That's MISTER Jackass to You

Heard onboard ship as four individuals find themselves lingering for a moment in a stateroom corridor:Passenger One, pleasantly, after introductions: So what is your husband’s name?Passenger Two: Jackass.Passenger One, not having heard quite right:  I’m sorry? You say your husband isn't traveling with you?Passenger Two:  Nah Jackass left me years ago for his secretary.Merry laughter all around.

Dress Up Or Dress Down?

"Innnn your Ea-ea-easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it..." Remember that song from a million years ago? Remember when we all dressed up smartly come spring, the little boys in  blazers and the little girls in sherbet-colored dresses with matching ankle socks and hats? Oh and we wore little Mary Janes too!  My sister and I would bring our new Mary Janes to our grandfather reading in the wingchair of his bedroom and he would take out his pocket knife and scratch up the soles a bit, making it harder for us to slip and go down in all our ruffled finery.I’ll admit I miss those days, living as we do in an era air when people saunter onto airplanes wearing their pajama bottoms and clutching their bed pillows. I miss the days when we sat up straight while traveling on public conveyances. I miss the time when gloves covered the hands of many ladies, sometimes even the hands of the flight attendant. I know I wore white gloves to a job interview at age 19, just because it was spring and the dress I wore seemed to cry out for those them.Now of course all has changed and women rarely even wear dresses - well, besides the poor young meteorologists who are made to stand in profile in skin-tight sheaths against the weather systems they're gesturing at on the swirling screens behind them.For the last 30 I've been walking around in workout wear much of the time. Get up, pull on the gym clothes and get at that workout: that was the idea. Nike built a whole logo around it.But then, just today on Facebook, I saw a picture of a high school friend’s wife. She is slim. She is attractive. But when I clicked on the photo to make it bigger and saw the look of those under-carriage-clinging yoga pants I had my own Road to Damascus moment. I came to realize something and that something is this: The only person who go every got away with wearing such tight pants was Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie in the old Dick Van Dyke show.Something for me to keep in mind as I sally forth in the months and years ahead.So yesterday was Easter and for Easter I wore a crisp silk shirt, a long swingy skirt, a favorite pair of outback-looking boots and a kind of Indiana Jones fedora. I felt pretty good setting our for our relatives' house. I felt I had risen to the occasion.Of course it was hot yesterday.Way hot. So hot the cheeses all puddled - AND we were out in the bright hot sun for most of the day.Almost immediately, I tossed the hat under a table lost the boots 30 minutes later and 30 minutes after that slithered out of the pantyhose by ducking behind a tree and working fast. THEN I could really enjoy the day!Let's watch these two stars showing off their finery while singing that old chestnut of a song. 'He', Fred,  has always been an icon of male elegance and I think we can all agree that 'her' hat is fabulous. It's true that when I first saw her arms I thought I'd wandered into a commercial for eczema cream, or maybe a relief-from-psoriasis one, but no. That's no skin affliction but a pair of long pink gloves.  My expectations are that altered in the distinctly less formal world we inhabit these days. Over to you now, Judy and Fred!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_sVZ52vOTM

Bathing Suit Hell

When the latest spring swimwear catalogue dropped through my letter slot last week I thought Wo, here's one expressly made for me! It even said so, right there in black and white! It took me a whole minute to realize they  were talking about plain old terryCLOTH and not cloth made for me, the former Terry Sheehy now living under witness protection as Terry Marotta.All my life it's been painful to shop for swimwear even when I was a little kid going to summer camp and one of the suggested items for every camper's trunk was a forest green get-up seemingly made of wool. Anyway it was this heavy furry stuff, done over in a kind of waffle weave that caused even the slenderest camper to look like she'd been rolled in a thick layer of batter.God had the taken the trouble to roll me in my own personal coating of batter so you can imagine how I looked in it. However my sister and I were told we had to have it because our mother and aunt as the owners/directors of Old Camp Fernwood felt we should set an example. I hated that suit and was so glad when I could pull on the simple cotton one with the ruffles. I wanted badly to look like those glamorous older campers striding long-leggedly toward the lake for a swim.Instead I looked like this - and if I tell you that for all my life I've had wild curly hair, you'll pick me out at once in this little lineup:But all that was in the past. The task I now face is to find a couple of suits for the present.Some suits today have weirdly longish skirts. These I am unable to wear as I can't help but think of them as Eleanor Roosevelt Goes to the Beach.Some are tankinis, which means they have two pieces, a very nice feature that eliminates the need to peel off the whole tight cocoon of a thing every time you have to go to the bathroom.I tried one tankini with a spilt top two summers ago and looked like Who Pitched a Pup Tent on Top of THESE Two Solid Columns?Then last year I went with the full sun-repelling line of swimwear, consisting of a skin-tight zip up 'jacket' tight and bermuda-length 'shorts' but that was wrong too: too darn hot for summer wear and talk about Sausage Party!Accordingly last Thursday I ordered this bathing suit and it just came and it is perfect in that it covers my sun-damaged chest, spares the world yet another cleavage shot and lets me to dart free as a minnow through whatever waters present themselves.Now I just need a sarong to cover my thighs and a lightweight 'shrug' to cover the ruin of my upper arms and I will be SET!

Forget Perfection

People judge you. There's no avoiding it.Example: Fella comes to my house one day, wants to clean a rug that lies on the floor of a room where a zillion dust motes dance in the golden bars of daylong sunlight. But the minute he walks in, his face goes pale. “What have you done here?” he shouts. “Your rugs are all faded!”I look and he is right: The rug he has come to carry off for cleaning used to be red, tan and navy when we bought it. Now it's rust, cream and baby blue. “This rug is losing RADIANCE!” he shouts again.“Hey I’m losing radiance myself,” I say. “It’s OK, it doesn’t hurt.”“Here’s what you have to do,” he goes on, ignoring me. “Pull down the shades. Draw the drapes.” He bustles around doing this until the room that has dazzled with sunlight a moment before looks ready now for a séance."But we love the sun,” I tell him,  feebly adding, “We sit in this window seat here, and...” “Then AT LEAST take a sheet and cover the area of greatest exposure!” he snaps. “You owe it to your carpets!” he adds, scooping up the carpet in question and hurrying out the door.Since that day I have thought a lot about what this man said. I was sorry to have let him down, but I just can’t run a house his way, keeping the rugs bright by locking the sunlight out. Keeping things perfect under plastic. Pleasant under glass.I used to visit houses like that when I was little, the kind that made you feel as though silken cords were stretched across the chair arms, and velvet ropes were hung across the doorways. I vowed even then that if I ever did have a house of my own, I would never run it that way.And I don’t. We LIVE in our house. We live all over those 19th century sofas in the living room, which are only done in velvet because velvet is the toughest fabric there is - well, next to maybe Naugahyde. And I'm proud of that fact.But now hasn’t the upholstery man just gotten after me too: He came here once for a Victorian sofa that I'd reupholstered myself a decade ago that ended up looking like a lumpy pink bed with a person sewn inside it. He took that old thing out and turned it into a pale blue dream of perfection.Then this past month, a small visitor set her little bones upon a sofa even older than the Victorian one and blam! one leg — ball, claw and all — shot straight out from under it. The upholsterer was here to perform diagnostics on the break, but his gaze fell first upon the toddler who was clumping quietly around in his little white shoes.“You let your CHILDREN in this room?” he squeaked, his voice ascending the scale of disbelief.“Sure,” I answered, as the child in question smiled sweetly and drooled a little onto the velvet.“On THIS couch!?” He squeaked. “MY couch?!”“It’s going to lose radiance!” I could all but hear him say next.He didn’t say that though. Instead he picked up this most recent casualty and started for the door. “Well it's your house,” he sniffed, washing his hands of us all.“You bet!” I told him, smiling big. Because really, it’s fine by me if our stuff is too worn out to pass down to our kids one day. What I'd much rather pass down to them is permission to enjoy the beauty of their surroundings; permission to fade, as we all must fade, gloriously, in the sun.  

Got Stuck There for a While

Personally, I’m thrilled to have a brand-new aquarium of a year to swim around in. I feel as though for the last two or three months I was moving my little fins through mud instead of water. Put another way, I couldn’t move forward. I mean, I had 95% of my Christmas cards done on December 8^th but I simply could NOT finish the rest. I called my husband at work: “I’m going to just throw them all under a bridge somewhere, like that mailman in New York turned out to be doing for months and months.”He laughed, but I wasn't joking. I truly I was stuck, the same way I used to get stuck as a kid in various turnstiles and revolving doors, what with my violin case and that bulging book bag over one shoulder. Time simply stopped for me around the first week in November.Example: I had put a pumpkin on my porch some weeks before Halloween, along with one of those purple kale plants and a pretty sheaf of wheat like they talk about in the Bible when the speaker in The Song of Solomon tells his lady friend that her belly is like a sheaf of wheat.Well, the kale died the death of most extravagantly colored plants and the stalks became dental floss for the squirrels, but that pretty pale-peach pumpkin I simply could NOT throw on the compost pile, even when neighbors up and down the street were decorating for Christmas.Instead I set it on the stone wall out back, where still it sits.Even now. Even with that stubborn snowbank sullenly hanging around the edge of my driveway like a schoolyard bully making a silent point about who's really going to win this battle we’re now joining.Winter will win it of course, just like the House always wins at the casino. A few more days and we’ll be shin-deep in snow again and quaking like the leaves on an aspen tree. And I know, I know: It’s not as if this is the Yukon, where hardy men send straight strong streams of pee into the frigid air which then freeze into stout shafts for use in their damaged dog sleds. It’s not as if this is even Minnesota, where people’s eyelashes get cemented together while they’re trying to crack open the diamond-hard shell of ice encasing their cars.Still, it’s winter and winter is cold. And we mind the cold, hothouse tomatoes that we are.Yet already the days are growing longer and in just eight weeks that old Uniform Time Act will have us all reading the paper in the park until almost 7:00 at night. Until almost 9:00 by the end of June.Then what? Then the days will start getting short again alas, because Time is a big old ferris wheel that never does stop moving, except ever-so-briefly, to let new little folks on and the rest of us less-than-new folks off, each in our turn.So what is the universe trying to tell us? Maybe to love the pumpkin for all its beauty and then to let the pumpkin go. Maybe to love what is given today.It might also be hinting that no matter what bleak, stuck place I find myself in, I should really never throw 200 handwritten, sealed and stamped Christmas cards under a bridge, because does it really matter if they arrive a little late?Let's hope not! You guys should be getting mine any day now. :-)

at the post office

Easy Street

I was pretty spoiled as a kid. Raised by a mother-and-aunt combo, I never had to do a lick of kitchen duty. Instead of enlisting my help, this  were forever shooing me away so I could rest up for the night's homework.Man, was that a sweet deal.The amazing thing is, they  didn’t even seem to mind all the holiday cooking they had to. Rather they seemed to actually enjoy the job, perhaps  because of the amazing tales it yielded up over the years - like the one about the Thanksgiving Eve deep in the Depression years, when their lawyer-father came home with a peculiar kind of payment for handling somebody’s case:A turkey, slackly wet and freshly slaughtered. "Here you go, girls!" he cried happily, slinging it down on the kitchen table and walking away fast to take up his pipe-smoking ritual in the deep peace of the cozy front parlor.As the story goes, the bird had been butchered, sure, but not completely plucked, alas and alack. Decades had passed by the time my sister and I first heard the tale of this night and our grownups’ frantic city-slicker efforts at getting those feathers off . There was the tweezing attempt, the singeing-over-an-open-flame attempt  and more. We never forgot the gory facts, and them every November from then on begged for more details about out how they finally got the job done. (“Six words,” my mother finally said in a show of merry candor: “A good big bottle of Scotch.”)So for years Thanksgiving meant pure ease for me, right on through the first chapters of married life when my young groom and I would nervily show up at each of our childhood homes in turn, to gorge ourselves and stretch out like fat lounging hippos in the living rooms afterward. We didn't cook a thing.THAT sweet deal came to an end about five years in to our marriage, when seeing us off, my tiny mother-in-law sidled in close and gave it to me straight: “Next year? Your turn."From then on, I TRIED with the turkey every year, I really did, but so much went wrong: There was the one I roasted with the giblet-mess still inside, smelly and dark in its butcher-paper wrapping; the one I cooked upside down for added moistness which, when I went to remove it five hours later, disintegrated like papier-mâché and came to the table looking like a fourth-grader’s failed art project; and let's not forget the one rendered SO moist at cooking’s end that it shot straight out of the oven and slid into home plate on the kitchen  floor.Those were some hair-raising meals all right. Luckily there were only about 30 years of them.Now, with this reputation going before me - AND a daughter who wedged culinary school training in between college and grad school - I am back on Easy Street, with Thanksgiving at her house and the lightest of assignments for me: The salad, and come on, who eats salad on this High Feast Fats and Flour?Finally, a picture of me back on Thanksgiving back in the early golden years at my mom-in-law's house, she bustling busily around the kitchen amid her pretty-spoiled sons and me, her brand-new not-quite-getting-it daughter-in law, perched on a stool and sampling some grapefruit.  

Let's Get Scary

Sometimes, come Halloween, I ask myself: Who would I dress up as if right now today they announced an actual Halloween for grownups?Back in the old days, little girls went out dressed as princesses or kitty-cats on Halloween; as witches or ghosts, if they could stretch far enough toward the dark side.Little boys seemed to resist the whole dress-up thing somehow, maybe because they got stuffed into jackets and ties a lot more back then. Maybe it felt to them like yet another conspiracy on the part of the females in their lives to deck them out like fools - then go taking their pictures even. So I guess they went out dressed as hobos, most of them, borrowing outsized cast-offs from a handy male grownup, smearing their faces with charcoal.My sister Nan and I went out as hobos ourselves, come to think of it. Nan set the whole tone for my whole childhood, with her nose for the slightly ‘transgressive’ as the saying goes. For one particularly instructive period during a certain autumn, a dead cat came to our attention in an alley we then began visiting the way pilgrims visit a shrine. "A corpse!" we exulted on first discovering it, giddy with that blended jolt of joy and revulsion. We'd have gone out that Halloween CARRYING the dead cat if we'd dared to. If we hadn't by then taken the common childhood pledge to shelter our grownups, innocents that they were, from life's spicier side.Today of course males of every age are far more "plumed" than they once were, and less fixed on the need to seem macho too. It’s my sense that these days little boys' costumes are as elaborate as little girls.  This year they will once again going out dressed to the nines, in masks portraying horror-movie villains: Jason. Chucky and the rest. Every now and then you sometimes even see old Tricky-Dick Nixon, who still enjoys a strange afterlife in the Rogue's Gallery of your standard costume shop.And the point will be what it's always been: To startle. To counter expectation.We had a good friend back in the 80's. Didn't smoke. Didn't drink. Took old bikes from the dump, fixed them up good as new and gave them to kids who didn't have bikes. On the Halloween immediately following one lunatic's murder of several people by slipping poison into random Tylenol bottles, our friend took his kids around for Trick or Treat, himself dressed as a giant Tylenol capsule - and was actually surprised when another dad offered to punch his lights out. THAT escapade countered all our expectations.By partying indoors on Halloween, you can cut down on offers of violence (depending on who you friends are of course) and have fun too - by seeing the dedicated beer guzzler come dressed as a Mormon elder, say, or the biggest Don Juan in the group come decked out as the Pope.I don't go in for much in the way of girlie stuff as a kid; never even wore makeup til I got to be 50. But one year at an adult Halloween party I dressed as Early Cher, in heavy mascara and spangly bathing suit top and hip huggers, and of course a giant wig exploding in cascades of inky curls.I looked ridiculous. It was awesome. And my mate, Sonny to my Cher, looked even better, in the 70's-era peasant shirt our kids found for him, and some baggy bohemian pants and a Prince Valiant wig.Of course with his wire-rimmed glasses, he looked more like early John Denver, or actually with the wig more like Moe of the Three Stooges than either of those two, but still - he SEEMED like Sonny Bono.That’s the fun of Halloween: getting to seem like someone else for the night.So whatever you might be up to tonight, just be careful, like my old cat Abe here. 'Cause you just never do know who you're going to meet.

Acting Your Age

“Act your age” grownups were always saying to us when we were kids. I recall vividly one time I heard it. It was the time my big sister Nan flipped me onto my back, straddled me, pinned my arms out to either side and began ever so slowly lowering a long string of spit down from her mouth toward my screaming face.That’s when our mom suddenly loomed in the doorway and boy, did Nan get it then. “Here you are almost 20 and acting like this!” she shouted by way of winding up her tirade.In fact Nan was all of 12 at the time. And she was acting her age. Sort of. Certainly the 12-year-old boys we knew were doing this kind of thing to each other all the timeWhether or not Nan ever did heed the command to act her age, I know I could never quite seem to. I say this because when I was 14 I acted like I was 40, probably as direct result of the sad thing happened in our family that year. All I really know is that within a month of this terrible detonation I had changed completely from a carefree self-involved 9^th grader to someone who had committing herself to a habit of over-functioning that lasted for more than 50 years.Give you an example: Every Thursday night in my early 30s I would leave the house to tutor some young people in English. I would get them started on their essays, tear over to choir practice at the church just across the street, then tear 90 minutes later to work with the young people for another 90 minutes. I thought I could add in anything, help anyone, transport some ride-needing youth clear across the state and still be back in time to make the supper. Of course I could! I’d just need to get up a little earlier in the morning.I might have gone on like this indefinitely if the year 2016 had not offered me some surprises.First, I broke a bone in my back by running around the edge of the swimming pool to get to a shivering grandchild. Then, six months later, I tore my biceps tendon by lunging for the ladder of a dock while attempting to leap jauntily from a moving swim raft. And just last week I twisted my fists into my eyes, causing one of my contact lens to fold in two and shoot up into my head, where it remained for four excruciating days and causing a painful infection that had me just about blinded for almost week.But what did I expect, knuckling my eyes so childishly? And trying to stretch like Gumby between a moving swim raft and a stationary ladder? What did I think would happen when I ran around an indoor pool past no fewer than four big signs that read “NO RUNNING“?It’s a mystery to me. At 14 and all through my teen years I behaved as if I were 40. Now in my 60s I’ve been behaving as if I were ten. Will I ever come to understand how old I really am and start acting accordingly? Check in on me when I’m 90. If you find me in long sable curls and my bell-bottoms from the 70s, take me aside and counsel a wiser course.PS. Of course I did also fall into the lake when I practically yanked my arm out of its socket reaching for that ladder - and that reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from On Golden Pond. Enjoy!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KUVXUGzKaE   

You're Doing That Wrong

In  my post of a few days ago, I did all this bragging about how competent women are; about how we women GET THE JOB DONE.This  Harry Bliss cartoon shows the flip side of that in that it illustrates our need to control and/or comment upon just about every aspect of life around the house.Maybe that's a human thing more than s a gender thing though, because in truth we all have our domains.My husband's domain is Pantry Management. Every three or four months he takes every single item off the pantry shelves and lines them all up on the kitchen counter according to category. That way, when I note an absence of, say, cornstarch, and go to the store and buy some, he can do what he always does: With neither fanfare or remark, he walks over to those many shelves  and take out all three, or four, or five of the boxes of cornstarch that I somehow didn't see.Come to think of it, I guess I should count myself lucky that he never, in our many years together, has said I was doing the shopping wrong. (It's true he never buys the food or helps me bring  it in from the car - "I have no shoes on!" - but he does put it all away God bless him, and that's a job I hate even more than. emptying the dishwasher!  

My Classic Nightmare

My recurring nightmare isn't the one where you're naked in public on the subway platform  with only the odd stray animal there to help cover you up - though I have had versions of this nightmare.I've also had the one where I'm 15 again and walking toward my 10th grade locker, only to look down and see that I've forgotten my top and - darn it - my real-life bras just never look like the bras you see on the Victoria's Secret cuties.But the phantasm scenarios that really haunt me are the dreams like the one I had last night. These dreams , which I have had a million times, involve being unprepared:

• Unprepared to give that speech I am slated to give, with not a notion in the world  about what I'm expected to speak about, as I stand  before an  audience of 1,000 people.
• Unprepared to talk off the top of my head while being videotaped for a news site.
• Unprepared as a teacher to give a math lesson in front of the principal because I didn't even know I was teaching math this year....and there  are a dozen others.

Last night's bad dream had an education  theme like that third  one. It took  place at a school completely new to me  so I didn't know my way around the building. Worse yet, I was a student yet and it was a Spanish II class I enrolled in and  was expected to attend , only I had apparently skipped all of Spanish I, skipped it for whole months at a time over the previous school year.This is the kind of thing that really makes my vision wobble and pulse in any bad  dreams: the idea that I didn't just fail to prepare for one single event, but that for  dating back who knows how long , I had been derelict. I had failed to do the work.I'm a woman, so  you can see why this would terrify me. Because women do DO the work. Women do the reading. Women wouldn't dare  close their eyes on a school night without knowing just what clothes the kids will be able to put on in the morning and just what food they'll be able to eat before they get  home from school again tomorrow.Women get the job done -  not unlike the more than 300 years of immigrants to these shores have done. Take a minute now and listen to this cut from the runaway Broadway hit Hamilton. It's about the embryonic nation and Washington's victory at Yorktown. To me it's very inspiring and illustrates the truth of what the hitherto marginalized can accomplish.  Plus the music! Ah, that music ....! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpsuEcKW8ZE

Could be the Keys

Last night I dreamed I parked at our local transfer station, turned off the car and climbed out, tossing the keys back in through the open window and onto the passenger seat. That was safe to do, I figured; I was only there to throw a few bags of trash onto the conveyor belt, that great River of No Longer My Problem.But as I was doing this, I happened to see out of the corner of my eye that an old white guy had slid in under the steering wheel, picked up my key ring and was fumbling with it in search of the key he would need to turn the car on. I remember thinking “So here’s the value of carrying so many keys around! It foils thieves!”He got away with my car anyway, as well as my money and all my credit cards, but that isn't the part of the dream that sticks with me.Really the dream got me thinking about all the keys we carry these days.Used to be, people carried their keys around in a small hard-shelled key case. All three or at the most four of your keys could be tucked away in there until you flipped one out when you were ready to use it. But now most of the people I know don’t use key cases. Instead, they have what I have: a series of strong rings from which dangle five or six or eight keys, some from rings that in turn dangle from the big ring.So who do we think we are, Mrs. Hughes from Downton Abbey, managing a household brimming with larders and linen closets for a late-sleeping landed family and a large live-in staff? Do we think we're St. Peter and these are the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and its Many Mansions? Why do I have literally 13 keys that I carry around in my fist? They weigh a pound if they weigh an ounce. I mean, I could use them as brass knuckles.I recently read that some 80% of Americans complain about back pain. Under our 20 pounds of skin and the circuitry of our nerves and blood vessels, under the mighty muscles and the tendons and the strong, strong ligaments we have a skeleton,  this delicate scaffolding that we must  keep balanced like a tower of teacups as we move.Isn't it just possible that it's these 16-odd ounces of  keys that throws us  out of kilter and gives us pain? If we keep them in a pocket they pull down that side of our pelvis. If we carry them in our purse, they yank down that side of our shoulder girdle.THINK ABOUT IT! And then pray for the day we can start our cars AND open our houses with retinal scans that let us walk around free. And who knows? Maybe by then all our official docouments and our credit card info will be neatly imbedded in our skulls. :-)  

Grandma

I  saw this picture of Cher taken at a Clinton rally the other day and it has me  wondering: When did she start looking like an Italian grandmother circe 1930?It must be the ruffles at the wrist. If you're getting up there in age and your relatives don't strictly forbid it, the undertakers will try dressing you in ruffles for your viewing; this I have noted at more than one wake.Though I don't look at all like Cher with my thin lips and map-of-Ireland face, I definitely do feel like a grandma on this family vacation anyway, which is to say:I'm doing a LOT of laundry.In fact it feels like that's all I'm doing.I have learned this week if I had forgotten it, that kids shed clothes like a snake sheds skin. One of these grandchildren of mine yesterday had so many clothes strewn about his sleeping area  that there was no telling which ones were clean and which were dirty.So, I washed them all.Another, the first one's younger brother, seemingly had no dirty clothes at all, since, as I just this morning realized, he has been wearing basically the same clothes since he arrived last Saturday.The third grandchild, their four-year-old sister,wears long tea-length early-20th century 'frocks' pretty much exclusively , which I find myself not only washing but also  ironing God help me. Still, she looks very nice in them, even when she wore one to climb Rattlesnake the day before yesterday with her doll.Her mom's job that day was to forge the path up and up and up the hill. The job of her dad, now called "papa," was to keep things moving in the middle portions of the line of march. My job, I was told, was  to be last.As it happens, I did an excellent job at being last but I have to say: the Grandma who does all the wash and can be counted on to go slow is not exactly the Grandma I had hoped to be. I liked it much better last summer when I was the Grandma who took the kids and bought the kind of stuff that was instantly condemned by their parents and summarily confiscated.At least that job had some fun to it.But I'm not complaining, not really. It's kind of nice being one of the old ones, the  ones who are definitely NOT in charge of much of anything even though this is still our house. Just please, if any of you are around when I finally kick the bucket, put me in tattered workout clothes like these before those undertakers begin coming at me with the ruffles.  :-)   

On the Starship Colonoscopy

Sit with any group of 50-somethings long enough and sooner or later the talk will turn to the various strategies for getting through the  colonoscopy prep.This regimen, in case there are small pockets of the population who have not heard, involves the drinking of eight 8-ounce glasses of a thick chalky cocktail, at 15-minute intervals, until the entire 64-ounce pitcher has been drained.That’s a gallon of gritty sludge, downed within the space of just two hours.As one who was recently contemplating her own date with destiny, I consulted my 900 stranger-friends on Facebook for advice on how best to approach the ordeal.“Make the drink as cold as you can!” many said. “Use a straw!” advised a second faction. “Skip the straw and just fire it down!” counseled a third group.I had used all three techniques by the time I was finished, and let me just say I wasn’t exactly yodeling out a Julia-Child-like “Bon Appetit!” with each glass.But as unpleasant as the prep is, everything turns rosy when, in your hospital gown and booties, you are escorted into the hospital’s ‘scope suite, where you all at once feel like a guest on board the Starship Enterprise, with the many uniformed crew members circling and circling as they tend and monitor.You are ushered to a gurney where, alongside 15 or 20 other pre- and post-procedure folk, you stretch out like so many limp strips of bacon.Someone comes and covers you with a warm blanket.Then a cheerful medical professional in a pirate-like headscarf comes along to take your vital signs. His hands make a sort of Sign of the Cross as they move from your left arm to your forehead to your chest and then over to your right hand. This is where the needle goes to deliver the I-love-everything drug that cancels all fears. You will then discover another cheery young crew member sitting inches away and peering into a monitor that offers a minute-by-minute account of what’s happening inside you. You feel like the coolest guest at the dinner party. Everyone finds you so interesting!At last you are wheeled into the operatory for the “periscope up” procedure that has brought you here. A neat slice of time is cut from your life, and the next thing you know you’re back in Mission Control with your fellow strips of bacon.After a woozy interval, the doctor materializes and, with a somber clergyperson’s air, tells you how things looked. He dematerializes again and you yawn.Somebody brings you a snack of juice and crackers.You yawn again and have a little snooze. It’s like being in pre-school again, but without the singing.In short, it is Heaven and you  have come through. you have been seen, and accepted for who you are. And when you depart, you depart smiling, with a strange but unmistakable sense of blessing, and bits of graham cracker crumb still clinging to your lips.  

Napolee-o-leon (& Others)

It’s two weeks now since my man and I got back from France, where the number of pictures I took as compared to the amount of food and drink I consumed stands in a ration of 1 to 1000 - and now here I am with little more to remind me of the experience but my new fat tummy. Lucky for us , we took this Viking Longboat cruise with two close friends who took tons of pictures. Even better, ‘she’ has written the whole trip up on her travel blog, a site which in my greedy way,  I have boarded as a pirate boards some poor sitting duck of a vessel, and helped myself to the photo booty. ‘He’ was my first friend when I moved at age 9 to our new house and found myself caught up in endless rounds of kickball and the chase-hide-and wallop game we called  “the Commies vs. the Americans. Good times.We two couples had also gone, via this same Viking cruise company, from Budapest to Nuremberg back in 2014, when the world felt to be in far less trouble than it feels to be today. That was a dream of a trip on which I got to hang out for a while with actual Mozart, or anyway an official Mozart impersonator.  He spoke about the hard life of a professional musician which he actually is. He's a serious guy.This time though it was not Vienna but Paris, a city which appears to do a lot of looking back. We passed the place to which poor Marie Antoinette was brought to meet Madame La Guillotine, she  paraded for mockery's sake in a crude wooden cart, her hair shorn and her wrists bound behind her back. We saw the monuments Napoleon brought back from Egypt where he went to further foil the British by messing up their trade routes. And, in our fancy tour bus as wide and serene as a clipper ship full-bellied with the breeze, we billowed along down the very route the Allies took after the brutal 100-day Battle of Normandy to at last reach and liberate this famous City of Lights.On other days we went to Giverny, the estate and gardens established by the Impressionist god Claude Monet who smoked 60 cigarettes a day, slept with his best friend's wife, and quarrelled sfrequently  with his one surviving son that the son wanted nothing to do with the place after the old man died at 86.We saw castles and clambered over their ruined stones. We marched up and down streets with ancient stone and timber houses and even a few thatched roofs. And finally we went to Napoleon's country house, where we saw with our own eyes how small of stature the man  really was. This is his bed, which, in the flesh looks like the the popsicle stick nest you might build for your pet hamster. Poor Josephine lived there as well until he divorced her for failing to give him a son.  We walked in the gardens of this estate, known as Malmaison, but the tour guide apparently ran out of steam because with an hour to go before we could board the bus and go back to our cozy longboat, she told us to enjoy the gardens and disappeared .It was 55 degrees,  the hospitality center/gift shop was closed and a layer of low grey clouds hovered above us like an omen of old.Our two pals duly circled the large garden, admiring the roses and chatting up the other members of our expedition.  The two of us did not. We went and sat on a stone bench - until  another Viking cruiser, from the American  South to judge by her accent, came by, declared us 'cute', and snapped this picture.Then she made us get up and walk to a spot 100 feet away  where she snapped another.The lesson of that moment? Stick around long enough and you too can become a monument. 😛 

Another Fun Couple Takes a Trip

You get to the airport and find that your flight has been cancelled.It’s a flight to Iceland. And it’s cancelled.So much for the strange beauty of wide skies, and treeless plains!You wait an eternity to be told that now you will instead be flying to Frankfurt. Bring out the ketchup and mustard!Still, you know you can’t be TOO mad since your final destination is Paris and sure enough you do get to Paris eventually where, you are interested to see, the old sidewalk pissoirs have long since been replaced by wondrous new unisex sidewalks booths called Sanisettes, in which, when you touch a final button, cascades of water swirl in, washing everything in sight clean, clean, clean and disinfecting it all too. And the pissoir, in case you don’t know was for over 350 years the standard Parisian accommodation for any man who felt the need to make water. It featured a panel from knees to shoulders that blocked out the key parts of his anatomy while still allowing him to stand and chat companionably with his pals.

Hard to believe, right?

Anyway, now here you are wearin’ out your Nikes and seein’ the sights, and then at night inhaling the great food and tossing back the complimentary mealtime beers and wines on a riverboat that will take you, via the Seine, from Paris the City of Lights to Normandy and back with several bracing stops along the way.The ship’s windows are wide and the sights are lovely. (Here now: A man who looks to be straight out of a Van Gogh watercolor standing in the water and fishing! Here now: A windmill that goes back to the time of Marie Antoinette and her Marge Simpson hairdo!) And the rolling waters! The waters alone!You feel like a baby, and a fat happy baby at that. You turn to your travel buddies while dunking your face into your second glass of the good red wine.“What could go wrong from here?” you burble, “unless we break a tooth and see a giant jagged crater open up in our mouth.”You laugh hilariously at your own joke, and then, not 12 hours later, while eating the good French bread, exactly that happens, and it happens to you.But hey, it’s your all-too-short visit to this place. Your dentist will be there when you get back, and for now you're just another stylish couple having fun in France. :-)  

Sick Tyke Expert?

Need some last-minute childcare for your under-the-weather preschoolers? Send ‘em to my house for a safe and quiet day. Anyway that’s what my little granddaughter’s parents did recently, nursery school being out of the question what with the fever they'd seen the night before.The child arrived pale but cool. “What about some lovely toast with peanut butter?” I sang, - only the Jif had somehow been put in the fridge. “Watch THIS,” I cried, popping the jar into the microwave and pushing “start” – only to see a tall column of fire arise from a tiny arc of foil still clinging to its rim.Snack at last in hand, we climbed to the small third floor room that these many years later still holds toys and children’s books and a crib, all from the late 1970s. There under the eaves we worked on several jigsaw puzzles, none of whose pieces matched the pictures on their boxes.But the child was growing  paler now, so I suggested we drop down to the second floor and get into bed. This we did and I read to her for almost two hours, only then realizing that the lovely toast had fossilized for lack of attention.“I know! Chicken noodle soup!” I hollered and hurried down to the kitchen, where I found that we actually HAD no such item. So I quick cut up some leftover spaghetti, mixed powdered chicken bouillon with water, nuked it all in a large Pyrex cup, and proudly mounted the stairs with it, only to find that in my four-minute absence, the previous night’s fever had come roaring back to life. Down the stairs again I dashed for the Children’s Tylenol. Back up I then ran - this time to find my charge sound asleep.“I’ll just tiptoe into the study get a little work done,” I thought and what peace I found writing away in there, with a little child napping under my roof! It was just like the old days!Twenty minutes later, I tiptoed back to the bedroom and found it… empty.I looked in the bathroom: empty. Ditto the whole second floor and the floors both above and below it. Had I lost the child entirely?I rocketed up and down the stairs, caroming off the walls and calling the child’s name -  until, on a second frantic pass, I spied her curled up like a kitten in one corner of the crib.“No Tylenol!” she squeaked, but with many tries I did finally manage to get some into her down in the kitchen, where, in one corner we have a TV and a little sofa. On this sofa we both slumped, pulling on our sippy cups and letting a cascade of kiddie shows wash over us.That’s when it hit me that I had not eaten a morsel in almost eight hours. I walked to the counter and picked up the Pyrex cup that held that nice noodly broth. Thinking “Who needs a mug?” I tipped it up and was a half an inch from my first gulp when I saw it: a tail. A tail right in the broth. And then the whole toes-up corpse of a wee drowned mouse who, somewhere in the quiet hours, must have also liked the look of that brew and toppled in.I uttered not a syllable but returned quietly to our joint slump, and the day ended peacefully.So I’ll say it again: You need some pinch-hit childcare for your sick tyke, just send up a shout. Because truly I have got it all, from the rodents, to the missing-person alerts to the towering pillars of fire. :-)

Crap Day: I'm a Clown AND a Narcolept

What a crap day it's been weather-wise. I have to admit it's gotten to me; it's had the effect of scrapping all my plans.Here I was all set to go to Yoga for starters. I was up and dressed before 7:00 even.Well, not fully dressed. I had on my clown-pant pajama bottoms and my favorite too-big tee. On a day with many tasks ahead,  I like to first fire up the old neurons by hitting the treadmill upstairs, and I'm totally fine with pulling on socks and sneakers even while still IN the clown pants because who knows what I'll end up REALLY wearing for the day? Plus, you know, who's going to see me? Thirty minutes and done, I thought.But first, I reasoned, I'd better eat a bite, and it was while my egg was boiling that I looked out the kitchen window at this cold grey rain. It was also then that I saw our magnolia with its buds littering the ground, murdered in their little bed back a few weeks ago when we had that freeze. In this time of vernal yearning, the tree is as bald as Walter White's head.And somehow that fact alone brought me down enough that I never did climb the stairs to do those miles.To say nothing of going to yoga. Or doing my real work. Or filing away those old photos I dug out last week. I was going to foodshop, and hit the cleaners. I was going to get stamps as well, and swing by the Apple store for yet another one of their quickly fraying chargers.But exactly none of that happened. David is away tonight so I was also going to call a pal and catch a movie but that's not going to happen either. I feel like all I really did today was fall asleep repeatedly and noodle around on Facebook looking for people who wronged me 30 years ago. And now here it is after 5, and me still in my clown suit. How I’ll spend my remaining six hours of consciousness I have no idea.Maybe the thing to do is pull on those sneaks and see if can find my way to that treadmill. Yeah, I'll try that. And maybe also send up a prayer that this rainy cold 'down' day gets followed tomorrow by a sunny ,warm 'up' one.     

Here's a Fun Thing to Try

 I was closing in on 50 when, at my yearly checkup, my doctor asked that question we all understand to be key these days, about the medical history and cause of death of my two parents.“My mom: heart attack,” I said “but my dad left before I was born, so I have no clue how he died.”“Find out,” the doc said. “Do some digging if you have to.”So, I dug. It took months, but by the time I came back I had my answer. “'Intestinal cancer’ it says on his death certificate.”“OK, then. You're overdue for  a colonoscopy.”“ Hey come on,” I said, going for the joke. "I didn’t even know the guy!” He didn't laugh. "A colonoscopy is indicated for anyone past a certain age either of whose parents had cancer ‘below the bellybutton’. Here are the names of some people who do this procedure. Pick one and get it done.”So… I picked one, and in a month’s time found myself seated across from a white-haired GI doc for a little facetime. Did I have any questions? he wanted to know.I did indeed. "My sister has had this procedure and she says it's super uncomfortable and I should ask for medication, so I wondered: what do you give people?”“A muscle relaxant of course, as well as a drug called Versed  which acts an amnesiac.”“An amnesiac?! You want us to forget then, which means it MUST hurt!"But does it, really?" I asked, hoping against hope.“Oh, I won’t say I haven’t heard a few good groans over the years," he answered cheerily. "I mean think about it: You've got a five-foot probe and...three right angles."  I thought about it; pictured that flexible wand and its seeing-eye fiber-optics. Then I pictured the colon itself, an inverted letter “U” that you explore by 'driving up' a squiggly on-ramp.I went head anyway and booked the procedure.When the day came the two drugs, administered in painless I-V fashion made me feel fine. Wonderful, in fact."Let’s see that five-foot probe!” I gamely sang.“Here it is!,” the genial doc sang back.I turned then to look at the monitor – and then somehow a 90 minutes swath was cut from my life. I was lying on my side and it was 8:41; then suddenly I was sitting up and it was 10:11.I do have a vague memory of turning in protest once, but it seems more dream than memory and, as the saying goes, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a noise? If a highly 'personal' but beneficial experience is visited on you and you don’t remember it, can you call it uncomfortable? Maybe not.So line up and get it done if you're at the magical age. The dread snacks you get in the Recovery Room alone are make it all worth while. 

This Old House ;-)

It's tough being a woman; for one thing there's thr chance that as the years pass you'll start looking like a man - even like Richard Nixon in a wig. Yet I see all these age-defying products and I have to wonder what kind of fools their manufacturers take us for.Just think of the skin creams that claim to be ‘age repairing’ and ‘youth restoring.’ I mean, come on: The human body isn’t some rickety old building whose floorboards you can pull up; whose walls you can tear down to let in more light.I came upon a jar of face cream at the pharmacy the other day. From reading the labels on these moisturizers and creams all these years, I 'get' how alike they all are, but I bought the stuff anyway and told myself it was the high SPF factor that put it in my cart (yet if I’m honest I'll admit I was mostly just mesmerized by the dark-crimson color of the jar, which reminded me so sharply of the votive candles of my convent-school youth.)Generally, though, I’m a lot harder to mesmerize in the beauty products department. I know very well what's happening in the regions north of my shoulders and I'm OK with it. I'm even OK with what's happening to the south of my shoulders – although I do wonder why men get away with so much more than we women do.Think about it: Men can have bellies the size of hot air balloons and still be cellulite-free, with thighs that look like marble columns on an ancient Greek temple. If their hair goes white, they just look more alpha male, more powerful. If it falls out, they just have to shave the whole dome, grow a beard, and they look like a dozen celebrities. (Think Bruce Willis. Brian Cranston. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.)For us women, it's a different thing. There’s a cultural expectation that we out do something about our cellulite. There’s an expectation that that we’ll be proactive about our hair, when it starts thinning or greying.And so… we use products to thicken it.  We color it.And if we start losing the hair on our heads, we sure don't turn to the male trick of growing it on our faces. Far from it. If we start to see the beginnings of facial hair, we pluck, baby. We pluck. Or we seek out the zap of electrolysis. Or we turn to hot wax as did my old pal from the ‘80s who would remark, in her Southern drawl, “Ah’ll be lookin’ like mah own Scotty dog soon if ah don't go get mah whiskers snatched off."And that's all aside from the many other signs of time’s passage – like what happens to the skin on the neck. Or the skin on the hands, which get all veiny.Still, even while noting these things on my own skin, I have to stop and be amazed at everything skin does, from acting as a barrier to passing on sensation to regulating temperature. Skin is actually pretty great. In fact all the systems of the body are great, and their aging is just a sign of their faithful service to us.So why treat our bodies like old fixer-uppers, knocking down walls to let in more light, when the whole time we all know that the best, ‘realest’ light is the light that comes from within.OK now WHERE did I put those tweezers? ;-)  

Back Story

One morning last week while making the coffee, my mate David reached for the sugar and was stunned to find a live mouse inside the salad dressing carafe that stands on the same kitchen counter.Because the  lid of this carafe had been recently crushed in the garbage disposal, I had contrived a temporary fix by placing a sandwich bag over the top of the carafe and anchoring it there with a small inverted custard cup.

 But even with all this protection, the little guy  must have figured a workaround, because in one deft movement he seems to have dislodged the custard cup, nudged the bag off and dropped down inside the carafe where we now watched, astonished, as he wiggled and jumped, wiggled and jumped, executing a kind of high-speed pole dance in his attempt to get free.Being the guy who will escort even a spider outside by his little parachute lines rather than kill it, David rushed the carafe onto the grass and set it on its side and, sure enough: The mouse scampered off.
 And yet for days after, the image of the mouse in the bottle came back to me, along with that line from Shakespeare where Hamlet says, he could be bounded in a nutshell and still count himself the king of infinite space.But why did both that image and that line of verse linger so in my mind? I worked that question the way the tongue works the space left by a missing tooth until it finally hit me: They were lingering because of the injury I suffered some 11 weeks ago, when I broke a bone in my back and consequently became ‘bounded in a nutshell’ myself, told not to twist, or lift, or drive very far - and certainly not to stand or sit for more than 30 minutes at a time.The standing ban has actually been sort of nice, getting me out of more than one cocktail party or coffee hour marathon; and for sure the wisdom of the twisting and lifting ban was brought vividly home to me that day last month when I tried leaning out a second-story window to shovel a layer of snowpack off the back porch roof.  It’s the not-sitting-for-more-than-30 minutes thing that's been the most restrictive, in that it has forced me to find a whole new way to meet my readers in the paper each week.My writing method now is this:  I scribble out a column from a lying-down position, leave it a while, come back later, give it the critical squint and pencil in corrections. Then I leave it again to 'cool', and once again come back later to scribble and squint some more – until, finally, I take my phone and, using Siri, read the whole thing into the record, email it to myself, import it into Word and send it to the printer, so as to see it in black-and-white. This method has slowed me down for sure, but it has had its benefits too, in that it has paradoxically helped me to write the way I talk, which is what you want in a column like mine.And if I'm honest, I'll admit that passing the long winter weeks bounded in my nutshell has been kind of  nice. For one thing, I've spent my time reading so many family journals and letters that I think I am starting to levitate mentally, to lift above my own little life to almost – almost! - glimpse that ‘infinite space’ that Shakespeare is talking about.They say every trial brings its blessings, and certainly I am aware of the sense of peace I have enjoyed in this interlude. Really I’m only sad that things went a different way for the mouse, whom we found a few hours later, dead, not ten feet from his oily jail.