Safe to Port

This is a picture of our girl Annie with her little nephew David, on vacation on Kiawah Island a few years ago.  And this is from a poem called "To a Newborn Baby Girl" that I found when  Annie was born:

Now from the coast of morning paleComes safe to port thy tiny sail.Now have we seen by early sonThe miracle of life begun.

She looked like this at the time of her birth, seen here with her mom:She was so little when she was born! - and the pregnancy had its complications, so we worried.Here she was a few days later, still in the first week of life, with her Grandma Ruth:But in time she grew. Here she is with her Dad at age five:And here she is, on the left, with her first best friend sister Carrie.This was Annie is at age 15 with our ABC host son Dodson who was halfway through RPI here.)Was it just two years later that she and John fell in love? I think so.Time passed.And passed.Until, last December, when they got married.And, after ten years of being everyone's favorite auntie (seen here with little Edward in 2006)... Annie and John had a baby of thie own, just a couple of days ago, and named her for their paternal grandmothers.This explains my being away for a while, not that I did any work. (What do women say about a grandbaby? The best work they never did? Anyway here is little Ruth Alice now, to be called Ruthie Magee.Seen here with her proud dad. And again with him and a madly ecstatic looking grandma.  Well done you two! So can we come over later today? ;-)  

Gandhi and Mother Theresa? Maybe Not Yet

I sometimes think I want to be the kind of old lady my mother was, breezily calling them as she saw them, as with the docile babies in the TV commercials. “That child is drugged!” she was always yelling at the television.Most times though, I want to ​be an old person like my kindly Uncle Rob whose eyes would fill with tears watching those same babies, and who loved everything in sight: the supper you made him, the squirrels outside, even the two stiff high school photos of my sister and me smiling eternally away there on the living room table. I guess I​'ve hoped in general that both David and I would grow sweeter with age in this way. And I thought this was actually happening, to David anyway, the day he felt a little spider land on his nose and begin rappelling down toward his chin like a climber descending a cliff-face.  When I saw him unhook the delicate rope of web, go to the door and set the whole thing down outside, all I could think was, “What a Gandhi of a guy! What an out-and-out saint!”Well, I don’t know what happened to THAT man, but he sure was among the missing on the day we discovered a huge hornets’ nest peeking out from the ivy that crawls across the garage roof. “We have hornets!” I yelled over to the neighboring family as we stood watching a zillion bees zooming back toward the hive and squirming wiggle-hipped inside it. “It’s nothing,” said David. “Who’s afraid of bees?” “I am!” said the next-door mom from her porch. “What will we DO?” I yipped, panicky.“Take ‘em out,” David said, with that exact smile Jay Gatsby smiles when Tom Buchanan reveals his bootlegging past.He trotted inside and emerged almost immediately with an aerosol can of bee killer bought in the 1990s.“YOU can’t do this!” the next-door-dad called over. “Get the professionals!”“At least go put on gloves!” called his wife.  “And a hat and jacket!” she added.“At least long sleeves!” I said. “DAVE,” I added in my meanest wifely voice.But no, he said. He had it covered, he said. He would wait and spray them when they were all back in the nest for the night.  In an hour, he said, just before he went out for his weekly card game.And so it happened that in an hour he went back out to do the deed.He stood three feet from the nest.The rest of us watched from the safety of our houses as, within four seconds of the spraying, he came barreling across the grass, thundered up the back steps and slammed into our house.It seems that the first burst of insecticide had no sooner left the can than the bees swarmed furiously out, one to find Mr. Gandhi-No-More and sting him - zzzt! - right in the ear.Was I nice to him in his pain?Well, sure. Sort of. After I got through delivering the small I-told-you-so smile of the longtime married.And what about him? Was he chastened at all? Not a bit. He even boasted about the incident to our kids the following day.“In the first round it was Bees 1, Dad Nothing. But when I got back from cards at midnight, I had another go at them and Boom! Bees Zip, Dad 250.”Boasting! About all those bee corpses!                 Maybe neither ​one of us is ready for sainthood yet. 

Raking is Better?

Raking is so much better than leaf blowing with those powerful hoses you hear people say - but they're mostly NOT the ones stuck with the rake.Here's a poem  on the subject called Gathering Leaves, by Robert Frost. It's about raking but also about much more. (You know Frost!)

Spades take up leavesNo better than spoons,And bags full of leavesAre light as balloons.I make a great noiseOf rustling all dayLike rabbit and deerRunning away.But the mountains I raiseElude my embrace,Flowing over my armsAnd into my face.I may load and unloadAgain and againTill I fill the whole shed,And what have I then?Next to nothing for weight,And since they grew dullerFrom contact with earth,Next to nothing for color.Next to nothing for use.But a crop is a crop,And who's to say whereThe harvest shall stop?

Maybe you hear some people waxing nostalgic about the joys of raking but I'm more with Frost: gathering these husks, these shells , these vegetal corpses just reminds ME, as he is suggesting in spite of the pink bow he ties it up with at the end, of how hard it is to harvest anything in this life.If they must fall and die then let them. But bear them away quickly, as the men did in my yard yesterday morning. Strangely cheering to watch this brisk householder's task .[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHH0zC1K1aI&feature=youtu.be[/embed] 

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.        

SCARIER Than Halloween

So this is my spine.

You might have to look closely to see it.

David took the picture for me in our bathroom Thursday night.

I had him take it because,  earlier that day, at our weekly session,  I had asked the very gifted woman who works with such care on helping strengthen the muscles that hold me upright to do something:

I had asked her to draw...

in white chalk on my brown shirt...

where the 'buttons' of my backbone were.

This she did and here are the results. This picture below is a close-up.

The lateral line is my braline.

If she had kept going and drawn the ribs too, we could all see that I'm listing sharply, like the Titanic, 30 minutes after impact. In the last few days I've been fixing to blog light-heartedly about this scoliosis that has so recently expressed itself in my body, even though one is apparently born with the condition. But then, just now,  when our ridiculously late Saturday mail finally came and I saw that Mass General had sent me  the images on CD of the MRI they did of my lower back, my comic impulse kind of drained away.The hospital failed to include any narrative about my case  - I will have to ask my PCP for that on Monday - but the images are pretty horrifying if I'm reading them right.The timing is funny because just yesterday Dr. Scott Fuller, the wonderful chiropractor I see every other week, took a notion all on his own to draw a sketch of my back,  based on his X-rays, and mail it to me.

I consider it such a kindness that he would do this for me. I have wanted so much to be able to really picture what was happening in there in there, so I could understand where the pain was coming from and maybe help alleviate it. 

Now I have these official images and I'm feeling more alarmed. It's what behind the little beaded curtain that's significant. And the curve looks different because this 'picture' is taken from the back and Dr. Fuller's was looking at me from the front.

My lumbar spine looks like the tail of a lobster! Now I just want to SEE Dr. Fuller, I just want to SEE Dr. Bennett and get somebody to explain what I'm looking at. It's hard to be alone with pain at night, but in the daytime at least it's nice to have some other kind humans willing to help shed some light on what's going on in your little insides. I don't feel hurt or mad; I don't feel like my body betrayed me – nothing like that. I just want to befriend this faithful servant who has done my bidding so uncomplainingly all these years..

Changing Skyline

It could be May as you look at this tree, couldn't it? I took this picture yesterday outside my local YMCA where I spend an hour or more four times a week.It looks like May but it's sure enough October, and October's last week in case we're forgetting. The hour was noon as I snapped it, and I had just finished Active Stretch Class which involves abs work and balance balls. I thought I'd feel so good after the class but instead everything hurt.I have pain every day now. They did an MRI on me last week because their theory was that I had sciatica but I knew it wasn't sciatica. When my doc saw the images she told me what I already knew: it's the scoliosis I was born with, because people with scoliois are indeed all born with it. It has grown "severe" in the estimation of the medical people only over time. The truth is I didn't know I even had it until a yoga teacher touched my shoulder in class 8 years ago and said not to worry that I wasn't symmetrical in Child's Pose; that it was just my scoliosis.My what? I have what? Then I began to notice that the zippers on my slacks were all off plumb. Then I could no longer wear vertical stripes. Then as a young person in my life said to me one day, "Wow yeah! Your pants are here (gesturing) and your shirt is over here (gesturing a few inches to the right.)There's no cure for scoliosis in adults. No Surgery. They can shoot you with steroids or give you physical therapy. My doctor gave me a scrip for Neurontin. We'll see how THAT goes; I don't like the look of it. She says if your back looks like this, and the disks are 'extravagating' (great word!)  even a little, then some of those delicate little facet joints are going to start  tap-tap-tapping against each other and pinch some poor nerve pretty good.This is what I look like generally,  although my big curve is lumbar rather than thoracic...

(the violet hue is nice though isn't it?)

I guess I've felt a little down since confirmation of my oh-so-severe scoliosis came in, but being in Boston on a beautiful day was lovely. It was lovely to sit in the courtyard at Mass General Hospital and see that famous Ether Domel where the first person was successfully anesthetized in the 1840s

And then there was this lovely sculpture of a mother and child, so tender you did just want to go up to it.

So now, on  good days, I try to embody this spirit:

But there can be no doubt about one thing: It's October, not May, in my body, and it's time for me to adjust an altered skyline.

Bus Ride on a Rainy Day

It was pouring rain as the eight-year-old moved uncertainly toward the back of the bus. He and his mom had boarded partway into this hour-long trip, and there weren’t many seats left. “Grab that one!” she said, pointing to the seat next to me near the back of the bus. He hesitated. “Just sit! You sit there and I’ll sit here!” she said and settled into the seat across the aisle.She seemed slightly annoyed with him and I could tell he didn’t want to annoy her more. In the seat beside me, he shrugged his way out of his backpack, which seemed much too large for his narrow shoulders. Then he looked quickly over at me and away again.  “Hi!” I whispered, inclining my head slightly toward him.  “Hi,” he whispered back.Then I turned back to what I had been doing before the pair boarded, namely toting up a column of figures to see if I could afford new letterhead. “Are you a Math teacher?” he asked, studying my paper. “Nope,” I smiled. “I’m just somebody trying to remember where the decimal point goes!” “I think it goes right…. THERE,” he said, pointing to my bottom line. I didn’t want him to feel he had to make small talk, so once I got done with my calculations; I tucked the paper into my own backpack and pulled out the column I was working on for the following week. I find I can never tell where I’ve gone wrong in my writing just by looking at it on the screen. I have to print it out, and then come back to it later.They call this process ‘letting the manuscript cool’, and it’s an important step. Why? Because if, having let something ‘cool’ in this way, you then come back to it and find that even after reading several of its beginning sentences you have no clue where you were going with it, you have to begin again. Because really if you yourself can’t tell what you're trying to say, how can anyone NOT living inside your little diving-bell of a head possibly figure that out? I was on Paragraph One of the manuscript and already I had altered three words and chopped a phrase.“Is that your homework?” the boy then asked.“In a way,” I said.“Uh huh,” he replied, and looked longingly over at his mother who was fixedly studying the screen of her smartphone.His shoulders sank a little and it came to me that sitting next to a stranger on a long bus ride probably wasn’t what he had hoped to be doing on this day.I leaned across to his mum. “Can he play Ninja Fishing on my phone?” I asked, showing her the app. “Sure," she shrugged and went back to her own screen.The boy played expertly for a few minutes.But Ninja Fishing is pretty old news, even for an 8-year-old, and he soon handed me back my device. Then he sighed a small sigh, pulled what looked like a spelling paper out of his backpack and got busy on his own assignment.I hope he was happy enough to be doing his own work in the world on this stormy afternoon. I hoped so. I really did. Because in that moment as I watched the rain streaming down the bus windows I know how happy I was to be doing mine.  

This Lovely Day

It’s all changing now.Even a whole 12 days before we turn the clocks back, things feel different.The milkweed is even rosy. I found this 'bouquet' today in the field behind the YMCA.And of course the leaves are contemplating cashing it in.I think of what Emily Dickinson wrote to her brother Austin one morning:"We are having such lovely weather," she wrote. “The air is a sweet and still – now and then a gay leaf falling - high in the crimson tree a belated bird is singing – a thousand little painters are tingeing hill and dale..." It was like that today with the thousand little painters.It was also like what Robert Frost described.  In his poem October, he addresses the month directly saying,

Beguile us in the way you know.Release one leaf at break of day; At noon release another leaf; One from our trees, one far away.Retard the sun with gentle mist;Enchant the land with amethyst.

That last line kills me every time, 'enchant the land with amethyst.'I sat on the stone steps in my yard for a while today and watched as the sprinklers swept the lawn for the last time this year.The effect seemed to me magical when the water from two sprinkler heads on either side of the path crossed each other and made a faint rainbow. Can you see it? Look.Now look again. It's a very short video and it's just s flash. But how much we miss when we hurry along instead of just standing still (!)[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTGbKUL0gg4&feature=youtu.be[/embed]

For the Stranger I Danced With

Shortly before my reunion ten years back, I found myself strangely moved by the remarks sent in ahead of time by my high school classmates.Among them were a Restaurant Owner, and a Sheet Rock Installer, an Engineer and a Supervisor of Accounts Receivable. They wrote that they remembered hanging out after school, pulling the fire alarm senior year, skipping gym and smoking in the girls’ room.I wanted to go to that reunion but I had been shy in high school, and way too serious. Back then, I yearned to be accepted by those same ones who skipped gym to smoke in the girls' room. I was the kind of kid who faked sick in gym class so she could sit in the stands, doing the next night’s homework. By just about this time that year, I still wasn’t sure if I would go. David wouldn’t be coming, we agreed. He knew almost no one in the class and I knew my reunions were a torture to him.Then, about a week before the event, I ran into the only classmate who lives at all near me. She asked if I were going, then turned to her daughter.“Mrs. Marotta was a nerd in high school,” she said pleasantly to the child. That cinched it somehow. I’d go, all right. Plainly I had nothing to lose. I called up a couple of people and we made plans to meet there.It was sad to see who had not come. But the ones who had were fully there, and I found myself talking to people I had hardly known before. And I couldn’t help but note that there was none of the judgment or constant evaluation of earlier days, all of that having given way to something kinder.Back in high school, I was on the chubby side and had a short curly bob. I clanked with bracelets and swaddled myself in breath-squeezing cocoons of fabric.  But chubbiness ended for me when I turned 21. I grew my hair to shoulder length and have pretty much kept it there ever since.So the night of the reunion I wore a simple black dress and hoop earrings. Now I’m not saying I looked great. No doubt I looked better back then, even batter-dipped in baby-fat as I was. But I felt… freer somehow, less encumbered, on every level. We had all been watching the dancing, specifically the dancing of this one classmate who somebody said taught Ballroom Dance as a part-time job. Part way through the evening he came over and asked me to be his partner. “But I don’t know how to do the steps,” I stammered. “Just follow,” he answered, putting his hand on the small of my back.At first I kept looking down at his feet. Eventually, I took his advice and let him lead. I closed my eyes and felt… weightless.In the course of the evening, I think I danced with him three times.He thanked me all three times, bowed slightly and walked away. I never even caught his name. I found it out ten years later from the other people I worked with on the committee to plan our last reunion. His name was Tom, and he died shortly after that night. But as I think of him now, I think of what I learned from him that night, which as I look back, seems emblematic of our human journey: The way, nervous at first, we mount the stage of our emerging life.  The way, after a while, we learn to leave doubt and self-consciousness behind. Time does the rest, for it is Dance Master Time who holds us, really. We lean back. Maybe we close our eyes. It turns out we need only follow.

No Problem for YOU Maybe

“No problem,” says the young waitress when I thank her for a fresh fork after she’s knocked my original fork to the floor. “No problem,”’ says the young barista just after I thank him for my cup of decaf. “No problem,” says the kid at the gas station after he has filled my car and I have thanked him. So here’s how I feel: In each case cited above, I have been happy to hear that it was no problem for these young people to have done what they did. But these exchanges are all commercial transactions, in which one party offers a good or a service in exchange for pay from the other, so as far as I have always understood, the notion of a ‘problem’ doesn’t enter into it.Look at commuting. It’s hard to have spent two or more hours on the road to get back and forth to your job. It’s hard to have to stand out in the elements in wet or cold or sizzling hot weather waiting for the bus that will get you to your job and back again. Ask any random group of people what time they have to get up in the morning in order to get themselves and their family members fed and dressed and out the door to work or school and what you learn will back up the statistics: Americans are among the hardest working people on the planet. And yet you rarely hear them using the word ‘problem’ about what it takes for them to get to that job. Most people - in these post-crash times especially - are happy to even have a job that they can go to every day,So what’s with this ‘no problem’ phrase that has become the norm among so many younger people? I don’t mean to be grouchy here. And for sure it’s not that I don’t CARE about the problems people face day to day because I do. If I see a sales associate furtively rubbing her neck with a look of pain on her face as she waits for me to dig out my money, I’m not going to act as if I didn’t see it. I’m going to ask her if she’s OK.It’s just that ‘No problem’ is the wrong response to ‘Thank you’ and don’t we all know that? Don’t we all remember the right response, the one we were all taught as kids? The right response to ‘Thank you’ is ‘You’re welcome.’ In Italy and Spain they say, ‘It’s nothing’ in response to a ‘Thank you.’ In Germany they use the word for, ‘Please,’ which, handily enough, also means ‘Thank you’, ‘Care to have a seat?’ ‘After you,’ and a host of other things as well.In English we sometimes say, ‘Don’t mention it’ when someone says ‘Thank you,’ which, come to think of it, feels a lot like ‘It’s nothing’ as well as the German word for ‘Please’, Thank you’, ‘Care to have a seat?’ and ‘After you.’‘You’re welcome’ means ‘You are welcome to my help’, or, in these instances, ‘I am happy to be the one providing you with your coffee/your gasoline/your bag of potatoes, which I hand you in this bag here.’No matter if they’re not all THAT happy; we say ‘thank you’, ‘please’ and ‘you’re welcome’ because it is courteous to do so; because it oils the social machinery. But enough for now with my beefing! Next week, if I’m still showing my age - and my grumpy side - I’ll be going after all those people who absurdly call me ‘Young lady.’ ;-) 

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!

To Everything (There is a season)

It's been rainy and cool all day today -  30 degrees cooler than it was on Sunday.

I keep thinking of Sunday.

We were up north and I just kept looking and looking in the direction of the lake. To the left is the view from the kitchen window.

First, in the morning, there were bird calls, and the trees looking so lovely as they begin to just think about undressing for their ‘night.’

Then later, as I lay face down on the dock for an hour I fell dead asleep, hypnotized perhaps by this little fellow.

We had watched each other for a good 15 minutes before I dozed off and he's lovely is he not?

His eyes were the exact color of the lake as the lake always looks in by the shore in summer, overhung by its mantle of green.

When I woke he was gone, so I spent my time studying the little rowboat by the dock rocking in the 'surf'

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzCj_PnYxrY&list=UUdU7Zw4NfLLbtnYtb0hg2fw[/embed]

When again will we take this little craft out? Will there be - could there - ever be other such weekends in this now waning year? 

I stayed on the dock just long enough to see that flash I so love when the light from the westering sun skitters along aluminum edge of the swim raft.

Soon the swim raft will come in, like the boat, and the lake will have ice deep enough to park trucks on . The dock will ring like iron and grow a cap of snow to keep it warm until that faraway spring thaw.

For now though? For now I'm going to fix on the late September morning I saw last Sunday. 

http://youtu.be/pb7rbhcDwAw

Children of the Corn?

It was late on a Sunday at the discount drugstore, the right kind of night for conversation between a lone clerk and her one customer.The customer was pointing to the cover photo of a fall magazine displayed on the counter. It showed a jack o'lantern fashioned from a regular old pumpkin, but with twin rows of perfect little fangs and two large eyeballs hanging by a seeming thread from the two ocular orbits carved in the pumpkin’s big orange 'face'. “Who carves a jack-o'-lantern this perfectly?” she asked. “Right,” said the cashier, also looking at the image. “You’d need to use a scalpel to carve that precisely!” “AND be Michelangelo!” said the customer"Right!" said the cashier, ringing in a few of the customer's items. “I know it’s almost October but I'm just not ready for this all the autumn stuff,” said the customer, still studying the magazine cover.“Totally,” said the cashier. “I feel bad," she added.  "I haven’t done any fall stuff in years. When’s the last time I went apple picking?”“I don't think I've EVER been apple picking, not in the real way where you pay money to do it,” said the customer. “All I know about apple picking is from that Robert Frost poem where even in his sleep he still feels the rungs of the ladder against his insteps.”“I bet it’s been ten years since I’ve carved a pumpkin,” said the cashier.“The squirrels just eat them anyway,” said the customer. "What a sight it was the last time I came upon that ruined cranium. I felt like I’d stumbled onto the set of The Walking Dead."“How about doing a corn maze?”  the customer then said. “Have you ever done that?”“No, you know I never have,” said the cashier. “What’s it like?"“Well this whole corn maze thing was new to me until I about three years ago," said the customer.“And was it fun, making your way through it?” asked the cashier.“Sure,” said the customer. “Well, actually no, it wasn’t that fun,” she interrupted herself to say.  “A corn maze is really kind of hard. You get lost.”"Is the corn that tall?""The corn is SO tall! And it got cold. And then the sun went down.""Jeez!" said the cashier. “It sounds like that old  Stephen King movie Children  of the Corn?”"Horrible!""Horrible!""Let's never do a corn maze!” said the customer."I won't if you won't,” smiled the cashier, and handed her her bagged purchase.  And with that the customer departed the store, glad for the merry exchange and resolving to carve up a few pumpkin heads anyway this fall, those frisky squirrel squads notwithstanding.  

Fun at the Bar and Grill

I’m no drinker but I do love a quiet bar-and-grill in the daytime. I find such places so snug, so faintly churchlike with their regularly spaced TVs flickering in the shadows like stained glass windows. My two girls did much of their college homework at places like this, though they weren’t drinkers either.The younger one took four years of Latin in high school, then took it again as a senior in college, and she just loved working on it at ‘her’ bar-and-grill just off campus. I still picture her there, sitting with her tuna while teasing apart the strings in that compact knot cheese of a language.I’ll bet she felt less lonely with the work as she looked over at the regulars there, those old guys roosting wide-bottomed on their bar stools, who got so they knew her and so would tease her: “Studying the Latin again, Annie? No money in Latin, Annie!” they would say but she would just smile back and keep on working.I think it also relaxed and focused her to be there, just as it relaxed and focused me when, during the year of Anatomy and Physiology I took, I lunched in my own favorite bar-and-grill while memorizing the names and functions of the 12 cranial nerves, say. Even today with whatever work I have, when that little brick of salmon comes with its accompanying fist of broccoli and its wheel of pale sliced tomatoes I am one happy camper.Just recently in this place, a waitress old enough to remember the snoozy 1950s stood maybe ten feet from me at a terminal, toting up somebody’s bill and talking to herself. Then suddenly she began grooving.“Yeah we were dancin’, dancin’ in the stree-eet,” she sang, from that old Martha & The Vandellas hit. “We were swingin’ swayin', records playin’” she went on, before abruptly interrupting herself.“How OLD is Mick Jagger?," she asked the air and suddenly we were a long way from Martha and her Vs.“He’s like 70, am I right ?"I looked around. Was she talking to me?It seemed she was, and so I answered. “I think that's about right, though I just read where somebody said he looked 70 when he was 40.”"Hah! No he did not!” she scoffed and we both briefly looked off in the middle distance, perhaps both thinking of the years of the Stones’ really big hits and the fashions that went with them, the platform shoes and those gorgeous slacks with their high wide waistbands and yards of fabric skimming close and tight around the hips before cascading down and down to hit the knee and flare like the nostrils of a spirited horse.But now she was talking again. “He's still got it!” she said, shaking her head in admiration. “It's all that cardio,” I said. “Did you ever see him in concert? “But she had moved on and  was singing something else.She was back to Motown and this time it was the  Supremes. “You can’t hurry love, no, you just have to wait,” she sang. “Love don’t come easy, it’s a game of give and take….” Well, yes. There’s a lot of give and take in this life all right, and a great many  things don’t come easy.  For sure good grades on your tests don’t come easy. It’s always hard to sit to any of your tasks I think, but if you approach them with a cheerful heart and maybe a nice little sandwich close by your elbow, maybe you can soon enough catch the spirit and groove a little with it yourself.

Where is My Bathing Suit NOW?

Waking this morning and entering the living room I beheld a kind of light that seemed almost valedictory, almost literally tinged with shades of farewell.  I can't explain it but it feels as if the sunlight in September is coming now from a different star; as if the sun we knew all summer called on some quieter, less flashy sibling and said, "You take over. I'm beat."Just ten days ago it was all might and haze. A week ago Saturday, September the 6th marked the hottest day we had all summer when even the dogs were looking around for that can of antiperspirant. You walked outside and the sun accosted you instantly. It came and sat on your head and pressed down.I hear in Colorado this week's temps went from the 80s to the 30s in a 24-hour period. That didn't happen where I live north of Boston but something like it has occurred. Tucking in to bed last night by a lake in New Hampshire, the weather alert on my phone told of a frost advisory.Our sandals will soon be behind us. Flip-flops probably already are, along with sleeveless tank tops and the sarong-style skirts such as women might wrap quick around their bathing suits before running out to buy the groceries.Bathing suits already seem a faraway concept to me now, and anyway the elastic on the leg of that nice purple one of mine is all shot.No matter now. I’m not going near any pools. I have a zillion other plans now, all spelled Back At It.Here is a picture of one of the only creatures you’ll see in most pools now: the cheerful ducks, who are gathering daily and muttering by the shores of city ponds.They have a plan too and that plan is spelled Going South.The rest of us will stay here and see what God sends. Here are some lines addressed to Him by the composer Francis Wylie in one of my most favorite hymns: 

Thou from Whose unfathomed law the year in beauty flows,Thyself the vision passing by in crystal and in rose,Day unto day doth utter speech, and night to night proclaim,In ever changing words of light, the wonder of Thy Name.

Amen to that sentiment! Now let's go seize this matchless day!

Walkabout, City-Style

I once owned a poster that said on it “There is more to life than increasing its speed,” and I can picture it still, with its small smiling turtle nestled against a background of flower-power blossoms. (Well my goodness, here is an image of that very 70s-era poster, courtesy of Google Image - see?) I think of it now because, fresh from traversing the Northeast Corridor on Amtrak’s Acela Express I’ve decided that I’ll never again take a high-speed train. Sure, you gain something in time, but how much you do lose in other ways: All my life riding trains, I have delighted in the sight of the cities and towns rising up each in their turn with their proud brick banks and reaching steeples. All my life riding trains, I have I loved the old harbors and feasted my eyes on the silky marshes grass so green in late summer, then so golden as Nature makes for that final station stop called winter.On a high-speed train, all these sights are barely granted you before they get abruptly snatched away. “You like it? You can’t have it!” seems to be the message and don’t we all get enough of that old taunt here on the far side of Eden? I don’t want to get to a place so fast that I can’t  fully grasp  my journey. The Lovely Rhode Island seashore: a blur!Far from wishing to zip along in a train or even a car again anytime soon, I have found, after a few days in Manhattan, something I want that is quite different. I want to walk, and feel all that humanity swimming past me: The man talking on his phone with such a small earbud you’d think he was talking to himself.The phoneless man behind him who really was doing that and gesturing by way of emphasis.At first I went to a Starbucks, curled up by a street-level window, and just watched.Here were two handsome young guys leaning against this very building. They wore bright-white T-shirts with cargo pants, and their hair was gorgeously sculpted. One of them laughed, then tipped a cigarette to his mouth as if it were a champagne flute. Smoking! I thought. Remember Smoking? Then they glided into the stream of traffic and commenced walking. Walking! I thought, then drained my coffee and set out walking too, and it felt like pure freedom. I felt like the shark who must move in order to breathe.I saw hundreds of young people striding along in backpacks. I saw hundred of older people similarly equipped, and striding along, their arms free and swinging. Was I en route to the theater? It was only ten blocks. I could be there in no time - and I was. Was I in need of a bite? A sidewalk vendor sold me a brimming treasure-chest of berries for $2 a pint. I walked, and ate as I walked. And then a bride emerged from a hotel, veiled and holding her bouquet. She had two parents, and a seeming aunt in a hat like the Duchess of Cambridge might wear. She had a groom trussed up like a Cornish game hen. She even had a ready-made baby in a stroller and it was as if all her future dreams had been realized in this shining present moment and didn’t I feel that way too? As if a dream of my own had been realized too? Call it the old dream of community that I can just about barely recall from the time when we all routinely used and relished our public spaces.So take the train again soon? I don’t think so. I think I’m going to try recreating here at home what I saw in that great city. Just let me dig out my old backpack.

Diamonds Were a Girl's Best Friend

Diamonds Were a Girl's Best Friend.From my favorite misanthrope!

He-e-e-e-y CUPcake!

It was 80 degrees even well after midnight as I drove in to the city. Above my head, the stars were twirling madly, or anyway that’s how they looked to me: like gymnasts tumbling and climbing, then stopping to land Ta-DA! with their little arms thrown high. But if the stars were happy, then so was I. I was more than happy in fact to be meeting the 1:00am bus that would bring our youngest briefly back to us from his little apartment above a dry cleaners well north of Central Park.  This trip in to the bus station takes about 15 minutes without traffic and at this late hour I was expecting it to be as quick - until two miles down the highway, I rounded the bend and saw the brake lights of 100 cars. Cars as far as I could see, stopped dead in their lanes.Sometimes you don’t actually MIND being stopped if you enjoy looking at people. Now, for me, here were dozens of people all at close range. Cell phones began lighting up like glow-worms as people called to communicate the delay. Then car windows went down, letting out laughter and strains of music.Arms holding soft drink cans emerged.Cigarettes dangled at the ends of fingers. When I saw many bare legs begin appearing from car windows I realized I was among mainly young people. Of course! Who else is out and wide awake at almost 1:00 in the morning?And then I heard The Voice.“H-e-e-e-y” came the insinuating sound from a round male face in the back seat of a car full of young people.“Hey, let’s go get drinks!” it said in my direction. I acted like I couldn’t see the young guy addressing me, his head like a toy balloon bobbling alongside us all in our barely moving cars. “Come on, Cupcake! Time to Par-TEE!” he said three minutes later.  Good Lord, I thought to myself, eyes ahead on the still-stopped traffic.“I have sexy mu-u-u-u-u-scles!” he yodeled, five minutes after that. Still, I stared straight ahead.It went on like this for 15 minutes as the cars inched forward.Then suddenly with my lane some 50 feet ahead of Bobblehead’s, he got out of his car and starting walking toward mine. “Let’s end this,” I thought, when he was about 20 feet away from me.I turned to look him full in the face and smiled with what a kind of rueful, what-are-we-going-to-do-with-you-Son smile."She looked at me!"  he yelled back to his companions. “She looked at me!”  Then to me he said, “Is your name Mary? We think your name is Mary.”a“No.”"Susan?”“My name is Terry,” I said and I could tell by a slight hiccup in his voice that he had by then gotten just close enough to me to see that I was out of his age range. Way WAY out of his age range. 'Oh! Well, hi, Terry,” he said, and then meek as a schoolboy, turned, walked away and got back in his car.   There was a lesson for us all in this I know but I’m not sure yet what it is. The stars saw it all though, so maybe they know; and not for the first time I wished those distant old fireflies could talk, and explain to us all that they have seen.Now a quiz. My round-faced friend didn't look much like this guy but who IS this guy anyway? Great year for movies when this was made!