Schooled, at the ER

Here’s a memory from a freezing winter night in the Time Before. It describes the time I spent in a big-city ER, where, three hours after being ushered past Registration into the vast inner rooms, my main thought was, “Where do I sit?”

I spotted a single chair clear at the end of a row beside two public toilets and grabbed it, just happy to sit down and open my book. But as time went on and people kept trooping in and out of these bathrooms not 18 inches from where I sat, I decided to do my waiting elsewhere.

I circled around some in that vast warren of rooms ‘til I spotted a small semi-enclosed area occupied by two big middle-aged guys. It had a television.

“TV!” I silently exulted, and sat down.

Immediately, the brow of the first of the first furrowed as he held up his swollen hand. “I have to stay here attached to this IV, all fuckin’ night ” he told me, indicating the pole he was connected to. He seemed friendly enough and I offered my sympathy. As for the second man, his split lip twisted into a sneer the minute he caught sight of my book. “Gloria Steinem!” he snorted. “She made all that stuff up, I hope you know!”

Just then, a third man with long gray hair over his eyes arrived at the entrance to this area and stood for a moment beside the staff member who was escorting him.

“Jeez will you look at THIS guy!” yelped the one guy.

“Hey, SHAGGY!” cried the other. “Talk about needing a haircut!”

“Guys!” I whispered. “He can hear you!”

“Who gives a crap?” the first man replied. 

The new man took a chair and slumped over in it, cradling one hand against his chest.

“Asshole! Hey ASSHOLE!” said the second of the two men - at which point the newcomer sat up and let loose a barrage of language sharp enough to shave your mustache. Then the air grew thick with streams of profanity, lobbed in all directions.

“People?“ I finally squeaked. “Can’t we all just get through this?” But “Come on!” replied the sneering man. “This is FUN!”

Looking back now I see all this in a different light.

Because there I was making judgments about what I thought I saw in these others, never imagining that they were very likely making judgments about what they thought they saw in me: Some kind of 60-something book-clutching lady in a floor-length fur. Of course they didn’t know I wore the coat because I had travelled 100 miles, by bus, on an eight-degree day to get to this ER. Of course they couldn’t see the holes under the arms of its cracking pelts, or know that it had once been fiercely peed upon by a cat who fired a redolent stream of urine at it, right through the bars of its sweet little Pet Taxi. All they saw was someone who thought she could teacher-boss everyone into behaving a certain way.

So maybe none of us understood much in that little ER corner; but it’s a good bet that that nobody understood less than the preachy old gal in the long fur coat.  

The Best Reunions

After a while in life, you start noticing that there are only so many faces in the world, which causes people’s identities to really blur in the mind. Someone spoke to me in the supermarket yesterday and it took me three whole aisles to realize it wasn’t Bette Midler at all but some girl I had sat behind for four years in homeroom.

This is basically why I’ve come to believe that there are good, and less-than-good, ways to run a school reunion.

The less-good way tries to do the thing in just one evening, when it takes three hours to figure out who people even are. Sure, nametags are great in theory, but you can’t be peering at people’s chests trying to read them because weren’t we all taught since we couldn’t even see above the grownups’ kneecaps that it’s rude to peer at people’s body parts? Plus if they see us doing it, boom, there’s proof that we don’t remember them.

No, the best reunions are definitely NOT the ones where all the fun is jammed into one night. The best ones are the ones that take place over two or three days, so that by the time you get to the big event on Saturday night you can match at least some names with the right faces.

But in truth what I’ve come to believe is that we should all throw our own reunions, and invite only those people who know exactly how weird we looked in our gym suits.

You don’t need nametags for this kind of reunion, or decorations either.

You don’t need music, or neckties, or the latest fashions.

All you need is a nice reasonably priced hotel, a place to take walks between sessions of maniacal laughing, and a few restaurants laid back enough so you can hang around the tables for four hours talking and crying.

One summer I attended such a reunion, hosted by a classmate who lives on the ruffled coastline of Maine and that first night our hostess assigned us roles to play at her kick-off dinner.

I was assigned the role of President, charged only with proposing a toast and calling on the others: the Bard, who told stories of escapades best forgotten; the Seer, who predicted our futures; the Pragmatist, who, as our hostess, furnished all our food; and the Wine Steward, who kept on pouring.

We slept two and three to a room, just like in the old days.

Did crossword puzzles out loud, collaborating on the answers.

Inspected a lot of flowers.

Walked ‘til our feet hurt.

And talked: about … well, what didn’t we talk about?

And in the end this reunion seemed to be just what any school reunion should be: A field trip of the imagination to the time when we would gather in dormitory hallways during study breaks to joke, and commiserate, and tell fond, semi-mocking stories about our families, who turned out not to seem so crazy after all when compared to other people’s families.

They should be field trips of the imagination to the years before we were tied in tight to this old world by the cords of work and food prep and obligation. To the days when we believed – really believed - that Time would never touch us. 

Kitchen Wars

It was bound to happen after all this isolation: Things grew a little edgy around here, in the kitchen especially. For one thing, my man and I can’t seem to agree about where the dishwashing gear belongs when not in use, never mind the best way to hand-wash a glass. “Is THAT how you do it?” is what we’ve been saying to each other for more than a year now (but seriously, who performs this task without using soap?)

I know I sound mean here, but, you know, I’ve discovered I enjoy blaming him for stuff, and he enjoys blaming me. It’s entertaining, sort of. Plus why be married if you  can’t pin stuff on the other guy?

Here’s some blaming I’ll do right now, in fact: Last night, I cooked a whole and actual chicken, which is a huge deal for most of us nowadays when we can all buy the little guys freshly roasted and still warm inside their plastic swaddling clothes.  “Here’s some real home cooking right here!” I told myself as I gave it a nice little sponge bath. I rubbed it all over with salt, tucked a handful of freshly quartered onions in under the arched rafters of its ribs and mailed it on into my oven -  from which I drew it 90 minutes later with a crackling honey-colored skin and an aroma that would cause a stone statue to salivate. 

Naturally I whipped up a stuffing. I also steamed some fresh veggies and made gravy the old-fashioned way, using the nicest chicken stock to slowly urge the drippings up off the bottom of the pan, and mix them with a velvety mix of butter and flour. It was plain heavenly.  

But when mealtime came and I offered to ladle some onto this man’s plate, he walked over to the pantry, rooted around there for a full two minutes and pulled out a jar of gluey commercial stuff marked “chicken flavored.”

“What in God’s name is THIS?” I yelped, “and who even bought it?”

“It’s gravy, and I did, a long time ago.”

I’ll say a long time ago. It had expired in 2010 as I saw when I took it from him.

When I told him as much he said, “It’s perfectly fine.” He added, “I’ll have this and you have that,” in a tone that suggested nothing could be more reasonable – while in actual fact I don’t even eat gravy, and I’m pretty sure he knows that.

All this annoyed my socks off  but I held my tongue, in just the same way he holds his, I reckon, mostly when I open the refrigerator and then wander off to water a plant. Maybe I just need to keep in mind that people have their ways: He can’t bear to throw out even the worst old food, while I can’t stop going at the preparation of a meal until it seems perfect in every way, right down to the decorative sprigs of parsley.

Anyway, we’re still married after all these years and we laugh every day, so, really what else is there?

Just Talk to Folks, or Lessons From the Field

 The day of that field trip was cold enough to freeze tears and as damp as a wet dog’s nose. Their teacher has told these 75 high school juniors they will spend it in the gritty city’s center.

He has asked me and three additional adults along to create five small groups of 15 kids each, all here as part of their unit on “Scripting the Other,” which meant trying to better understand the experience of people they do not normally see, or if they do see, do not necessarily pause to speak to or even glance at. In a respectful, non-invasive way, their task was to fan out, then watch and, where possible, interact with these individuals; in other words to do what their moms taught them never to do: namely stare, if discreetly, and talk to strangers.

It was an exercise not only in observation and empathy, but in subjectivity too, since, as we all slowly learn in this life, much of what we see in the world is a reflection of who we are.  It was a difficult assignment and many of the kids in my group were uncertain - nervous even. “We don’t know what to write,” several told me in the trip’s third hour. “We don’t know how to do this.”

“Sure you do,“ I said. “You’re born knowing how to do this.  Just forget yourself. And smile. The rest will follow.” 

So back they all waded again, into the great democratic tide, to look and be looked at, to address and be addressed, to feel themselves a part of this rich common life - all but three girls, walking close behind me.

Just ahead of us on the sidewalk sat a badly-twisted man in a wheelchair, the panhandler’s traditional coffee-can clutched in one bare and wind-stung hand.

“This is too hard for them,” I thought. But suddenly, the girl most recently fretting over her shyness veered to stand before him.

“How’s it goin’?” she called cheerfully. “Can we bring you some coffee? We’re just going to get some.”

I cannot here reproduce the speech of this man, who had a disorder that not only corkscrewed his body and sent his head arching backward, but prevented him from closing his lips for consonants, thus making of every word a long and groan-like utterance.

 In the next 20 minutes he said several things in this tortured way, among them, “If you would be so kind”; “Cream and sugar”; and, after an effort at speech so great as to cause facial spasms, this warning sentence: “I will require assistance.” Of course!  we realized, looking down. He lacked the use of his hands. We told him we’d be back and set out to find the coffee.

“This is hard!” one girl said as we hurried along.

 It was hard indeed, and on many levels: hard to see affliction this grievous; hard to cross that invisible moat one normally keeps around one; hard, once one has crossed it into seeing, to cross back into not-seeing, into rushing past with eyes averted.

When we returned, each concentrated on a different aspect of the task. One held the hot coffee to the gentleman’s lips, one concentrated on “translating” his words, and one approached tentatively with the doughnut he had finally admitted he would also enjoy. This third one holding the doughnut stepped close, then hesitated.

“How do I...? What should I...? I don’t know how to do this.” 

Again the man’s groan-like sounds. Again our struggle to sort sound into meaning. 

At last we understood. “It’s not a complicated process,” he was saying. In other words, “Bring the food to my lips.” In other words, “Feed me.”

Thus did at least four people out on a field trip begin learning how to cross that moat. All it took was focusing less on ourselves than on the other fellow.

And the gentleman was right: It wasn’t complicated at all.

Beautiful Thought

ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
by Rebecca Elson

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

Lean Back

 Daylight Savings began a good while ago now – as if you could ever save such a thing as daylight, or delay for even a second the spilling bright silk of it. We change the clocks  because we can’t change time. We borrow light from day’s end to paste onto its beginning. The days grow short and shorter still. Rename their hours, run them backwards, stand them on their heads if you like, there’s no changing that fact.

 It used to frighten me as a child, coming home in the late afternoon, kicking through the shin-high leaves so much like my breakfast cereal, the dry ones like drifts of cornflakes, the wet ones milk-soaked. A tipped-over metal trash would rock in the thin cold wind by the curb. Old-style street lamps would set cones of light down on sidewalks, making the gathering darkness all the darker. I would turn the corner, footsteps quickening – until I saw the light from our kitchen: my own kitchen, and my grownups moving about inside it.

Having once joined them, I was all right again, with my homework open on the kitchen table, and the water for tea drumming softly against the kettle’s base. Once the daylight was truly gone, I was fine. Watching it go was what hurt. 

I sat once in a woodside church, the whole back wall of which was fashioned from glass. As I listened to the voice from the pulpit, I looked out at a stand of trees that together wove a bright pumpkin-colored tapestry dotted with wines and mauves. I glanced out at the golden light; glanced back; then saw it begin to flicker eerily as birds, blackbirds by the look of them, began arcing through the trees: swooping and diving and multiplying until dozens became hundreds, swirling past. 

The eye wants to catch on such flights bird by bird; instinctively, it goes for the particular. But in all the motion, eye muscles fail. Focus fails. But if we look past the fleeting particular to the general tapestry the effect is immediate: we feel that we ourselves are spinning. We feel twirled again as we were twirled in childhood by parents' hands or playground swings. Then, we spun until the world spun too; if we were frightened at first, we soon learned to lean back and watched it go.

The same night of that flock sighting, I arrived in full darkness in my driveway and sat in the car, somehow reluctant to go inside. For minutes on end, I sat. Then suddenly a black shadow crossed a silvery wedge of grass: my cat. I opened the car door. She hopped in, quick as thought; stood on the dashboard looking out; moved to the back window; leapt lightly to the headrest, all the while swiveling the twin satellite dishes of those fine triangular ears. She settled at last on the passenger seat beside me and together we looked out: Heard the deep bassooning of wind in the pines; watched a branch sway; saw mousy movement in the grass. We sat there for 20 minutes that passed like two. I believe that moment taught me darkness and I am not afraid of it now. 

Meanwhile, the days grow shorter still. The world is spinning us down into winter. 'Let go,' you might tell yourself now. 'Lean back and let it spin.' You are a child once more, and the strong hands that hold you are Nature’s.

Scary Stuff!

It was late on a Friday at the discount drug, the right kind of night for conversation between a lone clerk and her one customer, me.

I had pointed to the cover photo of a fall magazine displayed on the counter. It showed a jack o’ lantern fashioned from a regular old pumpkin, but with twin rows of perfect little fangs and two large eyeballs hanging by a seeming thread from the two eye sockets carved in the its big orange 'face'.

 “Who carves a jack-o'-lantern this perfectly?” I asked.

 “Right,” said the cashier, also looking at the image. “You’d need to use a scalpel to carve that precisely!” 

“AND be Michelangelo!”

"Right!" said the cashier, ringing in a few of my items. 

“I know we’re midway through October but I keep hoping it’s still August,” I then said. “I'm don’t seem to be at all ready for the autumn stuff.”

“Totally,” said the cashier. “I feel bad. I haven’t done any fall stuff in years. When’s the last time I went apple picking?”

“I don't think I've EVER been apple picking, not in the real way where you pay money to do it,” I replied. “All I know about apple picking is from that Robert Frost poem where even in his sleep he still feels the rungs of the ladder against the soles of his feet.”

“I bet it’s been ten years since I’ve carved a pumpkin,” the cashier said sadly.

“The squirrels just eat them anyway. What a sight it was the last time I came upon that ruined cranium. I felt like I’d stumbled onto the set of The Walking Dead."

“How about doing a corn maze?” I asked. “Have you ever done that?”

“No, you know I never have!” she said. “What’s it like?"

“Well the whole corn maze thing was new to me until a few years ago.”

“And was it fun, making your way through it?” asked the cashier.

“Sure! Well, actually no, it was more scary than fun. “A corn maze is really kind of hard: You get lost.”

"Is the corn that tall?"

"The corn can be SO tall! We had no idea how to find our way out. And it got really cold. And then the sun went down."

"Jeez!" said the cashier. “It sounds like Stephen King’s Children of the Corn?”

"Horrible!"

"Horrible!"

"Let's never do any more corn mazes!” I all but yelped.

"I won't if you won't,” smiled the cashier, and handed me my bagged purchase.  

And with that I departed the store, glad for the merry exchange and resolving to carve up a pumpkin head anyway, and let those toothy little squirrels get in some noshing.

Written Last Fall - for 50th Reunion Book

smith 50th book

To give a full account of myself, the story has to go way back, to when my big sister Nan, our single-parent mom and I lived, together with a sheltering layer of three old folks, in a place where an actual lamplighter made his nightly rounds, and a tiny old man in a cap pushed a wagon crying, “Ra-a-a-a-gs! Bring out your rags!” It felt more like the 1920s than the 1950s, honestly, a feeling intensified by the fact that these elders were all born within a decade of Robert E. Lee's surrender at the Appomattox courthouse. (And what a thing that was, to listen to the musings of people who remembered the 1870s!)

When these dear old ones died, as they did within a year of one another, the house was sold, and we needed a new place to live. Lucky for us, our sweet Aunt Grace and her husband Jack invited us to come live with them in the new town they were just then moving to. There, for the first time, Nan and I lived a real Leave-it-to-Beaver-style life, replete with bike parades and ice-skating on the flooded vegetable patch in the Talbots’ backyard. It felt like heaven for four great years – until old demons returned to claim this uncle who, on the morning after my junior high graduation, cleared out the bank accounts and left us for keeps.

We were four females alone then, with creditors calling the house day and night in the wake of his manic spending. Mom and Aunt Grace seemed as upbeat as funny as ever at the kitchen table, maybe moreso with Uncle Jack gone, but I could sense that they were scared. That’s when I got the notion that I could save us all by getting a scholarship to a top school.

It was the first flash of insight I had ever experienced and it came with the realization that I had agency; I could make things happen.

A thousand high school all-nighters later, it did happen. I arrived on the Smith College campus where I was encouraged by most of my profs though not all, notably the one who covered my virgin effort for her with stinging comments.  “Whence this gratuitous observation?” she scribbled on my second page; I still have the paper.) Her angry vehemence came as a shock to me since I’d always figured God liked it when we made observations of any kind, because it showed we were paying attention. How I got from that low point to a magna cum laude I do not know. I remember being so fearful of the sciences that when it came time for an oral presentation in my intro-level Geology course, I pretended to be so suddenly taken sick that kindly, no-longer-young Professor Schalk offered to give me a ride to the Infirmary on the handlebars of his bicycle. (I still tingle with shame at that example of my low nature!)

And then finally, there was Daniel Aaron, a giant in the field of American Studies, who just plain taught me how to write.

I cherished the friends I made there, and the way we gathered nights in the comically sloping hallways of dorm - an old frame house built 150 years before -  to compare childhoods in a semi-serious but-mostly-jokey sort of way. I cherished them too for not minding when I fell in love the summer before junior year and began taking off on weekends to be with the person I would marry three weeks after Commencement, the person with whom I have made a life.

That was when I decided to postpone further education for the sake of the really big bucks: the 'princely' $6900 a year I would earn as a high school English teacher in the Cambridge-adjacent city of Somerville. We rented a fifth-floor walk-up in Allston and David worked toward the MBA. But a year later, when, having been accepted into the Masters of English program at BU, I found I couldn’t bear to leave the classroom, and there came a second flash of understanding: I realized that nothing had ever felt more important to me than spending time with young people, who ever and always are doing the crucial work of growing a self that feels authentic to them. This remains true for me still and I continue to work with teens, principally through my town’s residential chapter of A Better Chance. Since 1982, I have driven to plays and movies and nights on the town with generation after generation of these young scholars in a vehicle with seven seatbelts. Now, for their sake, I am shortly to buy a vehicle with eight.

I adored having children of my, own with their art projects and their Strawberry Shortcake dolls and that Cabbage Patch Kid I stood in line so long for and who, come to think of it, I’m starting to look like. I loved the long talks we got to have, sitting on the stairs or perched on the edge of their beds nights.

Still, I missed the wider communication and one day at naptime I opened my high school yearbook and saw a reference to my old dream of being a writer. I whipped up a quick 700-word bouquet of gratuitous observation and brought it to my local paper. “Can you do this every week?” The editor asked. I could and I did. I produced, marketed and sold this light personal observation column every single week for the next 36 years, and there came another insight: I loved comforting people and making them smile. I even worked in six years as a massage therapist to bring comfort and healing without using words at all.

In 1986, before the space shuttle Challenger exploded before all our eyes, I learned  I had made it clear to the finals in the Journalist-in-Space competition. I remember the morning my name went out over the wire. It was just before a local news crew arrived and I was in the bathroom watching David shave. “Do I really want to go up there?” I asked him. “It depends,” he said. “Do you want to see your name in the history books?”

I didn’t give a hoot about seeing my name in the history books and there was another insight: I didn’t care about accolades. and I never did go to grad school.

In my early years I craved attention; talked and wrote my head off; did all these magazine shows, ostensibly to promote my books but really just because it was such fun to improvise on live TV and radio.

I don’t do any of that now. Now I’d much rather listen than talk.

So here I am beginning upon this eighth decade of life. It can scare me to dwell on that that.

But my big sister Nan, who has been in Hospice since March of 2019 is still here and still the funniest person around: “Have you SEEN these diapers they put on me? They’re sized for Man ‘o War!” she said during one of my early visits.

Oh Nan, what will I do without you, you who earnestly told me, back in that first house, that girls got their periods at 12, and boys got theirs at 15? What will any of us do but keep loving whoever is ours to love?

Saga of the Sad Old Bathrooms

With all this COVID stay-at-home time, I've been circling around the rooms in this old ark of a house, where, for almost 20 years, even with TEN people living here, we had just one shower. We had to get up at 5:00 every day to squeeze in a mere six-minute sprinkling. That's when my spouse and I began to think remodeling.Usually, though, that was as far as we got - the thinking stage. And you have to know: these bathrooms were bad, with tiles done in weird unearthly colors, one a strange green like the nasty tongue-coating mint-flavored Milk of Magnesia with fixtures the exact queasy hue of Silly Putty.They dated back to the 1940s, which meant the strangely off-plumb sinks stood on skinny metal legs and were topped by medicine cabinets the size of cereal boxes. Their potholder-size wall tiles were ancient rectangles. Every few weeks, despairing perhaps of their out-of-fashion lives, first one and then another would pop out of its dry frame of grouting to smash itself silly on the floor tiles which, like ancient petrified Chiclets, kept lifting from their crumbling matrix to affix themselves like wee clinking ice skates to the bottoms of our showered-dampened feet. One friend, on seeing the awful truth about these rooms, delivered herself of the opinion that we were true saints, as otherworldly as Mother Theresa. “You’re so... non-materialistic!” she had exclaimed - by which she meant, “Gad, what crummy bathrooms.” And she hadn’t even used the one with the famous Toilet That Tilted, which, if sat upon too quickly, would give its shoulder a quick porcelain shrug and flick you off like a horsefly.But it isn’t that we were so ... other-worldly, so evolved. Our bathrooms were crummy because younger, pushier members of the household clamored for changes in their bedrooms, thus sucking up all their parents’ energies in the home-improvement department.First, it was one of our daughters, then 12. Suddenly, she despised her peach-colored bedroom. She wanted to spatter-paint it, she thought. I went along; masked every inch of molding and baseboard and painted the whole room white, walls and ceilings both. I tarped up the floor. Then, at the appointed signal, the two of us pried open four cans of bright primary-colored paint, dipped our fists clear to the knuckles in the vivid goo, and heaved it by the handful in every direction. It actually looked pretty good. (And boy was it fun!)Not two springs later, our then-sixth-grade son became desperate to redecorate his room. He said he couldn’t even study in it anymore; the wallpaper was that embarrassing. (Teddy bears in cowboy hats: we couldn't blame him.) He thought instead, a kind of God’s Eye View would make a nice decorating motif.First, we steamed off the old paper and pulled up the rug. I painted the walls pale blue and he hand-sponged them with fluffy white 'clouds'. Next, I made the ceiling a deep indigo, as directed, so he could paint upon it the nine planets, each in its proper relation to the sun.The whole project cost me three solid weeks of personal time and a permanent kink in the back from the night I knocked the black paint over and created an oil spill to rival that of the Exxon Valdez.But hey, the kid was happy. He spent all his time up there from then on. We would hear him from our own room, nights, zooming across the bare floor in his new desk chair with the wheels. And isn’t that a perfect metaphor for parenthood?  Your kids above, redecorating your world and sailing along among the stars; you down below, trying to limp to a crooked sink on rocky Chiclets. 

A Salute to Them Both

(My sister Nan at three-and-a-half and me at 18 months with our mother Cal)I wrote this some years ago but it has come to mind again in this season of ‘pause’ when suddenly all the moments of my life seem to be one present moment….I was 8 when my mother was 50, and sometimes, standing among the young moms in the schoolyard, she said she felt like our grandmother. For ‘Cal’, as everyone called her, had married late.Because there was a Depression, she said, and no one had money. Because there was a war, she said, and all the men were gone. We had heard both reasons as she described her young life as one of five children of a widower.They may not have had much money, but they sure had fun, to hear the tales: of evening dresses by night and raccoon coats by day. Speakeasies even entered into it.  And yes, there were men on these occasions: young singles and the brothers of friends. “But to be honest,” Mom said of them all, “there was no yeast in the bread” - by which she meant they didn't attract her.Then she met our father, stationed during the war in Boston. They called him Hap, for his mild and cheery way. This time there was plenty of yeast in the bread so she married him. He had wavy hair and red cheeks and bright blue eyes. I know because I've seen snapshots; he left before I was born.It was when I was 8 and my mother was 50 that my slightly older sister and I began to understand how different our family was from the norm.“Where is our father?” we asked our mom. “I don't know,” she told us truthfully.“Our dad's dead,” I told the neighborhood kids. “He kicked the bucket,” an old friend tells me I said with false insouciance, though Nan and I plotted in secret to write “Queen For a Day,” that old TV show that identified women with difficulties, measured their hardship by audience applause, then put the 'winner' in robes and a tiara and offered to make her Dream Come True.Our Dream would be finding our dad - little realizing he preferred to stay lost.So Mom raised us without him, in her childhood home. It was actually our grandfather’s home which he shared with his own older sisters. Each night Mom fed and bathed and tucked us in alone, the old folks being past all that. She crouched between our beds to stroke both our childish brows at once and sang us to sleep.Often, we were naughty. But often we sensed her sadness too: we turned down her bed for her and wrote notes raw with love and apology. She told jokes and drove fast and made great faces. She also had a temper and was late for everything all her life.I was 18 when she was 60. She sent me to college and listened on school breaks as I told her everything I was doing in those wide-open late '60s years. It never occurred to me to lie to her.But I did lie once: I said I was going a few states away during spring break to see a friend. I saw the friend, all right. But I looked for the man with the blue eyes too. When I got back, I told her how I had found him. She listened, the tears running down her face.One day toward the end of that week, the phone rang at home. I picked it up and said hello. It was my mother, calling from work. "Tell me again what he looks like," was all she said.I was 28 when she was 70. Nan had a baby and I had two, just when she was beginning to think we never would. Shortly before my third child came, she moved to a retirement home in my town, where she hosted sherry fests and ignored the fire drills and nearly drowned, in her sunny little room, in subscriptions to every magazine from Prevention to Mother Jones.I was 38 when she died at 80, all unexpected. I felt wholly a kid at the time of her passing and no more equipped to do without her than in the days of the early bedtimes.But I am better now. And I hear from her in odd ways: Our daughter Carrie has her very smile; our boy Michael has her sense of humor. And our middle girl Annie, as wise practically from the cradle as any adult, heard this story at age 10 and said, in dead earnest and with shining eyes, "I will call my first boy Hap."Some cold thing in me melted then. And it causes me to say, as this fresh Mother's Day approaches,  Here's to you, Cal, who held out for love, and got it, however briefly, and two kids too, who loved you fiercely. And here's to you too, you lost father redeemed from blame at last, as we all would wish to be redeemed, deserving it or not. 

The Rumblings Abdominal

Over the past couple of years, my eyes grew so heavily hooded it was as if I was peering out at the great Street of Life from under a pair of heavy canvas awnings. Thus, late last month, I had an operation to open these peepers up a bit.

Everything went swimmingly the surgeon said, and so, five hours after the initial scalpel cut, he sent me home - with an Rx for a 10 mg dose of Percocet, which, besides some acetaminophen, holds within it a small but mighty hit of Oxycodone.

These pills I took in strict moderation, choosing to take only the one-, and not the two-pill dose at a time and stopping cold turkey after just five days. I still felt pretty crummy of course, and my eyes stung. I couldn't bend over, lift anything weighing more than a few pounds, or even read or look at screens. And so my husband and I decided that, come the weekend, we would seek a change of scenery. We would drive the hour and 40 minutes north to our summer place where we could curl up with our new kitty, stream some good shows and look out at the frozen lake.

Now I had not been outside at all in the ten days since my operation, but the morning of our planned trip I felt the need to join three friends in doing an errand of mercy for a fourth, very elderly, friend. And so I slowly dressed and, glad to be out at all, drove to meet these three, one of whom called out to me as she crossed the parking lot.

“Should you really be here?” she exclaimed, knowing of my surgery. “And also, WHY are you dressed like this?!” she added, her eyes sweeping down over what turned out to be one very ill-considered getup: a silk blouse, a crepe skirt with a voluminous hemline just brushing the tops of my high-heeled boots, and the fanciest coat in our front hall closet. “I mean, are you going someplace after?”

Well, I was going someplace, of course: to the lake, later, but first home to meet up with David, there to give the kitten a small palmful of kibble before settling her in the cat carrier for her journey on my lap, and finally to visit a drive-through for burgers to go. BUT, I told my friend, the far realer truth was I had dressed up just to feel better.

And mostly I did feel better, at least for the first third of the journey. David and I talked companionably, and I nibbled at lunch, balanced over the cat carrier that held our soundly sleeping kitten.

And then it all went south.

The little cat opened her eyes just as a certain.. scent reached our nostrils. It was a mild scent, reminiscent of the meek scent of a newborn’s diaper. Alas, she then began crying out,

Something was coming.

It was coming.

It came.

We sped like Roger Rabbit in his roadster to the highway’s nearest rest area, me whispering “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” into the cat’s wee triangular skull. Because I just knew that her troubles followed from a nurturing flaw. I knew that the only other time I had given her kibble - as the vet had said I could do now and then “just as a treat” –  she had had what appeared to be a kind of painful diarrhea that caused her to cry out just like this. 

And now it had happened again.

Once we had reached the rest area, I pulled the poor creature out of her foul prison and set her on the floorboard in front of the passenger seat, there to be looked after by David, while I shot into the Ladies Room and did what I could to dab at the many stains and pawprints on my silky blouse, my fancy coat, and that gorgeously wide crepe skirt. I made a spectacle as horrifying as the raggediest of the ragged Walking Dead, and people were shrinking from me, I could see, but what else could I do? I crawled back into the passenger seat and cradled the kitten in my arms, David doing 80 because you can go that fast in New Hampshire.

Nestled up against me, she went right to sleep, tummy up and legs splayed. After a while, in despair and alarmed by this new immobility, I whispered to David in mournful tones, "I think I've killed her." “Nah,” he said back. “She’s just worn out.”

Of course, he was right. She was just worn out. And once we reached the refuge of this house up north I was able to give her a bath, hose and scrub the holy hell out of her cat carrier, bag my formerly fancy outfit for later consideration by the dry cleaner, and treat myself to the world’s longest shower.

So all of that was Story One.

Story Two commenced at the end of that peaceful weekend when I met my daughters for a fun dinner out - only to find I couldn’t eat a single morsel, or concentrate, or say much.

I was just as sick the next day, and the day after that, or for all three of the days following. Finally, 18 very long days after my eye surgery, I began to both faint and throw up, a winning combination in anyone’s annals of illness.

“For heaven’s sake get in here to the hospital!" cried my PCP when finally I called her. “You need to be evaluated!"

David came home from work and into the ER I wobbled, to do my seven hours of penance among the suffering.

There were people coughing, people in masks, people spitting up and people passed clean out. As far as I could tell, though, I was the only one with blood puddles under me legs.

Long story short, after a CT scan with contrast and various other ministrations, the docs decided to admit me to the ER's observation unit 12 stories up. I felt I had died and gone to heaven. From the rag-and-bone shop of the ER, I had ascended to the hospital's uppermost floor, with a twinkling view of the Boston skyline.

I got to stay in that room for two blessed days, and though they discharged me before I was altogether well, I have done the remainder of my healing at home – or to be utterly candid, at home for two days and then in the cozy stateroom of a Viking cruise ship whose itinerary loops all around the Caribbean.

Both David and I have treated these 8 days as a rest cure. We pad about on deck, take gentle walks on land, eat amazing meals and toddle back to our cabin for yet another nap.

This - tonight - is our last night on board. Tomorrow we fly home to that new little cat of ours who has been well cared for by not one but two sets of family members nice enough to have actually MOVED IN in order to look after her.

I can’t wait to see her, keenly aware as I now am of our connection. For are we not all meek small creatures, utterly dependent on the intricate workings of our bodies to go about in the world? We are indeed, and in this connection the famous limerick comes to mind that gives this post its title:

I sat next to the Duchess at tea.

It was just as I feared it would be:

Her rumblings abdominal 

Were simply phenomenal 

And everyone thought it was me.

Well, it was me, this time.

The upside is that I now keenly sense my commonality with all beings, and I am content. Sure, my eyes still sting a bit and yes, some bruising persists. But these eyes are OPEN! – enough to see that whatever further surgeries await me in this life I will never, ever, again take the fiendish little pill known as Percocet.

See? My eyes DO look better, don't they? ;-)

A Crummy Cook Gives Thanks

A Facebook friend posted the night before Thanksgiving that she was really grouchy just then and wondered if anyone else was feeling that way too. I was, boy. I was feeling super grouchy though I didn't post as much, being at the time too grouchy to join in the spirit of generosity that characterizes Facebook at its best.I had a list of good reasons for my grouchiness that night, or so I told myself. For one thing there were the muscle cramps I keep getting as I sleep, which make me dread the night as much as the parents of colicky newborns do. I LEAP from the bed every time one hits to put weight on the troubled limb, even knowing that one of these days I could accordion flat down into a human puddle, like those collapsible tin drinking cups the Scouts used to use on camping trips.There was also the tedious chore of food preparation, a task I have not enjoyed since the Seventh Grade when our poor Home Ec teacher tried to teach me and 29 other snickering 12-year-olds how to make Prune Whip.

There was the personalizing of 200 holiday cards that I'd spent the previous six days working on. I wish I could just sign our names and be done but I can't seem to do that any more than I can plunk a big box of Count Chocula down on a dressy Thanksgiving Day table.

And finally, there was the way I looked just then, in worn-out sweat pants gone in the waist, a hand-me-down man's shirt in which I look like the old dad in Modern Family, and over it all an apron from a decades-past college reunion embroidered with an image of Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz.Well, I knew that much: I wasn't in Kansas anymore, if Kansas is seen as Martha Stewart’s version of the run-up to Thanksgiving Day.My husband David had gone up to bed before 9. I minded that and wished desperately to join him but instead stayed downstairs by the kitchen bingeing past episodes of This Is Us and inscribing another 40 Christmas cards while a slew of wee laboriously peeled onions seethed on the stovetop. (I'd been too late with my shopping to find the kind in a jar that comes all cooked, dammit.)I worked and I worked and finally at midnight thought The heck with this, pulled off the apron and crawled into bed.The next morning I spun up now less three bowls brimming with greens and various toothsome mix-ins. I made the bechamel sauce for the onions and blobbed the whole sucking lava-thick mess into a chafing dish even though at that point it looked to me like nothing so much as a mixture of Ping Pong balls and Milk of Magnesia.I spread all these dishes out on our kitchen counter and texted a picture of them to our daughter Annie, along with the "caption" Three Salads and a Funeral", the funeral being what I had come to think of as my Creamed Onion Surprise. She in turn texted back lovely pictures of the three holiday tables she had set up for the whole family and the next thing we knew we had set out Over the River and Through the Woods to her house. My failing Merit Badge contributions were added to the feast and we all sat down to eat on the all-too-short remains of the waning, amber-and-amethyst-colored afternoon.In other words, the sun rose and the sun set on that day, mere hours from Decembers' start, and we looked, and saw that it was good. 

On Being Backed Up By Your Mom

I get such a kick out of this picture; I don’t know why. I can't recall my own mother backing me up like this when I even metaphorically stuck my tongue out at anyone. Parent-child solidarity was rare when I was a child. Most people my age go on about how they got punished twice for wrong-doing, once by the teacher who discovered them at it, and then again by their parents when they got home at night.Come to think of it though, my mom wasn’t like those parents either, and actually may have BEEN more like the filly-mare team pictured here. For one thing, she was twice as old as all the other mothers in my Second Grade class. She'd seen some hard things in her life and at age 50 was not about to let anyone push her kid around. For another, as I gradually realized over time, she had a wee bit of a problem with authority and liked nothing better than to challenge it whenever she had a chance.I say this because two months after my seventh birthday I got kicked out of the much-becalmed convent school my sister and I attended - for talking, of all things. And I don’t mean I got sent to the Sister Superior’s office. I mean I got hauled out of my little nailed-down desk-and chair combo by my scarlet-faced teacher, handed an empty cardboard box and told, "Pack your books! You don’t go here anymore!” Out of all patience, the good sister threw my coat at me and told me to go stand alone at the abandoned edge of that urban schoolyard under the darkling shadow of the elevated train while she had the main office call my mother to come fetch me.I stood there and stood there. "What will I do now?" I remember fretting through my tears. "I think I'm too little to get a job!" And then I saw my mother bounding up the hill of the school grounds in our goofy old station wagon. She took me home all right, but the next day she brought me back and, on encountering the young nun there by the doorway, hopped from the car and strode right up to her.  "See HERE!" she began. "A child who talks in class is a child who is BORED!" and what could this green young nun say, especially since it did really kind of look as though my mother was actually sort of lifting her up by the snow-white bib of her habit?Anyway, my mother saved me, even though I didn't faintly deserve saving. Because the truth is, I did talk, endlessly, to the kids in the seats to the front, back and sides of me. I was guilty as charged. I have always suspected that Mom knew that as well as I did, a fact that remained unspoken between us for the rest of our time together on this earth.The funny thing is, her doing that for me made me more, rather than less inclined, to stay on that straight and narrow ever since.

Get Back to Work, You

On a plane ride home from Tampa, I saw a giant of a man in the seat in front of me who wore such a skimpy tank top that I had a chance to count every one of the thousands of shoulder and back hairs visible to me.Then, on that same flight, a mere 30 seconds after the pilot turned off the Fasten Seat Belt sign, a woman in one of the backmost rows began shouting “Jesus Christ,  will you people MOVE!”Later, as we were all proceeding along the lengthy peristaltic trek to Baggage Claim, I saw at the bar of one of the airside eateries a youngish dude in a cowboy hat who kept shoving his napkin up under his sunglasses as he wept and wept while talking on his phone.These were all things I noticed in one three-hour period.It has literally been months since I have come to this blog to write down anything at all, whether happy or sad. Suffice to say it was some summer. But now, finally, I think I’m ready to begin again, maybe because of the kindly dermatologist I saw for the first time just before that flight. He asked what I did for a living so I told him I had taught high school English in my 20s, and then added with a look that was unmistakably nostalgic, that for 36 years I had written a weekly newspaper column.“Had written?” he asked .“Yes,” I sighed. “A day came, kind of out of the blue, when I felt I just couldn’t do it anymore. Writing a weekly column is like having to produce a term paper 52 times a year, I could also have quoted author Sidney Sheldon's observation that a blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.It was at this point that the nice dermatologist said something that has echoed in my mind ever since. “But of course you still write, don’t you?” he asked, and I literally hung my head. “Um, well...” I stammered, shamefacedly – and felt lucky to get even those two words out.You know how when we were kids the grownups would sometimes say, “Let that be a lesson to you?” Well, I let that moment be a lesson to me. And it was only days later on my trip from Tampa to Boston that I suddenly noticed these three people I opened with above.Why was the cowboy crying? I would never know. You can’t intrude on private grief by going up to someone and asking but still: I wondered.Why did that mountain of a man wear what amounted to an above-the-waist thong on an airplane? Did he not feel embarrassed, the way I would feel if, say, my travel companion suggested I pull out a razor and start shaving my armpits? (Shaving on a Plane, now there's an idea for a new trend!)And I wondered even more about the yelling woman at the back of the plane who by now had elbowed her way to just two rows back from me. “Why don’t you go in my place?” I said to her.She looked at me quickly, maybe to see if I was being sarcastic.I wasn’t. “No, really,” I said. “I’m in no hurry.”“It’s just that I get panic attacks,” she said. “I have awful claustrophobia.” And I thought yes maybe she does, because hadn’t I noticed her at the outset of the trip joshing good naturedly with the people around her as she was stowing her bag?I had indeed. And maybe I would not have ‘seen’ her at all if that lovely doctor had not metaphorically lifted my chin, thus encouraging me to keep on doing what I so clearly love doing, that is noticing things and writing down what I notice.  Maybe, speaking of God, doing that is even a kind of prayer.

On the Road.. er, Ship

Water travel is always so broadening, especially in the hips. Especially if you’re spending nine days on a Viking Riverboat cruise where the food never stops, even at breakfast, what with the stout coffees and delicate teas; the fresh omelets and smoked fish and sausage; the veggies both raw and cooked; the breads and rolls and croissants; the cereals both hot and cold; the bowls of berries and the platters of sherbet-colored melon; not to mention the juices from every kind of fruit Eve ever thought to toss in her Garden-of-Eden blender.This tour I set out on last month made its way through the Netherlands and into Belgium. Some of us also took the optional excursion as well, to visit World War I battlegrounds near the border of France. (After such indulgence on board, it felt only right to bear witness to the suffering the people of these lands endured during the bloody century just before this one, and I can say more of that in another post.There in Amsterdam on that first full day, I learned about this old, old city that, staggeringly, saw over 17 million visitors last year. While threading through some of its 165 canals I learned too that it is home to people from 181 nations if you can picture it. I can't, as my own list of the world's nations stops at around 40.It has a population of 850,000 people, 40% of whom are under 30 and there’s a frightening thought. I mean, what if these youth kick off a real virus of a border-crossing movement to take out all us oldsters, wallowing in our nifty AARP benefits and discount movie tix?  What then? Oh, admit you’ve considered the possibility. I mean can’t you sometimes just feel them behind you in the subway stations, waiting ‘til no one’s looking and shoving you in front of the train, Frank Underwood style?)Still, they’re pretty adorable, the young, and here in Amsterdam especially where they’re all the time wheeling past on bicycles like so many American tykes in the great era of Hot Wheels. Sure, they drink and get high and amble over to the Red Light District to check out the patient ladies sitting bare as newborns in their cozily furnished display windows. And yes, in a typical year the city has to fish some 12,000 bicycles out of the canals, tossed there in moment of youthful high spirits. Nonetheless I am heartened by the sight of them. At the AnneFrank House there are at least as many young people as older folk waiting in line to get in. At the Rijksmuseum too where all the Rembrandts are kept. They are not innocent of history, the young people here. They know what has transpired here in this fallen world.One crisp morning I stopped for coffee at a Starbucks with a whole plaza of outside tables. It was a place overflowing with both older people like me and with the younger too in their practical backpacks and their jaunty scarves, and as I sat among them all in a freshening breeze, I thought this is what peacetime looks like. For if this isn’t what people the world over don’t want I’ll eat my hat as the old fogies used to say: What we want is only to sit together, the young and the old and the in-between, the babies, the dogs and the toddlers too, and feel the blessing of each passing moment.I thought all this. Then, it being almost time for another storied meal onboard, I trotted the quick mile-and-a-half quick back to the ship. 

Travel Don'ts from a Hapless Tourist

A few things you’d best NOT do when traveling for ten days to countries where you don’t speak the language: One, fail to pack a warm enough coat; Two, fail to pack the most important hair product in your bristling arsenal of hair products because you foolishly believed the cruise line when it said no blow dryers or flatirons; and Three, scratch the living daylights out of the oh-so-delicate tissue protecting your eye, necessitating a trip to an eye doctor with whose staff communication was impossible given the language barrier.But let me take these step by step, not necessarily in this order.I’ll start with the forbidden hair care items about which the cruise line was as primly stern as the evil governess in a 19^th century novel. No, you may NOT bring your own electric appliances, heavens no, it said the literature they send out ahead of time say. The current, you know. The strain on the ship’s energy sources. Anyway, they sniffed, you’ll find one of those leaf blower hair driers right in your stateroom.But the problem for me, see, is that with the type of hair God gave me I have never been able to get even an approximately normal look by wielding a round brush in one hand and some honking-huge drier in the other. Instead I have to use the kind of drier that has the brush attached right to the heat source, the kind that were designed for men in the great ago of disco. (Think John Travolta’s hair in Saturday Night Fever.) Most of the women onboard this Viking longboat sported fabulously fluffy and /or shiny hair styles come the Cocktail Hour and the elaborate dinner with all that complimentary wine that the waiters kept unstoppably pouring. I can’t imagine how even one of them managed to look so great when here I was at these events looking like the homeliest Chia pet on the block.Next, there was the issue of the warm-enough coat I had failed to bring which didn’t seem as it was going to be a problem when I unpacked that first night onboard - until it turned out that the weather report for the Netherlands and Belgium, which had PREDICTED temperatures in the low 60s with partly cloudy skies actually MEANT to say low 40s with a nice-two-for-one combo of pelting rain and hail. After one day-long walking tour on Saturday I couldn’t have said I had hands at all. You could have cut off all my fingers and applied nail polish to the bloody stumps and I wouldn’t have known the difference.And finally, there was the wholly unanticipated visit I had to make to the eye doctor in Antwerp after, in an effort to remove the contact lens in my left eye, the darn thing just would not budge. This was at 10 at night after one of the fancy dinners with music and trivia games in the lounge afterward. I dug and I dug  ‘til the white of my eye turned dark red. See, I just knew the lens was in there and had rolled up into that part of my brain where I keep the multiplication tables and the names of all the major rivers in the world.So the next morning I went to the ship’s concierge. He called a local ophthalmologist to make me an appointment. When the hour drew near, he called a taxicab to take me to the office of this good doctor.  Who peered with the standard blinding scopes and strobe lights into my eye said that whatever lens has been in there during that last elegant dinner was in there no more. Which means that what I had actually done was to cross-hatch with dozens of tiny slices the whole white of my eye. Death by a thousand cuts, in other words. But HOW after 30 years of daily putting in and taking out these single-use contacts, could I miss the fact that, before taking out the contact in my right eye, I had already taken out the contact in the left one?All I can think is, must have been the wine. :-)There'll be more to say about this wonderful trip in future blog posts. I just had to get the nonsense part told first.   

She Dug Up Her Mother?

I just read an article in The Times about the subject of ‘serial’ memoir-writing that names author Kathryn Harrison, who has penned a number of autobiographical works over the course of her life. At one point she is quoted as saying she knows she needs to write yet another memoir when a perspective on her life becomes 'an obsession'. For example, she writes, "It was only when I was on the phone with the funeral director out in Los Angeles, asking him to dig my mother up, burn her up and send her to me, that I thought to myself, ‘You’re behaving weirdly now. Perhaps you should start taking notes.'" The result: The Mother Knot, a book in which she finds peace of mind about her challenging relationship with her parents by scattering at sea her dead mother’s ashes.This topic of trying to figure out - and write about - what happened to you really hit me as I read about it just now because it's what I have been doing for 40 years: namely repeatedly beginning upon - and repeatedly not finishing -  a memoir of my own, filled with the often dramatic turns that both my life and the life of my parents and grandparents took over time.I myself have never once thought of having my mother's remains disinterred. Far from it. I like thinking of her in that old cemetery.  "Oh mom! You love that pale violet suit that you're wearing still! " I think even now, more than 30 years after she left us in such haste. I picture her there and recall how, on the cold winter day we left her on that little hillside,  I bent and scooped up a handful of the dirt that had been dug from the open grave. My cousin saw me, sidled over and said, "WHAT on EARTH are you going to do with THAT?"I didn't know the answer to that. I just know I needed it and I have still, in a slender glass vial. It is the more dear to me because it is dirt from the same grave where my grandfather has lain since 1958, with my sister and I looking on in our little Mary Janes and our new white gloves. It is dirt from the same grave where his bride lies, the young woman who was my grandmother, though neither of us had the chance to enjoy that bond since she died in the impossibly long-ago year of 1910.Having this vial of earth comforts me yet, as does the fact that I still have the bright blue blouse my mother was wearing, all dressed up and feeling fine, when she died in my living room in at her own 80th birthday celebration. I still have the little purse she was carrying that December afternoon. I still have her cane. So much happened to her, both as a child and as an adult. So much happened to her two parents. How can I not wish to get it all down on paper, and say how it affected me, and how these effects have played out in my own life?One day last year when I told two dear-to-me 16-year-olds only a part of this story their eyes widened in near-incredulity I suppose because truth really IS stranger than fiction and who among us, when young, can believe all that will happen to us in life?Will I ever get it all down in words then? I have less energy than I once did so I have begun to doubt that I ever will, and maybe it doesn't matter. I had a dream shortly after my mother died. In this dream, the two of us were trotting down a wide set of stone steps together, creating that rhythm people fall into when, sure of foot, they take on such flights of stairs. Halfway down, I looked over at her in surprise and said to this woman who in life saw most poorly and could walk only with a cane, "Mom! You're running!""I know!" she called back, still mid-trot. "I'm not old anymore!"It was a dream so vivid I'm not so sure it even was a dream. Maybe the idea of linear Time is a clumsy fabrication, the best we could do with our tiny minds. Maybe there is no Past but only an eternal Present, in which case why write your rueful memoir at all? 

For Bobbie at Year's End

The Christmas I was 9, our mother began an annual practice of giving both her kids a daily diary, which, for the next three years, I virtually never wrote in except to scribble “Had Gym today” on every Tuesday that school was in session.My older sister wrote in hers though. “Got a horse today,“ Nan fibbingly scribbled on one page of her own personal journal, and so I made a similar entry .Then, when she penned “my horse is expecting” some few days later, I told the identical whopper in my journal and never mind that these two facts could not have BEEN further from the truth for two children living (together with their mother and three ancient folks all born before the Election of 1876) on a narrow city street that trolley cars screeched past both day and night. The only thing that was true between the equine world and us was that we maybe accidentally smooched the televised images of Spin and Marty’s horses while going for the two Disney idols themselves. To put a finer point on it, kissing the TV screen during the Mickey Mouse Club show was basically the most adventurous thing either one of us did back then. So, apparently we thought it best to make stuff up.But then, when we were in Sixth and Fourth grade respectively, our sweet resident old people died within 15 months of one another. And so, invited to live in a new city with our Aunt Grace and Uncle Jack, Mom closed up and sold the old house and moved there with us, to a street with no trolleys, no lamplighter at dusk, no dusty elderly man with a pushcart bleating “Raaaags!” in an effort to collect folks’ unwanted textilesI did write in my diary in this new place, which to Nan and me resembled nothing so much as the set of a 60’s TV show with, instead of back alleys and in-ground garbage pails, there were kids on stilts and pogo sticks playing right out in the street. There were tough little crab apples for hurling at one another in the great The-Boys-Against-The-Girls wars, and endless games of kickball ,and skating on the crusty mirror of ice that Mr. Talbot conjured up every winter using just his flat backyard and a garden hose. THEN my entries were action-packed, all right, like this one when I threw my first party:But they only became more “inner” when I fell in love.Because in those days the Church said that kissing for more than five minutes was a Mortal Sin, I became haunted by a letter-of-the law-mentality that lurks just under the surface of most of my entries of my Middle School and High School years. I look now at the record of all that angst - about my immortal soul, and my homework, and whether or would do well enough in school to get a college scholarship - and how I do feel for that young girl drawing at the top of the diary’s pages a heart for the kissing, a church steeple to signify I had gone to Confession, a pair of googly eyes for the all-nighters I pulled trying to get those A’s!At age 13, I developed a friendship with a girl so much like me that we would read one another’s diaries at the end of every year. Thus, Bobbie saw it all, right up to the time, when, still a ‘mere girl’, I fell in love for keeps, and decided together with this ‘mere boy’ of a guy that we would marry as soon as college was over.Below is the letter she wrote me after reading my account of my very last year of life as an uncoupled person. It is a letter I found to be so loving when I drew it from between the pages of that year’s diary just now that I thought I would share it here. Here's what wrote, in long-ago 1968, as she returned that year’s volume:

"Here you are, Terry dear. I will no longer read entries about the Aprils-Junes-Septembers in Terry’s life and you, I’m sure, will stop writing them if you haven’t already. Such a progression from the scrawly writing of the young, young Terry, and then Mike in eighth grade, and Nan’s boyfriend, and that near-death experience when she gave him the Ex-Lax valentine! All that and the pink and golds of heaven and on to next-door Dicky B. and bedroom windows with walkie-talkies between, and Kathy Rodger. and Peter Paul and Mary and of course a different boy and the overstuffed chair in the basement study where that interfering religion made a lovely thing so hard and tortuous."So many entries over the school years with your tiny top-of-the-page pictures of the weather, the days’ outfits, the little church spires and stars - and later only weights at the top of pages and notes reading “Oh God it’s 2am!” or “up at 5 sewing clothes” (or making that facsimile of a 12th century manuscript, or just plain writing papers.) Then Senior year and the end of Special Chorus and the Keith dances but Terry’s list of duties continuing, on to college, where most of the pages now are too recent to be memories ….Let’s never stop knowing each other."

And we haven’t stopped.I record all this today because I want to report that I never stopped writing the diary either and have just this last hour made the final entry in the 2018 volume. There are 61 of them now, all in a row, all stored in old National Geographic binders in a third-floor bookcase.I don’t know who will ever read this centipede of a life story except maybe my children, if even they have the fortitude. I do know, however, what writing it has done for me. Week after week, month after month, year after year it has taught me to feel so very grateful for good friends like length of days and the peace of mind to live them out.   

Grateful? You Bet I Am

For 8 weeks this past summer I couldn't drive, or dress myself, or haul the heavy ropes of wet laundry out of the washer and 'thunk' it into the drier. I had had the dread rotator cuff surgery on my right shoulder, which left me hurting like the dickens, both day and night. Also, as a righty, I could eat only with my left hand, which meant I spent a lot of meals feeding my ear.Then, ten days ago, I had a second and unrelated fix-it repair and am now sporting a tidy zipper of stitches on my insides.I am grateful today to be on the mend from both interventions. I can drive again, a good thing since some of those Uber drivers gave me a hard time for asking to be brought what they considered too-short distances to be worth their while. Once, still very early in my recovery, to spare myself the sulky lamentations of those few, I tried walking to my destination in my sling and brace, on a 93-degree day, along a road whose sidewalk suddenly gave out, such that I found myself picking my way in flip-flops along a trash-littered soil embankment that was tilted toward, rather than away from, the road - along which cars were zooming by, 15 inches from my teetering body.Big mistake, that effort. I learned from it though, and am grateful for that. I'm grateful too that now I CAN haul stuff out of the washing machine. And almost dress myself without help. And deftly just fine with my right hand (and don’t I have a fresh little batter of fat to prove it!)But really today I am grateful for so much more, as well all no doubt should be.

• I'm grateful for the help of my family and for my women friends whose candor and open heartedness have created a kind of shelter in the storm for us all.
• I'm grateful for the guys at Kevin Ryan's Fells Hardware,  who routinely offer to cut the wrongly sized curtain rod I have brought in for a consult instead of having me buy the $40 shears that would let me to the job at home. "Why spend the money?" Kevin will say, he whose presumed goal is to get people to do exactly that. I have had such great talks with these folks over the years - about the pain of Shingles, about depression, about the War of Northern Aggression, as some Southern historians still refer to it.
• I'm grateful for Jimmy at the Post Office, who lost his wife last winter and lets me now and then gently inquire as to how he is doing.
• I'm grateful for John at the Shoe Hospital who gave me the name of a guy he said was the best window repair guy he had seen in his 87 years. The guy himself turned out to be on another project but he introduced us to his brother Mike Sheridan, who every day for 90 days from 7 'til 3, came to this house and worked, both on ladders and in the machine shop he set up in our garage, so as to give new life to every single window and piece of trim on this gracious old lady of a house. Mike, your gifts with the living wood, as well as your meticulousness and work ethic, are remarkable and I hope you know that.

I go on too long here so I will have to get to the many others in another post.My husband ALMOST went out to rake earlier but on seeing these frigid temps, settled for a morning indoors. He is in the shower now. Our son Michael and his Jen,  here from the big city, are still sleeping. And our daughters are texting hilariously back and forth to us all about the foods they're trying to prepare for this afternoon's feast. Soon we will get to be with all of them, plus a harvest of grandbabies and more family beyond that.My assignment is only to provide two autumn salads and a raw vegetable plate, and maybe offer a consult on the gravy when that crucial moment comes. I need to be about that work now, but how could I let this lovely claret-colored morning pass without saying how lucky I feel right now for my many blessings, I am who am no more deserving than the many who this day are hungry or far from home? May we all  feel ourselves cradled in Hands far larger than our own, and in so feeling. do more and more and yet more for others.

Whatever Follows

Whatever might follow in the weeks ahead I have to say this has been one beautiful season, and in spite of the usual vacillations. Temperatures hit the mid-80s one day and four days later we came close enough to a hard frost that a baby maple I see every day took a nasty fright and went instantly crimson. Now as I write, a big wind is muscling around outside,  giving even the grass blades a stern combing-back.I sometimes hear westerners say our old New England is just all damp and claustrophobic with lowering skies and too-near horizons.  I don't see it that way. Anyhow it’s sure not that way now on these bright tangy days that have us all feeling happy and energized as we kick through the leaves and set out those jolly toy balloons that the world calls pumpkins. My own personal housemate got to feeling so energized last weekend that he climbed out on two of our roofs to prune the limbs of trees that in actual fact didn't need pruning at all (but that's just me.) I watched with my heart in my mouth as he executed one deep squat after another while balancing inches from roof's edge and then extending to its farthest reach a 12-food pole with a lethal sickle on the end and – SNAP!  pulling the trigger. Here he is first contemplating the job...And beginning to execute it...I sent our visiting houseguest Machias out to spot him in case he started to pitch forward and fall. (Machias is six-foot-nine with a rower's mighty legs so I thought he could maybe execute a rescue.)    But "I'M FINE!" insisted  my mate -and by some stroke of luck he turned out to BE fine as this triumphant look testifies.Myself, I attempted no such feats of strength and balance that day. I just walked a few miles, set out some seasonal decorations and reveled in all this beauty.Here was the sun that day, glowing still strong at 5pm, behind one of our front porch columns....Then at the top here was the sun only moments later in the side yard, filtered through our little dogwood...And finally, out back, here was the sun setting our neighbors' tree even further aflame.All this was on the Saturday. Then, on the Sunday, we had the privilege of attending the wedding celebration of a couple who, together with their families, threw one amazing party.It took place on a hillside farm with 180 guests on hand to enjoy popcorn and cider, adult beverages of every kind and food that never stopped coming.Best of all, the two brides helped make the music. Bride Alli, from all I can tell, plays every instrument on God's green earth and her band was playing; whereas Bride Angela, by her own admission not a trained singer, took the mic and spoke of the meaning this one particular song has for them both.  Then, at first softly, and then in full and glorious voice, performed "Hallelujah,"  by the late Leonard Cohen.Here's my favorite recording of this wonderful song, that today seems to me to capture all the beauty and longing of earth's seasons, and even of our own too-short lives.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_NpxTWbovE