Cheese and cookies

Yesterday we spent the day with good friends, one of whom is a godfather to M and C (and a fellow runner), in Milwaukee. It was great. They're wonderful, warm people with a comfortable, welcoming home. They fed us until we could barely walk.

It was a relief to visit them and laugh and share holiday cheer a day after those poor babies and educators were murdered in Connecticut. Like a lot of us, I can't stop thinking about it and trying to figure it out. Guns. Mental illness. A f*cked-up culture that glorifies violence. Still, it doesn't make sense.

There are two kids, besides my own kids, that I can't stop thinking about. They're 11 and 14, and on Monday of this past week their mother was buried. I worked with their mom at a previous job a few years ago, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Less than three years later, at 49, she died. It's so hard to believe she is gone.

So what I keep thinking, amid the discussion on how to explain the unexplainable to your kids, is how does Courtney's family process this? How does the girls' father, who is already tasked with the burden of grieving and helping his daughters navigate the loss of their mother way too soon, explain this inexplicable violence? It makes me want to cry every time I think about it. I am hoping they are often in someone's arms and getting the comfort they need.

My husband and I had a dumb argument on the way to Milwaukee. He was grumbling about stuff, and I decided it would be "helpful" to pick at him for grumbling. Yeah, I know. Sometimes I just need to shut up. We had barely left Chicago city limits and I had popped in my iPod earbuds to tune out the grumbling and end that dumb fight, which dissipated by the time we crossed the stateline into Wisconsin. Hitting the awesome Mars Cheese Castle always helps, too. Cheese and cookies make everything better!

Seeing friends reminded me that, well, we need to do this more often. I know it's short-sighted, naive and wishful to think it's this simple, but maybe if we all spent time enjoying each other and loving each other more, we'd have less of this horrible crap.