But Don't Get a Swelled Head

They try to make me feel good, these guys who host my blog: They just issued a report saying that if I were an exhibit at the Louvre, it would take three days for all the people who came to my blog in 2011 to see it.And I find that very nice indeed - even though I know very well that at least half of these people came  hoping to see pictures of ladies in bras.Or not in bras.Or because they spotted the tag "men’s underpants."I posted for 364 of last year’s 365 days and am told that my busiest day was October 19, when I wrote something I titled "Call Me Miss Hannigan."Go figure.I don't think I wrote about a drunken orphanage boss but let's have a look. Ah yes, here it is now, one of those whiney posts.I forget what the most popular post was in 2010 but in 2009 it was the piece I wrote about Rosemary Kennedy, the “other sister” in the Kennedy clan, the one with the botched lobotomy.My mother knew her. She didn’t know the rest of the family, except for the iron matriarch Rose whose clipped and imperious letters I still have in my attic.She sure knew Rosemary though. They slept in the same cabin for three weeks. .And my most popular post in 2008, indeed my most popular post of all time?One called "Peachy Keen: Dirty Pictures" that  had an antique photo in it that just proves the old truth that if a girl covers up just a little she will end up looking far sexier than if she went totally nude. That one is here with its picture belowSo there it is: my report card so far. I’m rounding the home stretch to the 1,000-post goal just now. Come with me and let’s see how the world looks to us from there.A life well spent eh? Well, laugh and the world laughs with you!

A Day in the Life

Tiresome to work so hard the way I did yesterday, up at 5, yoga at 7, food-shopping 'til 9 then fanny to the chair like any good grownup trying to earn a dollar. No breakfast ‘til 10, no lunch ‘til 4, no supper ‘til ‘8 – but one good thing came of all this work: for the anniversary of Ted Kennedy's death I wrote a few words about Rosemary Kennedy and sent it off to the Huffington Post, along with both a picture of that poor girl as my family knew her and the scanned-in letter she wrote to us just six months before her lobotomy.I did this in honor of Teddy and of Eunice, who did so much for people like Rosemary. All these years later no one seems to really know what was wrong with her. Was she merely slow, or emotionally disturbed too? Or did she have some totally treatable affliction like Tourette’s?Never mind. She is safe now and out of the rain, as are all but one of her siblings.Tomorrow I'll probably go back to cracking jokes and posting pictures of cats writing emails but for now this, Teddy eulogizing the second of his slain brothers, just because it is so very moving.  Then click here , and see his poor sister's letter.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwmmdKMuUqY&feature=related]

May You Rest Now, Ted; You Felt Like My Brother

I wanted to go last might but it was 9:00 before I got free and could I do it really? Stand in the dark for hours with the temps down in the 50s and the wind off the water the way it always is?I wanted to go so badly because I had just realized for the first time that the same number of years separate Ted Kennedy and me as once separated him and his oldest brother.We could have been siblings, Teddy and I.In a way I felt that we were:I mean, his people are buried in the same cemetery as my people. As I recently wrote his sister, the slow one, attended the summer  camp my  family owned and ran. His dad came through Boston Latin School, same as my mom. His grandfather was Mayor of Boston and my grandfather ran for that office, though the other Irish called him Yankee-on-the-inside and a traitor to his race, just because he was upright and bold and fought the abuses of that famous old scoundrel James Michael Curley. For years my grandfather was Chairman of the Boston FinCom and of the Boston School Committee too and a first-generation American with roots in County Kerry, born of a woman who could not read or write English. And yet he studied and he learned and he studied some more and before he was 35 he was not only a Boston lawyer of note but a judge too, and the individual whose honorary degree from Harvard then-President Lowell said had given him the most pleasure to confer.My sister Nan and I grew up in this grandfather’s house. I thought he was our father until Nan set me straight. (He can't be our dad! He has white hair, stupid!" Certainly he acted as a father to us – that is until the day he fell and was taken away and showed up eight weeks later in a polished box looking thin and wholly unrecognizable with a nose like a plow-blade. “That’s not him,” Nan snorted before turning away from the casket and scooping up a pile of prayer cards which she used to invent elaborate games for us in the far-back rooms of that grand old funeral home in Kenmore Square.I last saw Ted Kennedy in person on a fall day when I met Bill Clinton who had flown into Logan. He stood off to one side looking like his back hurt. I first saw him in 1960 at a political rally addressed by then-Speaker-of-the-House John McCormack. I was just nine years old at the time but I still remember old McCormack pointing his bony finger at Nan and me in the front row. “THESE young ladies down front!” he thundered in some future-invoking burst of rhetoric. That same fall, our Uncle Jack drove us to Manchester NH the night before Teddy’s big brother was elected President. I got to touch the great man’s shirtfront; Nan got to shake the great man's hand.Forty years later my girl Annie worked in Ted’s office in spring semester of her junior year at Smith. One day she was sent downstairs to get him his lunch and when she was just boarding the elevator back up, here came Massachusetts' other Senator John Kerry, with a large retinue of aids and assistants.They crowded in, almost crushing her in the corner. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me!” she said,  fixing Kerry with a look of mock-outrage. “What I have here is the SENIOR  Senator’s lunch!”  (She’s always been like that, this Annie of ours: breezy and funny and joking around with the cops and custodians and all.)“The Senior Senator’s lunch eh?” said Kerry, catching the spirit of the banter. Well I HOPE IT'S A SALAD!"Annie’s impression of the man lying in state today? That he was universally respected on Capitol Hill; that he was universally loved.Part of me wishes Ted would be buried in Holyhood Cemetery near my mother and grand-father; near his own mom and his rascally dad and his poor sad sister Rosemary whom he never abandoned.But he will lie beneath the sod at Arlington National.He will be near his real brothers, this pretend big brother of mine. And when you recall the catch in his throat every time he spoke of them you have no doubt that there is where he should lie.Requiescat in pacem, as we all so often in a world now vanished forever.  Et lux perpetua luceat eum.

I took this on Kalmus Beach  Hyannis just the other day

Eunice and the 'Other Sister'

I could look at pictures of Eunice all day, hero that she was for trying to do for others what she couldn’t do at home. She was just 19 when sister Rosemary was lobotomized according to their father's wishes. He didn’t even tell Rose he had ordered it done 'til the surgery was over and they realized to their horror that she would never again stand erect, never again write the kind of letter that appears below here. My mother and aunt owned and ran a girls’ camp called Fernwood and in the spring of 1940, Rose Kennedy asked to meet them in New York to talk about her 22-year-old ‘working’ there as a Junior Counselor. Mom used to say she should have known the minute Mrs. Kennedy arrived without her daughter that the girl was not as 'able' as Rose was leading them to believe and sure enough, her care proved to be too much for everyone and her time at Camp Fernwood ended early, something the vacationing Mrs. Kennedy was most unhappy about.Rosemary was unhappy too as  you can tell reading this letter she sent to my mom and aunt. See the wistfulness in it, the brave good cheer. Now imagine that within a few short months all this liveliness would be erased. Unlucky for Rose and Joe’s handsome oldest girl! Lucky for us to have had her little sister to raise our consciousness around all issues of the differently abled!