Henrietta Hay's Column

Once again the dog days of summer have come and my brains have left. It happens to me every August. Webster defines "dog days" as, "the hot, uncomfortable days in July and August; so called because during that period Sirius, the Dog Star rises and sets with the sun." The ancients, who felt they had to explain everything, sacrificed a brown dog at about this time to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that the star was the cause of the hot weather.

This has been a weird summer, with good news and bad news. Perhaps the biggest tear-jerker has been the tragic story of baby Jessica. Seldom have so many adults made so many decisions in a two-year period to cause such havoc in the life of a little girl. Finally Baby Jessica DeBoer was literally torn from the arms of her adoptive parents and given to her birth parents, to become Anna Schmidt. Everyone is hunting a villain and there probably is not a single one. But the best interests of little Jessica were never anybody's major concern. Maybe now the laws will get changed to consider the interests of the child.

As a counterpoint to that story, I just finished reading for the second time Barbara Kingsolver's "The Bean Trees." It is the story of Turtle, an abused, abandoned three year old who was left in a Volkswagon. She was one of the lucky ones. She found love and relative security. "I let Turtle see the adoption certificate," says Taylor, her adoptive mother, "and she looked at it a very long time, considering that there were no pictures on it. 'That means you're my kid, and I'm your mother, and nobody can say it isn't so. We're going home.' 'Home, home, home, home', sang Turtle."

A big event for Colorado is the visit from Pope John Paul II and the 150,000 young people who gathered from all over the world. One columnist suggested that since most of the guests to the Big Cow Town of the Plains won't get out into the countryside, Denverites should wear boots and cowboy hats to impress the visitors. I find it hard to imagine what the Pope would have thought about being greeted by a bunch of cowboy hats, but I'm sure he would have been gracious.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has been putting on its regular Dog and Pony Show, with three nominees to give them an excuse for making speeches. If prizes were given to the people who could use the most words to ask a single question, the committee would win in a walk. Once I timed one of the Senators at 25 minutes to ask a question that the nominee answered in 10 seconds. Whatever will they do for TV bytes when all the appointees have been approved or rejected?

Probably the funniest story of the summer is that of Lorena and John Bobbitt, which may or may not get past my editor. It isn't really funny, of course, but it's hard to keep a straight face. Lorena is the woman whose husband raped her and she retaliated by chopping off his penis with a butcher knife. No comment.

I may be the only person in Grand Junction who has not seen "Jurassic Park" but I don't like to pay to be be scared. There are enough scary things in the world without spending money for another one. To be fair, however, most people who have seen it liked it. The best movie I have seen all summer is about the same age as the baby boomers. Danny Kaye in "The Court Jester" is one of the funniest movies ever made - a wonderful antidote to hot weather.

Several of us were sitting around in a friend's back yard last week discussing the end of summer. The conversation got onto dangerous summer activities. The pilot in the group admitted that she would be scared to run rapids in a little rubber raft. This was after the owner of the raft confessed to having accidentally punctured it in the middle of the Colorado River this summer. On the other hand, the veteran river runner admitted that she would not want to go up in a little airplane. But another said both of those activities were quite safe compared to driving the streets of Denver this summer.

Guess I'll stay in the back yard and wait for fall.