Hey Nonny Nonny Nonny Nonny No

TIRED tonight, boy. I haven’t had any down-time since Monday morning when I was unexpectedly summoned to the airport to meet a bunch of Seventh Graders from rural Arkansas and bring ten pieces of their luggage, 200 pounds of their food, three of the young scholars themselves alive-alive-o, oh plus one of their teacher-chaperones to the hotel where all 30 of these young sojourners would be staying for this the Boston leg of their big History-related field trip to the North.

As soon as they'd all checked in I was asked to go right “onstage” and talk about the pleasures of first-person writing, which was fun since they were such a cute audience, laughing at all the best parts of my stories like when people fall down and little naked kids say funny things and when I got done one of them stood and led the others in a little chanting cheer of appreciation.

Then yesterday I went to an out-of-town funeral that took all morning, then bought a new pot to replace the one I burned the bejesus out of making the rice on Sunday night, bought a new iron to replace the one I have dropped on the floor so many times it doesn’t even get warm never mind hot anymore, brushed my hair, changed my clothes and zipped over to a lovely old Cambridge home to act out my part in a reading of Shakespeare's As You Like It , a piece of cake I figured since it consisted of like three short speeches as the so-called Second Page - only whoops! -it turned out the First Page and I were supposed to SING that whole passage at the end of Act Five, did I not see that those 24 lines were actually a song? And surely I knew the melody did I not, that famous centuries-old tune with the Hey Nonny Nonny Nonny Nonny No? The room grew dim. My head swam. A faint threatened - until a kindly soprano lady took me aside and taught it to me then there and even sang along with us both when the time in her clear, practically see-through soprano voice so whew! I got through that.

Then today I got up at 5:00, wrote 'til my back hurt, went to a Weight Watcher meeting, brought David's 87-year-old uncle out into the sun for two hours, did exercises for my messed-up neck, drove to a more commercial corner of Cambridge this time and watched the highly accomplished young author and illustrator Matt Tavares take his turn presenting to the Seventh Grade kids, then went accompanied them to the famous JFK Library and did the tour with them, trying my best to answer their questions. They asked about Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. Also about Kennedy and James Meredith whose enrollment at Ole Miss he made possible by kicking ass and taking names when the backward-thinking governor there tried preventing him. Considering the life of President Kennedy is for kids born in 1996 and '97 a lot like considering the life of oh, Alexander the Great, say, and when I told them I had met the guy once they looked at me as if I were Methuselah himself.

But really they had long since forgiven me my decrepitude. We had wonderful fun and I even got a few pictures before they climbed on the bus to go see Yale and finish up their field trip with two-and-a-half days in Manhattan. They were adorable and who cares if I’m too tired to iron or make rice the right way it was a great three days and yeah sure I’m pretty tired now but hey I’ll sleep when I’m dead, you know?