Fourth of July, USA

Come on, sing along with me, I know you know this tune if you live in the USA:

“You’re a grand old flag,
You’re a high flying flag,
And forever in peace may you wave.
You’re the emblem of
The land I love,
The home of the free and the brave.
Ev’ry heart beats true
Under Red, White and Blue,
Where there’s never a boast or brag;
But should auld acquaintance be forgot,
Keep your eye on the grand old flag.”

Love that song. Love the Fourth of July. And I love this United States of America. I often think how lucky I am to have been born here.

Not that I don’t love other countries. Most all countries have their beautiful spots and their wonderful regional food and their lovely people. But I’m always glad to come back home.

It’s the little things I love here in the USA. Listening to Sinatra when he sang “The House I Live In” has always, all through my life whenever I’ve heard it, touched me. I rarely hear that song without feeling tears well up, because it described life in the USA so well. But guess what. It still describes life in the USA.

Small-town USA Fourth of July parades, where everyone salutes when our American flag passes by, and everyone winds up in a park or a field on the outer edges of town where American families, no matter what their original nationality or race or religion, sit at long wooden tables for their Fourth of July picnic. We still do that, you know. We do. You don’t see it very often in the bigger cities, but they’re still here, and we’re still laughing at hilariously sloppy watermelon eating contests, scarfing down grilled hot dogs and corn on the cob and lemonade, kids still run around with their sparklers after it gets dark. It’s all still here. For you guys and women overseas, wherever you are, it’s all still here, waiting for you.

I love driving through my town on holiday weekends like this one and seeing American flags hanging from their poles in front yards everywhere. We still do that. We’ll always do it.

I love watching the fireworks on Fourth of July night. They’re so beautiful. SO beautiful! And even listening to the Boston Pops with fireworks in the background on television is beautiful if I’m not able to get out that night. My emotions are just as stirred.

I once drove back up to Chicago on Fourth of July night and every town we passed was having their fireworks display, almost as if they’d timed them so we could see almost all of them. Magic nights like that don’t happen very often, but they happen.

They’re still here.

I even love the constant political arguments in Washington, D.C. because it says, to me, that at least we can still argue like one big dysfunctional family, because that’s what we are, you know. And dysfunctional though we may be at the moment, we’re still family, and while we all get riled up at times, at least we can say we’re riled up without being afraid of getting arrested or shot for it.

One of the most touching Fourth of July events I ever attended, which kept me in tears the entire time, was in a very small town further down in Illinois where the parade couldn’t have been more than three blocks long, if that. It wound up in the middle of town at a statue, where all the older men who belonged to the VFW took part in a ceremony that ended with them all standing, even the ones in wheelchairs, and saluting our flag while the small band played America the Beautiful. That song always makes me cry. They played it at my stepfather’s funeral, so eloquently appropriate, because he deeply loved this country and wasn’t ashamed to say so.

We have our cherished traditions, and like Tevya, who describes it so well in Fiddler on the Roof, we know what they are and we continue them. We always will. No matter who objects to our American Flag, we’re still going to fly it whenever we want, wherever we want. As long as it still flies, that’s all that matters.

It’s still our Grand Old Flag.

Well, y’all, I’m going to hop into my itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini and go lie out in the sun a while, sipping lemonade, occasionally rolling into the shade under my red, white and blue beach umbrella.

Goofy as I am most of the time, I’m still one of the most patriotic people you’ll ever meet in your life and I love this country with a passion. So ta ta for now, thank you so much for stopping by, and don’t forget to keep humming the song at the top of this blog post.

I know you will. You won’t be able not to. That’s why I put it there.

Love y’all, come back soon,
Hotclue

GOD BLESS AMERICA

This is Beth Anderson, substituting for Hotclue today, since she’s off on vacation in Florida.

I want to take this day to honor all of our service men and women, both past and present, who have given so much of themselves over the years so that the rest of us are free to do all the things Americans love to do on Memorial Day.

The cookouts. The family visits. Steak or hot dogs on the grill, it doesn’t matter what the menu, it’s the human connection that matters. Swimming, if you’re anywhere around water. Watching the Indianapolis 500 every Memorial Day weekend–an American pastime if I ever saw one. There’s nothing else like it anywhere. I don’t think I’ve ever missed Indy since I became aware of it.

I love the Indy 500. The crowds, the balloons, the Air Force flying over. The National Anthem, whether we can sing it or not–it’s still our Anthem and we still sing it. Jim Nabors singing Back Home Again in Indiana. The only thing that comes even close to that is during the Kentucky Derby, when we all sing My Old Kentucky Home whether we’ve ever had a home in Kentucky or not. In both cases, it’s easy to pretend, even if only for as long as it takes to sing it, that we are Back Home Again in those places where life is simpler and neighbors still trade cups of sugar and babysitting and share good times grilling out back.

Even though the vast majority of us right now are very much against having our young men and women in such a far-away, dangerous place as the Mideast, still, they’re there, and we cherish every one of them. They deserve their day.

No war is ever popular. Most of them, in my opinion, should never have happened. But they do happen whether the reasons are valid or not, and we have courageous men and women who go far from home to fight them, giving up all of the things themselves that they’re fighting for.

Some come home okay, although forever changed. Some come home with devastating external and internal damage. And some come home in boxes.

Whether we’re supposed to realize this or not, there’s still the unmistakeable fact that over 2,500 of those boxes have come home with the bodies of our sons and daughters who will never laugh again, or barbecue again, or hold their loved ones again, or see an Indy 500 again. The thought of 2,500 flag-covered caskets all at one time boggles my mind, but we must think of it, because every one of them did what they did for us.

In addition to that, what about countless family members who are left behind to grieve. Our war dead aren’t the only collateral damage, as those who sign us into war like to describe it.

Think about it. For every one of those names on the Vietnem Wall, there are many more people left behind whose lives have also been changed forever, and not for the better.

God bless every one of our Armed Forces, both dead and alive, and all of those in all previous wars who have gone before them.

And God Bless America. We need all the help we can get.

Love on this beautiful day, and thank you for stopping by. Please come back, I know Hotclue would love to see you.
Beth

HOTCLUE DOES MAMA’S DAY

Ha! I bet you thought I was going to say something like, “Hotclue Does Houston”, right? Who knows, I might yet.

Right now, it’s 2:00 A.M. on Mother’s Day, I can’t sleep and in fact, I’m wired and my Hotclueieness is rolling over me like an eighteen-wheeler hurtling down Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway, so now’s a good time to snitch–I mean, tell you about Beth Anderson, the mother, who doubles as Beth Anderson, the author. A triple threat when you add me to the mix.

Sounds derogarory, doesn’t it. Calling her a mother, I mean.

Well, sometimes it is.

Beth’s the kind of mother who (or is that whom? EDITOR, OH EDITOR!) her children don’t really think of as a mother, but more like an addled woman-child playing hopscotch and tra-la-la skipping through life while she forms tremendous, award-winning bubbles with THEIR bubblegum. I have to tell you, that’s a pretty accurate description, and I take full credit for most of her goofiness throughout her years of somehow coping with motherhood.

I’ve been around a long time, although she didn’t know I was here until recently–well after she started writing, in fact, which probably says something profound about the stressfulness of Writing Novels and Getting Them Published. As soon as I figure out which part is profound, I’ll let you know.

Anyhow, as absolute proof of her innate but unmistakeable outrageousness, she received a Mother’s Day card yesterday from her middle child (which should tell you that the child is hopelessly warped anyhow, even if she wasn’t Beth’s daughter). On the front of the card it says, “When we were growing up, a lot of times running away seemed like a good idea.” On the inside it says, “But you never did.”

Both Beth and I are still laughing about that because it’s so perfect. It says it all. She might even keep that one. Well, it’s possible. (This should give them something to look for when she’s gone, just trying to find it.)

When all four of her children get together, they love to torment her about the time she took one of her grandbambinos down a huge rolling sliding board and got stuck halfway and had to do her inchworm act to get the rest of the way down. They all laughed so hard they peed (somehow tinkled sounds so prissy so I won’t use it) their pants. She never told them this, but I’m telling you now: So did she.

There was the time when she was babysitting two of the grandbambinas and got bored, so she (although I instigated this) said to the girls, “Let’s blow up some balloons and put them in the trash compactor and see how loud they blow up.” Naturally, being the adventurous kids they are, and I’m speaking of all three of them now, they loved the idea. The noise was tremendous, and thus her reputation was established with the little girls when they were at a very tender age. They’ve never fully recovered, although the fact that their other grandmother is perfectly normal should help them out somewhat.

Her son once told her, in a moment of deep reflection, “Ah…you were okay as a mom, you just never grew up.” She’s still trying to figure that out, although she has to acknowledge the wisdom of it. Or maybe she’s just trying to figure out how come he GOT so much wisdom, having sprung, unsuspecting, from her loins.

Her daughters love to say she’s not the normal mom everyone else had, the cookies and milk kind of mom, don’tchaknow, which has resulted in her, every Christmas SINCE they grew up, making tons of cookies, which nobody ever eats, probably because the sight of homemade cookies is so unfamiliar.

Or maybe it’s because once when she made some really gorgeous ones, she wouldn’t let anybody eat them because they were too beautiful to eat. The grandbambinas are still traumatized over that and no amount of cookies now will tempt them. Oreos are just fine, thankyouverymuch. Their parents were raised on Oreos, and as often happens in severely dysfunctional families, the Oreo dysfunction has filtered down to the next generation.

At the risk of becoming maudlin (Oh, God, NO, Beth has something sentimental she wants to say! Please, NO! SCREEEEM!) she wants to say thank you to all four of her children, Debbie, Rick, Barb, and Beth Lyn, for letting her be their mom, such as she is.

It’s been fun, guys. Well, most of the time. And don’t worry. I’m never going to change. In fact, now that you know there are two of me, Hotclue and I will continue conspiring to fill your lives with adventure and oddballness, as well as love.

Happy Mother’s Day, everybody!
The Hotclue
(aided and abetted by Beth every once in a while, when they let her out of The Home.)

KISS ME, I’M HOTCLUE!

So I wake up this morning, expecting at the very LEAST an emerald and gold four leaf clover pin with a huge diamond in the middle for my St. Patrick’s Day present. Instead, Count Babalallapaloozo gives me a deed to some castle in Spain, attached to a little green gecko. A live one.

And guess what. I LOVE the gecko! Adore him! (Or her, how do you tell?) Anyhow, the Count and I are giving a St. Patrick’s dinner party for a couple hundred of our closest, dearest friends. Okay, so they’re people we met at a casino last night. Anyhow, we’re celebrating in style with a big corned beef and colcannon dinner. If you don’t know what colcannon is, I’ll tell you in a minute.

I’m bringing my gecko to the dinner. I’ve already arranged to have a chair and a complete table setting for him. He can climb around on his plate to eat his dinner if he wants to, because I LOVE the little green critter and I can’t bear to be away from him for a single second. When I love something I do tend to go all out, don’t I. Well, that’s why they call me Hotclue. The passions run hot, but I don’t have a clue.

I’ve composed a little Irish ditty for all of you who are celebrating today, you can sing it to that tune, you know the one, it goes Da de da da da da da de da da de daaaaa, yeah, that one. Anyhow, here’s the ditty, which it would be nice if you’d sing it with an Irish brogue, please, just to keep it official:

Ohhhh today’s the day we’ve waited for,
The wearin’ of the green,
We’ll start with green martinis,
The brightest ever seen.

Just haul out all your jewels,
And drop them at the door,
And I’ll be glad to keep them,
(Well, what’s a party for?)

Doesn’t matter what your color,
No matter what you weigh,
Ohhhhhhhhhh, everybody’s Irish
On this St. Patrick’s Day!

(Ohhhhhhhhh, EVERYBODY’S Irishhhhhhhhh on this St. Patrick’s Day!)

I knew you’d love it. I made it up just for you. You’re welcome.

Colcannon? Oh, there’s a dish to die for, although it sounds kind of sloppy, but flavor? To die for, like I said. Here’s how you make it–I’m getting this recipe from my French chef, who specializes in Irish food. Today, anyhow.

Take a bunch of potatos, peel them and cut them in little pieces. You don’t have to use a ruler, just cut ‘em, for God’s sake. Put them in a pan with water and salt and cook till they’re done. Simple, right? Wait, there’s more,

Cut up a head of cabbage. A small head. Just chop it like in one inch pieces. Put that in a separate pan with a cut up onion, lots of butter, (don’t forget the salt and pepper). Cover all that mess with milk and set it to a slow simmer. Don’t go off reading a magazine now, when you’re cooking with milk you have to watch it.

When everything’s cooked, drain the potatoes, sort of mash them only leave them chunky, add the cabbage mixture to it, milk and all, stir it all together, and, as my chef says, “Voila! Colcannon!”

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, my loves. See you again oh, Saturday night, Sunday morning.
Ta ta!
Hotclue Herself