Telling stories of my youth, hearing songs from a bygone era, a familiar laugh two tables away - all bring memories and stories to mind with names attached, names associated with individuals I’ve long since lost track of.

Where are you?

Bobbi O’Neil - Lost in Montana.

Mike Steele - my car sliding off your driveway the night after you had your wisdom teeth removed. You, me, Gary, Jen and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when they were still just on paper and not on the silver screen.

Jen Jones - how many are there out there with the same name? None that bleached their bangs with me in Fairbanks over spring break or that I walked a million miles with in the middle of the night so you could flirt with a boy and steal his shoe. None that I taught about Bones Brigade.

CE Lebady - Southern Comfort. I’ll say no more.

Christopher Lee Johnson - Can’t leave out that middle name.

Mike Buschemi - California boy at The Pier with a yellow Chevy.

David (not Lee) Roth – LA to SF trips to visit the imaging business you had with Rick the “MacPushr”. Valentine St. years ago. Last time we talked you were getting married.

Keith Judson - My first true grown up friend and confidant at SEA under the doorknob to hell. Sanity in a sea of engineers.

Tony Galek – What, did you move to Japan?

Maybe they’ll Google themselves and find this, maybe they won’t. Either way, it’s a step.

In parting, from the “Holy Crap” files:

Myanmar mother breastfeeds tiger cubs - Bengal tiger cubs rejected by natural mom, zoo officials say - via Steve-O. Could this be more disturbing? Those cats aren’t the only ones who are going to need therapy.

This morning Atlanta feels like San Francisco. The sky is a bright, clean blue that usually equals warm and muggy here, but I stepped outside and was surprised by brisk cool air and a gusting breeze. Now all I need is an ocean and I’ll be at peace, could someone get on that, please?

There’s a “new” syndrome called BlacBerry thumb.

There are chimps in a South African zoo that have learned to smoke by watching humans.

I’ll never be able to hear the word “vacation” and not start singing the Go-Go’s song in my head.

Penguins mate for life, but this one is a little different.

I’ve got countless commitments this weekend which all interfere with my original plan to catch a few legs of the TdG. Foiled again. I’ll just have to monitor the real time commentary on Cycling News via the BlackBerry (yeah, I know) from wherever I am.

I need to swing by Tower and hit the used CD section in attempt to replace a few I’ve lost along the way. Yaz - Upstairs at Eric’s comes to mind.

There’s a tour of homes in a the neighborhood this weekend, stop on by.

Better scoot, have to be at the barn in 24 minutes and I haven’t showered yet. Toodles!

The good news is I already got my taxes back, the bad news is I got them back because I forgot to sign them. Whoops.

Despite my previous devotion to J. Crew (due in no small part to the friendliness of their Garnamal-like outfits for a woman who loathes shopping), they recently hired a new head designer - who came from The Gap. Clothes from The Gap have never existed in dimensions that a mirror would allow me to buy and wear - even with my deficient eyesight. The new J. Crew line is cut a little differently, the selection is leaning too heavily towards uber-casual and the new color palette is horrific against my skin tone. There are limits to my loyalty.

The good news is our payroll office accidentally overpaid me by 40 hours. The bad news is they recognized their mistake, I gave them permission to correct it. They were to cut me a “live” check that - you guessed it - never arrived. The magical Friday deposit cut-off time came and went while somewhere out there one of the guys from our mailroom is probably wiping his ass with my livelihood. I hope he gets a papercut.

I like my coffee with a solid splash of cream and a ten-count of real sugar.

Oh, my fellow earth loving tree hugging monkey children, our holiday is upon us! Visit http://www.earthday.org to learn more, and to find an event in your area.

Now, your history lesson for today by Senator Gaylord Nelson, Founder of Earth Day.

What was the purpose of Earth Day? How did it start? These are the questions I am most frequently asked.

Actually, the idea for Earth Day evolved over a period of seven years starting in 1962. For several years, it had been troubling me that the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. Finally, in November 1962, an idea occurred to me that was, I thought, a virtual cinch to put the environment into the political “limelight” once and for all. The idea was to persuade President Kennedy to give visibility to this issue by going on a national conservation tour. I flew to Washington to discuss the proposal with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who liked the idea. So did the President. The President began his five-day, eleven-state conservation tour in September 1963. For many reasons the tour did not succeed in putting the issue onto the national political agenda. However, it was the germ of the idea that ultimately flowered into Earth Day.

I continued to speak on environmental issues to a variety of audiences in some twenty-five states. All across the country, evidence of environmental degradation was appearing everywhere, and everyone noticed except the political establishment. The environmental issue simply was not to be found on the nation’s political agenda. The people were concerned, but the politicians were not.

After President Kennedy’s tour, I still hoped for some idea that would thrust the environment into the political mainstream. Six years would pass before the idea that became Earth Day occurred to me while on a conservation speaking tour out West in the summer of 1969. At the time, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called “teach-ins,” had spread to college campuses all across the nation. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me - why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment?

I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda. It was a big gamble, but worth a try.

At a conference in Seattle in September 1969, I announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment and invited everyone to participate. The wire services carried the story from coast to coast. The response was electric. It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air - and they did so with spectacular exuberance. For the next four months, two members of my Senate staff, Linda Billings and John Heritage, managed Earth Day affairs out of my Senate office.

Five months before Earth Day, on Sunday, November 30, 1969, The New York Times carried a lengthy article by Gladwin Hill reporting on the astonishing proliferation of environmental events:

“Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam…a national day of observance of environmental problems…is being planned for next spring…when a nationwide environmental ‘teach-in’…coordinated from the office of Senator Gaylord Nelson is planned….”

It was obvious that we were headed for a spectacular success on Earth Day. It was also obvious that grassroots activities had ballooned beyond the capacity of my U.S. Senate office staff to keep up with the telephone calls, paper work, inquiries, etc. In mid-January, three months before Earth Day, John Gardner, Founder of Common Cause, provided temporary space for a Washington, D.C. headquarters. I staffed the office with college students and selected Denis Hayes as coordinator of activities.

Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.

Addition to the 27 Year Old Curse via Rian: Otis Redding, dead at 26.

Props, Grasshopper.

Driving these city streets it lightens my heart and elevates my mood when I see your standard Ford Contour donning 2 working “spinners” and 2 gimpy ones. Heh. Money well spent.

End of random snide observation, I’m going back to loving my neighbor now.

Gavin DeBecker wrote a book I picked up years ago called The Gift of Fear. I’ve since purchased and/or leant to girlfriends countless times, but there’s always a copy in my stacks collecting dust and waiting to be referenced. The premise of the book is that although we (as women) are raised not to hurt others feelings, we frequently do so to our own ruin.

It’s late at night and you’re leaving the office alone, but a man is walking behind you. Do you adjust your stance, convince yourself you’re being silly or do you trust your instincts, turn and walk back to the building - and safety? You’re in a random elevator late at night and an excessively friendly man steps in. You’re uncomfortable. Do think you’re overreacting when you notice the bells going off in your head and stay, flashing a weak smile; or do you look in your purse and promptly get off pretending you forgot something?

We learn to stifle our instincts. We shouldn’t.

I’ve managed to learn from the book and other endless life lessons to adjust my life in order to protect myself physically - as is only fitting in “the hood”. What I seem to have more of a struggle with is trusting and honoring my instincts on an emotional front. Do I reach out? How much? What is this thumping and where the hell are these nagging, negative thoughts coming from? What if I go too far, give too much, smother? What if I’m inadequate?

I know I’m not alone, we all have these worries don’t we? Yet we continue to extend ourselves, to give and even love blindly. We pull back and close ourselves off. We reconsider. We attempt to surrender our pride and our hearts, to lend ourselves freely if we can bear the pain and the risk. We all exist in varying places on the scale, and we serve (more often than not, I like to believe) to help each other on the journey to healing. Damn that dance.

Maybe this is why I write. Maybe this is why you read - and don’t write.