Old Things

I love old things. One of them you see here, a bottle from the 1890s or before, meant as I am guessing, for spirits of some kind. You can't really tell with the label mostly effaced.I came upon this and the item below while going through a nasty drawer full of junk under our kitchen's utility sink. It was in the 1980s that these two items first came to our notice from their sleeping-place deep down in the earth . It happened when we excavated a portion of the yard to expand our antiquated kitchen.I don't know what the builder was thinking when he laid out the original room when the house was new in the 1890s. Even by that era's standards, it seems a truly terrible space to for the preparation of food. I say this because in all the 90 years before we came, this kitchen had remained the same. Sure, the stove had been swapped out and the old stove still reposes, a slumbering whale in our basement. The refrigerators got swapped out too, from the original icebox to electrified coolers, like the 1920s-era version that also slumbers below stairs.But the basic layout?  Unchanged in all that time by which I mean to say that when we got here, there were no cupboards above sink or stove or fridge. If you wanted a cupboard you had to walk in to the next room, a room grandly called, in those days, 'the butler's pantry'. I called it that myself  - I had grown up in a house with room we called the l pantry - until I realized my small children thought I was talking about a pantry without a butt. (It must have been my Boston accent.)Additionally, there were no surfaces on which to set things in this kitchen we inherited in the 1980s. Not a countertop in the place. If you wanted a surface, you had to walk into another room called the larder, where there were wooden shelves, wooden drawers and a lone square of marble for rolling your pie dough on. If as the cook, you needed to pare the potatoes you stood at the sink. When you needed to whip the potatoes, you sat at the wooden table in the room's center and worked with the bowl in your lap.And when our family of four sat at that table, still situated in the room's center, we were all squeezed in so tight that someone had to vacate his seat and push in his chair in order to open the fridge for a forgotten item, and another person had to do the same so someone could check the oven to see if the brownies were done.We couldn't wait for that renovation. It brought us not only a larger more airy space in which to prepare and serve meals to friends and family, but it also delivered to us this last old item: a railroad spike from... who knows when, as Its irregular shape argues for a vintage older still than the 1890s. Today I am thinking hmmmm: the old Massachusetts town of Concord lies only a few hills and laps distant from here.  Maybe this is the kind of spike driven in to the earth when they first laid that Boston-to-Fitchburg run in the 1840s, and the iron monster  so shattered young Henry Thoreaus's peace of mind over there in his cabin on the banks of Walden Pond. Anyway, here is 'our' spike, seen against one of my cookbooks for scale.The past is all around us, no doubt about that! Now if I could just talk to Thoreau, or Emerson, or Walt Whitman, or my girl Emily D. over the road there in Amherst. Where do they go, the dead, the silent dead?

Snowday Epiphanies

It takes a lot to slow us Americans down, no matter what the weather does. We stand at bus stops, profiles to the wind like those big-domed heads on Easter Island. We churn along snowy roads. We crane our necks in subway stations watching for the light on that first train car to lumber into view.  But if the governor says, “stay home,” we stay home. Anyway, the schools are closed and even the officious bureaucrats have to acknowledge that they too are ‘non-essential personnel’.And so there we all are on these snowdays, walled up in our houses for the duration.And it’s hard, at first, to stop spinning our wheels.  We go out and shovel, or try to anyway. We probe holes in the snow for the dryer vent. We probe holes for the car’s exhaust pipe, in the event that we’re ever be able to drive again, which prospect looks pretty doubtful with everything we own getting swaddled in filaments of white like flies by giant spiders. Then, trekking back indoors, we begin on the small household jobs we always forget we have waiting for us.In the snowdays just past, I catalogued old photos, sliding them into albums I had bought for the purpose nearly a decade ago. 

• I sorted through many perfectly fine articles of clothing I somehow never wear, and bagged them up to give to Goodwill.
• I went through my mother’s old collection of recipes clipped from the newspapers of the 50s, 60s and 70s and smiled at the easy, guilt-free way people cooked before food preparation became a competitive sport. ( “For Hearty Fisherman’s Stew,” one recipe begins,  “take a can each of Campbell’s Cream of Celery Soup, Campbell’s Lobster Bisque and Campbell’s Clam Chowder adding to these three canfuls of cream…”)
• I climbed to the attic and knelt by that old cabinet that holds all my mother’s diaries and read every single entry she made in the last three months of a life none of us knew was about to go to black as abruptly as that famous final episode of The Sopranos.

 But ‘Enough of this clerk work!’  I finally told myself. ‘Enough with this peering and the sorting!'I drew a bath and sat in the hot soapy water for a full 40 minutes, considering things - and realized, as I studied my feet, that they look exactly as they looked when I sat in the tub at age three while my mother worked a busy washcloth between my toes.That made me smile and I felt my own inner clockworks slow down at last. I stopped obsessing about how we would ever dig out; stopped fretting over how I would meet my obligations and get to the places I needed to get to in the days ahead.Then, with the bath drained and me once again dressed, I went into the kitchen and began rummaging among the canned goods - to find there slumbering after all these years, the making of a ‘stew’ of my own, from those trusty soups in the red-and-white cans. I had Cream of Tomato, I had Cream of Mushroom and I had Cream of Chicken. It was 1960 again.  And it began to look to me as though  old William Faulkner hit the nail on the head when he said, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.”  What at though, eh? Now WHERE did I put mom's old frilly apron again? 

Happy V Day! Here, Let Me Stab You to Death

Here's an ominous Valentines Day symbol for ya: Check out this video taken from our study window just now. I video'd it instead of just snapping a picture because... it's SWAYING in this stiff winter wind. LOOK OUT BELOW! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmn3SXck-B8&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

Memory Distorts: The Winter of '64

Memory sure distorts. I could have sworn the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show the same night I had that party where nearly 60 kids showed up and, as my diary, tells me, "ground chips into the rug, dumped sandwiches on chairs, tore books, spilled Cokes, flicked ashes, broke the television (Freddy fixed it), broke the glass punch ladle etc." Maybe you can make out the writing for yourself down below here.I also had the memory that, as the Beatles sang and the party roared on, some of the more poorly behaved boys, the ones who arrived smoking, were seen holding a bottle of Clorox. I know that the next morning I found out my little pet alligator dead, his ivory tummy thrown to the sky  in the shallow water of his enamel tub which smelled suspiciously like a swimming pool. (The party was held in our basement where the washer and dryer were, as well as the clothesline, which we took down for the night. (Clotheslines! Remember clotheslines?))It’s true all this happened but it wasn’t the Beatles-on-Ed Sullivan night at all. The party was on January 4, 1964 whereas the big night on NBC was February 9 of that year as we were all told again and again yesterday.How I blush to see what I revealed of myself in that diary: the way I was 'auditioning' one boyfriend and easing out another at age 14. The way I so callously described my mother’s poor bloody hand when she climbed up over the counter where we folded the clothes, hoisted the sash of the window she was bent on polishing for this silly party with one hand and then – too late – saw that same sash slam down onto her other hand. I only say that it ‘bled disgustingly’ but  even at the time I remember my heart swelling with love and gratitude to her for trying to make things nice for me and help me work my way in to the big new school.Here’s my favorite picture of the pre-Ringo Beatles, just as they were just starting out – and here at the top, obviously, is that diary entry too. Long time passing since those days all right!

Why I Love Boardwalk

Speaking of TV shows as we were the other day, the show I find I like best is Boardwalk Empire.Not, I suspect, for the usual reasons. I don’t like it because I find Gillian a fascinating character.Though I do.She ran a house of prostitution but really did seem to insist in maintaining an atmosphere of courtliness there. Think how appalled she was when Lucky Luciano’s men were seen to be taking their pleasure right there in the drawing room.I also don’t like it because of Steve Buscemi  with his wildly protruding eyeteeth, though I’m a big fan of those teeth. Without them could he possibly have risen in the world of film? Back in 1990’s in The Usual Suspects they made him seem only laughable. Then in The Sopranos when his character Tony Blundetto was getting out of prison and trying to start his life over as a massage therapist they seemed strangely sweet. Now as the corrupt, icy-eyed puppetmaster Enoch Thompson the teeth make him seem above all petty concerns like vanity. Nucky has his eye on the prize; with his wife and child long dead, nothing else even appears on his radar.  The truth is, I like the show for its interiors.I practically faint with nostalgia at the sight of those living rooms. The wallpapers alone! The davenports and easy chairs! Even the draperies, as they are properly called. (My mom would narrow her eyes with contempt if anyone in our house dared call them ‘drapes’.) I love the rooms in Boardwalk because they look just like the rooms I grew up in.  My grandfather purchased our family home for his new wife Grace, three long years after the sudden death of his bride Carrie  who was Grace's loving sister. Carrie had wide cheekbones and electric blue eyes and she died at 31 carrying the couple’s fifth child. This new bride Grace was older when she came to marry my grandfather. She was 30 and a dedicated schoolteacher. She didn’t want to leave her students – she said so in many a letter to this man who was courting her but in 1913 no teacher could stay in the classroom once she had married.This is my grandfather Michael Sullivan:He bought this house for that former schoolteacher and his four little children, who were 4 and 5,and 6 and 8.Then two years later they had a child of their own....and with five little ones together and a house with such a nice front porch life was good. I know because I have read all the diaries.Then, tragically,  this happy wife Grace died just after turning 40,And the house? The house fell under a spell.Thirty-five year later, when I came to live there, with our grandfather an old man by then, and his two ancient sisters-in-law still there and now my big sister Nan and our mom, the place looked exactly the same as it did around 1920, because, as I believe, no one had the heart to redecorate it.And so in some crazy way, when I see the interiors on Boardwalk I think “I’m home!” I think that  my  gentle grandfather is reading one of his many histories of the Republic in his wing chair, and the two great-aunts are shuffling about, making jam and clucking over the news of the world. Our mom is working from home every day trying to prop up a failing business and Nan and I are happily lowering baskets of stuffed animals suspended by a string of tied-together scarves from the third floor banister clear down to the entry hall so many steps away.This was the 'best' living room as we called it in the late 1950s. Maybe you can see what I mean.Where is the past then? Where are those faces? Washed away now, like the footprints Atlantic City’s Nucky Thompson leaves in the sand just off his boardwalk.And yet I have that circular mirror you see on the wall, and  Nan has that desk. I have that little round tip table and my girl Annie has those chairs I even have all the books in the bookcases even, and the very same pink paper on my walls. Everything, in short but those people and how I do miss them. How I do miss them today.

These Children

These children I talked about Monday: somebody said they look like they all wanted i-Pods instead of the toys they are holding. Funny!I just wish I could find the actual photo of them because these two images here are from a charcoal based upon a tiny snapshot from 1910. Thus it is not a photograph of nameless children like you'd pluck from a bin and buy for a dollar at some antique store. These were unique and particular creatures, as we all are.Take this dubious-looking one with the old telephone. Some 40 years after this picture was taken she caught that old train bound for Conception mere moments before the last egg dropped down her tubes to make her my mom. “The oldest mother in America,” she called herself, though she didn’t seem old to us kids.Only kind of strong.Only kind of kick-ass, in the nicest possible way.Still, she couldn’t spank us to save her life. Only once did she start after us with a hairbrush to tan our hides. Then she saw herself, a woman 50 chasing a couple of primary school kids around a table. "You little hooligans!" she cried, then sat down and gave herself over to laughter.That's what she did all her life with her brothers and sisters: she laughed. They all laughed, all the time.The boy on the left was the funniest one, though he wasn't trying to be funny when he signed his letter to Santa that year “Your friend James, a fat six-year-old boy.” He was just offering Santa the description. I remember him making his siblings laugh until they cried when they were all in their 60s and he began recalling memories from the nineteen-teens. “It was one of those Saturdays when Pa took us all to that doctor in East Boston to have our nostrils cleaned out,” he was saying and how his siblings roared. We all did. (But did their father really do that? Possibly. Dramatic interventions of a health-restoring sort were huge at the start of the last century as far as I can tell from my reading. According to this dad’s diaries, every time anybody sneezed it was enemas all around.)And this seated child, the one with the broad cheeks holding the train?He was sweetness itself. When my mother started kindergarten in 1912, he could just imagine how scared she would be and so went clear to the edge of the Boy’s side of the schoolyard, himself a little first grader, and held her hand all through Recess.He came and lived with my mother and aunt for a while when Alzheimer’s was just beginning to trip him up. He kept going to the hall closet to fetch his hat and start out the door. "Rob, where are you going?" his alarmed sisters would ask. “Down to the courthouse to argue a case of course," he would reply mildly. He had been a lawyer earlier in life, when he was a dead ringer for To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch as played by Gregory Peck.In the actual snapshot, which I promise I will look for, there were five children smiling in front of the tree. The artist son chose not to portray them, even though he did not know as he chose that they were the cousins; that they were not the people from whom he is himself descended.I guess that’s enough to say for now. If I start on how their young mother had just died the previous summer I will surely go on too long. That's the difference between the writer and the artist maybe. The writer can really empty the dictionary on an idea, and still bring you no closer to understanding it. With the artist though, it's another way.

Sad

I was so sad yesterday. In the supermarket, on the road, my eyes kept filling with tears and why? Because I hurt my ankle at dawn in the darkened driveway trying to get Uncle Ed’s wheelchair into my car? Because when I went to get him for his bloodwork he said he felt ‘bereft’ during the whole six days I was gone, causing me to feel I let him down? Because that's what we all do, let down the people we love who love us back even with our annoying habit of leaving the cabinet doors open as we cook?Maybe I’m sad because HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” ended last night and I just loved it, the way they got so much right about the year 1920. I once taught a course on the Twenties in America, so I know something about the era. The main thing I know is what that First World War did to people, which you see so clearly in the character of Jimmy Darmody: he has quite simply lost his humanity. (His hideously disfigured friend and fellow-vet Richard Harrow has the same problem only his wounds show.)How can people recover from such an experience? I heard a segment on This American Life about a child who had been in a Romanian orphanage until he was seven, literally tied in a crib with no stimulation, no human engagement... The couple who adopted him were at wit’s end by the time he was in adolescence; he was that violent. Then this adoptive mother underwent a special kind of therapy to bond her with her son the same way an infant bonds with its mother: by having the two gaze fixedly into one another’s eyes for hours at a time. It is an amazing and hopeful story.Maybe I was just sad because of my own mother's death and I shouldn’t really look on that loss as I did here yesterday. Maybe if I lie on my back now she and all my dear ones will come, the way Billy Collins says they do in this 30-second clip, pausing above us to watch til we sleep:[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3474890035450021520#]

THE DEAD by Billy Collins

The dead are always looking down on us, they say.while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heavenas they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,they think we are looking back at them,which makes them lift their oars and fall silentand wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

Dazzled

I just learned that a houseguest is coming here tonight and last Friday a bird was swooping around on the third floor where I would put him. It finally wormed its way under the door and ended up in the attic crawl-space and I walked away fast, hoping he’d find his way out under the eaves. Point is I'm still scared to go up there so today at 6am I entered this little 2nd-floor room not slept in since last Christmas when all 8 of our young'uns were home for the holidays.I walked in there this morning and was dazzled by light that in summer only comes in for maybe 30 minutes right after sun-up.The sight just dazed me and seemed to nudge me off my moorings. Were all these things here before?The old bureau?My grandfather’s specs resting upon it?And here again is my sweet first girl smiling up at me and my how I loved her in that dress!And above the bureau and to the right a picture of my own little family of origin in the frame that will never hang straight.

What is this place with tokens of both the 1880s and the 1980s, the dear dead past and the dazzling present? I have many tasks to accomplish today, checking on that poor bird being only the first - but how could I not first come here to you and show you what I saw just after dawn on this midsummer morning?Maybe the tile on this novel which was sitting right here explains it. The Notebook of Lost Things it says.

But are they lost really? I think they are just out of sight.

me with our mom and my big sister Nan

Glory Days

There’s nothing nicer than going to somebody else’s high school reunion because you can just relax and watch it all unfold. No one is looking for you or at you and except for when people hand you their cameras and ask you to take their picture you’re just on the sidelines.

This was David’s reunion that we went to last night. He was Class President which meant that when he walked into that function room a beefy guy yelled “Marotta!” and began loudly humming 'Hail to the Chief, ' which  of course  turned David redder than a sunset.  Then, when he heard he was the one meant to stand up and make the welcoming remarks, he immediately took his bottle of Budweiser and tried to lose himself in a knot of guys all laughing about some crazy long-ago stunt down at the Cape. He’s still pretty shy is the truth of it.“He’s just like he was!” one woman said to me later. "Just always quiet like that, and nice!" His theory? People liked him because he was quiet; because that way they could attribute all these good qualities to him.Well I’ve live with the man for 40 years, and except for that one football game when, thoroughly padded and helmeted, he punched a kid square in the face, he has never done a mean thing to anyone.  (And there’s more to that story too: At game’s end, kids from the losing team's side leaped from the stands and raced onto the field. One grabbed him from behind and swung. It’s just that when Dave swung back the Boston Herald got the picture and put it on the front page of the Sunday paper.We have that picture around here somewhere, in a scrapbook assembled by his high school girlfriend. If I can I’ll find it and put it up here too, as a companion to this picture, of how he looked the summer I met him, a mere three years after the Glory Days at Medford High.

It's My Birthday

I’m having a great birthday so far - it’s not quite 3:00 as I write this. When we first woke up today David patted me the way you’d pat a dog. “Old TT,” he said. “Another year older.” Catchin’ up to you old man,” I said back. Then I saw that my friend Bobbie had written about me on her blog which I always love reading.  Then my big sister Nan called and we talked for a good 40 minutes. “Happy Birthday Wormhead!" she said. Then she reminisced about when I was two and she buried me in the back yard in one of those set-in-the-ground garbage cans you opened by stepping on this rusty little pedal. Then she described some people she met who were drinking what she called “Pop-Skull Vodka and Tang" and "had children who looked like they were straight out of that movie Deliverance." Then for good measure she recalled the time I wandered off at age three and the cops carried some other poor lost kid up the front porch steps and into to our house instead of me. I was missing for hours. Our mom and aunt, our ancient great aunties and our grandfather - everyone we lived  with in short: all were frantic and even looked in that sunken garbage can but as far as I can remember - and I remember this incident vividly - no one ever talked about how it was for little Nan, five, to lose her baby sister. She said for the first time today, “I was beside myself. I was a MESS.”Well I’d be beside myself if I didn’t have Nan in my life. And our cousin Sheil who texted me from outside the country just before midnight last night. And our cousin Kath who sent a card AND a Facebook message. And all those other wonderful Facebook friends. And our boy Mike who called from Brooklyn. And old Dave who picks up after me and never gets mad even when I flood the place by leaving the water on. And our niece Joanie due over in an hour along with our girls and the grandbabies. And Bobbie too, always Bobbie, and now Bobbie’s old pal Maggie from camp who I am getting to know here on the internet better and in a more heartfelt way than ever I knew her at good old Fernwood in the Berkshires where we were all young together.It’s 3:30 now and I insisted on picking up lobster for this little feast so I better go. Hope all of you out there in Radioland are having as nice a day as I am!

What Kids See

The day before last you’d have had to tunnel under your house to feel as low as I did: The dead and the little children of the dead and babies cradled in their coffined mothers’ arms, gad!  If you missed that post it’s right here. But today, with Nature shining an  innocent sun down on us here in Boston even as She kicks the states to the south square in the pants, I feel hopeful - maybe because of this great picture I found yesterday.These are the children whose young mother died when the little one was still in her high chair. That’s Julia, in the middle there, who turned out to be about the funniest person who ever lived. And look how happy Robert and James seem. Only my mom still looks sad who was the world’s second funniest person and always said she photographed badly anyway with what she called her ‘rotten-down-turning mouth.'But look at the mischief in little Julia’s face!  And I know James 'came back' pretty quick because the Christmas after the death he gaily signed his letter to Santa, “James Sullivan, a fat six-year-old boy,”  (this in an era when it was considered safer to have some extra flesh. )So I ask you: what can children see that the rest of us can't? And how can we acquire vision like theirs?

Not Gone

On a summer morning in 1910, a young father rode the train with a heavy heart. His young wife  was two weeks dead and he could not imagine how he would comfort their four small children. At the time of her death, Carrie was at her childhood home with the babies,  which is why Michael found himself on the train each week, out from the city on Friday and back again on Monday. They were all together on the Fourth of July weekend when she took sick so suddenly and died within hours, calling their names.Now, on this Monday morning train, he was trying to write his little ones a cheerful letter which his dead wife’s sisters would have to read aloud to them young as they were. The boys were four and six and to them he wrote,  “You are such good little fellows to write your papa every night. I will be up again next weekend and we’ll play and play!” The girls were two-and-a-half and 17 months and to the older, called Callie, he said “Be kind to your little sister Julia and teach her how to walk and talk.”I know because this man Michael saved every single piece of correspondence from those days. I know it because he did not die young but lived into a wise old age as the grandfather in whose peaceful home I passed my earliest years. But mostly I know it because in my family we tell all the stories, and the sad ones especially, because doing so helps us make sense of what has befallen us.Now, a century later, I visit the place where Carrie is buried. I stand over her grave peering so intently I sometimes think I can almost see her down there, still so young at 31, together with something tucked into the crook of her arm just before the lid of her coffin was nailed down  tight: her stillborn child, unnamed and unmentioned in all six newspapers that carried the news of her passing.I have long understood that my two girls find this story moving but I did not realize until recently that my son might find it moving too.  I discovered as much when I saw the five large charcoals he made as part of his Honors thesis in his final semester of college.They are immense and highly detailed drawings, all based on tiny photographs taken by that same train-riding Michael. My son maintains that they're mostly studies in form and texture but I can't believe they are only that to him. Especially I can’t believe it when I look at the life-sized drawing above, which all but stops my heart every time I come upon it. For these are the four little children themselves, only months before fate rendered them motherless. They're standing on tiptoe to peer out an open window and looking more real and alive than any mere photo ever could ever reveal: bald Julia in her high chair; the toddler Callie, who would one day grow up to become my mother; Little James and littler Robert, both squinting manfully into a lowering sun. Their father Michael is taking the picture which I know because I recognize the shadow of his hatted head. It lies across the house’s lower left hand corner, just as ominous thin shadows of a large tree darken the whole other side of the drawing.Their young mum does not show in this picture, but anyone looking at it can sense her there. Having gathered her little ones at the open window and pulled aside the curtain, she has leaned back and away from children and camera both, as she would all too soon do forever, until her face, and scent, and touch would be forgotten by them entirely, even by the former six-year-old James who, during his final hospitalization, told me he could remember her from the back only, as with silver brushes, in a bedroom in 1910, she combed and dressed her long brown hair.Some say the dead are dead and we should let them go and live life forward. For me though it is another way, because if they are truly gone, then why can we so sharply sense them at times, as if behind the thinnest of curtains? Why can we can feel them right here, only shrinking shyly from our sight, as if in respect for our busy living?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I post this piece for my grandfather, Michael, who died February 3, 1958. and also for young Carrie,  great-grandmother to my girl Carrie who I like to think is now living out some of her dreams.Born here as a first generation American, Michael went back to Ireland in 1899 to look up relatives. This is he on shipboard.

...and this is a picture of Carrie on her wedding day, taken by her groom. I love it for that human squint and because it's one of only two photos I have of her smiling so big that her teeth show. They are just like the teeth of my mother who I still  miss so much.

Freud Called!

Ohhhh! NOW I get what that dream meant the other night! It meant the past is out of sight, forgotten very nearly, the repository of lost things that live just above us there, untouched by time, relying on virtual sources of nourishment (and, to hear the cat tell it, episodic benders.)The walls down where we live grow suddenly wet and sometimes water runs clear across the floor because …well, because that’s how those Snow’s of Yesteryear are: they sometimes melt and trickle down and catch us all by surprise in the little Chamber of Forgetting that is the present moment.My slaughtered cat is up there living along as if coyotes were never created, and the ugly red curtains I made when we were too poor for real curtains, and all these big standing houseplants I bought to disguise the fact that we had no furniture..... Ah but it’s all there, our memories of the lovely young Sophia Loren below, and Linda Hamilton above with her killer muscles, oh and the young Jack Kennedy before steroids squirreled his cheeks out and of course, of course, of course Jayne Mansfield, seen here with Sophia who had scant reason to look enviously at anyone before Jayne came along: Resplendent Jayne before Death came and took her in that car wreck.

In Memoriam

It was bright and sunny three hours ago when my husband David’s Uncle Ed said he wanted to go to the cemetery where his wife Fran lies. He just had to see the grave he said, tired as he was from our trip to the dentist, but for some reason we just couldn't find it, in spite of my sprinting down the grassy lanes like some kind of loony Irish setter.Uncle Ed is 89 and can’t walk on smooth surfaces never mind rough ones so I left him in the car as I did this; but it must have irked him that I kept coming up empty because at one point I looked back from some 100 yards away and there he was, handing himself tentatively along between the monuments.The thing is, Auntie Fran is buried right next to the grave I still think of as David’s father’s grave though his mother Ruth is there now too. Ralph Marotta sickened in his early 40s and was gone by 45 when his second son was a carefree 12 and the next brothers down were only nine and six. Ruth never told any of her four boys that their father was dying - those were different days, is all - and only big brother Toby, 15, seemed to understand. He  remembers him leaving for his final trip to the hospital; he remembers going to sit in his lap and kiss him goodbye.There’s more to this story, which I can tell on another such brilliant day that all too soon goes down to darkness but for now I will only say How we miss them: Pretty Aunt Fran seen here on her wedding night pointing mischievously to the bed. Meek-seeming Ruth Payne Marotta who was secretly made of steel and didn’t care what anyone thought. She modeled such great courage for me, a daughter-in-law scarce out of her teens.With his extra weight and congestive heart failure Uncle Ed knows well that he will soon be here himself. Maybe he just wanted to be sure that on future days I would know just where to find him.Go back now through these lines  and click on every word that's a different color, 'lit up' in hypertext and see their pictures up close: Uncle Ed with little David long ago, and Fran, and Ruth when all were young and the world was new and the grass was ever greening.

What Dressing Rooms?

I’m not done with the topic of fashion quite yet. Forget that whole post about the fashionistas, let’s talk Real World. My Real World truth is this:  I don’t care how popular Mad Men is, I don’t want to dress the way women they did in the early 60s. I did it once and the results weren’t pretty. That’s my mom on the left. That’s me beside her in the Porky Pig hat, I know, say no more, right? I wasn’t set free until the day came when I could  choose my own clothes and ride all the way to Boston on the train to do it, landing – where else? at Filene’s Basement where females dug fast as foxhounds through bins of newly discounted apparel and changed outfits right out there in the open.Filenes Basement closed in the summer of ’07, that wonderful get-it-for-a-song store in the bowels of its 1910 Boston building and for years as much of a tourist destination as the Paul Revere House over in the North End, as familiar to visitors as the Cheers bar just across the Common. I wasn’t much more than three the first time Mom took us there on a mission to buy her two little girls the ensemble that was the ‘look’ for all little girls in that far more formal era: a knee-length wool  coat, leggings to match and a little beaked hat. I remember we met Mom’s old friend and her two little boys at the Public Garden after, had a ride on the famous Swan Boats, had ice cream sundaes at Schrafft’s, then went to this woman’s apartment where the three-year-old peed on my leg, using this funny little faucet he pulled down his tiny trousers to find. It was my introduction to the difference between the sexes, the great engine that drives our small and weak species to keep on keepin’ on.Impelled by this same engine, I went back to that great den of bargains again and again in my high school years. It was there that my groom bought the suit  he wore on  our wedding day; there that that I bought the dress I wore that whole summer, a true flower- child frock which I loved with all my heart though it was so short I couldn’t sit down in it.Those were the days all right. Here’s a look-back. Watch it and weep.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joI288b2ByA&feature=related]

Where Going?

Our guide warned us the minute we began picking our way among the rubble on the ancient isle of Delos: we could Look Where We were GOING or we could Look Where We WERE, lest we stumble - ‘bite the dust,’ as Homer said to describe what happens in battle. (Picture it: crying out in anguish as the solider falls and sees his mouth suddenly stuffed full with the muck undefoot.)For the hour I spent in Delos's museum I did only the Look Where You ARE Thing, living fully in the present as I gazed at this statue and the curve of its supple back. Like most moderns I spend much of my time Looking Where I'm GOING Thing, thinking “What next?” and “After that?” and “If the rain falls?”, “If I miss the train?” If I lose my job?”If I’m honest though I’ll admit I spend most of my time Looking Back. Where is my mother who I think of every day, even these 22 years after her death? Where are the kitchens of my childhood, my baby feet in my naps as I so clearly remember seeing them? Where are they now? Where is this young person caught in stone? This couple of the exquisite garments? Where ? Where ?

May You Rest Now, Ted; You Felt Like My Brother

I wanted to go last might but it was 9:00 before I got free and could I do it really? Stand in the dark for hours with the temps down in the 50s and the wind off the water the way it always is?I wanted to go so badly because I had just realized for the first time that the same number of years separate Ted Kennedy and me as once separated him and his oldest brother.We could have been siblings, Teddy and I.In a way I felt that we were:I mean, his people are buried in the same cemetery as my people. As I recently wrote his sister, the slow one, attended the summer  camp my  family owned and ran. His dad came through Boston Latin School, same as my mom. His grandfather was Mayor of Boston and my grandfather ran for that office, though the other Irish called him Yankee-on-the-inside and a traitor to his race, just because he was upright and bold and fought the abuses of that famous old scoundrel James Michael Curley. For years my grandfather was Chairman of the Boston FinCom and of the Boston School Committee too and a first-generation American with roots in County Kerry, born of a woman who could not read or write English. And yet he studied and he learned and he studied some more and before he was 35 he was not only a Boston lawyer of note but a judge too, and the individual whose honorary degree from Harvard then-President Lowell said had given him the most pleasure to confer.My sister Nan and I grew up in this grandfather’s house. I thought he was our father until Nan set me straight. (He can't be our dad! He has white hair, stupid!" Certainly he acted as a father to us – that is until the day he fell and was taken away and showed up eight weeks later in a polished box looking thin and wholly unrecognizable with a nose like a plow-blade. “That’s not him,” Nan snorted before turning away from the casket and scooping up a pile of prayer cards which she used to invent elaborate games for us in the far-back rooms of that grand old funeral home in Kenmore Square.I last saw Ted Kennedy in person on a fall day when I met Bill Clinton who had flown into Logan. He stood off to one side looking like his back hurt. I first saw him in 1960 at a political rally addressed by then-Speaker-of-the-House John McCormack. I was just nine years old at the time but I still remember old McCormack pointing his bony finger at Nan and me in the front row. “THESE young ladies down front!” he thundered in some future-invoking burst of rhetoric. That same fall, our Uncle Jack drove us to Manchester NH the night before Teddy’s big brother was elected President. I got to touch the great man’s shirtfront; Nan got to shake the great man's hand.Forty years later my girl Annie worked in Ted’s office in spring semester of her junior year at Smith. One day she was sent downstairs to get him his lunch and when she was just boarding the elevator back up, here came Massachusetts' other Senator John Kerry, with a large retinue of aids and assistants.They crowded in, almost crushing her in the corner. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me!” she said,  fixing Kerry with a look of mock-outrage. “What I have here is the SENIOR  Senator’s lunch!”  (She’s always been like that, this Annie of ours: breezy and funny and joking around with the cops and custodians and all.)“The Senior Senator’s lunch eh?” said Kerry, catching the spirit of the banter. Well I HOPE IT'S A SALAD!"Annie’s impression of the man lying in state today? That he was universally respected on Capitol Hill; that he was universally loved.Part of me wishes Ted would be buried in Holyhood Cemetery near my mother and grand-father; near his own mom and his rascally dad and his poor sad sister Rosemary whom he never abandoned.But he will lie beneath the sod at Arlington National.He will be near his real brothers, this pretend big brother of mine. And when you recall the catch in his throat every time he spoke of them you have no doubt that there is where he should lie.Requiescat in pacem, as we all so often in a world now vanished forever.  Et lux perpetua luceat eum.

I took this on Kalmus Beach  Hyannis just the other day

"The Dead Beatle"

It seems I’m not through with Paul yet. I’ve been thinking of him so much I  dug out the interview he gave to The New Yorker in ’07, just before the debut of Memory Almost Full in which he spoke about the amazement he feels when he looks back on his life:"There were four people in the Beatles and I was one of them. There were two people in the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team and I was one of them. I mean right there that’s enough for anyone’s life.  There was one guy who wrote ‘Yesterday’ and I was him. One guy who wrote ‘Let it Be,’  ‘Fool on the Hill,” ‘Lady Madonna' – and I was him too. all of these things would be enough for anyone’s life so to be involved in all of them is pretty surprising. And you have to pinch yourself."Well I have to pinch myself too, but more to keep back the tears as I read and listen. They were so gifted, all of them, such wonderful songwriters, Paul and John, though neither could read or write music. They were each just 15 when they met and George was even younger when Paul noticed him on the school bus with his Presley-like hairdo. Turned out the kid could play the guitar like nobody’s business. And then came Ringo and the rest was history.It’s six days now since I saw him in Boston. He’ll be in Atlanta soon. But he’s right here now in this song “The End of the End” about the day he dies. It comes with more great photos and also his best mate’s tune “Isolation.” Words below the clip this time too. Once again, get out your hankies.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dczjgl-Vus8]

At the end of the endIt's the start of a journeyTo a much better placeAnd this wasn't badSo a much better placewould have to be specialNo need to be sad

On the day that I die I'd like jokes to be toldAnd stories of old to be rolled out like carpetsThat children have played onAnd laid on while listening to stories of old

At the end of the endIt's the start of a journeyTo a much better placeAnd a much better placeWould have to be specialNo reason to cry

On the day that I die I'd like bells to be rungAnd songs that were sung to be hung out like blanketsThat lovers have played onAnd laid on while listening to songs that were sung

At the end of the endIt's the start of a journeyTo a much better placeAnd a much better placeWould have to be specialNo reason to cryNo need to be sadAt the end of the end

McCartney at Fenway Park

He walked out on the stage and the crowd roared. The guy on my left said “I paid $240 for my ticket but what is he, like 70? I mean this could be it!” The guy on my right said “My God he’s playing that same Hofner bass he played with the Beatles in those clubs in Hamburg in the early 60's!” Then I think I lost hold of normal day-to-day consciousness as the man began to play - over 30 songs right in a row, no break, hardly any sweat especially after he took of his sleek snug jacket to play in his white Oxford style shirt with the red suspenders.

Paul McCartney isn’t 70 of course, though he isn't 28 like in this picture. He’s only 67, with a perfectly flat stomach and no love handles whatsoever. His hair is the color of a fine Canadian whiskey and just a wee bit thin at the crown which you can see when he bows deep. Only his jowls and pouches at the mouth show the years. “Wonder why he doesn’t get a face lift,” said the guy on my right but if he did I think he'd look SO young that his tributes to his two dead mates might not have the same effect: his tribute to George with the photo montage of Harrison as a boy, as a handsome bearded man, as the talented elder still making music until his recent death; and of course his tribute to John, his writing partner, who he loved and was furious with and split from and loved just the same until that bullet in 1980 took him at only 40. The song he wrote his first best friend says it all. It’s called 'Here Today' and let me stop here and we can see him sing it with the the lyrics under it, a testimony if ever there was one:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3anmTfa5OPw]

And if I say I really knew you wellWhat would your answer be.If you were here today.Ooh- ooh- ooh- here to - day.Well knowing you,You’d probably laugh and say that we were worlds apart.If you were here today.Ooh- ooh- ooh- here to - day.But as for me,I still remember how it was before.And I am holding back the tears no more.Ooh- ooh- ooh- I love you, ooh-What about the time we met,Well I suppose that you could say that we were playing hard to get.Didn’t understand a thing.But we could always sing.What about the night we cried,Because there wasn’t any reason left to keep it all inside.Never understood a word.But you were always there with a smile.And if I say I really loved youAnd was glad you came along.If you were here today.Ooh- ooh- ooh- for you were in my song. Ooh- ooh- ooh- here today.

No TALKING to My Friends! Mum!

I drove 400 miles in six hours’ time and then kept myself awake until midnight yesterday so I could send a Happy Birthday text to someone whose fate was closely linked to my own in a delivery room once. Drove from Boston clear to Albany and back to record seven  ‘commentaries’ for  Northeast Public Radio, to me the best Pubic Radio station in the whole country hands down.

One of these pieces I offer below here, because it's about this boy of mine. Its tenderness makes me blush a little, but how can I not return nostalgically to those days, as someone who is still trying to get used to the fact that he’s not nearby anymore? The fact  that he doesn’t bang in the back door like his big sisters do, cracking open a beer and talking a mile a minute?

~ Sigh ~  Anyway, here’s who that boy was in the 8th grade. Who I thought he was anyway. Who we all were maybe:

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They say boys separate from their fathers either by beating them at what the dads do best or refusing to compete at all. How girls separate from their moms I remember well. Our oldest used to spend hours talking on the phone in my home office and writing little notes on my all my stuff. (“I’m not writing on your stuff” these notes sometimes said) but about how a boy separates from his mom I know only this: It’s isn’t quick and it isn’t easy.When my boy was 12 he thought I was the best thing since Tic Tacs. I used to go into his school every year to talk about Writing From Personal Experience, maybe even get the kids to try it.First we’d loosen up by telling stories, like the one about how my underpants fell down when I was seven. I was the Flag Bearer at a full-dress Flag Raising ceremony, with nary a hand to spare lest Old Glory touch the ground, when the elastic snapped and those little panties descended – and fast.Kids love stuff like this, and before we knew it, everyone in the class was laughing, and no one more than my own child.But by the time he turned 13 I just seemed to embarrass him.His teacher called up that year to ask If I’d help chaperone a field trip to see “Romeo and Juliet” on stage. I quick switched some appointments and jumped at the chance.Michael left the room when he heard the news.“OK, a few ground rules,“ he said on his return:  “No talking to anyone. No sitting near me in the theater. No explaining the play to the kids beside you.”Well, I failed on all three counts. We tried again with the carpools-to-out-of-town-soccer-games issue.“Parents don’t talk when they do these carpools!” he said through gritted teeth. “They just drive and keep quiet.”I failed again - repeatedly even.  He just needed a little distance, maybe.He got it that summer, He went away to a camp in the Berkshires called Emerson , a camp that happens to be on the same 130 acres as the one I went to for 11 years, owned by my family and called Fernwood in those years.Halfway though his time there we went to visit him.He was making some separation progress anyway:  a child who for years refused to even pick up a tennis racquet at his father’s invitation suddenly said, “Dad! Want to volley?” When they rejoined his sisters and me the two of them were  smiling, if winded. “I’m awesome!” reported the son. “I crushed him!” said his father.“Hey, Mike!” I spoke up then. “Let’s you and I walk over to the girls’ cabins.” I wanted to see if my name was still there, carved high in the rafters.“Are you kidding?  I’m not allowed to go there!”“C’mon it’s Family Day!” I said. “Even the girls cabins will be crawling with males! And if they ask, I’ll tell them I went to camp here.” And I started on alone.Suddenly he was right there beside me. “OK, go to Bunk J,” he said, walking fast. “Quick, got a pen?” he said. I gave him one. “I’ll stand guard,” I said. Then he ducked into the empty bunk, stood on a girl’s trunk, and amid 60 years worth of names, wrote “Mike Marotta” in bold caps high on the cabin wall.“A fine influence YOU are!” said his dad when we got back and reported the deed. My boy and I just traded a little smile I remember. And all I could think was “maybe we’ll separate next year.”