Just Do What She Tells You

It was sweltering yesterday and I had 25 women coming to my house for the big camp reunion. They came from all over. Even my big sister Nan even came from faraway Florida and when Nan is in town things always take a lively turn: In the morning as we were just leaving the house she quick darted into the bathroom, from behind whose doors there suddenly came a scream and loud exclamations. I rushed right over.  “Nan! What’s happening?”“Nothing. I looked in the mirror.”The outside temps were set on 'Broil' at dawn yesterday and by 10:00 when we went out on that final Party Needs run they had inched up to 'Self Clean.' We had just scored a world of soft drinks when Nan saw another store she wanted to duck into on the chance that it might have the food her 1500-mile-away cat is partial to.“A Pet shop, hey! Stay here," she said, veering inside it. Then, over her shoulder, “Work on your tan.”So what could I do but work on it, as I stood all alone with my brimming shopping cart on the  blistering pavement?  I learned way way way WAY back when I was only a little guy: if you want the fun to keep on coming just do what the older one tells you to. This is not actually Nan and me but the one on the left IS  \Nan's little daughter Gracie, then six, while the one on the right is my first girl Carrie, then five, but that look of delighted admiration? That's exactly what I'm talkin' about !

Another Day Another Fire

So I was excited, see, because I got such great flowers - plus FOUR gorgeous pots - for my birthday. The pots came  from our niece Joanie Marotta, 23 next month, and they were so pretty I decided to bank them all together on the kitchen counter  by 'all' meaning One, the begonia and calla-lily plants, from my two girls who we mistreated in childhood by sitting on the low ends of  their see-saws so they could never get down see above ha ha; Two, the lovely purple blooms from Dodson who is like son to us and his bride Veronica; and Three some basil which I bought so the cats could have some normal greens to nibble on after they got totally drunk eating a catnip plant

... and snapped the picture - AND was just congratulating myself on having such a fine eye and being such an altogether awesome person when I noted that my coffee was no longer hot. Well, the carafe is metal I reasoned and so put it on one burner for the quick fix; then forgot it and wandered to the other side of the kitchen to check on the cat’s food when whoosh! Another FIRE AT THE MAROTTA HOUSE which smelled really awful the way burned plastic does natch but LOOKED so great I almost took a picture before extinguishing it.

I did extinguish it first but here's the aftermath.

Funny, right? Stalactites coming down even!

Finally just for more beauty is Joanie, as pretty as the little crocuses with their pointy bishops’ hats just now trying to struggle up through the snow:

So Enjoy the Day and remember: everything is funny til you die (and then of course there'll be jokes at the funeral.

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.

Happy 2009! May You Too Get Dragged in a Sack

Happy New Year! I’m going up to the attic to pound the treadmill, make up the crib for our baby and the bed for our pre-schooler, both coming here to sleep and eat and tear the place apart next weekend while their parents do the same in New Orleans.Right now Old Dave is putting away Christmas and there’s the upside in having a control freak for a husband:I don't have to so much as place one ornament into a box because I could do it wrong and then what? - so little elderly Charlotte the cat and I are sitting on our plump pin-cushion bottoms, she licking her paws and I writing to you.Sad to say, my boy Mike was no happier about the picture of him on our Christmas card when he finally saw it than he thought he might be. (See last post.) He read it silently a few times, then put it down on my desk and said only one word - “Shame” - which for an old recovery girl like me lit up about six danger signals in my brain and caused me shortness of breath for over an hour..... Luckily, it turned out he wasn’t THAT mad - said later “I shamed you and now I’m past it” – after which we all played Celebrity, a ridiculously fun game involving fast-paced charades, which I rock at since I have no dignity.New Years Eve is the birthday of our oldest girl Carrie so the night before last we celebrated by going to the wee house-in-the-woods she keeps with her own true love Chris and the above-mentioned little ones. We were all there, and also our girl Annie’s tall, much-muscled firefighter/paramedic boyfriend who manhandled the pre-schooler and dragged him around the floor inside a silken sack, much to the child’s delight. The rest of us sucked down a special rice the girls made using an actual Japanese fan, along with pot stickers, baby scallops and FINE wines and vodkas and sat by the fire.I've been keeping a diary for 50 years and last year I wrote in it only about 40% of the time. This of course is because I had you talk to. Though this ephemeral medium might not last as long as paper and ink, still it was worth it:You kept me company in my lonely writer’s job for which I say thanks; thanks for clicking through every time and may this day and all your future days be as lively and full for you as they have been for us!

Come on Baby Light My Fire

Some things about this season I KNOW I won’t miss. Couldn’t think straight the whole time. Made mistake after mistake:+ Sent out 300 letters about my new book, forgetting to write what the darn thing cost with the result that 300 people shrugged and tossed it, whimsical sample chapter and all.+ Lost car keys. Lost treasured piece of jewelry. Lost credit card (briefly: turned out it was inside my bra.)+ Made holiday card at very last minute using software definitely not yet mastered with jarring result that the many photos in it are so small family members look like wee homunculi, tiny-headed leering gremlins.On this card included one highly comical picture of youngest kid, scored from one of his friend’s Facebook page. “This is why I won’t ‘friend’ you!” kid cried in exasperation when he heard. (He still has not seen the thing.) Feel hot shame as a result; realize I’ve been exposing this kid to the public gaze for 24 long years.+ Let sole cheap candle in whole house burn down to the cheesy wood-sleigh candle-holder cradling it. Look up to see small conflagration on living room table, yelp, "There’s a fire!", thus waking dormant mate who jumps up, blows on it (which even I know is wrong.) Run to kitchen, get bowl to smother it, success! On second thought should have grabbed handful of flour, my fave tool for quenching kitchen fires because you get done and hey! there’s your gravy!Yep, one thing you learn over the holidays is how to save time.Quick last thought maybe not a bad one:+ Take candle-lighting kitchen matches and set fire to the all 250 holiday cards, thus killing two birds, one stone.So Joy to the world y'all. Now where did I put that that EGG NOG?

Enjoy ALL Da Holidays - BLEAGGHHHH!

Last week at the supermarket I came upon a bin of a half-price Halloween stuff which was exciting for me since I'm always JUST A LITTLE late for every holiday besides which: I do love a skeleton.

I'd just begun examining one bald and clattery dude, thinking maybe THIS is what I can use to explain the pelvis to little Eddie Marotta, four, when suddenly the meat guy heaved out of the back room, bloody apron and all, and hollered “Buy him! The guy is crying out for you to buy him!” - and pressed a button on the top of this dude's plastic noggin and what do you think? - he stuck out a six-inch tongue and said something sort of harsh and smart-aleck-y in the voice of a Rodney-Dangerfield-style comic.

I bought him on the spot and he rode around in my van for six days, his bony feet and his domed skull just peeking out from the top of the shopping bag. Then yesterday he came inside for our uncle’s 88^th birthday party.

Little Eddie was there but he didn’t make much of him – kids are so over these talking toys with their microchips and their scripted remarks. His innocent angel of an 18-month-old brother, however, took one horrified look and practically jumped clear out of his Pampers.

As to the rest of the fam, they just shook their heads and said it was a pity SOME people didn’t understand that these were hard economic times and excuse me but what happened to restraint? TERRY?

They were just jealous, the losers. They're always jealous.

Luckily they were all cleared out by 9 o’clock this morning when I set my buddy up in a coupla different spots and took some pictures. You see him silent at the top and delivering one of his jokes here below.  I'm leaving him around til Christmas Eve I think when I finally put up the tree because, face it, the guy is so suave already; just think how great he’ll look in an ascot and Santa hat, clutching a big old cup of egg nog!

"Hit me!"

Family Life - Love Among the Ruins

This is what our summer has been like: We’ve all been together every weekend and sometimes it’s been great and sometimes it’s been hard. The baby is sick this weekend and though he never cries normally he sure is crying now. His mum Carrie went running and a big golf ball-sized lump popped up on the side of her knee after. (The surprise that Fate had for us all last summer was to learn that Carries has the auto-immune disease known as Rheumatoid Arthritis, this athlete, this former Crew girl and Rugby player. Last summer she could not lift a glass of water to her mouth on account of it. Now she’s almost all better thanks to the new drugs but feels – I know she feels – that her youth is over.)

That’s Old Dave with the white hair. He still has his health and is still the strongest man I know aside from John Magee, shown here bench-pressing our first baby a couple of summers ago.

That’s the new child, the little sickie on the far right.

And me, I’m taking the picture so I’m not in it. My health is good except my neck hurts all the time. I have a mental image of myself as the Cat in the Hat with my skinny neck making all this trouble. The discs are bulging forward, squeezed out of alignment like marshmallow between two squares of graham cracker. The shot they give you for this feels like cold death must feel as it zizzes instantaneously through all your ductwork but it helps for six months or so and I will be glad to have it again soon and I'm content.

The baby has found one of the cats now and is patting him and seems better for the moment anyway. I love watching the ones who are watching each other. That’s family life I guess, and I sure thank God for it.