Monkey on Ya Back

This faded old photo to the left is me trying to smoke on the last day of camp the summer I was 14. People were packing, and later, after the weepy rituals of Candlelight Ceremony and Good Night Circle, the friskier kids would climb onto the cabin roof and gorge themselves on contraband sweets obtained by “sneaking out,” darting down the road ducking behind trees and bushes to get to the corner store.

This was the only time I ever tried tobacco.

(I've cropped the picture to spare people the sight of a child coughing her lungs out.)

Since I seemed to be focusing on health topics here lately let’s round out the week with some observations on smoking from a site called Medicine.net. here I learned all over again that smoking:

• Stains your fingers
• Puckers your mouth
• Squints up your eyes
• Puts vertical Clint Eastwood-style line in your cheek (ha ha same cheeks!)
• And makes your skin inelastic

The funny thing is, in time all this happens to non-smokers too. I work so much with dyes and woodstains my fingers are always pigmented strangely and I have to tell you all of these other conditions are fast becoming mine as well.

To see pictures of all  of them just click on the colored hyperlinks above. Have a look, then ask yourself if  you wouldn’t just as soon stick with your more harmless obsessions like tweezing your moles and watching dumb TV.

(because it's tough to have just one :-))

and because it's not this easy to quit

Not in Kansas Anymore: A Final Word on Italy

In 17 days here in Italy:

1) Inspect (and utilize) hotel bathrooms in six different cities.

2) Discover bidets in every one.

3) Consider using them to wash doll clothes in as preschool cousin Kathleen once did with every toilet within reach.

4) Find an alarm in every bathroom, generally placed above bathtub. In America can DIE in tub and all they do is charge you the extra night.

5) Experience double-take moment regarding the many aprons and tea towels showing outsize images of male genitalia passing selves off as “details”of the David.  What happened to towels featuring dead Lady Di?

6) Learn to drink coffee standing up, down the hatch and strong as Drano.

Observe even more:

+ Modern young mums nursing in public. Nobody stares.

+ Little children out at all hours.

+ Absence of bug life. (How they DO that?)

+ Absence of litter. (How they do THAT?)

+ Presence of quiet dawns, raucous midnights, yummy wines and aperitifs.

+ Clocks in local basilica sounding the hours.

+ One fly, just ONE fly in this Ointment of Eden....... (Are you ready?)

+ Entire population smoking like chimneys.

Back in Your Mother's Belly

The secretary of my college class sent out a group email begging for news of us all. How were we really? she wanted to know

Well let’s see now, is what I thought. I think I'm in better shape than my mother was at my age since women didn't even walk in the old days, never mind exercise. Men didn't either plus they all had these little fat tummies which they wore UNDER their belts for some reason.

Everybody was soft, I guess, takin' it easy after the War maybe - never mind that they all smoked their brains out. My own mother smoked in a closed car on the hour-long ride to our cousins' on holidays; smoked madly until the summer of ‘74 when she got a bad bronchial infection and was ordered to her bed. She dragged a little TV into her room to watch the Watergate hearings. “That man is disgusting!” she yelled at one point about poor old Nixon, “and this is disgusting too!” she yelled again, looking down at the cigarette in her hand. She stubbed it out and never smoked again and lived until her 80th birthday party when she died within the space of about ten seconds, a little plate of cookies on her lap.

But I figure we’re all going to live so long with our annoying Boomer talk about enhanced sexual performance and all that our kids will be just dying to put the pillow over our faces.

I guess I expect to live up into my 80s - IF I can start paying pay better attention that is and not step off the curb into the path of some big old bus.

So in general I feel pretty much as I did at 19 though God knows what color my hair REALLY is. Still, it’s fun to grow older. I lie in bed at 5 in the morning when the alarm first goes off and time-travel all the way back to crib days. I like that: the way we're lifting a little every day as we get older and can sometimes survey the whole landscape almost.

My oldest girl wanted to have her firstbaby at home last May and I was a wreck. We watched him kick and we could sometimes feel his little spine right through her skin. We all drummed on his little bottom: "Hello hello are you OK?" we said the way you would to someone trapped in a cave…

Along with not knowing what any body's real hair color is anymore I find we don’t know what natural labor is like. The doctors hurry everyone along so with their Pitocin and then oops labor slowed down! and oops the baby looks upse!t and then it’s C-sections all around.

I was proud of our girl for wanting to do it God’s own way with her two midwiveswho said “Put sheets you don't care about on the bed and under those a set of waterproof sheets and under THOSE your very favorite sheets in the world." There's the progression of the thing right there, peace at the end of the struggle.

In the end the medical establishment won of course. They took their tests when the baby was ten days overdue and said the amniotic fluid was draining clear away so in the end it was Induced labor and Pitocin and an Epidural after all - everything but the dread C-section.

I wrote all that in my email to the college and they printed like three lines of it in the Alumnae Quarterly.

The moral of the story I guess?How I am is how they are, meaning my children, and right now anyway my children are just fine and that new baby smiles away alone his crib like he was getting paid to do it. Even his big brother three is growing rather fond of him. He said recently that you do too get to go back inside your mother’s belly. “WHEN YOU DIE” he said and well who could argue with him there?