I have been away from the porch more than usual for the past month. We took our annual trip to New Mexico to accompany the grandkids to the Suzuki string camp. This was our seventh year to make the trip. The camp has always been in Santa Fe at the College of Santa Fe. The college closed this summer for economic reasons and the camp was moved to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The facility at UNM is great but Albuquerque is no Santa Fe.

We then spent a couple of days in Dallas for more string recitals and workshops and also visited the Meadows Art Museum at SMU with a great tour of an exhibit on Diego Rivera. The tour was terrific and was conducted by a high school classmate who is an art historian.

All this activity is supposed to make me a little more civilized but like Huck Finn said, it’s almost more than a body can stand. I had really rather be on the porch and am thankful that I’m now home.

One of the things that struck me during our excursions is how sloppy everyone has become. We went to a big shopping mall in Albuquerque with some fancy stores. The mall had a very small number of folks actually shopping. A few blocks away at WalMart, the place was packed. In years past the malls were filled with well-dressed people and the fancy stores would have an upscale restaurant on their top floor where the ladies could have a gourmet lunch. Those restaurants are now gone and have been replaced by food courts and by McDonalds or Burger King in the WalMart stores. There are no longer any well-dressed ladies. There are now fat, tattooed, Cro-Magnon type people who are dressed in shorts and other sloppy attire wearing flip flops and such.

At one time the first lady always set the style for the well-dressed female. Jackie Kennedy was always beautifully dressed and set the trends for fashion. Actually, all of the first ladies until now have been pretty well-dressed, even Barbara Bush with her ever present pearl necklace. Michelle Obama recently stepped off Airforce One wearing a pair of shorts. None of the previous first ladies would ever have dreamed of doing anything this scandalous. She is setting the example for the poorly dressed slob as well as defining the culture, values and moral tone of the nation. She probably has a tattoo above the cheeks of her buttock, which will be revealed to us later.

Like I said it’s good to be back on the porch. I can thumb through my scrapbooks and see how real ladies used to look and remember when we were once a proud people. All this doesn’t have anything to do with whether you are a Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal. As a matter of fact it seemed to have ended with a Democratic President in Dallas on November 22, 1963 with an assassins bullet.