Account for Yourself

So what would I say I did this week if somebody asked?

Well it looks like I started the week with this picture of my family, which was NOT the picture that made it to the holiday card.

Now I seem to be finishing it with a second photo from that same day, the five-year-old still in violence-mode but everyone else looking pretty ‘prettied up' and ready for the shot.

In between week's beginning and week's end, I had my highs and my lows, as we all do:

I spilled a water bottle inside my bag, again, and was consequently taught how to do CPR on my device by plunging it in a big bowl of raw rice.

I skipped my Weight Watchers meeting, but caught that Zumba class.

I came out of the Post Office Friday to discover  that someone had managed to take out my left  tail light without dealing even so much as a scratch to the rest of the car.

“Maybe they stole it!” said David, as puzzled as I was when he saw it, but how would you do that, and WHY? Still, it does look pretty popped out, like poor King Lear’s eyes after the bad guy went at him with a grapefruit spoon.

 I had some island food from Singh’s Roti and that was awesome.

And while I was there, in the sweet old burg that is Dorchester, I drove past my first childhood home that, in my baby days was my universe entire with its oak wainscoting going up the front hall  stairs and that big stained-glass window at the landing.

Back in the 90s, it was a halfway house for women getting out of the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Framingham. I used to visit the women there and once I wrote about it for the Boston Globe.

Most of the houses on the street look great. Like Mrs. Kaposky's old place:

No so much mine.

It's no longer used by the state  but the fire escapes remain.  And the steps are sort of rotting. And somebody started to paint but only did as much as they could reach without a ladder and then gave up.

I got out of my car and looked at this house for a pretty good spell, remembering and remembering: my life there and my mom's life before me and the life of my grandfather before her who bought the place with such a sense of hope and joy in the spring before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand ushered in the bloodiest war the world had ever seen - until that next war broke out just two and a half decades later.

So I guess in short it was a week like any week, lived partly in anticipation and partly in memory. It’s our curse and our blessing, this ability to live however briefly in moments that are not the present moment.

Yay for the Boston Accent

There was a story in yesterday’s Boston Globe about people trying to essentially scour their Boston accents away.They fear people regard them as uneducated, or else they worry that the way they talk will prevent them from getting acting jobs because supposedly they sound so funny to everyone else in the country.Here's a video for you in this story by Globe reporter Billy Baker who attempts to use the accent-scouring technique he has just been telling about on his dad. You'll see what a dyed-in-the-wool South Boston accent really sounds like when you hear old Pops. (Gotta love the guy; he’s trying SO hard - right up until the end when he says "Now get the hell out of my house.")       

My Road Not Taken

This appeared in the Huffington Post  on Friday , the 25th anniversary of the loss of the Shuttle I almost got to ride on: When in the Spring of ’86 I became one of the final 40 contestants in the initiative to send a journalist up in space, the loss of the Challenger was still so recent the bodies had not yet been found on the ocean floor. Maybe that’s why the TV crew who came to my door the day my name was announced seemed so eager. “She even looks like Christa!” said one of them. “Have her children cling to her skirts!” said another. We were all still in a kind of shock I think and maybe that’s why that news crew was trying to frame things in such a dramatic way. We hadn’t yet adjusted to the new reality. Masters of technology that we imagined ourselves to be, we thought we were in control of everything.It’s a notion we humans cling to fixedly and relinquish with great reluctance.Picture being on a plane as it taxis toward takeoff, a rolling rec room in most of our minds, in which folks read and doze and look out the window -  until it picks up speed and the trees blur and the tarmac goes fuzzy to your sight and somewhere inside, all your instincts as a land animal cry out in disbelief that this big-bellied metal hull will ever lift and soar in flight. The tiny bubble in the carpenter’s level of your brain leans way over to one side, and a small frightened voice deep inside you asks of your death, 'Now? Today? This very minute?’ Then the plane straightens and climbs higher and with relief you turn back to your magazine, thinking, ‘Not yet then. Not this sight the last these eyes will behold.’In the months before Challenger flew, teacher and Mission Specialist Christa McAuliffe said in her motherly and reassuring way, “It will be like taking a bus.” But it isn’t like taking a bus and it never was, as every career astronaut knows. It’s like riding a Roman candle.Back when this first crew died what shocked us most was that we all watched it happen: one minute, seven hale and joshing Americans; the next, a blank sky. And then between that lost mission and the loss of Columbia in ’03 came that other event when, in an eyeblink, two mighty steel towers gave way to blank sky too.I was just 36 when I applied to be the first journalist to fly in Low Earth Orbit. In the days just after January 28th I wrote in the Boston Globe that we owe God a death, as Shakespeare says, and that the Challenger Seven had paid their death-debt. They now flew free, I felt, beyond caring about control, or planning, or how many days might pass until a tiny planet tips enough to bring what its creatures call Spring.I think of them today. Oh I think of them. “Give me your hand,” the black box caught one of them saying as their capsule hurtled quickly downward and the phrase is lovely, holding as it does all we can offer one another in love, or friendship, or at the Hour of Our Death. All, and perhaps enough.Watch this is you can bear to. It's very hard. And under it, for comfort, President Ronald  Reagan's finest hour:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQL0NWS1Rc][youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JKIZ7j20EA&feature=related]