Let the music play...I'm listening.

Once a month I find a small sixteen to twenty page newspaper in the little box below the one used for post at my curb. "The Bedford Press" informs me of all the going-ons here in my tiny piece of the cornfield. Last week I thumbed through the quick read and noted the photos of "Bedford's most beautiful garden." For a moment, I let myself imagine the dreamy possibilities held hostage within my own fences and imagination. I turned the page and scanned the obituaries. I'm not from these parts and most people I know have my own last name so I don't recognize anyone. Thank goodness, what a shitter that would be. A couple of pages later I am celebrating local youth and their educational achievements rewarded with scholarships from The Rotary Club, The Kiwanis Club, you get the picture. For a moment, I let myself imagine the yet fully realized potential in my own children and the resulting pride attached to them. Then somewhere in the middle of the free to me, not much more than a flyer, paper my attention is drawn to the "Church Chatter" editorial. Titled, "An Uplifting Moment, The Fiddler" and penned by David J. Claassen from Mayfair-Plymouth Congregational Church.

There, I found a piece of God.

I don't go to church, anymore. For an accurate description of my own religious/spiritual belief system, written with words that didn't come to me, you could take a look at Elizabeth Gilbert's, "Eat, Pray, Love" chapter (or bead number) three. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet and God by any other name is "an adequate and inadequate description of the indescribable." With that said, there on the tree pulp turned to paper, I found a piece of "God."

God is good. God is great. Let me thank him for the spiritual food I am fed. Especially the tender and juicy morsels that melt in my mouth and are left in my mind and even more importantly, in my heart.

Pastor Claassen's editorial drew heavily from an article in The Washington Post originally published on April 8th, 2007. It was Easter Sunday and it was my birthday. The author, Gene Weingarten, won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts and I can clearly see why. I strongly recommend when you leave here you read the full article for yourself. The gist of it you will find below...

7:51am, Friday, January 12, 2007. A violin player stood near a wall in L'Enfant Plaza, smack dab in the middle of federal Washington's rush hour. His violin case was open at his feet as he fiddled away for forty-three minutes. A total of 1097 humans passed through the plaza as he played six classical pieces. Here, my dears, is where it starts getting very interesting. Seven people stopped, at least for a moment, to listen.

Wait, how many? Yeah, I said seven, that lucky little number tucked between six and eight. Seven fellow humans stopped, for at least a moment, to listen. The musician collected a total of $32 dollars and some change for his efforts. Of that amount a twenty dollar bill came from one generous woman. Her donation almost doesn't count. She recognized the musician as the internationally-famous virtuoso Joshua Bell. She'd attended his free concert at The Library of Congress three weeks earlier.

You see, this was an experiment.

Staged by The Washington Post, Mr. Bell was playing his 397 year old, handcrafted Stradivarius, reportedly purchased for $3.5 million dollars. He was performing six of the most beautiful and difficult pieces one can play on a violin. Bell regularly sells out auditoriums with the "cheap seats" going for a hundred dollars and more.

An experiment. On the condition of the human heart if you ask me.

I read the original small article in The Bedford Press a week ago and I still can't shake the heart aching sadness that overcame me. Does it matter that it was rush hour? Does it matter that he was some famous guy? Does it matter that the whole thing was staged? Would the outcome be different in another city at another time of day? What does matter people? The questions keep coming and I find myself searching the sum of my own experiences for an answer. The sad, sad reality is 1090 people walked by this man without as much as a second glance, if they saw him at all.

Oh good grief Dani, get over it, the world is a cold, self-centered, hustling and bustling place. There are meds available for minds like yours. Not everyone has the luxury of hanging around with their head in the clouds. Some of us have j-o-b-s. To that I reply...Isn't it part of our "jobs" as humans to recognize (even if there isn't time available to honor) art? Beauty? To reward an artist with at least eye contact if not more? Why can't I shake this melancholy? This judgement attached to the 1090 humans I don't even know? I told you...the questions keep coming.

I clearly remember on a day following 9/11 how acutely I felt for the victims, the families, the rescue workers and on a grander scale every American. (It's the same way I felt when that mom drove her kids into the lake and another drowned hers in the bathtub, and the way I felt when Michael Vic was arrested for dog fighting, and the tsunami, and the earthquake, and human trafficking, and honor killings and this list grows with every newscast.) On that particular September day I told my mother-in-law I wished I didn't feel as much, as deeply as I did. I wished I could just shake my head like so many others and leave it with a, "That's a shame." I wished I could go back to channel surfing for another reality show to get sucked into. Because watching some dysfunctional schmucks screwing up their lives makes me feel better about mine. I wished I had rose colored glasses, I would wear them all the time, because the world is prettier that way.

I wished. I wished. I wished.

My God loving and worshipping and praying mother of my husband looked me dead in the eye and said, "I pray those wishes never come true." And then, I did too.

I don't always wallow in such self-indulgent lamenting about the condition of the human race and what our collective behaviors mean. I mean, I do, a lot, sometimes. But I will be the first to admit this world of ours is a beautiful place and in it I am blessed beyond anything I am deserving of. Realizing so, I make it a mission to find the beauty and magic in my days. They may play a game of hide-and-go-seek with me all day but I 'll sniff 'em out before the day is done. I declare victory, daily, again against a world seemingly hell bent on self destruction. My glass is always half full so that empty half leaves plenty of room for shaking. The emotion pulled from me by the violin experiment definitely constitutes shaking.

This shaking inside has magic of it's own, a lesson is the blessin', some bliss within the bitch. After a week of chewing this spiritual food I think I have it figured out and here's where God comes back in...

The deepest, greatest sadness in the violinist being passed by is in a world so full of hurt and hate and ugly that 1090 people passed up an opportunity for a moment of potential pure joy, art and beauty. Free too.

"Ghetto Dani" could string togetha a long list of very descriptive words for this group of people. Okay fine, I'll go there. Wait, let me get my head bobbin. Cheap a**, mf'in, spiritually depleted, soul-broken, a-holes. Oh my, that kinda felt good. In a really wrong kinda way. However, my far more evolved doppelganger knows I shouldn't judge their audacity to opt into mediocrity.

I know I should pray for them. (See, I told you God would make another appearance.)

Surely Pastor Claassen would agree. His final thoughts on this subject were," The world walked by as the musician played. They missed something beautiful hiding in plain sight. Let us heighten our awareness of all that's good around us. The world God has made and sustains is brimming over and bursting forth with so much we should appreciate."

I couldn't agree more and so it shall be.

Now I'm gonna go pray for those assholes.

Word.

The September issue of Elle and drugstore happiness ($2.99)

I just finished looking at the September issue of Elle, all 562 pages of "must-have dresses, jeans, jackets, and heels plus the jewelry that goes with everything." I dog-eared the cover article featuring Julia Roberts talking about Eat, Pray, Love for another time, reminded myself I want to read that book, scratch and sniffed Gucci's new fragrance "Guilty" and did a double take on the pictorial of Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian frolicking in the Bahamas. Their foray was titled "The Graduate" and I immediately wondered if it had been an under aged girl and a well endowed somewhere, twenty-nine year old man and the pictorial was titled "Lolita" if anyone would have a problem with it. Probably not, it's what we've come to as a society. I, for one was a little disgusted and a whole lot looking at every picture. Lord, please help heal my "Bieber Fever" I'm too old for it. After I flipped the last page I quickly decided there wasn't one "must have" that I couldn't live without.

Okay, on page 260 there is an Alexander McQueen, embroidered resin platform heel with a set of angel wings across the top of the foot (price upon request) that I would come close to selling a kidney on the black market for. A guarantee to seal the deal would be if they threw in the Corto Moltedo black satin and feather clutch on the same page, $1,105. Hell yeah! I could live without a kidney, that's why they come in pairs. But, I can and will also live without... the shoes.

Once upon another fabulous, five-inch heel I was a bright lights, big city, little woman-child livin' the life of Riley. Single and on the mingle, no mortgage, no car payment, no preschool tuition, no budget and a fistful of dollars to blow. On a regular basis I was all dressed up and had everywhere to go. And go I did. Been there, done that, all the way to the point of no return, asked for directions and found my way back. Spanx was something that happened to me when I was really good at being bad, not something I wore. I filled my God-hole and lots of other orifices with all the things that money can buy and just-the-right-look-in-your-eye can have handed to you. Sound fabulous? I thought it was. The hindsight reality is...I wasn't very happy.

Fast forward a decade or so and here I sit, corn fields on the left of me and on the right too. I would bet my left tit there's not a chick within a ten mile radius that could apply false lashes, let alone in the back of a San Francisco taxicab. I have a husband, two sons, a mortgage, property taxes, and contribute to a college fund times deux. Spanx still fall into their original category, just sayin'. Last week I was at Walgreens picking up my four-year old's nasal spray and some canned cat food. As I was digging for exact change in my knock-off (Don't judge) handbag I saw a scrap of paper where I'd scrawled "Ivory Fairytale." No, not a fantasy destination, a nail color. Sally Hansen, diamond strength, no chip nail color. I high tailed my tail right back to the cosmetics section. After acquiring the said polish I also made an impulse purchase of a $2.99 lip gloss by Wet n Wild. Turns out that not only is it the absolute perfect summertime-shine-meets-shimmer but it tastes like toffee. Bonus. I applied it in the rear view mirror of my Yukon, licked my lips and smiled. Sometimes, it's the little things.

I will be the first to admit that there's nothing that can suck the hot right out of you quicker than having children. But winter will find me rockin apple-bottom jeans and boots with the fur in my kid's school parking lot. Against my will, in part, it gets really fricken cold here. If function and fashion just happen to collide then I'm gonna call it physics at it's finest and roll with it. I opted for fringy bangs instead of Botox because saving by siphoning off the grocery budget by clipping coupons was just taking too long. Those lines on my forehead are from all the deep thoughts I have a-hole, what's your excuse? Occasionally after a particularly long day I will look into my bathroom mirror and pull the skin around my eyes taut imagining what a little nip/tuck could do. Then I smile as I think about how my first born tells everyone who asks that I am still thirty-two and they believe him. I slide my feet out of their Target flip flops ($9.99) and admire my Sally Hansen home pedicure. It hasn't chipped and I mopped my floors on my hands and knees cause I left my cleaning lady in Cali and she said it's the only way to get them really clean.

Sound fabulous? Maybe not so much if you can afford to not take this trip and therefore haven't arrived. It's not as glamorous as my "hot child in the city" phase but it's also not the maniacal extremes of highs and lows that I called my twenties. I don't need a pair of shoes and a handbag to make me feel whole, anymore. I don't need anything more than I have and the September issue of Elle will not convince me otherwise. If this fact makes me sound like a broke, self righteous bitch then so be it. At least I am a happy bitch.