Who Would Have Called You Gramps

Nice day, Sunday. We cleaned house. Remember Lady Macbeth saying "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him," just after slicing the king up as he slept? That's how we felt yesterday when we cleaned out the cabinets where we store liquor. Who knew the Marottas could open a saloon?  Most stunning was the realization that we had five entire bottles of Creme De Menthe.

My sister likes to have a stinger after dinner when she visits us from Florida every three or four years and stingers are made of brandy and this creme de cremey stuff and I guess she brings a bottle every time thinking 'Surely they’ve have finished that bottle from 2002.'  But it seems we never finished that bottle or any bottle. To me the stuff is kind of eh. I mean, I’ll just as soon have a shot of Scope.

It was Father’s Day of course so I asked David to wear his Hop on Pop T-shirt in part so people could see I didn’t make that story up about how he’s too highly evolved to brag in his class reunion book and how he's so simple in his needs and hangs on to his clothes forever. That story I told last week and it's right here.  And that piece, which was once a column that I only much later turned into a chapter in my second book? I wrote that piece in the summer of ’96, almost 20 while years ago and still the T-shirt gets worn. He also so worked in the yard for many hours so here’s a picture showing him taking a break, with our middle child Annie beside him and her giant dog’s tiny dog toy in hand. (They weren't acting as extras from the prison scenes in a local production of Les Miserables. It was the sun painting those stripes on them from the deck beneath which they sit.)Then later, the rest of our gene pool came over and there was Chinese takeout and a little FIFA watching and a long fun game of whiffleball out back. It was all very nice.Later, after they all had left, I opened Facebook, and saw that everyone was putting up pictures of their fathers but I never knew mine, so posted nothing. And I guess I write this now by way of focusing on what I have instead of what I ever lacked.Anyway here’s the man now, taken when my sister Nan was a baby and he was still around.One time, a minister I knew and respected told me he saw sorrowful-looking older man bending over me in his pastoral office where we sat talking. "Was there an older man in your life who might need your forgiveness?" my friend asked me. There was I supposed and it would have been our dad.But who doesn’t need forgiveness, even now, even decades after the harm they might have caused? I think most of us inwardly punish and hold ourselves responsible for the pain we have caused in this life. I think we all know the ways we have failed others, and I think we are all sorry.Anyway here's to you Francis John “Hap” Sheehy of Wilmington Delaware. I hope that you're resting in peace, wherever you may lie buried. And I'm sorry that you never had a Hop on Pop T-shirt yourself, or knew the four children who would have called you Gramps.  

The Getaway

You know how it is when you try to cheat winter and grab a few days in warmer climes. You stay up late and get up early every day for weeks, to shoehorn in just a few days when your ears won’t feel like a couple of frozen shrimp pinned to the sides of your head.That’s what I did, fretting ceaselessly over the question of how life would go on without me. ‘Who will do all the driving?’ I obsessed. ‘Who will collect our papers and our mail? Never mind that, who will make sure the moon comes up with me gone?'David and I were to leave before dawn and a mere five hours before that, as Jimmy Kimmel Live rolled its final credits, I was still throwing things in a suitcase.  Then the big day arrived, and brought with it many vivid hours of the blur-and-turbulence that is winter air travel.Then – finally  - we were in the Caribbean.Waiting for the ferry to take us to our hotel across the bay, I watched a promotional video about the place. It was playing in an endless loop on an immense super-hi-def TV.You know how it is: you can’t look away from these big TV’s, even if you want to.Ten times I must have seen this video. First, it showed old footage from the 1950s, the people moving jerkily in that old home-movie way, waving sweetly and self-consciously at the camera.  (“Oh the past!" I always think, seeing such footage. “Are my parents there? Where are MY parents?”) But then this nostalgia bath gave way to the wordless ‘story’ of a modern couple – two actors really – riding bicycles and smooching and getting up out of the hotel bed that floated not near but actually IN those blue ocean waters. (They can do anything with film editing these days.)The fourth time it looped, I noted a chickenpox scar on the female actor’s face. The sixth, time I saw three small pimples on her neck. The tenth time, watching the actor boyfriend in his filmy harem-pants tumble from the bed and swim off like the Little Mermaid, I laughed out loud.That next morning, I saw that I'd forgotten to pack my comb, my sunglasses and my hat, my frantic planning notwithstanding, and sure, you could buy all these things at the gift shop for a small fortune, but I thought ‘Eh’ and just bought the comb, deciding to squint for four days and let the sun have its way with my dye job. And that was the start of my letting go. By degrees I went from noticing everything in that sharp 21^st century way to noticing very little, except the lapping of the waves.The ocean was almost body temperature. Sitting at its edge, I watched pelicans swoop down to feed and suddenly I WAS a pelican. I watched a cloud billow across the sky and suddenly I WAS a cloud.  I looked over at David sleeping in a lounge chair that stood perpendicular to my own chair, so that I looked upon him not from the side, as usual, but as if from above.I saw his still-muscular arm thrown up over his face. I saw his hair, no longer black as in days of old, but as white now as a seagull’s wing.And suddenly I too was in a video, along with every living thing on this island, all of us in our own home movie, captured for those few seconds, all moving and breathing and as delightedly alive as the folks in this old reel. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kanChmXAge4]

Memory Distorts: The Winter of '64

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

Happy Birthday Fatty

This in honor of the recent birthday of my youngest, seen here in Fifth Grade, impersonating America's tubbiest President, William Howard Taft.For a while there, we were in danger of some real solemnity in this family; of growing downright grave what with practicing the quieter virtues. We had two children at first, both females, and I can tell you we all floated along on a great river of calm.Even when a third child had come and was, of all things, a boy, we still moved with tranquility, and for a while the baby seemed to do so too - until the day at about 12 months old when he stood up in his crib and began hollering to his stuffed animals. A certain vividness surfaced for us all then; and quiet understatement went down for the third time.This little boy’s grandmother had been a wise-guy and we all loved that about her. She died when this third child was only three so he doesn’t remember her.But I found myself calling my sister not much more than a year after her death. “I know this sounds weird, but I think Mom’s back!" is what I told her. Because this third child was a happy little wise-guy himself, and brought to the once-peaceful supper table of family life a level of hilarity we never would have predicted.He fancied toilet plungers as a First Grader, and when, at the hardware store, he saw a display of very small ones, he cried out with joy and began promptly applying them, with great sucking sounds, to his ears, mouth, and bare tummy. He asked for half a dozen for his birthday.He told us in Fourth Grade that the teacher said they would need string for that night’s homework.“What if we have no string?” he asked her. “Use dental floss,” she replied, setting herself up for it. “I can’t,” he answered with mock-sadness. “My family doesn’t believe in oral hygiene.”We dreaded the next parent-teacher conference.Around this same time, he got a new jacket imprinted, as these jackets often are, with our town’s name. The nice man helping us pointed out that with so many jackets alike, it was a good idea to have his name stitched on the sleeve.“OK!” he agreed readily  “Only have it say ‘Fatty,' he added, and three grownups could not talk him out of it.At this point he was four foot eight inches tall and weighed 72 pounds. Every spring at his yearly checkup, the doctor would say, “Due for a growth spurt soon!' And every year he would look ironically over at me.But while we awaited this famous growth spurt, we had some dandy fun.I recall the time he pulled some hair our of my hairbrush, glued it to his bare chest, sauntered into the living room and said in a theatrically deepened voice, “Dad, I’d like to use the car tonight.”When he finally turned 11^th, I remember we got him everything but more toilet plungers – and also a cake reading “Happy Birthday, Fatty.”Of course he insisted on being the one to light its million candles; then rushed into the darkened next room and made us march in with it, singing.“What did you wish?” one of his sisters asked after he blew out the candles.He wouldn’t say - some things are serious, after all - but I knew what I wished: that night. I wished we could rewind the eleven years and run them clear through again.And the 11 years that followed them too. Ah, those years too.

Now and at The Hour...

my mother, with her firstborn Nan inside her

Do most people believe in ghosts? I think they do, if by ‘ghost’ we mean that sudden sensed presence of one now departed. In fact, show me the person who claims never to have had this experience; never to have ‘heard from’ such a one.I know I did, once. Only once, but I ‘heard’ all right. It happened about three months after I lost my mother, who died very suddenly, right before my eyes.She was 80 and I was 38 and still a child myself in some ways. All I knew was that living my life without her seemed impossible; she was still that much of a parent to me.She had a pragmatic kind of sense that she expressed with a wonderful bluntness.Take the time I called to tell her we’d be welcoming a 19-year-old Austrian girl into our home to help care for our baby while the older children were in school, she laughed right out loud.“Great! Now you’ll have FOUR kids!” she said, and come to think of it she was right about that. I felt such tenderness for this sweet young woman, so far from her home in the Alps, that my ‘office hours’ as a listening mom never ended. A full 90 minutes after I was supposed to be at church for choir practice, say, I’d still be sitting on the front hall stairs with one of them, whether the seven-year-old, or the nine-year-old, or the 19-year-old, listening, listening, car keys dangling in one hand – ‘til it got so late I knew the only lights on at church would be the outdoor ones illuminating the steeple.She was pretty frail by then and she could hardly see, but she weighed in on things just the same.“An aging actor in the White House?” was one tart remark from the spring of 1980.Another: “Cookies IN the ice cream? Isn’t that going a bit far?”Every week I would drive the 20 miles to my childhood home to see her and if I was ever delayed because of a deadline she'd be equally frank.“Just write anything!” she would cheerily say on those occasions, even knowing that the wonky, stay-up-all-night-doing-homework daughter she had raised could never do a thing like that.She loved to laugh. here she is the day she came home from the hospital with a broken hip that would keep her out of work for a month. Still smiling, as you can see.

Twenty years after, with Nan beside her

Eventually, she moved to a wonderful assisted living facility in my town - and brought her renegade ways with her: Once during a fire drill there, with sirens blasting, she buttonholed her best pal Alice, who was obediently caning her way toward the elevator. “Never mind that nonsense!” Mom told her with a wink. “Come, we’ll hide in my room here, and have some sherry!”Ah, she was something. And what a hole her passing left in my life. In the weeks after it, I listened for her on every frequency I could think of. Where WAS she?I heard nothing for months. And then I had this dream:In it, she and I were descending a wide flight of stairs; kind of sprinting down them, in fact, with that galloping rhythm you develop when you do that.I suddenly realized what was happening. “Mom you’re RUNNING!” I said.“I know, isn’t it great? I’m not old anymore!” she said back.And that was the dream. It lasted maybe two seconds.Still, it comforted me.And in these weeks with so much stirring and returning to life, the thoughts of powers beyond our ken? Well, those thoughts comfort me still.

and twenty years after that, as Nan looks upon her face one final time

Road Trip

I had to drive 100 miles on that cold short day and already it was 3pm.I stopped first at my local gas station where the attendant always speaks to me in such a friendly manner.“How was that funeral you went to?” he asked.  “It was in your home town, you said.”“The funeral was really beautiful, but it was sad seeing the changes there. I went past a hospital that they’re tearing down now. I had to drive by twice to get it through my head that it would soon be gone.” As I spoke my thoughts strayed to the times we visited my mother there when she broke her hip, and our cheery aunts and uncles kept coming with sherry and little crystal glasses to drink it from, talk about your vanished world!“The whole building was laid open,” I told him, “like a dollhouse, only with the roof gone too. It’s hard to see change like that, you know?”“I know,” he said. “Oh, I know!”He did know. Of course he knew. We are all refugees from the past.I began my long drive then, and noticed after just the first few miles that the large box I had dropped on my foot just before leaving home was still ‘with’ me. Though it hadn’t hurt much at the time, a sharp pain was now radiating up my leg and into my hip..I saw I had no choice. I would have to use the last of the fading light to get off the highway and buy some sort of analgesic.This I did, literally limping into the first discount drug store I passed. I grabbed some Tylenol gel caps from the ‘pain’ aisle and limped out again, heading for the fast food joint next door in search of water to wash it down.“What can I get you?” said the young woman behind the counter. “Oh, what’s wrong?” she added, reading the look on my face.I told her. She gave me a big cup of water, no charge, and just as I was tipping back the two capsules she stopped me.  “That’s Tylenol PM!” she cried, half a second before it had gone down my throat, thus saving untold numbers of motorists from sharing the road with a seeming narcoleptic.I thanked her and got back on the highway.There was traffic by then and it had begun to rain.An hour passed. Two hours. Finally, just ten miles from my destination, I stopped to gather myself a bit and elevate my foot.I chose the 99, a chain restaurant. I love all chain restaurants, for so many reasons: The breezy manner of the wait staff, the speediness of the  service, the way they know right away that yes, you would like some popcorn while  you’re looking over the menu and so they just bring it to you.I ate and looked around and slowly my stress level ebbed.And when I saw the little girl gently leading her blind grandpa by the hand to the booth their family had chosen, the stress went away completely. It went away because there,  near the end of my long day, I realized what its lesson had been: That we are not alone in this life. That we too are led, escorted in a way, both by those we love and by kindly strangers.This all happened last week. It was a good lesson to end the year on.

We Are Here. We Leave a Mark

In light of the horror that unfolded Friday in Newtown, it is easy to believe we make a scant mark for good in the world - that we are each just another account number at the bank, another face on the morning train. There's even a philoso­phy to suggest as much, as in the comment made by the Spanish sage. “Place your finger in a bucket of water,” he said. “Then pull it out and see what a hole you have made,” the melancholy thought being that the waters close over us and we are forgotten.I don’t buy it.I once visited the old walled city of York in England, where the earth had been draped and clamped and laid open like a surgical patient so citizens of today could look upon the painstaking process of archeology.At the end of the Disneylike underground ride through a re-creation of the old Viking village of Jorvik, you see a cross-section of the earth itself, sliced straight down as you would slice a fruitcake, and holding within it bits of pottery, and metal, and animal and human bone.This is what happens, I thought at the time: You live and you die and you're tamped down into a pudding of mud.Lucky for me, our group went just after to a Ves­pers service at the house of worship called the York Minster, built a full thousand years ago.We heard music written back then, woven in words penned at the time of King David, then held and sent forth pure and clear from the living throats of elders, and youths, and little boys not yet ten.Words live, then, and music lives, even as good deeds and careful instruction lives, to a far greater degree than most of us realize and long after our little lives have yielded to ultimate gravity and fluttered to the ground like the glorious crimson leaves.I picked up some photos last night from that shoe box I talked about yesterday.I had taken them the day my youngest started kindergarten.Here he is smiling shyly on the lawn, squinting a bit against the horizontal glory of early-morning sun.Behind him the lavish branches of that certain stand of maples wave brashly to the camera.Before him, invisible to me until now, visible to him some time ages hence perhaps, on the lettuce-green grass, the clear and unmistakable shadow of his mother.However hard that may be to believe at times, we do leave a mark on the world. We do.And now, a version of Pslam VIII sung in that great cathedral, very much like the one I heard when I visited there.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdKQh7pHlwc]

When Your Friend's Parent Dies

My heart leaped when I heard her voice on my answering machine. It was Judy, who we teased so in college for her youth: she was just 16 for most of our freshman year. Judy my roommate and bridesmaid from the days when young women had hair down to their elbows and dressed in gowns as flowing in gossamer as you'd see on a host of angels.

But glad as I was to hear her voice, I was that sad to learn why she called: Her mother was hospitalized near here and she had dropped everything back in Manhattan to come sit by her for her final weeks.

I don’t know how many times I saw Judy during this period.

Once was for perhaps the saddest New Year’s Eve dinner she will ever spend, with her mother going and her dad having gone just last June.  Once it was to meet at my dry cleaners, where she left off the clothes in which her mother would be buried.  Once I brought her straight from the hospital to the movies, where the two of us sat in the theater’s garage, downing the chicken cassoulet I had thrown together so she could eat before the show.

Naturally, I saw her at the funeral, where she rose and spoke so movingly  of her mom’s life, beginning in 1920s Brooklyn and going on through the marriage and parenthood, right up to her final years when, even with growing dementia, she could still beat the pants off her husband in Scrabble. This is the lady above.

And this is Judy on the piano bench at 12.

She spoke of her childhood and family life in Brooklyn, then Cincinnati, then Dayton. She told what her mother had loved: Her children. Music on the stereo.  Things of beauty, like the high-end jewelry she sold for years in her career.

I took in every word.

And afterward, as I stood studying the gorgeous photo of her mom as a young woman, Judy came and stood beside me.

“YOU love pictures!” she said. “I have literally hundreds of them back in my hotel room. Would you like to come see them the tomorrow night as I pack everything up, maybe even keep some for yourself?”

I said I would relish having one last visit with her and this time I brought chili and a Waldorf salad. “Why are you always feeding me?!” she laughed when she opened her door.

As we ate, she told me the story of her family, who had come here in the early 1900s from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. She spoke too of the ones who did not come, on her dad’s side; whose letters had abruptly and heartbreakingly stopped – just stopped - as Hitler’s dark shadow stretched over Europe.

I heard about Brooklyn grandmothers in funny old grandmother shoes.

I heard about her family’s migration to suburban Cincinnati where grandmothers drove actual cars and wore sleek Jackie-style pumps.

We spoke of all this and then turned to the hundreds of photos, from jocular candids to formal studio groupings and beyond.

“Take some!” she urged.

She also gave me a brooch, a single gold ‘S’ for her mother’s name.

“Your LAST name begins with ‘S’” she said. “At least it did when I met you. And I have no family member with this initial.”

“But you might someday,” I said. “I will keep it for you until then.” And so I will.

I took a lot of photos too and in the days following scanned them and saved them on my computer, where I go and look at them often.

I look at them very often, in fact, struck as I am by my good fortune in being near her during this passage; struck as I remain by the generosity of spirit that takes a mere friend from the old days and turns her into family.

And this is the Judy I met at 16, here seen at 20 the day before our Smith graduation:

No friends like the old friends

The Last Fun Day

On the last fun day we had together, we built a race track that these two had given to our little guys. They waited this long to bring it forth, knowing it would be a big hit after things had settled down some. After the little boys had done simpler things, like climb into this unfinished cabinet and make twin bunk-bed forts there. After they had worked on their Lego sets for hours and done all the puzzles and cooked up the Shrinky-Dinks.All my life I wanted to replicate the family feeling I grew up with when my sister Nan and I had a mother and a grandfather, a pretty young aunt coming over every day to work at the family business and the real stars of the show, those ancient great aunties, one in the chair where she sat in her old-lady shoes with her stockings rolled down to her ankles and the other scooting around in her dark blue Keds, making the beds and the jelly and the chicken 'n dumplings 90% of her waking hours and only then sitting, when her 90-year-old legs begged her for a little time off.When we came into the kitchen there were always people there, our pretty Aunt Grace with her light high voice like a bell or our mom with her contralto growl. (Was it the cigarettes or was it the irony she cloaked herself in to keep pain at bay? ) Great Aunt Margaret when not saying her beads, would beopening her mail: ten thousand solicitations from the world’s unfortunates. (“I‘m dead with praying for the blind orphans!" she once cried.) And Great Aunt Mame, a spinster since she stopped looking in the 1880s, would be snorting at the engagement announcements in the paper. ("For every old sock there's an old shoe!" she would tartly pronounce.)The women cooked all week for the one man in the house, our grandfather, who came home from some bland emeritus tasks at his law office to sit in his wing chair and read his histories and biographies, carefully cutting the pages open as he went with a pen knife once belonging to his own dad (seen here as he looked newly arrived from Ireland in the early 1850s.)How keenly do I miss these many now! How more keenly still would I miss them had I not been able to make a family very similar to that one I grew up with. By which I only mean to say that for the last week there were nine of us together under one roof, ten if you count that unborn baby. And when our kids were kids it was the same: every room filled with kin, both 'real' and 'honorary' such that at night to the owls passing high overhead this house must have seemed to billow with our common breathing.Anyway, here's the race track in motion. That's our first ‘honorary’ son Dodson and his Veronica admiring it to the left, and our youngest ‘child’ Michael doing the same to the right. The little guy in the middle, named for 'my' David, has the last word, that as far as I'm concerned, can stand for this whole ride of mine through life:"That was awesome!" you’ll hear him cry at the end. And yes it was and I hope I have the sense to say so too.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkh-LZGAlbQ&feature=youtu.be]

Safe! The Turkey Rounds the Bases!

Remember how in elementary school we made paper buckles for our shoes for Thanksgiving,  and paper Pilgrim hats for our heads?  One year my 5th grade class made all of Plimoth Plantation on a felt-covered mound in the back of the room: a whole little village of cabins made of small painted milk cartons, with a forest behind, through which the gracious natives would come, bearing corn. (Years later I visited the real Plimoth Plantation and learned that those first settlers pretty much steered clear of fresh water, choosing instead to drink a healthful quart or two of beer a day. Looking at the real slaughtered hog hanging headless and upside-down by a doorway, I could understand how they might have needed it.)If they drank to get through the big day as well, they sure weren’t the last to do so: My mother and aunt used to tell the story of her dad once coming home a freshly killed turkey given him as payment for his services as a lawyer.“Here you go, girls!” he said to them, slinging it onto the table and moseying off in search of his slippers.They took one look at it, with its long feet and enough feathers to stuff a pillow with and headed straight for the Scotch.Turkey is never all that easy to make; don’t let anyone fool you. If four people in a family are snoozing away Thanksgiving morning and wake at 10:00 to the delicious scent of roasting poultry, it means a fifth person got up at 5:00 and stood alone in the kitchen. bathing an ice-cold carcass before heaving it into the heavy roasting pan.Things don’t easier once it’s in the oven either. Roast it breast up or breast down, wrap it in cloth or muffle it in paper, every tactic brings its consequence.One year I set our bird on fire. A few years before that, I basted it in such a way that when I opened the oven after the usual five or six hours, it shot straight across the open door and slid into Home Plate against the table.  And some few years before that, when I took my first look at a dressed bird with its neck and organs packed tidily inside it, I fainted, just as I had done faithfully in church throughout my whole long childhood.Still, on the great day itself, few of us prove vegetarian. We eat some of that big clumsy bird, then take a walk, or watch the game, then sit down to eat some more.I recall the moment on one Thanksgiving in my adult years when my mother and aunt arrived, the “here you go girls” of family lore.I heard their voices before I saw them, the one light and merry, the other deeper and more ironic.“Here they are!” I remember thinking, and felt once more like a little child of seven.Their voices are stilled, as this Thanksgiving approaches. The faces change. The years blink by.I stepped outside early this morning, into a day all still and misty.As I watched, six leaves seemed to spill down together from the little oak tree across the street. But just I saw them, sadly thinking, “Goodbye then!”  they changed direction, became six live birds, and took to the sky.It felt like a message to me, and the message brought me comfort. ‘Be content where you are,’ it said. ‘Do not fear where you will one day go.’ A falling or an ascension: it depends upon your angle of vision.

Drownin' Here

I spent two whole days cleaning out the hall closet, and what did it do for me really but make me see how ridiculously thin I was back when that green leather coat was new? (How did we survive the fashions of the 70s with the super-tight waists? How did we breathe even ?But what I really want to say here is you're right, you are so right, all you wise souls who posted comments yesterday noting that the less you have, the lighter your burden. Because I also worked all weekend in the dining room which you see as it looked on Friday. Just try having Thanksgiving around six lamps and a world of wicker! The outside of the house is being painted – the screened in porch too - and everything has been in chaos for the last five weeks. If my camera had a wide-angle lens you could also see the box of human bones, a story for another time.BUT! Less than 12 hours after the painters were done with the screened-in porch I had carried every last lamp, footstool and table back out there.Single-handedly 'cause Dave was away.Then I dug out my grandmother’s pale frail china from 1903 and her brittle little goblets. I found the pickle forks and the celery dish, unearthed and re-washed the tablecloth, and the tablecloth that goes over the tablecloth and ironed all 80 yards of both of them.Now I'm turning to my mom’s wedding silver, which of course has gone goldenrod yellow with the passage of time and needed to be polished the old fashioned way (with the stuff that turns your hands black that means), then thoroughly washed, then dried with a linen towel and polished some more etc etc.And the whole time all I could think was how appalled a guy like Henry Thoreau would be, who said Simplify! simplify!How appalled Khalil Gibran would be who said Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.This place isn’t even an anchor; it’s the Titanic and maybe it’s going down!“Jaaaaack! Jaaaack! That’s me as Kate Winslet.Or maybe we’re that old couple who stayed in their stateroom, hugging in their bed ‘til the last.Anyway I’m not really complaining; I love the old things, the Limoges given to poor Grandmother Carrie, who died in her 32nd year.I practically put her soup bowls to my ear and listen to them, just as if they were sea shells.And you know what? Sometimes, sometimes, I think I actually hear things. 

Hoarder Here?

The last time my mom came to my house, she placed her cane in the umbrella stand where she could reach for it when it was time to leave again. Only she  never did leave, as I know I have said here before. She died that afternoon in the wing chair by our fireplace. But this quarter-of-century after her death that cane still rests where she set it.I've often wondered if I was crazy, holding on to things this way. Then one day I walked into the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut (seen here on the left) and it was all I could do not to throw my arms in the air and yell, “I’m home!”The big old steamboat of a place that Sam Clemens built for his family just knocked me out so much did it remind me of the house where David and I have lived all these years, raising our children and mourning our old folks. We don't have Persian rugs draped over everything the way they did but still: Here were the same potted palms! The same ceiling-high bookcases! Even a similar sculpture of a standing nude! But really it was the feeling emanating  from every object that did it for me. You simply can’t find anything there that didn’t have great meaning for Mark Twain and his wife Livy, as the docents there will eagerly tell you.I loved their house because it said so much about their journey, just as I guess this house must say about ours.Even now I am thinking of  that closet in the back bedroom containing two baby dresses stitched in the 1860s. Of that wall in our dining room holding a framed sampler made by one of David’s Yankee ancestors in the 1840s. Of our living room, which has as its focus a sofa my grandfather bought second-hand in 1890. 1890 and we're still sitting on it! This old horsehair sofa  slept for decades in the basement of one family home after another, until, in the early 1980s, I taught myself how to upholster and did it over in a dark red satin. When I touch it now I can almost see the past.I have no idea what makes me look back and hold on in this way. But imagine my surprise when, 20 years after redecorating the living room in this house, I came upon a crinkled snapshot of that first childhood home, whose interior I can barely picture because we moved when I was eight: It's almost exactly like my present living room: Same pale-pink wallpaper, same white paint on the bookcases and the trim, and the exact same soft blue on both couches, the one from my childhood home and the old 1890s one now done over again, thank God by a professional upholsterer this time.  So did I remember that room  on some level? Did I see it in a dream?  I have no idea.Much of the time we humans are living forward and looking forward, I realize. But lots of times I think we are also looking back, as if perhaps to see if those absent others aren't following after us, hurrying even now to catch up and tell us all their news.

How Can I Not Show This?

I am named for a certain person and this is her wedding gown, which she wore for four short hours in 1903 when she married the lad she had met in college and a fine-looking lad he was as you can see up close by clicking on his photo below. Who knew he would one day become a judge and the Chairman of the Boston School Committee and take on that scalawag mayor of Boston, James Michael Curley? He was but a lad then, the first in his family to get past 8^th grade and she the third child of the weaving supervisor at the mill. They were born in the 1870s to people with fresh memories of the Crossing. Anyway, yesterday I took out this dress again and noted again how she had sweated into its bodice, this girl who died so young that her children for all their trying could not bring back her face much less the sound of her voice, being only one, two, four and six at the time. My mother was the two-year-old. Reports are that the one-year-old cried inconsolably for weeks calling “Mama, Mama!”75 years later, when the then-six-year-old lay dying as an old man in a hospital bed, I brought in to him his mother’s silver mirror-and-brush set and he said he could then ‘see’ her again; see her for the first time in his mind as she sat at her dressing table brushing her long, long hair.I can't see her because I never knew her; but the first time I saw the bodice of her wedding dress I pulled my T-shirt right off and tried it on. Then I knew about her tiny waist and small breasts. And when I pulled the long silk skirt from the yellowing tissue paper, I kicked off my jeans then and there and tried it on too. That’s how I found out how tall she was.She was my height exactly and she haunts me, ah how she haunts me. Her death set off a sadness in my family that has ramified down through the decades. I feel so lucky that her young husband did not die but lived to be an old man and grandfather to many, modeling a kind of willed optimism that made of me the merry child I was, when things could so easily have gone in another direction.A fatherless child, I lived in his house and under his care.  He called me 'Blackberry Top' for the tight dark curls emerging on my baby head.We owe for so much in this life; how can we ever repay it, except through reverence and thanks?  Some things fade: these flowers are starting to fade, and the dress comes apart in my hands. This silver creamer, meanwhile, seems to endure, as does this image of that Maloney daughter called Caroline Theresa who lived on the little rise of land just across from the mill. 

The Past is Our True Home Town

Anytown High School here - sigh. Immediately after I wrote yesterday’s piece about an old Atlantic City-style beach town I was  invited to join a Facebook page called "I Remember Revere When…”  I don’t in fact "remember Revere when" but I’m glad for all the people who do, as I see them happily writing about their bikes and their hangouts and the brightly striped tube socks of the era.Last Sunday I spent the better part of an hour on a page called “You Know Your from Lowell when…” and yeah sure it bothers me that whoever put up this page misspelled the short form for "you are" but it seems mean to point that out, the site being full of so many tender memories.Turns out I'm very nostalgic about the place where I came of age and have been since long before Mark Wahlberg made The Fighter there. Before Ricky Gervais and the dimpled Jennifer Garner filmed The Invention of Lying on its streets too. I wrote about both films, one at the end of December of 2010 and one nearer to that month's start.  Lowell became my home when I was 9 and I lived there until the summer after freshman year in college when a prescription for diet pills so altered my judgment that I was walking eight miles to my job every day, madly cleaning the house when I got home at night, and generally living like a combination over-achieving social worker/nun and a speed freak. (I swear all the doctors who gave those pills out to people should have been barred from practicing medicine.)In early adulthood I probably thought the place hadn't affected me much but it did. Of course it did, though in a graduating class of 988 kids I really knew my neighborhood pals and the other drama-and-chorus nerds like myself.  We sigh looking back at the fashions of our young years.Whether it was the Princess Grace-style French twist or feathered-back Farrah-style bangs or that signature 80s  look like Jennifer Beals had in Flashdance when her hair rose like a living Burger King crown from the top of the head.Poodle skirts, saddle shoes, minis, maxis, the images of a hundred styles and ways to be all live in our minds. All are waiting for us, held and kept safe for us in the memories of the ones we are moving through time with. It's wonderful isn't it?

I Think They're Still There

I feel such an urge to go back to that beach I visited last month. I keep thinking that this time the women will be wearing long full skirts that sweep the boardwalk and hats that make the Duchess of Cambridge’s lids look like so many Girl Scout beanies.I spoke yesterday about the doomed couple who were my grandparents: they courted on Revere Beach and also just up the way in Winthrop.I have pictures of them in these places. And the descriptions of the outings in their diaries, And the excited letters that passed back and forth as they planned these outings and the outings sure took some planning: both of them hailed from western Massachusetts where they met, but then he, Michael, came to Boston to become a lawyer while she, Carrie, stayed behind to take a job teaching in one of those famous one-room school houses of the era. (You should see the pictures of that raggedy band of thin-faced children, the millworkers' offspring, first generation Irish-Americans just as Carrie and Michael were first generation Irish-Americans.)Sometimes I feel as if I could build the whole village of Hinsdale, where Carrie grew up; as if I could draw pictures of her living room and then furnish it.I can do this and I know this because of the writing they did. They left a record. People just did that back then. What a loss if we moderns, we citizens of the last 30 years, turn out to leave nothing behind but a screen that glows for a while and then goes dark as all screens must.In comparison paper is such a stable medium. Study these images of a day by the water's edge 100 years ago. Dont' you suppose the people pictured are still there... somewhere? I will go again soon and look some more.

Liftoff

Travelled last week; it was mind-opening as usual. Watched a zillion sitcoms on my personal TV screen aboard Jet Blue, reveled in the big wide seats, gobbled not one but two boxes of Animal Crackers.I love Animal Crackers. I love all little things: dogs made by the Beanie Baby crowd, mini-marshmallows, Paul Simon...I bought the $8 headphone-and-nap-set just to get my hands on that little pillow. If I kept dolls I could totally use it in my doll house.I was visiting my big sister Nan on this trip. (She's the cute one pulling at her shorts in this picture.) Nan didn't approve of dolls. We never played with them as kids. Oh the odd grownup would sometimes give us one but we just kind of dismantled it for parts after we’d used it as the Baby Jesus in our annual Nativity tableau. (Ah those were great events! Nan took the two rocking chairs from our great aunts’rooms and tipped them over so the tops of their backs met in a perfect roof shape. Then she played the Virgin Mary in gossamer veils of blue, while I was Joseph in our grandfather’s old brown shirt. (Well I was Joseph if you can possibly recognize Joseph in a person less than three feet tall with hair like Don King's. (Does it even need saying that I’m the one on the bottom at the right?)Instead of liking dolls we liked stuffed animals, far more noble creatures in our minds. I had a stuffed dog named Pinky who got less and less pink over the years and Nan had a bear named Jinglefoot with a bell sewn into his lower paw.When I was visiting her in Florida this past week, we wandered into her closet so she could lend me a purse more decent then the old black feedbag of a thing I normally carry. I stood there marveling at all the closet space people get in new houses and that’s when she spoke up:“See that thing on the top shelf? Do you recognize it?”She reached up then – Nan is tall – and pulled down Jinglefoot himself, carefully saved all this time. So yes travel takes you to other places, yes. But if you're really lucky and you keep your eyes peeled, it will take you to other times as well.

Chins & More Chins

I suppose everybody knows this is King Henry VIII who married six times and ended life fizzing with syphilis. And maybe most folks recognize his daughter Elizabeth, that shrewd queen. They say she had trouble relinquishing the  nubile (read ‘impregnable’) look since she used her marriageable status as a carrot to dangle before possible suitors/heads of state who took one look at her and saw a realm. I learned from the PBS series Elizabeth R that she wore a centimeter-think paste of makeup later in life and laid on the perfume pretty heavy too. (This is Glenda Jackson in the title role.)I felt for her so, hearing this, and prayed I would never do the same. Sure I wore a little eye shadow for a while there but all it took was seeing myself in a single photo to send me back to my roots as a Woodstock girl. (“She’s awfully PLAIN," I once heard a new acquaintance say about me. “I mean how about a little makeup?!”)So maybe you know those two heads of state but how about this king, with as notable a jaw as Jay Leno himself? 50 points if you ID this one right.And finally who is this little maid? This picture was just discovered in the year 2000 though it goes back to 1865. Looks like it’s the real person too according to scientists who have scientifically compared it to the one known portrait of the lady. ID her for another 50 points and give yourself an additional 10 for saying something about how seeing this helped you understand her writings better.Me I think it’s worth remembering all these long-gone ones. We want to be able to say Hey to them in heaven, right? And it really IS as William Faulkner said: The past isn’t dead. It really isn’t even past.

The Old Neighborhood

The night before last I went to the wake of the lady I lived next door to growing up, who I still picture barefoot in bermudas, smiling as we tore in and out of her house all day, a pack of drool-flinging dogs hot on our heels.When I first got there I felt both weary and strangely shy. “I’ll stay just 30 minutes, then get back and start dinner,” I told myself. I signed the guest book and prayed at the kneeler where her urn was displayed next to a half-completed crossword, her eyeglasses set down beside it as if she had just jumped up for a minute to see to some small task.I spoke first with Mr. Wilson and then their three great kids, companions of my happy childhood. Then my middle school boyfriend appeared and I talked to him a while before confessing that I was making my way doorward. “I’m just so tired, I don’t even think I can make the rounds again to say goodbye. With all these people here and the family so busy I could just sneak out, couldn’t I?“You could, sure you could,” he said mildly. “But think for a minute how you'll feel when you make that first left hand turn out of the parking lot?”He was right. This wake was not arranged as an Rx for me. I took off my coat and stayed another hour.I spoke again with Mr. Wilson, then with the O'Heirs from the old farmhouse down the road; then the two brothers on the other side of our house who my sister Nan and I were off-and-on in love with only for about ten yeas between us. Then in came Mrs. Blazon from two doors down, at 82 still the blue-eyed beauty whose little sons I babysat in high school.The older one stood beside her now and I went right over.“Hey, Mrs. Blazon! And you’re Billy, right?“Well, Bill, yes.”“Your mom let my friend Tina and me take you for a little walk in your stroller when you were like ten months old. We made straight for the woods by the Pow-Wow Oak and immediately got your booties soaking wet, which forced us to sneak back home, steal matches from my kitchens, go back to the woods and make a fire to dry you out."“Yes and I haven’t walked right since,” said Bill, though of course he doesn’t remember. I'm amazed I remembered, since Tina and I were only nine, maybe ten at the time. If Mrs. Blazon wondered about the dark smudges on her woodsmoke-reeking child she never said so, though I do now recall that I wasn’t asked to babysit again until I was an all-too-serious senior in high school translating Latin orations after Billy and his little brother had tumbled about like pups in their PJs, then tucked into bed like a couple of angels.All this came back to me at this wake that I am so glad I went to and stayed long at. Because now they are fully alive in my mind, Barbara and Charlie Wilson, the departed one so calm and quick to laugh always, and also the one remaining, funny salty-tongued Mr. Wilson who so many times all but physically tossed eight or ten of us in the back of his convertible and brought us for ice cream, he leaning out the window to loudly moo at the cows we passed in that one field along the way.

Long Time Passing

This is part of a letter my great aunt Mary Ann Maloney received from her never-seen-again cousin in Ireland. How did they all do it? Go years and years without seeing one another and finally die, one or the other of them, the news of their deaths not reaching across the ocean for years, sometimes even for decades?This lady you see below on the right - the one with the strong chin - she was Mary Ann, the recipient of this sad letter. She lived all her life a spinster as Mary Ellen did back in Ireland. Perhaps it seemed to them the safer way. Perhaps it was safer, because of  those losses that came when there were children. I study the picture below in which Mary Ann's mother Katherine is seen holding her first grandchild in 1904. Look at her face; look at the way she holds or rather doesn't hold the infant. Maybe you'd have to know that seven of her children died young, five of them as children to understand that look.Life was hard enough for people 100 and more years ago without their being cut off entirely from the world they used used to know. Every time I see happy people recrossing  the waters in today's swift carriers I think 'Good for you for going and returning! Good for you for spending the money to go back and keep alive the family bonds!'

Where's My Bed?

You can get pretty disoriented, pretty easily see the Past melt into Present, like watercolors in the rain. Writer and speaker Kurt Vonnegut used to say he had one thought only when he returned to his home town of Indianapolis: "Where’s my bed?  Where's my bed?”It’s how I feel every time I go back to Smith where I went to college.I was there two weeks ago for the big Women in the Media conference.  Many luminaries came, the news director at National Public Radio, the woman who got to spend three hours with Jackie Kennedy in 1960, and who rode in a limo with Ringo to get the story for Life Magazine during one of the Beatles' first trip to the US.....Gloria Steinem was supposed to be there and offer the keynote - yes she's our too I’m proud to say, as is Betty Freidan and Ann Morrow Lindbergh and Terry Marotta ha ha – but Gloria felt she had to be at the bedside of her good friend Wilma Mankiller,  a feminist in her own right and the first female chief of the Cherokee nation who died last week at 64.But when I see that campus! When I see those trees! Even now when on business I find myself passing through Northampton, a town so cool Tracy Kidder wrote a book about it, I always go straight to the campus, change into a pair of jeans and sit under one of those trees. None of the young women look at me funny. They see me the way I saw each of them: as a sister.But talk about 'Where’s my bed?' There are days like the day I am having today when so much is whirling and  so much ending that I still yearn for that little room under the sloped ceiling in the ancient house where the college was born, all 14 students and the faculty living there together. There are the old elms up above and down below here is  my little room freshman year. I walked down to the Five and Ten and got that weird gold cloth for 35 cents a yard to make the round pillow, which I found so beautiful. Then, because a child without money never knows when to stop, never knows when it’s too much, I also covered the lampshade with the same stuff. That’s how you knew me in high school: the girl with the problem bangs whose blue plaid headband matched her blue plaid skirt. Ah that callow hopeful girl: Where is she now? Where is my bed?