Breakin' the Rules

 

Friday night is a big night for dreams around here, at least for me, probably because like most of us, I don't have to get up in the morning. I opened my eyes at 6:30 and again at 7:00 and it's the-not-getting-out-of-bed-right-away that brings them on.In the work week my mind is whirring like a top by 6:30 even if I don't leap right from the bed. Today by contrast I knew I could lie there til 9am if I liked, so I turned over and in came the dreams.One was about the far-distant friend I ran into in Macy's. She had just blown into town for a week, she told me there in Domestics."But where are you staying?" I asked her, meaning Why aren't you staying with us?"RIght over there," she said, indicating the linens section of this Home Department and sure enough: Among the dozen perfectly curated display beds, each one tricked out with gorgeous color-coordinated puffs, quilts and duvets, not to mention a world of improbable throw pillows, was a bed that had clearly been slept in and only partially made, with an actual somewhat-worse-for-the wear stuffed animal atop it.More than her resourcefulness I admired her chutzpah.Chutzpah must have been the theme of the hour during that 6:30 to 7:00 window because the second dream showed more nerve than the first:My family and I were on some sort of Disney-style cruiseline of a ship that prided itself in providing a highly sanitized and carefully managed experience. Maybe it really was a Disney cruise come to think of it or maybe, as the dream wore on, we were by then in actual Disney World where , if you've ever been there, you know you can't so much as hoist yourself up to sit on a fake-stone wall without having three guys wearing blazers and walkie-talkies converge on you to suggest you hoist yourself the heck back down. Ma'am.Anyway, we were this restaurant whether on land or sea, when our young waitress, dressed as Snow White, suddenly set down her pot of Decaf, tugged at the front of her costume which must have been velcroed together  like stage clothes, and with one motion stood before us entirely bare, that super-white  Snow White skin looking all the whiter for the contrast with her jet black hair."My first naked lady!" a little boy exclaimed just before a flying wedge of blazer guys began hauling her off.As she passed me I couldn't  help it. I spoke to her. "Hey good for you!"  and she shot me her dazzling smile.So there it is: proof that even a good girl who leaps straight from the bed already planning a dozen ways to save the world, can have some pretty transgressive dreams if allowed to sleep even 30 minutes over... But hey, fun is fun, right? And we all need a little friskiness in our lives.

Back at the Workbench

Is Monday easy for anyone? This is my household this morning. We have such a hard time getting going they send in three adult matrons and an oversized teen girl to keep us on task and get us pumped for the day.They start by getting us up at 5 and making us do squats and jumping jacks in the driveway. Then we’re given a bowl of porridge apiece and read to for an hour: inspirational stories mostly, by famous old advice-givers like Ben Franklin and Horace Greeley.Today when we seemed a tad less than energetic, they then turned to long passages from the Book of Exodus and basically said You don’t like building pyramids all day? We’ll show you! Now you’re going to have to build the bricks for building the pyramids. In this picture you see us shackled to the workbench, building the palms trees before we get to work on the bricks and the pyramids. I’m the one farthest to the left, trying to curry favor with by smiling at the off-camera matron who is taking the picture.  (I’ve always been the Stockholm Syndrome type.) My man Dave is the one on the right way down toward the end of the table with his head in his hands.His clothes are mismatched I see, but it appears that most of our clothes are mismatched. Sigh. I guess you just do the best you can on a Monday morning. With whole new mountains to push uphill again this week we’re just kinda thinkin’ Whence comes our deliverance? Let’s hope the people in Washington can end this government shutdown today and get to work on the debt ceiling yikes. 

Did You Say LICE?!

What’s fun about life is its many surprises.I was certainly surprised one winter’s day when my little girl came trailing down the stairs from her nap to find me cozily reading in the kitchen.My friend had called the week before to say she couldn't come over, because her own little girl had developed a case of head lice.“Head lice?!” I wanted to shriek, only didn't, since my friend was already weeping softly over the horror of it all, she who keeps a house so clean you could toss a salad in the toilet bowl. My little one crept up in my lap then, clutching her blanky and - scratching her head. “YOU DON’T SUPPOSE…?!” I thought suddenly. I lifted a length of hair - and saw a row of teensy eggs stitched like seed-pearls along each wispy strand. It was all I could do not to 911. I tried holding her at arm’s length while urging her bendy limbs into a snowsuit so we could go to the doctor’s, and there’s a task roughly equivalent to drinking a glass of water with both arms in wrist-to-shoulder casts.“Hmmm, fascinating!,” the doctor murmured, browsing through her scalp. “I've seen a thousand cases of nits - the lice's eggs, you know - but never an actual louse!” he added, beaming.Per his orders, I bought the nuclear shampoo and that medieval torture device the fine-tooth metal comb. Once home, I washed her hair with it, only to see the bathwater turn into a small Yangtze River, bustling with the commerce - dead now - of a hundred actual and ‘fascinating’ lice.It was some little surprise, all right. But such surprises happen to us all.My friend's cat Squeak got gum trouble and went in to have her teeth out.While under the knife, she was found to have a tumor too, which the vet removed. But at home, toothless and convalescing, she kept opening her wound. Finally, the vet put her on Valium. She jumped up on things and missed; forgot how to blink; smiled a lot; and developed a weird appetite - for elastics and earrings and cigarette butts. “Never mind Squeak, give ME the Valium!” my friend said to the vet next time she saw him.Many surprises seem to involve the animal kingdom. I think of the time my sister's cat Shadow bit her on the toe. “At 2:00 A.M. the lymph nodes in my groin had swollen,” Nan wrote me afterward. “At 6am when I got to the Emergency Room, the doctors took eleven syringes of pus out of my foot and sent me home to bed with an Rx for Darvocet. Looks like yet another allergy to painkillers for me: everything I saw was framed like a stained-glass window, and the Space Shuttle kept landing in my kitchen.”One animal surprise in her life didn’t even come from her own animal. She came out to the garage one morning to find that a wild beast had entered her car, spent several hours whooping it up to such an extent the sight of her car brought sobs of disgust even to the pros at the car-cleaning place.You TRY to be ready for anything but hey, you can't be. As a teen, I used to carry safety pins,TicTacs and pencils against life's many surprises. As the years passed and I  began catching on more, I added a pen-knife, Band-Aids, and disposable wipes. Now I'm considering a tourniquet, a pair of Depends and some feel-good pills myself.The pills I may not need right now, but who knows? Anyway, according to Squeak, they go for ten bucks a pop on the street.

If a Man Asks for Your Shirt...

It doesn't show poor boundaries that I offered a guy one of my contact lenses, does it?He came to look at our house to see if there were any way we could air condition such a leaky old ship as this place and arrived a little after our appointment time."I'm so sorry I‘m late!” he said. “My contact lens just popped out of my eye on the way over here! I had to pull over and I looked all over the truck but I didn’t find it.”His eye was watering.“If you’re like me you can't see at all,” I said.“Right!” he said.“Are yours the extended wear 30-day kind like I have?"“Yes they are.”“What magnification?”“3.75 in that eye,” he said.“Just a sec,” I said. I went to my medicine cabinet, pulled out one of my own 3.75s and gave it to him - and we had a little festival of joy for the poorly visioned then and there.It isn’t often you can help someone in such a specific way like this. I was glad I could. 

Breaking Bad (Hashtag Hashtag) Kinda Glad It's Over

The Breaking Bad craze yikes. Last night I watched the final episode of the final season of that AMC show just like everyone else and saw the internet light up with the universal sign #, which means "this is what I'm referring to." People were practically out in the streets in their excitement.The Today Show did some a short tribute to the show at 8:15 this morning, being careful not to give away anything as I will also be careful to do here since no doubt many DVR'd the episode due to pressing football commitments or sock-sorting chores or baby-tending tasks or whatever it is that people do on Sunday nights.I watched the live post-mortem too and was charmed both by Vince Gilligan's humble ways and by his intelligence. Aaron Paul, who has played Jesse Pinkman for all these episodes, spoke too and he was okay though I was sorry to see that his personality seemed very much the same as it is in the show. I'm always so sad when this happens, and it happens a lot. I mean can Diane Keaton even MAKE a movie anymore where she's not either sobbing showily or laughing maniacally?I have no idea what Jimmy Kimmel was meant to add to the lineup there on that couch but I guess they know what they're doing, the people who stage these events.I will miss Gus Fring. Will he never be back in his impeccable suit?  No, alas, he will not.I will miss Hank Schrader whose real life self I came to know a bit about by listening to 'Fresh Air' with Terry Gross. A Harvard kid who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.I will miss Walter White's lovely son, and also  Hank's wife Marie with her purple purse and her purple rugs.I won't  miss all the point-blank shooting-of-people-in-the-face that became almost the show's trademark in this last season. At the very least can't a person be allowed to finish his sentence before this happens to him?Well it's over now and Bryan Cranston is now playing LBJ six miles from here at the American Repertory Theatre.Since I mentioned talk show host Jimmy Kimmel let me also mention the great Jimmy Fallon as an introduction to this clip: a very funny takeoff on the use of hashtags by the (mostly) young. Jimmy is the funniest man in America, in my estimation and as for Justin, is there ANYTHING he can't do?Sit back now and give yourself a smile with this clip about hashtagging from a recent Saturday Night Live.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57dzaMaouXA]

One, Two, Three, HIKE!

Good follow-up to a night of 'toasting' with Big Dave's bridge pals: We hiked up Rattlesnake Hill.Encountered:two big dogs,several slews teens, all affectionately pawing one another,and dozens of young parents urging their kids along with everything but electric cattle prods.David, good host that he always is, carried a sack of drinks, so that when we got to the top we could have a Sprite Zero, a Bud Light, or a wee can of Strawberry Margarita, the latter two perhaps being somewhat in violation of trail rules......which may account for this image: The person behind the camera thought he was shooting a picture on my i-Phone but turned out to really be shooting a video.Oh well! Love his laugh, anyway.Good old Charlie! Then David took this picture of toothy me. REALLY NICE WEEKEND WITH REALLY GOOD FRIENDS.. :-) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlaMOdaeC9Q]

Still No Luck

I so much want a refrigerator by now - any refrigerator! Well, any refrigerator but the one that's been stewing in its own juices since it died here on September 8th, just before our last heat wave. That refrigerator immediately began giving off an odor like a combination of rotten eggs, dirty socks and the way a thing smells when somebody sneezes on it.I bought the new fridge over the phone 8 days ago. last Friday, not three but SIX delivery guys found that it wouldn’t fit in the room. They suggested we hire contractors to make the adjustment necessary to getting it in here.( Those stories above.)They came back again once we'd made those adjustments and they STILL couldn’t install it, for the simple reason that the floor under the old fridge had rotted completely away . Evidently a leak some time in the Clinton Administration just chewed away the solid old support beams that shore up the kitchen ."It's a wonder this thing didn’t fall clear through the floor and land in your basement!" said one delivery guy."It did seem to be kind of rocking when you opened it  I noticed lately " said a family member."I'm afraid to step here!" trilled a second delivery guy.Then Brave Dave came home and 'stepped there' with our carpenter-pal Dick Iannetti. They worked together most of yesterday cutting out the old beams. Dick will come back today and finish putting in the new.Pretty funny to think what might have happened: 'Got Milk?'." Sure,  let me just reach in here. Whoa!!!"  Foomp! And only settling dust left to tell the tale. This is the wood under the old one: As they used to say in Ancient Rome,  "Res ipse 'loquitur! The thing speaks for itself. This was taken in the kitchen. Those are the  bricks of the chimney it backs up to. And that golden light center front? That's coming up from the cellar.   

It Came It Saw, It Went Away Again

This was Day Six with no refrigerator. The start of that tale is here.

The new one came, it saw, and it went away again. What did it see, you might ask? It saw it couldn't fit into the kitchen.

"Sorry," the three delivery guys said after ten minutes of chin scratching,  "It's just not gonna happen."

"But..." I sputtered. "The old fridge is the same make and model. I mean we didn't build the kitchen around it!"

"Ah but see you got handles projecting from this new one. You didn't have handles with the old one."

"So let's take the handles off."

"Can't do that. It voids the warranty."

I was alone with these guys so I said “Let me just called my husband at work.” I called Old Dave and told him the situation.

“Tell them to take off the door from the dining room,” he said in that annoyingly reasonable way a person has who, though not present, is giving advice to people who are.

"We tried that. It’s not gonna fit."

“The back door then."

“Tried it."

“The porch door."

“Tried it. (Do you think we’re idiots?’ I thought about saying, suddenly siding with my new pals the delivery guys.)

"Why don’t YOU talk to them," I said and handed the phone to one of the men.

"Hi! So what do you think? What can we do?“ he asked them.

“Well there is one door. The one leading from the living room.” Then the man holding my phone half-turned to me too, out of courtesy I think .“You folks will have to  call someone to take off the door and pull out the radiator."

"WE can do THAT," I snorted. "We've been taking off doors and pulling out radiators for years."

"But this swinging door with this big iron spring? I've never seen a door like THIS door and I'm 31!" I didn't say that the house was four times older than that. I knew it though, and knew that the spring was original to the house.

“Ok then so we'll get the door off and move the radiator and then call you guys back over.”

“You know you have to drain the whole system,” he said

“We do it all the time,” I said.

And so they left. and took our new fridge but tell ya what: Twenty-four hours later the door was OFF and the system was all drained, We moved the radiator too, three ton thing that it is, and yes entered another week without a fridge-  but somehow felt triumphant just the same.

A Miracle All Right

You go to school to learn, of course, but how much learning takes place outside school? A lot, that’s how much. Only think of all you have learned outside the classroom.Think how you struggled to turn the idioms of that new language you were taking in school. What on earth did the French phrase ‘to sleep on both ears’ mean? It took a while to understand that it meant to sleep soundly.Think of the time you first tied your own shoes. Maybe you were four or five and sitting on your back steps, working away at the wobbly loops of those laces until, almost on their own, they executed a sort of pirouette and resolved into: a bow!Remember the moment in William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker when young Helen Keller finally understands that there’s a relation between what is spilling over the palm of one of her hands from the pump and the movements being drummed into the palm of her other hand? When she ‘sees’ at last that one signifies the other? That this lovely cool stuff has a name, and the name is water?Helen Keller speculates in her autobiography that she made the connection in part because, as she learned much later, ‘water ‘ had been one of her first words at age one, just before a sudden illness robbed her of sight and hearing both. But in large part too it was the tireless repetition of the signs worked into her hand by her dedicated teacher Annie Sullivan.We learn language through repletion, by big people leaning down toward us like gods from their tall high world, cooing the words we will soon enough speak: ‘Baby.’  ‘Mamma.’  ‘Blankie.’We learn so much through repetition: The multiplication table. The names of the state capitals. The principles that together build the precisely balanced scales that is mathematics.But other things we learn in other ways. We learn both by sudden insight, and by a slow sort of dawning.Take insight. Take the first time you really understood that poem you had to analyze for English class. You went along reading the thing, often distracted rather than helped by its rhythms, your eyes scanning along until - bang! you slammed into a word you did not expect. You thought ‘huh’?  Then ‘ahhhh’! Because suddenly the poem’s tight little bud of inscrutability had opened like a flower, revealing fold after fold of meaning, layer after layer of beauty.Then take slow dawning, the things you learn by degrees:

• As in the way you come slowly to realize that when you dislike someone almost on sight it is because of something you see, or think you see, in that person that reminds you of a part of yourself you have split off from or tried to deny.
• As in the way you come slowly to see that not hate, but a willed indifference is the opposite of love.
• As in the way you slowly recognize that love is not a feeling at all, despite what all the songs say. It’s more a decision, love is. When I think of the people I love it’s as if I am saying to them with every thought and deed, “I’m for you, kid. I am in your corner.”

Why live at all if not to learn? What would separate us from a pot of plastic daisies were we to stop even trying?I get so excited when the school year starts. We still have so much more to understand!Now, under this picture of the real Helen Keller and her teacher, is the 'water scene' from that great 1962 film.[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=lUV65sV8nu0]

Slime City

I haven't written much this week because something horrible happened Monday.Our refrigerator died.We didn't know it had died for almost 24 hours.We went to bed, woke up in the morning, and the baloney was slimy.The eggs were sweating.And the black beans and broccoli crowns in their little bowls....Well, let's not get into the black beans and the broccoli.Weatherwise we started the week on the cool side. Then temps soared into the 90s.We considered our options. We've repaired this refrigerator four times just in the last ten years. Even the repair guy, who has gone to Florida several times thanks to this old fridge, couldn't recommend that we fix it again when he came again last May.We knew we had to buy a new one and we knew it had to fit in the cut-out made in the cabinets for the old one, back when we did this kitchen over in the late 1980s. Which meant it had to be by the same manufacturer. And the cost of the new model is like four times the money my family spent to send me to college back in my era which was the Woodstock era..Plus, it might not fit. We measured and talked to the salesmen, measured and talked and it looks like the old fridge, though the same brand as this new one, is half an inch taller. Which means when the guys come in a few minutes, it really might NOT fit. Plus it's so old, its hookups might not match: the places where the electrical cord goes and also the water source that makes those clunky half moons of ice for you.So, they may just have to leave it in the middle of the kitchen floor until we can also call a plumber, a carpenter, and electrician. Unless Dave can act in all those capacities, which he probably can.Sigh. Tell ya what, nothing is easy.I better stop now and go look our front for them. They'll need face masks I'm pretty sure, and maybe some of that highly mentholated stuff for putting under their noses.

Here Comes the Bride

Bridal showers are always fun. Nobody knows anybody else so you have to mix it up. At the shower I just attended for my niece Grace, the bride-to-be was both radiant AND composed as she opened 1,000 boxes of filmy underwear.She'll use it all though; fads come and go but women still wear underpants.Also bras, I'm pretty sureBack in the Pleistocene era when the mother of the bride and I were given bridal showers we received these hideous two-part things for what was then referred to us our 'trousseau.'  What they were even called I can't remember. One part would be this enormously flounced-out, mostly see-through garment shaped like a dinner bell  that came with a second enormously flounced-out  mostly see-through over-garment that tied at the neck with a bow. I was just a kid when I got married: Nan was too. We spent our days in cut-offs. Why were they dressing us like lampshades in a little girl's bedroom?These gifts were better. Grace received and immediately donned a white baseball cap with the word 'Bride' on it......and praised and relished every single present while her mom took notes on who gave what.There was some poorly shot video by me which I will try to post here in a bit, but suffice to say that everyone had fun.We ate and drank in the delicate way women do. We talked about our fertility, our surgeries, our men. Sooner or later when women are together they're bound to share such truths. Once at church in a special session called Discerning Your Path, I got paired up with my friend J. We were instructed to talk about the times we felt the call of God upon our lives but as she said later to a third pal, we mostly just complained about our husbands. (Tell you what, put women in charge of the world and honesty will rule over all!)Anyway it was a great time - and now we have the wedding to look forward to. Our lovely bride and her beautiful groom: Long may they prosper!

Glad I Came

I flew to Florida Friday to go to the house of my sister Nan and be present at my niece Grace's bridal shower. Here they are some few years ago when Grace was a little on the bald side.When she first invited me she said she knew I couldn't come. Fly 1200 miles to see a roomful of ladies cheering in the dismantling of gift wrap? No one expected that of me.But the minute I heard about it I knew I wanted to be there. I didn't say so but I knew. 'Maybe, just maybe, I'll surprise this godchild of mine.Then, eight days ago Grace texted me to say a quick hi. "I so wish you were going to be there" is how she ended it.I couldn't help myself. "Oh Gracie I am going to be there! " I texted back. "I booked my flight the second I heard about it and even got a good price! At $237 round trip Boston to Tampa how could I NOT come?"So much for surprising her. "We'll surprise Nan," we decided, but really there was never any surprising Nan, somehow, who has been three steps ahead of me all my life.But the point wasn't for ME to be the event anyway. The shower was the event and I'm so glad I came for it. The guests on the bride's side and the groom's side seemed to instantly bond and share stories both funny and sad, the way women do when they're alone together. I am so glad I was there.And now it's Sunday morning and I'm packing up for the airport. I stayed at the Tarpon Springs Hampton Inn, not to be in the way, and I rented the car that in 30 minutes will take me to the airport and then back to my own near-and-dears who I texted someplace in there yesterday, suggesting we all go swimming at the local pool one last time when my flight gets in. They went for it but we might all be crazy given the cool front that's just blowing in up there.Anyhow all that lies in the future. As for right now which is the only moment we ever really have, I am feeling happy and grateful and stunned by the glory of a brand new day.

Nice Guy Traffic Cop

This was me in traffic yesterday morning, feeling kind of grouchy, waiting my turn while the opposite lane of cars snaked around some construction in the road ahead. The cop who halted me held up his hands, held them up again, held them up again as if to say 'stop, stop, so STOP already!' - which seemed a little weird because I was stopping. Then he pointed to a particular patch of pavement is if to say 'come right here, come right here,' kind of like they do at the rental car return place.When he approached my car I thought “Here we go."But instead of chastising me in any way, he motioned for me to roll down my window. Seeng that Ihad my iPhone plugged in with that little tether that lets you listen to it through the radio, he said,"whatcha listenin' to?"That took me by surprise. "What's that now?" I said."Whatcha listenin to?" he said again, leaning in my window. "Meaning what kinda tunes?""Oh I'm not listening to tunes, I'm listening an audiobook.""Cool! What book?""Oh um something called If I Wake Up or When I Wake Up or Will Someone Please Wake Me Up. To be honest I just started it. It's for my book club. Some lady with amnesia or something,"I said.“Amnesia, huh?” he said, and we both took a minute to think about what it would be like to have that particular affliction. Would that also be ‘cool'? Or would it be painful and punishing to maybe not remember who we even were or what we were doing paused in the middle of Rte. 38 there.If he had amnesia he might forget that he was 26 years old and liked to chew gum. If I had amnesia I might forget that I was his age in reverse and now have pretty little spider-vein 'bracelet ringed around both ankles.But we didn’t have amnesia. We knew who we were and where we were, and he especially knew that the best days are of the ones where you have just enough high spirits left over to take on even the grumpiest-looking fellow citizens..

Jeeesh, What Are You Gonna Do?

A bunch of people offered such good advice when I posted on Facebook two days ago about grouchy reader who wrote in to say he thought my latest column was the most boring thing he has ever read in a newspaper.I liked all the comments people left, from the one that said, "Tell him to go suck a lemon" to the one who said  "Jealous! Who says that? He hasn't gotten the memo that mean people suck? You go girlI nodded and also learned something when one person wrote, "People who take the trouble to write are people you've affected, whether it's positively or negatively. To a communicator, they're of equal value. Your enemy is indifference."I smiled in appreciation of the one that said "I have learned that we are not always *for* someone - kind of like when you hear speakers and some just "speak" to you and others turn you off. No biggie."True enough, true enough, Laura.I even liked the one that said, "You may be controversial at times, or even irritating, but never boring. I love reading your columns." That one made me laugh right out loud. I'm irritating? Really?But the one that made me feel best of all came from fellow columnist Mike Deupree now retired. I have been learning from HIM since 1988 when I attended my first ever National Society of Newspaper Editors Conference and here is what he wrote:I once got a phone message from a reader. He sounded very upbeat, gave his name and phone number, said, "I just wanted to let you know that your column this morning was the dumbest f***ing thing I ever read in my life." I always responded to people who identified themselves, so I called him and talked for a while. Nice guy. Became a regular correspondent and we met in person several times. (He was wrong about that column, though).That experience has been mine exactly. Sometimes people write me the most hateful things, me with my liberal theology and my support of equality in marriage. I too always answer - by email because people don't call me - and I think them for taking the time to write and sometimes say a word about God being a God of love and how I too admire and emulate Jesus and do you know what? Nine times out of ten they write back and say "well I was kind of in a bad mood when I wrote that" and though we haven't become friends exactly like Mike and his caller, we seem to have blessed each other, which is all I'm hoping for every day when I get out of bed in the morning.This is Mike, called 'Doop' by his friends around the time I met him. I miss him and wish he were still in the business.

Boring He Said

Got some good advice from my Facebook friends Monday night when I told about the reader wrote to say that my latest column was the most boring thing he had ever read in the paper.A couple of people asked to see the piece, so they could see for themselves. Here it is then: the word for word exchange I had with the cab driver who came to bring me to the bus station.Maybe a column shouldn’t have as much real life stuff in it but I thought the opposite was true. Anyway, here she is:

Because I had to be in the city to catch a bus at 10am, I ordered a taxi for 9:00 and was out in front of my house at 8:55.With an hour to traverse the eight miles to the bus station I felt happy and relaxed, the way you do in a cab when the cabbie is friendly and present, which is to say NOT talking on his phone the whole time.In fact, this cabbie did use his phone once when it rang but only because he saw that it was his wife, just waking for the day. He told her it was raining out so she should just turn over and go back to sleep and who wouldn’t be happy to overhear a cozy domestic exchange like that?Plus, friendly? He was sure friendly.As he wove deftly through the braiding lanes of traffic on this expressway, he chatted about this and that: About how he had just been on this road two hours ago, bringing a woman to the airport. About how his stop-for-a-drink-after-work pals were all cops and firefighters. About how he graduated high school back in the 70s. 1974 to be exact.“I know about the Class of ’74! “ I said. “Did you have shoulder-length hair and go to the prom in a tux with a ruffled shirt and a velvet bow tie?”“Who knows about the tux, it’s so long ago, but yup to the shoulder-length hair!”“And did they play Stairway to Heaven for all its endless length including that part in the middle when the tempo changes and you can’t slow-dance to it at all?”“No doubt!” he said and broke into song. “Dah dah DAH dah dah dah, dah dah DAHdah dah dah and they’re buy-ee-ing a stair-eh-way to Heah-ev-en.”We rode in a remembering silence a while before I recalled what had just happened on this road the week before.“What a shame it was about the intoxicated driver in the Caddy who hit that trucker so hard he went over one of these guard rails and fell 40 feet down onto the spur beneath!"“Another few inches and he would have fallen the full 400 feet to that street.”“But he’s OK, I read.”“If you call a broken back and neck OK. You sound like the driver. ‘Well he didn’t DIE,’ she said when she heard about his injuries.”“No, I know! A broken neck and back is awful-”But he was still talking:“I also hear that-“I wanted to interrupt him but by the time I saw what had happened it was already too late. In all the talk he had exited right when he should have stayed straight and now here we were in the long, no-turning-around tunnel that finally brings you up at…The airport.“You know I’m actually going to the train station, right?” I said in a small voice.“Dang! “ he exclaimed. “ I have NEVER done this before!”He went on. “Not to worry though. Watch this!" - and he orbited those airport roads faster than a hamster orbits his hamster wheel, dove into a second tunnel, surfaced four miles farther south, shot a mile and a half back north and landed me at the bus station at  last with 20 minutes to spare.“I’ll eat the $5 toll for the airport,” he said, but I gave that same amount right back to him as a tip.Because really how could I not? If there was ever a case of dual responsibility for that proverbial wrong turn, this was surely it."

And now, just for fun, that very song and a typical couple from the good old class of '74:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOemwDVBlqE]

Jumping the Fence

We were like a couple of second-story men backing down the driveway of this empty house.No one was home and we knew that. “This won’t take long,” we told each other, stepping out of the vehicle.But not 30 seconds after we opened the van’s rear gate, a muscular woman with short curly hair from the house behind this one shot out of her back door and began trotting toward the chest-high chain link fence that separated her yard from this one.  Then, without so much as a pause for breath, she placed two hands on its forbiddingly spiky top, gave herself a boost and vaulted over it. “Hey!” she called, striding toward us.  Talk about your neighborhood watch! was all I could think.As it turned out though, she wasn't there to challenge us; she was there to help us. And we weren’t there to take stuff away from this empty house but rather to bring stuff into it. The door off the back deck had even been left open for us. The muscular woman must have seen that at once, taken a long look at these two old Boomers and thought, “These two sure need help! “We’re the Marottas,” I said, pointing to the empty house. “We’re his godparents.” “Name’s Maura,” she said, quickly extending a hand. Then, just as quickly, she brushed me aside and took one end of the Queen Ann Sofa we had begun pulling from the van. I glanced back toward her house and saw a second woman who looked to be in her early 70s also approaching the fence. She wore a sleeveless blouse and Bermuda shorts and held in one hand the longest cigarette I think I have ever seen. We too exchanged names. “That’s my daughter,” she said, lifting her chin to indicate our muscular helper, who, together with my spouse, was now carrying the couch up onto the deck of the empty house. “She just jumped over this fence!” I told her. “She’s been doin’ that for the 40 years now.” And so, while the two lifters tipped and tilted the sofa, trying to get it into the house, the two of us chatted. “She’s an electrician,” she said. “No kidding?” “Uh huh. Like her dad is  - or was, I should say.  He passed three years ago.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” said. She nodded, looked away for a minute. “Yep, not one but TWO electricians right in one family.” “The  International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers!” I said, rather foolishly I fear. But “You know it!” she said. “And don’t I thank God every night for Local 103! They took care of me.” We both looked toward the house, at the precise moment the two lifters were concluding that this sofa was definitely NOT going to fit through the door.But just then, lucky for us all, our godson materialized on the back steps, home early from work. “Well, I’m the one who put this door on,” he smiled. “I guess I can take it off too.” And he went to get his tools. “You guys got this? If you’ve got this, I’ll take off,” said Maura. “I’m playin’ in a softball game a few towns over.” She gave a kind salute, waved to her mom at the fence and was gone, almost before we could thank her. And ten minutes later, a Queen Anne sofa, two tables and a dozen boxes were inside the house, everyone had said their goodbyes and this little stage was empty of players, leaving us with the fresh reminder of what good neighbors really are.

Afternoon Delight

I worked at my keyboard for three straight hours each day of this vacation,  but then I did nothing.By nothing I mean I sat on the deck and read my book called Titan, the new biography of John D. Rockefeller with his long skinny face. (I’m just on page 21 of its 800 pages but it's a start!)I read this for an hour sitting up. Then I turned over onto on my stomach and read some more, now on the fully collapsed lawn chair with the book on the floorboards beneath me. Then I fell asleep for 90 minutes.On waking, I made a tuna sandwich without the bread or mayo which is a little like eating salty sawdust but never mind.  I also made a protein shake using as its base 8 ounces of strong coffee, a cup of ice cubes, a scoop of  chocolate flavored protein and two  and a packets of Truvia, the natural non-caloric non-sugar that would put a smile on the face of dead man.THEN I went back out to my lawn chair on the deck and read  some more  on my Kindle this time, that old sob story of a novel The Prince of Tides by by Pat at Conroy, made into a movie starring Blythe Danner, Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand. I have read both this book before, which vacation is for. :-)It's true that since last Sunday I have I logged in about 25 hours of work for the organization that lately claims all my heart and many of my waking hours, but really I mostly just walked a little and looked out at the water.Around noon yesterday, a ruckus broke out on the deck next, like the sound of  a tiny helicopter crashing. I looked down and behold: it was two tiny helicopters crashing:  Two dragonflies, mating.The sight of them brought to mind the e.e. cummings poem I so I loved in high school about what a fine thing it is  when two creatures mate on your premises. These dragonflies whirred and fluttered and remained locked together for four or five minutes before the male flew off, leaving the female still and dazed.I have felt that way too this week: Still and dazed. It’s my one week off in the summer and I’m making the most of it. My man is outside for five of our 16 waking hours every day working,working, working on his ministry of weeding and when he comes inside in the world’s filthiest T-shirts and dirt in his teeth I can see he is one happy man. I’m happy too.  Once in a while I guess we all just need change of pace.And here's e.e. cummings from a different poem, speaking for me again:

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

a sweatshirt, a railing and a wee weeding man bending over his trash can. (I'll take the 800 page book ;-))

The Sky is Falling

It was a full year ago when this place on my kitchen ceiling began billowing downward, but in such a tiny way I thought I was dreaming it. Then one day a circle some 20 inches in diameter ceiling had visibly swelled down to occupy more and more of the air-space above the kitchen table.“Hmmm,” I thought. I looked over at the wall, mentally measuring the distance between it and this strange growth of plaster. I went upstairs and stood in the spot I judged to be directly above it. Sure enough. I was standing by the shower just off our bedroom. I walked over to the bed I share with my One and Only, still snoozing away at 8 in the morning. “The kitchen ceiling has a tumor,” I said to him.“What?” he said, coming slowly awake.“Well it LOOKS like a tumor, or maybe a breast. Kind of an androgynous breast, but still….”He got up with a sigh and let me lead him into the bathroom. “I think the shower might be leaking,” I said.“Nah” he said. “Somebody just left a cup of water on the lip of the bathtub once and it spilled and seeped through the floorboards.”“Somebody who?”“I don’t know, one of the cats.”“One of the cats? Our last cat died in 2010!”“Somebody,” he repeated. 'You,” I knew he was thinking, but it couldn’t have been MY fault. How could it be MY fault when the only things I ever leave on the lip of the tub are back issues of old New Yorker magazines that then fall into the water and become a kind of pulpy baklava.“Let’s wait and see,” he went on, because that’s his answer to most things. I’m having the phrase chiseled onto my tombstone once I’ve finally choked to death on that last bite of healthy kale.And so we waited.And so we saw.And the tumor grew as the ceiling lowered, then lowered more – until finally I was allowed to call the fix-it men who came and sawed a big square hole in the kitchen ceiling so that now you can look right up into the bathroom while you're eating your meals.With the ceiling laid open like that, the boss fix-it man made his diagnosis:“It’s the pan,”  he said somberly. “Your shower pan has failed.”So the following Monday in came the pick-axes. Out went half a ton of tile and concrete so thoroughly busted apart that every picture on the walls went crooked from the pounding.“Two more weeks and you’re set,” the boss fix-it man said. “In the meantime, take all the baths you want. Nothin’ wrong with your bathtub!”cAnd so we're doing our best to muddle through, me with my baths and my soggy magazines.It’s true that there are pieces of the shower stall all over our bedroom. True too that just this morning a fresh fall of water began dropping like the gentle rain from Heaven once again on the kitchen table, only this time from the tub and not the shower.But at least the tumor is gone – and as I eat my daily tangle of kale I look up and think to myself Hey but really: what’s nicer than a room with a view?

Blinded by the Light

I had my annual visit with the eye doctor yesterdayWhich I dread always.Because of how they dilate your eyes.Because of how the first drops sting! and the second drops open those pupils so they grow into two great lacunas in your head.I looked just like these pictures above and below. ( Wo, I see my mustache is growing in again but you get the idea.)PLUS, not to make a big deal here. but you can't read.And everything is so BRIGHT! Even with the roll-open-and-plant-on-your-face shades they gave me I almost had to throw my skirts up over my head to keep from having my retinas scorched by old Mister Sun. (And it was a cloudy day!)I couldn't even peer into my trusty mobile device the way we all do, consulting the mite-sized characters on its tiny screen the way the Ancients once studied the entrails of sacrificial animals.Nope.All I could do was stagger about in a Walgreen's more or less window shopping the easier -to-identify items like Huggies boxes and emesis basins.Here's me a full three hours after the drops. I had just tried to do business in the  Post Office, but ended up pocketing the letters I meant to mail and neatly affixing stamps to the corners of my two prescriptions.Oy! At least I only to do this once a year

Ghosts of Summers Past

Things change, and so much we once associated with summer has vanished.Take tanning. Tanning is gone, or nearly gone. Only your young teens still lie out on the griddle of pool deck or beach, and the only deeply bronzed people you see in the media are figures of fun, like the neighbor lady in There’s Something About Mary. I remember the  audience screaming with laughter when she first appeared on the screen – and that was a good 15 years ago.Nowadays I'm almost frightened  by the sight of a deeply bronzed person. It takes me a good ten or 12 seconds to realize I’m looking at a suntan; a full ten seconds before I stop thinking ‘What on earth happened to this poor prune?’Your young parents however, totally get it that catching rays is a dangerous practice. Just last weekend I was a looking for some sunscreen to offer a houseguest getting set to take his baby for a stroll.“Here you go!” I cried triumphantly after rooting around under the bathroom sink for some.  “Suntan oil with an SPF factor of 8!"“SUNTAN OIL?” the young dad repeated with a look of horror. It was as if I had offered him a vial of skin-dissolving  acid.“And with a factor of 8, are you kidding?"The fact that I think of 8 as super-protective tells it all, especially since I just had a patch of Basal Cell removed my shin, which now looks like someone dug a trench in it with a grapefruit spoon. Live and learn!Also pretty much gone from the summer scene:Drive-in movies.  Handpush lawn mowers with their wonderful scissoring sound.  Dancing in the toxic fog the bug man left behind. Who knew it was DDT, or if they knew who had the sense to warn us away from it rather than toward it? Our parents didn’t seem to know; babes in the woods that we all were, we thought it was just another example of Better Living Through Chemistry  as the good people at DuPont used to say.What about those cute halter-tops girls wore together with hip huggers so as to really show off a tan? My friends and I wore both. We applied Baby Oil to the vast expanse of skin laid bare by such togs and held record albums wrapped in tinfoil under our chins to really train those UV rays at the face .We sunned on the flat tar roofs of our buildings, and took diet pills prescribed by real doctors, who gave them to any of us wishing to look better in a bathing suit.The diet pills were amphetamines of course, pure speed, though for sure nobody told ME that. I was 19 and living in Colorado that summer and would look at those Rocky mountains after taking my morning pill and literally think I could walk to the top of any one of them, easy as pie.I look back now and think the only thing there is to think from the perspective of the years: How did we live to be grownups at all?