What's Worse?

I’m home now from out west. I put in my five hours on a plane, my knees pressed against my chest and the tray table driving itself into my sternum.Flying is such a joy.I should admit that traveling knees in my mouth is my own choice, because I hate to have to use those overhead bins. People vie so for the space in the overhead bins and I’d just rather not do that if I can help it. All jockeying for position makes me uncomfortable. Not enough testosterone in the mix maybe.Plus what if you need something during the flight and it’s up there in the overhead bin? You then you have to stand up in front of that whole planeful of bored people who are going to WATCH as scraps of luncheon meat rain down on your head because you had them in your raincoat pocket after stopping to refuel your rental car where,realizing how hungry you were, you then bought a package of ham and tore open with your teeth so as to toss most of it down as you zoomed toward the airport and who needs that?It’s embarrassing to find yourself festooned in half-eaten foodstuffs, like our friend Oscar here. ( I remember that sales trip back from Ohio so vividly! All I needed was a banana peel on my head.)Anyway, so now I choose to travel right WITH everything I might need stuffed in my backpack.Which I then jam under the seat in front of me.Which is why my knees are up so high: my feet are resting on it.For this last trip I had craftily poured my coffee into Thermos Number One back in the terminal.I had done a similar thing with Thermos Number Two, filling it with the special brew of lemonade and mint tea I favor.PLUS, I carry my own food, natch. That day it was two boiled eggs and some black beans for the first snack; a small tub of cauliflower and salmon for the second. (I never do tire of the looks on my seatmates’ faces and when I pop the Tupperware tops and release the scent of these dishes into the air. :-) )So, I reasoned, I was all set. I would eat well and drink my drinks straight from the ‘jugs’ .Then all I figured I might need from the flight attendant was a nice cup of ice.She served it to me and 20 minutes later I knocked it over, letting icy water spill all over my lap, soak between my legs clear through to the seat of my pants.Whether or not it worse than wearing shreds of deli meats about my head and shoulders is hard to say but I can certainly attest that it was it was a WHOLE lot lot less comfortable.

Gonna Be Fun!

Yesterday, after I voted in the town election and had my annual doctor's visit, I went to hang copies of this poster in surrounding towns. It's for the workshop I’m giving on Saturday at the Maynard (MA) Public Library where, being an expertly unstoppable blabbermouth, I will teach a small group of interested people how to journal – or rather show them that they already know how.

For sure I believe in the practice.  Dark times in my life, journaling is all that got me through I sometimes think. I would drive in my car to someplace quiet, some anonymous outdoor space and just scribble my every thought down on paper. Scribble it down, tear it up. Scribble it down, tear it up.  It worked too. It helped me fish around in every last corner of that messy attic that is the human mind.

And that was just when times were tough and my mind was a toss of conflicting emotions. When times are good inside your head and the livin' is easy, well who wouldn't want to write stuff down then?

I have a whole 90-minutes for this workshop during which the audience and I will remember back over our lives, using little starter phrases to get us going. I got a million of those all right. And if you’re not shy about telling your own funny-slash-embarrassing stories you find that your audience isn't shy either and pretty soon everyone is laughing and slapping their knees, their own if not each other's and sometimes that too.

I used to be so shy I couldn’t call up the theater to find out what time the movie started but I am not shy now because at the tender age of 21 I got a job where I was thoroughly exposed, right down to my footgear and fingernails. ("Gardening over the weekend, eh Miz Marotta?" No, staining wooden furniture actually.) Or "Miz Marotta! Time for some new shoes!"

You only get remarks like this in the job if you stand between the front rows, among your ‘customers’, so to speak, which is what you have to do if you want them to pay attention and live in healthy fear of getting called on.

You know what that job is now, right? Here are two super-blurry picture of me doing that job many a long moon ago, and along with it some of my 'customers' from Sixth Period.

Best job I ever had, I still say. Guess what that job was and I’ll give you a free book on Saturday when a bunch of us will look back together :-) (Oh! and the library says "If it's not convenient for you to register in person, send an email to fmplibrary@gmail.com, include "workshop" in the subject line. and specify which class you're interested in.")

 

God For President

Every November, I start thinking we should all have to stand for re-election, from doctors to cops to customer service people. It’s an idea that has occurred to cartoonist Ruben Bolling too, since one of his “Tom the Dancing Bug” comic strips shows no less a figure than God himself out on the hustings.“GOD’S ELECTION CAMPAIGN,” the caption reads, next to a campaign poster with a shot of the Creator himself, duly robed and bearded and standing against a background of stars and planets. “My 12 billion year term is almost up,” he is seen declaiming, one finger in the air, “and I need your support for 12 billion more!” Then caption underneath says, “God for Supreme Deity’’ with the persuasive slogan, “Hey, his name is GOD!!”Mr. Bolling knows one thing: name recognition counts for a lot in any contest. Think about it:Many‘s the obscure candidate voted into office around the east because his last name was Kennedy. John Kerry never pretended he was a Kennedy but how my mother fumed back in the 80s when he first broke on the scene with his middle name beginning with “F.” “He’s no JFK!” she sputtered, as if he thought all he needed to win office was those magic initials.People may not be that dumb but still: it's pretty amazing to hear how often they say they enter the voting booth with no idea about why they’ll pull the lever for a particular candidate. Many say they don’t decide until the last minute, waiting on some flash of intuition, some welling-up of that warm fuzzy feeling, that “Reach Out and Elect Someone“ mentality that media expert Neil Postman describes.It wasn’t always like this: In my desk I keep a letter written in 1899 to my grandfather, a first-generation American whose mother could read and write only in Gaelic. Sent from Danville, Kentucky, the letter is written by his Uncle Patrick, an immigrant with no formal schooling – and goes on for two full pages in precise and tiny script about the ways in which Presidential Candidate William Jennings Bryan’s ideas are consistent with those of the Founding Fathers.You don’t see many voters with that kind of grasp of the issues these days, boy. These days in presidential election years, we all want somebody who seems dignified and all that but not, you know, boring to look at, or tiring to listen to, or God forbid in this youth-centered culture, wrinkled. We want someone Presidential, but not, you know, too challenging. Someone Presidential, but not demanding anything of us. (What would John Kennedy say if he saw what become of his Inaugural Day “Ask Not” directive?)Well I guess we have a whole year to work ourselves into a tizzy over this issue so let’s return to the Tom the Dancing Bug strip we started with. Here are the words in its final panel:“The campaign was not going well. God’s previous inaccessibility made his attempts at positive publicity seem disingenuous.”Then there’s a drawing of God, microphone in hand, saying, “And I’m sure this new shopping mall will bring prosperity to the whole tri-county area!” while out in the audience, an unseen heckler yells “`Hey GOD! I prayed for a job eight months ago and I’m still out of work!”Good satirist, that Ruben Bolling. He almost makes you wish God would make a few selected appearances - though I have a feeling if he were to, he might just bring along something bigger than prosperity, and to more than just the tri-county area.

In It for the Laughs

(Big family dinners: they're complicated!)

What keep me going are laughs like the ones I get from my friend Ann Aikens, who described what she called ‘the  wine-fueled row over nuclear power" she got into with her family at Thanksgiving last year.  “My aunt nearly dumped a casserole of boiling German Beans on me, she writes.  "Coincidence?  Hard to say.’  Or the  rundown she gave of the Christmas when her pals brought a pig too big for the oven. “If you too do this, make sure you have a clean hacksaw blade handy because the alternatives are really hard to explain to the neighbors.”It was years before Ann and I met face to face though we both wrote for the The Vermont Standard in Woodstock VT,  one of  the last of the old-time papers, section after section, page after page  of opinion and local news, columns on country living and who’s up to what. Sometimes I think I'm in Heaven itself when I go see them there in Woodstock and the satellite towns.I also write for the nearby Herald of Randolph where a jewel box of a music hall acts as focal point  for musicians and singers as fine as any you’d find at Lincoln Center or the Met.She calls herself  Upper Valley Girl in her column and for a spell she actually moved to LA to LA and became a real valley girl. That year she sent a Christmas card showing herself  in Lolita-style glasses and leopard skin swimwear sitting out by a pool.Because she feels almost like a baby sister to me, I was happy when she came back east.The last time I saw her was in July of 2010 at the memorial service for Kevin Forrest, longtime editor of the Standard,  musician and father, beer lover and all-around great guy who liked nothing more than to stay up late with his million friend laughin' and pickin’ until dawn. BUT ! She did write a column for the Herald of Randolph just last Thursday. It starts like this:

One of the great things about going to Disney World is that you think for weeks, “I’m goin’ to Disney World!” You could be in gridlock traffic with a full bladder. Getting fired. Your leg could be falling off. But things really aren’t so bad; you’re goin’ to Disney World.

I don't know yet what the rest of it says since that's as much as the piece the paper will let you see at first, unless you're a subscriber. But the rest of it should be up tomorrow and I can get my fix of her frank funny talk then. Or who knows, maybe she’ll see this post and send me an even fresher laugh, hot off the griddle.

Fun at the Doctor's

I didn't recognize my own name when summoned by the tech in the doctor's waiting room.  "Caroline?” said for the second time but no one has called me that since the day I was baptized. “Oh! that’s me!” I cried, shooting up out of the chair.  A few cents short of a dollar I could all but hear her thinking and sure enough she began repeating all her instructions, to "put my bag HERE and my coat THERE and to step on the scales please with my boots on, yes with your boots on , it doesn’t matter," and a sentence ending 'Not for the likes of you' hung in the air. "141? But I don’t weigh 141" I said but she was on to the next step: "How tall do you think you are?" she demanded as if to calculate how far off I'd be this time. I thought about saying six foot nine.  Instead I said, "I think I'm five five and a half," and I was, exactly.Things took a happier turn from then on. In  less than ten minutes’ time this same tech took my temperature and my blood pressure and administered an EKG. “Wait you’re a phlebotomist too?” I said when she pulled out a hypodermic and began siphoning out a couple of shot glasses' worth of blood from my arm. “No but they train us to do all this stuff now.“It’s efficient” she added. “It saves  money,” said I. We both smiled then. We didn’t run the place. We just underlings, just a couple of jamokes, well down on the old ladder.Once she left, an RN came in to take a history things got even more cheerful. This nice woman praised me to the skies. She liked my vitals. She congratulated me for not being on any medication, for having no illnesses and no disorders. I got to feeling like I'd won felt like I’d won the lottery. "I haven’t had a cold in five years!" I started to brag before remembering how annoyed I get with Old Dave when he tries for a similar boast as we're dressing in the morning say."Well you’re still gonna die one day, ” I tell him every time. “Hey maybe not!” he smiles, stepping into his underpants.“So  do you want a flu shot?” the nurse was now asking me.“Eh” I said in my role as Supergirl.“Get  one” she said.“Seriously” she said, which caused me to repeat my remark about never getting sick.“I bet I know why," she said. "I bet you wash your hands all the time."“I do actually. My time spent as  a massage therapist taught me about that. Also my cousin Bernice who says more disease enters through the nares than anywhere else" the nares being the front part of your nose, those twin portals leading into your nasal passages."You wouldn't believe it. The bathroom here is right across from my office. You wouldn’t believe how many people flush and come right out. They don’t wash!""They don’t wash!" I echoed. Then the two of us also shared a smile, superior human beings that we were.SO all in all t was a very satisfying visit in spite of the two Band-Aids I'm walking around with one from the flu shot and one from the shot glass worth of blood pulled from me as if by leeches. All for health I say and remember the nares, to keep them safe from germs! These are my nares below here. Time to get out the tweezers again it seems! :-)