Jaki Jean on Jean

This evening, watching the early news, I told my mother that I wanted to go on record. That the last thing I wanted to see was a musical of Little House on the Prairie.

A bit later, she rolled into the kitchen & said:

I just want to go on record. I do not want to watch a rendition of Romeo & Juliet with Ellen & Rosie.

We laughed & I said, of course, Juliet was played by a man.

So what a gender bender it could be, Rosie & Ellen, playing those roles.

A woman as a woman, a woman as a man.

And my mother smiled.

It's the surface Navy's worst loss of life during peace time operations.

I remember the call I received twenty-one years ago.

I was sitting at my desk in the Washington Hilton, contemplating the wording in a corporate brochure or a bride’s choice of flowers and colors and I answered the phone.

It was Leslie, a friend of my youngest brother.

Leslie, who arrived as my father was in the midst of a massive heart attack and performed CPR and brought him back. Only for the paramedics to lose him on the way to the hospital.

I still see her in the Emergency waiting room, and I hear her saying I never lost anyone before.

And then I hear her say over the phone, Are you watching CNN? There has been an explosion on the Iowa.

Of course I was not watching CNN – I was contemplating the magnificent and the mundane of floral choices. My youngest brother was on the Iowa.

I made a call to a woman I worked with on an Inaugural Ball for George I, a woman whose son worked with Naval Intelligence. And I tell her that my baby brother is on the Iowa and that I need to tell our mother something.

She made a call.

Her son the Naval Intelligence Officer called me.

His name is not on the list of the dead or the wounded or the missing. This is all I can tell you.

So I had that to tell our mother. He was alive.

My brother does not talk about the turret explosion. Except that some of the sailors he brought to crash in my apartment on Virginia Avenue in D.C. died that day. And that there was not a lot left in the turret.

With all due respect to that kind Intelligence Officer who tried so to give my mother comfort.

My brother was not dead or missing.

But he, like so many others, was wounded.

In peace time.

So what has left our men & women wounded in these war times>

T & I

I wonder when it was that I started crossing my Ts and dotting my I s as I write, instead of waiting until the end of the sentence, or at least until the end of the word, to take care of that penmanship housekeeping.

I looked up the whole concept of crossing t and dotting i.

Generally, it means being careful, thorough and precise: including all the required elements of detail.

It comes, I believe, from the days of manuscript copying where the letters i and t were carelessly left unadorned by their dots and cross-strokes because they required a break from the continuous flow of the writing.

So, if I read these definitions correctly, my obsession with crossing t and dotting i as I write is a sign of precision & a willingness to break the continuous flow of my thoughts.

Fractal instead of linear.

Excellent.

About that Thanksgiving

There was no carrot souffle.

But there was baby Ailee, my sister's grandchild. Beautiful & bubbly & intense.

Like her parents.

I missed the souffle.