When My Mother Did Her Nails

I used to think my mom was crazy the way she’d wait ‘til we were in the car on our way someplace to put on her nail polish She never wore it otherwise. Then she’d light up a cigarette and there's my memory of that old ribbon of highway: the car windows closed, the smell of cigarette smoke and nail polish, and us trundling along in the slow lane for one solid hour.

Didn’t she know it would smudge? I used to wonder. Why apply nail polish just then? Or when the party was at our house why put on nail polish ten minutes before the guests  arrived?

I could never figure it out but there she' be in her usual spot at the kitchen table with the nail file tucked just under the toaster tray and the bottles of polish crowded in close by her ashtray.

And she was no kind of fancy lady. If you noticed her hands at all you only noticed they were strong - so strong she could wring out a facecloth in a way that made you sorry for the facecloth.

She never dated after her marriage more or less evanesced 18 months in, so she wasn’t doing it for a man. And God knows we kids never gave her a compliment; we were too busy holed up in the attic talking Premature Burial.

So why?

I didn’t understand until last night that she did it for herself, when I, no fancy lady either, started putting on nail polish half asleep, in the bed, at ten minutes past midnight.

Mine was called Mirage as against her Cherries in the Snow; and there was no cigarette smoke involved as far as I can recall.  But I fell asleep five minutes after I applied it so rise today to find nails looking like ten tiny waffles with the imprint of the sheets.

I don’t care. I did it for me in the last eight minutes of waking and it made me feel great - so great I'm smiling big - and lookin’ around right now for a couple of facecloths of my own  to strangle. So once again thanks Mom in your old 1950s car for helping me all the way from Heaven to keep on truckin'!

It's Winter - What Can We Say?

It's snowing again and everyone’s sick. This time it seems to be the Green Death as we call it in our family. In one friend’s household a college-age child fell ill last Sunday and within 36 hours all four of his family members were also clenching and writhing - drivin’ the porcelain bus as they say.

My friend’s body must’ve thought it would be funny to add fainting to the mix too. Anyway, it shut the lights out inside his head just as he was making his midnight way toward the john so that THERE HE WAS in a heap on the floor trying to regain consciousness when one of the other kids, en route to the bathroom himself, stepped right on him. Then they BOTH screamed, which made me picture that scene when the very young Drew Barrymore comes upon ET in her brother’s closet. Aaaaaah! AAAAAHHH!

The January I was in 6^th grade a whole shelf-full of books fell on my head in the school library. Then the next day I broke out in cold sores, my specialty that year as my school picture eternally attests. The day after that we had to go to my cousin’s in Brockton and on the ride back I got so sick, so truly limp-as-a-skinned-bunny-sick I couldn’t even put my legs down on the ground once home. My mom carried me up the stairs and put me in my new red pajamas and I knew I looked small and scared and skinny-necked - a lot like ET in the closet myself, come to think of it.

I knew I wouldn’t be going to school the next day either but would have one, maybe two days in bed with hourly Room Service and a little bell to ring if I thought I might throw up.

My bed was right up against the window and I turned on my side to look out it at the old elm tree I looked at every night of those little girl years and felt empty.... lucky....safe. And it was snowing then too.

(the tree died the next year - The men who took it down said it dated back to Revolutionary days. I still see it in my mind.)

Not a Mile Down the Road

My most recent newspaper piece is David’s Uncle Ed - you’ll find it right up at the top where it says “This Week’s column” - and it occurred to me that maybe people would like to see what he looks like. Here he is on his honeymoon, pretending to be exhausted by his husbandly demands. He was 33 when Auntie Fran set her sights on him and she was 40 and a real ‘looker’ as they used to say.Here she is seeming to point in merry fashion at the bed in the little New Hampshire cabin where they had their honeymoon:Two people on their honeymoon have only each other to take pictures of so here’s Ed with the drinks at sundown and then savoring one of his first breakfasts as a married man.They had 45 years together though for the last ten of them Fran was like a bird trapped in a cage: perplexed, sometimes cross and finally so resigned to the her state that she stopped talking altogether – even let the food you put in her mouth dribble right on out again the second you looked away.Fran isn't even a mile down the road now, over in Oak Grove, in the lot which was bought for David’s young dad, dead so tragically at just 45 and now also holding David’s mom his wife Ruthie so that Ruth and Francis Payne sleep together as they slept as children in the little house in Manchester, New Hampshire, two girls born when the century was in its teens.Ed was born in 1920. He wrote poems in the War - also profiles essays and funny songs, all while stationed in the jungles of the South Pacific with the bodies rotting on the beach. Then he came home and took care of everyone: his darling Fran, his mom til she died in the bathtub, a heavy old lady weary with the years. He takes care of me now. though he thinks it’s the other way around.Here he is two springs ago holding our newest family member. Not your wispy old man with a jawbone thin tin as an axe-blade. He’s as substantial as they come in every way. He will leave a very large void when at last he goes to join the Payne girls over in Oak Grove not even a mile down the road.

Museums in Florence: the Lowbrow Tour

All these Holy Family scenes: you gotta love ‘em. You could write a whole dissertation on the expressions seen on the Virgin’s face alone. My favorite: that “How did  I get HERE ?” look of hers with Joseph’s face a close second. "How did YOU get here?!"And the Baby Jesus who sometimes looks a lot like Jon Lovitz? He often has a face only a mother could love. Sometimes in the painting he’s squeezing a bird and sometimes a pomegranate. Sometimes he’s got his fingers going in funny ways: "You got a little something right here," I thought one of them said but Dave insisted it said "YO! Keep your eye on ME, bud! I’M the main event here!" I could see it since I myself caught a look like that in the painting I call "So Whadja Bring Me?"You can entertain the daylights out of yourself with all kinds of jokey thoughts like this until one day, ONE DAY you stumble into the rotunda that houses the David and it just plain shuts you up. All around you are people sitting on benches just to be in its presence.That Michelangelo: dead on one level but still alive on so many others. Just think of David’s life: Pops Goliath with a tiny rock; plays harp for the king; BECOMES the king; takes another man’s wife, just because he wants her; sees the first child of this union die as punishment; sings in public for sheer joy though some find it unseemly. He does dumb things, he does great things, he is human. He dies and leave the throne to his kid Solomon whose Psalms are still singing in all our heads still especially that Song of Songs Which is Solomon’s, Arise my love my fair one....And all of this, all of this is in the marble that looks like flesh, like veins, like living muscle in this work that one man made. Ah!

Leavin' on a Jet Plane

The block party looked like such fun last night but we couldn’t go.

Our girl Annie wrote us all an email to say she wanted to see us.

More to the point she wanted to feed us because that’s what Annie does. She knew we were leaving today for Italy and I guess she just wanted to collect all her family members up and look at us all again.

I brought a very old photo album to her place to show them all, a pictorial account of my grandfathers' wedding trip from 1903.

I say 'his' : His bride was along for the ride too of course but because she died at 31 I have trouble thinking of her as a grandmother.

I think of her only as Carrie, who I have heard about all my life. the young mother who died of uremic poisoning in her fifth pregnancy in six years, Carrie with the blue eyes, Carrie who we named our own first child for.

It happens that I have all the letters this honeymooning couple sent home in 1910 and so last night I asked 'our' Carrie if should I take my new silver Sharpie and just carefully print some of the text of those letters inot the book, to illustrate various phrases of the wedding trip based on what they said about it.

"Hmmmm, I don’t think so Mum,” she said in her careful and diplomatic way. “I mean, this is so beautiful as it is, the old black paper, the leather covers. You wouldn’t want to take anything as new as Sharpie to it, would you?"

That’s the difference between us I guess. They are all aesthetically tuned, these three children of ours; they love a thing by leaving it alone. I am historically tuned; I love a thing by learning all about it and trying to pass on what I learned. I want everyone in our family to know our story and well - this album has no markings on it all. You can slide the photos out yes but even they have no writing on the back. Who will remember, I worry? Who will know and remember what happened to us?

That there was this early death and a baby buried in a mother’s arms?

That there was poetry and the Irish Virus which means drinking?

That my father didn’t even ask to see me when I was born and had been gone throughout the pregnancy anyway and then stayed gone for the rest of his life?

Who will remember my grandfather’s sadness? My mother’s willed jauntiness in the face of a society that shunned and feared her as an abandoned woman?

Who will remember and why can’t you write in an album and leave your own imperfect handwriting as part of the record because you will soon one day be dust yourself?

But my judgment is always shaky. And come to think of it my three children do know the story. Annie knows every least detail of it, right down to maiden names and birth dates. Carrie protects the artifacts and reveres them so much you can see it in the way her very hands look as she holds them.

Even our son knows it and talks about it in a very different way: when he was a college senior he did this charcoal at the top here. It is a huge canvas, five feet wide and three feet tall and it depicts the four children at a window just weeks before their mother's death would forever mar them.

He worked from a tiny photo just like the photos in the wedding trip album. In it you can see the shadow of a tree falling over their faces. You can see the shadow of the hat worn by the young soon-to-be widowed father who snapped it. I mean you couldn't think up an image so filled with such foreboding.

This grandfather, this photographer, was not a drinker himself, any more than our abandoned mother or our abandoned aunt who helped raise us and yes her husband drank and left us too so it was deja-vu all over again.

My grandfather was too nervous to let alcohol carry him away. He was like me in that respect and in many other respects and I know this because I lived with him. In our abandoned state we lived with in his house, my sister Nan, and Mom and I, and when he died we had to find someone new to take us and that’s where Aunt Grace and Uncle Jack came in.

Well enough of all this old sadness. I'm getting on a plane with David this evening even though as the classic child-of-a-drinker I distrust fun and fear loss of control…. Still, all of Northern Italy awaits and if a person can’t relax and enjoy 16 days there, I guess she can't enjoy anything.

I'll close with this image of Michael and Carrie from 1899. He is the one with his hands on her mortal head. She is the one already engulfed by waves.

I know but who else knows that the woman next to him perished in the great Influenza epidemic of 1918? I know but who else knows that the man next to her died three weeks before the Armistices, just two months after his wedding day?

And if we didn't - if someone didn't - know all their stories, who would they be to us but strangers on a beach?