Having faith

Today is a rambling sort of day....Why? Because I get to make the rules here....

Item number one: I happily watched and listened to President Obama last night. And that, I realized towards the end of his address, is something new -- both that I gave an hour of my crowded evening to our president and that I was happy while doing so. Amazing....I think that as Americans, we are becoming happy and proud again. We're also scared (are we going to pull out of this economic disaster? are we going to war again? etc.) but we're beginning to have faith. Really. I feel it. And isn't that what faith is all about?....

Item number two: A related post script to number one. It made me feel personally proud of my thirteen year old daughter to see her sitting and listening to the whole speech -- even telling a phone caller that she'd have to call back because she was watching the president....

Unrelated item number three: Today is the funeral for an old friend of the family's. And though he was old in every sense of the word, and I guess his time had just come, I still have to comment that a sparkle has left the earth. And I think of other bright lights who have gone, many seemingly before their time, and though I rebel against accepting these realities, I cannot deny that just as water vapor rises up and then rains down out of some distant cloud in some other place, so too some people die and others are born and cycles and symmetry do exist....

Maybe it all gets back to...faith....

Economic Troubles Keep Coming

My brother always says, "You can either make lemon aid or you can suck on the lemon."
These days, we're lucky if we have the lemon....

In and around my neighborhood, restaurants and businesses are falling prey to the economic realities of the world. It is shocking and depressing. Scary. In the last few months, one corner has seen Starbucks close (okay, I admit, I wasn't one hundred percent sad when it did), and upstairs, gone too is a Berkeley stalwart restaurant that everyone had been to at least once, and just yesterday, at that same intersection, Elephant Pharmacy closed its doors....

Elephant's website has this message: "It is with a heavy heart that we post this notice: Elephant Pharm has closed indefinitely. As a small business, we’ve been hurt by the terrible turn the economy has taken and the tightening of the credit market. It’s been a very special six years since we started this drugstore revolution, and we certainly couldn’t have made it as far as we did without you—our customers. We hope that you will continue your pursuit of a good, long life, well lived."

If that isn't a tear-jerker, I don't know what is....Last night when my daughter heard the news, (big news in our house, as I've been a booster of this store since it opened, with its alternative healing and its commitment to the local community), she said, with a stricken look, "Let's move to Canada." Not much better, we had to tell her. "Mexico, then," she said. "There too," we said. It's a slippery slope all over the world....

How then, lemon aid or lemon bars instead of puckering on a sour lemon? I don't have any good answers; I don't know how we get a foothold and don't succumb to the slippery slope...but I do know that answers or not, we can't give up....Giving up is not an option.