That's The Way That the World Goes 'Round

I once read that Japanese businessmen smile all the time, happy or sad. In fact the article said the sadder they are the more they smile and I don’t know if this is true or not but the idea of it struck me like a thunderbolt. I identified. I also happened to read the piece the very same morning I was walking through the sanctuary of my church before the service began. “Why are you always smiling?! “someone said to me and in not all that nice a way either. I guess what he meant was “Nobody’s that happy” which is true enough, though teachers also smile no matter what, because they know that whatever pain or disappointment they’re dealing with those kids filing in have a right to see them at their best.I write here every single day because that’s what I vowed to do when I started this blog . Some days I’m ridiculously happy and some days I’m pretty sad but even I can't tell, reading back, how I felt on a given day. It's such a blend in this life, the joy and the sorrow, isn’t it though? My old neighborhood came together yesterday to remember the life of a man who was, in his way, a father to all of  us kids. We came from Missouri and Florida and Vermont to be there, first for the visiting hours and then for the  memorial service. For the better part of 24 hours we did our best, together with his three grown children once our closest pals and co-conspirators, to conjure up the past.He was such a funny man this Charlie Wilson yet he was always helping people too. Being around him was more fun than watching monkeys on a trampoline, yet he cussed like a sailor, which made you laugh even more. His son Alex said during our reminiscences that they wanted to rename his boat The Goddamit Barbara,  for how often he could be heard exclaiming those words around his relaxed and easy-going wife. We laughed so much over the last few days, the three bereaved children included, even though they wake again this morning with both parents still gone from them; with both parents in that other land, the  great and inimitable Charlie Wilson and his bride Barbara, who went on ahead last November. And that's how it is for us all We laugh and we mourn. We smile and we are sad. Maybe singer-songwriter John Prine said it best. Below his tragicomic vision of life, here performed by the luminous Norah Jones.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSHPsY2bY4&feature=related]

Travel Day

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

Mothers Day Post-Mortem

When my sister and I were kids, Mothers Day meant sneaking outside at dawn in our pjs, picking blossoms, glomming them together with electrician’s tape, wrapping them in tinfoil because tinfoil was of course so pretty, then impaling the whole top-heavy thing on a hat-pin and presenting it to our mom. She’d pretend to be surprised and would never get mad about the grass satins on our pajama-bottoms or the tree-bark clinging to the great lifting cloud of my curly black hair (talk about biscuit head, which even today my spouse calls “The Net”.)

I got one card for Mothers Day, from the dazzling couple shown here. That’s our Favorite Oldest Son (as he calls himself) Dodson, the first-in honorary kid in our big shambling family, Dodson who came to us back in ‘86 as a barely five-foot-tall freshman in the ABC Program and that’s his bride Veronica. They sent me flowers AND a card AND called yesterday. And I heard from three of our other honorary children too, darling Susie and handsome Gary and Deanna whom I met when she was 18 and now seems like a lovely pale lily of a younger sister to me.

So they got in touch. And I got to actually see all my girls because I invited them over and made salmon and swordfish and roast beef, rice and a salad of Boston lettuce, strawberries and goat cheese in walnut oil. Carrie's my oldest girl. She and her partner Chris brought their two shorties who got right to work dismantling the place. And my younger daughter Annie came straight from the airport and four days in Chicago. Our youngest, Michael, living above a dry cleaners in East Harlem I did not hear from but poor Mike: him I will hunt down in a hour to proof my column which has to go out this morning. Michael edits everything I write and has done so since his Junior year in high school and if you ever find a typo here you’ll know he didn’t see it first. Each week he takes my column, a mere 620 words long and he sits with it for a good 15 minutes, finding the stray grammatical goof-up or the logical lapse, pointing out the turn of phrase that is awkward or that repeats or that has become in his mind an annoying verbal tic of mine and who knows more about those than a person’s own kids? Annie looks at my work too I should say and Carrie as well and these poor kids: when I die they’ll say, “Thank God! Silence at last!”

So anyway the baby and I patted the cat and his pre-school brother and I went out to my car and pushed buttons to make the doors and windows open and close so many times the things began to resemble a big gilled sea-creature breathing hard. Then with supper we drank a Frei Brothers Chardonnay and a Hess Select Merlot. Chris, who is Carrie’s partner and as dear to me now as my own child started with wine, but then switched to beer. We talked about doing childcare for them in two weeks when they go to an out-of-town wedding and Annie told about eating at the finest restaurant in Chicago. Carrie and I also spent some time studying pictures of our family from over 100 years ago and she again said how she wanted to go out to the Berkshires and see that old old house where our family story started.

They say Michael looks just like me. Annie looks like her own gorgeous self and is her own bold and funny self too. But the more I look at this first child Carrie, the more she looks to me in moments like my own mom and also like the pictures of Mom’s mom who died as a girl barely 30. If it were now instead of 1910 she might not have even been pregnant by that age. As it was she’d been pregnant five times and the fifth pregnancy killed her. Here they are now, the daughter I know so well and the grandmother we none of us knew, Carrie Maloney, married in 1903, and Carrie Marotta, married 100 years later, almost to the day. You tell me they don’t look alike.

I think of that young dead woman. I picture her often lying there just a few feet down below the grave I visit. Alas and alas I now also picture my mom, who lies there too at the feet of the mother she could never remember.

It got late fast last night and I was too sleepy to write. So let me just say this morning thanks, guys, for making me a mom. And thank you, husband of mine, for doing all the dishes and drying them; for putting them away and wiping the counter-tops same as you do every time. And finally thanks to you, Mom, and here you are as a newlywed of 38, pregnant with her first child before the troubles came that rendered you single again, but even then this is what I remember: you with your big smile, telling it like it was and making everyone laugh.