Back Story

One morning last week while making the coffee, my mate David reached for the sugar and was stunned to find a live mouse inside the salad dressing carafe that stands on the same kitchen counter.Because the  lid of this carafe had been recently crushed in the garbage disposal, I had contrived a temporary fix by placing a sandwich bag over the top of the carafe and anchoring it there with a small inverted custard cup.

 But even with all this protection, the little guy  must have figured a workaround, because in one deft movement he seems to have dislodged the custard cup, nudged the bag off and dropped down inside the carafe where we now watched, astonished, as he wiggled and jumped, wiggled and jumped, executing a kind of high-speed pole dance in his attempt to get free.Being the guy who will escort even a spider outside by his little parachute lines rather than kill it, David rushed the carafe onto the grass and set it on its side and, sure enough: The mouse scampered off.
 And yet for days after, the image of the mouse in the bottle came back to me, along with that line from Shakespeare where Hamlet says, he could be bounded in a nutshell and still count himself the king of infinite space.But why did both that image and that line of verse linger so in my mind? I worked that question the way the tongue works the space left by a missing tooth until it finally hit me: They were lingering because of the injury I suffered some 11 weeks ago, when I broke a bone in my back and consequently became ‘bounded in a nutshell’ myself, told not to twist, or lift, or drive very far - and certainly not to stand or sit for more than 30 minutes at a time.The standing ban has actually been sort of nice, getting me out of more than one cocktail party or coffee hour marathon; and for sure the wisdom of the twisting and lifting ban was brought vividly home to me that day last month when I tried leaning out a second-story window to shovel a layer of snowpack off the back porch roof.  It’s the not-sitting-for-more-than-30 minutes thing that's been the most restrictive, in that it has forced me to find a whole new way to meet my readers in the paper each week.My writing method now is this:  I scribble out a column from a lying-down position, leave it a while, come back later, give it the critical squint and pencil in corrections. Then I leave it again to 'cool', and once again come back later to scribble and squint some more – until, finally, I take my phone and, using Siri, read the whole thing into the record, email it to myself, import it into Word and send it to the printer, so as to see it in black-and-white. This method has slowed me down for sure, but it has had its benefits too, in that it has paradoxically helped me to write the way I talk, which is what you want in a column like mine.And if I'm honest, I'll admit that passing the long winter weeks bounded in my nutshell has been kind of  nice. For one thing, I've spent my time reading so many family journals and letters that I think I am starting to levitate mentally, to lift above my own little life to almost – almost! - glimpse that ‘infinite space’ that Shakespeare is talking about.They say every trial brings its blessings, and certainly I am aware of the sense of peace I have enjoyed in this interlude. Really I’m only sad that things went a different way for the mouse, whom we found a few hours later, dead, not ten feet from his oily jail.               

Static?

It’s one thing or another these last days: it’s too moist or too dry. When it’s moist it’s moist because clouds are draped us like damp heavy sails pulled down onto the deck and every other hour snow falls. The snow soaks our clothes and puddles on our floors. We count on other members of our household to towel us off when we come back inside, looking like sleek and wet-headed pups, hair close against heads. But then the sun comes out and our furnaces are still working overtime because it’s so cold.  I drew this pretty tassled cloth from the drier and saw it sort of 'tentacle' all around me. I pulled out the ironing board to try taming it that way and its fringes began reaching for the bureau. I picked it up again and leaped onto my sweater. Then I remembered that can of Static Guard I had bought back in the 90s which did the trick.But it has had me pondering in the hours since that little cloth’s eerie antics:What does Science all the the opposite of static? Dynamic, right?  So then what are we living through right now with all this weather and the snow piled high against our windows and fresh storms bustling in past the gate to muscle aside the storms that have come before them. Is this the static dead zone of deep true Winter? Or is there something dynamic that, beneath all the wailing gales and blinding snows, is breeding Spring, which is not SO many weeks down the road, no matter how things feel right now?What was it that Hamlet said to his school pal after seeing his father's ghost on the castle parapets? “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” How true is that?!

Fun for the Four-Eyed (and more)

Two days ago I picked up a pair of glare-canceling nonprescription glasses (for night driving) and also a pair of prescription glasses, for the dreaded unforeseen circumstances under which my contacts pop clear out of my head.When you're at the optician's, they clamp all these gadgets to your face and then take a picture.Soooo, documentarian that I am, I took a picture OF that picture.It's me all right - same dumb little nose - but my eyes look strangely un-brown. I knew I had better get some of those glare-killing glasses because I often have precious cargo aboard in my car: seven talented young scholars, entrusted  for four years  to my town's local chapter of the A Better Chance Program by their awesome families. Here they all are last fall, on a fun outing in Boston that Resident Academic Coordinator Penny took them on. It was also last fall, while bringing them to see an amazing performance of Romeo & Juliet at the Strand Theatre in  Dorchester,  that I glanced down at my navigator for half a second and rolled into the car in front of us.At 5 mph, but still. The woman driving that car yelled "That really hurt!" and grabbed her neck when I jumped out to apologize. She also called the Staties. Those guys arrived, lights flashing, together with three guys in a fire truck, all of whom quickly assessed the situation and declared it a non-event.The boys, meanwhile, had hopped out of my car right when I did, some of them to comfort me (she was really yelling) and some to take pictures of her completely unblemished rear bumper.But then, when we all climbed back in to resume out pilgrimage, they were, to a man, quietly texting their mums:"Terry just rear-ended someone."Humbling! AND scary!Now I take so many precautions behind the wheel it's a wonder I ever get out of my own driveway, where peace reigns and even the field mouse feel safe. 

Be Glad of it All

Here’s why I’M thankful on this last day of the long giving-thanks weekend:1. I don’t have to peel anymore slimy flesh off a turkey. The soup's all made and I'm done sifting through gunk to find the tiny bones.2. I’ve decided I’m not going to even TRY doing the dreaded Holiday Card until January since I have new book just published and it'll be all I can do to get the word out about that.3. The book is an audio book so I didn’t have to annoy the socks off my whole family by asking them to read it for errors. I just closed myself up in a back bedroom with some fancy sound equipment last summer and let fly – and amazingly enough it doesn’t seem to embarrass me to listen to it because my old pal Roger Baker out in Albuquerque not only took out all the swallows and lisps and hiccups but also added original music between the ‘cuts’ so it’s all pretty and nice.4. I can actually SORT OF of swing a golf club even though my spine is twisting up like a contortionist with this secret scoliosis I didn’t even know I had, never mind a neck with so much joint-degeneration in it the guy doing the X-rays in at Mass General in October said, “Wo! Whadja, fall out of a tree or something?” I’m taking these lessons and my head hasn’t fallen: amazing.5. I’m not sure but I THINK I’m getting to be less of a workaholic. The whole neck problem comes from being such a wonk all my life, actually hand-writing term papers in fancy Old English script in high school, taking notes on my notes all through college, bringing entire pieces of furniture on ski vacations to strip and refinish them. (Picture it ! Whole SETS of chairs! Entire bureaus!) Last night before supper I was able to spend a whole hour locked in a locked closet with my four-year-old grandson without once feeling like Patty Hearst or panicking about all the emails I wasn’t answering. A little later I asked him if he wanted to hear the world’s greatest tenors and put on a CD which I had thought was Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo but which turned out to be the soundtrack to the Kenneth Branagh movie of Hamlet. “Where’s all the singing?” I said after we'd listened for a good two minutes. “Shhhh! TT” whispered my little friend, putting his finger to his lips. “This is just the part where the curtain is going up!” I liked that. I really liked that, because it reminded me to feel thankful AND glad AND lucky that...6.Yet again this morning whatever shape we find ourselves in, that big old curtain went up for us all.