Salon.com > Sadie

How baseball saved me from Rush Limbaugh

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:01:00 +0000

Well, it was another day of my cross-country car journey with my dog, Sadie, with stops to throw the ball. Before I explain how baseball saved me from Rush Limbaugh, first a Sadie update: She misses Boulder, but found nature in this little patch of land behind La Quinta:

She thought this drainage ditch was another creek and made a run for it (I put her back on the leash):

One stop came in lovely Newton, Iowa, the childhood home of Charles Murray – I won’t hold that against Newton -- as well as Maytag headquarters. We had Sunset Park to ourselves in a cold rain:

So, at one point I broke down and listened to Rush. You know, even the paranoid Sean Hannity sounds a little jauntier. Rush actually seems depressed. He was inveighing against Michelle Obama comparing herself to Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old Chicago girl killed in gang violence in January. Obama’s speech was incredibly moving; NPR played long clips of it and she sounded as though she was fighting tears; listening to her, so was I.

In Nebraska: Old friends, “Mad Men” and chatting about divorce

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

I feel I’ve failed you again, dear reader, in that I’m not discovering roadside kitsch or figuring out why red state people like their guns or (sometimes) think Obama wasn’t born here. This weather spooked me, and I’m driving crazy fast when I’m driving.

It was hard to leave my friend Mary’s house Wednesday morning once we heard there was going to be snow all day across Nebraska. Both fireplaces were lit, there was coffee and muffins, Sadie was happy with her pack, the gorgeous Golden Retrievers Max and Malie, and I was headed to Nebraska? Why?

A word about Mary. I met her through Open Salon, she was one of the fantastic originals, and we connected through our writing right away. She came to our crazy Salon party at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, where Glenn Greenwald and Duncan Black cavorted with Joe Klein (no, they didn’t cavort, although they were all there) and Arianna Huffington came for a minute and left her lovely sister Agape while she departed in a limo for dinner with celebs (which was all good) and Gov. Ed Rendell dropped by and a bunch of Open Salon people came and they were pretty much my favorites. There was Dave Cullen, of course, my writer on the Columbine school shootings, still a year or two away from his award-winning book, and I’m sure there were other people, and then there was Mary.

A much-needed post-Hannity snow day

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 22:41:00 +0000

As part of my ongoing road trip across the country with my dog, Sadie, I planned to spend two days in Boulder, but wound up with no choice in the matter: We’re socked in with about a foot of snow. I tried to race the storm to Boulder on Monday, but it found me in Evanston, Wyo., when I woke up yesterday morning.

I complained in my last post that it’s been hard to meet people since I’m averse to leaving Sadie alone in a hotel room. But in Evanston I met a drunk welder in a cowboy hat as soon as I checked into my dog-friendly Best Western. “Hey, good lookin’,” he said, and I can state categorically that I was not good looking at that moment: dirty hair, no makeup, boots still salty from our trip to Bonneville Salt Flats.

(Oh, here’s Sadie, before she got salt poisoning.)

I’m on the road!

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:32:00 +0000

“A dog is a tragedy,” a maudlin New Yorker growled at me over drinks after I first arrived in the city last August with my dog, Sadie. “You get them knowing they’ll die before you do. Unless they don’t.” Buzz kill, huh?

I never meant to be a crazy dog lady, partly for that reason – I didn’t want to love someone I was pretty much guaranteed to lose -- but I have become a dog lady anyway. It turned out, after my daughter left for college, that I am a person who needs the tether of caretaking. I liked the cooking and cleaning up, the dressing and the driving to school, the daily bustle of family, where someone else has to come first. For the first time in 24 years I lived alone and I didn’t like it. So I moped for a while, and then I got a puppy. Now, at the time of life I’m supposed to be grateful for my freedom, the capacity to travel the world and come and go as I please, I can’t. And it turns out that’s fine with me.