The Column I Sent to Updike

The Life is the Light

I was at the beauty parlor a few months ago, and Randy was washing my hair before cutting it. As I lay back in the chair passive, inert, feeling his fingers work­ing in my scalp, a question came into my mind:“Have you ever done a dead person’s hair?” I asked. “Sure,” he answered.“And was it scary?”“Not really,” came his reply. “In a way it’s easy. You just do the front, of course.”We were silent then. As he worked, I thought about my own little skull and how the day would come when it would lie all quiet beneath that Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone that Emily Dickinson refers to in one of her poems.“Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?” I asked.He looked at me for a long moment. This was not, I knew, standard beauty parlor gab. But Randy is not your standard person.“I don’t know about the body,” he said. “But the Bible says the dead are a great crowd of witnesses.”“Where are they though?” I asked, a question I have thought about every day of my adult life.He took a breath.“What I think,” he said, “is that it’s like theater here, and we’re on the stage and the dead are in the audience. They can see us but we can’t see them. You know how that is on a stage? We can’t see them because of a bright light in between...”“And they’re watching us?” I interrupted, “and think­ing, ‘such a fevered dream, this living of theirs. Such tiny strivings’? Do they look at us and think, of our actions, ‘how paltry and insignificant?’”“Oh, not at all,” said Randy emphatically. “They’re watching us because our actions are significant. We’re the ones now. It matters very much what we do.”I’ve thought about this conversation many times since we had it back in June.A few people are as clear as Randy is as to our place in the grand scheme of things. Many more aren’t.A young person said to me the other day, “You’re born and then you die. And the whole time you’re here you don’t have a clue as to what it’s all about.”I look around myself, to see what it’s about:A little cat hops quick as an eighth-note to the kitchen window sill, arranges herself in a pool of sun that shines on the white stone slab of counter. I see the bright China blue of a fruit bowl next to her, the dazzling large-pored orbs of orange within it, her soft pelt electric with life, as she smoothes it with a wedge of pink tongue.A cellist rises from her chair in the symphony orches­tra and sits in front, to perform an extended solo. Seated again, she takes the instrument between her legs. As she draws the bow over its strings, and the deep rich tones of the cello roll out over the audience, her throat constricts, as if with great emotion. Her nostrils flare. She keeps her eyes closed as if against the insupportable beauty of the music. When for a brief moment in the piece she opens them, she does not see the audience.A young man, full of life and high spirits, goes on a youth retreat the first September weekend of his Senior year. Boarding the bus to return home at week’s end, he collapses and dies within minutes of what the autopsy will later show to be a cardiac infection. Another young man, unknown to him before that week away, speaks at his memorial service. He has worked with the sick at a nursing home, he says; he knows this is no fainting spell. He holds the dying boy, in the few seconds remaining. “God loves you, Jermaine,” he tells him. “I love you too.”If the dead are all around us; if they are watching, as Randy believes, they may say, “See how they shone, at their moment in the light: the little cat; the cellist; the boy who left life early, and the one who helped him to leave it.”Mother Theresa cradles yet another sickly infant brought in from a dumpster on the streets of Calcutta. She presents him like a bouquet of flowers to the visiting British journalist.“See!” she says with shining eyes, “There is Life in the child!”The life is the light. And to all those who feel the light—in them and upon them—this world is shot through with glory.

For Charlotte

It’s all I can think of today: that time I came upon the black cat dead in the road who I just knew was my own cat Charlotte, black like her and wearing the same collar, her small spine facing outward toward the cars speeding past; toward the speeding cars like the car that had struck her and kept on going.I tore home and blurted the awful news to David, who folded his newspaper and stood slowly and walked me to the window. “T, no,” he said putting his arm around me. “Charlotte is right here napping on the patio, see?”Last night I dreamed we had this same kind of happy ending but I wake today and it isn’t so. Our poor old Charlotte with her bad hip has been missing since last Monday and she never wanders off this way. At age 14 she knows all too will what she can and cannot do. If she were a person she’d be hitting the Early Bird Special and going right home to get in her PJs.I’ve been telling funny stories all week but maybe I can give in to my real feelings now. Maybe telling the rest of the story about that other poor cat here will help me find the release I need. Anyway, what follows is the rest of what I wrote in the summer of '03 when I came upon that other poor creature:+    +    +    +    +   +    +    +    +    +    +    +    +    +   +  +    +    +    +    +   +    +    +    +All I could think was "I’ll go to Mary’s! She's an RN. She'll know what to do about this poor abandoned creature!’Mary answered the door with her two kids besise her and though quick tears sprang to her eyes too, she was calm.‘I’ll get something we can put it in,’  she said and went to do that, while her boy Ben, eleven, and her girl Rachel, nine, followed me to where the animal lay.First, Ben turned the collar of the little thing in a vain search for identification. Then Rachel crouched and stroked the fur. Then we all three crouched, a mournful silent trio.On seeing us from across this busy street, a woman walking her dog called over.‘Was it yours?’When we said no, she told us that she had recently moved to this neighborhood but she thought it might be her neighbor’s cat and why didn’t she just go see. Then Mary came with a big blue towel. She spread it out and gently lifted the motionless creature, perfect but for a spot of blood at the mouth.And then we were four, keeping silent vigil.And when, from the dog walker’s side of the street, came two young women striding purposefully with an empty carton, I felt more tears rise.‘Are you the family?’ I asked in a barely-controlled voice, dreading the witness of a sharper woe.I can’t describe to you the voice of the one who answered. The kindness that was in it. The comfort.‘No,’ she said gently, ‘But I am a veterinarian.’ And straightaway she knelt by the little cat and placed her fingers soft upon its breast.‘Is it dead?!’ the children blurted.  ‘Mmmm,’ she murmured. But it was not us that she spoke.'What are you then?’ she whispered to the animal, gently lifting the legs. ‘Ah you’re a little girl!’ she crooned. Then, with both hands, raised the delicate head in a gesture like a caress.“She’s gone,’ she told us, and in one easy motion lifted the cat in her blue shroud of towel, settled her in the box, and closed the lid.‘What will you DO with her?’ the children cried.'I’ll bring her to where I work and keep her for a while, and then... we will cremate her,’ she said gently.And so it happened.nd in a day or two a sign went up about a lost black cat and we had the privilege of meeting the family whose pet this was, and of telling them things which to me stand as proof of all that lives and does not die. Because to them we were able to say, Not the shovel and the city truck, not the passing hours and the coating dust, but instead quick witness, and an honor guard, and escort, in the form of a young veterinarian. Escort, like an angel’s escort, out of this place, bright as it is, and lovely, and dangerous.

Felt Up

Kid walkin’ down the street, mindin’ own business 15 maybe 16 years old. Lone cop in squad car activates flashers, screeches in front of oncoming early afternoon traffic, rockets up ONTO sidewalk to accost him. Kid looks stunned, offers his best here-comes-a-grownup-what-now smile. Cop utters unintelligible commands. Kid produces papers of identification. Cop reaches up, pats him down: on both breasts,  arms, waist,  thighs, flanks. 30 seconds later boy is walking again in my direction, tucking away his papers and trying to look nonchalant as cop zooms manfully back into own lane, dousing the big blue flashers.

Another victory for public safety… or  not?

Flyin'!

We had a party in our back yard on the weekend. I’m not over it yet.There were three of us in this neighborhood with landmark birthdays, so we put our heads together, rented a tent, called the barbecue wizards at Redbones and laid in some hooch.It poured the morning of the party and the temps couldn’t seem to climb out of the 50s so we quick called the tent guys and added heat.180 people showed up dressed for the weather but it was still freezing those first few hours; all the heat seemed to do was roast the caterers’ ankles. Then the DJ cranked the sound and the part took off.  We asked 200 people and darned if most of them didn’t come.The grass out back is still flat as a pancake and burned in places , just like the caterers' ankles. The guests though? Those guests were HAPPY!

Breakin' Our Hearts

Our nice old boy-cat Abe went missing again yesterday, and came home 20 hours later hot and listless and refusing all food and water. I kept him in our room last night, something I never do because generally he’s all over me, telling me in a thousand pink-tongued ways how much he likes me.Not last night. Last night he stared straight into the darkness like a man bracing himself for the worst. And so this morning I brought him to the vet who has him still. An hour ago his staff called to say that he's full of bacteria with two ear infections and a UTI and the last time he had the latter they cut off his penis so Gad what’s next? I am wondering.Abe and his sister Charlotte came into this house as the big present our kids gave us for our 25th anniversary. Here below is the story of that day, from way back in the days we were all a lot younger and death and illness seemed a million miles away:++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++When the plush velvety cat we all doted on was killed by a car, we almost felt we couldn’t get another one. What if the next one were killed too? How could we bear another such loss?The kids, of course, wanted a new cat immediately. In fact, they wanted two, and campaigned unremittingly for them. We put them off.“The house is so out of control!” we said. “Just let us get a little organized! Let me try to prioritize things for once and see if we can’t first sit down for meals together, without someone always standing at the sink like a stranger wolfing food at a hot dog stand.”But still they wheedled. Until quite suddenly - almost overnight - they stopped.Our anniversary was approaching and they began dropping the kind of hints that suggested they were planning something big.What did they have in mind? A pool table in the basement? A 30-foot trampoline in the yard? It wasn’t until the actual anniversary that we found out, as the two of us approached the supper table, after an especially psyche-shredding day.“Sit down, sit down!” cried the younger two excitedly. “OK, close your eyes and hold out your hands!”The two little cats were fresh from a shelter so meticulous they had had to bring with them not only an in-the-flesh adult relative, but actual documents proving we owned our home and were therefore free to take on the care of two tiny apostrophes of fur. Dave and I just looked at each other over the heads of the softly treading creatures in our laps.And so it was that instead of achieving an orderly household, or even dwelling on such a concept, we have spent the weary tag-end of this long long winter raising up a couple of newborns: Abe, the exact shade of pussywillows in March, and his sister Charlotte, all black and weighing not much more than your average candy bar.They were so small trying to climb our big stairs, they looked like a couple of Slinkies, tumbling up instead of down. They ate too fast and got sick and harbored various little hosts of the mite-and-worm sort. But under our good vet’s care, they have grown to be clean as whistles and today eat with table manners nicer than ours. Having had their Leukemia, Rabies and General Plague shots, they now begin to taste the pleasures of a delicate tails-up stroll in the dews of morning.And sure, one keeps sneaking into our room nights to sit on my head and scrabble wildly in my hair for 10 minutes, before falling asleep and waking to do it again so that not even our bed is organized. Yet I am content with my graying groom and my babies both old and new. Now I just close my eyes nights and pretend I am at the beauty shop - and that new girl, Charlotte, is doing Shampoos. Charlotte in her baby days

The Breathe-No-More Garment

Note to Self Regarding Compression Garments: Avoid Like Plague.

What they TELL you is if you buy one of these longline get-ups you’ll have no bra line, no unsightly bulges on the side, back anywhere and will in fact look, LIKE YOU’RE NOT EVEN WEARING A BRA except for that nice perky uplift of course. The reality though? you can’t get into the things and you can’t get out of them. Since they have no hooks, zippers or loops they have to go on over you’re head and be pulled down -  or else over your hips and be pulled up but your shoulders are in the way in one direction and your hips in the other; and either way you eventually run into your breasts which are not a bit happy about being squeezed into something  as big around as a tube sock.

This is a picture of me holding my new longline super-elasticized Whatever-it-is,  snapped by my pal Kathy at the dentist’s office, which accounts for the crooked smile since if I didn’t have a head stuffed full of Novocain you can bet I wouldn’t be smiling.Why? Because unassisted you can’t GET this thing on or off. With the help of several ladies in waiting you can finally get it on but then you can’t breathe.It has NO give. It would be too tight on my thigh. This one' i an Extra Large and I weigh what? 132? I mean you'd think it would fit! But I feel in it like a mouse in its last moments as the boa constrictor is doing ist final constrict.

To give you a better idea of how small it is I show it here with my cat Abraham for scale. I put it  on a small stack of toilet paper rolls and even items as small as these are screaming in their tiny voices "Aaaaaaargh! Don't Squeeze the Charmin!"

Abe: 'Get This Thing Away From Me - now!'

Dressed in Borrowed Robes

Day 3 on board the Fun Ship Inspiration with big Sister Nan, pictured, and Cousin Sheila whose landmark birthday we’re celebrating with this Cruise to No Place Much. Day 3 with just the clothes I wore on board, the rest of my stuff orbiting someplace between Tampa and the Eden isle of Cozumel.But Nan gave me a pair of sandals and Sheil lent me a nice fluttery thing for the big Captain’s Dinner. Other than that I’m wearing a couple of bought-on-board short-and-T-shirt combos, all imprinted with either Carnival Cruise Line’s logo or the kinds of sayings that appeal to smart-alecky 12-year-olds. (I am like TEN TIMES OLDER THAN THAT in case anybody thought I was first cousin and contemporary to  the blogger Heather Armstrong and don’t I wish, just for that jawline alone.) This on a ship with females who at every hour of the day and night look like total underwear models while I myself have no makeup, no meds, no hairbrush, no extra bras except a somewhat decorative but not altogether functional strapless number and… no underpants. I do however have a quart dispenser of liquid body soap attached to the wall of my shower, two or three ounces of which I squirt into a drinking glass. This I mix in the sink with hot-hot, sudsy-sudsy water, wash those faithful little bikini undies, wring ‘em out and what else? pop ‘em back on wet and go up to the pool deck to let the sun take care of the Dry Cycle. What else can I do really? I’m sure not about to walk around without underwear and did I mention I don’t have a bathing suit?Turns out I don’t care, really, and that’s the good part. I got the hot sun and a world of food; got “Soothing Tunes by Rick,” by day and “Relaxing Piano Music by Hrvoje” at teatime, and - can it get any better? - “Karaoke Kraziness with Sanjay” by night. Here’s Sheila on the left with me - the three of us just keep on drinking smiling!

Mr. Fix-It Practices Home Repair

"Hey, Mum," says my son, "remember that weird single-serving coffee maker you gave me a while ago?” and of course I remembered it; it cost like $150 bucks.The way you get coffee out of this pricey gizmo is you stick in these small impregnated disks that look a little like diaphragms and cost like a buck apiece. Then there’s an almighty whirring noise and 30 second later out spurts the java into your favorite mug.I thought the kid would need a thing like this. He was just out of the College People Don’t Like To Name For Fear of Having Everybody Hate Them. I’m told they call it “dropping the H bomb” when you do this and like most nice normal kids, he does it very little.It’s not that Mike isn’t a great person; he is, as you can tell he is by the sweet mild look on his face as seen here a few winters ago holding our first grandbaby.He’s just a little .. strange; the kind of kid who thinks a T-shirt he imprinted himself with giant bloody-looking handprints all over it is just the thing not only to wear to the big Halloween party but who then insists I use this picture and not any other picture on the family Christmas card that year.I was pretty sure he couldn’t even make coffee on his own and a felt he would need some when he moved to New York mere months after graduation and was looking for a job.Turns out he used it for guests and not for himself. You know how the young are. “It’s such a cliché, ‘Oh here I am in my New York apartment drinking my coffee and surfing the net,’” he says to me. (Do you understand this? I don’t understand this but maybe that’s because my whole LIFE is a cliché.) Anyway so this other day as we four ate together he says, “I decided I needed coffee in my life again and so I pulled out that thing you gave me and opened the top to see if it needed cleaning. And out came all these exoskeletons. Insect parts, cockroach legs.”“Eeww!” we all cried. “What did you do?”“Well, shook it a little and more came out.”“Yeah And THEN what?”“I shook it again. I even held it upside down and they kept on coming.”“Mike, did you throw it away? “I hope you threw it away!” his two older sisters cried practically in unison.“Nah,” says Mike. “I filled the bathtub and submerged it.”“You put an electrical appliance in the tub?!” I said. “Then what? Did you get in there WITH it and plug it in?”No I just let it soak a while. Then I put it on my radiator to dry.”“And?”“And it works fine,” he said in his mild way and my first thought was “And THIS person is going to be caring of me in my old age?” But then maybe it’ll be OK after all. Because doesn’t everyone say God looks out for the simple-minded and the crazy? And isn’t that what’s protected ME all my life? ’cause one thing is sure-enough for sure: the apple just don’t fall too far from the tree.

Fax Me, Chill Out, Oh Baby of Mine

They’re something so touchingly dated about Necco’s gritty little “Sweetheart” Conversation Hearts. I mean who exclaims ”My Baby!” these days, never mind “Love Bird!” Of course “Fax Me” is in its own category of out-of-it-ness because when in the last 25 years has anyone with romantic intent excerpt for during a moment back in the 80s when we were all still blown away by the new technology? I faxed a birthday greeting to my brother-in-law in California and could hardly wrap my head around the fact that he’d be getting it at 9am when I had ACTUALLY SENT IT AT NOON! He was getting it BEFORE I even sent it! This is the kind of ecstatic mind-altered thinking that led to people sitting on their office equipment to photocopy their fannies (which, ha ha funny stuff, they would sometimes then FAX it to their friends.)

Bottom line: if a would-be suitor says “Fax Me” you’re dealing with some kind of culturally handicapped person Andy Kaufman's Latke Gravas character from the old show "Taxi."

But to get back to hearts which come to think of it are shaped like the human bottom when it is compressed on a flat surface, Necco’s website offers some history too. Seems these candy hearts go way back to the 1880s when they were much bigger and used the kind of high courting language we just don’t see today. Messages like “Dear One” and “Be Mine” are all I could find remaining of that era in the little box I have here but once they said things like, “Please Send a Lock of Your Hair by Return Mail,” and “How Long Shall I Have to Wait? Pray be Considerate!”

Now the only thing you’ll find on a heart is what fits in two short words or maybe even one. It’s kind of a falling-off if you ask me. Plus where are the QA guys? Half my candy hearts are smudged or stamped on crooked, the way American automakers are said to be putting your new car’s door on if it’s a Friday and they’re just kind of phonin’ it in there at the factory.

Let me tell you about the ones I have in my lap here. OK the one I just ate a minute ago said “Love (smudge)” and the one I’m tossing back now says “Sunshin,” the ’e’ having slid away and out of sight. Some are blank entirely and some are so crooked it looks like the sugary “ink” got stamped in the dark by helper monkeys.

Plus another lame thing this year: they’re going for a meteorological theme. That’s where “Sunshine” comes in and also “In a Fog” (which is supposed to recommend someone to you?) Also “Chill Out,” which sounds to me more like the prelude to a fight than a kiss but what do I know?

I say if they’re going to pursue themes they should really branch out, to the wide world of medical care, say and give us hearts printed with “Hold Still” or “Open Wide” or that phrase we all tingle to hear, “You'll Feel a Little Pressure."

Hey but wait! I just took a quick look around the Internet and look at this! two people from Minneapolis have offered a tallying-up the inky message inside their own bag of these little confections. The ones with a zero next to them are the ones they’re just making up but they offer them in such a great deadpan way. They say they found all of these and more: two Smiley Faces, five Unreadables, six Angels and five Call Me’s; but none that said “WWJD,” “Recently Tested,” “My Ho,” “Bad Rash,” or “Mammogram.”

“Mammogram,” see? There are others out there whose minds work like mine!

To see more and marvel along go to "How Much is Inside Converation Hearts?"

Then hurry out quick to the store to get something for your own honey; something living in this season of the brown grass even if it’s a box of yeast. I saw a guy trying to pass off a bouquet of purple kale as flowers for his lady last year. “Hey, it used to be alive!” he told me at the check-out. “Plus she can cook it up after. “

I wished him luck as we all should wish one another luck in this perilous season of the valentine. And now I have to run out and get something for my own main squeeze who’s going out to play cards and drink with his buddies tomorrow night instead of spending the evening with yours truly. He’ll be home around 1 and maybe a little muzzy with his evening’s fun. I bet he won’t even notice I’m keeping watch camped out in the guest room across the hall. I might be gittin’ up there agewise but by God I still know how to short-sheet a bed.