FISHTRAP HOLLOW, Miss —
My Louisiana buddy Greg Guirard, who doesn’t phone often, called all excited one day to tell me he’d learned a trick.
Now this is a man who has lived more than seven decades, made a living from the Atchafalaya Swamp, traveled the world at various times and expertly photographs things that he loves. I tend to listen.
Get a straw broom, he said, relatively new, and with patience place your palm on the top of the wooden handle. Oh, so carefully, balance the broom on the floor. The broom eventually will stand by itself, he said, and remain standing for as long as nobody runs into it.
Greg was going for the record.
A few months later I visited Greg, and, sure enough, his Fantasia broom was there in the cabin corner, upright and steady. People came and went, all assiduously avoiding the broom, afraid of upsetting the plan. When a door slammed, everyone would turn in concert and check to make sure the broom hadn’t fallen.
I’m not sure if he broke any standing broom records, but Greg had created a monster. Me. I stood a broom on my own porch, hoping to startle visitors. I left a standing broom in a friend’s kitchen where I knew he would find it. He did and briefly was convinced his house had a ghost.
I wasted lots of time making brooms independent.
Halloween ought to have more standing brooms and less bought ready-made junk. How have we turned a perfectly good holiday into another mad consumer rush?
As early as July there were Halloween doodads in the stores, with candles shaped like candy corn and jack o’ lanterns made of everything from plastic to velvet. I recently went to a store in New Orleans’ French Quarter where you could have spent a life’s savings on Halloween paraphernalia, including $125 witch hats and $50 glittery signs that said “Boo!” I bought nothing. When I can’t write “Boo!” on a board and sprinkle glitter, bury me.
The Internet “news” has been full of inappropriate costumes children sport for Halloween. Especially disturbing were the come-hither poses the child models struck on the packaging. There were Size 4 girls tricked up like Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. Mermaids were vamping on beds. They even rendered the endangered Big Bird “sexy.”
As children, we made our own costumes, appropriate or in-. I alternated between princess and hobo. The hobo costume was more comfortable and required a bandana on a stick. Being a princess meant wearing a hand-me-down evening gown that only fit well the first year. I substituted a plastic headband for a crown. I wasn’t any particular princess but generic royalty, and I felt lovely.
The problem with childhood these days is adult involvement. There is too much of it. My mother might have hunted up an old hole-y sheet for ghost purposes, or loaned us her red lipstick for making monster blood, but she sure never shopped or sewed or agonized for hours about how to dress us for Halloween. We were on our own, and that was the way we wanted it.
Our house had no official Halloween decorations, but then the stores were not full of them. The other kids also were ghosts, hobos or witches, none of whom had store-bought hats.
Despite the overkill, I still love Halloween. I wanted to stand the broom on the porch again this year, but its bristles are old and uneven. It seemed silly to go buy a new one.
Opinion
This little trick that may ‘sweep’ the country
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
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