Um, Those Are Your Underpants

On a lighter note today, my pal Mary just sent me this video, made eons before MTV, of Nancy Sinatra and her own 60s-era fly girls, dancing to These Boots Are Made For Walkin'.Did women really dress like this?They sure did. My mom was 63 years old the summer my sister Nan and I got married and wore two mother-of the-bride dresses so comically brief above the knee they looked like paper doll outfits.And as for the hemlines on the really young women?Well here was our rule: if your fingertips didn't brush skin when you let your hands drop down by your sides, your skirt was too long.Nan and I would come downstairs set to go out for the evening and our mother would rattle her teacup in its saucer and tremble so hard her cigarette ashed all down onto her clothes. We both remember the time she yelled "Oh the bust! Oh the hem!" (Luckily we married at 21 and 23, young enough so there were no consequences to be paid for going about all tarted up like that.) Yikes~!Anyway this is me before the Ivy Day Parade at Smith College.I dressed this way for a ceremony! On Commencement weekend!  We even dressed our babies with leg showing it seems.This is from the Christmas of '78. The shy one looking down is my firstborn Carrie. The leggy lass beside her is Nan's one-an-only Gracie, as we called her then whose marriage I told about here.But on to the video, seven women in their underpants doing the pony and the swim and sort of a timid shimmy. Mary's one wry sentence appended to the message she sent it with: "I still dance like this!" Haha, she does not (but boy did I laugh...)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbyAZQ45uww#t=70 

Big Deal

Newspapers are sure aiming for the lowest common denominator these days. boy. In the condensed headlines-only online version of the Boston Globe that appeared in my inbox yesterday it read, “This Day in History: Ally Sheedy turns 50.”

Really? News about that little fox-faced waif from The Breakfast Club tops the list of all the things that happened on July 13 over the centuries?

I clicked on that link and saw that all kinds of other things happened too, far sweeter things and more evocative things:

• Like the fact that on that date in 1842, Queen Victoria became the first British monarch to ride on a train, traveling from Slough Railway Station to Paddington in 25 minutes. (Paddington! Like the bear! Queen Victoria, who missed her dead Prince Albert so much after his death at 42 that forever after she had the servants bring fresh water to his dressing room, the same as when he was alive!)

• Or the fact that on that date in 1886, King Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned in Lake Starnberg. (A king drowns? Was there even an investigation? Was it like Fredo’s death in Godfather Two - or wait, that wasn’t exactly a drowning was it?)

• Or what about on July 13, 1927 when Charles Lindbergh was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York City? Lindbergh, that hero who turned into a pariah for saying nice things about the Nazis! I always felt like I knew the guy: my mom was in college with Anne Morrow, his future wife, who went on to live through so much, her husband’s ostracism, the kidnapping of their dear first baby, the many burdens of fame… Mom heard her once in the college book store, talking about how she had just met the famous young aviator...

So yes, my initial reaction was “Ally Sheedy? Pfffffft!” but in truth I have always identified with her, I think because she has that jaw-chin arrangement. We have that in in my family, too. I have it. See? That's me on the right.

My girl Carrie has it too. And my mom sure had it. When she was mad she could extend that jaw of hers so far forward she looked just like a witch.

I can that do that witch trick too but I never do on account of how I’m all the time trying to frame myself as the new Mother Teresa ha ha. As for Carrie, when she sticks her chin out at work grown men run for shelter under their desks.

I read where Ally was a ballet dancer before she turned to acting. And she wrote a children’s book that made her famous before she was even old enough to vote. Her folks were these hooked-up artsy New York types so that that sure didn’t hurt.

Me I had to make it on my own (sob!) but look at what I can do now: yoga poses that make Salvador Dali’s meting watches look stiff. Or wait, is this really me or is it secretly Ally? Place yoru bets - then watch this clip from that signature high school film. Ah, Anthony Michael Hall! Ah Molly Ringwald! Emilio Estevez! Judd Nelson! Ah the lost 80s!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkX8J-FKndE]

Still Our Baby

Today I'm taking some time away from the usual weighty drivel since it’s the birthday of our girl Annie, seen here (as a baby on the day of her christening) in the arms of my old pal Kathy, one of a small group of women with whom I wouldn’t have survived those early parenting years.

Annie was the second-born so we didn’t teach the daylights out of her like I had done with her poor big sister. We just enjoyed her.

Like any second-born, she had the sense not to take parental expectation too seriously: She told us  about the big Fourth Grade project on Native American Myths just hours before it was due, choosing as ‘her’ myth “Why the Buffalo Fears the Chipmunk,” and drawing for her buffalo a wobbly picture of a seeming mammal that bore an eerie resemblance to Herbert Hoover and using for her chipmunk our hamster-of-the-moment, decked out with tiny Indian props.

The next morning at school the hamster ate the box, Herbert and all, and escaped its shoebox to make mayhem in the classroom. Everyone loved it.

Annie knew even then how to take things in stride.

She also had amazing powers of observation. Such amazing powers of observation I decided to try apprenticing myself to her so I could notice more in life. She could 'sketch' for you any person in her class, not by pouring the whole dictionary n them as I tend to do but by naming just one feature and then, eerily ‘showing’ the person to you by making her face look like that person’s face. You know how that Saturday Night Live’s Darrell Hammond ‘did’ Bill Clinton mostly by biting his lower lip? It was like that. I thought even then that Annie could get a job doing impressions.

Add to that the fact that she’s funny; was funny, right out of the gate. She was only 15 when one of her big brothers said of her that no party really started until Annie got there.

Here she is one last time on the day of her graduation from that awesome school in Northampton, together with her godmother Sheila and that her big brother Dodson. Happy Birthday Annie Marotta! May you get three times the number of years you have now!

 

Commencement Was Yesterday

I left home for keeps at 17, when I packed up my poetry books and my dorky bike and headed for college. We drove west on old Route 2 in that car that smelled like dog no matter how often we  tried to clean it. ‘Who will ever accept me the way my family did?’ I worried on that trip, ‘me with my obsessive list-making and my line of meaningless chatter like a monkey’s?’

Then we arrived and here was my roommate from Aspen Colorado, blond and blunt and athletic. “Man, you’re Catholic?" was the first thing she said to me with high amusement. "I never met a real Catholic before!”

I felt awkward for.... oh, at least an hour on that long dark hallway our rooms lay along. But then other freshmen began opening the doors to their rooms, all our families having left gone by then and didn’t we all have our favorite pillows and our homely slippers, even the same nature posters with that legend “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World” printed along the bottom. By the end of that first day freshman year I had six new friends. And by the first day of sophomore year I couldn’t wait to get back to campus, a feeling that kept multiplying exponentially with each passing year.

Then, almost overnight it seemed, we graduated and joined the long line of alums.

I missed our 5^th reunion but went back for my 10th, and for every reunion thereafter and loved every one.  I kept meeting these wonderful open people I had not known as an undergraduate and it was all utterly great. What was even greater was coming  back on ordinary days, when I was passing through Northampton MA on a business trip, say, or coming to attend a lecture or two-day symposium, or, best times of all, coming to see Annie Marotta and Susan De Young, our two daughters, one 'real' and one honorary, who graduated the last year the amazing Ruth Simmons was President there at Smith. I remember how Ruth - we all called her just ‘Ruth’, the way Moses is just called Moses - left the podium and came to the front of the stage at Commencement exercises and held out her arms in this cherishing gesture while the whole class of 2001 clapped and hollered and stamped for her.

I adored my time at Smith and I adored every inch of its beautiful campus. The love of my life and I decided we would marry while standing on this red bridge by the athletic fields.

Then, two whole decades later, I brought four of our kids back to see the place, little thinking that Annie and Susan would one day go to school here; little thinking that Carrie, in the background, would do a Summer Science program here. Michael our youngest would have gone to school here himself if he weren’t a boy.

Anyway, this is all of us at that red bridge. Susie was the one taking the picture so she isn't in it. And this below is a short video that to me shows why the school is still so great. Commencement was yesterday and all day my thoughts were travelling westward along old Route 2, just as I had done that first time long ago.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNh4FFpwFjI&feature=relmfu]

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 Much Dreaded College Essay

What's the most important task for you high school seniors hoping to get into college - after you earning the grades and doing OK on the SATs that is? The writing of a good essay, in which the scratchy voice of the 17-year-old comes through.That phrase belongs to the Director of Admission at Yale who uttered it some ten years ago when my kid was looking at colleges.What he meant, I believe, is that you should write the essay yourself. Don’t let your parents write it, much less some college “coach” your parents might have hired.Don’t let them dream up your topic either. Dream up your own topic.Also, try not to bore your reader to death by stringing together sentences that bore even you as you tap them out on your keyboard.These readers are only human after all, and chances are they’re very weary given the number of folders they must go through in order to assemble this next college Class of 2016. I picture them with eye strain. I picture them with feet that have gone to sleep from curling one and then another under themselves as they try to get comfortable during these marathon reading sessions. They probably need more water than they’re drinking and their minds doubtless keep wandering toward thoughts of dinner.

Show them the courtesy of speaking to them in your own voice about something that interests you. Don’t try writing like a C.E.O or a department head at the Internal Revenue Service or some solemnly intoning guy in an infomercial for cholesterol medication. You’re a high school student! Relax and let yourself be what you are right now, even if your secret hope is to one day find fame and have paparazzi trailing you in pursuit of those stolen-moment candids of you sleeping with your mouth open or yelling at your dog.I had the chance to read two great college essays in the last month. One has in it time travel and 16^th century horses straining at their reins; the other, a peach tree, a bright blue door slapping open and Sunday dinner with Grandma.They're both terrific and they're nothing like the college essay I once wrote telling how I routinely skipped meals and stayed up all night fashioning flash cards and making teensy notes on all my class notes.This was when I applied Early Decision to that fine women’s college called Wellesley.Six weeks later they flat-out rejected me.Thus, when I applied to that other fine women’s college known as Smith I wrote a very different essay, telling what it was like to be charged with the protection and emotional well-being of half-dozen Seventh Graders at summer camp the year a bear with an eerie resemblance to Babe Ruth kept appearing at the clothesline behind the cabins to sniff at all our swimsuits.Smith did accept me, welcomed me in September and got right to work teaching me that study is much more than rote memorization, that balance in life is crucial and that it’s pretty much never a good idea to skip a meal.I still think I got into one college and not the other because I wrote that second essay with pleasure and fondness and even excitement. Therefore, young applicant, speak in your own voice about what has moved or surprised, delighted or terrified you, and let the chips fall where they may – as indeed they always do.Therefore, young person, speak in your own voice about what has moved or surprised, delighted or terrified you, and let the chips fall where they may – as indeed they always do.

The Man is a Prince: He Does the Dog

The phrase ‘the second shift’ refers to that whole second workday most women put in after they get home from their real jobs. I read a recently that nowadays  men are doing just as much around the house as their wives.  I certainly hope this is true.They sure weren’t when Arlie Hochschild spent eight straight years conducting the research for her book The Second Shift. Observing daily life in the homes of 50 working couples with children, she found that only 20% of American men shared the extra work of chores and childcare while women put in an average of 15 hours a week on those tasks,  which add up to an entire month of 24-hour days. You could resent the heck out of your spouse living this way, but what many women do is create a 'story'  that allows them to keep resentment at bay. One woman named Nancy explained that her husband Evan 'did' the downstairs while she did  the upstairs - only in their house doing the upstairs meant doing all the work relating to the kitchen, living room, dining room, bedrooms and bathrooms, while Evan, for his part, handled the garage.Oh, and the dog. He did the dog.But this  way of framing things allowed Nancy to think of Evan as pulling his weight. When asked by Hochschild to reflect on this, Evan said, “We don’t keep count of who does what,” quickly adding, “Whoever gets home first starts the dinner,” a statement which did not in any way line up with what Hochschild saw as a frequent visitor.This was just their ‘story’, the ‘family myth’ as she calls it that they had devised to cover up the imbalance. “The truth was, Nancy made the dinner.”Other husbands in her survey had stories of their own. One said, with a perfectly straight face, that he made all the pies."But I was brought up to do housework,” explained poor Nancy, in charge of every room in the house. “Evan wasn’t.”And there's the crux of it right there. As Hochschild puts it, “the female culture has shifted more rapidly than the male culture, and the image of the go-get-‘em woman has yet to be matched by the image of the let’s-take-care-of-the-kids-together man.”  Or as Gloria Steinem said a while ago to a standing-room-only crowd of fellow Smith College graduates, “The problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, "How can I combine career and family?"The day will come though, I feel sure - provided we work hard on raising up strong  and fair- minded little girls  - AND  get them the heck away from all that appalling sex-kitten apparel they’re showing these days in the stores.Tomorrow I won't be so crotchety, I promise. :-)

Who'da Thunk It?

I’m giving a talk this coming Thursday at the Theological Opportunities Program in Harvard Square. I know I’m doing this because I saw notice of it in the Boston Globe yesterday. Not that I forgot or anything. In fact I’m excited to deliver this speech, which is about that Who’d-a-Thunk-It place you end up in when you dread a thing that then  turns out to have more secret compartments than the lining of a pickpocket's jacket and each one full of happy surprises.Take this weekend for example. I went to a college reunion not my own for people just barely 30 and I’ll be honest: I dreaded it. I dreaded sleeping under a thin blanket in a chilly dorm room with a glaring overhead light that looked designed for conducting interrogations.It took me two trips to drag  all my stuff from my car into that dorm at 3pm on Friday. Then, at 5pm, I dragged it all back out and stuffed it in my car.  “You’re leaving at 6am tomorrow, " I told myself. "Why not just sleep in your clothes?”  I see now that I was ready for the whole experience to be pretty awful.In fact it was pretty great.It was great because I got to see the nice people who work in the Alumnae House. AND I got to play with that infant I was in charge of while his parents went out to dinner. PLUS  got to walk around the campus whose grand old trees still appear in my dreams from the long-ago years when I went to this school myself.I also got to spend time with my two girls, Ms. A . Marotta and Ms. S. DeYoung,  both of the Class of '01 , and also with the latter’s husband Kevin who is daddy to that pink-cheeked infant.I did have a moment of panic at the look of horror on Annie’s face when she arrived on campus Friday morning and I sidled  up to her: “I’ve been to our dorm,” I told her. “They gave you a  roommate.” They did WHAT?” she exploded. I was almost afraid to tell her that the roommate was me in case she would still be mad.She wasn't, thank God, and that was the final silver lining in an experience I thought would be so stressful: For the first time in 30 years, I had the privilege of watching all night long over the peaceful sleep of my onetime Baby Annie. 

Daughters' Reunion

Last night found me back in a dorm room; it's like I never left. I even felt a little bit the way I felt then: as if everyone else in the place was out having crazy weekend fun and I was stuck in my room, fantasizing about Peanut Butter Cups and trying to get my bangs to lie down flat.No really it's not like that at all. Really I’m sort of crashing my girls' 10th reunion and doing a little babysitting while they go out on the town. This is at Smith, which has been a women's college since its founding in 1875, just a couple of years before I was a student here ha ha.When I was here we thought we couldn't  get through the weekend unless there was a scheduled “mixer” to bring in guys from the guys’ schools. (Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams: all the schools you could get to in a reasonable amount of time were for men only.) When I first arrived on campus as a freshman I remember being surprised by the way some of the upperclassmen worked to get invited for the weekend to one of those ‘guy’ schools,  there to witness all the foolish behaviors associated with alcohol and male hormones. It's sad the way we all seemed to be full of such yearning back then. The students here nowadays  aren’t like that at all. When my two girls  were here at Smith and I would come visit them I couldn’t believe how simultaneously focused AND jaunty the students all were. They were studying their brains out AND they were chalking saucy sentiments on the footpaths; aspiring highly like we did but also having such fun doing it. And, as far as I can tell it's been years since anyone was  dying to get away on the weekends. Having been back on campus a lot when these two were here from '97 to '01 I can tell you that their class seemed utterly happy and fulfilled. And having come back here this weekend I can tell you they sure still seem that way. Take a look at the faces of these three, who let me take their picture last night. It just makes me thank God for the steady progress of the Women’s Movement; and thank God too for women’s education wherever in the world it's going forward.

Baby I'm Amazed

Pretty soon I’ll be sleeping on the roof, this place is getting so crowded: Besides the two who moved in back in March we now also have Susan her husband Kevin and their wide-eyed baby Peter. (Does he even HAVE eyelids? His dad says he keeps wanting to narrate his movements as he struggles to pick up his own toes let’s say. He has him  saying to himself “I know I can do this if I can just open my eyes a little wider!” ) Susie, or Sooz, as her pals call her, did some of her growing up right in this house. She was in Sixth Grade when she became another honorary kid around here, coming here most days after school, starting her homework, sometimes having a little pre-supper meal.And every Thursday night she slept over, right next to my girl Annie in Annie’s big queen-size bed. They fit just fine, though I do remember the morning Annie appeared in the kitchen ahead of Susie. She came in smiling and shaking her head and finally told me why: "She keeps finding MY hair in her sleep and tucking it behind HER ear! I’m out cold and suddenly my head gets yanked over to one side!”This was an easy mistake for Susie to make since Annie's hair was pretty long then,The two were best friends right on through senior year and even went to the very same college together, where one tore up the Rugby field and the other practically scoured the very language right off the Amendments to the Constitution so hard did she study them and all their thorny implications. They graduated from Smith College together ten years ago and are going back today for their reunion.Last May, when I was on that same campus for my own reunion, I am recalling that the Commencement Day speaker was Rachel Maddow with that mind of hers as sharp as a deli-meat guillotine. I love going back to that campus, where I will be before 9 am tomorrow. MY job besides walking around in in my usual haze of general admiration for my school? To look after this little guy tonight, while Kevin and Sooz and Sooz’s best pal Annie join some old pals and kick up their heels on the campus where my long-gone mom, and then I myself, and then the two of them learned so much and had such dandy fun.It's enough to make anyone smile. :-)

 

New Mother

Pretty nice weekend with the warm weather and  the birds all yelling with joy like they’d just gotten a governor’s pardon. Then yesterday morning as I made the coffee the news flashed over my phone: Susan had had her baby, little Susie who came into our life when she met our girl Annie in 6th grade and they both just knew they would be friends forever. She is resting now in Salt Lake City – the birth was hard and she couldn’t yet talk on the phone - but oh if she were next to me now what I wouldn’t say to her! Maybe something like this:“Remember when Annie brought you here the day after you two met? It was Good Friday and we dyed Easter eggs. And then the next day we shopped for pale-yellow and purple paper goods and a stuffed bunny the exact color of that warm spring soil. And then Easter and then that Monday was April vacation and they were running the Boston Marathon and I brought all you kids into the Museum of Science, remember that? Do you remember how later that day when you got out of the car at your own house you said in this cute shy way “I have a brother.”And then he came too, after school and on outings, and your oldest brother as well and it was a whole new stage in the life of this family, already enriched with one honorary son but now with you three too. With YOU, Susie, and your flashing dark eyes and your love of all dogs everywhere. You leaping away in the name of Track and Soccer and Basketball in high school and then off to Smith College right alongside your Annie. Remember sitting in Sage Hall the first time everyone accepted to the Class of '01 was assembled, you turning to us with an impish smile and whispering . “Where are the guys?!” Ah but you flourished at this fine women’s college, you and Annie both. She made notes on her notes and threw elegant beer parties in her room and aced every course they threw at her while you cracked Geology wide open, swam competitively, sang in an à cappella  group and used that cute scratchy voice to get your own little radio show. Then it was field study all over the planet, and grad school, and then suddenly Kevin as if he'd been waiting for you all that time, the perfect match, blonde to your dark, tall to your tiny…And now this unimaginable gift of a child.I remember when your mom died at last of her terrible illness in your 10^th grade year. At her memorial service you stood to sing an à cappella version of  “In My Life”  together with your closest singing pals - only your face began to crumple part-way through and Annie rose and encircled you with an arm and brought you back to the pew.You couldn’t feel your mum that day maybe - or maybe you could feel her all too well, I don’t know. But I bet you can feel her this morning, the beautiful Peggy, gone too soon of ALS. And thank God, thank God for this: that when her sister Ginny heard the news on the farm yesterday she got on the very next plane, and isn’t she there right now this morning as you wake, there holding you all in her incomparable Aunt Ginny way.To you both! To you all, until Annie and I and your dad can get there too!

Stand Together

Damp as a wet dog’s nose when my alarm went off at 5 yesterday and I thought I’d never be able to get out of that bed. But  I had to be in the city by 7 so off I went in the rain and even my old fedora couldn’t stop my hair from looking like this. (It’s funny: you think you look OK  right up until someone two decades younger grabs your arm and says  “Oh look at you in your hat! how CUTE is that!" and boom you’re back to feeling like a circus monkey all over again just like you did when you were 12.)Still, I had a swell time: I learned about an institution so great it will need more than a newspaper column and a few blog posts to tell about. I also looked up at  the ridiculously high ceilings of the Harvard Club that kind of make you want to rally the peasants and lead a torchlight mob to the palace – until  you remember how many young people with nothing have found a place there over the years.I didn’t find a place there. I didn't find a place at any of the Ivy League schools because when I was coming up they didn’t take my kind at the Ivies. I was a girl, and back then  girls were raised to act as ornaments to their husband’s careers and tenders of the next generation of little male rulers. I went instead to  a women’s college called Smith which has been turning out sharp and competent leaders since the 1870s and I thank God every day that they found me and gave me that scholarship that got me through,along with the my part-time job and the $25 a month my mom scraped up to send me.One of the people given an award at yesterday’s breakfast was Ayanna Pressley, the first woman of color to serve as one of the Boston’s City Council's Councilors-at-Large. She told us how some older guru-pol told her she'd sure-enough  never win an election on a platform of saving the girls but that was her platform and win she did because, as she says, "girls become women and women are the backbone of our families our neighborhoods and our communities."Rain or no rain it was a good day to take my little monkey-self to hear a message like that.When I got back to my house I sat outside in the car for a whole hour, looking at that front-yard tree so bare now just 24 hours after its big moment. And I remembered what Eleanor Roosevelt said about how no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. And I thought "Wear the hat you like when you want to wear it, T!" And who cares what kind of creature you are as long as you're strong and kind and you stand with your fellow creatures in good times and bad.

March When It's Time to March

Why do people come back for their reunions, in some cases from around the country, in some cases from around the globe? Not because they’re looking that great or setting the world on fire usually. I think they come for those late-night conversations.At my Smith reunion this past weekend we had all the human drama you’ll find among people anywhere: cancers conquered and cancers fought to a standstill; pain on rising and pain on going to bed, no matter HOW many time a week we go to the Y. We had here and there a ripening cataract; here and there a worn-out hip. But our hip replacement girl is back dancing  and our future cataract patient will still be running a whole corner of her state.  One of us hoisted a bike out of her car single-handedly and rode all over campus, just like she did at 19. And this one with the long hair above left is a golf pro at 61.We were college kids in a time of war and assassination, and last winter when ten of us  got on the phone to dream up slogans for our class signs we thought a lot about that: the pain our country was in back then what with deaths from war and protest and assassination. But we thought too about what rose up in so many young people as as a result, which I would call a readiness to stand with the excluded and help make a place for them. Yesterday at the Alumnae Parade someone from a younger class saw us approaching with our signs and our outfits and called to her pals, “Here come the hippies!”Hippies? Aren’t we  doctors and lawyers, artists and actors and scientists, designers of laws and landscapes and buildings? Parents, some of us, and even grandparents? Hippies, never. No Hippie ever studied the way a Smith girl studies.Now if you have the time watch Rachel Maddow talking last Sunday to our newest graduates; then, for a real nice chill up the backbone read this real short excerpt from her speech that day. I believe I'll sit down then and memorize it.

In the big picture, standing at the age you are now at graduation, looking for your own deep-water horizon, consider the possibility that you might very well get old - everybody hopes you do. Be part of good decisions because the stuff you do now you will want to be bragging about when you become 90.How do you become part of good decisions in the absence of a crystal ball? The best way is to get smart and get smart fast, to take the opportunities you've got very seriously, to continue your education not necessarily in a grad school way, but in a lifelong way, be intellectually and morally rigorous in your own decision-making and expect that the important people in your life do the same if they want to stay important to you.Gunning not just for personal triumph for yourself, but for durable achievement to be proud of for life is the difference between winning things and leadership; it's the difference between nationalism and patriotism; it's the difference between running for office and devoting yourself to public service; it's agreeing that you're part of something; taking as your baseline that you will not seek to reach your own goals by stepping on your community; it means coming to terms that your country needs you…”

So I say: march when it's time to march.....

and dance when it's time to dance.

Home Again

What a difference a day makes: Thursday's nasty hotel cost $150 per night and the one I’m in now? $120 for three nights. Why? Because now I am home in the arms of my alma mater, the place I still can’t drive past in my hamster-wheel travels  without  ditching my car and walking in the gates to sit once again under that big copper beech that’s been sheltering young women for a hundred years and more.It’s Reunion Weekend here at Smith and I'm staying in Room 109 Comstock,  as nicely monastic a cell as you could ask for. I have a window, as you can see and a desk, a bureau, a bookcase and a sweet single bed.Last night 4o of us hung out for a couple of hours in Comstock’s living room, once as  formal as all such living rooms were in women’s colleges. (This  is the place Julia Child went to school, remember - and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Sylvia Path and Barbara Bush  when she was Barbara  Pierce. I mean you can just picture the pearl necklaces.)My class was like that for oh, maybe about five minutes Freshman  Year. Then in came the Youth Revolution. I remember I cut a full 12 inches off that blue wraparound I came with in September, traded in the bra  for a halter-top and let my previously just-so hair tumble down in the curls God gave me.

We may not look much like the girls we once were but I can tell you this about the 102 of us here this weekend:  We seem as happy to be on this campus today as ever we were when youth and strength were ours and the days ahead were poised to open and open like flowers.

Now I Ask You

Don’t some people just look better with eye makeup? I didn’t know until I began doing a little television that when I laugh my eyes just disappear -  Poof and they’re gone, engulfed by the folds of skin around them. In fact, last time I want to the eye doctor she lifted up one of my impressively iguana-like upper lids and said “you know you can totally get your eyes done and insurance will pay for it.”  “Really? How’s that gonna happen?“ I asked. “Well pretty soon you won’t be able to see out from under a lid like this.” (A Lid Like This – nice title for a book -  about haberdashery maybe.)But look to your left here. In the top picture: the Plain Jane of all Plain Janes: Gloria Steinem as she looked graduating from Smith College in 1956 . In the  bottom picture: Gloria as she looks today with those signature dreamy eyes. It wasn’t until I met her in November and was given this book of some of her public utterances that I realized: sometimes what God forgets to give you, you can get from a bottle - or in this case a eyeliner pencil. I took a lesson I can tell you. Click on the “Play” symbol and see:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBu8A13aMw0]

Build Grow Move Build Grow Move

Reunions Magazine has just quoted part of a column I wrote about a mini-reunion with my college pals. Only thing is they have me down as a columnist for the Norwich (CT) Bulletin whereas in fact I am a Columnist for the World in the sense that my little words go far and wide, which is a great source of satisfaction for me even if there’s no money in it. (350 papers in Massachusetts alone have access to my column and many of them use it. My compensation? $15 a week.)But never mind that. Here’s what the Reunions issue labeled November/ December/January 2010 quoted from that piece. It was kind of the big finish:

And in the end this reunion seemed to be just what any school reunion should be: a field trip of the imagination to the time when we would gather in small groups to joke and commiserate and tell fond semi-mocking stories about our families, who turned out not to seem so crazy after all when compared to other people’s families; to a time before we were tied in tight to this world by the cords of love and obligation; to a time when we believed – really believed – that Time would never touch us.

Ah but Time touched us all right. Time turned us and turned us, forcing us to grow as the chambered nautilus grows. That little creature inhabits one ‘room’ of his delicate shell, grows, builds a new, larger room, moves into it, grows, builds a new, larger room, moves into that, etc. until he has that lovely circular condo whose image we see on all the exercise equipment. (I bet on some level you also know the poem about this creature by the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes if you’ll just reach back far enough in memory. “Build more stately mansions O my soul!” etc., remember? The whole thing is here, if you want to have a look.You’ll also see the nautilus's shape in this picture I took of the stairs inside the lighthouse at Pemaquid Point in Maine which we visited during our three days together. We hiked clear to the top, clambered up into the place where the beacon is and clambered down again. These were once my best friends in the world, Vicki and Cathy and Elizabeth, Virginia, Susan and Judy and in many ways they still are that. A seventh pal, called Lynne, couldn’t make it this time but I think of  her every day – not just because she was and still is  so  beautiful but because she taught me by example that even if you feel all sad and weird you can still by God get up off your fanny and do your work. (Lynne at an earlier mini-reunion on Rattlesnake Hill, NH. For more on that experience go to Elizabeth's website here)

Glorious Gloria

Gloria Steinem has a button that says, “The Truth Will Set You Free (But First It Will Piss You Off)” which is funny because I can’t think of anyone who seems to be in less of a pissed-off state than this activist/ feminist/ lecturer/ author who spoke to a sold-out crowd of fellow Smith College alums last night at a gala celebration of her 75th birthday.

“SHE'S 75?” I said to myself when, lean and limber, she strode onto the stage at The Asia Center on the New York's Upper East Side. That thought came right before I moved on to the equally silly “Could I possibly look like that at 75? If I gave up meat AND dairy AND wheat AND possibly Thanksgiving dinner too?” But within five minutes of the time she entered into her conversation with Smith President Carol Christ I was asking myself if I could ever BE like her, be like any person who carries her gifts this lightly, and with so much humor and heart.

"Empathy is the most revolutionary of emotions" Gloria once wrote and she sure feels like a person who has lived into that insight. Not that she never gets angry. When someone asked her last night what makes her mad today, she quickly said, "The fact that women are still doing two jobs, one at work and one when they get home." And then she shared her most recent insight: “I figured out the other day that what women have are the jobs that can’t be outsourced. I mean to be a nurse you have to actually BE there, right?” But when at the end someone asked her to name the moment that had perhaps given her the most satisfaction, she described the morning she was crossing Lexington Ave. to get a bagel and a city worker popped his head up out of a manhole. "Hey GLORIA!" he yelled. "‘See that sign 'People working'? It took us FIFTEEN FUCKIN' YEARS to get it! Today my daughter is an electrician and makes as much money as I do! How great is that?’”

Pretty great, jaunty man. Pretty great, you Gloria of ours. Thank God for your 75 years here and may you get your wish and still be with us at 100.

Gaudeamus Igitur

Italy Day 11: Being on a guided trip is like being a baby again: you HOPE your caregivers know you need a nap and a juice break; you HOPE they'll check to see that you’re still dry. Our caregivers do know all this and have handed us along from dawn to forenoon to golden gloaming with so many of our needs anticipated that I find myself released somehow to range in thought over all of my tiny life, remembering, and regarding anew, and looking forward.

 What I’m remembering today is what it was like to be 18 and beginning my second year at Smith College, when a girl named Vicki James arrived.  Dewey House, where we lived, was a tiny dorm, the place where my Aunt Julia had lived in her own time at Smith with her big sister (my future mom) just three dorms away. It is for me one of THE key places of my life, a stage upon which unfolded so many new thought and fresh insights, a place gracious and formal and fine, staid and timeless - until Vicki came and changed everything.

She knew History, and believed in History’s lessons. She also knew what fun was and she believed in beer. The above picture shows her blindfolded on the lawn in front of Dewey House before the Freshman Sophomore picnic that ended with one of us spraining an ankle and another getting wedged inside one of the sinks at the Davis Student Center. It was Vicki who found out we could drink 35-cent beers in downtown Northampton. She liked the townie boys and so I liked them too, and the nights we walked down to see them we'd roll back up the hill toward campus singing the ancient Latin drinking song she taught us all.  “Gaudeamus Igitur dum Juvenes” it began. Let us rejoice now while we are young because “Where are they who were in the world before us?” As if we didn't know. We knew all right, but we didn't think for a minute that we would ever be anything other than young, with firm strong limbs like the marble limbs of the Greek and Roman youth we saw in our textbooks.

I had my first apartment ever with Vicki that summer while I worked and she took the courses at Harvard that would let her finish Smith in three years’ time.  A week into our living in that tiny Cambridge house I met the boy who would become my husband. Vicki went on to the PhD program at Harvard; David, then a Senior there, went on to get his MBA at the B School just across the river. And I, who had so earnestly hoped to go to grad school too, instead became a teacher of Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth graders and saw almost every value I had previously held turned on it head, in the best possible way. Those students changed me as much as Vicki had and when the letter came at last admitting me to my own Masters Program I tore it up, taught five more years, and four years after that began writing the newspaper column that has aimed always and only to delight a weary public.

Well, Vicki came a few days ago to see her two old friends in Bellagio. She is called Victoria now, Dottorressa Munsey in fact and has lived here in Northern Italy for the last quarter century. She and I walked the hills above the city while David toured the Villa Carlotta and then three old friends ate dinner together.

Our blindfolds are off now and we all see more clearly. And if we are old, yet are we happy.

So here below is old Dewey House that gave birth to our young dreams; and below that and larger for the beauty of the photo the clear light from our hotel room that helped me remember it.

 

Gandhi was not Bald: Poofy Coifs

When you sweat you feel virtuous; it’s how you know you’re a good person and I’ve been doing some serious sweating this afternoon, or anyway my right armpit has been. Which must mean either that I’m only half the saint I like to think I am or that my mind wandered and I only rolled the Arrid Extra Dry onto the skin of my left armpit which happens all the time, of course it does think about it you’re using your right hand and it’s a nice easy reach across the body to get to the left armpit but a much more constricted curl to get to the right one. Kind of like when you sing the I’m a Little Teapot song and act it out at the same time which David does for us all sometimes and is frankly why I married him in the first place.

Well now here we are on the weekend which means it’s time for me to put up the new column which happens to just BE about what happens when you get to thinkin’ you’re deserving of canonization like a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa . All kinds of papers used it this week so as well as sticking it up at the top here under This Week’s Column why don’t I touch the magic wand to the words Citizen.com and let you click through and see how it looked in in New Hampshire.

Pride really does go before a fall, just as the story says. I thought I was so great one time, because Smith College where I went to school invited me to give as talk at the big reunion, calling me the Distinguished Alumna Speaker. I bought a silk dress just the bright–blue color of a peacock’s wing as well as a small scarf of that same hue with swirls of burnt orange and coral thrown in. I looked like the kind of lurid cocktail an 18-year old girl with a fake ID would order her first night at the Tikki Bar.

So there I was in the big the lecture hall where I once sweated earnestly over midterms and finals. Now I was up on the stage! With a microphone and a screen behind me! And everyone had to listen to ME, with my carousel full of funny and poignant slides that I just knew would make those 400 women laugh til their bras popped open, then cry a little, then near the end finish up with a last gentle chuckle and off to the class cocktail parties. I looked out at that sea of faces, went to take a tiny sip of water before I began.... and poured the thing right down my front and ended up giving the whole talk with a dark stain resembling the map of Argentina reaching from just under my chin clear down to my bellybutton.

It happens anytime you compare yourself to the great. In fact here’s a photo from the summer of '93 when I actually  'met' Gandhi at Madam Tussaud's Wax Museum in London and Zounds! By gosh if I’m not wearing the same ugly dress I refer to in this week's column! I see that I’m also trying to look like he and I are twins both inside AND out but anyone can see: his hair looks WAY better than mine

(But Yay for the 80s and early 90s huh? Look at me and my sister Nan up top here! We sure did have the poofy coifs!)

Thanks From a Seventh Grade Class

This is the sweet letter I just got from a 7^th grade class from Arkansas whom our honorary son Gary brought to Boston and New York for an extended field trip – a really extended six-day, Iron Man kind of field trip and how he found the vision and the energy to plan it I don’t know.

Here in the Boston area he took the kids out on the Freedom Trail, to the Kennedy Museum, to Concord and Lexington, to the Boston Common, to Atwood's Tavern to hear artist/author Matt Tavares talk on the making of his book Lady Liberty, to tour Phillips Andover AND Harvard AND Yale before it was on to Manhattan for more sites and sounds beyond my ken.

Ah but I was the lucky one: I was their first ‘presenter.’ As soon as they’d dropped their bags in their hotel rooms they gathered to hear my talk. I gave each student a copy of my very first book I Thought He Was a Speed Bump, a read-‘em-in-any-order account of life with small children and chock full of the great things little children say, with chapter titles such as “When Will DAD Become a Woman?” and “I’m Not Naked, I’m Wearing My Penis!”

My talk was about how anyone can write if they can get to that joyous state where everything seems cool and interesting. I thought the story Kaela mentions here about the hamster and the two photos would work well for opening with and so had the pictures blown up big and stuck on foamcore and weren’t they a darling audience as they looked and listened and laughed. I’m not exactly sure where the little originals of those two pictures are but I’ll see if I can put my hands on them and post them tonight.

In the meantime here at the bottom is a Christmas Day '07 picture...

...of their teacher, Mr. Gary De Young, who came into our family in 7^th grade and more than any other kid hangin' around this place kept me company making the dinner. He’s also smart, that Gary: he was asked to give the big Honors Day address on graduating from UMass Amherst some six or seven year ago; AND so universally beloved by the women of my alma mater, nearby awesome Smith College, that at Commencement, which by the way was the last Commencement of our wonderful then-President Ruth Simmons, he got cheered as much as anyone by the 500-plus members of that graduating class.

So here’s to you, Gar. And as for you, sweet Kaela, I would LOVE to come down to your school in the Delta anytime - just invite me - and I’ll bring 30 copies of my second book Vacationing in My Driveway, just as sweet and funny as Speed Bump and together we’ll all try to get into that same joyous state where everything seems cool and interesting. Because I’m pretty sure that’s where God wants us to be, every single day, enjoying this world and feeling grateful.