Dessert First

'Keep Calm and Carry On' (see yesterday's post) makes me think about my mother-in-law Ruth Payne Marotta who worked at the forward-thinking Tufts University lab school I mentioned yesterday. During her time there she would try to get me to  bring my first baby in. I'd do it sometimes, bring her dressed in a little baby bonnet  – she was balder than the Buddha – and sometimes even leave her for a while at Ruth's request. I was never sure just what happened while I was gone but I knew it had to be good.She was the most open-minded adult I have ever known, this Ruth Paybe Marotta. "There's no reason not to have dessert first," I heard her say to my kids more than once as she spooned ice cream into small Bert-and-Ernie bowls. You also couldn’t shock her so you didn’t try. She regarded children, and all young people,  as spiritual equals to adults and she spoke to them in grave matter-of-fact tones. That baby of mine graduated from the great high school she attended some 17 year after her visits to that Child Development Center, and her cousin Katy and her old pal Alden came all the way into the city to attend the ceremonies. At the special lunch we went to afterward Alden sat beside Grandma Ruth. He asked her what it was like to be old. He always had this childlike curiosity Alden did and he asked this in the most respectful way.She didn’t flinch or rise up in all haughty in her chair or rap his knuckles; far from it. She welcomed the question and answered it carefully and thoroughly. I remembering wishing I could sit just a little closer to better hear what she was saying.Ruth had a gay roommate back when they were both members of the Class of ’39 at Tufts and was  a loyal friend to her for their whole long lives. And she didn’t bat an eye when one of her own family members and then another revealed that they were gay themselves.I feel so lucky to have met her at age 19; to have had her as an 'extra mother' - even before I married her son at 21. For years I watched her calm way of dealing with life and learned at her feet, because my family’s way was so different. (We yelled, we laughed, we sobbed - sometimes while laughing. (We were Irish what can I say?))  But now all these years later I am actually more like 'Grandma Ruth' than I am like my own mother.Anyway I’m quieter than I was and calmer too, slow to take offense, and impossible to shock and all of this I lay at her doorstep. Or maybe on what promises to be this sunny warm Thursday I will go find her gravestone and lay it there, with some spring tulips for my thanks.

She was the beloved younger child of a couple of New Hampshire Unitarians. This is Ruthie now, peeking shly at the camera. I have to say her son is just like her.

Happy Birthday Kiddo

Life is such a Dickens novel it slays me, the way it loops around and interweaves and characters not see since the early chapters show up again knitting at the Guillotine.

I wrote about an instance of this in my column this week, telling about what happened a few days before when, on a bus to Manhattan, I began thinking about a pal I first met over 40 years ago who now lives in New York and then didn’t she manifest right there in the tiny shop in Grand Central Station where I was going to meet my boy Michael for supper. If reading more of my stuff doesn’t make you feel like too much you’re doing shots of maple syrup you can see this column, and in all kinds of places, but most easily perhaps by Googling “Terry Marotta” and the phrase “kitten’s teeth.” Google my name and “kittens’ teeth” and if it’s the last weekend in April or later up will pop the piece as it looks in papers all over.

Three of our 'honorary' kids were at the dinner too which I don’t think I said in that column. An honorary kid in my book is anyone who has (a) lived in our house for a year or more, (b) launched college and/or grad school applications from here and (c) knows how to unload the dishwasher. Anyway three of the five of them came this night to see Michael because it was his birthday coming up and he is the family baby after all, born some 15 years after the oldest honorary kid and younger by a fair amount than his two 'real' sisters.

Sometimes he has no sense. I love that about him. You can read in a February post how he put his coffeemaker in the bathtub to clean it a while ago and when he lived under our roof he was no better. He spent his early years hiding behind doors to scare us and dressing up in odd costumes. He microwaved an egg still in its shell once just to see what would happen and oh wait that was my idea, but he sure loved the results more than anyone else. When he turned 14 he began at this wonderful place called Commonwealth School and never wore a coat from one end of the school year to the other that first year though he had to walk to the train station, switch to the subway, get out at a windswept plaza and walk yet more to get to the school. September to June the kid didn’t wear a coat I guess because the thought he looked cute in these certain vintage T-shirts bought for fifty cents and sized for a ten-year old... He could wear child-size clothes because right around then he turned skinny. He was round and darling as a child and then he just kind of skinnied on out and even now still weighs just 135 pounds.

He still wears those tissue-paper-thin T shirts from the 1970s too. He had one on the other night and over it this odd little military jacket that looked like something an organ grinder’s monkey might have on.

Anyway forgive me for talking about him so much. It’s just that today is his birthday which is also old Will Shakespeare’s birthday and I’m a big fan of both guys. May you live and live, Michael of ours and be like Willie Shakes if that's what you want getting married after the baby’s on the way and then having twins and going to the big city and doing what you love. To us you’ll always be what your big sister Carrie called you when she was a college sophomore and came home midweek for supper and you were saying funny ridiculous things and when you left the room to go back to your homework she called you Our Best Final Project. So Happy Birthday BFP, and TRY to keep the electrical appliances out of the bathtub. Can't wait to have ya back under the umbrellas some nice warm weekend soon.