Good Hotel

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

Milestone Post

This is my 1600th post and well... I just did the math: At the rate I have slowed down to, it will take me ten whole years to get to 2,000. Would it be worth it to reach for that goal? I still can't tell. All my life I have suffered from an odd affliction in that once I even start thinking about achieving some crazy goal or doing some wildly ambitious project, I almost literally can't NOT begin upon it. Yet milestones like this one do get a body thinking.This coming October I will have completed 35 years of weekly column-writing. Shouldn't I stop , and have pity on those poor readers who might appreciate a fresher voice? I started in 1980 for God's sake when we didn't even have faxing!Back then I looked like this. (I'm the already-haggard looking brunette making the sad-cow face on the right, not my sister-in-law, the blonde beauty facing the camera.)The blog of course is more recent. The blog I started in the fall of 2007 but by mid-2008 I had decided I had to write every day. Every day! What tripe appeared under my name! I wrote from the heart a lot but in many posts I was also just appealing to popular culture, which anyone can do God knows, God knows. Search on my site for the word 'underpants' and you'll see.)Now after all this time I look like this, dye-job and all. ( I know I know. I've discovered minimizer foundationwear since this picture from last September.) Sigh. At least I'm smiling this time.Smilin' on the outside anyway.And it's not that I'm cryin' on the inside but I'll confess that I have lost the old merry trait  that made me think absolutely everything was funny, a trait that got me in a world of trouble with my teachers all along the way.So it's my 1600th post and my 1800th column that I've been working on this morning. I love to write still but I love a lot of other things now too, so how it will all play out I don't yet know. A woman from a church group just wrote me to see if I still do public talks. I  haven't written her back yet but I do think I'm done with public talks. Anyway, stay tuned if you care to.  Now let's all go out and sniff some of that downy spring air !

But Where Are Their REAL Teeth?

I know I'm not the only one nostalgic for them: people's real teeth.Just look at this tricky picture of Tom Hanks, both his younger and older selves,as if you could put your two selves side by side.My heart just rose on seeing the teeth Tom once had before the installation of those bright-white piano keys he now has in his mouth. I look at the Tom Hanks on the right and think of when he was Josh in the unforgettable film Big. I loved the way you really could see the connection between the way he appeared bumming around with his suddenly much shorter buddy Billy and the way he appeared while trying to keep his head above water with that woman at work ) who had her eye on him.I look at the Tom on right and think "I know him! Weren't we kids together?" I feel that way about David Bowie too with the pointy little canines he used to have.Now? Perfect teeth.Nice but what I love are images like this one. from a YouTube video of him singing with Bing Crosby in 1977. I love it partly because it's a great duet but mostly because of the dear unreconstructed look of those teeth. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADbJLo4x-tk[/embed]There are more celebrity tooth jobs here if you're curious but I think for myself I will just keep on enjoying images of these two guys as they look today, new teeth or not. They're both fuller in  the face too which I like and more relaxed- looking too.Fix what you need to fix to become self-forgetful I guess is the lesson here - and then move right on to thinking of others!

Pretty Funny, Mother Nature!

Here it comes. Here comes the heat. Its return has me looking back to last November, when, in this space, I painted a picture of what most of us were doing just then in these northern climes: We were cleaning up the after the summer, that messy Mardi Gras blowout with all its glittery litter. I meant the berries and leaves and nuts all cast around on the ground.I meant the cat’s cradle of spiderwebs stretching everywhere about.I meant the ivy that every year climbs so high on one side of my old house that before the frost gets it, it will have sent its bright-green gobliny fingers right in past the supposed barrier of the combination screen-and-storm windows, things expressly designed to keep the ‘outside’ out.But the darn pricey windows didn’t do that in the growing season, and for sure they didn’t do it in the season of frost.This year there was no keeping the outside out. It snowed and snowed and snowed, in case you’ve forgotten. and on a thousand YouTube channels you could see videos of people’s crazy guy-friends in their underpants jumping from their second story porches into the 12-foot drifts below. You could see young women doing it too: donning their bathing suits to land shrieking in that cotton candy spin of utter cold.You could even see these people helping their dogs make the leap down into all that white, where, if they were small enough, they would literally disappear from sight for a couple of seconds before leaping back into view, happily yapping.You couldn’t look at these videos and you couldn’t not look. They were funny in a horrible sort of way I guess and maybe we all needed the laugh by January’s end.Four weeks later though, nobody was laughing. People with cars parked on the street couldn’t even find them for all the snow. And then there were the ice dams.We all had them on our roofs, concrete-hard icebergs that just would not melt. You could climb up there and hack away at them with pickaxes, even sledgehammers, and still they would not yield.They were there and they stayed there, until, little by little, they moved inside. This means that their moisture slowly ‘wicked’ right into and through all our walls with that same slow but steady determination I see each year with the ivy that climbs in my windows. The wood trim of all our interiors first bloated with moisture and then wept, sending blackish tears streaming clear down to the floor. Wall coverings grew what look like maps of unknown continents. Apparently the wall behind my own bed had grown so spongy by the beginning of March that one day the picture on it fell to the floor. Not realizing what had happened, I tried driving in a fresh nail to hold it. Alas it was like trying to nail something into a bowl of oatmeal.I look back now at what I wrote last November about the great mess summer makes behind and I have to laugh. That mess was nothing compared to the mess this past winter has left us. So all I can say now is Thank Heaven there are such things as window cleaner, scrub brushes, and sheet rock. And also, God, thank you for giving the world contractors and handymen (and may some of them soon start returning our calls!)[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iVAQINANgk[/embed]

Ah the School Project!

I love this time of year because it's when the schoolchildren, working away at home, fashion maps, and hand puppets, and dioramas, then bring them in for all to see.These events have many names, from ‘You Make It Day’ to ‘Night of a Thousand Projects.’I remember one such night in my own kids’ lives. It had as its theme ‘Our Friends the Animals’, and for it my fourth grader painted the inside of a shoebox green for the African savanna, then drew a picture of a lion and glued it onto the cardboard. Done!I remember another poor kid who used balloons to make a giant dolphin, which somehow got away from him, floated clear up to the ceiling, and spent the night bobbing aimlessly around the classroom. Another still carved a shark out of a blue sponge and set it to float in a tank full of Goldfish. Of course the crackers began instantly to first bloat and then disintegrate, so that by evening’s end she was sitting beside a tank of solid orange sludge in which her porous beast rested, leaning over on one flank.But no school projects are more memorable to you than your own. I think of the one my best friend and I cooked up in Eighth Grade when, for Ancient History class, we decided to build an actual sphinx.Mr. Sweeney had given us all a choice: We could either write a paper or make something. So hey, we figured: A session with two bags of potato chips and a six-pack of Pepsi and we’d wrap it up fast and score ourselves an A.A day-and-a-half before it was due, we bought a 20-pound sack of plaster of Paris, added water and started molding. In four hours we had a set of haunches and two melting paws. Then we ran out of plaster.But the next day we were back at it, fresh sack at the ready. This time we got some shoulders going, as well as a little pin head that looked so good we didn't want to mess with it by trying to enlarge it.That's when we noticed the real problem: our sphinx was failing to harden. After each successive go-round, we would find its hips widening, its shoulders slipping down onto its belly, its small head getting smaller by the minute.So ... We got our grownups to drive us back to the store to buy still more materials.We punched the whole thing down and started again, cutting back on the water, throwing dry plaster by the handful right onto the mound.This time, the thing kept its shape, and by 8:00 the next morning it had finally dried. We nudged it onto a plywood platform and added some 'scenery': a bag of kitty litter for sand and a small plastic palm tree with a monkey in its branches – and never mind that the monkey was wearing a plastic T-shirt and clutching a plastic cocktail.It was way too heavy for us to lift so our folks had to work together to lug it in to school.Mr. Sweeney took one look and smiled sadly like many a middle school teacher before him. He ended up giving us each a B-minus.Ah well. We thought we could fool them all and still get the easy A. But it looks like the punching-down part is easy; it’s the building-up a good thing from scratch that takes the talent. 

This Old Thing?

I was giving a ride to a young friend the other day when he suddenly caught sight of himself in the passenger-side mirror. “Man, I just pray I never go bald!” he said. “I have such a weird-shaped head!”“What are you talking about? You do not!“ I said back. But then instead of modeling a more self-accepting way, I went foolishly on. “I know what you mean though. I wear bangs because, well…. really I’m kind of homely and I always figure bangs might help.”It was a pitiful exchange and one that had me thinking yet again that if we could only stop fretting about how we look, or how we come across, or what they’re thinking of us NOW, we‘d be so much more open to the present moment.We'd be better able to notice things I mean: Like nature. Or other humans, who are just so funny and brave, and kind for the most part too - and what a shame to miss catching daily examples of all that. When you spend your time fixed on your own ‘image’ it’s like going to see some great movie but then missing all its bright beauty because you’ve spent the whole time in the theatre’s dim little bathroom critically regarding yourself in its dim little mirror. I mean, didn’t we all do enough of that in Seventh Grade?It isn’t easy to be self-forgetful, God knows, especially in this Internet culture where everyone but your pet hamster maintains a carefully crafted public ‘profile.’ Then too there are those things your parents were always saying to you when you were young, like “Stop that awful slouching!” and “Get your hair out of your eyes, can’t you?”When I was in high school, I was always pointing out the run in my stockings as if it had just then appeared, when in fact I knew very well it was there when I put the stockings on that morning. And what kind of strategy is that, pointing out your defects to others before they can point them out to you?People do it though. Compliment a woman on her hair and half the time she’ll say “Oh it’s all crazy today!” Compliment her on her dress and she’ll call it ‘just an old thing.’Men do it too. At one point in my career I was considering whether or not I should sign a deal with a literary agent I had been talking with for the better part of a year. I remember closing one jaunty exchange with him by saying, “Well, it would be great if we could work together. Among other things, I like your teeth."“My teeth?“ he cried with true alarm. “My teeth are the first thing I’m going to change when I’ve saved up enough money!”Oops. I should have remembered then that passage from Alice in Wonderland that I've always been so struck by. It comes when Alice first meets the Mad Hatter before sitting down at his tea table.“Your hair wants cutting,” he nervily remarks.“It’s rude to make personal remarks,” she tartly replies.And she’s right, our little fictional Alice. Just ask very tall people how they feel about hearing all those “How are the weather up there?” cracks.No, we’d best not be talking about one another’s looks. Doing so just sends us all back to the sad little mirror in the movie theatre bathroom, there to miss, on the big screen just down the hall, that dazzling feature film called Life. 

Comfort in a Time of Pain?

On another note on this sad Morning After, how about some Kurt Vonnegut, who always spoke truth to power and who was present, a P.O.W., when the Allies firebombed the beautiful city of Dresden. 135,00 civilians died in this Medieval city was once called The Florence of the Elbe, making its fire-bombing the single most destructive act of the war, outranking even Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this passage from his extended cry-for-peace novel Slaughterhouse Five, there is this vision witnessed by protagonist Billy Pilgrim who, having become ‘unstuck in time,’ is granted a sort of vision. This is what he 'saw':“American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and every thing and every body was as good as new.When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.Let’s do it: let’s re-bury it all, every accelerant to every weapon. And let’s also look inside our own hearts as well - for the accelerants not only of anger but also of our indifference to the suffering of others. 

Forgetting It All

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

Bon Appetit!

See what you think of these dishes, the recipes for which I found in a cookbook that has rested on my kitchen shelf for decades. A fat volume of brown and food-stained pages, it was passed down to my mother from her mother, who received it from her mother, born in the long-ago 1830s.Here’s a recipe  that caught my eye right away:“Wash a fresh tongue” it begins, and yes, I too thought “Gack! Whose tongue are we washing and for what purpose?”But the recipe doesn’t say whose tongue. It just goes briskly on:“Barely cover the tongue with water in a pot and until morning when you will put it in a kettle full of cold water, stand it over a very slow fire, and simmer it gently for four hours, until you can pierce it with a fork. Then, when it’s done, stand it to cool in the liquid in which it was boiled, peel off the skin starting at the tip,” and -boom! – “the tongue is ready to use.”Ready to use HOW?” you might faintly wonder, as I did, the little hairs on the back of my neck stirring uneasily.But back then people knew what a critters’ tongue was for: It was for dinner.And you’ll admit it would make for some hearty eating, especially if it were a cow’s tongue which Google shows to be a good 18 inches in length.Now a second recipe, for the delicacy known as Ox Cheek:“Soak half an ox head - (yes, the whole head) for three hours and clean it well with plenty of water. After eight hours of cooking and four hours of chilling, remove the cake-fat and warm the head and the pieces in the soup, adding truffles and vegetables as desired.”As a 21^st century person I don’t know what cake-fat even is, unless it’s what shows up around your middle after pigging out on birthday dessert.Finally why not try tripe, which Wikipedia defines in it its no-nonsense way as “a type of edible offal from the stomachs of various animals” and which the old cookbook says is “both delicious and easily digested.” For those of you who have never seen it, tripe resembles a white, rubbery open-celled sponge.To prepare it, “scald the stomach in boiling water sufficient to loosen the inside coating. Wash and scrape it well through several boiling waters, then soak it in cold water overnight and in the morning, scrape it again until white and clean. “Which leads you to queasily wonder what it looked like BEFORE you scraped it clean.Yet who are we to pass judgment on foods with which most of us are unfamiliar? Who are we to shrink and quake at these details? For the farmer of the 1800s or any folks prosperous enough to buy their food at a market, meat was at the heart of every good meal. People enjoyed their meat dishes and would have seen no reason to practice denial about where it came from. We moderns are the ones practicing denial. Styrofoam trays and plastic wrap help us do this but make no mistake: a living creature died so we could sit down to this roast, this burger, this chop. Let’s at least always stop and offer up that pre-meal prayer of thanks.

They Laughed

They laughed at my i-Phone 6 Plus. Or rather at the case; the case is what kicked me over to the realm of the laughable. I have been trained by the teenagers in my life to use the Otter Box for a case since with an Otter Box you can drop your phone onto a floor made of prison-yard concrete with impunity.And pink was the only color Otter Box they had at the Verizon store that day besides black, and I knew I couldn't have a black case? In the depths of a purse or backpack I'd never spot it. But as you can see, this wasn’t just pink, it was HOT PINK. Barbie Doll pink. As I carried it over the last two months I’ll admit I was beginning to feel like a person walking around in clown shoes.And boy did people made fun, my family members especially. One of them said the case made it look like I was carrying around a hot water bottle. "My phone does look like a hot water bottle!" I thought.Or an enema bag.  I remember the days when an enema bag was a real rubber bag, and the 90-year old woman who was the sage in my family held one high in the air, letting gravity do the work as a pink hose conducted its contents of warm soapy water down into the wee small opening in my wee small bottom.I was five so I don’t remember more of this episode, except that my big sister danced past the bathroom door and called exultantly, “Her face is PLAID! Like all checkered, red and white!” Then I fainted, less than a second after the two ends of the tubing were ‘connected’ and the flood of water began,So, you know: Bad associations with pink.Lucky for me I have just come from seeing my friend Bobbie, who has just bought a phone case that doubles as a slim wallet. With her phone nested inside this palmful of sleek black leather she looks power-dressed even at the gym in workout clothes. Maybe she saw the look on my face as I regarded it. Maybe it was all she could do not to laugh when she first spied my clown phone. As we were finishing up at the gym anyway, she asked me if I wanted to go with her to Best Buy and look at cases.We did go there and look at cases and I found this little beauty. It’s a soft moleskin brown. It has only two little slits inside the front cover so it doesn’t hold as much credit-card-wise as Bobbie's does but that works for me too.And so... I bought it, and for less money than I had spent on the original pink monstrosity. None of these cases are cheap but it’s money well spent, because, as we all learn pretty quickly on this titled and wobbling planet, we do need protection!  

Thou Shalt Not Shame, Blame or Attack

We are all harmed when we blame, or shame, or attack each other - or even ourselves. I learned this truth at a VISIONS® workshop I attended some eight years ago. And yet dear as I hold this teaching, there are moments when I slide back into a state of forgetting, as I did twice, just in the last week.The first time occurred when I messed up at work and then got called on it. Immediately I curled up like a badger and withdrew to my badger-cave, the one with the sign over it reading, “You're hopeless, you'll never learn, you might as well quit.”I had made a mistake, yes. But I dragged it around like an ant with a dead ant on its back. I lost two whole days of my life during this cave-retreat and nothing was made better for my having stayed there, chanting over my little witch's brew of self-contempt.So that was my first ‘forgetting.’The second forgetting occurred when I began blaming and shaming someone other than myself the silent and sneaky way: in my mind. This happened as I was entering the women's restroom in a tourist hotel and heard a commotion from within.“It’s STAINED Mother, have you heard of the concept ‘stained?’“ a young female voice was shouting. “And no, the stain WON’T come out!” she added.“I actually think it will," a second female voice said. “It's only make-up after all and–"I rounded the corner then and saw a mother by the sinks standing beside her child of about 15, who was wildly scraping at the corner of her gauzy top with a wad of wet paper towel.“We’ll go up to the room. I have some liquid Tide-" began the mother. But the girl was having none of it.“It cost friggin’ $200!” she bellowed, only she didn't say ‘friggin.’’“Let’s go to the room and see what we can do,” continued her mother in the same quiet voice. “Come on now,” she urged again, and exited the restroom as if to lead the way.“I! Am! Not! COMING!” bellowed the girl, even more loudly and stayed where she was, so that she and I were the only people in the rest room.I approached the sink to wash my hands and glanced briefly at her in the mirror. She wouldn't look at me. I wanted to say “Wait and bring it to a good dry cleaners and you'll be fine.” But there she still stood with that furious scowl on her face and her harsh words echoing in the tiled space, so that then I wanted to say a few more things:Like, “Hey, calm down!” Also, “What's wrong with you, talking to your mother like that?”Also, “How much of a sap does a person have to be to spend $200 on a half-yard of fabric that looks like it's made of Kleenex?”And then I caught myself. Maybe she couldn’t meet my eye because she was ashamed. I thought about how quickly her mother had left, and with no apparent anger. Maybe the girl has a condition, some turbulence that has beset her since birth, something she has no control over.In short, who was I to judge?Now if I could just learn to REMEMBER this valuable teaching I hold so dear, I just know I would do a lot less damage, both to myself and to others. 

The Cave Thrown Open?

Noontime on Mondays I would go to the nursing home to help feed my husband’s aunt. She couldn’t move her arms - or wouldn’t. Couldn’t speak - or wouldn’t. She had not taken a single step since she had first come to this place after breaking her hip some six years before. Her caregivers said she uttered a chance phrase from time to time, “pretty good,” or “yes indeed,” emerging clear as clear from the depths of her silence. Mostly though, she regarded us all with a dull and lifeless gaze.In the beginning she had talked a little.  “The years are passing so quickly!” she said once out of the blue. And “Eddie is so good to me.” And, one day, “You look exhausted!” Back then, a look of animation would flash over her face when I first arrived. She would smile and color would mount to her cheeks and I would begin talking and talking, hoping to keep her there. It never worked. Within moments she was gone again, far away and alone. Our communication remained focused on the simple ceremony of feeding.“What should I do after she eats?” I asked Uncle Ed once. “Where she won’t talk, I mean?” “Just sit with her,” he said. “Just hold her hand.”So I did that, and watched what went on around us.Mostly I watched Edna, tall and big-boned, with wispy hair.“Girl! What time is it, Girl?” she asked me once. “That poor soul,” she added, indicating another with a nod of her head. “She’s touched, you know!”I liked Edna. “I’m goin’ out for a smoke! Where’s my bag?” she would say, just as if she could walk on out whenever she liked. She carried that small black purse with her everywhere. Once I saw her bring it to the dining room and put it in the trash. Later in the meal she became agitated. “Where’s my tea?“ she kept saying.“Right here,” said her helper.“No! My TEA! ” she exclaimed, looking now under the table.“Is this it?” I asked, going to the trash and fetching forth her purse.“Yes!” Later, she spilled her actual tea and saw the erratic shape the spill made on the tiles. “Girl!” She hailed me. “There’s a chicken on the floor here!” In time, Edna fell permanently quiet, as sooner or later they all fall quiet on this ward. When she died, I cut out her obituary. I have it still.It took almost ten years before Auntie Fran died. By then she had long stopped wrinkling her nose as she once did when I would bend to kiss her and my hair would tickle her face and she had gotten so she would hardly eat.I stopped worrying what to say to her when I came on Mondays. And I got to wondering if she were in there at all, until two things happened in a one-month period. Once, when I did not briskly pull up and away at embrace’s end but stayed there, my cheek against her cheek, she made that little sound people make when you kiss them and they like it. And another time – it was in this same month of new beginnings that we are now in - I brought her an Easter lily when she was already in bed, blue eyes on the ceiling. I tipped the plant until it was nearly horizontal, and the soft chalice of its blossom dipped toward her face. She shut her eyes and inhaled deeply.She was in there all right, and to this day I am still so glad I was able to reach her there just that one time, deep in her cave and waiting for the great Transformation.       

"What's That Again?"

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

Exotica!

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

Bubbles, Baths & the Pearly Gates

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

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

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

Spring (almost)

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

Accept It?

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

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

  

Forget the Resort Wear

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

Funny Lady

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

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