Your Unit is Ready

“Hi” began the breathless email I just got. “This is Brian! I ordered your new unit and need to hear from you for confirmation on delivery date!”  So ‘Brian’ here clearly wants me to think that not only are we such pals that he needs no last name but also that I will smack my head and say “Oh my UNIT! I totally forgot I ordered it!"  Pretty cute using the word “unit” too, a generic term that applies to so many things, your conditioner, your apartment, your toupee.

Speaking of 'rugs', I had a six-foot-three, 230-pound hair-stylist friend I’ll call Huey. By night he wore leather chaps and chains and participated in various tableaux in which he dressed like a giant painted woman but by day he made things pretty. In the salon he was all you could ask for: he fitted wigs on hair-loss people like nobody's business, he cried when you cried and he could do anyone’s hair living AND dead and send them to the party looking better.

Since he was bald himself  he talked a lot about his own unit. I'd go see him and ask about his day and he would treat me to such vivid descriptions of his morning rituals I felt as if I was sitting right next to him at the dressing table in his apartment - and naturally there was lots of talk about his unit, which was strictly top drawer and got more attention than most people’s pets.

I sigh to think of him. Maybe someday I’ll have a unit too and yes I DO know the word has another meaning and no I don’t contemplate sexual reassignment surgery QUITE yet BUT IF I DID – or if I were bald, hot or needed an apartment why I’d write right back to Brian here lickety-split and say “My UNIT? It’s ready for shipment? Well here’s my home address, bank account numbers and Social honey! Now you send that thing right on out, I’ll be waitin’ by the door!”

You are Boring

The other day a reader took exception to the writing style of two of the columnists he sees in his Sunday paper and since one of them is me the paper’s Executive Editor to whom he sent his email sent it on to me. Here’s what it said:

“I HAVE NOTICED YOUR FEMALE COLUMNISTS CAN ONLY WRITE ABOUT THEMSELVES, THEIR FAMILIES OR CUTESY THINGS THEIR CHILDREN OR RELATIVES SAY OR DO OR A 'WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER' ESSAY. THEIR WRITINGS ARE FILLED WITH 'I , ME, MY, WE, ETC.', IN OTHER WORDS A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE COLUMN WITH AN EXCESSIVE USE OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS."

(In other words people and their darn families! Who cares about that?)

“IT IS VERY EASY TO TALK OR WRITE ABOUT YOURSELF” he went on. “ARE NOT COLUMNS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT THINGS? IDEAS? EVENTS?  FAR-AWAY-PLACES? OPINIONS OR CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM? THESE REQUIRE THOUGHT!"

(And, well, he may be right there and the idea realm is a good place to start so how about Intelligent Design for today, kids? Or perhaps Should Form Follow Function? Or, Benevolent Despotism: an Oxymoron or Our Future?)

“LET THIS BE A CHALLENGE,” this reader wound up. “CAN MS. X (as I will call her) OR MS. MAROTTA WRITE A COLUMN WITH MAYBE JUST ONE OR TWO PERSONAL PRONOUNS AND NOT ABOUT THEMSELVES?”

Can we? I have no doubt. Will I? Today anyway? Not likely.  On my writing agenda today I seem to have (a) an account of the bird the flew in our house and lived here undetected until the cat Abraham found him this morning; (b)something so sad I heard at the wake I went to yesterday that stayed with me all night and kept me from sleeping; and (c) a description of me falling face first, all dressed up, into the cargo bin of my minivan.

As to the 'Should I?' part, a Seventh Grade girl named Danielle wrote to the National Society of Newspaper Columnists last March, asking about what it’s like to have as your job the pouring of talk into a tall skinny word-funnel for the newspaper. I said I'd love to be the one to answer her and what I wrote I used as my column that week. It's is still on the NSNC website if you’d like to read it. It’s serious and I stand by it. But if I were the kind of person who enjoyed sassing back I might to “Two words for you Mr. Z who thinks people aren’t interested in reading about other people: Reality TV."

To Full Equality

This is My Independence Day Story: To Full equality, in marriage and everywhere else !

How would it be for you as a parent, if you gradually came to understand that your just-emerging-from-college daughter had fallen in love with another young woman, and six years passed and she loved her still?

How would you feel if you belonged to a church that around this time chose to examine the possibility of going on record as a place welcoming to any woman who loved a woman, to any man who loved a man, the same as it is to any person who entered there to worship?

And if one day during this 18-month-long period of study, prayer and reflection designed to let people really examine this possibility, a woman stood and expressed her concern about how “these people” might fit in, I wonder if it would surprise you to hear the man in the neighboring pew whisper to his wife, “She doesn’t realize: she’s talking about our son.” Or if it would surprise you to learn that a half-dozen other parents present that morning were likely thinking the same: “You speak of our children, onetime singers in the Junior Choir and assistants in the Sunday School; our children, whom you have known since their infancy.”

I wonder how you might then feel if, after that lengthy consideration, your church voted “Yes. Let the word go forth that we in this 150-year old community of the United Church of Christ unanimously choose to be known as an Open and Affirming congregation.”

And if you were yourself one of these parents and if your above-mentioned daughter and her beloved sought to undergo a Liturgy of Commitment here, I wonder how you would feel to have the Deacons say “Yes. By all means yes, and we are delighted. For you are our own daughter, and this one that you love is our daughter now too.”

I wonder how you might feel if, during this ceremony, your husband of 33 years with his hair now white but his manner still so gentle stood to recite a fatherly poem to the two; if he prefaced it by saying he knew he spoke too for the much-missed dad of your daughter’s beloved, gone now into death’s quiet corridor; if he then paused and looked over at this young woman where she sat beside your girl and said aloud to the very large assembly there gathered that he couldn’t be happier that his daughter had chosen her for a life partner.

I wonder: Would it not lift your heart to hear the verses he then read by poet Gail Mazur?“What you want for it you'd want for a child, “it goes. “That she take hold; that her roots find home in stony winter soil; that she take seasons in stride… “That she know, in her branchings, to seek balance. That change not frighten her, rather that change meet her embrace... that she find her place in an orchard.”

And if, in the year following, a baby should come to their house, would you not rejoice and be glad? As we rejoiced last month when we first saw this newborn with his grave and curious look, with his chest no wider than a lady’s hand, held so tenderly in their slender young arms?

I think you might, if it became personal for you in this way.

I think the realization might dawn within you that this is what is chiefly asked of us here: That we make a family. That over the long years we spend ourselves in many deeds of care and kindness, and make a place where such children as we are sent can shelter. And take root. And one day find their own place in the orchard.

Mystifed. The Kid Was Mystified.

(for all you young'uns: THIS is a harp.)

An Aubuchon Hardware store, one of 130 in the New York New England area, in its 100^th years of service to the public. I walk in to encounter a pleasant looking youth who asks if he can help me.

“Sure can! I need a harp.”

“A hop?” he says and I think to myself This is good old New Hamshah, and I still have to pronounce those pesky R’s? “Oh I’m sorry H-A-R-P, the basis for any lamp.”

“Hmmm,” he says again, looking puzzled. “We don’t carry those I don’t think.”

“Are you sure? Because you know most hardware stores do.”

He leads me to the lamps aisle where there are little desk lamps, utility lamps etc. “See?”

“But they wouldn’t be HERE, exactly,” I say.

Still he doesn’t think they have them so I give up and say I also need some spray paint.

“THAT I can do!” he says with his nice smile and off we go to the spray paint aisle where I begin studying the labels of two brands of white enamel spray paint Good on wood, good on metal, the really big printing on the front says,

“Hmmm, but t I need this stuff to spray on ceramic,”

“Ceramic?”:

“Yeah you know, like a pitcher-and-bowl set,” I say realizing there is NO chance he will know what this is, 100 years and more removed as we are now from the time when people had chamber pots and pitcher-and-bowl sets in their bedrooms. Sure enough , he looks pleasantly fuddled so “Can I spray this stuff on, like, china?” I ask.

“I really don’t know a thing about paint,” he says.

“Do you know how to read?” I say, though I am not at all grouchy - just incapable of reading the very tiny print on the back .

“Well I’m only 16 of course. I figure I have my whole life ahead of me, “ he says with a wink. He takes the can and reads it - but alas even then we remain mystified in Aisle Twelve.

“Hey it’s OK, I’ll just take this one.” I say. “Now let’s go back to the front of the store. I forgot I need finials for two lamps.”

“Finials! Another VO-cab word!” he shouts gleefully. “What are finials?”

“Well a finial is an ornamental element found atop a thing. Like the knob on your ladder-back chair, for example, or at the foot of he stairs the little sculpted element on your newel post...".

“Newel post?”

“Or the decorative thing on the top of a cupola even.”

"Cupola?" But just then comes striding along the lady 60 who has worked here for decades.

“I need a harp and some finials,” I say.

“Of course,” she smiles and leads me straight to a corner of Aisle Two where I find it all: harps, finials, even risers and I buy them all from her and my spray paint besides after she has walked me up to the counter, where the boy takes of his apron and gives me a big happy wave as together we exit the store and cross the parking lot in the warm June sun.

...and these children, these are finials.

Disgruntled Would-Be Memoirist Bitten on Fanny

Hey who wouldn’t want to write a disgruntled memoir about all the shady stuff they we're forced to live with? Back when it was Howdy Doody Time for all us early Boomers how frequently did I myself want to set down in black and white the abuses I suffered as a toddler when mothers would routinely shut their wee ones up in the ingenious Gitmo-style restraint knows as the "Snuggle Ducky,” a sort of zippered cotton envelope which prevented a person from sucking on his fingers or toes, forced him to lie as if crucified, unable even to scratch his nose - I choke back old tears writing this - able only to do what my three-year-old self bravely, gamely, spoke of as ‘making cookies ‘ which meant using the only thing I had, my little rosebud of a baby mouth to suck little circles of moisture onto the cloth as the only source of sleepytime fun. ~ SOB! ~

Plus, I was also given enemas, right in front of three, sometimes four wildly smiling older women. (What was it with the enema and the woman of former times, can somebody tell me?) Also, my sister and I were taken out on leashes, in public! Also tied to the maple tree out front so we wouldn’t wander off.

In other words I can totally identify with this Scott McClellan dude and his exposé of life in the White House. And the only thing that stops me from taking pen in hand and writing up my own book of Humphs and Grievance is the sad fact that I myself live in fear now: of my very own cats of all things who I can just tell in the twilight of their careers have totally forgotten the meaning of loyalty and are poised to start talking to the media. And I know what they’ll cite: The tuna-flavored lip balm designed to bring up hairballs; the odd thermometer addressed to their nether parts when such a thing proved needful; the cry of genital mutilation from our boycat, just because he got his pee-pee cut off this spring BUT NONE OF THESE WERE MY IDEA, they were the vet’s, and the vet is my superior and nothing is my fault ever and all right so I won’t write my memoirs but continue instead to hold my tongue and lick my wounds poor me, poor sainted, sainted me.

Dear Diarrhea

Sun, rain, sun: yesterday was of those days I guess. One hour it was 80 and sunny here and I was thinking how I really should go outside and scrub the patio chairs and then – boom! - the heavens opened and the rain drummed so hard the lilacs on their bushes knelt right down flat like obsequious courtiers and yay I was off the hook for the scrubbing anyway.

Somebody said this about blogging: Nobody cares what you had for lunch; they just want to know what you’re thinking and feeling. (Could this possibly be true? Should we ask everyone who read about Gawker editor and blogger Emily Gould in the New York Times Magazine Sunday?)

But OK I’ll play along: At the moment I’m thinking about how happy I felt at the airport after my visit to my pal Bobbie last week – until an old lady with blue hair pulled out a cell phone and starting talking.

Loudly. And for quite a while. “MAUDE? WELL YES MAUDE I GOT THE DIARRHEA DON’T YA KNOW BUT I’M TRYIN' TO HOLD IT TOGETHER HERE!”

At first I thought, “I won’t look over at her, I don’t want to embarrass her.” Then, five minutes later I stole some little glances at the other people there at the gate to see if anyone else thought this was as funny as I did. "Nothin’ doin’ there. Then five minutes after that I thought 'What the HELL lady!' and I did look at her, neutrally the way you have to so the person you’re looking at doesn’t jump up and beat you to death with his carry-on bag - and the woman paid absolutely no attention but rather made a second phone call to a second friend and began again with her fascinating account.

So there it is: sun and clouds on just about any day you care to name… and that’s what I’m thinking right now. And oh right, I almost forgot: Yesterday it was tuna salad, a handful of almonds and a chaser of Crystal Lite - and you?