Cecelia Halbert's Blog

Photo by @rachelcohn22 (Twitter)Before I moved to the North Shore, I’d never even heard of Lilly Pulitzer. I’d seen gaudy floral print shifts on my mother and her friends in the ‘60s, but having grown up in rural Central Illinois, I’m fairly confident that they were from K-Mart and not Lilly Pulitzer. The only designer label I remember my friends talking about was the tag on the back pocket of a pair of Levi’s. These days I do quite a bit of my shopping at thrift stores. If I have anything with a designer label, it probably set me back less than ten bucks.
Yesterday, Target launched a limited collection of Lilly Pulitzer clothing and home decor. I’d heard about it. I didn’t care, but apparently my well-to-do set neighbors did. 
I subscribe to a local marketplace list on Facebook. By the time I was awake yesterday morning, that Facebook list was full of Lilly items already marked up by 75-100% of what the listers had paid for them that very morning. As the day went on, there were more and more listings and then I learned that Target had sold out of everything Lilly in less than ten minutes. The items popped up on eBay almost instantly as well. Thousands and thousands of them.
Prior to the launch, preppy sorority types had whined that the elitist designer had sold out to Target, but yesterday, post-launch, the Target clothes were fetching prices nearly equal to the prices of the ‘real’ Lilly clothes.
I was disgusted and angry and I couldn’t really figure out why. I couldn’t care less about the ugly clothes. Why would I care if other people cared that much? Why would I care about preppy sorority types devoted to their resort-wear idol? These aren’t my people.
Photo: @amzbls (Twitter)They aren’t my people. These are people who have no idea how I scrape together money for groceries and gas because it’s expensive to live on the North Shore on a teacher’s salary. These are women who don’t have to work. They go to lunch at the country club while I’m at school teaching their children. I don’t want their lives. Why am I angry?
I’m angry, but only in part, with those women went to Target for the sole purpose of scooping up all the pink and lime-green Lilly they could shove in their carts with the single purpose of making more money with it.
Not that I’d want that ugly crap anyway. I don’t. 
I’m not as angry with those women I am at Target, who knowingly created this phenomenon, likely for the sheer publicity of it all rather than the purported intent of bringing designer items to the ninety-nine percent of us who couldn’t begin to afford the regular Lilly line.
I'm not the only one angry and disgusted. My friends are equally outraged and they complained on the marketplace list. Arguments ensued between the haves and the have-nots. One woman actually suggested that the items had been purchased in order to resell them as a favor to those who could not be at Target for the ten minutes that they were available and that the mark-up was fair compensation for the trouble.
I repeat: We, the have-nots really didn't want the stuff anyway. So why are we angry?
We’re angry because the haves win again. Money wins. They got stuff we can’t have, whether we want it or not, and they got it at a place that is supposed to be affordable. Target used to be a place I could go and get what I needed at a reasonable price, but now it’s just another corporation that is part of the big problem.

Target, most recently, has run roughshod over my neighborhood. I live in an unincorporated area of the North Shore where the working-class people live. It’s a nice neighborhood, and significantly less expensive than the million-dollar homes on the lake a mile or so east. Target bullied its way into my neighborhood, bringing with it a couple of strip malls, thus destroying the bike path that connects us to the schools and the lake, the landscape, the traffic flow, and the feel of our community. I should also mention there are two other Target stores within ten miles. 
The Lilly Pulitzer hullabaloo is merely a symptom of what’s wrong in America. People and corporations with money get what they want. The rich buy politicians. Their money makes them more money. The rest of us struggle. 
The rest of us don’t want what they have, really. We don’t want their things. We just want equality. We want our kids to have the same opportunities and education. 
Money, more than anything else, divides us.

And that’s the bottom line.

You can follow me on Twitter: @CeceliaHalbert

“Just what is so great about baseball?” my thirteen-year-old son asked me on Opening Day.
Horrified that any offspring of mine could fail to love the game as much as I do, I scrambled for a response, but all I could come up with in the moment was, “Baseball is America and summer and everything that is good in life, and the only way to get through winter is by counting down the days until pitchers and catchers report.” 
He didn’t understand. He’s thirteen and he’s grown up in my house and he doesn’t understand, and this defies all logic.
I was raised just outside of Peoria, Illinois, halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. Peoria is divided territory. My dad was a Cardinals fan. If it was a Saturday afternoon in June, my dad had probably just finished mowing the lawn and he was falling asleep on the couch while Mike Shannon and Jack Buck called the strikes and balls on the radio. It was the soundtrack of summer.
We went out to eat at the Washington Family Restaurant in the days when children were expected to be seen, not heard, so I ate my pork tenderloin in silence and stared at the pictures on the wall of Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Joe Torre, Al Hrabosky, Keith Hernandez, Bob Forsch…. my childhood heroes.
The first time I heard the crack of a bat hitting a ball in the old Busch Stadium is etched indelibly in my memory. 
I drank my first Budweiser with my dad and my grandpa at Ray’s Patio Inn: a dark and cozy Cardinals’ establishment on the corner of Loucks and Hanssler Place. We watched the game on the 19-inch tv over the bar while slopping runny crock cheese on Ritz crackers. It was a rite of passage.
My little brother liked the Cubs. He liked the Cubs just to piss off my dad. Some of my friends liked the Cubs. They were still my friends despite our differences. Yes, we were loyal to different teams, but we were all loyal to baseball and we all agreed that the designated hitter is just plain wrong. 
I’m madly in love with a Cubs fan, believe it or not. 
World peace could be had, I believe, if the Cubs/Cardinals rivalry could be replicated in politics. 
But then there’s the American League. 
Oh well. It’s still baseball. 

It’s 5:00 p.m. and I am sitting at my desk in my classroom looking at the gray day outside and wishing I could go home because I’ve been here since 7:45 this morning, but I can’t because it’s day one of parent-teacher conferences and they go until 8 p.m. tonight. I teach orchestra at this elementary school and the parents come in to see their kids’ classroom teachers and not to see me. I’m not sure they even know I’m here but I leave my door open and my lights on anyway in case they want to stop in, but they don’t, so it makes for a very long and quiet evening.
In the last two hours since the kids left the building, I have deleted over 600 contacts on Twitter who either don’t follow me or who have well over a hundred thousand followers and therefore clearly don’t care about me, or who consistently fill up my Twitter-feed with self-congratulatory proclamations and therefore deserve deletion. I’m hoping to enjoy Twitter again after cleaning house. 
I also went back and read a lot of my blog posts and was actually kind of pleasantly surprised at the quality of a few of them. I noticed, while reading them, that in the last year or so, the quantity has decreased in direct proportion to the happiness in my current relationship, which is not to say that I don’t have anything to say, but rather that I have much less to complain about and it seems that complaining comprises the vast majority of my source material (reference paragraph one of this post).
So that’s about it. I just wanted to say that I was still here and still thinking and pondering about things (and writing run-on sentences) but that I don’t have anything very insightful on my mind lately other than the horrifying state of public education in America and writing about that just puts me into a state of agitation and I’m feeling rather peaceful at the moment so I’m not going to tackle that topic just now.

I hope you’re feeling peaceful too.
You can follow me on Twitter @CeceliaHalbert. (If you're interesting, I'll probably follow you back.)

Level 9 and I have been binge-watching Boston Legal lately and re-loving the whole Denny/Alan  friendship, which led to Level 9 asking me why men have longer lasting friendships with their male friends than women have with their female friends. I found this to be a very interesting question and I’ve been thinking about it a lot for the last few days, and as I do when trying to figure things out, I’m writing about it. What I've figured out might make sense. It might not.
Level 9 has two best friends and the three of them have been close for nigh on sixty years now. 
I’m not sixty yet, but I can’t even come close to such a claim. I’ve had close friends in my life. I have close friends now, but I can’t say I’ve stayed close to any of my women friends for more than a dozen years. 
Here’s what I think, and take it with a grain of salt because I’m not a sociologist or psychologist or anyone that studies relationships with anything more than a casual layperson’s observant eye.
What I think is that men don’t change much. 
Even though he gets married, has a career, and becomes a father, a grandfather, etc…   a man essentially is the same person throughout his life. A man’s identity is formed early on and while it’s developed and enhanced over time, the core of that identity doesn’t change. Therefore his friendships stay roughly the same and even though he may be geographically separated for some time from his friends, they stay in touch and when they come together from time to time, they interact with each other the same as always. 
Women change a lot.
A woman takes on a new identity when she becomes a girlfriend, a wife, a mother. She takes on a new identity when she begins a career and she’s more likely to stop, start, and change careers because of her other life roles, particularly because of her role as a mother. 
When a woman becomes a mother, she bonds with other mothers. When she is at work, she bonds with colleagues. When her children are grown and gone, she sometimes struggles to find her new identity and friends to whom she can relate. 
A woman’s friends often come and go throughout her life, depending on who she is at any given point in her life. Women come together as friends because of like-circumstances and when those circumstances change, the friendships often change, which is not to say that the friendships dissolve - they just change.
Conclusion: A man is the same man throughout his life. A woman becomes someone different with every major life event. This affects their friendships. 
Asides:
And we wonder why marriage is so difficult. 
No wonder Alan married Denny.

His response flew out of his mouth like a reflex, so swiftly that it was obvious he hadn’t had time to think. He made a clumsy attempt to recover,like men do,but it was too late. The rogue words had already been launched and the futile subsequent statement, meant to intercept the first, didn’t bring them back. 
He pretends the words were benign, invisible and silent, hoping she hadn’t noticed, but clearly she had. She wants to pretend too, but doesn’t know how because she, like women do, sometimes thinks too much. 
So now they’re stuck. Minutes pass. He has already forgotten his words, like men do, and does not know why her eyes are sad. She, like women do, knows she has extraneously extrapolated his seemingly meaningless words into malintent, but doesn’t know how to let them go.
Because,she thinks, perhaps the words had more meaning than he thought, having been fired from his gut they way they were. 










You can follow me on Twitter: @CeceliaHalbert

Wow. It’s been a really long time since my last blog post. 
On Christmas Eve, I started to write a Christmas Eve poem as I’ve done in previous years, but then family showed up and I decided to pay attention to them instead. The poem I started to write wasn’t anything different than the previous two anyway, so there wasn’t much point.
Days go by and I frequently think to myself that I need to write but then I don’t and for the same reason. I’m busy paying attention to the important people in my life. 
Oh sure, you say, "You have to MAKE time to write."
And if you’re saying that right now, I say, “Fuck you, I’ll write when I want to.”  (The words ‘write’ and ‘exercise’ are interchangeable in that sentence, by the way.”)
A couple of years ago I was writing a novel. And a full-length play. And a bunch of little plays. And blog posts. And sonnets. 
Know why? I had nothing else to do and so I was trying to manufacture a life. 
Now it seems I actually have a life. I still write here and there… a song, a poem. 
And at the moment, a blog post. 
When life doesn’t make sense, writing is an excellent way to organize and categorize the chaos. 
At the moment I’m happy for the current lack of chaos, and therefore happy to be living more than writing. 



               Dammit. I just remembered how good it felt to write.











You can follow me on Twitter: 
@CeceliaHalbert

I can write about this now because, as is the case with me frequently, I couldn't keep my big mouth shut and the cat, or rather the scarf in this case, is out of the bag - or in this case, the closet, and by closet, I mean the one where I was hiding it when he was around because it was supposed to be a present. It's a gender-neutral scarf.

The Scarf  was knitted with seven different colors of yarn. It is 800 rows long by 36 stitches wide, which makes it a little over 15 feet long and 12 inches wide or 15 square feet of scarf.

Not counting the tassels. The tassels add almost another foot of length.

I hadn't knitted for years, but I like to knit and residing somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind were some tiny fragments of rudimentary knowledge about Doctor Who and a colorful scarf so I did some Googling, as they say, and learned that in Season 12, the fourth Doctor, the Tom Baker Doctor, did indeed have a scarf. Through my extensive research (a.k.a. Googling), I also learned that The Scarf  had been studied thoroughly by knitters/Doctor Who aficionados and that exact patterns of The Scarf are available online by way of these aforementioned scarf experts.

The man I love happens to be a fan of the Doctor, so I figured a replica of The Scarf would make a nice gift.

I didn't realize what knitting The Scarf would do for me.

First of all, I remembered how to knit and in doing so, I remembered my grandmother teaching me how to knit, which is one of the only really heartwarming memories I have about my grandmother, who was not the most nurturing of women.

Secondly, knitting - creating fabric one stitch at a time is simultaneously mindless and mindful. The Scarf is knitted in garter stitch, which is just knit stitch after knit stitch for 800 rows. The only exciting break in the action is the changing of colors. It's kind of like a long road trip in which the distance to the destination is reduced by each city and landmark passed along the way. Only twelve more miles to Jefferson City and Jefferson City is halfway to Enid = only four more rows until the three rows of purple and that's halfway to the end of the scarf!

Knit stitch, knit stitch, knit stitch....  I can almost do it without looking. ALMOST. But I have to look. I have to watch every stitch in order not to make a mistake and leave a hole somewhere along the way. Mindless and mindful. Zen. There are mistakes though. I left them there as a reminder that I am not perfect.

As if anyone needs a reminder of that.

And lastly, knitting brings me peace and contentment. My hands are not idle when I knit and I can see measurable progress. Like banjo music, it's impossible to think of anything bad when I'm knitting and when I'm knitting for someone I love, I put that love into each stitch, every single time the loop moves from the left needle to the right. I wonder if he who wears The Scarf will be able to feel that love.

I'm on to other knitting for other people I love. I rarely keep anything I knit.

So I finished The Scarf, but I haven't stopped knitting.

I just had to pause long enough to write about it.



You can follow me on Twitter: @CeceliaHalbert

The easy answer is….   you don’t.
That’s what I told my daughter. You don’t know. There isn’t a litmus test.  All you have to go on is your gut feeling and there’s no guarantee, in the long run, that you’ll be right. 

If, however, you’re in the throes of that new, head-over-heels infatuation that masquerades as love and you find that even the most minuscule, seemingly innocuous tiny little things about him annoy the crap out of you already, then I caution you: DO NOT PROCEED. You and he are doomed to eventual failure. He is not the one if, in this glowing state of love-struck rosiness, you don’t find every single quality about him absolutely adorable, right down to the gas that escapes his body in what might otherwise be considered auditorily or olfactorily offensive ways.
I speak from experience. 
I know how difficult it is in that trance-like, intoxicated-by-endorphins phase of a relationship, to envision how years upon years of living under the same roof with that person might magnify to a horrific degree those seemingly minor and perhaps petty irritants. But I tell you - those tiny little annoyances will fester and aggravate you to such a point that one day, while watching him sleep in the Barcolounger in his underwear in front of an ancient episode of Who’s the Boss, his chest and belly littered with crumbled remnants of the contents of a can of Pringles, you will contemplate forever surrendering yourself to a convent of cloistered sisters just so you will never have to lay eyes on him again.
HOWEVER, 
If you find every single characteristic of this man that you profess to love to be uniquely ambrosial and captivating AND if this man feels the same way about you….   then there is hope. 
You’re also probably on the right track if he’s happy that your team won because 1 - it makes you happy (even if he hates your team) and 2 - because he believes that any baseball is better than no baseball.
He’s something special if he does what he says he’s going to to do and if he’s there when he says he’s going to be there.
And lastly - if his arms feel more like home than anywhere you’ve ever been, then they probably are. 


You can follow me on Twitter:  @CeceliaHalbert

Leaves on the trees have started to turn and the sun is lower in the sky at midday, casting a creepy sundowning glow in the early afternoon. I’d like to say I have a love-hate relationship with this time of year, but it’s mostly hate.
The bright side? For a week or two, I won’t have to turn on the furnace or the air-conditioner.
That’s about it, really. I despise the dark and the cold. I don’t even really like the magnificent colors of autumn. I’d rather be surrounded by the lush humid green of July and August than the sparse goldens and reds that are the harbingers of the the perpetual uncomfortableness of winter. 
Only four games are left in baseball’s regular season and next year’s reporting date for pitchers and catchers has yet to be determined.
Sigh.
September is almost over, yet I’m still wearing my flip-flops, hoping against hope that global warming will somehow turn Chicago into Los Angeles (albeit with a much better skyline and fewer earthquakes) and I will never have to shovel snow off of my driveway again. 
Wishful thinking. 
And also selfish thinking. Global warming of that magnitude would only benefit my little corner of the world, so I’m retracting that wish just in case there’s a magic genie reading my blog.
However, in the off-chance that such a genie is listening, I’d like to put in a request for some intestinal fortitude to appear on my doorstep in the form of cases of red wine. 
It's almost October and only four games remain, but my team is guaranteed post-season play so I have that one shred of summer left and I’m clinging to every last frayed remnant with one hand and strangling the neck of a wine bottle with my other.

An “Aha!” moment.
The light bulb goes on.
Epiphany.
It’s not you. It’s me.
But it’s not what you think. 
I have no problem saying “I love you.” 
And I mean it when I say it.
The problem for me has always been the “being loved” part.  Aha.
I remember telling him early on that it probably wouldn’t last. I would probably do something to piss him off and then he’d be gone. That’s what I’d come to expect because that is what has always happened.
But he’s not gone. I think this time it’s different. I think this time I can get it right and here’s why:
This man knows how to do love.. He did it before. For forty years. He still loves her and he always will.
But now he loves me too and that’s a big deal, given that in the beginning of us he didn’t know if that was possible.
I’ve watched his love for me grow into what it is now and I know that when he says he loves me he means it. I know it. I know when that bridge was crossed, I remember the day when he gave me his heart, and I will never take it for granted.
The difference is that this time I am ready to be loved, and I think I'm learning how from him.
Light bulb.
There is no greater risk and there is no greater reward than love. 
That is what I know.






You can follow me on Twitter: @CeceliaHalbert