Travel Day

Big travel day today. Makes me want to go in to the train station and sit at one of those tiny tables with the wire mesh tops because when you do this people feel they can come join you. There aren’t many seats and why should YOU be hogging an empty one and you not even going anywhere?An old lady sat with me once. It was maybe 1:00 pm. “Am I late?” she asked. “My train leaves at 5:25!” Once a guy sat down and said he was feeling sick. Turned out he’d been doing drugs the whole previous day and night. We  drank our Snapples and looked up at all the airy light you can still see now, same as in 1908 when the place first opened. And once a man in a suit leaned in and told me he liked the satin stripe down the side of my pants.They were tuxedo pants and remembering them now makes me think of my teaching days and 16-year old Barbra. This was back in '74, long enough ago so that as a lesbian she was about the first openly gay teen most any of us had ever known. She had quit school by the time I met her but she showed up a lot anyway. She would sit in the back of my English classes and  just listen, and the following Spring she went to the prom in a tux.As it happens I ran the prom that year and that night the principal called me over.  “What is that young woman's status?” he asked me somber-faced. “She’s a girl at her prom,” was  all I could think to say. That summer when she enlisted, we drove past lovely  South Station for her induction at the Army Base. Then, her status was Private First Class. And now? Well now she’s a Molecular Biologist and one of the deans at UCSD. And to think I wouldn't even know her today if she hadn’t had that nice train-station openness and come into my class one day to say hi!

The Swift Completion of His Appointed Rounds

I made a promise in my latest column. Just click on that word and it’ll take you right to that piece and yes, young ones, I know you think everyone already knows all about this but it just isn't so. Think of that poor soul who called the tech support hotline to say that that handy “cup holder” on his computer was broken and yup he was referring to the D-drive port that pops out when you push the button. Over these last few months I have been dragging to this site thousands and thousands of die-hard, and in some cases, older newspaper readers for whom all this web stuff is still pretty new.

The column was about our former mailman now retired and I said I would tell another story about him here so let me do that now:

I heard someone call my name at the local nursery and I didn’t even have to lift my eyes from the geraniums to know who it was. “Hello MRS. MAROTTA!” boomed this voice, alive with mischief.

“Joe!” I yelled from my spot 30 feet away.

“How’s business?”

“Here today and gone tomorrow!” he cackled.

Joe now works part time now as a sometime pall-bearer and general funeral home associate, and I guess I this is the place to say that though I’m calling him Joe, really that’s not his name. You never who’s going to feel shy about having his name spread all over the galaxy so I thought I’d just christen him anew here.

Anyway, after we’d made our purchases and left the nursery we continued talking out in the parking lot. There was lot to go over since his nephew taught at the same high school where I too taught way back in the days of platform shoe and feathery hair. Plus we had to dissect the news of the neighborhood that he once so expertly stitched together as for year after year he executed the swift completion of his appointed rounds.

We must have lingered a good 20 minutes before partying anyway and every time I see him I think afterwards of the story my friend Mary told me once about the day he helped her when she was new to our neighborhood and didn’t really know anyone. She had thrown her back out and when her eight-month-old woke up suddenly sick to his stomach she realized that with her muscles spasming the way they were doing she couldn't even lift him from his crib. It was then that she spotted Joe just passing under her second-story window and so called to him. He slung that bag down and came inside, changed the baby and called Mary’s husband at work to say that she needed him home now. It was a bold act of kindness all right and for year after when that baby grew into a boy three and five and six and eight he would often say to Mary with endearing eager earnestness “Mum! You never have to worry. If something goes wrong. I’ll just go find Joe!”

And that’s the story of Joe who I hope I see again soon, at the plant store or outside some church in a black suit; walking down the street or just plain anywhere. And if my kitty disappears again as she did the time I told about in that column, well I might have to go find him myself.

It's All About the O-Rings

“You should come to the gasket convention in Orlando the first week in April,” said my husband David a few months back. 

“Gaskets! What are gaskets anyway?” 

“O-rings. You know, GASKETS, things used to make a joint water- or air- or particle-tight.” 

“Come on there are no gaskets anymore, only microchips,” I said back, just to get him going. He’s in manufacturing, an industry which here America is diminishing like a cookie-tin-full of Shrinky-Dinks in a hot oven.  

“Hey don’t kid yourself, you couldn’t live without O-rings,” and if that wasn’t the language of courtship I don’t know what was, and so Yes, I said yes, I said yes, I will go with you. 

And thus do I write this in sunny central Florida, where over the heads of a cool 1,000 conventioneers, families and staff, clouds of infinitesimal bugs hover like wee guardian angels. 

This morning I spent a few hours at the kiddy pool, which I chose for the democracy of the place, the lack of all display except for the simplest display.  

“Dis is my bellybutton,” a three-year-old said to his new friend and I felt I was in Heaven itself, just being alone and looking around. There was no preening by the young and unlined, nobody worriedly studying the backside of anyone else, just me reading a story in which the main character finds herself touring Ireland as a passenger in the car her mother has to rent because the mother could drive stick. Every day she sits on what should be the driver’s side but without the steering wheel until she begins to feel like a child again and thinks, “I’m back.” 

That’s how I felt: I was back, a little kid again with just these small splashing strangers and the solitude. 

I’d had solitude at breakfast too and there swooned so deep inside myself that when afterward I stopped at a little table to dig out the apple and the yogurt that I’d tossed into my tote bag I almost tripped over my very own husband sitting and sitting having coffee with his co-worker Moe. 

“Brian didn’t come in til 1:30,” Moe was saying of a third compatriot. 

“Wait, does he make you share a room?” I asked, mostly to tease Dave a little as the president of this company they all work for. 

“Nah,” said Moe. “I couldn’t share a room with anyone anyway. Even when I got married I said to my wife, ‘Maybe we should just live together like three nights a week.’” 

“I get that. David and I are second babies; both our moms said we loved just playing alone in our cribs. I just feel safe when I’m alone. I can’t even sit with my back to a door. It’s like I was in the Mob in a former life.” 

He was looking now at my food items. “A little something for later, eh? You should’ve seen my mother in a restaurant. When she got up from the table that table was BARE. Rolls, cole slaw even: right into her bag. I do it too, a little.” 

“Sure. I’m on the road a lot myself. Take today: here’s this giant breakfast buffet and all I had of it was an egg and some toast and coffee for my $15.95.“   

“And you never know when the next service plaza is.”  

“I’ve often thought with adult diapers in my life and I could keep on driving forever. I’m grateful for good muscle control though.” 

“I’ve said it before,” my husband piped up. “We’d all be sunk without the O-Rings.”