found it, the past rushed through me, taking my breath away, jarring an early childhood memory from the early 60's. My grandmother's house in Brooklyn,  grandpa was still alive. More of my Lithuanian relatives were there, and everyone had hard boiled eggs. They played a game called egg tapping (or jarping) where you went around and tapped on each person's egg. The person whose egg did not crack after making the rounds was the winner.  I don't remember what they won, probably another mug of beer, or perhaps as tradition had it, a pot of money.  It is one of my better childhood memories of the grandparents I loved so well. The laughter, the small but cozy kitchen filled with my Lithuanian relatives.  Stocky great grandma Morris telling me  I was too skinny and to "yeat, YEAT all your food!" 

And as an aside, my grandfather's last name, before it became Americanized, was Gimbutas.  I wonder if I am distantly related to the famous archeologist Marija Gimbutas -the Gloria Steinham of Archeology. According to Gimbutas, early European culture was a goddess culture, a time of peace where homosexuality was honored, and  economic equality prevailed.  The downfall of this peaceful culture was the invasion by a male dominated, war-like civilization. And well, the rest is history. 

My next blog:  the Eastern European tradition of men spanking their women on Easter Monday......

Aren't you glad I am back?







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