Cheer Up, Jeeze

Cheer UP, Jeeze! That's what I said to myself yesterday after realizing what I wrote on the two days before  this.I swear, you’d just be crazy all the time if you didn’t have other people to pull you back into Normal. I picture the lone ant blundering off without a mission, feeble feelers waving as his companions march along together cheerfully, bending now and then to lift the dead ones off for burial. Solidarity!The point is, I felt pretty bleak Monday morning and so wrote that dismal limerick.Even on Tuesday I had little to offer but mopey sheets of 'sensitive wallpaper' as Garrison Keillor calls most  introspective writing.Hmmm, well OK maybe it wasn’t ALL  mopey. There were those high school girls hoisting their skirts up and me telling myself that sure, I worked out every day when in truth what I mostly did was sitting OUTSIDE the health club in y car reading and looking at the sky.But mostly, it was like this: Two days, two downer posts.Then in came a comment to the blog written by a reader named Chris N. plucked out 15 words from that 50 word limerick to show me what I had done. Here’s what he said:

Motivation and discipline are interesting. I’m starting to realize that a big part of both of them is visualizing the positive future benefits of the discipline in the here and now, and putting aside the visualization of the negative experiences of the discipline itself. So put the “dark”, “chill”, “summon the will”, “quit”, “bleak”, “rock”, “push it on back up the hill” and all those other downers in a tidy pile on the side of the road, say goodbye to them, and write a limerick full of positive images of where you will be after you got up early, did what needed to get done, and then are enjoying where it got you!

He was so right . My spirits shot up  like mercury in a dog days' thermometer from that point on.I couldn't call up the wit to write the cheery limerick he suggested, but here’s one by my old student Bill, someone I haven’t seen since Jimmy Carter took office, but who feels to me now as if the two of us are still in each other’s daily lives, every Fourth Period in a that sunny top-floor  classroom with its big old windows that rattled in the wind.

Yes it’s true, it’s a morning to shiver,Time to rise and to stand and deliver,Pushing boulders up hillMay be wearisome, still,It beats eagles consuming your liver.

"It could always be worse, he added. "You could be Prometheus," he added.Prometheus! Who stole not cookies but fire from the gods and got punished every day by having his liver plucked out by crows - only then it regenerated itself every night! A good one! So now I feel much better.

Change Now?

That’s it, I’m making some changes. I don’t WANT to feel like Sisyphus pushing the same rock up the same hill every day. (See yesterday's.)  Back in ’08 when I began writing this blog in earnest, I said I would post every day and it was huge for me the first time I skipped a day. Who am I disappointing? was all I could think. I trained as teacher and began adult  life in the classroom. It would be like just not being there when the kids showed up. Eventually, though, I was given to understand that even famous bloggers take the weekend off, so I started doing that around last summer.But then this last Sunday night I went to bed with nothing at all dreamed up for Monday morning’s post and I knew I couldn’t write it at 7 and put it up at 8. The morning hours for me have always been for the newspaper column that I've been writing since 1980 and I know if I start writing crummy columns, people WOULD be disappointed and they would be the editors of those newspapers and that would be the end of THAT career.So now here I am wandering the house in my nightie between 6am and 7:00, watering the plants and looking at the sky and watching the small figures of commuters hurrying to catch the train into Boston.It feels odd. It’s scary when you feel yourself changing.For the the last ten years since our last child flew the nest I would write every day for two hours, THEN eat, THEN go to some damn gym at 9:00 in the morning.It took me years to realize I was mostly sitting outside the gym, reading old Time magazines and writing in my diary, and on lucky days scribbling down sweet things I saw out my car window, like when a squirrel would sneeze, or one of those parochial-school girls would pause in the alley before going into the building to hike her skirt up a foot above the knee.I got so I hated the gym, yet it took my years to cancer my membership. Even today if I never see another Nautilus machine it will be too soon.Now I go to the Y. At 10am instead of 9am and it makes all the difference.I still hurry right past even the treadmills and just do the dance classes. I look at the faces of the other ‘dancers, ’ all of them lit with the joy you get when you move to some music. Zumba alone!  Little did I think I could do those mambo moves, a stick-in-the-mud wonk like me who looked while dancing like one of the extras from The Walking Dead! Sped-up stumbling: that’s what my moves were.I know I’ll keep going to the Y. God knows I need to keep moving, but beyond, that my days are  changing. I can feel another rhythm trying to get established.Suddenly I just want to sit on that sunny window seat and read my book.I want to write more notes to people going through hard times. I want to sit beside my husband and try to figure out from him what sanity feels like.I don’t want to be writing bleak limericks in my head at 5am, wasting that first fresh hour of wakefulness just so some fool looking for dirty rhymes can happen upon my blogWell, we'll see if I can make the changes stick. I sure hope I can. It's exhausting to be my brand of crazy.

Road Trip

I had to drive 100 miles on that cold short day and already it was 3pm.I stopped first at my local gas station where the attendant always speaks to me in such a friendly manner.“How was that funeral you went to?” he asked.  “It was in your home town, you said.”“The funeral was really beautiful, but it was sad seeing the changes there. I went past a hospital that they’re tearing down now. I had to drive by twice to get it through my head that it would soon be gone.” As I spoke my thoughts strayed to the times we visited my mother there when she broke her hip, and our cheery aunts and uncles kept coming with sherry and little crystal glasses to drink it from, talk about your vanished world!“The whole building was laid open,” I told him, “like a dollhouse, only with the roof gone too. It’s hard to see change like that, you know?”“I know,” he said. “Oh, I know!”He did know. Of course he knew. We are all refugees from the past.I began my long drive then, and noticed after just the first few miles that the large box I had dropped on my foot just before leaving home was still ‘with’ me. Though it hadn’t hurt much at the time, a sharp pain was now radiating up my leg and into my hip..I saw I had no choice. I would have to use the last of the fading light to get off the highway and buy some sort of analgesic.This I did, literally limping into the first discount drug store I passed. I grabbed some Tylenol gel caps from the ‘pain’ aisle and limped out again, heading for the fast food joint next door in search of water to wash it down.“What can I get you?” said the young woman behind the counter. “Oh, what’s wrong?” she added, reading the look on my face.I told her. She gave me a big cup of water, no charge, and just as I was tipping back the two capsules she stopped me.  “That’s Tylenol PM!” she cried, half a second before it had gone down my throat, thus saving untold numbers of motorists from sharing the road with a seeming narcoleptic.I thanked her and got back on the highway.There was traffic by then and it had begun to rain.An hour passed. Two hours. Finally, just ten miles from my destination, I stopped to gather myself a bit and elevate my foot.I chose the 99, a chain restaurant. I love all chain restaurants, for so many reasons: The breezy manner of the wait staff, the speediness of the  service, the way they know right away that yes, you would like some popcorn while  you’re looking over the menu and so they just bring it to you.I ate and looked around and slowly my stress level ebbed.And when I saw the little girl gently leading her blind grandpa by the hand to the booth their family had chosen, the stress went away completely. It went away because there,  near the end of my long day, I realized what its lesson had been: That we are not alone in this life. That we too are led, escorted in a way, both by those we love and by kindly strangers.This all happened last week. It was a good lesson to end the year on.

The Best Pals are the Old Pals

The people who knew you when you were young are the best ones. You don’t have to work hard to impress them. They know you; they know you from the back.I spent last Sunday with 13 people I had gone to camp with, talk about an old notion. These days if kids go to camp at all they go for a week or two, and it’s a specialty camp, like for basketball or cheerleading or weight loss. Oh there are still the fine old camps that are fully subscribed every season but their number is dwindling.Back when I was a kid, parents thought nothing of packing their kids off to eight full weeks of camp. (Everything was cheaper then, and that sure helped.) We all went to camp for eight full weeks as girls. It was the only way we could go. And we didn’t just go in that classic latency age before the hormones hit. We went to camp for six, or nine or eleven summers and then came back as counselors.Four of the people I saw last Sunday were sisters. There are five of them all together and didn’t the camp photographer love to line them up for a picture! We had five Creaghs, four McSweeneys and on and on.  Here is one of the sisters pictures below.I was in pre-school when some of these former campers met me. My mom and aunt ran the camp is why I was there at such a young age. We lived there. So all these years later in spite of the changes in my face they say they would know me anywhere.No doubt many remember the time as flag bearer during “colors” my underpants started to sag below my little-girl camp shorts as I marched hup-two-three toward the flagpole. They were touching my knees before I got there.The people who have seen your underpants fall down and like you in spite of this social gaffe are the people who know you. One camper who wasn’t present at Sunday's gathering might remember the summer I was so full of myself there was no living with me. She was my counselor for three years so she really saw my faults - and she called me on them.You can really relax around people who know you that well. This is the camp play I was in during which  what relaxed were my bladder muscles. I wet my maroon  crepe paper beet costume just moments before the curtain went  up I remember. I wept with shame after my scene and ran to my mother sitting in the back of the theatre. She didn't care about my wet pants. She pulled me into her lap and comforted meYou guys, who read this blog, know me. If you've been reading it for a while you know about the time my big sister Nan and I peed in the upstairs hall during our naps and left the puddles there on the hall rug,  each with a small corsage of t.p. in its midst, something we did for the sheer naughty fun of it. I think we must have  sensed that there was some sort of frisky fun associated with what resides in a person’s pants and pee was the closest we could come to imagining what it was.Well enough on THIS theme! I'll sum up here by only saying that we might like people to look upon us as some new Mother Theresa, some new Dalai Lama, but the truth is we’re more comfortable with people who have really got our number.What fun I had with my old friends Sunday! And that’s without even singing the great old camp songs like John Jacob Jingle Heimerschmidt! :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjWbT28VO34]

Good Haul

I’m as happy with what I didn’t get for Christmas as what I did.

• I got a white high-neck long-sleeved nightie. Psych!
• I got a book by Jonathan Kozol one of the last of the American heroes. Psych again!
• I got four sherbet glasses from the early 1920s that I'd fallen in love with at an antique store in November. They cost $25 for the set and are the color of a peacock’s wing. One has a chip in it and what could be nicer than that?
• I got a camera from Old Dave. I got this only after I found out he thought we were no longer exchanging gifts after all these years. No longer exchanging gifts! When I had just finished wrapping three sweaters and a new bathrobe for him since the old bathrobe has under the left arm something resembling a hash tag – you know, the symbol for number - only it’s 8 inches around. Pretty drafty for the cold nights when the wind is up. When he saw my face he said “Poor T! Go buy yourself something!” (This reminded me of when an old flame of my sister Nan said of her ironing that it certainly didn’t look like any shirt his mother would have ironed. Her response: “Does this meat cleaver that I’m about to bury in her your head look like anything of hers?” ha ha. ) So I did “go”, right to Best Buy where the clerk told me they no longer carry the Nikon D-90 that I have been burning to own but she looked it up on Amazon for me, she was that nice. She found a reputable seller, made sure it was a new one and not a rebuilt one and had me email the link to myself. Two hours later I had ordered thing and sometime next Monday it will land on my front porch.
• I also got a funny little cube of a radio with that little slot-like mouth into which you can set your iPhone so you can wake up to music OR news OR your own playlists and podcasts. Joy! This came my way only when because one of my kids asked for it as a gift and when I saw its awesome properties I asked for one too. (Well that’s not QUITE what happened. In the pre-Christmas chaos I ordered the darn thing twice from Amazon and so talked myself into wanting since an extra one was coming to my house anyway.)

I was happy about all these things and happy too that I didn’t have to talk myself into wanting a bunch of stuff I never heard of before, like a belt you can wear that gives you periodic electrical shocks to reduce your love handles or some such.So a nightie, a book, some glassware from the old days, a clock to mark the passage of time and a camera to record it with. It was almost as good a Christmas as the one when I got that model of the naked lady AND the see-through frog... And really Dave is a pretty good guy. Anyone who reads this blog knows that. Here's a picture of him that I've always really liked. (And now he even has a decent bathrobe :-))

WHAT are we thinking?

I was looking at this ad here for People Magazine and all I could think was WHAT has happened to our standards of female beauty?Look at Liz with those creamy shoulders and collarbones that just barely show under that satiny drape of flesh.Then look at Angelina whose whole rotator cuff is on display, never mind just her clavicles.Look at the difference in their upper arms!I don't know about you but I'll be happy when the pendulum swings the OTHER way a bit.Here is Angelina in evening wear. You could slice cheese with the blade of that humerus - right through her skin!And here is Liz dressed the same way. Who looks better to you, hmmm? And who would you rather get a hug from?

Couldn't Say it Better Than This!

I've never met Brian Moloney in person but we 'see' each other every day through our blogs. He sure says it all today, just in the first paragraph of The Freelance Retort:

If Christmas eve is like floating on a calm see, peering up into the stars…and Christmas Day is like a rogue wave that knocks you off your feet and envelops you into a deep dark sea of confusion…then the day after Christmas is like sitting in a puddle, on a muddy shore, picking sea shells out of your bathing suit. Beat up, tossed around… recovering from a thrill ride, all at the same time....

And as I say, that's before he even gets to the stuff he illustrates with the above cartoon. You can check out the whole piece here. Every day he brings me a smile!Now back to picking up after our own fun yesterday, blurry as it was.....Finally, here's a video taken when mischievous little Mr Rabbit Ears was a baby himself and mystified by all the hub-bub.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7SVfdvNqN8]

Happy Times! Here's OUR Holiday Card

This year I decided MORE PICTURES, FEWER WORDS. I also decided to give my kids a break and not make them appear in the holiday card. Just David and I and the little ones I figured. So first I created the thing, which took like days, and then I had it printed - only I didn't get enough so I reproduced the whole thing in a handmade kind of way to send to that last page o' people on my list.This is Page One you see here with the funny joke about Dave's hair.Then there's a Page Two which makes mention of the dear one we lost this year. Then there's a Page Three with even more pictures of the little ones (And another pic of Dave holding little Callie)... And finally a Page Four.I just finally finished the last 20 cards last night - Whew!The first 180 people who got the thing got a much handsomer version which I drop in below as a PDF. At least its printing isn't all crooked. Still, there's something endearingly sincere about crooked printing, isn't there? I'm counting on that anyway! Warm thoughts to all on a day special to so many the world over !2012 card as a PDF

Anxious & Greedy Santa Letters

Ah the profit motive! What else could call forth such literary output? Our kids could be getting so they can’t read the big white letters spelling “JIF” on a jar of peanut butter, but you wouldn’t know it now: the Post Offices are all swamped with Letters to Santa.Last year, one newspaper decided to print such letters, written by real-life kids. Taken together, they represent an outstanding effort, spelling errors and all. And, they come in several categories.

• First, we have the out-and-out Grabby Letter: “Dear Santa,” one begins. “How are your elves? I would like a new computer with, a new hard drive and the fastest Pentiu processor out there! Also, a Lazor printer, some Power Ranger action figures, and a dog (a real one). Also” - and here he moves into What-the-Hell-Ask-For-the-Moon-Mode - “a bigger bedroom, the most advanced watch there is, and a police car.”
•  “And” - now we’re really moving way PAST What-the Hellville, “my own sattalight in space for clear TV, a homework pass, and some friends.” “Oh, and make sure you bring batteries,” he winds up. And my own cat.”
•  While it may be hard to beat that one for naked greed, other interesting  categories appear in other letters. For example, we also have:
•  The Peer Pressure Letter (“Dear Santa: I want Power Wheels and a bike and my friends want it too. I know lots of kids that want a watch. I want one too. I know lots of kids that want Brain Quest. I want it too. People want baseball and basketball and football shirts. I know lots of kids that want cool tools...”)
•  Then we have the Yay For Brand Names Letter (“Dear Santa: I want Baby Tumbles Surprise, Wedding Barbie, Stroller Fun by Mattel, Baby  So Beautiful Dolls, Baby Looks So Real, and Patty and Her Play Pen.”
•   Of course there’s also The Kiss-Up Letter (“Dear Santa: I like you, Santa! I like my Parents. Santa Claus is a good Santa, because he gives lots of presents. Santa, Don’t forget me. Santa is the best!”)
•  And the This is a Test Letter (“Dear Santa: I want a jacket and a hat. I want a sterio. I want that tape, you oughtta know which one.”)
•  There’s the Don’t Ask Letter: (“Dear Santa. I want my own movie theatre. Also a  Junior Rector Set and a Vacuum.”)  I say you take a vacuum, a rector set, and a proscenium arch, and all the world’s a stage, by golly!
•  And the No, REALLY - Don’t Ask Letter (“Dear Santa: I want a Baby Tumbles, a Rosie Doll, and a sheep. I want to tell you a secret about going in the park.”)
•  There’s the Throw Myself on the Mercy of The Court Letter  (“Dear Santa: I am trying to be good this year. I am trying not to fight with my sister or my friends. Again, I am trying to be good!”)
•  The If You Play Your Cards Right Letter (“Dear Santa: I hope you give me a workbench so I can make things and My Size Barbie. I love you and I might give you a present.”)
•  And last but not least the This Kid is Really Out There Letter (Dear Santa: Can I please get the Power Ranger Zord? Not the Blue One, the One with the Red Arm. HI!!! And my olives, just like last year.”)

Poor Santa, trying to check off a planet’s worth of lists like these. Poor the-whole-lot-of-us, as my ancient Great Aunt Mame used to say, trying to help him do it. But no time for that now! The sheep and the rector set and the olives await us. Because it’s almost Christmas - and anything is possible!

They Say Don't Give a Pet for Christmas...

...But maybe it's OK  to get one yourself.Watch this video and just SEE if it doesn't make you smile. You might even take their suggestion at the end..[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG3O6UBLGbA]

Holiday Surprises

Things aren't going that great around  here. We began having the kitchen painted the Monday after Thanksgiving and as of this past Tuesday all the kitchen stuff was still in the dining room. Holiday decorating!My little guys came over a week ago and put all the fake-dripping-wax 1980s-era candles in the windows but the rest of the project stalled.I didn’t even buy the tree 'til last Sunday, in the pouring rain and dark, and failed to notice at the time that it has a kind of giant goiter of branches on one side only. Hence it falls over.Twice it careened onto the ground and once, when we turned it goiter side in, it fell into the wall behind it , which made the front half of its base life right up off the floorLast night just before dinner was the last time it fell. We heard that telltale whoosh and then a sort of muffled thud as of a heavy person sitting down on the floor. We hurried into the living room and there it was.There it is I should say. It's there as I write.Another complicating factor in my week was my last-minute opportunity to go with all the ABC scholars I love, and their Resident Academic Coordinator Mario Paredes, into the Boston State House to meet with the Honorable Deval Patrick , Governor of the Commonwealth.What a lovely man he is, who made these eight feel how much he has in common with them , having himself left home at 14 to be an ABC student at Milton Academy.I was too shy to ask for a picture of me alone with him but everyone else got to do that as the official photographer snapped away.This picture is one Mario took as we first sat down together at the table in that jewel of an office in the old Bulfinch building.  Look at these happy faces! How glad I am that Mario arranged this and the Governor agreed to give us 30 minutes!It's a lesson to me: nobody cares what the table looks like at most gathering, as long as everyone can find a seat at it.And we'll get there on the house preparations. Today we're lashing the tree with wire to hardware on the two windows that flank it. The show must go on!  :-)

Here's the tree after its third and most recent  fainting spell. ( Sigh.)  At least there aren't any lights or ornaments on it yet. 

Who Cares How You Look

In relation to all this recent talk about how funny-looking I was as a kid at summer camp, I have to say: at least we were competent athletes. We learned how to play every sport and the big girls looked so pretty sashaying the quarter of a mile from the cabins down to the lake.Some could dive so clean into the lake they made nary a splash.Some could high-jump. This is my cousin Mary Lou at the track meet.We also put in my time learning to use fake sporting equipment like the Bounce-Back here. (I know these campers look less than adept. This was the first time any of us every interacted with a Bounce-Back.)But we could hit a tennis ball! We could field a baseball and WEAR YOU OUT in volleyball! We knew the J-stroke and so could keep ourselves going where we wanted to go when alone in a canoe.We had all the Red Cross Waterfront classes so to this day I can do the Tired Swimmers Carry because I took Junior and Senior Lifesaving. To this day I know the order you use in reaching out to help someone who’s in over his head. (Throw Tow Row Go.) The Red Cross Water Safety courses make you memorize definitions, like the definition for panic, which I still remember as “the sudden unreasoning and overwhelming fear in the face of real or imagines danger." There's plenty of that in life, all right! And so now I know what to do about panic when I come across it.Camp was great and so what if we didn’t look like fashion models every second of the camp day. We didn’t even have any mirrors in the cabins except that four-inch kind you hang on a nail. We had other things to think about. We were learning how to lose gracefully and also how to win, and not 'spike the ball' when we did win. Sure, when we were older we tried sneaking out of camp some, or smoking cigarettes on the cabin roof when the counselors were at that big meeting, but it was all good.In sum we spent no time at all in self-consciousness, the theme to which this week has been devoted and that seems a very good thing for a girl.  Even an old girl like me probably needs to get outside herself more. I’m heading for The Y right now for the morning swim - see an earlier group below heading for their morning swim (there's that kid with the crazy hair again!)... but after that I'm hitting Sports Authority. Do you think they still make the Bounce-Back?

No I'm Serious

No I'm serious. I really WAS seriously funny looking. The doctor who examined me before entering Kindergarten asked my mom if I had water in the brain.The hairdo didn't help.Big forehead, little nose. They called me Dishface in junior high, those mean boys.At camp where my mother and Aunt Grace ran things - their father had started the camp way back in 1924 and basically told his two girls to run it for him- back then Mom had less time to get me in the death grip between her knees and wind my wild curls around her fingers as she did in the kindergarten picture here above.SO she cut it short...I look like the young J. Edgar Hoover, don't I? Not even a smile! And look at Nan, the future model!  Then look at me with my hair parted in the middle and little fat tummy.The boy next door used to call me "Bad Looks Good Personality." Right there, there’s the secret to my whole personality, my guiding principle right on up through the dating years: Dazzle 'em with kindness, remember all their stories, say funny things and MAYBE they won't notice how you look. Not a bad tactic in the end, now that I'm heading for crypt keeper status  - see pic of me below writing.Well, at least people still find me nice (if a touch on the bony side ha ha. )

Mindy's Fine. I'LL Show You Homely !

Mindy Kaling’s funny book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) is full of pictures of her chubby little child-self. It puts me in mine my theme this week: Never mind the offspring blushing to acknowledge the parent, here’s a story where the parent HAD to have blushed to acknowledge the child.My summer-camp-director of a mom was standing next to the camp nurse Fran, who was new that year and so was enjoying the spectacle as the campers filed into the dining hall from flag-raising exercises.Some were so cute! – look at this little cabinful! - and the nurse said as much .Then… “But whose unfortunate-looking child is THAT you have to wonder?” she said to my mom indicating one small girl.It was inevitable.“That child is my daughter,” said Mom somewhat icily.I never heard this story until two years ago. It sure puts me in MY place but I look at the pictures, and who can argue?  Live and get humble!

Daughters and their Moms Part Two

Mothers and daughters, man! When I was growing up my family ran Catholic girls camp, to which a number of wealthy Puerto Rican families sent their daughters. Winter in U.S. boarding school, summer at Came Fernwood in the Berkshires. We had Carmen, we had Isabel, we had Marisol and so on.This last one, Marisol had a wide friendly face and, like all the girls, heavily accented English.On Parents Weekend when all the families arrived for the festivities, the campers would be gathered on the porch of the dining hall waiting for the bugle call that would let everyone go inside for lunch. It was the perfect spot to watch for arriving parents.My mom told the story about one such time, when on the parents of a number of these exotic Puerto Rican kids seemed to arrive all together, as they probably would have, having just checked in to the swanky Crane Inn in nearby Dalton.In a phalanx now, the women were walking together, ahead of their men, eager to see their little girls. There were four of them, all in designer dresses and clinking with jewelry, chiffon head scarves protecting their perfectly coiffed hairdos. They almost looked like these ladies, only like 40 years ago.Marisol with her little round cheeks stood beside my mom watching their approach.“Which one is your mother, honey?” my Mom leaned down to ask.Marisol regarded the four handsome women, three as tall and slender as those Berkshire birches all around us and the third ….much less tall.She said something my mother couldn’t quite hear.“Once again Marisol? I didn’t catch that.”“My mohther,” Marisol said, her eyes on Mom Number Four. My mohther ees de leetle fat one.”And there it is. Travel the world and you’ll see it. Far and wide at a certain age, all daughters give their moms the critical eye.Now just for fun, here is a small segment of the cast of The King and I. Marisol is in here. See if you can guess which one she is. Gad! A dozen little girls in their bathrobes with Joan Crawford makeup! I'm in there too, I see.And here's another play featuring the drama geeks of Camp Fernwood. Marisol again I see. And Yours Truly too. (You don't suppose the MOTHERS were embarrassed by the DAUGHTERS ever, do you?

Happy Sunday! Stay Out of the Malls

Happy Sunday! Stay away from the malls, or else you'll sit in your car for an hour just trying to get within a mile of the place.Stay home and do old-time Sunday things.Read the funnies.Put a roast in the oven, which is really an old-time thing. (Write in if you're under 40 and you don't recognize words such as 'roast' or 'oven'. We have a little pamphlet we can send you."Watch old movies while filling out the old holiday card. Yesterday I caught portions of Titanic, The Dream Team and The Bone Collector, all on my best friend HBO, while writing warm personal notes on 200 holiday cards.Take a walk.Light a candle when the sun starts to lower, which it does around here at like twenty past twelve in the afternoon.Dig out those footed pj's.Breathe.Go to bed early.You're not in charge of as much as you think you are; God can probably handle the sunrise tomorrow. 

You'll Never Walk Alone :-)

It’s pretty funny what makes our skin crawl. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!I started the week here talking about what is above us.Some such thoughts are sublime, like the thought of the great airships sailing the night skies.Some of them make the flesh crawl, like the creepish things that creepeth upon the earth, like the spiders and bats that lower themselves down from their flight paths now and then and look us square in the eye.It’s ironic that these last are the ones that make our skin crawl, when you stop and think what a bag of germs each one of us humans really is.An article by Michael Specter that appeared in the New Yorker some weeks ago points out how the minute we are born we start loading up on germs. “We inherit every one of our genes, but not a single microbe.  We gather them up when we arrive.“As we pass through our mother's birth canal we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time we can crawl we are “blanketed by an enormous unseeing cloud of microorganisms – 100 trillion or more, which have come at us from every direction, other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, even in the air we breathe."They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between her teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as 10,000 bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by 10 to 1, and weighing all told about 3 pounds – the same as our brain.He called the article Germs Are Us.Aptly named!  Its main argument is that all this bacteria seems to actually serve us. Wiping them out with course after course of antibiotics that are now so freely prescribed looks like it might have been the exact wrong thing for us to be doing.  The huge increase in cases of asthma, for example, may just be a result of the fact that medicine has found a way to eradicate h. pylori from our gut.Turns out we may really need h. pylori. It’s kind of like Where would the Peanuts character Pigpen be without his enveloping cloud of dust? Naked. Naked to the elements, that’s where.My great aunt born the spring after Lincoln dies used to say “You eat a peck of dirt before you die.” Looks like it’s a good thing we do. Looks like the 5-second rule on dropped bits of food that we then take up and eat anyway is a pretty good one after all.

Have Some Vitamins

  And while we’re talkin' night creatures as I was yesterday,  how can I forget the time I came into the kitchen at 6am, sleepily reached for the uncapped plastic bottle where I keep my vitamin C, and, while the coffee was brewing, tipped it up toward my mouth....Only to find  alive and sleeping  bat folded up inside it like a gentleman’s umbrella.The spokes of its velvety wings,its bony shoulders,that small scowling face:all were mere inches – nay, centimeters from my open mouth.Add THAT to the things you never get over in your life. Talk about your gag reflex. I could scream even now thinking of it ...

Don't Look Now!

Of course sometimes when you look up you're sorry you did, like when your older sister has you pinned to the ground and is lowering a long drool of spit onto you. (I know, I know. You’ve heard this tale from me before, but some things are hard to put behind you, ask any younger sibling.)This post follows that ethereal set of jottings from yesterday. I mean the lovely thoughts of the person manning that isolated webcam had, about airplanes passing high above us.Some things you don’t WANT to see coming. Henry the 8^th had his wife Ann Boleyn beheaded with the sword and not the ax because it was a swifter and more merciful death. Additionally he had the headsman wear soft little slippers so the blindfolded queen of England would not hear his spinning approach.  (That’s how they did it according to Hilary Mantel, Booker-award winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies: The guy got a running start, swirled like a dancer executing a pivot and delivered the blow with all the energy that move delivered.)You also don't want to look up in the morning and see a spider right over your bed when he too is lowering something onto you, namely his furry many-legged self.In fact they say all kinds of critters trundle around on us as we sleep, even if the mattress is vermin-free. What about all those dear little ladybugs that appear everywhere the minute there’s a warm day? They don’t check into a motel when the lights go out. Just like your cat or dog, they too probably like to curl up pressed against warm sleeping You.The chimneys in this house are well-traveled highways for things from the sky: birds, squirrels, though God knows how they get their fat little fat hips down the flue, and also bats.The worst are the bats, because here they suddenly appear out of nowhere, in their jagged stitching flight.We once chased a bat all over this house, tennis racquets in hand, until it made its way clear to the third floor and hid behind the big oak mirror that hangs over a low chest of drawers. (Well, I wasn’t actually holding a racquet. I was mostly holding the totally enraptured children who were shrieking like banshees.)My old man, Old Dave was holding the racquet, making wild swings whenever the poor thing swooped by.“Let’s just shut the door to this room” I called to him in that third floor room, thinking, We never have to use this room  again.He said nothing. He knew that was no solution.He thought a minute. He looked at his racquet.He looked at the mirror.Then he went up to it and pressed it, slowly but firmly into the wall, and the dead bat dropped like a heavy little purse, down on to the floor.I felt a little badly of course but then thought what I still think today: If only more of what ‘befalls’ us could be dispatched with such ease!

Scared Shirtless?

Thoughts on the new James Bond film Skyfall:Thought One: Daniel Craig takes off his shirt every ten minutes so we can all study his torso.  A half hour into the movie I felt like 1,000 mothers  examining their kids' chests for signs of measles.Thought Two:  Mighty small nipples!Thought Three: Bond gets shot with a high-powered gun, falls of a moving train and goes over a waterfall, seemingly downs and still doesn’t die? Reminiscent of Tom Hanks meeting Darryl Hannah-the-mermaid in Splash.Thought Four: Motorcycle chase along the tops of buildings in Istanbul: this isn’t E.T. and Elliot on the bike!Thought Five: Of course not! No full moon... !Thought Six, on Javier Bardem in the film: Here’s an argument for Polident, yikes. (No picture from the film here... Spoiler.)Thought Seven, on the movie in general. I didn’t fall asleep once during the whole 2 hour and 23 minute thing, for a workaholic like me , well that’s akin to a miracle.