Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Hanging out, the fine art of doing nothing together.
See companion Podcast on puttering (Pitter, Patter, Putter Perfect), the fine art of doing nothing on your own.
Follow Liza Blue on:Share:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Hanging out, the fine art of doing nothing together.
See companion Podcast on puttering (Pitter, Patter, Putter Perfect), the fine art of doing nothing on your own.
Follow Liza Blue on:The other evening Nick and I were half-watching a Stanley Cup playoff game involving the Boston Bruins. At one point the camera panned the rafters displaying the banners honoring Bobby Orr, and Nick commented, “Wow, Bobby Orr only played for 10 years.” And then I responded with a nugget from the deep recesses of my brain, “Yes, but he finished his career playing for the Blackhawks.” Nick couldn’t believe that this was true – Bobby Orr a Blackhawk? But then he was suitably impressed when he consulted the Internet on his iPad. I was puzzled as to how I dredged up this fact – during the time that Orr played for the Blackhawks I was totally absorbed by medical school and the Blackhawks games were not televised then, so I really have no idea how I heard about it, why I chose to remember it, and how I could recall it some 35 years later.
The bigger question in my mind is what my brain refuses to remember – like anything to do with the Bible. I know for a fact that I have read about or heard the explanation of Passover, the burning bush and parting of the Red Sea multiple times – certainly more than the fact that Bobby Orr finished his career in Chicago – but I can’t give you any more details on these events other than that they were Biblical. (There is also that story about Jonah and Whale, but that might actually have something to do with Pinocchio who I think also spent time in a Great Blue. There is something biblical about Pontius Pilate, but that name only makes me think of Pierre Pilote, the sturdy defenseman, number 3 and captain of the Blackhawks in the 1960s.) Continue reading
Follow Liza Blue on:Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
A Bible illiterate takes a brief (and horrifying) tour of the Old Testament
Follow Liza Blue on:Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
The humble but magnificent liver is off limits for this carnivore.
Follow Liza Blue on:My introduction to liver was perfectly pleasant. There was a period in my childhood when liver was a routine dinner entrée. This was when my mother had 6 children under the age of 10 and was assisted by a mother’s helper. My memory is a bit hazy on this point, but I don’t think that we children ate dinner with our parents. My father was a printing salesman, and routinely got home around 7 PM, and I think that my mother made a separate meal for the two of them, while a rotating crew of mother’s helpers was assigned to children’s dinner. There were a lot of them. There was the mother’s helper my mother fired because she seemed too weirdly religious – she had taped a sign “Have you prayed about it lately” in the bathroom just opposite the toilet. Then there was a tiny scrappy woman named Ada, whose false teeth were fascinating, and who would go the to bars at the nearby naval base and come home drunk. She also tried to play the accordion, and at night I remember hearing a tortured version of “Roll Out the Barrel” emanating from her bedroom. But mostly there was a series of big-boned Finnish women from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My mother cleverly put in an ad in the UP Mining Journal, and then shared her responses with friends, so that our town had a nucleus of Finnish women – my mother referred to them as “300 pound wonders.” They stayed with us during the school year, and then disappeared to their own families during summer vacation. Continue reading
Follow Liza Blue on:My all girls high school was like any other with its typical array of cliques – the pretty, the ugly, the jocks, brains, geeks and the occasional total misfit. But the fact that it was a boarding school added another variable, particularly since I was a distant boarder traveling all the way from the Chicago suburbs to Boston, while most of the other boarders came from the East Coast. I generally felt totally intimidated by the sophisticated East coast crowd, who at one end of the spectrum had the polished upbringing of the upper crust, and at the other end were hip, at least in my naïve assessment. These were the girls who probably were sneaking down to the river to smoke weed, or who devised work-arounds to the restrictive parietal hours and invited boys up to their dorm rooms. Continue reading
Follow Liza Blue on:Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Life lessons from a fart.
Follow Liza Blue on:Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Physical mementos, from locks of baby hair to pictures of chromosomes
Follow Liza Blue on:Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
The day my mother found out that she had Alzheimer’s disesase
Follow Liza Blue on: