You Know You're Old Part Two

And here's the second half of the story I started earlier, this one 'given' to me one day last week as I stood in a room chatting away with seven male teenagers and one grown woman.“Ready to go?” I said to the seven teens who were departing on an expedition with me, and took a few strides toward the front hallway of the house we were in.“Wait, what’s THAT?” one teen suddenly said, pointing down toward my boots,  where a cloud of purple silk was seen to be pooling around my ankles.“It’s my slip!” I yelped, no less surprised to see it than I would be to see a small fire licking its way up my calves. But come to think of it, the elastic at the waistband did seem a little shot when I had put the thing on an hour before.The one other woman present was, by this time, laughing so hard she couldn't talk, and that was funny all by itself. But it paled in comparison to what one of the male teens then said: “What's a slip?” I might as well have been wearing a whalebone corset for the way they looked at me as I tried to explain.Something has happened in the culture if full slips and half slips have disappeared so thoroughly from the radar of the under-30s ......Which leads me to ask this question of anyone who might know the answer. Why on EARTH does every young woman under 40 now go bare-legged, even in the depths of winter?! 

You Know You're Old When ...

You know you’re getting up there in when, you have an experience like this: On tearing through the mall one day, you impulsively duck into a discount department store, head for the loungewear and pull from the rack a delicious-looking sample of the cozy-clothes on display there.You don’t even try the thing on.Then, on seeking to return it a week later because in fact it is sized more for Dumbo the Elephant than for any human female, you learn to your amazement that the young person at Customer Service does not recognize it as any species of garment at all.“What IS this?” she asks, holding it up to start processing the refund.“Uh…” you say.She keeps on examining it, turning it over in her hands as you stand stunned into silence.“Wait, what do you mean ‘what is it?’ you finally say. “It’s a bathrobe of course!”“THIS is a bathrobe? “ she says with a look of complete befuddlement.“Yes, it’s a bathrobe!“ you say back with a similar look.  It’s as if you are from two countries sharing a common language in which the word ‘bathrobe’ means entirely different things. “It’s not, like, a costume of some kind?” she says. “A costume?’ you say. “Like for a king? One of the Three Kings maybe, like, you know, for a Christmas pageant?” “What? No! This a BATHROBE. This is what bathrobes look like!"Ah but that is where you are wrong. Because in fact bathrobes have not looked like this in some time.No, these kinds of bathrobes, done in polyester plush, zipping up the front and topped off with a yoke of smocking or ornamental braid, have not truly been seen since the Golden Girls drifted around their airy ranch house on rising from their beauty sleep.That is why the young woman thinks you a dinosaur, as you are. As you surely are.... 

Things That I Miss, Things I Am Glad For

Things I miss: I miss the late 70s. The fashions were so great! Why are men's shorts now below their ankles and isn't that a kind of Victorianism all by itself?Things I am grateful for: Funny pictures and witty cartoonists.Here's a picture I once used to characterize the suppertime habits in this house. I called it "I cook. He cleans."That's a good funny one. And I like this one a lot too:And god bless the cartoonists, the theological ones being among my favorites. Here's one:We still do that, we children of Adam.And here's maybe my favorite one of all.On dreary winter days, if you want to cheer up, seek out the merry. It's like Yeats says in "The Fiddler of Dooney," a great old poem if ever there was one:

When we come at the end of time,To Peter sitting in state,He will smile on the three old spirits,But call me first through the gate.For the good are always the merry,Save by an evil chance,And the merry love the fiddleAnd the merry love to dance;And when the folk there spy me,They will all come up to me,With "Here is the fiddler of Dooney!"And dance like a wave of the sea.

Payback

The other day I drove 100 miles with  four feet of my scarf sticking out of the car and dragging along the ground. AND, it was 32 degrees and sleeting. Sigh. Such a pretty scarf too: I got so I was very vain, wearing it.I had closed it in the car door though I didn’t know it ‘til we got to our destination. It was frozen solid, like a brick, only sort of bent.Old Dave thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I think he saw it as payback, because when I say I was driving I was really only helping him drive, which I admit I do, since he’s so aggressive a driver, passing this driver, nosing right up under their petticoats of that one. I used to read, or nap, or treat him to my own brand of fascinating chatter as we drove. Now I seem to  be so vigilant I can’t do anything but 'help him' steer. It’s like this anniversary card I just bought to give him where they even got the name right. As you can see, the front says “Dave didn't have to watch where he was going...” Then when you open it up it reads “Because his wife was an excellent back seat driver." Just look at that woman sitting behind him. Of course I don’t look like a bit like her - not me! But the weird thing is, she does look a lot like my mom when she got her bossy hat on. Hmmm, what was it that Oscar Wilde said? "Every woman becomes like her mother. That is her tragedy. No man does. That's his"? (Good old Oscar Wilde: so epigrammatic always - and so RIGHT!)

Evolving

We all evolve; nobody starts out perfect.Consider this little person, a casual caregiver at best, with her bottle of beer and her baby splayed, arms outstretched, in the grass.She LIKED the baby well enough. She just didn't really know how to care for her.Her grandfather David and I didn't know how to care for her mother at first either: we read her to sleep on a waterbed in the basement of our friend's house by the sea.In Coastal Maine.In late August.And the waterbed, it turned out, wasn't even heated - so when we came back downstairs many rollicking hours later, having played rounds of Botticelli til we were blue in the face, we found our child seemingly blue in the face herself - or so we at first thought when we touched her and felt her cool, cool skin.People almost shouldn't be allowed to have babies until they're like 40.And yetAnd yet.Only six months later, this little person is still only one year old and already she has grown in the nurturing arts, as you can plainly see. .Moral of the story? Love a little person hard and s/he will learn to do the same.

A Final (Funny) Postscript

Here's a final postscript as the  jingling tinker's wagon we call 'the holidays' lurches off down the road. It served as my column last week.Remembering Christmas Past is like remembering childbirth: a certain amnesia sets in. If you asked me earlier in December what happens around here most Christmases, I’d have said not much. Then, last week, I looked up  Christmas in an old diary. How quickly we forget.That year, I came up with the idea that I should send a card to 192 people, and thus spent every spare moment over a five-day period entering their names and addresses on my laptop so as to generate labels.Finally one morning, I pressed “Print” and hurried away to take my shower - but when I came back, our nice fat-bottomed cat was delicately shredding the sheets of labels one by one as they emerged from the printer, while sitting directly ON the laptop, causing it to beep frantically, then lose its mind altogether, writing  “#!” when you tried to write "the" and "%#~" when you tried to type "when." And it kept ON doing this, hiccupping and speaking in gibberish for the next 13 hours.Then I spent five more days of non-existent spare moments working up a newsy collage of holiday greetings and when that turned out to be way too big for a conventional envelope, I went and bought bigger envelopes, on which my printed labels now looked puny and impersonal. So I took another five days and made everyone who came into the house help me decorate each one with a bright holiday drawing.And then there were the Disappointing Presents.Our then 15-year-old turned out to be hoping for a leather jacket and instead I bought her a big silky Cheese Puff of a thing. What was I thinking?So too, our then-10-year-old wanted little green army guys, but when the bucket of them was opened on Christmas morning, I turned out to have bought the wrong kind, a kind that couldn’t even lie down in the mud and inch along on their tummies. What kind of army guys can’t do THAT, right? Yet asking this bunch to do it would be like asking a Ken Doll to reach up and tousle his own hair. No elbows was the problem.Also, the much-wished-for video game was sold out until March, and it seemed you couldn’t BUILD Erector Set Number 6 unless you already OWNED Erector Sets Number 1 through 5 - which we didn’t.And as for the two presents I thought were sure-fire, the ones I had actually I had in fact bought super-early and even wrapped? These I couldn't even find until three days after the big day.On climbing into bed Christmas night, I recall my ten-year-old’s eyes shining with sorrow. “It’s my fault,” he said, so as not to sadden me his hapless mother. “I didn’t get in the Christmas spirit. I should’ve thought more about what I was giving, instead of what I was getting,” he went on.So this year we all tried to do that in this family: think more of what we were giving and not at all about what we might be getting.Still, you sure can get turned around. All this time later I now see that I was the one who wanted that big downy Cheese Puff of a jacket all along. I think it looks pretty good on me, don't you?  The hot pink really sets off my new hair color.:-)

Note at Vacation's End Part 1

Here's the motto I've been living out this last month:One more night of excess to go: Ready, set... start swallowing, whether it's food or drink! 

Holiday Slip 'n Slides

You forget about the Holiday downsides: The way you always plan too much. The way your eyeballs start jiggling the minute you get to the mall and see those kiosks filled with jokey T-shirts and giant bunny slippers. You THINK you’ll be fine and finish all the holiday tasks.  You’ll just get up a little earlier in the morning. You’ll just go to bed a little later at night. It’s all about efficiency, you tell yourself.In the name of this efficiency I decided to brew my morning coffee one day last week right in the bathroom, to get that jolt of caffeine at the earliest possible moment.I had my little pot all set up on the edge of the sink. It would brew while I took my bath. Brilliant! I thought.I had tested the water temperature, dipped a toe in the tub and had just lowered myself into the hot suds when I realized I’d forgotten to press “Brew.”No problem I thought.I stood up looking like the Michelin Man in my coat of soap bubbles, stretched across the length of our wide old 1940s sink and then…lost my footing.  My whole upper body crashed down onto that rock-hard porcelain, causing the coffee pot to SHOOT off the sink and land in the toilet – but not before creating geysers of coffee grounds, which plastered themselves on the walls, the floor and even the ceiling.That should have acted as a sign for me if I had eyes to see it. It should have been just the lesson I needed.But no, I had no such eyes. And no, I heeded no lessons - with the result that a worse occurrence followed three days later when I leaped suddenly from our bed to assist my sick ‘roommate.’It must have been something he ate that day, or maybe it was just one of those pesky stomach viruses that settle in and shiver your timbers for 24 hours.Anyway, this roommate-slash-spouse felt suddenly sick around midnight and, on waking to realize that this was so, I vaulted from the bed and ran to the bathroom just as he had done.Thinking to show support, see.Only once in there, I found myself bouncing against the shower door.Are you all right? I called to him in a faint voice.Then I careened in the other direction and bounced off the sink.This bathroom is two rooms, really, the larger one with the shower and sink in it and the other, far smaller one, with just the ‘facilities.’That’s the room he’d been, until he heard my voice.“What’s going on out here?” he said, emerging. “I’m not sure,” I said. He walked toward me. “You seem to be falling down,” he said.“I think I’m falling down,” I said, amazed,  and I fainted and did fall, section by section, knees buckling, ankles turning to Silly Putty.He grasped me under both arms as I dipped and swayed. “What do you want to do?” he said. “Just let me lie on this nice bathmat a while. “I’m fine,” I said.  “I love this bathmat,” I added.I lay there for a good little spell while my roommate, feeling rather better for his ordeal, went back to bed.  And it was as I lay there that a double realization came to me:One, too much haste around the holidays really is ill-advised.And two, have a nice soak in the tub or start pumping in the caffeine, but never, ever, ever try doing both at once. 

Shop Fearlessly - Really?

They say credit cards can be dangerous, but I can’t help it: I love the way you can just input that old number and send away for a thing.  Of course catalogs are arriving at our doors by the dozen at this season, every day their glossy pages spilling slippery through our letter-slots.Lots of them I CAN resist. After all I can just choose not to open the skimpy lingerie catalogs with those poor cold girls, skinny as insects - but rhe mail-order items that do get my attention are the ones found advertised among the sober pages of the traditional old news magazines.One example: I’m reading along about some country where they’re trying to actually SELL clean air to people, when all of a sudden there’s this ad with a picture of an old-fashioned model train chugging out from under the branches of an old-fashioned Christmas tree. “Classic trains!” reads the text “Relive the magic of your childhood, when large metal trains were a part of every holiday season!”Large metal trains, I sigh, growing instantly misty - and then I remember: We HAD large metal trains when I was little. We kids I used those sharp-edged bullion-bars of steel to clobber each other with. Then there was the year I got the wheels of one stuck in the thousand tendrils of curl that sprang from my scalp, causing me to run around the house dangling a Large Metal Train from my hair and shrieking, ‘til the grownups could figure out what to do about me.Another example:  I’m reading an article about teaching kids Phonics and here’s another ad: For a gizmo said to rid your home of “pests and vermin, mice, rats, roaches bats. Even raccoons and squirrels” the ad says.“It delivers a tremendous blast of ultra-sound, inaudible to you and your pets“ that disrupts their nervous systems. “They’ll leave your home within a few weeks - never to return!”It has volume-control and six variable pitches, depending on the size of the vermin, and already my fingers are reaching for the credit card, because don’t WE have such pests? Mice, when the weather turns cold? Egyptian meal moths the year round, raising their children in our cereal boxes. Bats and raccoons and I-don’t-know-what-all?We had a serious infestation of squirrels in our last house. They threw parties inside the eaves, chattering just inches from our sleeping heads when their friends came over, and grimly chewing and chewing when they were alone.In our desperation, we actually bought this device back then, or something very much like it. We never had the slightest notion whether or not it worked, its sound being inaudible and all. WE wound up moving instead.So last week those two items tempted me.But just the other night, and this is no word of a lie, I thought, “Never mind these silly toys and gizmos, why not use my credit card to order some nice books from Amazon the way you can so easily do these days?”I decided on The Age of Innocence and Doctor Sleep. I entered my credit card number and pressed “Buy.” Then, well pleased with myself and humming a little tune, I decided to check my e-mail.A message from Amazon - already!'This is to confirm your recent order,” it said. 

• 'Copies of The Age of Innocence: 1. 
• 'Copies of Doctor Sleep: 591.
• '$17,745 billed to your MasterCard. Payment authorized.”

Maybe these credit cards are deadlier than I thought.

Ready or Not It's Here

Well, SOME of you may have been ready for December. You know who you are. You've had your lights up for weeks. Goodie-goodies.Most years I don’t get our lights up ‘til our youngest child arrives home from whatever faraway place has beckoned him that year and I’ll admit it: that practice makes me nervous.One year I just couldn’t wait and got taken in by a catalogue ad for trees that are supposedly harvested only hours before shipping and what a mistake THAT was. When the thing arrived it looked like a giant Q-Tip -  and kept on looking that way even a whole week after I'd liberated it from its plastic mesh hairnet.“W-h-a-a-t?” our son exclaimed  when he got home on December 23rd and saw it all decorated in our living room. He's burdened by what I can only call your 'artist’s eye' : your crooked trees, your trees half bald on one side are a torture for him to look upon.Gently, swiftly he took off every ornament and string of lights, dragged the poor tree out back and drove straight to the nearest nursery for a realer version, shaggy and flouncy and still smelling of the piney woods.But preparing for the holidays is just part of what I have to face come December. For me there's also the glove problem.Every fall, I buy two pairs of black winter gloves that are sort of nylony and hug the hand so nicely. Then, not two weeks into the cold weather, I lose the one for the right hand.Always the one for the right hand. Never the one for the left.I don’t know how it happens but at last count I had on the shelf in the front hall closet exactly seven identical black gloves, all for the left hand. And because they have these nice little gripping ‘pads’ on the palm surface, you can’t just flip them. You’d walk around looking like somebody took each arm off, switched it and hung it from the opposite shoulder.It’s a problem for a person like me, who can’t leave the house from November to April without gloves on. Last winter I bought five pairs, just to keep that right hand warm.And finally in December I face the issue of storing the car, since, where we live, they fine you in winter for parking in the street.We do have a driveway, though it’s narrow. We also have a garage built circa 1915 when a car wasn’t much bigger than a sewing machine.But somehow this garage gets filled during the warmer months, this year with items from a deceased uncle’s house, boxes of our own mismatched china from Dallas and Dynasty days, and a broken old Nordic Track.You have to empty a garage enough to get one of your two cars inside but where do you begin?  Especially when you really loved the uncle and can’t part with his furniture? Especially when you’re the kind of person who remembers so very many of the thousands of meals eaten off that china?Every day I go out there looking to see what I can pry from the pile and discard.It’s painful. Worst case I’ll find that cast-out Q-tip of a Christmas tree. But best case, who knows? I just might come upon seven right gloves. 

Um, Those Are Your Underpants

On a lighter note today, my pal Mary just sent me this video, made eons before MTV, of Nancy Sinatra and her own 60s-era fly girls, dancing to These Boots Are Made For Walkin'.Did women really dress like this?They sure did. My mom was 63 years old the summer my sister Nan and I got married and wore two mother-of the-bride dresses so comically brief above the knee they looked like paper doll outfits.And as for the hemlines on the really young women?Well here was our rule: if your fingertips didn't brush skin when you let your hands drop down by your sides, your skirt was too long.Nan and I would come downstairs set to go out for the evening and our mother would rattle her teacup in its saucer and tremble so hard her cigarette ashed all down onto her clothes. We both remember the time she yelled "Oh the bust! Oh the hem!" (Luckily we married at 21 and 23, young enough so there were no consequences to be paid for going about all tarted up like that.) Yikes~!Anyway this is me before the Ivy Day Parade at Smith College.I dressed this way for a ceremony! On Commencement weekend!  We even dressed our babies with leg showing it seems.This is from the Christmas of '78. The shy one looking down is my firstborn Carrie. The leggy lass beside her is Nan's one-an-only Gracie, as we called her then whose marriage I told about here.But on to the video, seven women in their underpants doing the pony and the swim and sort of a timid shimmy. Mary's one wry sentence appended to the message she sent it with: "I still dance like this!" Haha, she does not (but boy did I laugh...)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbyAZQ45uww#t=70 

Stress Nation

It's an anxiety-filled age, all right, filled to the brim with stress and anxiousness.Just last week, a friend described to me the older woman he met in the supermarket who had lost sight of her little grandson. Paralyzed by her own panic, she could do nothing but stand rooted to the spot, alternately calling his name and the name of her creator.My nice friend went right over, got a description of the child, and began trotting along the aisles, looking for the pint-size blonde in a blue shirt.When he spotted such a tyke standing in front of a younger woman with a smaller child on her lap, he pointed."Here's a blond boy in a blue shirt!” He called to grandma.Whereupon the younger woman leapt to her feet, snatched both kids in a vice-like grip and shot her hand out, fingers spread wide."THESE ARE MY CHILDREN!" She shrieked. "STAY AWAAAAAY!"Looks like being a Good Samaritan just doesn't pay the way it once did.It's that people feel such stress. We're fizzing with it, like apple juice just turning into cider. We’re buzzing with it, like hornets trapped in a jelly jar.I was parked alongside the curb yesterday when a woman in the car in front of me showed signs of trying to pull out.I backed up to make room and waved her toward me.Her hands flew in the air in a gesture of frustration and the next thing I knew, she was standing by my car window."Uh Oh," I thought. "Angry lady!"But the lady wasn't angry. The lady was near tears. "I can't back up!" she cried. "I can't do anything!""See this cast?" she went on, holding up one arm, encased from the elbow down in rigid white. "Six weeks I'm wearing this cast! And now the doctor says two weeks more.""Awful,” I countered."I can't brush my hair!" she said."You can't do your bra!" I said.She lowered her voice, constricted now with emotion. "I can't pull on my pants," she all but whispered."Here's the trouble," she went on, pointing to a thumb similarly encased and held fast to the rest."Wow. Well, you know, cut that part off," I suggested. "Have you got a hacksaw at home?""Cut it off?! You can cut off your cast?"I shrugged. "My young cousin did.  As a matter of fact, she took off her own braces."She pondered a minute. "I'm calling the doctor back. I'm making him free my thumb.""Right," I said. "Just say, 'See here. This won't do.’”"Right!" She cried, and dashed back to her car with fresh resolve.Later I thought to myself "Hmmmm. Here was a person buzzing around in a perfect little go-cart of stress and what did I do but climb in beside her and help drive?"But tension is like that, as quick to jump hosts as the friskiest flea. Quicker to spread than the most contagious flu.Maybe what we all need is a mass inoculation.

Shake Not Thy Gory Locks at Me!

"Shake Not Thy Gory Locks at Me!" That's Macbeth, talking to the bloody ghost of Banquo who shows up at the palace just after Macbeth has ordered the death of  his old best friend. Scary, that image of a split scalp and bloodied hair..And speaking of scary, here are some images to stop you in your tracks: Pictures of how kids used to look when they went out on Halloween. Worse than any creepshow mask you can buy today eh?Hope you all got through the big night safely and are happily enjoying your loot today. Don't forget to brush and floss after, is all! :-)

Not So Spooky

It’s not just that Halloween comes around now. You’re drawn to the spooky anyway at this season, with the bones of the world emerging through the trees; the branches scratching like dead man’s fingers at window panes icy to the touch.When I was little, we went once with our cousins to a tall old ruin of a house, abandoned and alone on a hill. We stole inside and crept around. We looked down the parched throat of a long-gone toilet. "See that rusty stuff in there?" the eldest among us said. "That’s blood!" We shrieked, and bolted, and ran all the way home.Funny: I live in a house like that now, though it teems with life still. I sit by the hour in the little window seat of its second-floor study.  Just outside the glass, when there’s a wind, the ivy outside waves like the Queen at the parade passing before it.  In summer, the ten-thousand hands of its leaves are shiny-green. Now they are red-tipped, or vermilion throughout. "Ivy rots the shingles!," the experts shout when the talk turns to house-painting.  "Ivy is ruinous!" "Tell it to the birds," I think, the birds who shelter and practice their scales there, all safe and hidden in its rustling depths. Once a decade, the painters come and strip the ivy to the ground. But almost before the year is out, it has grown back, clear to the roof, nearly - and we secretly cheer it on.When David and I were in our twenties and babies still in every way, we bought a little apple orchard way up in Maine that belonged to a dead man named Luce.  This land was inexpensive because it had no electricity and no water on it.  The old man, who had been born on the land, sold it for not much money to some city-slicker who immediately doubled the price and sold it to us. Shortly after this, Luce died. Some said it was the humiliation that killed him. A neighbor that first year asked us if he could graze his cows on our land; it would keep the grass down, he said. Sure, we told him, and went back to building a cabin that looked like the Three Little Pigs’ House of Sticks. We used to go there for weekends, and cows as big as oil burners watched us as we set fire to our steaks, to our marshmallows,  to our very selves, on some nights. After eating, they watched us walk the orchard’s 20 acres.We often stopped to wonder at the clump of vegetation growing together by the road -  birch and aspen, and a riot of blackberry - a strange sight on this land, cleared but for the tidy rows of apple.  Finally, one day we looked closer: The growth sprang from a cellar-hole, the foundation of the house where Old Man Luce was born.Structures crumble, the message seems to be, but loveliness grows up from the ruins. And though Winter seems like death to us now,  it is only Winter. Would the noble geese leave us had they not made reservations for next year’s visit?The part of our house covered in ivy is a small turret capped at the top by a pointy princess-hat of a roof. Under it, on the second floor, is my curve-ended study with its window seat. Under that is the equally arc-shaped end of the living room where we put the Christmas tree each year."When I die, lay me out here inside the curve of this turret," I used to tell our kids. Never mind rented men in a set of rented parlors, I say. "Invite the world, give 'em lots of food and drink, and laugh as much as you like. ""OK!" they answer in chipper fashion. They don’t find it strange or macabre, because they were kids, and kids understand this truth best of all: the Old Growth dies to make way for the New.  Scary? Nah, it's not scary.That little cat at the top is mostly just ...curious!

WHAT NEXT?!

Anything can happen and maybe that’s kind of good, if only because it keeps us on our toes.By now  we’re so ‘on our toes’ around here, we could dance Swan Lake.It all started in August, when the shower pan in the upstairs bathroom ‘failed,' as they say in the drip-and-leak business. and water dripped so steadily down it made the map of Madagascar on the ceiling below.Also, back then, a bird flew out from under our TV. How she got inside is anybody’s guess. All we know is she was too big to crawl through whatever dime-sized opening it was that let that bat in four weeks earlier.Yup, a bat. We had a bat too, with its wee fangs and that sober little J. Edgar Hoover of a face.He may have gained entrance by worming his way in under one of the air conditioners, which we set in such old wide windows we have to use a world of cardboard and duct tape to seal things up each year.Which rarely works, despite our best efforts.We never did catch J. Edgar, in spite of the tennis racquets and fishing nets we had at the ready.They worked on the bird however, who was nicely escorted back outside, though not before writing  a ‘review’ of the TV show then airing, right smack on that pretty plasma screen.What else now? A kind of amnesia takes over when so much goes awry.Ah yes! Our old refrigerator almost fell through the kitchen floor when it was discovered that the thick beams beneath it, sturdily nailed together in the days when houses were made to last, looked like nothing so much as flakes of canned tuna.  Then, a week ago, the furnace announced itself broken.But all this was nothing compared to what happened last Monday night, when, at 11pm, burning-hot water began gushing out from under the sink as one of us was doing dishes and the rest were wiping down the counters and putting things away. The hot water just suddenly stopped coming from the faucet.“HEY! WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HOT?” this someone said.Then, not three seconds later, scalding water began coursing around his ankles.Ten seconds after that, the scalding tide had filled the cabinet under the sink and was fountaining all over the floor – and because our house tilts after 118 years of standing in one place, the flood was speeding fast toward the living room.It seems the feed pipe for the hot had simply exploded.There ensued some Three-Stooges-style yipping and running around in circles. With a near-boiling Niagara in the way, we couldn’t reach in under and turn off the water supply under the sink, so instead ran for towels and mops.We knew we had to get to the cellar and turn off the main water valve but then more yipping and running around in circles took place when we realized we didn’t know just WHERE that valve was.What a mess. What a cleaning-up task to begin upon at almost midnight. And we had to take every single thing out from the cabinets and place it all on the counter.But when so much goes wrong in a two-month span, you can’t focus on the bad. You have to focus instead on the good: all the fauna have moved out, the systems are hum along, and the pipe, thank God, didn't explode later when we were at work or, God forbid, away for the weekend..Had that happened I’d be writing all this from the Red Roof Inn and mourning the loss of three rooms of flooring , 30 years' worth of treasures in the basement and the last remnants  of my sanity.

Saved by the Joke

When you feel life’s stinging side is when you reach for relief through humor.  I cheered myself right up not long ago when I was transporting seven teenage boys who are part of my life into the city where they tutor young schoolchildren.They  love doing this. The children they help look up at them with the shiniest eyes, thinking, as I imagine, This is how I will look in just eight more years! – Like Hazees here! Or Machias! Or Tobi, or  LaVon or Gamaral or  Enderson or Bryson!'  One child always sets a small hand on his older helper’s hemp bracelet and slowly turns it as they work.I mean who wouldn’t be in high spirits after outings like this? I’m always in high spirits too as we make our way home through the by-then rush-hour traffic. We listen to Bob Marley and Frank Ocean, Justin Timberlake and Marvin Gaye. They joke and catnap, talk and sing along. One day though we were on the last leg of the journey, navigating the curves and dips on road that constitutes the final leg of the journey  to lands us at last in our town, which is when one of the boys said “your car smells today.”  “Yeah it does,” said another. “I ‘m getting it too’” said a third. “It’s like rotting vegetables.  “It does not!” I said.  “Kinda though , Terry. It kinda does,” they said  one said and they all laughed some more.So, what could I do but go funny: Oh yeah?” I said as we sailed down the last lap of that hilly road. “Well I’ve been drinking heavily, how do you like that?! Also....  I cut the brakes .” They laughed appreciatively at the absurdity of both ideas and we were off the topic of my sweet little girl of a minivan.I was hurt by the remark about her, sure. And to be honest I generally DO have some old forgotten piece of fruit huddled under the seats festering away. But hey: If you’re the grownup and you’re spending time with young people the last thing you should do is make them feel they have to take care of your emotions.Saved by humor again, as I hope to be so saved for many more years to come.

Took a Walk. Had Some Thoughts

I've spent the whole day so far walking and letting various thoughts rise to the surface.‘What weather!’  was my first thought. Also my fourth, 15th and 98th. Then  'How lovely these living creatures look, highlighted in their supple beauty against the drying landscape.'I listened to podcasts for much of the time I was walking  and from one such learned that comic Lenny Bruce had this to say about the craft of standup, which he was allowed to practice for only so long before they dragged him off the stage and arrested him. (This was of course was in those far meeker Days of Yore, before a six-year-old you could hear such language at any hour you care to name on television.)He said the role of the comic was to say something funny at least every 15 seconds."Tall order!" was all I could think hearing that, even as a person who used to write funny stuff all the time.If my heart hurt, I wrote funny. If I were bored, I wrote funny. But I found I could also 'go funny' when I felt so happy that my face was in danger of falling off what with all the smiling it was doing.When someone loves you and the audience is with you, it's easy to be funny. That's pretty key to it, I have found. You also need the chance to speak in order to be funny. It's hard to be funny when no one is listening to you. I remember sitting at the family supper table as a four-year-old with my grandfather, two great aunts, my mother, my aunt and my older sister. I couldn't get a word in edgewise at those meals, and began stammering badly in an effort to be heard. Until my mother made everyone keep silent a minute and listen to me, I used to have to do physical comedy to get any attention at all, mostly a takeoff of the lady in the Playtex girdle ad.What IS humor anyway and why do we need to produce or ‘consume’ it? Maybe I'll think a little about that this coming week. I've got a little loss heading in my direction so maybe it's time to turn jokey.In the meantime, here's poor Lenny Bruce, who never did get over being silenced and died two years later of heroin addiction.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXiPpud_oHI] 

Here's the charming evidence

When did I ever say I was a vigilant housekeeper?

See two posts before this for the back story..Ewwww!

Gotta Love a Birthday!

 TWO close family members are having  birthdays today but one is so busy with fatherhood and husbandhood it will be all we can do to take the little family out for a quick bite.'The other, our daughter-in-law Christine, seen here with her youngest, the baldest prom queen on record... ....allowed as how she and Carrie and the three bambinos would just as soon stay in and eat takeout pizza and watch the Red Sox. (Chris and their oldest son  were actually AT Fenway Sunday night for that unforgettable game. Yowser!) We'll do a real celebration for these two on the weekend,Today I also got to help celebrate the 84th birthday of Lois Goddard, a friend who is just turning 84. Our darling mutual friend Gloria set out a table worthy of the Winter Palace in Czarist Russia and we drank sherry and feasted on homemade cream cake and ice cream rolled around in pecans and huge tasty strawberries.Gloria asked all us  guests to write and recite a poem for Lois and every one of them was clever and  touching. Whenever I try to write a poem of this sort I tend to hang it all onto the coat hanger of Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, whose rhyme-scheme seems to be stapled permanently into my head so I did just that and stood to read it when it was my turn.One would-be guest, who is 90, realized  at the last minute that she had a conflict so what did she do? She wrote a limerick on the spot and emailed it to me and here it is, right above this picture of Lois herself,  holding a bouquet of roses and all our teary  love. 

"Since I have no gifts as a bardI  found it incredibly hardmy brain simply dodderedWhen I tried to rhyme 'Goddard'All the best to Miss Lois GodDARD!"

Aliens in the Kitchen

This is who I'm not:Here's why I say that:A can of oranges  exploded in the back of the kitchen cabinet sometime in the last ...can we say year?Dole's Mandarins, the kind with the pop-top.I guess they must have expired or something but ....wasn't July of 2010 just a minute ago?It looked like a tiny guy's skull was oozing out - turned out to be some seriously hydra-headed fungus.I thought I was in the movie Alien but I don't know .  I sure didn't have  Sigourney Weaver's reaction.I'd have taken a picture but that's really hard when you've just run screaming from the room.Good old Dave saved the day as usual. (Men aren't afraid of anything are they? Or else they've been so conditioned  they just have to act that way. Anyway the place is all cleaned up now. Smells a little funny but it's clean.)Here I am with the fungus now. I ran so fast I fell, and well, you know how a head wound does bleed. I'm fine really. :-)