Sam-I-am in clover

I would not could not at the play. I will not will not Tom DeLay.

It's Ides day again, but time is playing tricks on me. Beware of hidden emotional quick sand and tar pits. Teaching five year olds makes me feel like Alice big and small. I don't know how they got off on the subject of mothers dying. Under intense cross examination I explained with remarkable composure that my mother had died two months ago. "Was that before you were born?" Well, no, that wouldn't work quite right! Did she "pass off?" No, that's in soccer, not Mayo.

The older girls on the block when I was growing up preached the gospel of the news-worthy four-leaf clover and daisy chain. Fame would be ours if we could just find the perfect four-leaf clover. If individual fame proved elusive, we could go for the media discovery of the fabulously long clover chain we were connecting while we sat out on the driveway. We spent a lot of time sitting in the grass looking for the four-leaf clover(no fire ants back there!). We played hide & seek, kick-the-can, or jacks. We jumped rope, and sometimes folded paper "fortune tellers" requiring the selection of favorite car color and predicting our family size. We never were "discovered" by a newspaper reporter.

As for Tom DeLay, he makes me embarrassed to live in Texas. As for the play, it's at Theatre Three. Jeffrey Stanley's play, Medicine Man is about a NASCAR fan whose mother is dying of a mysterious illness. According to the press release, Stanley says the play is, "hopefully universal to anyone who has lost a loved one and hit the boundaries of faith medicine and faith in medicine." I certainly qualify, but just reading the press release brought on weird nightmares.