Cheer Up, Jeeze

Cheer UP, Jeeze! That's what I said to myself yesterday after realizing what I wrote on the two days before  this.I swear, you’d just be crazy all the time if you didn’t have other people to pull you back into Normal. I picture the lone ant blundering off without a mission, feeble feelers waving as his companions march along together cheerfully, bending now and then to lift the dead ones off for burial. Solidarity!The point is, I felt pretty bleak Monday morning and so wrote that dismal limerick.Even on Tuesday I had little to offer but mopey sheets of 'sensitive wallpaper' as Garrison Keillor calls most  introspective writing.Hmmm, well OK maybe it wasn’t ALL  mopey. There were those high school girls hoisting their skirts up and me telling myself that sure, I worked out every day when in truth what I mostly did was sitting OUTSIDE the health club in y car reading and looking at the sky.But mostly, it was like this: Two days, two downer posts.Then in came a comment to the blog written by a reader named Chris N. plucked out 15 words from that 50 word limerick to show me what I had done. Here’s what he said:

Motivation and discipline are interesting. I’m starting to realize that a big part of both of them is visualizing the positive future benefits of the discipline in the here and now, and putting aside the visualization of the negative experiences of the discipline itself. So put the “dark”, “chill”, “summon the will”, “quit”, “bleak”, “rock”, “push it on back up the hill” and all those other downers in a tidy pile on the side of the road, say goodbye to them, and write a limerick full of positive images of where you will be after you got up early, did what needed to get done, and then are enjoying where it got you!

He was so right . My spirits shot up  like mercury in a dog days' thermometer from that point on.I couldn't call up the wit to write the cheery limerick he suggested, but here’s one by my old student Bill, someone I haven’t seen since Jimmy Carter took office, but who feels to me now as if the two of us are still in each other’s daily lives, every Fourth Period in a that sunny top-floor  classroom with its big old windows that rattled in the wind.

Yes it’s true, it’s a morning to shiver,Time to rise and to stand and deliver,Pushing boulders up hillMay be wearisome, still,It beats eagles consuming your liver.

"It could always be worse, he added. "You could be Prometheus," he added.Prometheus! Who stole not cookies but fire from the gods and got punished every day by having his liver plucked out by crows - only then it regenerated itself every night! A good one! So now I feel much better.

Sensitive Wallpaper

(This is the ivy at my window today.....)So what if I just SAID HOW I FELT here every day and added yet another layer of sensitive wallpaper to the walls of this Enormous Room the Internet. Sensitive wallpaper: that’s what Garrison Keillor calls personal narrative of the kind everybody’s writing these days, me on my post-nasal drip, you on the heartbreak of psoriasis, me on my inability to kick prescription laughing-gas, you on how you’re stuck in traffic and OK yes my two examples are fictional.  My faucets are all that drip but they drip all the time - we finally had to install a cat under each one because in this house the cats drink right from the faucets babe - come on over for supper, we’re running a special on bacteria! – so no, no nasal drip really, and who needs laughing gas when life is funny enough in a world where you can come down to breakfast one morning, reach for your vitamins, quick lift the bottle to your mouth to shake one loose and find a tiny BAT snoozing inside the thing, all folded up neat as Jiminy Cricket’s umbrella.That happened to me once.  And here’s what happened yesterday:I drove six hours so Uncle Ed, on the lip of his 90^th year, could see the full-on New Hampshire-in-autumn foliage maybe for the last time. His body is aflame with the pain of arthritis and I have some sort of freshly revealed case of scoliosis that has my own little skeleton starting to sink and torque downward like the Wicked Witch of the West in her big meting scene. End result: this morning we’re both pretty sore but it was worth it because we saw those leaves. And because they made me remember the poem Robert Frost wrote about this season.  Read it and just see if it doesn’t express what we’re all feeling right now here in these northern latitudes. It’s called “October” and it’s from The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. 1916:O hushed October morning mild,Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,Should waste them all.The crows above the forest call;Tomorrow they may form and go.O hushed October morning mild,Begin the hours of this day slow.Make the day seem to us less brief.Hearts not averse to being beguiled,Beguile us in the way you know.Release one leaf at break of day;At noon release another leaf;One from our trees, one far away.Retard the sun with gentle mist;Enchant the land with amethyst.Slow, slow!For the grapes' sake, if they were all,Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--For the grapes' sake along the wall.

Be My Friend? Look, Here's My Allowance!

 Yesterday I seem to have invited everybody in my entire Contact list to be my 'Friend on Facebook' talk about embarrassing, since some of my contacts are famous people. Like Gloria Steinem. And Garrison Keillor I think maybe. And the POPE! and the Center for Wart Removal in Atlanta, and OK yes I’m making it up about the Pope and the Wart Lab but not the others. I HAVE these addresses but I never use them - or I use them only sparingly.

For example when I was younger, see photo, that's me in the chair sobbing, no of course not, that's me the mother, sorrowing over the first haircut... When I was younger my mom died at a party right in front of us all just as we were toasting her birthday, and this highly shocking event caused me in the 2 or 3 years following her death to do all kinds of odd things: Like wearing hats, I think to channel her old jauntiness. Like CRYING while giving speeches that were suppose to be light and funny, making the whole audience cry too, talk about your Typhoid Mary. And like writing letters to famous people.

I wrote to Ronald Reagan and sent him the column I did about him when I saw him in Concord NH. I wrote to the Prince of Wales after seeing him at the 350 birthday of Harvard. I remember sitting in the Yard looking up at all those ivy leaves declining like Latin nouns down the sides of the old buildings and thinking 'Damn you Ten Thousand Men of Harvard, why did you keep my kind out for like 99 % of your history?'

I wrote to Garrison Keillor when I applied to be the first Journalist in Space. I had mentioned him in my application essay and have always kinda figured that's why I got to the final 40 in that contest.

I even wrote to the great John Updike when I read a short story of his in the New Yorker that made it apparent his mum had died too. I sent him a condolence note and a copy of the column I wrote about Cal’s dramatic death – that was my mom's name, 'Cal', as jaunty a name as she was a person, a cigarette held tight in her teeth as she took the corners on two-wheels to get us to that convent school she enrolled us in by mistake where she was in a fight with the nuns from DAY ONE.

And they all wrote back, these famous characters: Ronnie R. wrote right back. The future King of England did too or at least His Honor Lord High-Fanny of the Royal Equerry wrote on his behalf. And Garrison Keillor and John Updike sent actual postcards, John Updike's saying a thing so nice about my writing it pulled me up out of obscurity like the wave of the Bibbity Bobbity Boo wand of Cinderella’s fairy godmother. In fact just last month he had another story in the New Yorker, this one so beautiful I was forced to write him again and what do you think? Another postcard came, as gracious as the first.

Now 15 years had passed between my first letter to him and my second, that's how careful I am. And I wouldn’t DREAM of writing to the Pope even if I had his email address, and the same goes for Lord High-Fanny who gave me some serious attitude in his letter just because my column said Prince Charlie wore the academic hood of his alma mater whereas in fact he wears the robes of the University of Wales just because he like OWNS Wales or some insignificant thing like that.

Gloria Steinem though? Gloria’s address I was saving for a special occasion, like offering myself to come be the jester at the next Inter-Galactic Women’s Conference. And now – agony!- my girl has called her girl if you can call an Address Book a girl and I seem to have asked her to be my friend on Facebook! The Queen gets invited to the worker bee’s after school party, Aaargh I could die! But, on the other hand in the last 24 hours I've heard from people I haven’t seen in decade and have admired their pictures and have written on their walls so why be embarrassed? Because really we're ALL members of the Class of '08, right? So really, why NOT write in each other's yearbooks?