Thy Will Be Done

"You JOKERS are all out of the will!"  I’ve always wanted to say that the way they do in the movies and I'll say it to you guys since I finally have one. A Will that is, to replace that Junior Will we made ages ago with its fearful provisions for looking after people still too little to dress themselves.This one feels a lot grander somehow, maybe because the old boathouse is no longer so far downstream.It comes with ancillary documents, natch - a warm letter to the now-grown children, a 'living will' to protects us from too many rib-breakingly 'heroic' measures, and, most entertainingly, a document stating our wishes for funeral arrangements. Here’s how the conversation went as we hashed that one over in the lawyer's office yesterday:Says my mate David, “Let them take any body parts they want, then cremate me.”“Whoa, not me!" say I. "I want to leave with everything I arrived with. For me a cardboard box and a plain green burial.”“I thought you wanted a wake," says Dave. "You can’t have a wake if you do that.”“Sure you can! They pack you in ice and hide the ice with that same ruffly velvet they all use. Dab a little blush on and you're good to go.”"Okaaay,” goes Dave which means he thinks that sounds gross. I can read the guy like a book.“And it's not gross to have them sew your eyes and mouth shut, and carve a big Y on your chest and drain out your blood?”“They won’t do that to ME,” he goes.“Why won’t they?”“Closed casket,” he says, smiling his best victory smile.That stopped me for just a second. Then I smiled. “What are you, some kind of Protestant?” (Catholics go for wakes more than Protestants do and we still kid each other about our respective religions of origin.)We both smiled then over this old joke between us, which goes back to when, at age 19m I brought him home to my Irish-on-all-sides family: this 21-year-old with a funny haircut who was not only a - what did they call it? - Congregationalist? - but an Italian too.We turned back to the lawyer then, both smiling big happy smiles, and signed those documents on the dotted line, babe. The good news is we’re to be put side by side in the end, my honest dust right by his grainy ashes with, we hope, plenty more laughs to be had for us then.

It Could Happen: Elder Stuns Family by Revealing He Has Left Everything to the Cats

Eerie, that Naked Lady

It unsettles me: every time I opened this site lately, the music from Cocoon started playing and that naked actress with the really small waist once again began lowering herself into the pool.  The video was harder to upload than others I've posted here so maybe it came trailing some mysterious coding that has crept in like ringworm through my laptop's feet. Maybe my blog was under its spell in some way and yearned always to show that naked lady. I finally had to replace the video with a mere link to it so you're now a step away if you're in this for the skinny-dipping.Only one time did my computer get really infected and that was the time I went to that silly website that shows the autopsy photos. I was looking to see if the pictures said to be of our assassinated 35^th President are really out there for anyone to see. They sure are and you'd know it was JFK all right, just by that wonderful hair the color of maple syrup and the freckles on his torso from many a boatride.It's a hard photo to look at of course, though for me not nearly as hard as the one of Marilyn Monroe who in death looked nothing at all like the still-young woman-child she was the night she took that overdose. Her hair is all slicked back and the skin on her face is so slack and she just looks so... alone. Alone and in despair. Even the lividity in her face doesn't strike you as much as that look she has of one truly forsaken.As a sophomoric gross-out final act on this site, one of its last links takes to you to the autopsy picture of a man who died of worms, which I guess brings us right back to where we started. They’re seen spilling from his body cavity, which tells me that this site is mostly trying to scare us with the threat  of our own death but heck, I go with what the philosopher Epicurus said which is basically that when we are here death is not and when death is here we are not, simple as that.......Rain AND snow predicted in these parts so  another big day for Mother Nature. I say let’s go outside anyway and watch her water the flowers, something that she does even in places like this:

a graveyard, Anytown USA

Goodbye Frog, So Long Mouse

Here’s a scary sight from the trip my family and I took out west. While the rest of sat like fat lizards in sun so dry the skin on your face tightens like a mummy’s, Annie went hiking with her super-fit man, then sat for a bit in a gully while he ran up the side of a mountain. As she sat by that little creek-bed she saw this snake eating a frog who, she says, cried out in heart-rending fashion until only his little hands remained, which you can just see disappearing down the snake's throat.When I emailed this picture to a member of the family who couldn’t come on this trip she wrote back to say it was the saddest thing she had ever seen and there sure is enough plenty of sad stuff in the great outdoors I guess. Plenty of 'sad' indoors too if you count mouse death.Our new housemates, freshly transplanted from Florida, stayed behind and shivered in the late March cold.  (Click here to see one of the nice big fires they made so as not to die of frostbite in the 20-degree nights.) I bring them up because yesterday when we were cooking together in the kitchen I saw evidence of mouse-life over by the earthenware jars where we keep the coffee. “Shall we set a trap and kill it right away or wait for warmer days when it will go outside on its own?” I asked Veronica who as a size Zero is not much bigger than a mouse herself. (See?)“Oh I hate to kill it!” she said at first, then some ten or 15 minutes later reversed herself: “I’ve been thinking about that mouse…” she began.So the a death sentence it was: I smeared peanut butter on a 59-cent mousetrap and here he was this morning, all nicely packaged for his trip to the dump.It does feel sad - such perfection of form gone down to death! - but that's how it is in this world. The poet Tennyson said it; nature IS red in tooth and claw.

David put him into the bag; Veronica and I were useless.

Vesuvius

Remember the old 1890s Baltimore Catechism that some of us could once recite quicker than our multiplication table? It went like this:

 Q. Who created Heaven and earth and all things?

 A. God created Heaven and earth and all things.

 Q. Which are the chief creatures of God?

 A. The chief creatures of God are angels and men.

 Remember? Well, I came upon a different sort of catechism while hanging around Mass. General Hospital this past week where my doctors performed their usual funny parlor tricks, resting their tummies on my lap to peer into my nose and eyes and so on. There in the lobby they had a special booth on aneurysms with pamphlets on Defusing the Time Bomb In The Brain, a video running on a  small TV and, behind the tables, a team of kindly people to help you once you have scared the living bejesus out of yourself by stopping to read them. See if you don’t think THIS little rundown has the same matter-of-fact feeling as that primer, that Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Council of Baltimore:

Q. What Is A Brain Aneurysm?

A. An brain aneurysm is a bubble that forms on the side of the brain artery, very much like a balloon. There are two types of aneurysms, ruptured and unruptured.

Q. Are There Any Warning Signs?

A. The classic symptom of ruptured aneurysms is the worst headache of your life.

Q.  Can Aneurysms Be Prevented?

A. Unfortunately, no!  (exclamation point theirs, believe it or not.)

Q. What Are the Odds of Surviving a Rupture?

A.  50% die outright. Of those who survive, one-third recover with some deficit, one-third with substantial deficit, and the final third may require institutionalization.

So there you have it, kids, if you had any doubt at all: We sure DO we live on the slopes of Vesuvius and either sooner or later that nice old God of Baltimore and Surrounding Towns  has fixed it so that every last one of us from the littlest sweetie-pies to the biggest bigshots, will, like it or not, ALL be together in Heaven - and there's a topic worth peering into for sure!

Jeremy Bentham Goes to Head of the Class

Talk about your fun time! Uncle Ed and I attended a book discussion group in Story Chapel at the famous Mount Auburn Cemetery founded back in a day when most people just buried each other out back. OK well that's not really true: there were church-yards and there were potters fields but the Mount Auburn Cemetery of Cambridge Massachusetts was the first place to offer public burial in a tranquil park-like atmosphere where a person could think on the loved one laid to rest there and on the great cycle of nature too.

As it happens the great cycle of nature was actually the topic at hand; the group was discussing Mark Harris's Grave Matters, a book about ‘green burial’ which means basically “Hold the formaldehyde honey 'cause ah’m a-goin’ back to nature and the quicker the better!” - and the discussers there gathered were so cool and fascinating I fell in love at once though the feeling may not have been mutual because not only did we get there late, Uncle Ed thumping down the quiet chapel aisle to the beat of his cane and me offering six kinds of body language that said So sorry! Oh dear! etc but we hadn’t even read the book.

Plus with all of us gathered round this very large table and our voices curling upward in that tall space like smoke from so many votive candles, Uncle Ed somehow turned deaf as a haddock. “I CAN”T HEAR A THING!” he faced me and boomed, the only male in the reverent feminine stillness. “Jeez, keep it down!” I wanted to say but how could I when I love him so much and he's 88 in November (even though things can get a little dicey sometimes as when an extremely heavy 20-year-old male waddled into the doctor’s office where the two of us were cooling our heels. “It sure is a b-i-i-i-i-g country!” Ed said that time and in that same clarion voice.

The group talked about all the options for dealing with one's remains When The Time Comes and I can say more about that another time. For now though let's give a big shout-out to philosopher Jeremy Bentham who Ed and I now know had his body forever preserved upon his death in 1832. It rests in a glass chamber at University College in London with a nice wax head replacing his actual head (Don’t ask! Another botched job by the nip-and-tuck men!) Here it is now anyway and heck maybe I’ll go this route myself. The gloves give a playful Mickey Mouse feel to the whole thing and c’mon, who doesn’t look good in a hat?