Confessions

OK, you might as well know this about me. I grew up with some very strange beliefs. For instance, I thought my family had lived on the moon before I was born. It was an honest mistake: they'd lived on Moon Street, and had a land rover (which I mixed up with "moon rover"), and my big brother's first word was apparently "moon." So, like I said, it was an honest mistake--anybody could have made it. I also believed for years that my mother had once served us frog legs. This was not a honest mistake. This was a joke that my above-mentioned brother made when I asked what we were having for dinner. The only trouble was that I didn't find out that we'd eaten chicken that night until I was 26 years old. I also blame him for my erroneous 2nd-grade belief that when you're on a ski lift and there's a skier below you, you're supposed to click your skis together to let the people know you're there. Luckily, this belief that didn't last long: as soon as I saw white powder from my Elans dust the guy below us, I realized that he'd set me up.

I tell you all of this in preparation for this confession: As a little girl, I thought Mt Rushmore was a natural phenomenon.

OK, there--I've said it. But in my defense, I did grow up in New Mexico, near "Battleship Rock" and "Camel Rock" and a bunch of other rocks that looked like what they were named for. So I thought that it was possible that somehow wind and rain and time had carved a mountain into remarkable likenesses of 4 of our presidents. (Let me remind you that I was VERY young, and I'm much more sophisticated now.) Now, let me declare to anyone still in doubt: I have been to Mt Rushmore, I have seen a bust of its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum. No doubt, it is man-made.

Today we're off to Montana. I've heard there's this 210 year-old man there...