Liftoff

Travelled last week; it was mind-opening as usual. Watched a zillion sitcoms on my personal TV screen aboard Jet Blue, reveled in the big wide seats, gobbled not one but two boxes of Animal Crackers.I love Animal Crackers. I love all little things: dogs made by the Beanie Baby crowd, mini-marshmallows, Paul Simon...I bought the $8 headphone-and-nap-set just to get my hands on that little pillow. If I kept dolls I could totally use it in my doll house.I was visiting my big sister Nan on this trip. (She's the cute one pulling at her shorts in this picture.) Nan didn't approve of dolls. We never played with them as kids. Oh the odd grownup would sometimes give us one but we just kind of dismantled it for parts after we’d used it as the Baby Jesus in our annual Nativity tableau. (Ah those were great events! Nan took the two rocking chairs from our great aunts’rooms and tipped them over so the tops of their backs met in a perfect roof shape. Then she played the Virgin Mary in gossamer veils of blue, while I was Joseph in our grandfather’s old brown shirt. (Well I was Joseph if you can possibly recognize Joseph in a person less than three feet tall with hair like Don King's. (Does it even need saying that I’m the one on the bottom at the right?)Instead of liking dolls we liked stuffed animals, far more noble creatures in our minds. I had a stuffed dog named Pinky who got less and less pink over the years and Nan had a bear named Jinglefoot with a bell sewn into his lower paw.When I was visiting her in Florida this past week, we wandered into her closet so she could lend me a purse more decent then the old black feedbag of a thing I normally carry. I stood there marveling at all the closet space people get in new houses and that’s when she spoke up:“See that thing on the top shelf? Do you recognize it?”She reached up then – Nan is tall – and pulled down Jinglefoot himself, carefully saved all this time. So yes travel takes you to other places, yes. But if you're really lucky and you keep your eyes peeled, it will take you to other times as well.

Happy Birthday Kiddo

Life is such a Dickens novel it slays me, the way it loops around and interweaves and characters not see since the early chapters show up again knitting at the Guillotine.

I wrote about an instance of this in my column this week, telling about what happened a few days before when, on a bus to Manhattan, I began thinking about a pal I first met over 40 years ago who now lives in New York and then didn’t she manifest right there in the tiny shop in Grand Central Station where I was going to meet my boy Michael for supper. If reading more of my stuff doesn’t make you feel like too much you’re doing shots of maple syrup you can see this column, and in all kinds of places, but most easily perhaps by Googling “Terry Marotta” and the phrase “kitten’s teeth.” Google my name and “kittens’ teeth” and if it’s the last weekend in April or later up will pop the piece as it looks in papers all over.

Three of our 'honorary' kids were at the dinner too which I don’t think I said in that column. An honorary kid in my book is anyone who has (a) lived in our house for a year or more, (b) launched college and/or grad school applications from here and (c) knows how to unload the dishwasher. Anyway three of the five of them came this night to see Michael because it was his birthday coming up and he is the family baby after all, born some 15 years after the oldest honorary kid and younger by a fair amount than his two 'real' sisters.

Sometimes he has no sense. I love that about him. You can read in a February post how he put his coffeemaker in the bathtub to clean it a while ago and when he lived under our roof he was no better. He spent his early years hiding behind doors to scare us and dressing up in odd costumes. He microwaved an egg still in its shell once just to see what would happen and oh wait that was my idea, but he sure loved the results more than anyone else. When he turned 14 he began at this wonderful place called Commonwealth School and never wore a coat from one end of the school year to the other that first year though he had to walk to the train station, switch to the subway, get out at a windswept plaza and walk yet more to get to the school. September to June the kid didn’t wear a coat I guess because the thought he looked cute in these certain vintage T-shirts bought for fifty cents and sized for a ten-year old... He could wear child-size clothes because right around then he turned skinny. He was round and darling as a child and then he just kind of skinnied on out and even now still weighs just 135 pounds.

He still wears those tissue-paper-thin T shirts from the 1970s too. He had one on the other night and over it this odd little military jacket that looked like something an organ grinder’s monkey might have on.

Anyway forgive me for talking about him so much. It’s just that today is his birthday which is also old Will Shakespeare’s birthday and I’m a big fan of both guys. May you live and live, Michael of ours and be like Willie Shakes if that's what you want getting married after the baby’s on the way and then having twins and going to the big city and doing what you love. To us you’ll always be what your big sister Carrie called you when she was a college sophomore and came home midweek for supper and you were saying funny ridiculous things and when you left the room to go back to your homework she called you Our Best Final Project. So Happy Birthday BFP, and TRY to keep the electrical appliances out of the bathtub. Can't wait to have ya back under the umbrellas some nice warm weekend soon.