Exit Only
“Because once you depart from this one-way road of life, there is just no getting back on.”
Keepin' It Light
You have to keep it civil; otherwise things get ugly fast.Like millions of Americans I watched the debate Monday night, but not before I attended a shortened meeting of the book group I’m in with fellow alums from the school I went to. They are all very cool women but the coolest of them might be the one who is soon to turn 90.“I think I won’t join you on the 16th," she said in her email to us a few days earlier. “I didn’t read the book anyway so I’ll stay home and become enraged again watching this new debate.”I could see her smiling as she wrote that. She always smiles when delivering these little quips. It’s the key to aging I think; not digging in and getting too serious.Like millions of Americans I also had my phone on while I myself watched, at the house of David’s brother and his wife, and how could I not look at the chatter on Facebook as I watched?You could tell the Democrats by what they said. “Bully! Let the President speak!” posted one.You can could tell the Republicans too. “He sure blew the Libya question!" said another.I can’t stand to see people fighting, having grown up in a household run by a mother and aunt who could pull out the long knives and slice each other up before you could breathe in and breathe out again, so I tried to say only neutral things.At one point I remarked on Twitter about how sort of cute it was that Obama had on a red necktie and Romney had on a blue one, an exact flip of their red-state blue-state affiliations.Then on Facebook, at one point, I wrote “Grecian Formula”. It just popped into my head as I looked at Romney.I have no idea if he colors his hair or he doesn’t, of course, but it made me volunteer the information that my husband is the exact same age as Mitt Romney, and his hair is completely white.A Facebook friend who I knew for one year when he was a 15 posted that he would be glad to have any hair at all, but he doesn’t anymore. Easier when the wind is up he said.And then I posted this picture of David holding our newest little baldie…
I was bald myself for years and then the curls came in and foamed up out of my head like Jiffy Pop. Maybe that will be her fate too.Anyway this kind of talk kept me from getting all nasty. Why spread that around in the atmosphere when it’s all we can do to deal with the real pollutants. (Tip: when the snow finally does come don’t – DO NOT – gather it in a glass and tip it back - not until it has a chance to melt and you can see what’s really in there! And there's a topic for much more national discourse!
People Notice
Talking of that one guy not laughing when everyone else is in stitches reminds me of something a high-level crime fighter once told me . And I do mean high-level: as in worked for Scotland Yard.He told me that people are pretty amazing when it comes to noticing things that don’t fit the pattern. That's what helps the cops track down the criminals.It could be that guy who lives with his grouchy mother. He usually comes out of his house at 8am on the dot, buys a paper at the newsstand and walks north. Only this one day he didn’t come out until 9.AND he was dragging something heavy.AND chuckling to himself.OK too obvious an example maybe but here's a thing I noticed almost 12 years ago during the inauguration of George W. Bush. I noticed that Dick Cheney didn’t sing the National Anthem.George sang along. Laura sang. Everybody up there sang along but this Cheney guy who just looked somberly straight ahead.What did it mean I remember wondering?We didn’t know much about Bush back then. Would he be open and good-natured, or would he tend more toward caution and secrecy? Would he hold grudges and fence himself off like a man in a stockade, or would he be able to let go of grievance, seeing people as they really are, filled to the brim with every sort of impulse, from high to low?I remember wondering this about Former Present Bush that day as he and Laura and the girls got ready to take up residence in that satin-pillowed jail, as former Bush and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan once described the White House (and she ought to know since she worked there for three years.)I remember silently wishing him the best. But mostly I remember the cold withholding feeling I sensed coming from that man who served as his vice president.And for all we have learned or not learned about him in the years since - from his book, his utterances, his actions - I still wonder: why didn’t he behave like a team player that day and sing along when they played our national anthem ?I'm not saying it has great meaning. I’m just saying…… I noticed.
Nice Doggie
Too many rocks headed my way yesterday in reaction to the post about Obama and Jackie, whoo!Who said if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen? Harry Truman, wasn’t it? If politics is the art of the possible (which it is) and if much of it relies on tact and diplomacy (which it does) then a second remark comes to mind, this uttered by the great Will Rogers: "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.These are snakey times all right; people are mad. It brings to mind what Will Rogers also said: “Every guy just looks in his own pocket and then votes. And the funny part of it is that it's the last year of an administration that counts. A president can have three bad ones and then wind up with everybody having money in the fourth, and the incumbent will win so far he needn't even stay up to hear the returns. Conditions win elections, not speeches.” Pretty apt! He also said, ‘Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for." Apt again.So tomorrow I think I’ll get as far away from 'the kitchen' as I can and return to Jackie Kennedy Onassis Tempelseman (if we can pretend she married that last guy which she might as well have.) But how can we end without quoting Will one more time?“We don't know what we want but we’re ready to bite somebody to get it”.Hard to believe he spoke 80 years ago, eh?
Barack, Meet Jackie
I just need to say this to my man Obama:Dear Mr. President,Don't take this the wrong way. In my book you’re great. I voted for you in ’08 and I intend to vote for you next year but I think you have to get some serious coaching for your speeches because you sound like such an insufferable smarty-pants. I’m not sure if it’s the way your voice goes up at the end of certain sentences and down at the end of others but the net effect isn’t good. You sound like a know-it-all, an intellectual, or “pointy-head” which in this country is not the way you want to be perceived. (Look at how they sneered at Adlai Stevenson. At Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton.)I’ve been listening over and over to the voice of “our” Jackie, in this audio tape made when she he spoke to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. just four months after the death of the husband Jack whom she so obviously loved despite his rabbity ways. She says,
I was so happy that I could do something that made [Jack] proud of me because I’ll tell you one wonderful about him: I was really… I was never any different once I was in the White House than I was before but the press made you different. Suddenly everything that had been a liability before - your hair, that you spoke French, that you didn’t just adore to campaign and you didn’t bake bread with flour up your arms…. You know everyone thought I was a snob and hated politics. Well Jack never made me feel that I was a liability to him but I was!
You have to listen to this, Mr. President, even if you did see last night’s Diane Sawyer special.. My point is that here she was, the child of immense privilege and she seems so humble and down to earth. And here’s you, raised by a single mother, visited only once by your grandiose and overbearing father after his abandonment of you as an infant, moved from one part of the world to another.... Why can’t YOU talk like a regular person if even Jackie could? I think you can. I seem to remember you doing it that long-ago Time Before. It took like 500 years of history to get you and your wonderful family into the White House, Mr President. I can’t bear the thought that you might only have only one term there.
I'm Heartbroken She Said
Yesterday I went to the ocean because it seemed a good place to go to get used to an altered reality. The day was mild enough so that someone had made a small sandcastle, now beset by the late-day tide. Alongside it long ditches were dug in the sand that I didn’t recognize as letters until I stepped back some: An ‘S.’ An ‘O. Another ‘S'. 'SOS' the letters kept spelling to the empty sky. Distress. Help us.Several seagulls came in for a landing, then hurried along on their little orange legs, muttering to themselves. Only one settled and stood looking out over the water, like a person trying to consider the bigger picture.I saw a dead fish with only a head left for flesh. The thin membrane of its empty skin held only a backbone and ribs. I looked and looked at that delicate spine, along whose length was written that same familiar pattern we see in our own bodies, the same pattern we see along the keel of boats both great and small: a central element with radiating spurs. So we design our boats to look like our bodies; we repeat in what we make the design used in making us.I watched the waves for as long as I could see them, the white foam curling along their crests before they sank down and it seemed me as though a great hand was zipping them shut like so many body bags. That’s the mood I was in despite the jokey tone of yesterday’s post. I think, like that seagull, I too need to fix on the bigger picture.
You Gotta Hand It
As they say about the blind prostitute… You gotta hand it to her.And you gotta hand it to him too: nice campaign Scott Brown.
Open Your Mouth and Say Ahhh!
“I got this PAIN doc.” Bet that’s what our man Obama heard from 20 different places the second he walked into the Oval Office today and boy don’t we ALL have pain.
I have a steady pain in my neck that requires me to see a specialist in ghost-buster gear at the world-renowned Mass. General Hospital. He puts me on my side like a horse, covers my face with a cloth like I’m dead, then takes a lethal-injection needle left over from the Dead Man Walkin’ wing at Alcatraz and slides it THREE TIMES into the wee facet joints of my neck, the teeniest places imaginable where the delicate shell-like bones of the cervical vertebrae touch together - tap! - like the baby teeth of the littlest children.
The needle has in it this super-steroid called astroglide, no analog, no no wait I know, kenalog that's what it is and the first time he gave it to me in the fall I nearly threw up on his shoes. Two weeks later when he asked how it felt I had to give it to him straight. “How did it FEEL? It felt like gray death entering my body! Tell me, Doctor, has anyway ever done this to YOU!?”and he blinked a second, not really getting it, the joke of it, a doctor having a taste of his own medicine, but then burst out laughing: “NO no one has ever done this me! I’m about the only guy who knows how to do it!”
So off I went today to have this second injection because I was desperate. My man was desperate. Even my cats were desperate because no one wants to be around a person with neck pain.
The Doctor finally admitted today he could give me a couple of little pills ahead of time to take the edge off, like what people take before that big Roto-Rooter Exam everyone over 50 has to have and as I swallowed them I thought of our shiny new friend walking into the Oval Office for the first time today to see 300 million patients just like me lined up at the door.
“I have this PAIN Doc, I lost my house, my kid is both fat AND anemic and I’m out of work…"
If we had a cloth over our eyes for a while during the last eight years it is sure enough gone today, and we can finally SEE how bad things are..... So now here comes your medicine; just open your mouth and say Ahhh!
Why DIDN'T Cheney Sing? Inauguration Day 2001
This is my Inauguration Day column from eight years ago. Ah the benefit of hindsight!"I hope you had fun watching the Inauguration yesterday. I know I did. I always watch Inaugurations, partly because I love seeing people in hats: Nancy Reagan in her signature reda; Jacquie way back, in her poofy pillbox. Hilary in ’93, in that deep-blue number that matched the coat. I was sorry Laura chose to go hatless, but I understand. We’d be lying if we didn’t admit that Hillary looked a lot like Smurfette in that deep-blue hat-and-coat ensemble, and a little like QE 2 as well, not meaning the luxury liner, of course, but the Queen herself, whose curse it is to live in a country where the female regent is just EXPECTED to wear a matching hat for every coat, and a matching purse to boot."Anyway, I loveall Inaugurations, mostly for the surprises they furnish us. I think of that blizzard that blew in January 19 of 1960, wrought havoc and blew back out again, blinding poor Robert Frost, who couldn’t see to read his poem, and ended up reciting a diffferent one, from memory. I think of the sight, eight years ago, of Emotional Bill, leaking tears like some Miss Congeniality all during the prayer service he attended the morning he took office."Of course there were small surprises this time too, the way Laura looked in her hatlessness being just one example. There was also:" The way Hillary looked, in what seemed to be a black Johnny Cash-style leather coat, with hair slicked back like Johnny Cash’s too. (Wait! Is Hillary actually turning into Johnny Cash? Is she becoming… TRANSGENDERED, as a final poke in the eye to Cheating Bill?"The way the new president gamely if quietly sang the words to the National Anthem, when that giant soldier-boy belted it out in his plummy voice."The way his Vice President Dick Cheney DIDN’T sing along but looked somberly straight ahead."All this time after catching such glimpses, I still look back at them, parsing them for the insights they might provide into the nature of the regime, and its new boss especially."Because we wonder: will this man be open, affable and good-natured, or will he tend more toward caution and calculation? Will he hold grudges and fence himself about with them, a man in a stockade, or can he let go of grievance, seeing people as he sees himself, filled to the brim with every sort of impulse, from high to low?"Someone said his success will depend on whether or not he enjoys wielding all the power inherent in the office. After all, power on that scale and the nation looking to YOU day and night have been known to turn men from spring-in-their-step bright-eyed warriors to haggard and scooped-out shells (see Jimmy Carter, Franklin Roosevelt, Dave Letterman.)"I HOPE Bush enjoys it. God knows he’s better at communicating joy than poor Al Gore, his opponent in this recent sorry election, and I admit here hat I voted for Gore."I wish the guy the best, as he and his wife Laura take up residence in that satin-pillowed jail, as former Bush and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan once described the White House, and she ought to know since she worked there for three years."I wish him luck, and I liked my Inauguration Day surprises, but still, I have to wonder: Why DIDN’T Cheney sing along?
