In the Museum of the Confedaracy

On that blazing bright day in early August, I stood with my grandson inside a museum housing relics from what some still call "The War of Northern Aggression." Some call it that in the South, anyway, which is where we had come on this family vacation.He and I had paused to let our eyes adjust to the dim interior, I holding the flower we had just bought outside, a palmetto “rose,” skillfully woven out of the fronds of that tree. It was then that the elderly lady who took our money began engaging us in conversation.“Are you back in school yet?” she asked the 11-year-old.“Not yet, “ he smiled, and I instantly wondered if I should have counseled him to say “No ma’am,” and “No sir,” according to the etiquette practiced in this region. But if she noticed the absence of this social nicety, she showed no sign of it.“When I was a child, school never started until after Labor Day,” she said. “Our children are already back now. "Where are you from?” she then asked, and we named our northern state.Did she stiffen just a little? I wasn’t sure but I think she may have. Did I stiffen a little when my gaze fell on the bumper sticker available for sale? “Heritage, Not Hate” read its text, under an image of the Confederate flag.Let me extend myself a little more and see if we can find some common ground, I thought. “It's a beautiful building," I said, indicating the space inside this 1841 structure.“Yes,” she said. “Confederate soldiers came here by the hundreds to enlist in 1861.”“For sure the past is all around us,” I remarked.“My people fought for the Confederacy,” she replied.“Oh! Did they all come home?” I asked, mindful of the fact that more American lives were lost in this war than in all our other wars combined.“Yes they did!” she said, with emphasis. "Oh dear," I thought.  Was this an insensitive question, coming as it did from a northerner?I searched my memory for anything I knew about Civil War battles and came up with only one:“I think of Gettysburg alone,” I said. “All that loss of life!”Silence.I went on. “I think of the accounts - even the old bits of film – of Union and Confederate veterans meeting 50 years later, and even 75 years later, a few of them. I think of the way they greeted one another so warmly, shaking hands in the very spot where so many fell.”She paused a moment.“I couldn't do that,” she then said.“It’s hard for people, I know!” I said. “My mother used to tell me how, in the years just after the Second World War, many Americans still harbored hostility toward the Japanese.”“Many still do,” she said, and closed her mouth firmly.Then it was my turn to go silent, because that has not been my experience at all. The 11-year-old and I thanked her for our tickets and moved in to the exhibit hall.My sister in Florida tells me that way back, when a hurricane would come, an indigenous person of our southern coastal region would lash himself to a palmetto tree until it had passed. They knew that this short, deeply-rooted plant would never topple.Maybe we are all “rooted, in this way,” all inclined to maintain the view of the world as it was first communicated to us. I just wish we could start feeing less “dug in” somehow. I wish we could be like those old soldiers and meet across our differences, our hands extended in fellowship.Now watch these Civil War Veterans on film, from the documentary Echoes of the Blue & Gray [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeLGasX8FHk[/embed]

Pompeii?

This is an example of the to-do list I have been making every day since I was in the 9th grade..The 9th grade!I came upon it this morning on one of my million legal pads and,  because I wasn't quite awake yet, thought, "Great, it's my list! Ok, what am I supposed to do first?"It took me a while to realize it was a list that I had made ... when?A year ago? Two years ago?I study it and think 'What a busy girl!' And also, I wonder if I got it all done?   Probably not but I I know I sure tried.Someday, stuff like this is all that will be left of us, besides our acreage-gobbling burial places. It'll be like what we know of the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii after Vesuvius blew her top: besides our bones-and-dust and a few gold teeth there'll just be a bunch of old kitchenware and some wall treatments - though hopefully not just the sex-and-phallus-glorification kind like they left. The theory is, this was an oil lamp:No accounting for tastes I guess. . Right now people rummaging among my things would find a bunch of sample grey damask papers for highly outdated front hall (speaking of wall coverings. :-)

Necessary Roughness

What can we say of the yearly mammogram? The glass plate is cold, they make you stand so close to the machine your ribs bruise, and then they force you to hold these contorted positions and stop breathing for like a million minutes while they set up the shotAnd then, of course, there's the vise.That victim of  the revenge of Joe Pesci's character in Scorsese's  Casino comes to mind.Your eyeballs don't pop out like that guy's did, but it feels like two things further down might pop for sure.Oh I know, I know, you don't really get permanently disfigured during a mammogram, and it's a crucial diagnostic.It's just that you go in with two rough approximations of this shape on your chest:And two minutes later they look like this:I think I was even leaning over like this guy by the time we got done - and though he appears to be almost smiling,  I sure know I wasn't!

You're Asking ME?

What  do you do when someone seeks your advice? I ask myself this question every time I read Dear Abby, the advice column written by Pauline Phillips, who, now in her 74th year, is one wise and earthy person.Take the response she makes to this high schooler who writes in to ask if it’s “wrong” to be put off by the fact that her new boyfriend has just told her that two of the toes on each foot are “webbed.”“When he sent me a photo one day to prove it, I realized they are almost entirely attached and I freaked out. I don't know how to feel. Am I being shallow? "“No, you are being foolish,” replies Abby and I’m betting it’s this kind of candor that keeps people reading her. Plus she offers so many pearls of wisdom: “Look within,” is often the gist of her advice. Also, “Examine your motives.”  Not to mention, “Seek counseling” something she will say in the same way that bold people will yell “Get a room!” when they come upon a madly making out couple.She just makes sense, as in this response she pens to someone going on and on to ask what words s/he should use to tell her/his new psychotherapist that that person “isn’t right for me.”“The words are, ’This isn't working for me and I won't be coming back,’” says Abby, adding only that the therapist probably does deserve to know why.And then there’s the advice she gives to an angry grandmother who begins her letter by huffing,  “Whatever happened to respecting one's elders and recognizing grandparents as head of the family?”Apparently the woman has just come from a visit to the home of her son and his wife where she had  “many disagreements” with her daughter-in-law on how to care for “my grandchild. Instead of respecting my years of experience as a mother and appreciating my help, she chose to ignore my instructions and advice.“Now, as a result, her son has told her she “will not be welcomed into their home again unless she apologizes for trying to undermine her parenting. I told him she should apologize to ME for not showing me respect as the grandmother! How can I make my son see that it is his wife who is wrong, and not me? “Oh dear. I do feel for this lady, I do. Her desire is so human. I mean, who among us wouldn’t wish to be supported in the belief that we ourselves are just fine and it’s the other guy who needs to change?Still, I have to shake my head reading her words: She’s the head of the whole family all of a sudden, just because her child now has a child? I’m a grandmother myself and my feeling is that in most instances my job is to keep pretty much mum until my advice is asked for.I’m so glad that “Abby” is still out there doing what she does  - and I am dead sure I would never want her job. If I have learned anything in the near 60 years, I have spent as a thinking person it is this:  When people asks questions about the course of action they should take, they often already know, deep down, what that course is.To my way of thinking, the best thing I can do is ask helpful questions and then listen to the answers, with utter, absolute attention and an open heart.

A Death Witnessed

We watched a bird die in our cove, a loon as we thought from a distance."What's wrong with that bird?" one of us asked."Is it a baby who doesn't know how to swim yet?" somebody else said"I would think a loon would be born born knowing how to swim," a third person remarked.We fell silent and watched as the bird fluttered and circled, circled and fluttered."Maybe it's playing.""But the bird wasn't playing, as we realized when it abruptly stopped, dropped its head in the water, disappeared from sight  and, a minute later, bobbed to the surface, one side up and entirely motionless. David took a canoe and rowed out to it. The bird was dead. He lifted it on one oar and paddled back to the dock where the rest of us were sitting.Everyone gazed at it sadly. "What can have killed it?," somebody said. "Leeches," opined the 8-year-old. "They suck your blood 'til you're dead!" "Lead," said somebody else." Lead in the water?""No, there's sometimes lead in the sinkers on people's fishing lines. When a bird accidentally swallows one..."So the bird's playful-seeming dance was actually a death agony.We took pictures of the bird, as you can see, and as we did so came to realize that it was no loon at all but rather a cormorant like the cormorants who perch on the rocks in our little cove.David carried him across the street on that same oar to bury him. Then the rest of us went on about our fun, alive and playing and all heedless of the fact, in the bloom of the late-summer day, that we too - even we - are also poling slowly toward  darkness.

You Can Feel It

The sun is hot and then it's not.The wind blows and the sky suddenly gets scowly with clouds and leaves you didn’t know had fallen begin scuttling across the sidewalk.Temperatures swing from the high 50s to the mid- 90s in a single six-hour period.Something is happening. The crickets know it; your skin knows it, safe from a weakening sun.Even the crickets know it, who, at twilight, are buoyantly bowing away on their little fiddles but by 4am are dead quiet. Have they taken a fright at the nighttime cooling and are dummying up so as not to call attention to themselves?I don’t know.I understand almost nothing of the great changes afoot.Here is a poem by James Richardson called End of Summer. It makes an sharp ache in my throat today. See if it does that to you: 

Just an uncommon lull in the trafficso you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up,with his brusque sweep brusque sweep of the sidewalk,and the slap shut of a too thin rental van,and I told him no a gust has snatched from a conversationand brought to you, loud.It would be so different if any of these were missing is the feelingyou always have on the first day of autumn,no, the first day you think of autumn, when somehowthe sun singling out high windows,a waiter settling a billow of white clothwith glasses and silver, and the sparrowsshattering to nowheresomehow ARE the Summer waving that here is where it turnsand will no longer be walking with you, traveller,who now leave all of this behind, carrying only what it has made of you.

EVERYBODY Sing!

Down here at the karaoke bar on this warm summer night, with a moon slim as a dancer watching all the action, things are gettin’ pretty lively. Four young women have just told the Master of Ceremonies that one of them has turned 21 that very day. “Born in the mid-90s, and drinkin’ here tonight, people!” he calls from the stage to the rest of us“I have socks older than they are,” a mustachioed mutters, but the emcee does not hear him. Like a preacher with a killer sermon, he is busy building momentum.The first young guy up sings something so wildly off-key that only the two great-grandmothers at the corner table manage to smile their encouragement. Everyone else talks right over him, some of them wincing as they talk.Next, two ladies join forces for “We Are Fam-i-lee” (as in “I’ve Got All My Sisters With Me”) and the crowd stamps and whistles.Now the emcee shouts, “At this juncture, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the best attorney on earth and on the moon, FRANK!”  and Frank takes the stage to deliver a tender ballad called “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off.”“OH yeah!” cries a young woman with a drink in her hand.Then, as if to illustrate its theme, she rises, her cocktail still in her hand, and begins executing that female dance move where a lady rotates her hips while languidly waving one hand in the air like a sleepwalker hailing a taxi.In response, a young man moves toward this young lady, perhaps because her clothes have in fact begun falling off, in a kind Venus-on-the-Half-Shell way. He smiles to show harmless intent, then yells at the top of his lungs into her ear, which is what people have to do in order to be heard in settings like this.She leans very far forward, whether in real or feigned deafness, prompting the three other guys who had come in with this brave swain to snap their eyes over to the slow loping rhythms of the ballgame on the wide-screen. No guy wants to be seen eyeing the cleavage of a girl another guy has begun the Great Dance with.Now a man and a woman on the high side of 60 are also smiling and attempting to chat until, with a sour face, the woman’s girl-pal moves between them and says, “We are out of here. NOW.” So this 60-something woman bids the gent goodbye, though not before hurling a nasty remark at the back of her departing friend.The gent just smiles philosophically as if thinking “Hey. Women: They come. They go. What are you gonna do?”Next, a young guy steps to the stage and does a hip-hop song about love and body parts. Now, a stocky girl takes the mike for a growly version of Nancy Sinatra’s “Boots.” After that, a smallish young man tackles Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” the one song I have just recently been told is guaranteed to bring any wedding dance-floor to soaring life.Finally, a man in his 70s comes forward and croons a pitch-perfect version of Louis Armstrong’s “Wonderful World” – at which point even that elegant slim dancer of a moon seems to bow in homage, just ever so slightly, in the moist summer sky.

Hot Enough For Ya?

Let's call this one "To Do List For a Hot Summer Day' or... "Livin' on a HotPlate'

• 6:00am: Rise, run coffee IV. Shower, dress, and right now, while it’s still sort of cool, iron dress to wear for night’s dinner guests.
• 7:00: If you really must serve broiled salmon on a day when temps are headed for the Self Clean setting, then broil it right now, before your eyes start melting and sliding down your face like they did yesterday.
• 7:30: Hmmmm. Recall that you tend to smell like salmon when you broil salmon. Throw clothes off and shower again.
• 8:15: Consider harsh penance of exercises your doc has you performing every morning. Not that you hate said exercises but so time-taking! Plan on doing later.
• 8:25: Head for home office 20 feet away. Close door, to keep you in there.
• 8:30: Get to work, first lowering window shades to keep out solar death rays.
• 8:58: Ask self, “Why is it again that AC unit in window is off?”
• 8:59: Remember: Electricity fizzles and fails with more than one such unit on. Must keep living room cool for dinner guests!
• 9:00: Keep working. Drink from giant water bottle, stored all night in freezer.
• 10:30: Recite pearls of Buddhist wisdom inwardly: To live is to suffer! Detach!
• 12:00: Break for nourishment. Ask self what is a cool, easily-prepped lunch.
• 12:05: Settle on couple of dabs of peanut butter spread on cool fluted columns of celery. Add sliced tomato, tangle of spring mix straight from the box. Toss back handful of almonds. Drink more water.
• 12:30 Attempt penance of exercise now, the weights, the core work, the cardio.
• 12:45: Epic fail on last. Nice try though! Take day’s third shower.
• 1:30: Back in work space. Note small beads moisture gathering on keyboard. Automatic sprinkler up on the ceiling the cause?
• Remember: IS no automatic sprinkler system.
• 1:31 Slowly realize: Misty bits = own perspiration.
• 1:32: Wipe off keyboard, keep on working. Write like the wind!
• 1:33: If only there WERE a wind.
• 2:55: Pause to peek out under window shade. Hallucinate sidewalk segments starting to slide, buckling and slipping like tectonic plates, one under another.
• 3:00: Give up on going AC-less. Activate unit. Gulp down more bottled water, which is now body temperature.  4:00: Day’s final push in the writing department! Letters on the screen swarming. More hallucinations, or brilliant e.e. cummings-style invention?
• 5:00: Conclude not likely the latter. Sigh. Close up shop and descend to kitchen to consider company dinner menu.
• 5:15: Nix on steamed corn on cob. Nix on hot dinner rolls. Hell yes on cold gin. Pop same in freezer. Check on chilled wine.
• 5:30:  Greet mate, home from nice cool workplace. Swallow envy. Fake a smile.
• 6:00: Trudge upstairs for final hose-down. Climb into ironed dress. Brush teeth, bend to gulp cool water, right from the faucet.
• 6:30: Guests arrive! Cold broiled salmon, unwarmed dinner rolls, greens right from the box - too hot to die from E Coli!-  and, just for laughs, raw corn on the cob, haha!
• 9:00 Dress now all wrinkled, shoes now kicked off. Good times had by all! Good day in general, and what do the weather guys know anyway? Tomorrow just might be cooler, right?

  me once the guests left

Now Showing

The world, as usual, seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, but just before midnight last night, here on vacation in the Low Country with our little ones all asleep, some of us went down to the beach to see if we could spot some meteors - and did we ever spot them. The “we” in this case were my three grown children, called Carrie, Michael and Annie, and Annie's husband, called John .I'm a good deal older than they are of course, and I couldn't see well at all on the long boardwalk down to the ocean, on the dark and moonless night.  I thought I could navigate my way by starlight alone but no: a quarter of the sky, low to the horizon, held a veiling of clouds in which lightning flashed and forked.Somehow, though, far overhead, there they all were, our 'old friends', not our friends at all really. and not looking down at us as we once believed but just burning away, unmindful of us in our tiny world. John had a birthday yesterday. Earlier, with the children all still up, we celebrated with a fat chocolate cake and sang and he pretended to blow out the candles though a stiff ocean breeze did that for him half a second after we brought the cake out onto the deck. Born on August 12th, he has doubtless been told all his life that the Perseid Meteor shower coincides with his natal day. Anyway he sure knows a lot about it, AND the constellations AND the origin of the universe, this whole cat's cradle of starry matter in which we are caught and held. He's a big-picture type of guy as you would know if I hadn't cropped this photo of him and Annie standing before a map of the world... In fact  Annie just joked via text when one of us asked where John was during the violent hailstorm that drummed us all into submission last week that yes, John was safe at home, out in the yard at present, explaining the Greek debt crisis to the dog.Anyway, last night when we five got down to the water, we lay back in beach chairs looking up. Mosquitoes feasted on our ears and our skin went clammy in the tidal air. "Start by looking over by Cassiopeia there," said John, pointing upward.We did. A minute passed. We saw two meteors."I read where the stars really were brighter , maybe even closer, in the time of Plato," somebody said."They were," said John.Another two meteors."So the universe really is expanding and cooling, cooling and expanding?" somebody said. It might have been me.The others agreed that yes,  this was the case. A palmetto bug trudged over somebody's instep and three more meteors passed."So where does it end?" somebody said. "It all collapses and goes dark. But well before that, like in three billion years,  the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda,"said John.A thoughtful silence. "Will I still have my job?" said Annie in a small voice.\Then a bat swooped low over Michael's head, which caused him to give a yelp, and a second yelp as it swooped back up and swooped back down as if choosing him more truly.Two more meteors, then three, then one. I stood up out of my chair then, thinking of my husband David and daughter-in-law Chris in our rented house with its honey-colored light. "Mum wants to go back," said somebody.It was true. Mosquitos had begun nesting  in the net of my hair and my neck hurt from all the uplooking.So my youngest child Michael escorted me, almost as blind as his recent bat friend, along the 300 yards of skinny boardwalk. It was utterly dark among the palmettos and now came a loud rustling sound just two or three feet from us."What was THAT?" I said, though I wasn't frightened. "It's a deer, see it?" said Michael.But I didn't. And then I did. I saw its eyes, two close-set headlights, as they looked to me. I never did see the whole animal, but I guess that's how we mostly do see, here on this mortal plane: in part, as the Apostle Paul wrote and one day face to face  - and would that not be lovely?  

Here at the Ferris Wheel's Top

I used to think of us, at this high point of summer, as people perched at the top of a roller coaster’s first thrilling hill, but today I see that that's the wrong image entirely. It’s no roller coaster that we are on, lurching gear by gear to the top of its climb, then dropping so fast our eyes can’t focus. Rather it's a Ferris wheel, that stately old machine into whose gently rocking seats we are strapped, then lifted slowly skyward, pausing in our ascent until the carts are all full, and those at the bottom are strapped in too.It doesn’t matter that those others are strangers to us. We are all on this ride together in the pale-yellow mornings and the violet-hued twilights; all of us together on this great wheel of Time. I hear tell that even as we here in these northern climes are kicking off our sheets and flipping our pillows to find the cool spot, it is winter in Argentina. In New Zealand. In Mozambique. I hear this but I can't ever believe it, quite, not as a person who, in order to visualize ballet of our solar system’s, still needs to have one person stand in the center while nine other people orbit around him, turning in small circles themselves. This makes me sound like kind of a C-minus student of the sciences, I know, but I find I don’t mind that; I don’t see myself as more than a C-minus grasper of much in this world.At this time of year I'm more than happy to see myself as the soft animal that every human being is, not especially fleet of foot, undefended by natural armor, a small creature fated to return to the earth far sooner than many creatures with shells, or tusks, or fins. And what kinship I do feel with all creatures waking to these warm summer days!

• Take this array of ladybugs on my windowsill, who appear to be lazily arranging themselves into a necklace of red and black seed pearls, as if for their own idle amusement.
• Take this 18-month-old I saw at the electronics store, who decided to lie right down on the carpeting near the adapter/powercord/and earbuds wall. I saw him on his little back, dreamily waving his arms over his head and I wanted to lie right down right beside him and do the same.
• Take the lone turkey I saw last night, head-bobbing his way across a busy street as we humans in our passing cars braked quickly and stayed braked before passing him oh-so cautiously, and going on to warn oncoming cars of his presence.
• Take my neighbor’s cat who is the exact color of a butterscotch sundae and who comes each morning to tickle her tummy by strolling slow and easy through the flowerbed that lies between our yards.

Slow and easy is how I want to walk now too, noting every least thing as we sail high over the fairgrounds. We're at the top of the Ferris wheel still in this first full week of August, and the ride up has been plain lovely. We need only remember, as the days keep growing shorter, that the ride back down can be mighty lovely too.

Old Things

I love old things. One of them you see here, a bottle from the 1890s or before, meant as I am guessing, for spirits of some kind. You can't really tell with the label mostly effaced.I came upon this and the item below while going through a nasty drawer full of junk under our kitchen's utility sink. It was in the 1980s that these two items first came to our notice from their sleeping-place deep down in the earth . It happened when we excavated a portion of the yard to expand our antiquated kitchen.I don't know what the builder was thinking when he laid out the original room when the house was new in the 1890s. Even by that era's standards, it seems a truly terrible space to for the preparation of food. I say this because in all the 90 years before we came, this kitchen had remained the same. Sure, the stove had been swapped out and the old stove still reposes, a slumbering whale in our basement. The refrigerators got swapped out too, from the original icebox to electrified coolers, like the 1920s-era version that also slumbers below stairs.But the basic layout?  Unchanged in all that time by which I mean to say that when we got here, there were no cupboards above sink or stove or fridge. If you wanted a cupboard you had to walk in to the next room, a room grandly called, in those days, 'the butler's pantry'. I called it that myself  - I had grown up in a house with room we called the l pantry - until I realized my small children thought I was talking about a pantry without a butt. (It must have been my Boston accent.)Additionally, there were no surfaces on which to set things in this kitchen we inherited in the 1980s. Not a countertop in the place. If you wanted a surface, you had to walk into another room called the larder, where there were wooden shelves, wooden drawers and a lone square of marble for rolling your pie dough on. If as the cook, you needed to pare the potatoes you stood at the sink. When you needed to whip the potatoes, you sat at the wooden table in the room's center and worked with the bowl in your lap.And when our family of four sat at that table, still situated in the room's center, we were all squeezed in so tight that someone had to vacate his seat and push in his chair in order to open the fridge for a forgotten item, and another person had to do the same so someone could check the oven to see if the brownies were done.We couldn't wait for that renovation. It brought us not only a larger more airy space in which to prepare and serve meals to friends and family, but it also delivered to us this last old item: a railroad spike from... who knows when, as Its irregular shape argues for a vintage older still than the 1890s. Today I am thinking hmmmm: the old Massachusetts town of Concord lies only a few hills and laps distant from here.  Maybe this is the kind of spike driven in to the earth when they first laid that Boston-to-Fitchburg run in the 1840s, and the iron monster  so shattered young Henry Thoreaus's peace of mind over there in his cabin on the banks of Walden Pond. Anyway, here is 'our' spike, seen against one of my cookbooks for scale.The past is all around us, no doubt about that! Now if I could just talk to Thoreau, or Emerson, or Walt Whitman, or my girl Emily D. over the road there in Amherst. Where do they go, the dead, the silent dead?

On Houseguests and the Laundry

For most of the last decade I moonlighted as a massage therapist, and this story begins in those years.It begins on the day a tall big-boned woman of 75 appeared in my office for her first appointment. After completing the intake form together, she and I entered the massage room itself where she took one look at my thickly linened table and without preamble turned to me. 
“So you’re Irish,” she said.  “How did you know?”I said back, startled.
“Hey just look in the mirror” she shrugged, and then nodded toward the table. "And I see you do a WHOLE lot of laundry!”
 
“I sure do!” I sigh, thinking of the Santa-sack of sheets and face-cradle covers I toted from office to home and back every day.“Well,” she went on matter of factly, “it's lucky we Irish are good at washing because we sure ain’t much in the kitchen!”I laughed out loud then. And I’ll admit that for all its ethnic stereotyping, her remark about laundry has made me smile many a time since that day.In fact I am thinking of it now. Why? Because for the last two weeks we have had five extra people in this house, three young children and their two parents.They are family so I love them already, but the truth is I love it anytime guests come to this house and sleep over. I just find the arrangement so …cozy.I mean sure it was a little more work having five  ‘boarders’ for a fortnight. And yes the children brought with them everything but their very beds; from favorite books to their stuffed animals to the small electronic devices all school-age kids seem to have these days.But in general they were among the most low-impact guess we have ever had. They prepared the food. They cleared the table. They loaded the dishwasher. They emptied the dishwasher.And when they climbed the stairs for bed each night, they did so taking every last sneaker, bookbag and babydoll with them, leaving our first floor as tidy as the rooms in a funeral home.They left this morning, - that's a picture of my girl Carrie above starting to make their move - which is why I find myself now once again doing laundry.I have gathered the linens from four beds and a crib; I have dragged downstairs the tall damp mountain of towels left in their wake, and all these I have submitted to the slow churn and gurgle of the washing machine; to the busy spin of the drier.And now, in remaking the beds, I am finding traces of this family’s stay. Here, for example: here is a tiny sock. And over here: here is a small stuffed bunny.I’m also learning things as this task progresses. I’m learning that one child appears to have slept all these nights with a giant box of tissues right in under the covers with him. I’m learning that his mother has curled up all these nights attended by a travel pillow in a hand-stitched pillowcase case from the 1890s.Chiefly I am relearning things I already knew. I’m learning again that I rather enjoy sending a fresh clean sheet aloft with a billow and a snap, whether it is to settle finally on a message table or a bed;And I am learning again that I do so love the feeling of having lots of people here in the dark midnights, all breathing safe and quiet under the same roof. It’s what I imagine God must feel too, gazing down, from that Heavenly realm, on all our little heads.

our littlest houseguest, 

Bag it, Baby

Here's a funny email that just zipped quicker than the Road Runner into my inbox“Dear friend” it reads.(I have a friend, that’s so great! I love having friends!)“Glad to hear you're in the market for column bags.”  Wait I'm in the market for column bags? I am?Well it’s true always in the market for something. Yesterday I went online to buy two nice fat wooden knobs for the ends of a pair of curtain rods I don't even own.And I guess maybe I can see why I’d get this email, since columns have been part of my daily life for some damn long time now - meaning I do actually write columns, every single week and have been doing that since the year Jimmy Carter found himself freshly ushered off the stage. These columns appear in papers all over the country . But gosh I didn't know you could store them in BAGS.Yet here's this company saying specifically "we specialize in column bags with good quality and competitive price” – AND they’re "willing to establish business relationship with" me! Not 'a' ie, a single business relationship, mind, you, but ‘business relationship’. It sounds so sort of …eternal. Anyone with abandonment issues like I have has gotta love that! Plus I'm excited because all this time I've been trying to store all 10,000 of these columns in dreary old file cabinets and I get all these paper cuts and there's all this bending over to get at them.Bags though? You can hang a bag. Bags are always better, especially when they're nice and new like mine would be. James Brown knew all about this didn't he though? I do love me some James Brown. Saw him perform once in a little club in Revere Beach. ;-)[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE5D2hJhacU[/embed]

Lets' Have Another YARD SALE

I should really hold another yard sale. It’s been a good 20 years since the last one and the old place is brimming again with so many items that SEEMED like wise purchases at the time but, really, were they ever? And I have to ask myself: how many scalp-singeing curling irons can one person own? Especially when that person already has curly hair and it turns out what she really needed was a scalp-singeing FLAT iron?And maybe while I’m at it I could get some tips about how to properly use these cattle-proddish tools, the true big guns of the styling realm. The last time I asked at the salon why my hair sometimes smells burned, all three stylists hooted with laughter.“If it smells burned it’s because you’re burning it! Adjust the setting!“ one cried amid all the merriment.“Wait, there are settings on these things?” was all I could think. It’s like when the repairman comes to fix your washing machine and lifts out some little doodad you never noticed was even in there. “Of course you’re taking this out and cleaning it every time, right?” he says and you nod gravely, wondering all the while how you could have failed to understand more about an appliance you have owned since Back to the Future was the movie of the year.But to get back to the topic of useless items, why do I have a so-called “air popper” that never did anything but burp forth a listless 20 or 30 scorched corn kernels from its snout before emitting a sharp metallic smell and quitting altogether? Out with the air popper!Where did I even get these crazy items, or were they gifts? It's true that some who have come here as extended guests have left behind things, like the thousand-pound set of free weights up in the attic. Sigh.I remember clearly that yard sale we had back in the 90s. It’s when I finally got rid of all those silky jogging suits done up in swishy pastel fabrics. I remember how it took me weeks to get ready, labeling things as I sorted.I had a pile marked 'Scary Bathing Suits', featuring some of the steel-girded ”full figured” numbers I wore in my Just-Had-Another-Baby stage. I had a richly comic pile consisting of half a dozen hilarious bras and a pair of fanny-padded underpants.Then I had a pile with dolls of the kind that you buy for your kids in desperate moments, when you’re just leaving for vacation, say. As I cleared a spot for them I gave them nice new names, like 'Jury Duty Barbie' and 'Vasectomy Ken'. And then, God help me, there were all those Nerf toys and Super Soakers with enough power to stun a mastodon.These last I seem to have somehow re-acquired and I guess that’s okay; younger visitors are thrilled to come upon them.That thousand-pound weight set though? Even as I write, that thousand-pound weight set is still here, slowly working its way through the splintery attic floorboards, ready to crash through the bedroom ceiling onto our unsuspecting heads. I live with the danger. In my mind it makes a nice metaphor for life.

Is This the SAME PLACE?

 Right now the air is so damp and sodden!I feel like I need gills instead of lungs to keep on living.And the vegetation outside is just drenched with chlorophyll..It's ALL SO GREEN !Even the inchworms are green, to say nothing of the mold growing on that one clementine that got stuck at the bottom of the fruit bowl.It looks like a fuzzy green bowling ball for Dopey and Sneezy and pals now.But seriously..Can this really BE the same block?The same state?Nay, the same hemisphere, that used to look like THIS?Can this be the same hemisphere where, when  the sun began to set and the icicle below halted whatever dripping it had been doing OUTSIDE the house and instead got busy dripping secretly INSIDE, painting so many of our walls and windows a rich caramel brown?I mean can this above picture really be  taken from the same exact spot in my house as THIS?It can be and it is.... and all I can say right now is Mama Nature she does like to keep us hoppin'!

"The Nuns" (and Report Cards in General)

After making up all those snow days, we finally came to the school year’s end around here  last week and the final quarter ended fully and for good.Back when I was a child, the end of any marking period was a tough time, both for my big sister Nan and for me, and why? Because we had "The Nuns" and The Nuns could be very exacting. Ours were anyway, and they sure didn't sugarcoat things on the report cards. For example, in the 'character development' categories at the bottom of the card, there was a box labeled “Accepts Correction,” in which I received a steady stream of NI’s, for “Needs Improvement.” There was another labeled “Use of God-Given Abilities” where Nan racked up her own share of NI’s. Nan was always as smart as a whip and it must have galled her teacher-nuns to see her doodling dreamily in the margins of her worksheets, up in that top right-hand corner where we were supposed to write ‘JMJ,” for Jesus, Mary and Joseph.I am so happy to see that nowadays young schoolchildren’s report cards seem so humane. Take this one, sent home with my little grandson David in the very first year of his own formal schooling. It has these wonderful categories, like "can describe the effect of wind on people and the environment” - love it! - and "can define balance and demonstrate how it is achieved.” And the behavioral evaluations seem so encouraging. For example his teacher writes "David takes pride in his work and follows our routines with ease.” Excellent! Also , “We see a thoughtful and compassionate side of David when he helps his classmates and teachers. He shows genuine concern for the well-being of others.” Great!And then there’s this part that COULD be interpreted as the bad news, but somehow doesn’t SEEM all that bad, the kindly way this teacher puts it:  "We also see a side of David that is physical. He can be full of energy and antics. He loves to play tricks and he can be pretty sly. When reminded about our rules, he works hard to maintain self-control,” she goes on."This is not easy for him.”“Growth is noted.”I find that wording just so wonderfully... careful. Does “can be pretty sly” mean he is snacking on stolen fingerfuls of paste during Art Class? Does “works hard to maintain self-control” suggest that sometimes he loses it?I love best that she writes that “growth is noted,” for don’t we all struggle to grow thus, ascending from our many lower selves to a higher self, whether we're six or 96?At close of this first day of sure-enough summer, on this brink of the fair season's biggest long weekend I say God bless all teachers for believing that this growth is possible. And God bless too the young woman I knew as Sister Catherine Alice, who once told us wide-eyed Second Graders about how, of a snowy winter evening on the hilly convent campus, she and her fellow nuns would sometimes bind up their skirts and veils and go sledding.

Nice Try on the Fathers Day Gift

I was browsing in a gift shop one June day when I came upon the simple-looking staff that I think of as a “Talking Stick.“Labeled a “Rain Stick,” it is a varnished section of cactus inside of which are many spoke-like slender thorns and tiny pebbles. When you tip it at an angle, a delicious pattering sound ensues as the pebbles fall from one end of its four-foot length to the other, tumbling past spoke after tiny spoke.The tag accompanying this Rain Stick told that in Aztecs culture the males would confer using such a staff, which helped preserve order, since a person was only allowed to speak while holding it.In fact I had used something very much like a Rain Stick the day my middle school daughters and her pals fell into an argument. I went and fetched a small broom from the closet by the back door and explained the rules.And it worked like a charm: There was no interrupting, the pace of talk slowed way, way down, and at the end of 20 minutes the four girls had not only had their say but had wept, hugged, blown their noses, and gone to the fridge for a little snack.Remembering this, I stopped in my tracks when I saw this gift-shop doodad. This is it! I thought. Here it was almost Father’s Day so why not give my children's father a Rain Stick, which, as the tag pointed out, would “help make life more enjoyable, meaningful and even complete”? Anyway, wasn’t the dad in this family ALL ABOUT male-bonding activities? Didn’t he have those pals he got together with every week to play cards, inhale Scotch and highly-salted snacks, and insult each other’s moves? Couldn’t a Rain Stick elevate THEIR level of communication?I paid the 30 bucks and took it home.On Father’s Day itself, the kids and I had planned to take our honoree to an open-air concert performed by a bunch of people dressed like 19^th century serfs. But as it turned out, actual rain was pouring like water from a busted hydrant and the concert was canceled.Then the dad received an invite from a buddy-dad to watch the Stanley Cup finals and somehow in there the Rain Stick got forgotten.Days later, when we at last got around to presenting it, we let him play with it a while. “It says self-realization follows,” we told him, reading from the tag.“So… are you realizing anything yet?” we added.“Yeah, I'm realizing you guys really blew Father's Day,” he said.Nothing daunted, the next time the scotch-and-sodium pals came over for bridge, I brought the Talking Stick forth to show it to them.They looked up from their brimming fists.One grunted.Another picked it up and swung it like a bat.Then they all looked back down at their cards.A month later, the youngest in our family whacked it on the floor and we saw 10,000 pebbles explode like confetti all around us.The child yelped in glee. On hearing about this later, so did his dad.  We three remaining family member, females all, sighed deeply. Then, in the ceremony of resignation common to families everywhere, all five of us adjourned together to the fridge to have a little snack.

No Fences

Seen from the air, the Florida development where my sister used to live reveals a pattern of houses that seem to pose like a group of ladies in white flanked by rectangles of turquoise: the in-ground pools that accessorize them like bright costume jewelry.These homes have small windows in the street-facing walls meant to ensure privacy and keep out heat. Access to them is gained chiefly through attached garages, which yawn open on command, admit a car, and then shut again, tighter than a bulldog’s jaws.The development has fancy stone gates out front and a Homeowners Association that pays visits to any families not conforming to the association’s ‘aesthetics’. One family, newly arrived from the other side of the globe, thought it would be okay to hang their laundry inside their open garage. It wasn’t, as they were quickly advised.I couldn't live in a place like that for a week.When I was just starting out in adult life I lived in a series of cramped and shuddery walk-ups in Boston and Cambridge. Then after marrying, my husband and I moved to the city of Somerville, back when Somerville was just a regular town and not the trendy burg it has since become. There we lived happily and unselfconsciously – until the day a friend told us what she had just said in the car on the way to our place: “Lock your doors, kids. This is Somerville."For years I seethed over that remark and when we bought our own house farther out from these cities, I vowed I would never be like that. I took comfort in the fact that we were just five miles away from the close-packed streets we had known. Here, we live less than 200 yards from the commuter rail, less than a third of a mile from the public beach of a little lake to which people from Cambridge and Somerville and even Boston come to swim, and grill, and enjoy their kids.On fine days, people from half a dozen other suburban towns pass outside our windows and sometimes even pick a few blooms from our hydrangea trees. I can hear their every conversation and I am glad I can. I like to feel the press of people and sense the larger community of which I am a part. And I pray I will never cringe from people I do not know, or choose not to open the door to some hardworking person with a clipboard or a Bible.Late last summer, an out-of-town friend came by and, after having a nice visit with us, set out to look around our Town Center. Confused, she went right instead of left at the end of our street.“I knew I’d made a mistake when I came to the beach with all the Mexicans,” she said upon returning."Mexicans?!" I wanted to say. “The people you saw there are from Cambodia and China, Sri Lanka and Portugal!” I felt such indignation.But then not a week later, our oldest daughter blew by for a quick visit and reported how she had just pulled over at that same beach and delightedly waded in its waters.“Why didn’t we ever go there?” she wanted to know.Well, why on earth didn't we? It was a reminder to me: either keep reaching out or risk turning inward toward a stifling homogeneity. I’m thinking I might put up a clothesline myself now that summer's here and hang me out some laundry. But  for sure I am going to that beach.

The More You Learn the More There IS to Learn

  Frantically copying down what I just learned at my Apple Store session. (Glad I always carry my legal pad even if the top page is my daily list : 

• "One, Diary  for a bit; 
• Two, Create the blog; 
• Three,  write  'til your  back hurts.."

Fella said you'd be surprised to know how many people can only do one thing on their computer. He said a woman 20 only knew how to use Word. Can that be true. On the other hand remember the old Word Perfect days when even Merge Mail was a walk in the park?  Our technology is too smart for us now. Have to say though, I bless the satellites that see me bumping along various highways and byways and correct my every error. (You could weave a theology around that  phenomenon alone. :-))

Vanity Vanity

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