“Seriously, Mother Goose?”

Believe it or not, Mother Goose has a college degree in Journalism! I actually have interviewed people, wrote feature news stories and had those articles published in newspapers. And now, here I am writing silly little stories to entertain and amuse the masses. Light fiction has become my bread and butter in these days…

You may ask, “Mother Goose, how did you lose your serious journalistic edge? Why aren’t you covering the BIG stories, the important stories of our day? Why don’t you go down to Occupy Chicago and give us a real story? Maybe you should go to the village council meetings and report back to us about Oak Park politics? Maybe you should be doing some investigative expose`s and submitting them to The Atlantic or Mother Jones…”

You may even wonder if Mother Goose has ever had a serious thought in the last few years! I submit the following photographs as evidence that I actually think very seriously at times, and could even write a thought-provoking news article if called on to do such.

Adam, Erik and I visited the Garfield Park Conservatory when they were home visiting last month. The century old structure was hit hard by an isolated hail storm this past July which did extraordinary damage to more than 3/4’s of their glass roof. As a result, four of their beautiful climate controlled rooms have been closed due to broken glass, and damaged trees and plants. Please consider a donation to their “One Pane at a Time” rebuilding campaign. Just look how serious we are about this situation:

I am obliged to say that Mr. Mother Goose and I were up in Wisconsin this past summer, and he did a little bit of fishing on the Wisconsin River. He got his lure caught in a tree. Now THAT looks quite serious. By the way, isn’t Mother Goose dressed very nattily with all her best jewelry on for the fishing experience?

A couple of weeks before Mr. Steve Jobs passed away, Mr. Mother Goose and I were at the Apple Store in Oak Brook. We were there to discuss some connectivity issues he had been having with our home computer network. Could it be the router? Could it be the air-port? Could it be the narrow bandwidth? In this never before published photo, you can easily spot Mr. Mother Goose hacking into the mac network to determine the cause of the problems.

As you may already know, Mother Goose is very serious about nature. On a recent trip to the Morton Arboretum, I was disturbed by the unusual markings on the trunks of some of the pine trees. It could possibly be evidence of the Asian Ashbore or ever-cantankerous and amorous Red-Headed Woodpeckers. This is extremely serious business.

And look at how droopy these flowers are! Mother Goose just doesn’t know what to do. Maybe some investigative reporting is necessary to determine the cause.

And why are these plants growing in the water? I need to do some detective work and write it up for a New York Times story!

So as you can plainly see, there is more to Mother Goose than meets the eye. Her head is not just stuffed with feathers and fluff.

Seriously.

And now let’s just have a good laugh at this silliness of this post.