Say What You Think!

So I'll get to the meaning of THIS picture in a second. I was at the office of this bone guy, whose waiting room as I walked in held just one elderly couple. The husband of the pair was filling out his wife’s health history on a clipboard. “Knee problems,” he told me cheerily, nodding toward his spouse, who within the space of 30 seconds had thrown back her head, closed her eyes and begun performing an aria of happy snores.Just as suddenly, she snapped awake and shot me an assessing look.“Nice you clothes,” she told to me in a heavy, Slavic-sounding accent.I glanced down to see what I was wearing, because you know how it is: you’re not always sure just what you’ve ended up putting on in the morning. “Well, thanks!” I said.I knew I would miss my visit to the Y that day, so instead of donning my usual crummy workout gear, I had on a forest green boot-length corduroy skirt very wide at the hem and a fur jacket that I have owned since the impenitent, over-the-top 80s when I found it for 60 bucks in an antique store down the road.“All my life I work in clothes,” she said. “I am knowing good clothes.”I would have asked more about that, but just then I was called into one of the examination rooms of this new-to-me doctor, who scrutinized my bent toy kite of a spine and asked about my daily life.I mentioned the Zumba classes I take thrice-weekly at the local Y.“Zumba?!” he repeated. “Zumba’s all wrong for you. You can’t be sending your thoracic region in one direction and your hips in the other! No more Zumba!”“No more Zumba? “ I squeaked. “It’s the only thing I do that makes my back pain stop!’“It’s CAUSING your back pain.”“I don’t think so.”“I think so.”"What happened to ‘Movement is life’?” I said.“What happened to ‘Listen to your doctor’?” he said. We looked at each other for a beat. Then, “Is this our first fight?” I said. “Listen the dancing is mostly salsa, where you keep your chest fairly still and just send your hips out to the right and the left.” He shook his head. We talked a little more, then he wrote me a prescription for physical therapy and suggested I also see a back surgeon. Fat chance I’m having back surgery, I thought to myself.“He’s a surgeon, you know, and a prominent one,” he said. “He’ll hurry into the room surrounded by younger doctors. Don’t be afraid to slow him down. Make him answer your questions. Stand your ground.”“I’m thinking that won’t be a problem for you,” he added, smiling. I smiled too, thanked him, and after we shook hands I returned to the waiting room, where the woman and her husband still sat in their chairs. The woman got right back to work examining me. “Good clothes,” she nodded as much to herself as to me. I looked down at myself more self-consciously this time, and picked up the end of the dark-green, tan and cream-colored scarf I had thrown around the neck of my jacket.“The scarf isn't right though, is it? I tried to find a better scarf but I don't seem to have one.”“No,” she said. “Scarf no good. The rest OK. Nice you clothes,” she said again. “Happy to meet you!” exclaimed her husband and with that we all bowed to one another and said our farewells - but not before I thought to myself how much I do appreciate frankness, wherever I chance to encounter it.

Kids, Darn 'em

Our boy Mike was here for supper last night. I made Moroccan Lamb Stew and a nutty rice and Roasted Beet and Apricot Salad for both him and his sister Annie, who came over with her five-pounds-of-sugar-brand-new baby. Your kids don’t like it when you change your house around, especially if they no longer live with you and yes I remember feeling that way too, about my mother and aunt’s house where I lived in from age nine on. I went back there as a young adult and was horrified by what they had done: What was this awful new wallpaper in the front bedroom where our mom always installed  us kids when we were sick? What I loved was the OLD paper, the pink roses on that lurid yellow background that made me feel like my fevers were tipping into pleasant hallucination.So I saw that son of mine; I knew just what he was doing patrolling the downstairs, his hands in the pockets and smiling faintly. He passed through the kitchen, whose wallpaper we took off two years ago. Here is the old kitchen and the son in question, working in it a couple of Christmases ago.The other night he cruised slowly past the two newly upholstered chairs in the living room, chairs that lived in the garage and smelled like two sour washcloths for the 36 months prior to their recent makeover. They're gorgeous now, to my eyes anyway, both of them done over in a kind of pussy-willow grey. They're as gorgeous as the newly reupholstered mini-sofa at that far end of the kitchen that I put up with for the whole ten years it spent worn bald by the fannies of the cats. It too is beauteous now. Beauteous!But not to him. “I GUESS I’m getting used to all the changes you’ve made,” he finally said, “only it’s all so kind of ...monochromatic now. No more whimsy, no more riot of patterns. The yard is like that too since you guys cut down all those shrubs this past fall.” He said it all looks like the mind of the Ellen Burstyn character after she goes crazy in Requiem for a Dream.These kid we all  have: they’re tough customers - not that my girl Annie said anything. We women stick together.I do remember asking him  back in October about the material I liked for the Lincoln-era love seat in the living room which I have loved ever since I found it in a second-hand furniture shop, bought for $80 and reupholstered it myself. (Horse hair! it was stuffed with! Actual Horse hair!) Now I had my eye on a kind of pale Caribbean blue for it, slightly patterned and textured. I showed Mike the two yard sample I had.“You realize this is green," he said when I spread it on the loveseat. "Green?? This isn’t green!” “Mum: It’s green.”I knew he was wrong so I paid no attention . I had the loveseat done over in it – and the minute the fellas from Rudy’s Upholstery walked in the door with it three weeks later I saw my mistake: It didn't go even a little bit with anything else in the living room,  but LUCKY FOR US ALL our bedroom has green in the wallpaper, so that now, instead of having a tidy little table under the window up in that room, we have this giant-seeming piece of furniture, a real, old time I feel-a-faint-coming-on settee upon which I now artfully recline watching episodes of The Knick and Penny Dreadful and pretending I too am a Victorian lady about to get bled, or vivisected, or covered in leeches.Sigh. I hated it when my mother and aunt were right and I was wrong, And now I have it all over again with my youngest child. but it is what it is.  I’m starting to think painting the kitchen was a mistake myself. anyway.  Paint has a tendency to chip and nick and get so .. marred. Another ten years and your dad and I will go back to wallpaper, Mike and you, son, of ours, will be proven right once again, darn ya. :-)

Blog Interrupted

So this is me today, trying to look properly angelic for the season. And please note the patched together quality of my appearance. Sometimes even gorilla glue won’t hold a person together come December.I’m actually here today to explain why this blog has been interrupted. It’s the steady advent of DECEMBER 25 which has yanked me out of my cozy thoughts of fall and the seasonal fun that is fall, the cannibalization of my pumpkins by their cousins the ants, the thoughts of those high school reunions all held over Thanksgiving weekend..  Oh and didn't I myself once go to my reunion with my dress on backwards by mistake, a thing I didn’t realize I'd done so until six months had passed. (“Oh wait!" I thought trying it on again the following summer. “The plunging V doesn’t go in the front?  It isn’t the shoulder blades that those two pointy pockets in the back were designed to make room for?")I’m yanked away from these pleasant reveries by the need to start pushing uphill the rock that is Christmas, so that our family won’t once again be the only family on the street trying to string up holiday lights 24 hours before the big night, when Santa harnesses those tony rain-DEER and starts making his rounds.  (And please note that that’s how you say it:  "When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-DEER. ")Anyway here’s the second casualty in our house: the angel who normally occupies that proctological seat atop the Christmas tree. She had too much grog at the holiday party and fell and broke her ankle. As you can see I have run an IV and put her in the little hospital bed I keep especially around for small accident victims.  There’s a little blood from the fall and as you can tell she’s been crying, mostly because she knows very well that that tiny Angel We Have Heard on High beside her is totally mocking her plight with the violin playing.Those angels: no sympathy.Catch you in a day or two we hope - if my gorilla glue doesn’t seep so much it gums up my keyboard.

In the Waiting Rooms of Life

You can play it one of two ways in the waiting rooms of your doctor and dentist: You can act as put-out and grouchy as you may feel, having to take time out of your crucial job running the galaxy.Or, you can smile and take things easy.I saw the reactions both good and grouchy at the appointment I had the other morning at the dermatologist’s, where - I counted - 14 of us had brought our sorry leotards of skin to be poked and peered at.The young woman behind the glass window greeted me cheerfully as I approached her at the registration desk.“How ARE you?” she asked in such a warm human way it was easy for me to give an equally warm and human answer.“Great! And how are you?”“Good, good. You know: life with young kids – and isn’t the time change still making them crazy!” she said, and we chatted a bit then: About that turning-back of the clocks and the havoc it wreaks on us all.She checked me in and invited me to take a seat on one of the molded plastic chairs.From a television mounted high in one corner, the morning news anchors beamed down a steady stream of stories both grave and cheerful, summoning up the proper facial expression for each. I would say some 70% of the people in the chairs watched, their eyes drawn like iron filings to a magnet, jaws relaxing into slackness.The other 30%, that is the ones not instantly magnetized by the TV set, did the kinds of things most people while waiting for what's next:Person Number One pulled out her planner and took a good long look at her life. Person Number Two read the newspaper he had brought in with him. And Persons Number Three through Thirteen prodded the flat little bellies of their  phones with such exquisite precision you’d have thought they were checking them for appendicitis.All these people I would put in the category of those who know how to take things easy.It was the 14th person in this waiting room who didn't know, who felt grouchy, who in fact felt entirely put out just to be sitting there. He shifted in his seat and sighed. He consulted his watch and harrumphed . Then, with a kind of raspy growl, he leaped from his chair and roared up to the desk.“What kind of a way is THIS to run a business?” he wanted to know. “I had an appointment for 45 minutes ago! 45 minutes ago, do you understand? Do you people think your time is more valuable than mine?” he shouted.  And on and on he went until the woman behind the glass partition, with that same human quality she had shown to me, looked up at him until he was finished and said the kind of neutral and pacifying things that those who wait on the public learn to say. He hadn’t ruined her day. He certainly hadn’t ruined any of ours. In a way he was our entertainment.But he just may have ruined his own day, starting it off like that first thing in the morning. He was, as they say, in a hell of his own making. Thus does it appear that life lessons are everywhere present, even in the smallest waiting rooms of life.

Guyways and Byways

I've been away for a while, dreaming up semi-curmudgeonly tales. I call this one ...WHAT I LEARNED FROM MEN.. So much of value have I learned from the women in my life! - but if I’m honest I’ll admit I have learned quite a bit from the men as well. Anyway I have learned how they navigate the world, which can be quite different from the way we ladies do that.I should probably admit that having grown up a house of females, I didn't actually KNOW any men close up until I met the man I married. Not until I was in my 20th year did I see a man shave his face or shine those big tie shoes. Never until that year did I see how a man might knot a necktie or tuck in a dress shirt.But let's move along now to the lessons themselves, which are offered in fun, I’ll say up front, lest an angry mob with torches starts marching toward my house. Also I will say that of these following ten items, only one item might possibly, sometimes, be a rule of of my own sweet spouse.  And so without further ado - Ahem! -  Rules to Live By, Guy-Style:

• One, if people ask you questions you don’t know the answer to, feel free to make something up. If they’re asking, it’s clear that they don’t know the answer either, so you’re safe. Improvise!

• Two, in classroom settings: If you’re that guy who hasn’t done the reading and the teacher calls on you, try denouncing the biases of the author, maybe just based on his name. Or, if you’re feeling frisky, call into question the whole syllabus. Wasn’t there always that teacher in your early days who liked to be steered away from the lesson? Maybe this teacher/lecturer/workshop leader is secretly like that too. 
• Three, never, ever, ask for directions. Who knows better than you do the best way to get from point A to point B? You’re a human compass! 
• Four, don’t stop the car. Even if you end up driving to Florida by way of California, red lights and traffic jams are for chumps. Go around. 
• Five, if a woman is crying, act like you don’t notice. If the person comes over and starts tugging on your sleeve while crying, tell a joke.

• Six, let others, more ordinary mortals, answer the phone. 
• Seven, don’t feel you have to jump right in and reply to an email. If the email is directed to several people at once, you can really feel free in this regard, as someone else will surely take the lead and reply in your place. 
• Eight, since most health problems resolve without any intervention, steer clear of doctors because really, what do doctors know? 
• Nine, most “issues” are just in people’s heads. Never visit the inside of another person’s head. 
•  And finally, Ten, steer clear of the inside of your own head especially.

Cleave to these rules and you will live a happy, carefree life – at least until you see that mob with torches coming in your direction – sometimes from inside your very own house.        

Pointer Sisters ;-)

Amen Amen I say unto you, buyer beware. You handmaidens out there especially!Verily I say unto you, seek not the bras that promise to flatten for a more youthful look, for they will not hold your headset, your hair elastic, your quarter for the parking meter anywhere near as well as the regularly shaped pointy bras that Nature  has suggested you wear.Your humble servant - this handmaiden herself - has been carrying her credit card in her bra for full many a year .Then yesterday while wearing her new silhouette-reducing bra, her bright green Am Ex worked itself free in the parking lot just outside Market Basket and was gone a full 24 hours before your humble servant missed it, panicked, contacted American Express and finally called the store itself  to see if someone had perhaps turned it in.Someone indeed had  and all is right with the world again but tell you what,  tell you what:THIS handmaiden is back now for good in her trusty old Bali with the bow in front and the twin embroidery hoops under each cup.Guard the goods! Live and learn!  

Another thing You Shouldn't Do Yourself

Don't try altering your own clothes. It's like trying to put on your own braces.First you think you're bigger than you are: I took some darts out of this skirt and sliced an inch off the waistband and when I put it on and zipped it up it fell right to the floor. Whoops! At the same time you might also somehow decide you're smaller than you really are. I decided to ventilate a shirt I wear to Zumba but got the proportions a little wrong. A little too much skin over the old waistband I think. Ewww!Moral of the story: Don't try to do your own tailoring. Just don't. :-)   

See It Through THEIR Eyes

For a long time in our family, this was the season when a new person would come to live with us. Every fall for six years running, we would nervously drive to the airport to meet the new young woman from Austria who would join our family and begin to taste the jazzy sauce of American life. How lost and uncertain must they have felt on arriving here on Foreign shores to live for a full year with virtual strangers?But being a self-centered soul I always saw it from MY point of view: what if the young woman didn’t have enough English to get along comfortably here? What if she only THOUGHT she knew how to drive a car? What if God forbid, she was a disliker of children, a secret pincher, say?All these old fears came to mind again during the fall when our youngest was a high school junior and we found ourselves again driving to the airport, this time to bring home an exchange student from Madrid.His name was José and all we knew of him was that he had a ponytail. Within minutes of identifying him, we were walking that long mile to the car, during which my whole family seemed struck suddenly dumb. Desperate to keep thing going, I talked my head off, with great animation and very s-l-o-w-l-y.“On drugs,” the kid must have thought. But things got easier once we were driving. A Bruce Springsteen tune came on the radio and he said “Ah, de Boss!” – and when “Stairway to Heaven” started, we knew we had not one, but two Led Zeppelin fans on our hands. The rest of the language barriers we got past with pantomime.At supper that first night, I thought I might go for the historical angle. “So what was the deal with FRANCO?!” I yelled, pronouncing the name of that old Spanish dictator with what I hoped was a meaningful anti-fascist frown.“Franco!” cried José, and executed a Nazi salute.But lucky for us all, we were all soon talking more naturally.My man David is often busy nights with meetings and dinners out, and in the fall of his killer Junior year our poor burdened youngest who was the unofficial ‘host’ of José was constantly plugging away at homework every night.That left me.And since by nightfall I have always been way too sleepy for any ‘thinking ‘ work, I spend evenings catching up on mindless tasks. And so José, who was neither busy nor sleepy, would keep me company, lounging on a nearby chair.I learned the words for existentialism , which is existencialismo, the adjective for manic depressive, which is maniaco depresivo and the term for paranoid schizophrenic, which is esquizofrenico paranoide. (We were drawn to the darker themes, José and I.) He told me he thought all humans were basically out for themselves - egoista. I told him I felt sure he would soon encounter at least one person whose unselfishness had helped change lives. Prompted by his stay with us, I began thinking back over time to those Austrian girls and remembered that some of them really couldn’t speak much English – and then was that one who is spite of her very earnest nature kept locking the car with the engine still running. We loved them anyway; of course we did.And now here was José who didn't need to drive, and whose English, if slower than ours, was pretty damn good. Once he left, we missed him like crazy.So in the end, there was nothing to dread and everything to look forward to on any one of those runs to the airport.I’ll have to remember how often this is the case – and how we should all recall that if we think it's hard to welcome strangers, how much harder is it to BE them? Now I don't have a picture of José but here now are two of our former au pairs, Alex and Gabi, once strangers, now our forever friends. :-) And HERE is Sonja, the one who stayed stateside, went to school, married  and raised her own family, seen at my landmark birthday party a few years ago - WITH the child who was once the baby these young ladies came to help care for.Time does fly does it not? I never thought he'd even shave!

How I Spent My Week Off

How I spent my week off: Not the way this picture would suggest. This was our vacation week; the only week old David and I take all year, just for ourselves, up at our place by the lake.My friend Bobbie, in a laconic email containing only one link, pointed me to an article in The Times about how you really mustn't let your work life encroach on your vacation. It says you just can’t keep answering emails and making calls, much less initiating them, but... well, you know how it is: you’re never on vacation really after about age 30, and certainly not if you're someone who writes for a living.And then in my case there’s the non-profit I spend so much of my time with the local chapter of an organization called A Better Chance that places outstanding students of color from all around the country in secondary schools that are regarded as the among the most challenging, the high school in our town being one such. We call it ABC for short and somehow I can never NOT work on ABC stuff, especially now with two shiny new ABC scholars due to arrive in a little over a week.  Lots of us volunteers have been busy lately, fixing up the house where our eight guys live together with two amazing resident directors and a crack resident academic coordinator. I myself have been buying new file cabinets and furnishing the newly painted study room with cozy window treatments and fresh artwork.I'll admit I’m mad for window treatments lately and earlier this month even tried hanging swags from old Dave's broad shoulders, like Carol Brunette did in her spoof of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett uses those velvety drapes from the lost glory that was Tara to make herself a ball gown. It’s like a nesting mania with me lately. You’d think I 22  and eight months pregnant.Anyway the the upperclassmen will be coming back any day now, one for Cross Country, one to row Crew and one just to help get the younger guys assimilated to life in New England. And there’s yet more to do: We’re spiffing up the grounds and painting the fence, getting a plumber in to replace one of the shower doors., and day and night I’m writing to all the new volunteers in an attempt to infect them with the enthusiasm I feel for this organization that helps so many young men grow into their gifts.Here’s one of them now, Machias Turner, who left here in June at 6’5” but looks to be returning to us closer to 6'7”. The picture was taken on the ABC College Tour outside of one of the buildings on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill.BUT ANYWAY, having said all this about the work i couldn't help doing, I did relax some. In fact, along about Wednesday that rainy,rainy day I relaxed so much I wasn’t paying attention even to the simple things. I was treating my coffee with liquid sweetener and  added some drops then tasted: added more drops and tasted again. Why isn’t this getting any sweeter? I wondered before looking down at what I held in my hand to see what I was actually using: the bathing solution for my contact lenses. I knew I was in what passes for vacation mode in my world when I was able to just smile. So I put saline solution into my coffee, so what? What’s wrong with a little salt to go with your sweet? I mean, what else made the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup the hit that it is? :-)

Ghost Town

Where IS everybody?It feels like even the Wallgreen's parking lots are empty. It feels like if you called 911 you'd be able to just tell that the dispatcher was filing his nails and slurping a smoothie.It's the weather.When the weather gets like this and stays like this, don't you just want to dress any old way and mosey on over to the Arts & Crafts tent?I do . I surely do. Let's go ask these nice ladies for some gimp and get under that big tree outside and make us some lanyards, whaddya say?

Your Kids: They Judge You

Tell you what: Admit nothing to your grown children, for they will surely judge you. Here’s a scene that took place at my house last weekend:It was midnight up in the country and my grown child and I were just straightening things up after watching a House of Cards episode when, standing under the light that hangs over the dining room table, he suddenly went “Whaaaat?”“What what?” I said.“What is THAT thing?" he said, indicating a tiny sphere bobbling about in the warm currents of air. Think of a snow globe that a home-décor-minded mouse might set out in his hole come the holidays. "Is it alive? Is it attached to something? The ceiling?" he said. He passed his hand above it. No thread, or web, or filament held it.He let it land on his hand and touched it. “It has… body. And - ew, it feels greasy. But it’s not a soap bubble….”Just then it burst, as I was trying to take it from his hand into mine and we knew that’s exactly what was.“But what’s a soap bubble doing way over here? And at this hour? I mean where is it FROM?'I swallowed. I knew what was coming and so armed myself in my breeziest manner:“Oh earlier tonight before you got here I just put a bottle of Dawn in the blender.”There was a silence followed by that mild look of incredulity your grown kids always give you when they question your choices.“Why?” he finally managed to say. “Why did you put a bottle of dishwashing liquid in the blender?”This time I went for a jaunty matter-of-factness. “I was dyeing it," I said.“Dyeing the dishwashing liquid? OK, Mum: This is a whole new level of crazy, even for you.”“Not at all,” I countered. “I dye all my liquid soaps if I don’t like their color, hand soaps, bath gels, all of them. Dad bought this transparent dishwashing liquid and it just looked so dull to me and I mean, who wants that? I want a dishwashing liquid with a nice deep-amber color. So I add food coloring, one drop of red, two drops of yellow and there we are!  Only tonight they didn’t mix right in the bottle so that’s why I poured the whole thing in the blender.”“But what happened when you did THAT? It didn’t spill over?”“Oh it got a little foamy. And when I poured it back into the bottle it had this 'head' at the top, like you get with beer: just this layer of tiny peach-colored bubbles. So I left the cap off and I guess that’s how one bubble got to where it was still floating around two hours later and 20 feet away.” I smiled at him, with my most confident smile.“I don’t know, Mum,” he said, shaking his head.I suppose the guy does realize that I’ve been dyeing my hair since he was in kindergarten but maybe not, and who knows? By the time I’m on my deathbed I may also be found to have a giant tattoo splayed all across my midriff. I may just. But hey, I say we should all ‘decorate’ any way we please, because it’s so cheering. Just ask that mouse with his little snow globe. 

Hit the Floor!

It’s fainting weather again.  If you’re an old fainter like I am, you’ll TRY blaming the weather when you faint anyway, even knowing perfectly well that there are other factors leading to your smackdowns.If you’re a fainter, you know that you can faint under all kinds of conditions: You faint if you get too hungry. You faint in religious settings, whether it's the airlessness in the place or the staying in one position that turns the world so suddenly black. If you’ve been fainting since childhood, you will remember how quickly you became a small rumpled pile of clothing under the pews, and how large male hands would haul you out by your armpits and make for the door as your little feet dragged on the floor behind you.It gets embarrassing if you’re still fainting well after childhood of course, and the memory of this embarrassment is so vivid that each time you start to feel even a wee bit odd in a public place, you’re sure you’re about to go down like the Titanic.You also faint when you get scared. That’s what made me faint at 14 when a mystified old-time doc, believing he knew how to remove my two very small warts, drew a small blowtorch from his bag and came at me with it. He burned twin holes on my forearm whose scars I have to this day. Plus, it hurt like crazy, so add that: You faint when you’re in pain. You faint at bad news.And you really do faint when the weather gets muggy, as I did in a department store at age 19, only to wake and see that all new male strangers had dragged me away by the armpits – because you can’t have insensate young women interfering with commerce.There’s a predictable physiology to the faint, naturally: You faint due to a reflex caused by one of the above-mentioned triggers. Then the blood vessels in your lower extremities dilate, and blood pools in your legs. Then your heart rate slows, your blood pressure drops and - boom! – you have left the premises, or your consciousness has anyway. it seems that this vasovagal syncope as such fainting is called, only happens when you're standing or sitting upright. It never happens when you're lying down.I read all this on the web just last month in a posting that said how useless it is for people to try holding you up, even IF they add in the additional treatment of yelling in your ears or slapping you. It also said that trying to fight off the faint “by forcing yourself to remain upright, willing yourself not to pass out almost never works out very well.” Get down before you fall down, in other words. And so I've been doing that, and also elevating my legs once I’m down there, which is also helpful evidently.I get leg cramps at night, see. So now instead of leaping up and making desperate pogo-stick-like hops around the room, I plop down on the floor and put my legs up on the bed.Last weekend, when I did this for the first time, my bedmate woke and saw the soles of my upturned feet by his ribcage. He peered over the bed’s edge at me.  “What on earth are you doing now?” he said in his mild way. A good long time we are married but still: he will never truly comprehend the swoon. So I just smile dup at him and said, ‘Oh nothing. It’s fainting weather is all.”  

The Hunch

I'm at the office of the massage therapist who has started by placing me face down on the table and running the heel of her hand like a plow-blade around the edges of the two kite-shaped ‘angel wings’ we call the scapulae. And in fact I do feel like a patch of plowed-up earth, the way she digs into me, but finally she stops. “There!” she finally says with satisfaction. “NOW your shoulders are up on your back again where they belong!”I'm calling today's post ‘The Hunch’, for what we’ve been doing to our poor bodies ever since we first stood upright and began sashaying around on two legs. Once our ancestors spent their days running across open spaces and handing themselves along among the tree branches. Every day they reached high above their heads, shoulders back and chests open. Today by contrast, at work and in leisure-time both, we spend our days hunched over screens and devices. Our arms in front. Our shoulders rolled forward. Our backs, quite noticeably, hunched. Right?And our bodies pay the price,  as I am learning on this table.Twenty minutes in, with my dorsal side ironed flat, the therapist flips me like a pancake so I'm now face up. Then, coming in from the side, she begins working her way through the filo-dough of tissues under my left arm to address that strong rubber band of a muscle known as Teres Minor.She presses. I leap like a fish. It’s worse than electrolysis. Worse than getting your mustache snatched off. Worse even than that time in childhood when, on a dare, you popped a wad of  tinfoil in your mouth and bit down, just to see how it felt on your fillings.While a person generally signs up for that last experiment only once, with massage therapy you’re there as often as you can scrape together the dough, the  ‘vividness’ of the experience notwithstanding.Deep work on little Teres Minor can be tough to receive, sure, but really? It’s worth the pain. As with the other three muscles of the rotator cuff, it lets us circle and swing our arms, while still keeping them attached to our bodies  - and a good thing too, because how would it be if people were all accidentally flinging their arms off every time you turned around?“Ah now, this is good,” the therapist is now saying in her calm soothing voice. “This way when you reach for that vase high on the shelf, you can just shoot an arm up without the rest of your body having to come too.” Then she works on my neck a while, so that I won’t have to  turn my whole torso to look behind me before pulling out into traffic.And by gosh, it all works. When, with the session over, I pull out of my parking space, I can keep my body facing forward while I turn my head practically clear around.I feel like an owl. A happy owl at that. Then once home, I try that other thing:  I reach a vase down from its place on the shelf using one of my newly mobilized, strangely longer arms while the rest of my torso, earthbound, taking things easy down below.In fact I’m looking at that vase as I dot these last i’s here, because as soon as I’m done I believe I’ll fill it with flowers and run it over to her office.  Then, on the way back to my car, shoulders back, and head high, I may even reach up to those pretty trees lining the sidewalk and swing from some low-hanging branches myself. 

Shop Talk

For a person who hates to shop, I do love going to go to the store.Last week at Macy’s, the most cheerful clerk I have ever encountered stood waiting on customers and complimenting them on their choices, even as she swung the garments this way and that, patting them into neat rectangles the way a storybook mouse might fold and smooth his little hanky after the wash. When it came my turn at her register she was just upbeat with me as she had been with the others. After I swiped my credit card in the magic slot, she said, “Now just sign your name and we're done!” Then in recollection her face opened into a wider grin.“Yesterday I told this one lady to sign her John Hancock and she actually wrote the words ‘John Hancock’! Do you believe that? People kill me!”People kill me too, which is what sends me out into the world to find them.Find more of them I did, a few days later at the supermarket when I was treated to a second friendly exchange: A woman in her late 50s pulled up behind me at the check-out, the seat of her shopping cart filled with a small two-year-old boy with a girl of about six standing alongside.I smiled at the girl, who was looking directly at me.She held my gaze for several seconds, and then beamed. “That's my Grammy!”  she whispered conspiratorially, her eyes shining with affection as she slid them over to the woman pushing the cart."Is that your Grammy?” I said in the same conspiratorial way. It was not really a question but more of an exultation to match her own, and it caused the woman to look at me guardedly, until I spoke directly to her.“I wish MY grandchildren were with me right now.”“Oh aren’t they wonderful!” she cried. “And yet you love them so much it scares you. You have so much to lose!""I know!" I agreed. “We’re really out on a limb now!” And with that we parted ways, each, I think, reeling with this truth.Finally, just yesterday the following happened when, again at the supermarket, the cashier and I came to the swipe-the-card moment - only this time, instead pulling my card from the wallet I was not actually carrying, I pulled it from and returned it to, a far more accessible place. “Did you just put that in your bra?" The young woman asked."Yep," I said."I do that too!"“Really? I thought only eccentric older people who didn't care what others thought did things like this!”“Oh No." she said. "The way I figure it, you’ve got this... SHELF...."  “A pocket with no holes!”“That's right! Plus you there's two of them and, really, what else are they for?"“Exactly! Well besides a baby’s food needs.”I decided to leave aside for the moment what these wondrous things are NOT for, namely an industry based on the male gaze, and profit, and exploitation – which was a good thing since just then it occurred to me to look at the boy bagging my groceries.“Sorry about the girl-talk,” I told him.But he just smiled. “Oh no problem!" he said."Actually I like it. All the talk makes my day really fun!”      And I couldn’t have said THAT any better myself.

Professional Translater For Hire

On a recent trip in Europe, I was at first slightly cowed by all I did not know. Luckily THAT didn’t last. Sure, I was surprised to find out there are still seashells from a long-ago ocean to be found in the Bavarian Forest. And yes, I was interested to hear that the old city of Vienna is home to one of the world’s first Ferris wheels. But if you’re a true provincial like I am, your surprise would soon give way to the smugness we Americans tend to bring everywhere with us.I mean, it didn‘t take me more than an hour to be smiling indulgently at the inscriptions outside many of the shops and eateries, all gamely aiming at a jaunty, American-style English. "Nonstop buffet!" read the sign outside one such place. “American Rump!” it said outside another. “How quaintly earnest,” I smiled in my smugness. And only after some days did I realize that of all the signs in languages other than my own I could read….…Exactly none.  I have no German. I have no Hungarian. I have no Italian. And I'll admit this fact almost made me feel slightly inferior. I say ‘almost’ because any trace of inferiority disappeared for me when I traveled on a smaller craft up a narrower section of the Danube where the guide began speaking not only in Hungarian, Italian and German, but also in French.“French!”  I crowed inwardly, because didn’t I just study French in high school? I figured all I needed now was confidence. I envisioned myself with a Parisian waiter’s tiny mustache and in my mind touched its tapering tips. Then, with an elegant flourish, I began translating for my American friends every French sentence the guide was speaking. And here, without further ado, is what he said:"Ladies and gentlemen, commence to please yourselves! The suitcase sits upon the cat!”He pointed to a castle we were just sailing past. “Fix the eyes: on this place are fixed 65 anniversaries, which George dragged under his bottom.” It’s true I didn't know who George was, but I was getting the gist for sure. I was ON this.“Eh Bien!” he went on, a common French phrase meaning ‘oh beans.’   “Inform yourselves! In Roman Times George found himself hung from this bridge, a deviant.” Poor George, I might have mused. But I was too busy translating for actual thought.“Imaginez! To your right, it is seen, a great bubbling from the nose,” he said. Surreptitiously, I checked my own nose. Then he waggled his eyebrows in meaningful fashion. “To your left is found the green plaque in the mouth of the king.“I nodded knowingly. ‘Those lazy royals,’ I muttered. I’ll confess I wanted him to like me. I wanted him to see that I got it all. I gave him my biggest American smile.He didn’t smile back. Expert as I am in translating French words, I couldn’t read his mind of course. Yet in my own mind suddenly flashed the phrase “American Rump!” It was as if we had some kind of mental telepathy. And that was kind of funny, you know, because… well, because who would have thought that here on the river, the guy would be thinking of steak? ;-)           

Back to The Kale and the Tofu!

It's back to the kale and the tofu for me, but boy did we eat great on that riverboat cruise!Here's the menu for the Captain's Dinner on the second-to-last night of our trip - and, as was true every night, the wine was not only free but it kept on coming:Since we got back  I've purged my kitchen of all cookies and crackers and the fridge of that lovely thick cream, a teaspoon of which I often blopped into my coffee mornings.Still though, STILL I have that Homer Simpson tummy. Paying the piper even these three weeks later.Here I am on the third floor of our house back home, looking out the window and envying the sparrows their svelte little bodes. (Gad, my bikini undies are even tight! May have to go to a thong til the weight comes off. ;-)  

Oops (Part 999)

Ah jeez. I washed my husband’s pants with the wallet still in the pocket.'What IS that pounding sound?' I remember asking the air halfway through the drier cycle but even then I didn’t get it. I thought there was a sneaker in there or something, but when I looked nope: no sneaker. I slammed the drier door shut and pressed the On button again. It wasn’t until hours later when I finally pulled the clothes out to fold and smooth them that I felt something heavy in those pants of his. What has he got, a tennis ball in here?No such luck. It was his wallet. That which was once a smart and tidy fold of leather now resembles a very small damp badger rolled up in his protective ball.Meaning it looks sort of ...rounded.And afraid somehow.Never mind that even today, a full 48 hours after I threw it in that load of wash and soaked the whole thing with the usual slimey shot-glass of Tide, the thing is STILL damp. Oy!Extracting the items from inside the wallet was a job too. It was like trying to deconstruct a sheet of baklava.All his business cards. All his careful notes. All reduced to pulp.I just feel awful.There’s only one silver lining: His credit cards appear to be as healthy as ever – unless there’s some horrifying truth about the magnetic strip and two hours of Pounding, Rinsing and Roasting on High that I don’t yet know about, please God no. Because after all, even a highly forbearing man has his limits.And this is that forbearing man. And these are the pants.

Spring Bounce

When the nice weather comes, people start expressing themselves; they just can’t help it. They shed clothes, for one thing. Last week I saw so many pale pairs of legs I thought I was at the Ballet.  Any minute now, sunburns will start to show, along with the permanent tans of the boat lovers, whose shins gleam winter and summer with the same shiny brown you see on a horse chestnut. And the shedding of clothes is hardly the end of it. Come the warm weather, folks also begin stepping outside their normal pathways. I know I did this one spring day when, still enough of a baby to be in training pants, I took a small Bible from the bookshelf and headed down the street to church.  Adventure! was all I thought. But oh what earnest teaching I was subjected to after by the many grownups in our house, who could only pray that I had learned my lesson. I hadn’t: Three months later, with my mom watching me through the kitchen window as she fixed me a snack, I sat in the sandbox of our fenced-in yard. I was right there - until suddenly I wasn’t. And then followed the running around and calling my name, the searching and the summoning of police.All I remember is how happy I felt, toddling in my little yellow sunsuit with the ruffly-bottom seat, on up Charlotte Street to Blue Hill Avenue, then across McClellan, to arrive at last at the Endicott School.  My sister wasn’t there in the schoolyard of course, nor was any child.  Recess was over, and when I turned for home I grew confused and toddled on past not only my own street but eight or ten streets more.  Back home, meanwhile, the drama kept unfurling, as a policeman ascended our steps lugging somebody else’s bellowing child (who of course was bellowing, since she knew very well that she didn’t live there.)When my family finally found me, I was eating ice cream and holding onto the baby-laden stroller of a young mother from Eastern Europe, who spoke no more a recognizable brand of English than I did.But really this is no big story. This is just what people do when the air is soft and the daylight feels unending: They go on walkabout. I see it in my own town. A few days back, at schoolday’s end, I watched as an eight-year-old dashed out of the brick fortress that had held him all day and danced on down the sidewalk, executing a perfect penguin impression as he tilted from side to side, his hands jammed down into the sides of his pants.And that was nothing compared with what I witnessed the following day, when three middle-school girls, who had been awaiting the “Walk” light to help them cross the street, started out into the busy intersection. Two of them, bearing backpacks, sailed across, as stately as a couple of swans. The third, free of backpack and stateliness both, got herself right into the middle of intersection - where, with traffic from five different streets stopped, she hopped twice and executed a perfect cartwheel, right there on the asphalt. If we hadn’t all been strapped in our cars, I think every last motorist would have given her a standing ovation. I know I yearned to.I yearn to salute all signs of high spirits. I yearn to applaud every length of limb on display.And sometimes – ah sometimes! – I do yearn to go back to the time of that little ruffly-bottomed sunsuit.    

Nice to be Back

Is there anything nicer than being back in your own bed and your own regular wardrobe, never mind all those travel clothes you take on vacation?After a full day's flying home from, we both slept like the dead Sunday night and opened our eyes yesterday to a cool,  cool sun and the popcorn of cherry blossoms strung along the branches of the little tree under our window. I felt good all day, in part because I had not only unpacked everything as soon as we got in Sunday but also washed and ironed it all, catching up on episodes of Veep, Silicon Valley and the frightening outrageously R-rated Game of Thrones, a show that makes me want to run into the bathroom and peek only a tiny bit through the crack in the door. (And yes we DO have a TV in our bedroom, so sue me . We brought it in when I was heavy with child in 1976 and only got through the early months of that first baby's life thanks to All in The Family, Cheers and that groundbreaking serialized drama Alex Haley's Roots.)I worked like crazy on my work-work and didn't get to the Y where I do need to go since soon I'll be doing even MORE ironing as I dig our my fashionable summer wardrobe.I'm going out to that YMCA even IF the sun is not supposed to come out at all tomorrow and the temperatures are going to feel more like March than the brink of May. I learned early in life, if you want fun in your life you'd best learn how to make it yourself.  Plus I always have fun at the Y. Hot Hula? You bet. I do it every week (love that sarong!) See it here.      

Greedy

I'll call this one We Got Too Greedy, or else maybe Tub o' Sludge. Here's why:We went on vacation, all ten family members, thinking, OK we'll stay for the FIRST part of the week in the cool old inn with the 1940s bathrooms. Sure, the other guests there are mostly ancient, but we figured that even if one or two did chance to visit the pool, they wouldn't mind us with our goggles and our floaties and our young ones with their fat baby limbs - and they didn't.And I loved that inn in Tucson and felt so sad when, on Thursday, we bid it goodbye to go to another, 21st century joint, named for the two brothers whose portrait hangs in every lobby, founders of this giant hotel chain.There, at the J.W. Starr Pass Marriott, were ten times the number of guests, including a Medical Records Convention, a Transit Conference, and a charming gaggle of pre-teen females here with their folks (or mostly mums, really) for some sort of Trapeze Convention.At this hotel, there are pools within pools, and a water slide, and a Lazy River, with the usual giant inflatable tubes in which you can float serenely around the perimeter of the aquatic  acreage, propelled by just enough water pressure to make a girl feel like Katherine Hepburn on the African Queen, before the part where she and 'captain' Humphrey Bogart get a little storm-tossed.That first night, when we came back from dinner, however, our tub looked like this. While we were gone it had vomited up this black sludge that would not wipe away with mere towels. I called Maintenance, who came instantly and poured what looked like Muriatic Acid down the drain and strongly suggested we wait until  Housekeeping could come in the morning to truly sanitize the thing. No baths for us!Then two of us humans began also vomiting up stuff, such that I got to spend five hours in a dark hotel room next door watching inane pre-teen programming on the Disney Channel while rubbing the back of my favorite six-year-old as he did residual gagging and spitting for 90 minutes into the room's wastebasket, carefully lined with the plastic bag from the ice bucket - all this  while everyone else had the world's most festive time with our brother-in-law/brother/uncle team, the ones we had come out west to see and here they are:Then, the same night it happened again with our tub. And the baby broke out in hives. And on our last full day yesterday the temperatures plunged from 90 degrees to 60 degrees and a day-long wind blew that practically sanded our faces off.Still it was wonderful to be there and now, in two hours, we will fly the five hours home.I will remember the clear dry air but not the sludge, and how we cherish these brothers who live here. Also I bet I will remember always how lovely it was to watch, at the pool, as 11-year-old trapeze girl, as slender as a young stalk of celery, executed an amazingly long hand stands while sipping at her lemonade upside down, through a straw - and don't I wish I had captured an image of THAT  wondrous feat!And also I love caring for any sick child which in any case helped me take my mind off my own sickness.Here he is playing on my phone once he felt up to such pleasures. And here I am bidding you all Good Day as we drive to Phoenix to begin the long journey home.