Vanity Vanity

You can't obsess about what you're going to wear to a particular event because Fate will punish you.She will punish you for your foolishness and your vanity.I took these pictures of myself so I could really examine how I looked in the navy dress I thought I might wear, something not seen in 20 years and found in the back of a third-floor closet. How I fretted over just the right thing to show up in for that evening wedding in Manhattan! I was trying to test it from every angle....Close up and far away ...I did know that if I wore it I'd have to shorten it on account of the website I came upon of fashion Do's and Don’ts for people my age. It said you definitely couldn’t show up at an event in an ankle-length dress from the 80s and the kind of  chunky white sandals that only Florence Henderson and I would think were just dandy. A dress like this say;Do you still have this dress? I still have this dress!But that website schooled me soo I had my pal Bob at Esquire Tailoring lop a foot off of it. And yes, the short sleeves made me look like I have upper arms like curtain swags but hey I actually DO have those arms so come on. For them I bought a white satin tuxedo-jacket kind of a thing at Nordstrom's The Rack. It cost $125 - high for an accessory -  but it was marked down from $400 so I thought hey, I'll wear it in my casket .Anyway ... the hour came to leave for the wedding , and I donned this get-up and stepped outside our hotel ....into a downpour such as you would expect to find only in the tropics. Even walking 15 feet to the waiting taxi drenched me. And when I slid onto the vinyl seat, slick with rain from the last passenger and his umbrella, the disaster was complete: both the white satin jack AND that navy silk dress puckered like the lips of Betty Boop., sprouted suckers like you see on an octopus's arms, The last time I looked this bad was that time at Camp Fernwood wet my pants up onstage during the big Parents Weekend play King Hale of Health Land in which I played Our Friend the Beet, in a costume of purple crepe paper.My togs looked like that crepe paper but you know what, do you know what? It didn't matter a bit because it’s pretty much true that nobody's looking at YOU Mom as my fifth grade son once told me. The wedding was truly memorable with a moving ceremony under the huppa, an open bar and platters of passed appetizers, mounds of cheeses and raw veggies, blintzes and I don't know what-all else - oh I wait do know - a station where they serving the best hot roast beef and roast turkey I have ever eaten. And all this BEFORE we went upstairs for the real meal to enjoy a thousand vodka shots and many funny toasts.The dress and jacket came back like new from the cleaners.I’m still pretty partial to it so maybe I'll l wear it to the bridal shower I’m attending this weekend. It’s so kind of Jackie O. in her Maurice Tempelsman phase don't you know, bowed a bit by age but still …. still lovely and still sort of respecting any given day and dressing nicely for it.(God Bless Jacquie gone too soon ! What a lady she was!)

Good Hotel

Online, the pictures looked amazing. Here we were right on Wall Street in Manhattan and we'd have THIS spacious a hotel room? Unheard of in my experience with New York accommodations!  I could hardly contain myself the day we drove here for the wedding of one very dear to us, who we have known since he was 15. And now here he was in his high 30s getting married to possibly the most beautiful woman in all five boroughs. And the event wasn't until Sunday night and here we were all checked in by 3pm on Friday and all this hotel fun ahead of us!It's true that the lone terrycloth robe we found was still damp - from the drier we fervently hoped - but Housekeeping brought two fresh ones up right away. Oh and the TV didn't work right away but somebody arrived to fix that almost before we had hung up the phone requesting help with it. So the service was great. Plus - this was even better! -  the room had this 12-foot long window seat you could sit on and look right into 100 different apartment windows directly across the street . In one window, a woman's naked legs on an ottoman! In another, a man starting to make his bed and then thinking the hell with it and flopping down on it instead. It was better than movies!"Do you think those people can look in and see US ?" I asked my man. "I'm sure the hotel coats the windows with something so they can't.""Doubtful," said Dave.But if they couldn't see us in our birthday suits, we sure could see each other, since - wait for it - the bathroom had no walls, or rather the walls were just glass, whose doors that swung freely, like saloon doors in an old western. No privacy for the toilet part, no privacy for the bath part. In fact, when you sat in the tub, anyone in the room could watch your every move through this big sort of picture window which you see here  on the left. I know I felt like a large pale reptile in a terrarium. And it was the same way with the shower.It almost began to feel like a spooky place with all these odd quirks,  this on-display feature and then with the way the plaques holding room numbers in the corridors repeated in illuminated fashion just below themselves.And yet here was a minibar whose drinks were all free, except the ones containing alcohol! - and who needed alcohol with a cozy bar downstairs and the wedding of the century looming before us? Plus the bride and groom had put a very nice red wine in all the wedding guests' rooms.I loved the place I decided. I loved our room, with the super-long windowseat that I lay stretched out on by the hour, watching the action outside.  I loved the five extra feet behind the long 'island' that held the desk and drawers and the TV .This I loved not just because you could stash all your luggage in behind it  but because when you walked back there you found  not one but TWO nicely upholstered banquettes and a  reflective surface on the back of the television so you could sit and do your makeup or fool with your hair. (That's me to the left, the morning after the wedding, when I was in need of attention to BOTH hair and makeup.)But most of all I loved to an odd revolving architectural 'element' that actually spun, so that - spin! -  here you had shelves and drawers - spin! - here a fat hook for those terrycloth robes - spin! - here a full-sized closet-  spin!  - and  here a full-length mirror. Some guests might want the mirror facing the sink and some might want it facing the bed (since you just don't know what people have in mind when they take a room haha) and you had all these options. And now, because a picture is worth a thousand words,, here's my narration of that odd slightly planetary rotation.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygVr3R7Zlkg[/embed]So think of the Andaz Hotel at 75 Wall Street in the town so nice they named it twice the next time you're in Manhattan! You do that and I'll wait and say more about this NY jaunt in another post. :-) 

Forgetting It All

I keep hearing ads for these brain training programs that are designed to 'increase mental acuity by calculating baseline scores' as they put it, but in my world a baseline score is what your doctor uses to measure the relative swiftness of your decline.And yet, and yet:  If I don't do these mental calisthenics, will I start losing it? Forget how to flush, or make change? Inadvertently turn into the funniest person standing in line... at the wake? I look at what's out there and then I look at my life. I don't do Lumosity. Or Sudoku. Or Words With Friends, which is basically just Scrabble over the Internet.  But the way I look at it, people old enough to worry about getting sharper are already less sharp. Just look up the statistics on how fast your synapses are firing now compared to how they fired when you were 12. You're slower than you were and that’s a fact, so now you want to start measuring how much slower? You might as well make little marks on your kitchen wall the way people do with their growing children - only you’d be doing it so you could watch yourself shrink.But back to mental acuity: When I was young, I could memorize anything, historical dates from the 1500s, the license plate numbers on my friends’ parents’ cars, the poems our teachers used to make us stand beside our desks to stammer out. Now all I have stored here in this head is a single credit card number, and even then I have to get a running start with, the way you do with the 23rd Psalm, say.As for poetry, every time I try to recite those bits of verse from my schooldays sonnets, they all mysteriously become, three lines, in, “Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know," but seriously: What are you gonna do?  Mark Twain famously wrote that when he was younger, he could remember anything, whether it happened or not.’ But as his faculties began decaying, as he put its, he got so he could only remember the latter. He could only remember what didn’t happen in other words.  If I get like this, I won’t be any kind of authority on the facts but hey, stick around anyway: It’s a good bet my stories will become a lot more entertaining. And now, this great clip from Men in Black, where the memory-erasing Neuralyzer is put to use... which leads me wonder: Have Agents J and K been around HERE lately?[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqlFiTOi6QQ[/embed]

"What's That Again?"

I just read that when people are approaching 60 they can literally see only half of what they could see at 30. Now while I mind this, I’ll also admit that there are lots of things I’d just as soon NOT see – like the little white bunny-tail of toothpaste you sometimes find on your cheek or,  God forbid, in your hair, even hours after you brushed the old chompers.This second thing has been known to happen to me. Before I bring out the bristling arsenal of smoothing tools every morning, my hair is so wild with waves and tendrils that all kinds of things get stuck in it. “The net,” my guy David calls it. Of course HIS eyesight isn’t that great anymore either you should see the two of us squinting at the remote in our effort to watch TV of an evening - but this is why God gives us children, so that, when they get older, they can come by the house and clean us up a little.Just recently I met up with one of my grown children after not having seen her for some weeks. She leaned in toward me for the hug, or so I thought - until she spoke:  “Hi Mum, you look great - and you only have this ONE little whisker!” she cried cheerily and began applying a sharp pincer-like movement to the underside of my jaw.But a thing equally bad is the inability to see with the old acuity is the inability to hear the way you could once hear: When you get older, you hear so much less. It’s a shock really. I mean here you’ve been, going on for years easily following two or even three conversations besides the one you are in. This ability to hear all around you is what's behind that thing you see when people stick one foot out to the side and then sort of surreptitiously s-l-i-i-i-de from one conversational group to another.  What has happened is that they have detected greener conversational pastures beside or behind them and are basically voting with their feet.Once your hearing starts to go there’s no more pulling off this strategic side-step into better conversations. By then you’re glad if you can hear what the one person directly opposite you is saying.Of course actual deaf and hard of hearing people do just fine. On its website, renowned Gallaudet University describes itself as “a bilingual, diverse, multicultural institution of higher education that ensures the intellectual and professional advancement of deaf and hard of hearing individuals through American Sign Language and English.”American Sign Language: a language that allows the deaf and hard of hearing to function every bit as well as, and perhaps possibly better than, the rest of us. American Sign Language: yet another language most of us Americans do not study and do not know.I certainly don't know American Sign Language so what I find myself doing is telling people to take their hands away from their mouths so I can read their lips, or asking them to  SAY THAT AGAIN PLEASE.I hate having to do this. I’m afraid I come off sounding grouchy and that’s the last thing I want to be doing as I get older.Still, I know it’s just pride that makes me feel this way and what do I need with pride at this stage of my life? “Just go with it T,” I tell myself. “Just accept it”But anyway, tell ya what: it turns out toothpaste in the hair makes a pretty good styling gel. 

Exotica!

This is me on a typical Monday morning, hand over my eyes, pretending I don’t have to get up and begin again pushing that workweek rock uphill.Not really.This is an orangutan I took a picture of last week when I went to the zoo again, only this zoo was the famous zoo in San Diego.San Diego! Is there a more beautiful spot on the continent? It mists up at night, just enough to keep the grass green, then, and then, like in Camelot, the moisture lifts come dawn and you have a sunny day whose colors seem to come right out of an artist's palette.They don’t though; the colors are real. Look at this view out our hotel room window; it’s looks like a watercolor, right?We did a lot in San Diego, even though we were there for only two full days. We went to spend time with our beloved older brother and his husband,...in the Ocean Beach section of San Diego where they live, walking and eating great food at the Organic food co-op and Ranchos Cocina, and - of course! - going out onto the very long pier where people still fish for the dinner while 70 feet below crazy people in wetsuits surf the giant waves.There’s more to say about the trip, but one thing I know I ‘ll remember is how I walked down Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach and met a woman about my age with dreadlocks, who held a sign reading: “Dirty Jokes: 25 cents each." I wish now that I’d sprung for a couple. I do admire the entrepreneurial spirit.Well more later about this Camelot. Until then let me rise up from my monkey-nap and keep on working. Just a day-and-half left to the workweek NOW![embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woA_SfURbt0[/embed] 

Bubbles, Baths & the Pearly Gates

On a rainy night with the scent of the wakening earth filling the air, I drove to a dinner where I found myself seated beside an elderly gentleman with dark and shining eyes.After we had performed the small unfurling ceremony of the napkins, he turned to me with a pleasant look.“And so,” he said, “What have you been doing here on earth?”“What?” I thought. “Who was this, St. Peter come down to do an early audit on me?”At first my mind reeled back to the time I was three and used my nap to do the wallpaper over in a bright Crayola rainbow; and also the time I got expelled at age seven for incorrigible whispering.“Do you mean what has my WORK been?“ I finally said, since Americans all think that their work is who they are.I thought back to the jobs I have held as a swimming counselor, and a lifeguard, as a teacher, and a chambermaid.And then there has been this decades-long career of writing for publication, which I picture as a kind of mangy tail that I ‘m dragging along behind me, like that super-long scarf I tried to knit in Sixth Grade and had to keep ON knitting because I didn't know how to finish it.“Casting off” I think is the term for it. I have never learned to cast off in life.Yet I knew that none of this is what the man meant. I could tell by his expression.“Let me put it another way,” he said. “What have you cared about in your time here? What have you loved?”Stated like that, the question set up in me such a whirring of mental gears that I was struck utterly speechless. Lucky for me, just then the emcee tapped his microphone and began the program.I was off the hook.And though the elderly gent and I never did return to the topic, his question remains with me still. Now if you thought this was the place where I might go all sublime and send my thoughts soaring into the realm of the angels, well, you’d be wrong.  The things I keep coming back to are more in the realm of the schoolyard. They are that simple. So what are they, these things I have loved so much? Well, baths, for starters. I love baths. I love taking baths myself and I love giving baths to little people, who look so much like baby seals with their hair all slicked back you forget they have ears.Also, bubbles. I love blowing the kind of giant bubble you can make by soaping up one hand, making a fist with it, then slowly opening the fist just enough to see that a pane of iridescence in the nickel-sized opening. I love how you can blow lightly on it and - presto! – make a bright wobbling orb as big as your face.I love listening to small children and delighting in what they will say.I think of the time one suddenly said to me “I like your nice fat arms,” or the time another leaned close to her mother in public to whisper, “That poor man has nipples all over his face!”I love being in the presence of kids generally, no matter what their age or what they are doing, just because they are so funny and honest. I love the way they live in the here and now.And I think that St. Peter might want me to live like them, open to surprise and delight as they are, with no more thoughts about mangy tails or the casting-off skills I will likely never, ever possess. .

"Jameson's? What's Jameson's"

 I have always been a frugal person. I have never flown first-class. I have never traveled in the fancy front car on the train where you get free drinks AND snacks AND a fresh copy of the daily paper brought right to you. I have never paid the special fee for the privilege of sitting in those special rooms the airlines provide, where people get the drinks and the snacks and the daily paper while lolling on cushy sofas.So when, six weeks ago, my husband David and I begin dreaming of a getaway far from all this snow and ice, I went online and found what looked like a decent room in a hotel on St. Thomas.As I was reading the particulars of the place aloud to him, he said, “Why not just call Scott?,” Scott being the travel agent from The Travel Collaborative used by the company David works for.So we did call Scott, who looked into his special Travel Agent’s crystal ball and suggested we register at the hotel at the “club level.” It would cost us more up front, but depending on how much we used it, it might…. just….possibly…. end up costing less.Scott can be pretty persuasive in his own sweet way. He reminded us of how hard the winter had been – poor us! poor us! – and told us how we owed it to ourselves to sign up for this slightly more elevated ‘Club Level’ arrangement.Twenty-four hours later, with our credit card number duly handed over, he closed with his signature remark. “You kids have fun!” he said.And by God didn’t we. We flew to the island, bussed to the hotel and immediately upon unpacking went to check out the ‘Club Level Lounge’, where, from noon on, we could get not only free food but also as many servings as we could want of wine, and beer, and rum.There were, in fact, nine kinds of rum. Nine! Also, tea and coffee. Free for breakfast we could have anything from omelets and bacon to smoked salmon and bagels. And for the day’s two larger meals? Fresh shrimp and cheeses . Soups and fancy wee sandwiches. Fried calamari and salads, and an array of ever-varying cream-infused hot dishes.Because I am a creature of habit, for the first few days I ate in my usual way, subsisting mainly on feathered celery, cucumber curls, fluted carrot sticks and only sometimes indulging in a bite of calamari, carefully stripping it first of its yummy fried-dough jacket.Now me, I don’t really like rum, or beer, and for me – eh! - wine is just wine in the end. However also set out every day and free for the taking were: Vodka (Absolut), Gin (Tanqueray), Scotch (Johnny Walker Red) and Jameson’s. “What IS Jameson's anyway?" I asked David on our second night."It’s whiskey, dummy. It's Irish whiskey.”“Why what at a coincidence!” I thought. “I'm Irish myself!”And so I drank me some  Jameson’s, and I LOVED me that Jameson’s, and suddenly I felt a sort of floodgate open in me, such that over the course of next three days I devoured the omelets, the croissants, the pastries and the cheeses, as well as many, many calamari, all still wearing their yummy deep-fried jackets.It was an experience, all right. And I’m not sure but I think we just MIGHT have beaten the house in terms of value for our dollar.But now we are home, and both on diets in the hope that we might travel more cheaply again at some future time. Why? Because while we knew the airlines charge for your bags, what we didn’t know is that they charge even more for the added weight of your nice new fat tummy. Right now though? Right now all I can think about is the lolling. and the feasting. and the fun.  

Spring (almost)

We had a day of warmth.  One day anyway.It was Wednesday.I brought two of my grandchildren to the zoo near us, a small-scale zoo, easily understood and easy to navigate, like some say the city of Boston is.One of these two is still in his wheelchair, having RE-broken the leg he broke on January 5th, this time by falling down and twisting it just the wrong way in his very own kitchen. (So close to healed he was! Such a shame!)  And so at the zoo we had a wheelchair and crutches, the three of us. 'We' were a seven-year-old, his little sister just turned three and me, a person who after this extremely vivid winter looks every inch her age.As we studied the lynx and the llama, the tarantula and the monkeys, the seven-year-old insisted on poling along with his crutches over concrete walkways as compromised  by frost heaves as all our roads are. So I pushed the wheelchair. which his little sister decided to ride in, everyone under eight casting aside these aids every three minutes  to clamber close to the fences  and TRY to see inside the nostrils of the bison; TRY to grasp the sipping-straw legs of the many flamingoes, those comical birds, dipped in pink-orange dye as they appear to be always. And when this happened, I would  be pushing the empty wheelchair while carrying the crutches and their two jackets.An hour in, the boy with his heavy cast and crutches finally did grow weary. "I think I need the chair now Callie," he told his sister.Her face showed her disappointment - of course! I mean who DOESN'T want to be propelled along aloft like this. But his little brother, ever kind, said "You can sit in my lap," So the boy settled in the wheelchair,  I hoisted his little sister up into the chair, balanced the crutches across the top and hung the jackets from the crutches' two ends.So the day was tiring, yes, but it sure was fun. We kicked every rotting snowbanks we passed along the pathways, yelling "Die, snow!' The little girl loved the snow leopards best. Pointing to the three heavy rubberized balls set in their environment for them to paw and play with, she told me gravely, "Those are their eggs," and I wasn't about to correct her.The chair lurched at every crack in the concrete and we were all getting tired, but just then an older man appeared who volunteers at the place."Which way is out?" I asked him, the grounds having begun to somehow seemed to me less small-scale and easily grasped  than I had thought."Follow me," he said. And so we had an escort,AND the fun of snow-kicking,AND the sighting of two mammals capable of laying large round  eggs.It was a a great afternoon, and for one short hour the temperature hit 60.According to weather.com, next Wednesday the day will start out at 17 degrees but we're getting there, WE"RE GETTING THERE ALL RIGHT .....aren't we?  

Accept It?

We all gripe but maybe there’s a way to not mind this endless winter and it is this: Accept it.Look at it this way: Sure there’s always that salt-and-sand mix on the floor by the door, agreed. You track it in on your boots and shoes and every day there’s more of it. Always with the salt and sand by the door!  But what are you gonna do? Sure, you can sweep it up every day and sure, you can put down a mat for those boots and shoes, but mostly things are gonna look a little litter-boxy for a while yet over there by the door. Accept that fact. Accept the fact that there’s still treacherous walking caused by the snow and the ice and the slush and the more snow. Over the last few weeks I have seen so many people take that banana-peel-style leap-and-tumble I feel like I’m watching some kind of super-athletic dance company in action. The other day at the grocery store I saw five people on crutches with casts on their legs. Five! And all of them were under 40!Sometimes it just feels safer to just stay indoors, so accept that fact.Maybe even try being glad for it. Because when you’re spending more time indoors you have the chance to tidy up a bit.Take the job of cleaning your closets. People don’t clean their closets in summer. It’s now that we’re moved to do it.  I’ve been cleaning closets myself lately. I’ve also been customizing things. Yesterday I dyed a bunch of sad old towels with hilarious results. (Let’s just say it looks like my man will be wearing underpants of a gorgeous sunrise hue for a while.)And today I began going over letters sent to me by people who have been reading my column all these years. I laughed all over again at the one where a woman wrote, in reference to the picture that accompanied my column at that time, “What makes you think you’re so great? Your eyes are beady, your hair is out of style, and your teeth look false.”After the initial shock, I laughed when I first saw it too. And when I published my first collection of short funny pieces I put that quote right on the back cover where the gushing remarks usually go. I took at lightly in other words. I took it with a grain of salt.Maybe that’s what we all have to do right now. Maybe we have take these snow banks with a grain of salt - and God knows the salt is in good supply. We can just amble over to that spot where our boots and shoes are and take some from there.As I say, what're you gonna do?

the above-mentioned blurb , I Thought He Was a Speed Bump

  

Forget the Resort Wear

Four things I learned on my vacation:Number One, if you’re not going with another woman, don’t bother bringing a whole lot of clothes. I brought five pairs of pants, seven tops, one of the new floaty cover-ups, two bathing suits, and a pair of shorts. I wore only the bathing suits, the shorts and the cover up, the last of which made me look like Mamma Cass.I never wore the slacks. What was I thinking, five pairs of slacks in the Caribbean? I did once wear the pair I had travelled in, just that one night when we went to the real restaurant rather than the poolside one.No, you should only bother about the nice clothes if you're with your women friends who will appreciate every last stitch and bangle. You should totally NOT bother wearing them for your man, who is never going to notice what clothes you have on, but will look at you twice only when the clothes come off.A bald assertion but a true one. In my experience. Ahem. Number Two, hotels have all the white-noise action you need. You really CAN travel without your tiny fan and your whirring white-noise machine. You really can. Terry. Number Three, if you’re at a hotel high in the hills where you take your life in your hands to travel  by taxi on narrow cliffside roads, you'd better have brought  your book. Or, as my daughter said upon hearing about the place we just stayed at, you’d better really LIKE your book - because your book will be about it unless you are one who can sit in the ocean for hours at a time, letting the surf bat you softly about like a sea anemone.  Number Four, Yes you can have fun finishing three books and the last six issues of The New Yorker, and yes it’s always satisfying to catch up on a million work-oriented emails while also keeping abreast of events in the whole known world; but if you want your head to really clear, next time, NEXT TIME, sit more in the surf, until  you feel yourself floating like all that nice aquatic plant life.

Funny Lady

Last week, when my birthday rolled around I reflected once again how nice it has been to share the day with one of America’s great humorists. At the time of her death, every print and broadcast outlet in the country ran a tribute to Erma Bombeck, the homemaker from Dayton who one day sat down and began sending out dispatches from the front lines of motherhood. The dispatches grew into first a column syndicated to over 900 newspapers and then some 15 books, including the wickedly titled The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank.But as uniformly fond as these tributes were as I reread them online now, many of them read as slightly dismissive, framing her almost as a clever dabbler, a suburban mom who started writing columns as a lark.As if any writer doing a thing ‘as a lark’ could produce the tightly crafted sketches she was known for. As if anyone tossing something off in the odd half hour could describe the child-rearing game the way she did.She wrote in one column that she once lived in a place so small she had to iron in the baby’s playpen.She wrote in another that if her kids had looked as good as the kids of her perfect neighbor, she would have sold them.She spoke about the child who could “eat yellow snow, kiss the dog on the lips, chew gum that he found in the ash tray, but wouldn’t drink from his brother's glass.”And then there was the column where she imagined how each of her three kids might someday recall her: Her first-born would think of her as “the slim dark-haired mom who used to read me stories and paste my baby pictures in the album.” Her second-born would picture “the somber-looking bleached blonde who used to put me to bed at 6:30 and bought me a dog to save on napkins.” And the baby of the family, she wrote, would remember her as “the grayish lady who fell asleep during the 6 o'clock news, and was GOING to display my baby pictures, as soon as she took the rest of the roll - at my wedding.”She had just that light way of describing time’s effect. But funny as she was, she always told the truth.She spoke of the feeling that comes to women raising kids in the then-newly fashionable ‘nuclear family’ where a man, a woman and their children went off and lived on their own, sometimes far from all kin.Her commentary on this new arrangement: “No one talked about it, but everyone knew what it was. It was a condition, and it came with the territory.”She called that condition 'loneliness.'I found out about this loneliness when I left my job teaching to care for my own small children. In their baby years, I would stuff them into coats and snowsuits and push, or walk, carry them – somewhere - anywhere I might find another woman in another house trying to do the hardest job on earth all by herself.But when those babies napped? When they napped, I’d kick the toys under the couch and begin to read and read, looking for something I could not name – until one day in my daily paper I met the writer who would show me what I most wanted to do in life.Erma wrote a column every week for 32 years. By now I've been writing one for 35 years – and with every passing birthday I think what a privilege it has been to follow in her footsteps, recording life as we really live it and celebrating its vicissitudes.

this was us in 1980, before the final child come and broke the snoozy,two-little-girls peace

Jeez Louise

I always thought if you skidded you went sideways, but I didn’t go sideways on that horrible day of icy roads and freezing rain that we had last month in northern New England.On that day, with conditions so treacherous the state ran out of tow trucks, my car didn’t go the way I asked at all but jackrabbited instead , straight into a tree.Never mind that I was turning the wheel.Never mind that I had braked with extra care.But if the car didn't go sideways over the last two months, just about everything else around here did – even before we got to the seven feet of snow.For one thing, everyone in my family got sick and some of us got Technicolor sick.I was one of the lucky ones: My kind of sick just had me laid out like Lenin in his tomb for most of our family vacation, aware only dimly of various kind family members circling through to bring me food I could not eat.Then, for the week following, I couldn’t sleep, because my air passages were so packed with what felt like concrete.Then, for two weeks after that, I couldn’t wake up.Also, for most of those weeks, I couldn't read.I couldn't iron, though ironing has always helped me calm myself in the midst of every kind of personal shipwreck. I would LOOK at the iron propped on the windowsill and sink, ‘How do you suppose that thing works?’ I would LOOK at the TVs darkened screen and think, “Weren't there some sort of beguiling images or something that used to emit from there? ‘And there is more: My little grandson broke his leg badly enough that he’ll be in walkin' like Captain Ahab ‘til the tulips come up. My sister fell and broke her pelvis.And I caught two toes on a piece of medical equipment at the doctor’s office – in the doctor’s very office! – painfully spraining them both.Someplace in there, chiefly out of a sense of compassion for my salt-and-sand encrusted vehicle, I pulled into our local carwash, but did so such a way that the two guys manning the place began yelling and waving their soapy long-handled brushes around wildly.Why? Why were they yelling? They were yelling because though I had glided nicely into place, settling my wheels just so in those two wheel-receiving troughs they have, I had then proceeded to throw the car smartly into Reverse and step on the accelerator.Then, in the ensuing panic, I stepped on the brake and leaned on the set of four buttons that open all the windows.So now every time I go to the car wash, the guys there take one look at my approaching vehicle and start yelling right away. “Neutral!” they go, waving their funny brushes. “Put it in Neutral!” They get so worked up every single time jeez Louise.But me, I just look at it like this: At least I didn’t try going in sideways.

Some Grumble, Some Stay Sweet

People are losing it for sure. Today the traffic in and around Boston was so bad folks were calling in to WBZ Radio to yell about how in an entire hour they had gone only 75 yards.Here's a picture looking out at my back yard in early 2015. I look at it and marvel at the fact that I took it in the dead of winter, a couple of weeks into this lively new year.It's hard to believe we had such a green January - and a green December too, as you can see by my little seasonally dressed friend sitting at the window in our kitchen to peek out.

This is the view out that window today:

We WOULD have scraped the snow off this little roof that comes up only to the tops of our heads, but even my tallest house guests kept sinking past crotch-height in this super-deep snow, which is acting a lot more like quicksand.

So no wonder people are getting grouchy.

I'm getting grouchy myself and even yelled "Christ!" in anger in this very kitchen on Monday before of an audience of sweet and deluded young people who I think previously thought I was Mother Theresa.

But the really sweet person? The female letter carrier who left a note I saw about digging  out one's mailbox.

And how do you know she's so nice? You just have to give the notice a more-than-cursory glance: she drew  a little smiley face right near the bottom .

 God bless the even-tempered huh? Now please somebody come quick and help me with these swords!

the view from the window of my second story office.  

Snowday Epiphanies

It takes a lot to slow us Americans down, no matter what the weather does. We stand at bus stops, profiles to the wind like those big-domed heads on Easter Island. We churn along snowy roads. We crane our necks in subway stations watching for the light on that first train car to lumber into view.  But if the governor says, “stay home,” we stay home. Anyway, the schools are closed and even the officious bureaucrats have to acknowledge that they too are ‘non-essential personnel’.And so there we all are on these snowdays, walled up in our houses for the duration.And it’s hard, at first, to stop spinning our wheels.  We go out and shovel, or try to anyway. We probe holes in the snow for the dryer vent. We probe holes for the car’s exhaust pipe, in the event that we’re ever be able to drive again, which prospect looks pretty doubtful with everything we own getting swaddled in filaments of white like flies by giant spiders. Then, trekking back indoors, we begin on the small household jobs we always forget we have waiting for us.In the snowdays just past, I catalogued old photos, sliding them into albums I had bought for the purpose nearly a decade ago. 

• I sorted through many perfectly fine articles of clothing I somehow never wear, and bagged them up to give to Goodwill.
• I went through my mother’s old collection of recipes clipped from the newspapers of the 50s, 60s and 70s and smiled at the easy, guilt-free way people cooked before food preparation became a competitive sport. ( “For Hearty Fisherman’s Stew,” one recipe begins,  “take a can each of Campbell’s Cream of Celery Soup, Campbell’s Lobster Bisque and Campbell’s Clam Chowder adding to these three canfuls of cream…”)
• I climbed to the attic and knelt by that old cabinet that holds all my mother’s diaries and read every single entry she made in the last three months of a life none of us knew was about to go to black as abruptly as that famous final episode of The Sopranos.

 But ‘Enough of this clerk work!’  I finally told myself. ‘Enough with this peering and the sorting!'I drew a bath and sat in the hot soapy water for a full 40 minutes, considering things - and realized, as I studied my feet, that they look exactly as they looked when I sat in the tub at age three while my mother worked a busy washcloth between my toes.That made me smile and I felt my own inner clockworks slow down at last. I stopped obsessing about how we would ever dig out; stopped fretting over how I would meet my obligations and get to the places I needed to get to in the days ahead.Then, with the bath drained and me once again dressed, I went into the kitchen and began rummaging among the canned goods - to find there slumbering after all these years, the making of a ‘stew’ of my own, from those trusty soups in the red-and-white cans. I had Cream of Tomato, I had Cream of Mushroom and I had Cream of Chicken. It was 1960 again.  And it began to look to me as though  old William Faulkner hit the nail on the head when he said, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.”  What at though, eh? Now WHERE did I put mom's old frilly apron again? 

Static?

It’s one thing or another these last days: it’s too moist or too dry. When it’s moist it’s moist because clouds are draped us like damp heavy sails pulled down onto the deck and every other hour snow falls. The snow soaks our clothes and puddles on our floors. We count on other members of our household to towel us off when we come back inside, looking like sleek and wet-headed pups, hair close against heads. But then the sun comes out and our furnaces are still working overtime because it’s so cold.  I drew this pretty tassled cloth from the drier and saw it sort of 'tentacle' all around me. I pulled out the ironing board to try taming it that way and its fringes began reaching for the bureau. I picked it up again and leaped onto my sweater. Then I remembered that can of Static Guard I had bought back in the 90s which did the trick.But it has had me pondering in the hours since that little cloth’s eerie antics:What does Science all the the opposite of static? Dynamic, right?  So then what are we living through right now with all this weather and the snow piled high against our windows and fresh storms bustling in past the gate to muscle aside the storms that have come before them. Is this the static dead zone of deep true Winter? Or is there something dynamic that, beneath all the wailing gales and blinding snows, is breeding Spring, which is not SO many weeks down the road, no matter how things feel right now?What was it that Hamlet said to his school pal after seeing his father's ghost on the castle parapets? “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” How true is that?!

Just Go With It

It gets so cold in January and God I mind it, warm-blooded creature that I am. It turns out we humans aren't that good at cheerfully soldiering on when the temperatures really plunge.It makes me think of something a nice young cardiologist told me he says to his patients.  He tells them, “Embrace the pain,” and I had to smile a little, hearing it. I mean he’s a heart doctor; most of his patients are heart patients.“How does THAT go over?” I had to ask. I needed him to explain more. “Well,” he said, “you have to just accept your pain on some level. Not fight it, or curse it, or stiffen against it but sort of… open up to it instead. “ Ok I thought. Maybe the way an animal does, when confronted with the wounded paw or the bitten ear, or the fear of the unknown that arises at the sight of that examining table in the vet’s office. It’s a compelling theory; I’ll give him that. Not sure it works with the cold though.Cold of the kind we have known lately sets off the body’s most unignorable alarm bells. “Danger to the Organism!” it says, the direst message the body can send. Because cold is the enemy, plain and simple.  These days I pity every cold thing I see out there, except maybe the dead in their cemeteries. I pity the cemeteries though. The little flags on the veterans’ graves shivering on their wee stalks. The headstones themselves, and the thin old ones especially, blading into those winds that seem bent on completely scouring off the names and dates their engravings seek to memorialize.I pity the waters in ponds and rivers that got frozen - zap! - all at once, as they rippled; that were just stopped like people in some sci-fi movie, turned to stone in mid-gesture. I pity the birds, hopping stiffly about on their sipping-straw legs, finding who knows what to peck from soil that rings like iron under the foot. I pity the squirrel I saw last week, hanging limply from the talons of a hawk that swooped down just eight feet from me to carry him off for supper. My heart pounded at the sight. I thought for a split-second it was one of our cats he carried off.But no, not the cats.Because the cats are smarter than all of us.  They stay inside on days like the ones we’ve had lately, lounging around in their pj’s, and sleeping late and waking to lick their paws with all the delicacy of ballerinas smoothing the sides of their satin slippers.As a matter of fact, the cats gave me the only smile I remember enjoying throughout all of this winter cold.It was one night when my mate and I were curled in sleep, the only human beings in the house.Under our pile of quilts and blankets we made a single mound, which the cats, in an uncharacteristic move, decided to scale.I woke with an unaccustomed sense of pins-and-needles on account of their weight. And I started to shoo them off - until it came to me what we must have looked like: Two little pats of butter on a big warm stack of hotcakes.That image in mind, I turned over again, thought “Embrace it, girl!“ then hugged my pillow tighter and went back to sleep.

Uh...No

I was at the mall yesterday at my new favorite store there, which specializes in so many types of diaphanous raiment you’d think it was another era entirely; for here seems to be gathered every lacy top and angel-sleeved dress ever worn by the Mamas and the Papa’s Michelle Phillips or Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks.So absorbed was I admiring in  this little cream-colored lace number, which the sales people had paired with a kind of soft wool cape woven in tones of peach and ivory, just the exact shades of a Creamsicle, that I didn’t even notice the beefy guy hanging by the counter clutching a cup of iced coffee as big as a half-gallon jug of milk."Hmmm", I thought, "you wouldn’t take this guy for your usual Free People shopper",  but then neither am I that, I suppose. I suppose I belong up the way at the Women’s department at Macy’s, pawing my way through tidy double-knit suits, but what can I say? I can’t forget that decade I was a young and not yet a mother when all us girls went about, even to the office, dressed in after-bath fashion, like Michelle here:This guy though: this guy finally broke his silence."Hey so can I leave my coffee here?"The two young women who, come to think of it looked a lot LIKE Michelle Phillips and Steve Nicks, regarded him saucer-eyed.“Excuse me?” they said together.He didn't like that. “I’m tryna walk the mall ,SEE. And I don’t want to carry my iced coffee, SEE. So I’m asking you: Can I park it here and come back and get it after, or not?”They were both young enough to know only a world where you get asked again and again at the airport if a stranger has given you anything to take on the plane ; where you get asked again and again if you packed your bag yourself, so of course they were stunned by the suggestion. Anyone would be, in this day and age.They said no they were afraid they could not keep his iced coffee, whereupon he uttered a series of nasty phrases and stomped off.He was in the wrong church AND the wrong pew, poor dope - maybe a little like Yours Truly who left the store with the ivory dress, AND the peaches-and-cream serape AND a crisply white flowing long-sleeved top.HE didn’t get away with his caper. I guess it remains to be seen whether or not I,  who was born just a few years after Stevie Nicks, will get away with mine, haha. Fie on the age-appropriate! 

Always with the Exercise!

Working on new Resolutions for Self,  fetch fresh pad of paper, write “Use-it-or-Lose-It, Just-Do-It, Better-to-Wear-Out-Than-Rust-Out.”Put pen down, stretching out on couch to ponder motivating strategies. Whistle.  Hum. Search ceiling corners for spider webs.Thirty minutes later, sit up, print following words: “WHAT GOT SELF TO EXERCISE IN PAST?” Easy enough:One, School System. Exercised because school forced Self to. In 8^th Grade High, 90-year-old gym teacher with tight grey perm and pale dead eyes yelled at Self, struck Self’s calves with old-lady cane, merely to get Self to stand up and uncross arms.Two, Cute Outfits, though these not in play in high school years when Self is made to wear inmate-style gym suit with name stitched on back. To avoid this fate, Self learns to fake low-level seizure activity every Tuesday and Friday. Works like charm.Time travel past matriculation at women’s college with gym clothes from WWI: rough cotton tunics with, God help Self, bloomers underneath. Wear for all freshman and sophomore sports ‘til Student Revolution sweeps country, causing Phys Ed requirement and so much more to go down like the Titanic.\Three, Adulthood and The Need to a Earn Living, requiring Self to look presentable, display admirable levels energy. Exercise methods in these years include:

• Standing All Day at Work
• Labor and Delivery
• Baby/Child Care.

Four, Fact That Running for Running’s Sake Appears On Scene. Jogging invented! Self is out of house at 6am, alone for 25 whole minutes. Self thinks died, went Heaven.Five, Exercise Morphs into National Obsession: Nautilus invented. People pay to push/pull/lift objects not in any way needing to be pushed/pulled/lifted. Also tossed up from same vast change: Aerobics. Cute outfits in play at last!  Self gives both resistance training AND aerobics a try in get-ups of the day: high-cut leotards and tights-with-leg-warmers, short-shorts and muscle shirts, giantly ballooning satiny workout pants and matching jackets.Upshot of all the Above: Self goes full tilt at various modalities. Runs for six months, collapses arch. Aerobicizes for 12 months, turns ankle. Weight-trains for 12 years, working muscles to failure, but more than muscles fail.Tired of so much me-focus, Self spends six months doing no exercise at all, has annual checkup with young doc who delivers stern lecture, mentioning his own daily soccer game.Self nods head, pities guy’s wife.Then one day Self sees old friend, tells her she looks great, what’s her secret? “Pilates at the Y” friend answers.Self joins Y where Self does Pilates, too. Also Zumba, Yoga, Jazz, Tai Chi - not alone but with 20 to 30 others dressed any old way. When woman to the right of self reveals she is 88 real goal of exercise dawns on Self: to get to that age too.Later, in Locker Room of Honesty, Self looks around at women of all shapes and sizes, ages and degrees of able-bodiedness. Smiles big at dawning enlightenment. Never mind “died and went to heaven;” let Self live and live, right here on Earth.,But still who didn't love Richard Simmons? ;-)

Victorian Prudery eh?

 Comment from the ever-clever Ann Aikens of UpperValleyGirl fame who wrote in response to my last post: "Marital aids and opiates – perfect for the holidays!" I didn't get the marital aids part until I read back over the darn thing. Figure it might have something to do with those bendable dolls? ( Unless there's a bedroom use for air guns that I don't know about.) Anyway love this old photo, an ad as I'm supposing for what Wikipedia tells me was once a highly respected manufacturing company out of New Haven. I only knew to look for this picture because I bought a greeting card with the very same image on it and inside the card, the text  "Who Would Have Thought?" - because of course we do now have Edible Undies and such which I'm guessing are made out of Fruit Roll-Ups.  Funny thing is I just threw this card out last week; could never figure out who to send it to,Now that I'm ascending toward sainthood it didn't seem like the sort of joke I should be mailing around haha - which doesn't mean I don't get a huge kick every time I look at the DamnYouAutoCorrect site, my favorite entry being the one where some poor homebody is texting his friend about the evening meal: "Chicken vaginas sound good for dinner?" Talk about thanks, I'll pass!  

A Tad on the Creepy Side

Things have sure changed since the old days, as I’m learning as I thumb through The Book of Christmas Things from the 1800s, a collection of holiday ads, songs and stories gathered and edited by one Robert F. Hudson. Example: Contrast the silly seasonal songs we hear nowadays with some of those folks’ Christmas ditties - like the one that whose second verse goes “Joy comes and goes but grief remains, my days small comfort bring….”Try getting people today to go out and spend money with a tune like THAT ringing in their ears!  Or take the advertisements of the time. How far would a toy company get today with this ad, running under a photo of a two dolls, a larger girl and a little tiny boy: “Great inventors, artists, and mechanics have been at work for years trying to perfect low-priced, jointed indestructible dolls that can be made to sit down, bend over, stand on their heads, move arms and legs and be placed in all sorts of cute positions either undressed or undressed.” Hmmm.It goes on: “The doll here shown is the most wonderful and successful result of long and weary trials, the boy doll made in the same manner, not jointed but with fancy suit of clothes to match, so you can dress and undress.“ (Lucky joint-free boy doll, who couldn’t bend an arm to help around the house even if asked! Plus he’s got the fancy clothes.)But the part that really strikes me as strange is that even after buyers shelled out their 25 cents to buy this pair they STILL wouldn’t be done, because, as the text explains in far smaller print, they dolls are just two skins (Hannibal Lecter called) but “you can fill them with bran or sawdust or cotton and easily sew them up.”Folks from the 1880s also loved cutlery it seems. It wasn’t like now when we all keep hearing from some poor 19-year-old who wants to come to our houses and sell us new knives by demonstrating how crummy our old knives are.Here’s an ad showing a spoon couple sitting up in their bed with expressions of Victorian shock while a third spoon wearing Christmas stocking around his nether parts is seen leaping in there with them. Wha-a-a-t?And here’s an ad for a spoon with Santa himself crowning its top and a Christmas tree worked into its bowl.  “What’s the matter with a solid silver Santa Claus spoon?” the ad bullies. “It’s alright!” it shouts on. “For the baby, for an oatmeal spoon, or as a teaspoon or as a charming souvenir of the season for anybody.”Then there’s this ad for “the perfect rifle, to shoot 22–100 cartridges, or act as an air gun to shoot darts slugs and bullets; “A Christmas Present That Cannot Fail to Please Your Boy or Friend!” its header reads in outsized print. “Suited for lawns, parlors shooting galleries, excursions festivals and fairs,” it goes on, “or to use about the house barn or field to shoot rats and small game.”Then finally, there’s this ad, for a gift that promises a cure for whatever ailed those people of yore; “The Best Christmas Gift “ says its headline. “If father is getting bald and mother suffers constantly from headache or neuralgia; if sister is prematurely gray and brother is troubled with dandruff or crazed with agonizing toothache we will guarantee a cure1” –and no, they’re not selling anything made from the magical coca leaf, or some elixir made up of 100-proof whisky, but rather a hairbrush. A hairbrush! I suppose people bought them, because it’s true: there really IS a sucker born every minute, as the canny P.T Barnum put it, whatever the century or decade.(and while we're at it, how's this image, drawn by the famous Thomas Nast? Pretty (and while we're at it, how's this image, drawn by the famous Thomas Nast? Pretty sure I wouldn't get in his lap !