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.

In jail here - Help!

We're in jail here for sure, for sure - and these are the bars.This baby is twelve feet long . Twelve FEET!

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? 

Bring Your Puppy to Work Day?

I sit in my car outside Rudy’s Upholstery, waiting for the owner and watching his left-behind Dalmatian pup through the glass of the shop door. "Back at 2:00" reads a sign on the door - and here it is only 12:55.The puppy sees me and cocks his head. "Come inside and play with me!" says his small eager face.I met this upholsterer, whose name is Alan, back when, as a boy with a mop of auburn curls, he sat both in my English class and my homeroom during his Junior year at the high school I taught. The next year he graduated, and 20 years went by zip, which is how 20 years do. During that time, my husband and I had had several upholsterers in our lives, some pretty good, some not-so-good. One pricey guy practically wept on delivering a Victorian sofa he had put more time into than he pictured doing. "Straw inside it!" he kept exclaiming. “Not even horsehair, STRAW!”Through the shop window I watch this baby dog investigating a book of sample fabrics, gnawing on its cardboard covers and gumming a nice swatch of burgundy brocade.Then, maybe two years ago, I drove past Rudy’s and wondered if it was true what I had heard: that Alan now owned it, having taken over the business from his dad and granddad. I walked in saw that it was.So now, when I have something that needs re-covering - chairs or window-seat cushions, or even those fancy pillows shaped liked Tootsie Rolls, I call him up.He and his colleague Ray can re-upholster anything - and soon he may have to re-upholster his very shop, since his pup is now biting clear through the edges of some shelving. Once when I was here, and Alan stopped to take a call, I turned to Ray. "He was a dickens in high school, you know," I said."He’s a dickens now," said Ray, smiling. Alan and I always talk: about who has sickened, who has died, who has made it big. We talk about how he still plays baseball and how he has three kids under eight and is nuts about dogs.When I came one morning last summer, we spoke about the rare illness that had taken his last dog, on that very morning. "I just got in, but I don’t think I can work," he blurted, looking around distractedly. "Listen. Find a new dog." I said, turning to go. "Oh, I don’t know..." "I know,” I said in that bossy teachery way. "Find a new dog and fall in love again."And so he has done, as I see here today.Now the little guy has now discovered a pair of gym shorts and is tossing them gaily up in the air."Boy are you going to get it," I start to tell the pup through the thick glass door.But here comes Alan now, in through the back. He looks around at the devastation, shakes his head and, smiling, bends to pat his little dog.And I think as I watch them, what could be nicer than this hour I have just now spent? What nicer than to cease rowing for a spell, and rest on your oars, and notice the ones who are sailing beside you? 

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?!

Drool on It All If You Like: It's Your Stuff

Fella comes to our house, wants to clean a rug that lies on the floor of a room where a zillion dust motes dance in the golden bars of daylong sunlight but the minute he walks in, his face goes pale.“What have you done here?" he cries. “Your rugs are all faded! “I look and he is right: The rug he has come to clean had been red, tan and navy when we bought it. Now it is rust, cream and baby blue.“This rug is losing RADIANCE! “ he yelled.“I'm losing radiance myself, “ I say. “It's fine. It doesn't hurt. ““Here's what you have to do, “ he goes on, ignoring me. “Pull down the shades. Draw the drapes." He bustles around doing this until the room that has dazzled with sunlight a moment before looks ready now for a séance.“But we love the sun!” I tell him feebly. We sit in this window seat here, and-”“Then at least take a sheet and cover the area of greatest exposure!“ he snaps.“You owe it to your rugs,“ he adds, scooping up the carpet in question and hurrying out the door.I have thought a lot about this scene since that day. This is the man who sold us our rugs in the first place and I was sorry to let him down, but I just can't run a house his way, keeping the rugs bright by locking the sunlight out. Keeping things perfect under plastic. Pleasant under glass.I used to visit houses like this when I was a kid and they made me feel as though silken cords were stretched across the chair arms, and velvet ropes were hung across the doorways.I vowed I would never run my own house that way.And I don’t. We live in our house, dammit. We live all over those velvet sofas in the living room, which are only velvet because velvet is the toughest fabric there is.But now the upholstery man has just gotten after me too. He came here once for the Victorian sofa I had tried reupholstering myself a decade ago that ended up looking like a lumpy pink bed with a person sewn inside it. He took that old thing out and turned it into a pale-blue dream of perfection.Then this past month, a small visitor set her tiny bones upon a sofa even older than the Victorian one and blam! one Duncan Fife leg - ball, claw, and all - shot straight out from under it. So the guy was here now to perform diagnosis on the break.But his gaze fell first upon toddler who was clumping quietly around in his little white shoes. You let your CHILDREN in this room?“ he squeaked, his voice ascending the scale of disbelief."Sure, “ I answered, as the child in question smiled sweetly and drooled a little onto the velvet.“On THIS couch!? “ He squeaked. “MY couch?! ““It’s going to lose radiance!” I could all but  hear him say next.He didn’t say that though. Instead he picked up the most recent casualty and started for the door. “It's your house, “ he shrugged washing his hands of us all.“You bet!“ I called after him.Because really it’s fine by me if our stuff is too worn out to pass down to our kids one day. What I would much rather pass down to them is permission to enjoy the beauty of their surroundings; permission to fade, as we all must fade, gloriously, in the sun.

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.

'The Dead Are Not Under the Earth'

The brother of  one of our ABC scholars is about to be laid to rest.His sudden death occurred on January 2^nd but the funeral was scheduled for the 17^th, which is today.Six people from Winchester ABC have travelled from Boston to Philadelphia for the 10am Homegoing Ceremony.Sadly, I will not be  one of them due to some ill fortune in my own family, meager enough by comparison. But though I can't be there, the words to this song, by Sweet Honey in the Rock, have been playing in my ear for two weeks, every time I have thought of the Sawyer family.Now by some miracle I find it here on YouTube accompanied by a very moving video.Blessings on whoever made this blend, marrying these Eye-of-God kind visuals to Sweet Honey's beautiful and reassuring words. God’s blessings on the whole grieving family as they gather to celebrate, and give thanks for, the life of 24-year of Gerald Michael Sawyer Jr. now gathered to his own ancestors.

listen more often to things than to beingslisten more often to things than to beingstis the ancestors breath when the fire’s voice is heardtis the ancestors breath in the voice of the waterthose who have died have never, never leftthe Dead are not under the earththey are in the rustling trees, they are in the groaning woodsthey are in the crying grass, they are in the moaning rocks 

And now, the song in its entirety: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSxjSherzaQ[/embed]      Sweet Honey in the Rock Ancestors’ Voices

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! 

It Was Such a Pretty Dream

You may think it'll all be easy after the holidays but no. Instead you're right away dealing with all new challenges - like I was that New Year's when the hot water heater turned everyone's shower a lurid Book-of-Exodus red. The truth is, our troubles are never behind us, and today’s often pale in comparison to tomorrow's. For example:I’ve been inwardly whining for the last three months about the back pain I have on account of how the toy blocks of my little spine got stacked slightly off-kilter when God was knitting me up in my mother's womb. I didn’t even know I had this problem until at one point about three years ago I started noticing that the zippers on my all my pants were zigging up in a northwesterly direction while the central seams on all my tops were zagging northeasterly. “What kind of cheap clothes are THESE?” I first thought. But a young friend, advised about this new condition, narrowed his eyes in assessment of my form and helped me better understand the issue.“I see it” he cried, cheerily gesturing. “Your skirt is here and your top is over here!" They call it scoliosis. Anyway I dealt with this pain throughout the whole run-up to Christmas, even as I went about buying all the gifts, cooking all the food, addressing all 220 cards, etc.But then the holiday passed and boy, was I psyched! One of those first post-Christmas nights, I found myself alone for the evening, always a cozy thing, and to celebrate this new lack-of-all-stress, I decided to take a long soak in a foamy bath.While drinking a foamy Kahlua mudslide.  And watching The Interview on my laptop, which I had set up on the clothes hamper not four feet from the suds.  “I'm on Easy Street NOW!" I exulted.And so I seemed to be until oh, about 30 minutes later when I climbed into my bed with its fresh clean sheets, sank back into the pillows – and felt settle into my body the worst virus I have ever had.First, there was fever. Next, there were two whole days lost to memory, slept through entirely. And then, on Day Three, Fate poured five pounds of concrete into my sinuses. The concrete remains.  With nose breathing impossible. I spend night after night moaning softly when, according to my mate, I’m not making noises like a wild animal. He is sympathetic though, except for the way he laughed out loud to find my semi-conscious self beside with a wet facecloth stuffed in my mouth to moisten a tongue so dry it turned white. More moaning! -  though the moaning sounds more like the underwater call of a whale.But there is this, Dear Reader, there is this:  In the whole two-weeks-and-counting of this cold and virus misery, I haven’t been aware of so much as a tremor of pain in my lower back.  Joy snatched from suffering! I just know I’m on Easy Street now!

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? ;-)

The Short Days

We're in this together, whatever kind of sacred holiday or year-end remembrance we might have just marked. As the year’s last short days go swirling down Time’s drain, I think we all sense and see the same things.Watch with me now as I look out the window of this second-story room:Five feet from where I stand, a squirrel quivers along the branches of the hawthorn tree I planted long and long ago. He is searching for the last of its bright red berries. He will be disappointed, for by now they have been eaten by his fellow creatures, each and every one.Across the street I see the pale blush of frost on the pointed gables of our neighbors’ roof and a thin plume of smoke ribboning up from their chimney; and the image so resembles a child’s drawing of a house with roof, smoke and chimney that I just have to smile.And speaking of children, does not the path back to our own childhoods not seem shorter just now?Remember what it felt like to make snow angels, lying flat in that feather-bed of frozen crystals as we windmilled our arms and legs?Remember when, in elementary school on that final day before the Christmas break, we brought little gifts to our teacher? I gave a handkerchief to Miss Lester, with her initials embroidered crookedly onto one corner, my first attempt at needlework. Though it looked less like a monogram than a wobbly scribble of scar tissue, for all her sternness, she blushed and smiled almost shyly at the sight of the wrapped package.Remember more with me now.: Remember how it felt to pull on scratchy wool mittens. If our memories go back that far, we might remember the elasticized clasps that held those mittens to the arms of our snowsuits.Remember our mothers or fathers helping us dress the rest of the way to go outside, then patiently undressing again when we came back in again, with snow crusted on our boots' cuffs and sometimes actually filling the boots themselves, leaving our toes so numb we thought we would never have feeling again.There's so much to reflect on when we look back. Consider the remembered sight of your folks’ bowed heads as they worked to perform these chores, and reflect on that fact that they were younger at that point than you are now, you former child, you who are a child still, on the inside anyway.Now I'm looking out the window again as darkness again enfolds us.Science says the sun has no surface at all, but consists wholly of a snapping undulation of fiery gases, and Science is right no doubt, but I like to think of the sun another way. I like to think of 'him' as a benevolent figure watching us from afar as we spin and wobble around him like a toy top. And like a top, we tilt, and in our tilting lean away from his warmth and light a while.But starting this week we begin leaning back again, closer and closer to the longer and the warmer days and further and further from these long, long nights. There is beauty in these nights but ah:  iff only Time could perform such magic as that and set us down once more in the little snow globe of our childhood winters! 

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 ! 

Say What You Think!

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

Kids, Darn 'em

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

Blog Interrupted

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

In the Waiting Rooms of Life

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

Together at the Table

Nowadays families eat in their cars, eat standing up, eat in the shower practically but once: things were different.Once what times we had in the great days of the family meal!In the house I grew up in, we talked so much at the table it was a wonder anybody got any food down at all. Weeknight meals, Sunday dinners, holiday feasts: each took a full hour as we kids sat and listened to our five (count ‘em) grownups hold forth.On and on our grandfather would go: about President Wilson’s and the League of Nations, about the assassination of President McKinley, about Lindbergh’s flight talking of these events as if they had happened just yesterday. (We all know about the Lindbergh flight but how many little kids learned know about the two French aviators how went down trying to match Lindy’s triumph?) And these meals took an hour ONLY IF our grandfather didn’t then decide we should get down on our knees and recite the Rosary, right there at the table, each of us crouching with heads bent and forearms resting on the the seats of our chairs.We moved from that happy house when I was nine but I can still see the shadowy old dining room with its oak paneling and its heavy velvet drapes that separated it from the front parlor. Our grownups drew them when the nights were cold and an East wind off the Atlantic rattled those big front window. To my sister and me they were like the curtains at a theatre and the room itself was like a stage set, where any dramatic thing might happen -even beyond the falling-to-our-knees part after the meal. Forty years before at that table, our pretty aunt Grace was only eight, her elders stifled laughter as she read aloud her book report in those same French aviators who, poor things, had gas for 40 hours.  I knew that story and I wanted to make my older people laugh too, so in the show-off-y way of the family baby, I stood up next to my chair and did imitations of a girdle ad showing how little constrained this one housewife felt by what was basically a straitjacket without the arms.  I also did the prologue to the old Superman show at warp speed, which turns out to be the only way you CAN do it; “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane it’s SUPerman!” it began. I can recite the whole thing to this day. And I killed ‘em in that house off Blue Hill Ave.But most dramatic time came when our tiny great aunt, was born a scant year after Lincoln’ death, fell sound asleep during dinner and fell right over onto the rug. Didn’t she jump right up though, dust herself off and scoot back to the pantry to fetch the pie she had baked.From the apples she had peeled. And quartered.And even picked herself.I see her now in her baggy dress and her little blue Keds and her falling-down hose that wound like the red banner on a barbershop pole around her skinny legs. I see her and I miss her.I guess thought my sister and I could stay forever at that family table and be looking at those same dear faces, but no. The faces are different now if no less dear. And the times are different too, God knows God knows.I hope that you all  find a table to gather round this weekend, as you eat, and laugh and tell stories. Let’s all send up a prayer too, even if we’re not kneeling by our chairs when we do it.