Skinnyman

Thinkin' about bones today. It must be this desert around me that's doing it. I just love bones, the way one nudges so nicely into another; the way the fat round head of the femur nestles into the deep bowl-shaped part of the pelvis fashioned to hug it tight.I used to keep a little dancing man of a skeleton on display in my office in the years when I practiced massage. He stood a good three feet tall there where he perched atop my file cabinet. You couldn’t miss him when someone opened my office door and I guess that’s why that little brother-and-sister team knocked shortly after I had arrived that one time. When I had passed them in the hallway where they were playing, they must have looked in and seen my clattery man, grinning down in that dapper little ​Mr. Bones way.“We want to see your skeleton!” is how I remember the little boy saying breathlessly, while his sister hid herself behind him.“Hmmm Well, I’m actually wearing my skeleton at the moment,” I replied, pretending to misunderstand.​ “I mean it’s under my skin.”He brushed past me and my silly joke and together with his sister entered my office.“THAT skeleton,” he said, pointing upward.“He’s scary,” he added gravely.“Scary? No!“ I said back​. “These are just his bones, just like we all have.” Then I went on. I can never help going on when it comes to this topic.“Bones do so much for us, holding us up, helping us move, providing a platform for our muscles...”“Look at his FEET!” squealed his younger sister.“I know​, aren’t they great, with all those tiny parts? And look at his ribs, like a perfect little birdcage, just right for protecting his heart.”The boy swallowed hard. “Show me his skull,” he said dramatically.“Let me see if I can lift him down then,” I answered and did so, causing the figure’s limbs to caper and sway.The children squealed, and squeezed back toward the wall.“And you know what the skull protects, don’t you?” I said. “The most important thing you have, which is….”“Your BRAIN!” they both yelled together laughing, then piled back out to the hallway.The boy dashed off then, but the girl stopped before following him, shot out one arm and waved a merry goodbye.“My name is Terry,” I told her because we had not introduced ourselves exactly. “What’s yours?”“Vanessa!” she shouted gleefully.“Well then Vanessa, goodbye for now. We’ll see each other again soon, I’m sure.”“Goodbye!” she yelled and danced away down the hallway.And that was ​that. It was an exchange that lasted maybe five minutes, but even all this time later I still cannot think of a nicer way to have started my day. For the whole rest of the week in fact, I felt cheered and buoyed up by it, and newly conscious of all the small people present among us.For if humanity is a forest, then we adults are its stiffly standing old trees, while they are the new ones. Self-important lot that we are, we imagine that we rule the forest. We even imagine we hold up the sky, with our barky old arms, hurrying the very clouds along to their next assignment.But the future of any forest lies in its new growth. And the whole time we elders go on looking upward for meaning, the meaning lies below us in these tender saplings - like the ones I met that day, so bright, and limber, and trembling with that fresh young life.

I'm Goin' With It

Yesterday saw such a tropical wind-driven rain around here that people’s hairdos were all over the place.My own hair, curly by nature anyway, was practically in the next county - EVEN THOUGH I had duly blown it dry and flat-ironed the daylights out of it, as is my custom.

The moisture in the air, driven by strong spring winds, was so extreme the TV reporters on scene all over the area were apologizing for their coifs. They looked like the utterly bedraggled news anchors in the first Batman movie, remember? After Jack Nicholson's Joker poisons the makeup supply to give people that same frozen smirk he has? I don't have a still image of the funny cameo when you see a pair in the days afterward, on camera without their usual buffing up, but let's say they - and all of us yesterday - looked like Sofia Vergera on one of those mean 'Celebrities WIth No Makeup' sites:

(Hard to believe that even IS the hot Latin wife from Modern Family, huh? "Mahnny! Dj'you loook so haaaandsome!" )When I got home last night my hair was so wildly tentacled I decided to do something new: I decided to stop fighting it. I put it in a few small rollers and 20 minutes later it looked like  this. I'm thinking of going with it. All these years I've had this curly hair, why NOT set it free at long last? I'm no Sofia Vergara to begin with and thank the good Lord for that.  

Fun for the Four-Eyed (and more)

Two days ago I picked up a pair of glare-canceling nonprescription glasses (for night driving) and also a pair of prescription glasses, for the dreaded unforeseen circumstances under which my contacts pop clear out of my head.When you're at the optician's, they clamp all these gadgets to your face and then take a picture.Soooo, documentarian that I am, I took a picture OF that picture.It's me all right - same dumb little nose - but my eyes look strangely un-brown. I knew I had better get some of those glare-killing glasses because I often have precious cargo aboard in my car: seven talented young scholars, entrusted  for four years  to my town's local chapter of the A Better Chance Program by their awesome families. Here they all are last fall, on a fun outing in Boston that Resident Academic Coordinator Penny took them on. It was also last fall, while bringing them to see an amazing performance of Romeo & Juliet at the Strand Theatre in  Dorchester,  that I glanced down at my navigator for half a second and rolled into the car in front of us.At 5 mph, but still. The woman driving that car yelled "That really hurt!" and grabbed her neck when I jumped out to apologize. She also called the Staties. Those guys arrived, lights flashing, together with three guys in a fire truck, all of whom quickly assessed the situation and declared it a non-event.The boys, meanwhile, had hopped out of my car right when I did, some of them to comfort me (she was really yelling) and some to take pictures of her completely unblemished rear bumper.But then, when we all climbed back in to resume out pilgrimage, they were, to a man, quietly texting their mums:"Terry just rear-ended someone."Humbling! AND scary!Now I take so many precautions behind the wheel it's a wonder I ever get out of my own driveway, where peace reigns and even the field mouse feel safe. 

What's the Deal with the Docs?

Watch what you say to your doctor, jeez. This new doc I talked about seeing last week took the records from my old doc and just copied  a bunch of stuff without going over it with me - and the stuff was wildly inaccurate. Unbeknownst to me the first doc had written this about me:None of which is true. None of it!Take syncope, which means fainting. Sure, I fainted some in my school days but the roots of that were theological. The minute I joined the Congregational Church the fainting stopped.And sure I may have mentioned the time I fainted one midnight in a lovely old Vermont farmhouse where I was a guest but that was only because I had spent 8 hours on my feet that day, then driven three hours to get there. At midnight, in my little bed, I suddenly got a cramp in the leg of that accelerator foot that was so painful it lifted me like Lazarus from out-flat to upright in less than half a second. You can't zoom the elevator to the top that fast without losing a little blood to the head, naturally and so I fainted. Got up too fast from that spectacular slump, and lurched toward the bathroom - where I fainted again, hitting my head on sharp corner of the bathroom vanity en route to the floor.That’s where the 'neck pain' came from: ten days after the episode when the finally did an X-ray to see about things my neck muscles were still in spasm. So yes I had neck pain, FOR A WHILE, yes. And I had fainted that night one night; I did.  But I haven’t fainted more than twice in 40 years. The only other time I remember fainting was at the Harvard Coop when I was shopping for a nice wide necktie for David's birthday. It was the 70s and ties were wonderfully wide, and colorful. I went down in the aisle and the floor manager dragged me behind the counter to get me out of the way. (Fainting is like, that, trust me: the people around the fainter just want to haul off the body.)As for Osteoporosis I don’t know here the first doc got that one, unless it was from the little joke I made about Osteopenia, which I called the other osteo's waiting room.I look now at this sheet with my ‘conditions’ on it as I exited he new doc’s office last week and it makes my blood boil. To make matters worse there's this disclaimer that says if anything is in error tell your PCP. Like, 'Don't tell us! We don’t care!'I found that strange too.When I first sat down with the new doc  I asked the guy Should I write down every procedure I ever had? Meaning should I write that I had my tubes tied back in ‘84?“Nah,” he said at his desk without even looking over his shoulder at me. “We just care about eye stuff. "So there you are: if the first doc wrote down too much and wrote it down inaccurately then this second doc was willing to write down too little.So maybe the sipping straws that are a person’s fallopian tubes really aren't that interesting to anyone 30 years down the line but something about the whole thing griped me. I should have told him I'd had my head replaced, like they did with old Jeremy Bentham when they staffed him and put him on display in that British museum. (You see his fake head on top, see, as his actual, somewhat worse-for-the-wear head rests under the chair on which he sits.) I wonder what either one of them would have written down then? Here's dead and stuffed Mr. Bentham now, providing some good perspective on many levels for us all .   

Everyone But Me

People are crazy. I'm always asking myself: why can’t they be normal like I am? Why don’t they do things the way I do them, the right way, in other words?And I know what I’m talking about. I get around. I go to laundromats for example. I watch the way people stuff their clothes into those washing machines. Crazy! SOME people – people in my own family, in fact - crowd up a washing machine like you wouldn’t believe. In go queen-size sheets, a few bath towels, a mattress pad, all in one load, and how is it going to get pounded clean THAT way?  I’d rather make a dress out of newsprint and wear that around than put on some of the clothes I’ve seen washed like that. Also, you hate to say it but a lot of people are crazy and nervy both. Young people, I'm thinking in this case. Young female people.Who are my children. They won’t wear stockings, even in winters as frigid as this one just past. Their legs are purple. But will they listen if you mention this fact to them? They will NOT. And they then have the nerve to frame ME as some kind of throwback.  They even mock me, for the nice Queen Size Suntan pantyhose I happen to be sporting. Which, by the way, are wonderfully warm. AND make my legs look great. “Sausage casings!” they hoot. “You’re wearing sausage casings!” And speaking of nervy, Get this: I'm at the leotard-and-dance-shoe store stocking up on Zumba essentials this one day and I ask the clerk if she can point me in the direction of the tights.“I’ll fetch them for you,” she says. “How tall are you?” she then asks, and I give her the same answer I gave at age 16 to the Registry cop who was filling out the paperwork after my road test.“Five-seven,“ I said to him at the time, thinking, ‘Why not round it upwards, Terry? You'll grow more …’So, “Five-seven " I say to the clerk. “Five-SEVEN?!” pipes up this perfect stranger beside me at the counter. “I’M five-seven and you're totally shorter than me. Plus, look. I'm in ballet shoes and you're wearing a boot with a heel. You're no five foot seven!” I handed over my money and hurried away from that dame fast.Damn fast, I can tell you.So see what I mean about people? Nervy and crazy both.Because isn't a girl free to say what height she is?I’m five-foot-seven! A cop said I am. He wrote it down. And his word lives on, right here on my license.  :-)  

The Old Doc to the New Doc Blues

These are your eyes, seen form above. Pretty choice pic huh?So I just changed eye doctors yesterday. I had a perfectly capable one but my husband is a trustee at this famous eye hospital and it finally dawned on me that I should be going there for my care.Plus my night vision really sucks lately.The eye doctor who used to treat me was honest with me always. She said there was a tiny ‘fog’ of cataract in one eye, which we would watch. Each time I came to see her she noted my mother’s glaucoma history and told me I had 'drusen' in my eye, which always made me feel like laughing. “Your drusen keeps on Snoozin'" I would think every time she said it.And you know I liked her well enough - even though in these last years she seemed to imply that I was some ancient thing. For example when I said I was on no medications save for a tiny dose of Levoxyl she looked at me the way they do when they think you're lying about how many drinks you have in a day.Then she said the time was coming when I probably couldn't wear contacts anymore. “God forbid!” I cried. “Why do you say that?”“Because older people have trouble seeing their eyes and getting that little tiny lens in there.  Plus, well you know, with the wrinkles and all….”Still, she was a warm person.  And as soon as I sat down in front of this new eye doc I to begin missing her sharply.He kept interrupting me as I told him what the other doctor said.“A cataract?!" he thundered. "People shouldn't throw around the word ‘cataract’! I would not call when you have a cataract and you certainly don’t need a surgical procedure!”I mentioned the contacts issue too and how sad it would be if I could no longer wear contacts.“Why on earth would you be unable to keep wearing contacts,” he barked.  “Unless your hands become crippled with arthritis?”He said in so many words that glaucoma isn’t inherited so I could just chill the hell out about that too.Then he told me everybody has bad night vision, and that I should just go get the specially-lensed glasses.I started to say “No but, see, I don't LIKE to wear glasses”, but I knew he didn't care to hear it.  I guess I’ll wear my contacts same as always and over them, at night, I’ll wear some plain-glass glasses, made in this special glare cancelling way. "I'll see you in a year,” he wound up. “Call with any problems” he added and I was out the door.So yeah, he might have been a mite grouchy but his news was good and the head technician in the place who did all the eye chart stuff couldn’t have been nicer. When she first came in the room and saw my reading through the records I had brought from my old eye doctor we had a good laugh. “It says here that I kept coming in with my contacts rolled back in my head somewhere.  It says sometimes I’d come because I had two lenses in the same eye, one on top of the other.“Hah!” she cried merrily. “Don’t feel bad. I couldn’t get a contact lens in if you stood over me with a gun.” And thus drops the curtain on another eye exam. I went out into the day blinded by the light with my scary dilated pupils ....but happy enough – as long as I was careful not to dwell on the fact that exactly nobody out there has any kind of decent night vision (!) 

Jiggety Jig

Going to a conference in a famously warm climate was fun and all but let's face it: You can't avoid your fate and our fate as Americans is obviously to shiver for five months, because that's sure enough what we've been doing. My man and I packed shorts and t-shirts, bathing suits and sunscreen and really, except for about 90 minutes at the end of one afternoon we never took of the twenty-five towels we tried wrapping ourselves in out by the pool.Plus then you have to come home again... Where It's raining and HAS been raining and PLANS on raining for the foreseeable future. Suffice to say we didn't need these!This was a conference about gaskets, which we all know and love. And in the end I was happy to be there in the company of people who know gaskets.“You should come with me to the gasket convention in Orlando,” David had said to me months earlier.“Gaskets! What are gaskets anyway?” I  had said.“O-rings,” he said. “Things used to make a joint water- or air- or particle-tight.”“Come on, there aren’t any O-rings anymore, only microchips!” I said back, just to get him going. He’s in manufacturing, an industry which for a while appeared to be diminishing here in the good old US of A like a tray full of Shrinky-Dinks in an oven.“How wrong you are,” he replied. “You couldn’t live without O-rings. Nobody could.”And if that wasn’t the language of romance then I don’t know what the language of romance is. And so, to paraphrase Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses, I said, yes I said yes, I said yes, I will go with you to Orlando.”And go I did, to sunny central Florida, where I saw exactly no preening by the Gorgeous Young, nor anyone enviously eyeing anyone else’s contours. Instead I saw only myself reading a story in which the main character finds herself touring Ireland as a passenger in a car her mother has to rent because she herself can’t drive a standard shift. Every day the narrator sits on what should be the driver’s side but without any steering wheel until she begins to feel like a child again and thinks, “I’m back.”That’s how I felt, despite the chill:  Back. A little kid again with all this solitude.Watching the people go by.Reading my book.Times like this you almost don’t MIND the chill, and hey your fate is your fate. Plus one way or the other you gotta figure there'll be tulips in a month. Right? Am I right there, please God?   

I Was Away for a While

I was away for a while, so I set this lady up in my place  (haha! Throwback to Tuesday's post.)I wasn't really away from Dave, though we have been at this business conference. He's this one with the white hair:I'm this wanly waving one. (It's freezing here, palm trees or no. I had to go up to the room and get my tights.)At any conference they make you wear these big clunky nametags on chains - for the networking of it I suppose - but a man can carry off this look a lot better than a woman in a cocktail dress can. Riding down in the elevator to the first night's reception, I caught side of myself thus hung, in the mirrored walls."I feel like a cow at an auction," I said.  "Why do I have to  wear this things at your conference? No one wants to network with me!""Two words," said another conference attendee also in the elevator. "Free drinks."Moo.  

Inside the Bathing Suit

Here’s the latest Believe It or Not: I found a bunch of bathing suits that come with the ladies already in them! And OK yes they’re made of see-through plastic and are missing their insides and their arms and their whole back half but still they have the important stuff, meaning,  ahem, breasts, that fill out the suit very nicely.“Wo they’re selling ladies! “ I cried when I came upon them in the bathing suit bin at my local BJ’s. Four other shoppers whipped their heads around to stare at me, but I couldn’t help it: they reminded me so much of the Visible Woman I got for my ninth birthday and oh the fun I had painting her little pancreas and tiny colon!She had breasts too, which were highly interesting to us kids since our mother was so modest she practically hid in the cellar to change. As a result Nan and I grew up in ignorance. What were breasts anyway? WE sure didn’t know and we were girls! We called them ‘lumps.’ “When will WE get lumps?” we asked each other.And now here were all these bathing suits that came with them! I picked one up. A two-piece, nice. Little black shorts and a kind of overblouse, cute. Made by Jantzen, a reputable house.I grabbed one and brought it right home; put a fright wig on its stem of a neck and propped it up on the bed next to Dave who said “DO NOT take a picture! OK DO NOT put that picture on your blog!"So I took her into the study and propped her up against the window so you could se her.She’s amazing , right?  She even has a bellybutton!  I love her.She goes with my skeleton, the next best thing I bought in the last six months.Now all I need is a bag of insides and there’s my kit: Visible Woman '14, here I come! 

I'm Happy Today

I'm happy today hanging out with my old man David  - these are his arms -who slept so late I thought he'd been kidnapped from our very bed, sucked out through the bedroom window by aliens. Call Liam Neeson!I'm happy because we will see our daughter Annie and her man John,though not their baby-dog Archer, still just a pup, though tall enough at 8 months to sweep the counters clean if left unattended.We'll see our daughter Carrie too, which makes me happy......though sadly not her  Chris, or their oldest son, since the two of them will I suppose be watching basketball or some such silly March thing while the rest of us are at our favorite eatery.Along with Carr, we'll also get to see their two younger children who are always ready to join me in restaurant fun. (Today: tiny black-velvet fuzzy-posters with bright neon-colored markers!) Sadly, we won't get to see our son Michaelsince he's out in Utah this weekend pretending to ski, a thing not really in our blood. David grew up with sandlot baseball, and pounding and being pounded by the other kids at the park, while the main pastime for my one sister and me was sneaking into the alley just around the corner from Blue Hill Ave. to inspect this one dead cat as it went through the absorbing transformation from the three-dimensional to something flatter than an old kid glove squashed under somebody's tires. I'm happy because I'm about to sit down and write 14 days' worth of entries in my diary. (My entries are a lot more interesting, I find, if wait 'til I'm really in the mood for the endeavor and can do the mental levitation that let me look at my last few weeks from the air, so to speak, and thus spot the highlights.)I'm happy because I just said 'Screw returning those shoes to Macy's today. The store will still be there tomorrow when my workday ends.'I'm happy because I think I might be about to actually vacuum that room I've been meaning to vacuum for a month.I'm happy because we watched that old chestnut Ghostbusters yesterday and I read my three books and stripped the lid to the piano bench for a piano that lives at the ABC house. I'm happy because I got it all sanded and primed and even stained. Now David will help me screw on the lid, I can put on two finish coats and then trot it on over there.I am not so happy when I remember that I almost learned to play the piano as an adult, together with Michael who was then 11, but quit just as I was getting that itchy feeling in the top of my head when my fingers were starting to know what a note was. We both quit and I'm sad now that we quit, causing the people who gave us the loan of that nice old upright piano to take it back again to give to worthier persons ... But the days are getting longer now and who knows but what I'll go out and buy a little keyboard and have another go at learning a new thing? We learn till we die do we not? I'm happy remembering that truth.And now, me playing that classic beginner's piece The Happy Farmer at age six (but why doesn’t that guy in the suit leave my nice pink dress ALONE!  

The Fun Never Ends

Really and truly, in this life the funny stuff never stops coming. That is, if you’re willing to LOOK at it as funny. And if you have people around you who support you in that view. Time was, my ten-year old boy and I used to think everything was funny. Microwaving an egg with the shell on as we once did? Hilarious! Duct-taping my old wig-head to a folded-up ironing board and dressing it in my bathrobe to scare his napping dad? Sidesplitting! Last week at the supermarket with the new ten-year old in my life along for the ride, I selected a bottle of sparkling water flavored to taste exactly like a fresh pink grapefruit. I needed some of this Ruby Red, and I needed it bad, because my trusty thermos-with-the-pop-up-nozzle had been sipped at over the last 30 minutes by this grandson of mine, whose mom and baby sister were bumping along in their own aisle, several food categories away. The boy just loves the special concoction I fill it with, a zesty combination of lemonade and mint tea that I mix up by the gallon. He named it ‘TT juice,’ when he first learned to talk, I guess because he calls me  ‘TT’ and he sees this as my signature drink. Anyway, he had drained it down to the final two inches in this jaunty blue thermos of mine when at last we stood on the far side of the checkout lanes. Thirsty as I had been, I’d wanted to set an example for the child and not be one of those shoppers who begins devouring the bag of chips or cookies before even paying for them, secure in their belief that no ‘mere’ stock boy or sales associate would dare call him on this behavior. I had waited until I’d handed over the money and was on the ‘paid’ side of the register.But at that point, as my daughter paused to re-fasten the baby’s shoes, I saw my chance: In one swift motion,  I twisted off the cap of that bottle of Ruby Red and began swiftly pouring it into mouth of my handy little thermos.In went the fizzy stuff. On went the screw-on top with the pop-up nozzle.I knew there was still SOME TT juice down at the bottom so naturally I shook the thing, to mix it up.I shook it hard. Then, I pulled on the pop-up nozzle…When I say the stuff geysered like Old Faithful I am not exaggerating. There was a loud pop and it flew high in the air, utterly soaking the whole front of my head before raining a fine mist down on the nine or ten people in the three checkout lines closest to us.Worse, it kept ON geysering, for almost half a minute. I couldn’t stop it, hard as I tried.And what did my young grandson say?“Don’t look up. Don't look around. Just let's walk out of her fast.”His mother, my own daughter, agreed, and so we did walk out.Which I found kind of a shame.  I mean, I SAW those people’s faces. I KNOW they were about to join me in the laugh.As it was, I had to wait ‘til we got home with the groceries, where my mate was making a sandwich, along with our own visiting former ten-year-old, now a thoroughgoing adult of 29.I told them both the story.My mate just rolled his eyes, for the ten-thousandth time in our marriage.My son, however,  laughed delightedly.Then he and I staged a reenactment - and the geysering was every bit as funny the second time as it had been the first.Who says you can’t repeat the past?  

Hamster on a Wheel

I tell myself I haven’t been posting here as often lately because I now spend three or four hours a day working for this great volunteer organization of which I am  currently the president.....But is that it really? I have to wonder.Because like a great many women especially, I have always crowded my calendar: I worked with a church youth group, served as a writing tutor, and looked after all our old people and used the kids’ naptimes to refinish large pieces of wooden furniture – all in addition to meeting the deadline for this column that I have been writing since Ronald Reagan first smiled his way onto the Presidential stage.I had the energy, all right!For a while there, I also spent my nights marketing the three column collections I had put together, sending out review copies to the radio and TV stations I had called during the day -  and never mind that I often fell dead asleep at my desk at midnight. Five hours later, I was good to go again, vaulting in practically one leap from my bed to my keyboard, before the children woke and life intervened.The year I decided to post on my blog every day was just the most recent chapter of my life as an overfunctioner.Back in ’99, a mere month after David's lovely mother died her timid and undemanding death, I decided there must be more I could to comfort people and so added massage school to my list of activities - once again without letting anything else go.For two years, I studied that art, undergoing countless hours of interning and then renting a room from this great chiropractor, where, two days a week, I kneaded out the knots in people’s necks and backs and helped opened the tissues of their poor tired feet.I worked that job for four whole years, not stopping until the day I had my first sudden awareness that there might be an ending to this thing called ‘Life’."What am I DOING?” I asked myself one day. “I'm in my 50s! What about that family history I was always going to write? Didn’t God make me a writer first?“I gave my notice to the chiropractor that same week – and the very next month started the blog, which, as the word suggests, is supposed to be a log, like a ship’s log, something you contribute to every daily.Maybe I only ever wanted to see if I could do it.And I could.For a while.Now, though, I can’t keep posting every day. I just can’t.And so I don’t.I still write the column each week. Thirty-four years and counting!I still work with young people in that great non-profit I mentioned, which is no burden at all because I love them. I spend time lying around with my husband as he peers into his i-Pad doing the New York Times crossword. I spend time with our kids and take such joy in them still.There's no more choir though, and the church youth group seems to be doing just fine without me.There are no new books I’m trying to write. Alas, there are no more old people to look after. And frankly right now I think I’d rather set fire to one of my beloved old wooden chests than to refinish it.A certain quiet has grown in me and I don't know what to call it. A return to the serenity I last knew in childhood maybe? If so, I say “Welcome back!” and “Where ya been so long?”

Where is the Warmth?

You’re grateful for any sun-up. Look at the beauty of this little stand of buildings facing on an alley I looked down at from a hotel room once.Mornings are the best!Even when it’s so cold out the birds' whistles and peeps sound as wheezy as kazoo music. Even when it’s so cold the leaves of the long-suffering rhododendrons are needle-thin, shrunk down, as I imagine, to reduce the surface area exposed to these frigid winds.Because there are winds all right, and my God are they frigid.Most years by the end of February, even here in the provinces north of Boston, fat-hipped geese have begun waddling around like they own the place. Crocuses have begun poking their small praying hands up through the soil, even if the soil still rests under a mantle of snow -- though these last weeks you wouldn’t call it snow even; it’s rock-solid ice, with the last day’s snow-dusting it over it.Nature sprinkles a little snow every 48 hours the way county folks once scattered corn meal on dance floors: so you could glide more. Last night I ‘glided’ under a parked car while trying to billygoat may way onto the open road and nearly snapped tibia and fibula both, like a couple of chicken bones.Where is spring? Where oh where are even the signs of spring? We can’t  glimpse it even on the far horizon. It’s 8:15 already two hours after sun-up. I need to work on next week’s column, vacuum four rooms, quickly change the batteries in the two smoke detectors that I can’t actually reach, then go out and buy groceries, a decent bedspread and six pillowcases, all before I see the bodywork Pilates wizard who is helping me strengthen my messed-up back. And all before noon when a whole other list of tasks loom.I love to see that lady wizard. And what’s more fun than buying bed linens?  But with temps like these I'd like it better if I could do all the outdoors stuff WITHOUT ACTUALLY LEAVING THE HOUSE.  

Study these Pictures

Study these pictures, taken over the past ten days and see if you can see what they have in common. I know that one Mary Woolf is going to know right away. And possibly Downton Abby's Mr. Carson would be quick to see as well.I mean this kind of fun has to rise on SOMEBODY'S back, right?Ach I have to give it away: Thanks, dear husband, for always always always doing the clean-up.  You're a  man outstanding in your field all right! 

Nice Weekend. Good Times

It was such a nice weekend:ONE PERSON threw up eight times.ONE PERSON watched 21 episodes of Modern FamilyTWO PEOPLE gave a dog a bath using Johnson’s No More Tears, offering him a pedicure after. Lucky dog!THREE PEOPLE played the board game Risk for hours.TEN PEOPLE devoured a yummy meal made by the dog-bather above: super-fresh thin-sliced swordfish drizzled with cherry tomatoes in oil, broccolini, braised kale with shredded parmigiano reggiano cheese, roasted cauliflower and a wheat-berry side dish.ONE OF THOSE DEVOURING PERSONs also blew out some candles....... on a chocolate  cake made by a family of five who ended up fleeing before the plague of throwing-up and so were not present for the fun - but! who, in their niceness, also left a giant shepherd's pie for us all, a homemade banner saying Happy Birthday and a wonderful card.ONE PERSON, having recovered entirely from the throwing up fits, enjoyed an iPad, with headphones so as no to drive the rest crazy with the sound.ONE PERSON enjoyed the cake so much he had several pieces.And ONE PERSON  watched it all with very wide eyes.It was a very nice weekend. A family is a family is a family all right.Wait, what's that you say? You've never seen that HBO documentary? Here's a 45-second clip from it. Dare ya to watch it unmoved. :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkFr-rjjzlw]

The Joke's on Me

Just after the last really big storm I drove over to the ABC House and was just hurrying up the hilly sidewalk to get inside when - whoops! - the icy walk got the better of me and I slammed down on the ice on both knees. I tried to get up and slipped again. And worse luck, everything in my hands flew out of my grip, and landed far out of my reach across the treacherous stretch of sidewalk. What to do, what to do?Luckily, since my phone was tucked into the pocket of my jeans, I still had it anyway. Crouching down so I wouldn't fall a third time, I called the house phone just inside and one of the students answered."Bryson, I fell down out here. I'm fine but I keep falling down somehow. I can't seem to even take a step. Plus I lost my keys, which are like six feet away from me.""What?! " said Bryson. "Oh God, I'll be right out!"And sophomore Bryson did come right out, along with senior Hazees, and together they led me up the hilly path into the house."You were so alarmed, it was sweet," I said to Bryson once we were safely inside. "Did I really sound that panicked?""No it wasn't that! It was when you said you lost your keys. I thought you said you lost your TEETH."Lost my teeth! And me a mere baby of 65 as of today.Still I take scant comfort; losing my teeth could be next all right, all right. For now, on this quiet birthday I'm just feeling grateful.For friends and family...For the full set of teeth I grew in my own once-little mouth... and for the help of the young and strong. Thanks, all of you! Thanks for all the fun and learning, you super ABC guys! 

Wrong Audience

Ever say something that gets met with a silence so profound by those listening to you that you can hear the sound of their blood swimming laps inside their bodies?It doesn’t happen because what you’ve said is wrong in itself, most times; it’s just that you’ve said it in front of the wrong audience. In life, it’s all about knowing your audience. I knew I had the right audience the time I was addressing a roomful of women and proposed pantyhose for the upper arms. General hilarity! I also had the right audience when I was asked to speak to a class of Fifth Graders about the joys of first-person writing. I warmed us up by having everyone think about how funny it can be when people get the words wrong, and, by way of illustration, pointed to the many little kids who think the Star Spangled Banner is all about bums bursting in air. More hilarity!But sometimes you just have the wrong audience for your remarks. I think of when I went to get my car serviced last month and in seeking to remove my car key from its jangle of fellow keys, came upon the one that opened my dear uncle’s apartment, in his grave these two years now.I began telling the young mechanic about how I found his body.And crying. Which utterly flummoxed him.I had the wrong audience.  Another day, in my book group of highly refined ladies, I was trying to help us remember the name of the next book in our lineup.“Wait I know what it is! It’s on the tip of my tongue! The title is one word. Two syllables.” “Bootstrap!” one person said  and everyone laughed. “Hiccup!” said another. Again with the laughter. “Butthead!” I sang joyfully. Nobody laughed. Wrong audience. Again. And then there was the time last week when my mate and I went for dinner to the house of friends we have seen maybe eight times in the last 20 years. As we were packing up to leave at evening’s end, this spouse of mine picked up my little tote, one of those soft, six-section bags that the liquor store gives you if you buy a few bottles of wine.  “You never know WHAT she’s going to have in here," he told our hosts in jocular fashion. “Rotting fruit, random beverages, which then spill…” I shot him a look. It’s true I often carry produce in there, as well my traveling mug with the coffee still inside it - even though the thing has long since lost its spill-proof sealing gasket. But then, peering down into the bag, he went on: “Whoa, wait! You have a bra in here too? Why on earth are you carrying around a BRA?”At first a look of horror started across my face. Then I gave up and chose Truth:“Why is my bra in my wine tote? Because, everyone, I took it off during dinner, that time I slipped away to the bathroom.” I held my breath. I looked at our hosts – who  after a short pause, broke into peals of laughter.It's true we've only seen them eight times in 20 years, but 20 years is 20 years and they know me sure enough. Luckily, that time I had the right audience.

Happy V Day! Here, Let Me Stab You to Death

Here's an ominous Valentines Day symbol for ya: Check out this video taken from our study window just now. I video'd it instead of just snapping a picture because... it's SWAYING in this stiff winter wind. LOOK OUT BELOW! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmn3SXck-B8&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

Memory Distorts: The Winter of '64

Memory sure distorts. I could have sworn the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show the same night I had that party where nearly 60 kids showed up and, as my diary, tells me, "ground chips into the rug, dumped sandwiches on chairs, tore books, spilled Cokes, flicked ashes, broke the television (Freddy fixed it), broke the glass punch ladle etc." Maybe you can make out the writing for yourself down below here.I also had the memory that, as the Beatles sang and the party roared on, some of the more poorly behaved boys, the ones who arrived smoking, were seen holding a bottle of Clorox. I know that the next morning I found out my little pet alligator dead, his ivory tummy thrown to the sky  in the shallow water of his enamel tub which smelled suspiciously like a swimming pool. (The party was held in our basement where the washer and dryer were, as well as the clothesline, which we took down for the night. (Clotheslines! Remember clotheslines?))It’s true all this happened but it wasn’t the Beatles-on-Ed Sullivan night at all. The party was on January 4, 1964 whereas the big night on NBC was February 9 of that year as we were all told again and again yesterday.How I blush to see what I revealed of myself in that diary: the way I was 'auditioning' one boyfriend and easing out another at age 14. The way I so callously described my mother’s poor bloody hand when she climbed up over the counter where we folded the clothes, hoisted the sash of the window she was bent on polishing for this silly party with one hand and then – too late – saw that same sash slam down onto her other hand. I only say that it ‘bled disgustingly’ but  even at the time I remember my heart swelling with love and gratitude to her for trying to make things nice for me and help me work my way in to the big new school.Here’s my favorite picture of the pre-Ringo Beatles, just as they were just starting out – and here at the top, obviously, is that diary entry too. Long time passing since those days all right!

Mock Away

People mock you when you have a minivan. They mock me,  but hey: when somebody  wants to transport a coffin I’m the one they call – and I notice they're not laughing then.I've had six minivans over the years, all made by the company that shares a name with that gorgeous Art Deco spire in New York City.I had a red one, then a maroon one, then a white one, then a green one and now a midnight blue one.  These last years, of course, they've all had the famous Stow ‘n Go Seats, where you just pull a couple of straps and the chairs all sink down into the floor, making room for your sideboards, sinks and sarcophagi.Also I love the design of the thing, with its cute high-hipped look, like certain breeds of puppies have, or colts. The running board is well off the ground, see, so you don't have to shrink and stoop to get into it. Plus then you ride high, like a long-distance trucker.You rule the road. And the speed at which you can accelerate is nothing short of amazing. Above is my baby today, just waiting to shake off this cocoon of snow and take me where I want to go tomorrow, when the sun is once again shining.