My Homemade Holiday Card, on this 12th Day of Xmas

This year my homemade holiday card offered a cruise through time, starting with this 1909 shot  of my mother and her brothers and cousins.She's the sad-looking one holding the toy phone. She was saddish by nature as a small child, whereas her oldest brother James, on the far left, was just plain jolly. His letter to Santa to Santa that year was signed, "from James Sullivan, A Fat Six-Year-Old Boy."My card was like that generally, both jolly and  jokey. After this first old picture I fast-forwarded 50 years to an image of David and his cute brothers posed by the their tree in Medford Massachusetts. He's the one with the nice big smile and the striped shirt.He and I didn't know each other yet of course but here I am not more then ten miles away then, together with my big sister Nan in our front yard on Charlotte Street in Dorchester. Nan is so pretty  even now, and was then too. I was always mugging so you can't ever TELL what I looked like.From there the card opened up to show two shots of David and me as a couple,  both in our early 20s, one depicting a holiday-minded Dave with a big red Christmas bow stuck to his head.  I won't put that up here since he hates having his image going far and wide  for all the world to see. Then the other one showed  me having what appears to be a 99th glass of champagne and wearing a one-piece hot pants getup and once again mugging.Then further down came pictures of our kids AS little kids and then a few shots of our grandchildren.Here was little Callie, AKA Caroline Theresa the 5th, named for her mom who was named for her mom who was named for her mom who was named for her mom - tiresome, I know.And, here since I seem to be doing a Ladies First thing, was little Ruthie-Roo, born 13 months ago and already one of the funniest people in the room.Young David Marotta came next in the card, a guy who was plain crazy about Nerf Guns for a while there, until the principle of disarmament settled upon the house.And last but not least there was this picture of Edward, at 11 our eldest grandchild, here dressed for battle for the honor of the Fenn School.Finally when you turned the card over to side four, there was this picture of David and me in the late 80s headed to a gala to celebrate the purchase, by its citizens, of a new Steinway for use by our town. The accompanying text basically said that al though WE two sure don't look as good now as we did then, at least the hall wallpaper has greatly improved.So there it was: a card that was funny and fun to make.And now, with Twelfth Night behind us and Little Christmas here, I'm sweeping away the last of the pine needles and laying those slender self-lighting, self-extinguishing window candles to rest in their attic box. Where one or two of them may well flicker on as darkness gathers and where, until their batteries run down, they will faintly light the gloom up under the eaves, until we pull them forth again next Christmas 

Down at Downton

Downton Abby was so delicious six years ago when the curtain went up on the year 1912 and all those “upstairs” folks started carrying on with their speech like butterscotch topping. Then there were the real people "belowstairs" who you always liked better, or I did anyway. I've often thought I would find it sort of cozy to live all together in a house like that.Of course what a lot of us loved most in those early 20th century scenes was the women’s clothing, the silks and velvets, the wide skirts circling like lassos around the ankles of rodeo cowboys And the colors of both clothes and furnishings! I could never decide what I loved more, the outfits Maggie Smith wore as the Dowager Countess or the window treatments in what I think of as her 'throne room'.Now, in the year 1925, the younger women we see in that candybox  of a library wear hair that is bobbed and gowns that have evolved into "frocks." I bobbed my hair once, seven years ago this month, and did it hang straight down in a perfect Lady-Mary-style wedge? It did not. Ten minutes out of the shower it looked like this.It took me seven whole years to get it back where it belongs.Moral of the story for me: fashions come and fashions go but you’d do well to know what you look good in. Tell your future undertaker NOW what you like, before it's too late and they trick you out in a perm and bright pink chiffon ! (And how's THAT for a dark post in bouncing baby year?) 

Make a New Path

 New year comin'! New choices all around! and the question for me is what it has always been: should I choose custom or should I choose innovation? Do what I have always done, or try something new?Custom, or 'tradition' as we might call it, beckons  powerfully  because it feels so...familiar. I look at my  life and see an instant example:We have a custom in our house around  the Christmas tree and the custom is:It falls over.All I know this year is that the thing was still standing  when i went to bed on the night we put it up  -and by 6am it was lying face down on the rug. It made its swoony dive in the darkened midnight, as I picture it, startling only the mice that come around nightly to scoff at my Jif- baited traps before getting on with the regularly scheduled dance party they hold nights in our kitchen.But if they were startled at the sight of the fallen tree, I certainly wasn’t. It’s tradition!It also seems to be tradition for us to seriously procrastinate about putting the thing up. It was December 4th when I bought this year’s model but we didn’t get our hands around its little neck to drag it inside until almost three weeks later.When it fell, it lay in the living room the whole day - because who was going to pick it back up and once again drive in the Frankenstein bolts that hold it upright? I couldn’t. I’m only one person and I have a job too, even thought I do it from home. Old Dave couldn’t; he was off at his place of business. Our son couldn’t; back from grad school for the holiday, he was holed up in his room all day polishing off applications for summer internships.“Hmmm,” I thought, every time I walked through the living room and saw it passed out on the floor like that. “Let’s just skip the tree this year!” I said to my housemates once we three had gathered again at day’s end. “Let’s just drag the poor girl back outside, dab her up with bacon fat, or some of our mouse Jif and let the squirrels and birds come enjoy her.”I pictured us watching through the kitchen window as they came to dine, even applauding when our pals the raccoons showed up with their fine little hands.But did my son and husband agree that this was a good idea? Did they see as clearly as I did that the universe was making a suggestion to us about the custom of the Christmas tree as it relates to our family?No siree. They both gave me that dead-eyed have-you-taken-leave-of–your-senses look designed to quell any future suggestion. Couple of stick-in-the-muds they are. I mean, where’s the adventure in doing things the same all the time?But the last time I looked  I was still the mistress of this house, so I got to plan the big holiday meal. The theme: Foods That Rhyme.I served ham, lamb, yams, clams, jams and Spam, the latter carefully chopped up and mixed with sweet relish to ‘pass’ as a fancy spread on tiny toast rounds.I never told that it was Spam, I’ll admit, but hey, a girl’s got to have some fun. And an innovator?  Well an innovator just gotta innovate! 😝  

Get Out the Elf Cap

Most years by the time we get to December's final innings, I’m worn down to a cranky little nub with all the Christmas prep work. I know I felt cranky a few weeks back when I got all worked up about how we shouldn’t rush Christmas but instead keep on clapping for those muted late-autumn days until they have swept their cinnamon-colored skirts off the stage.Yet for all my talk, this year I too started decking the halls right after Thanksgiving; and whereas this project once seemed like the world's most endless job, this year I found doing it only easy and fun.I had some help and maybe that’s why. That November day, when I heard that our grandsons eight and eleven were coming over, I dashed out to pick up some food, first texting their mom to ask if the kids could maybe go up to my attic for me and drag out the box with those great battery-powered candles that turn themselves on and off all on their own. Imagine my surprise when I got back in the indigo light of dusk to find them all in place, twinkling with their cheery Energizer life in every window. In an hour’s time while I had been running up and down the food aisles, the children has been transforming my house .

• Also, they had brought down the Christmas tree stand.
• Also, the phony-but-flouncy garlands that we can’t bear to throw out because they date back to the phony flouncy 80s.
• Also all three boxes of ornaments and room decorations, right down to the retired treetop angel on whose face I once drew large stagey teardrops for a YouTube skit I was making.

In our front hall we have a bronze sculpture of a woman standing with her hands shyly clasped behind her back. She's a nude, or at least she was a nude until the children placed an elf cap on her bronzy curls and draped some wide red ribbon about her like the sash on a Miss American contestant.Somehow the sight of her thus arrayed really pushed me over into "happy" and I have stayed happy ever since. I've been happy every time I've gone to the mall and found that they are actually NOT playing “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Sleigh Ride.” Heck, I have been happy even when they are playing those jittery tunes on their endless loop.We bought our tree on December 4^th and until three days ago we let it stay outdoors, enjoying a nice footbath in cool water. I have always felt sorry for all Christmas trees, the way they get stabbed with long screws and are left to parch with thirst in the overheated indoor air. We have been happy to think we did something nice for this one.These are small sources of happiness, I know, but they have done the trick for me. We all know what kind of year it has been. Out in the world, the news is dire, but the news is always dire out in the world. The news has been dire since the dawn of self-awareness, when, eons ago, people just like us saw the light failing earlier and earlier and heard the wolves howling in the not-so-distant hills.But thank God here inside - in our apartment buildings, on our blocks, in our neighborhoods - we still have the sense to flounce the place up a bit and lift a glass to brighter days ahead.  

Bed Injury

It started with the new mattress we bought because our old mattress had two very deep, distinctly person-shaped troughs in it, one on my side and one on ‘his.’ There had been some question on ‘his’ part about whether we actually NEEDED this new mattress – until the night a thick steel coil suddenly shot out of it and stabbed him bloodily in the ribs. There was also a question, again not in my mind but in the mind of my mate of many years, about whether or not we needed to buy that part of any bed that the mattress sits on. ‘He’ said that part was perfectly fine."Look,” he said, lifting the sunken graveyard of our mattress to reveal the box spring it rested on. “It’s like new!” he crowed.And so, we ordered just a mattress, which, in a week’s time, the delivery guys set down on our old box spring, leaving us with a severely mismatched sleeping surface on which we now spend our nights: It’s a bed as tall and high-hipped as the deck of an aircraft carrier, a bed with such altitude I have to practically pole-vault up onto it.And this is just what I was doing, kind of pushing off to make the leap up onto it, when a sharply pointed object pricked the ball of my left foot, a  splinter as I thought, from our splintery floor. I jumped a little into the air and landed again, on my heel.  This time the 'thing'  went in deep.I yipped. it bled. Neither my mate nor I could see anything under the blood so hey, we figured: it’s a splinter and, like all splinters, it would soon enough work its way to the surface.But eight days later when it hurt more rather than less, I finally took action and I drove myself to Urgent Care, where the people are always so nice, if you can get past the fact that they insist on weighing you every time, with your boots still on, of all things.The medical professional assigned to my case took a seat down by my foot, popped a giant magnifying glass into place and peered intently at it.I peered too.“Maybe you should lie down,” she said and so I did. She gave it an experimental poke. My whole body jumped.“Yikes!” I cried. “Lie still,” she said, and poked again. “I feel like Frankenstein's monster,” I yipped, trying to joke down panic. ‘Jolt me again and I'll lift up my big square head and lurch around the room.”She said nothing but only poked me again. Again I leapt like a fish.“You know what this is like?” I yodeled on. “Electrolysis! Ever have ELECTROLYSIS?"Again silence, which struck me as odd since I considered this pretty funny stuff.She exited the room then and returned with syringe and scalpel. She injected my heel, opened a neat canal like the kind people once thought they saw on Mars, and dug out a big chunk of glass.She gave a low whistle. “THIS is not small,” she said, showing it to me.Then, as she sewed my foot back together, I told three more jokes all of which she laughed heartily at. I told her I loved her necklace, we made fun of a few celebrities and parted as friends.I felt so happy I hummed all the way home, stopping only when I entered my bedroom, saw the gosh-darn aircraft carrier and realized that this could all happen again with any of my high-jumps onto the bed, with any kind of shard, be it of glass, wood or plastic.Thus does marriage wound us, over and over, I mused. This longtime mate of mine is my Achilles Heel, all right. The only comfort comes in knowing ...that I am also his. ;-)

Take Me For a Ride

With all the driving folks do at this season I'm thinking a lot about cars. It’s amazing what people can do in a car. Parents in the Roaring 20s went crazy worrying what their kids were doing when they borrowed the Model A for a night out. “Rolling brothels!” one worked-up elder called the cars of those days but cars were always much more than settings for sex. They were wonderfully mobile spaces people could climb into and go just anywhere - provided their tires didn’t blow and their little sewing-machine-sized engines didn’t fail.But if a car was nice to have then, how much nicer it is now, especially if your car is the much-mocked minivan.In my book the minivan is the best invention since the blow-dryer, the pencil sharpener, the washing machine even. I bought my first Chrysler/Dodge minivan back when the man with the velvet voice took up residence in the White House. It was bright red, like 90% of his First Lady’s wardrobe. Nancy Reagan was chic all right, but I FELT chic tooling around in my Caravan. And so, seven years later when it died, I traded it in for another one, again made by Chrysler, only white this time.

• Then, seven years later, I got a green one.
• Then in seven more years, another red one.
• And now these 30 years later, I have a van of midnight blue with big wide shoulders and a decidedly masculine feel.

I have loved them all, and done my best to nurse them back to health when any one of them got injured, as this one did, when, in a freak accident, our neighbor's construction-related porta-potty ended up falling on it.Yup, in my book, whatever year’s model you have, this seven-seatbelt marvel has all other vehicles beat because of Chrysler’s patented ‘Stow-and-Go’ seats in back, big comfy thrones that, with a touch here and a tug there, sink away under the floorboards, yielding a ballroom of space. Then, another touch-and-tug and up they come again like a band of jolly ghosts bringing mirth to the family table.I have at various times toted whole dining room tables in there, large and swoony palm trees, and up to eight chairs, both wooden and upholstered. I have practiced both yoga and piano back there, the latter on my portable keyboard.  I have soothed whole pet taxis of white mice alarmed by their visit to the vet. I have even refinished furniture back there, though not with the lung-searing chemicals you’d use for a major strip-job but with sand paper and steel wool merely. And this past summer I filled it with two seven-foot paddleboards while two nine-footers rode on the roof.  But the chief joy I take in my minivan comes from the peace I feel inside it, a peace that suffuses the whole car so that even behind the wheel I feel held and soothed.And while I love the model I have now, that doesn’t stop me from imagining the fresh delights that a new model might bring me five or six years hence. Maybe in that van’s roomy back I can set up a ‘The Doctor-is-in’-Style booth for compassionate listening, or – wait, I know! - how about a couple of lanes of bowling for my mice?In the meantime it will just go on being this family's faithful friend, in all our comings and goings.   

Life in These Yewnited States

Sometimes you come too close for comfort. For sure I did that day I picked up a can of Comet and started shaking its contents onto my oatmeal. You know that creepy all-over tingle you get when you almost fall down a flight of stairs? It felt like that.And it felt like that again the very next day, when I gunned my car in the driveway and nearly backed into the spanking new vehicle parked directly behind me, a vehicle that visiting friends had just two minutes before proudly pointed out to me from my kitchen window.That time I actually started hearing things: a kind of tinny high-pitched taunting tune, like the one the maddening little monsters in the film Gremlins sing outside poor Mrs. Deagle's house.So I do have to ask myself: What makes people like me lose their bearings this way?I don't think it's the “task” in multitasking that does it. It isn’t so much what we're actually doing with the many spider-arms we seem to think we possess, but rather what we’re thinking. So many of us get trapped on that to-do-list carousel, going round and round, reaching for that brass ring that keeps reappearing with every circuit.I think of Sisyphus, fated by the gods to push the same giant boulder up the same hill every day, only to see it roll back down again.I think of Prometheus, chained to a rock while an eagle plucked his liver out every day - only to have it grow back again, only to have it plucked out again, etc.But it's not just the repetitiveness of our daily chores that has us sprinkling powdered poison onto our cereal or backing our cars into other people’s cars. It's the assault from outside of us.Once it was just TV commercials, radio ads and billboard messages that we had to tune out. Now, the busy chatter is coming at us from a place far closer.I’m talking about the place inside our pockets. I’m talking about the spot right next to us, while we sleep. I’m talking about the smart phone and all those chimes and dings and hiccups it keeps emitting unless we reach deep into its “Settings” belly and gag it entirely.I myself, for example, am instantly notified by my college every time the place does something it thinks is cool. I’m notified by NOAA every time there’s a storm brewing three states away.I’m notified about any and all criminal trials deemed to be of such interest to the public that bulletins go out every time the Defense rests, every time the members of the Prosecution, prepare to question the witness, rising and buttoning their suit jackets the way everyone is always doing on The Good Wife. I know it's my fault. I did, after all, sign up for these notifications, so it’s on me if I get overwhelmed by the unstoppably pouring spout of them. Still, I can't help thinking of that first phone call in history call made by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant several rooms away. “Mr. Watson, Come Here, I Want You!” he shouted into the mouthpiece.These days everybody wants us. The challenge is to remember that with the exception of the good safety-minded people at NOAA, really, they only want us so they can sell us stuff.     

Before It's Over

Before it's over I wanted to stick up for this month in which we still find ourselves. It was way back at November's start that I made a last-minute dash to the supermarket and passed a house entirely decorated for the glow-fest known as The Holidays.I have to admit my heart sank at the sight. “What about November?” I yelled, though I was totally alone in my car. What I meant was, "How did we go from Halloween’s wild and jokey motifs straight to reindeer and snowmen, without giving November her rightful moment on the stage?" Because November has a beauty all her own.Maybe it’s dark as you read this. If so, close your eyes and picture what lies just outside your window:

• The branches of the bare trees that make of the sky a span of leaded glass.
• The leaves that still do cling to the trees dressed now in muted shades of bronze and copper.
• The green of the grass that, somewhere in the last ten weeks, woke up from its heat-flattened August swoon and returned to the party, looking as fresh and springy as the grass of April.

Only it isn’t April. The grass knows it. We know it. Every living thing knows that one day soon we will wake to find that a hard frost has taken hold of the earth. Then, our long hibernation will have begun.And that’s fine. It’s fine that winter comes each year. It’s fine too that the soil locks down tight and the temperatures dip so low they make your very fillings.It's fine because when winter comes it will bring us winter joys. We will make more stews. We will gather around the hearth, even if that hearth is just one of those nice fat candles that burns for hours. Heck, if we haven’t forgotten how, maybe we will do what they used to call “entertaining” and ask some friends over for a visit.We have a good 14 weeks of such pleasures ahead, all of which will be ushered in by these bulbs and snowmen and reindeer that I was so surprised to see in the days just after Halloween.I am more ready to see them now, though, and for sure I am seeing more of them every day on my route to the grocer’s. It was just that it hurt to think of November’s muted beauty going uncelebrated.November feels to me like that quiet guest at a social gathering who draws no attention to herself and so maintains a silent presence at the edge of things. I guess I just kept thinking: if I were that guest, wouldn’t I want somebody to come over with a smile and greet me too?

Just WASH Your Damn Hands, OK?

We move through the world surrounded by a cloud of invisible stuff. Think of the Charles Schultz character Pigpen who has been brought vividly to life in the newly released Peanuts, The Movie. I saw this movie a few days ago, and then went out for lunch to a restaurant in whose Ladies Room there hangs a sign identical to tens of thousands of such signs hanging in the rest rooms of the nation’s eateries and grocery stores.“Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work,” it reads.Now when I was a kid and the sign first started appearing, I at first thought “OK, so the management is saying ‘Yes, the people who work for us have to wash their hands after using the toilet but the rest of you? No worries about washing up! You just mosey on go back to your table and chow down!’” It was years before I understood that a person is totally nuts if he doesn’t wash his hands before leaving the bathroom.Because it's not just about how clean the facilities are or are not: it’s about how germy we ourselves are, with our same system of pipes as any animal - to say nothing of our habit of touching the dirty surface of the world and then bringing our hands up to brush our lips or touch our noses.This new movie depiction of Pigpen with a moving particle-filled cloud of dust billowing about his feet looks queasily lifelike and makes you wonder: What exactly constitutes this cloud?The answer is, the same stuff we're all surrounded by:

• Bits of lint and fiber from our clothing and bed linens.
• Pet dander, if there are pets in our house.
• People dander, in the form of dead skin cells, some large enough to come in flakes. (Yuck, I know.)

I once read a great book called The Year 1000 from which I learned that most people back then inhabited a two-tiered structure housing both man and beast, the animals sleeping on beds of straw on the earthen floor while above them, because the heat generated from their bodies would rise, the humans slept, on straw beds of their own.This worked for them, in part because they had developed resistance to much of the ambient bacteria. It doesn't work so well for us in the developed world, as it seems, we have been exposed to so many antibiotics that the germs consider it a fun game to keep morphing into ever more creative strains that we neither we nor the latest generation of antibiotics have power over.It’s this new susceptibility that had me asking myself why, in the name of all that is holy, so many restrooms bearing the sign about mandatory hand-washing provide only cold water from both taps.And the soap dispenser is so often empty. And the roll of paper towels has fallen from its now-broken holder and is teetering on whatever random surface will support it. It makes me want to write each establishment an impassioned letter, then try to get it printed in the paper.I know that over the next 48 hours all my thoughts will be thoughts of praise and Thanksgiving, I imagine but today: Well, sometimes you just have to express your feelings, the way little Charlie Brown does.

Table Manner Don'ts (In Living Color)

I'm sitting in a neighborhood restaurant, reading a book by Sarah Kortum called The Hatless Man, an Anthology of Odd and Forgotten Manners, a compilation of various guides to good behavior from over the centuries.As I read along, a party of four noisily fills the booth in front of me, in the persons of one exhausted-looking mom and her three young children, all dressed in their best.By the sound of it, they have just come from some sort of presentation at which they had to sit far too still for far too long.They’re making up for that now.I look back down at my book - to read both Florence Howe Hall‘s turn of the century remark that it is wrong “to put the spoon or fork so far into the mouth that bystanders are doubtful of its return to the light,” and George Washington’s frank advice, “When in Company, put not your Hands to any Parts of the Body not usually Discovered.”And just as I’m thinking, “Who in the world needs to be told this?” I look up and see these children, one of who is even now doing exactly what the father of our country advised us all against.It’s eerie. I watch them. I look back at my book - and one by one see these taboos enacted by all three kids: by this girl of six, her tights bagging and twisting at her skinny ankles; by her little brother who looks about five, and wears his little his suit jacket askew, in a rakish, off-the-shoulder way; and by the smallest child, tangled Alice-in-Wonderland curls scraped back in a headband and one wet finger hooked like an umbrella-handle deep in the corner of her mouth.

• “Never turn your spoon over and look at yourself in the bowl: it is the action of clown.” And lo, this very thing happens before my eyes.
• “Don’t make a wall around your plate with your left arm, as if you feared somebody were going to snatch it from you. And don’t I see this done, when the French Fries come.
• “In refusing to be helped to any particular thing, never give as a reason that you are afraid of it.” This happens too, when the boy screams at the sight of his mother’s shrimp cocktail.
• Do not “take up a whole piece of bread and leave the dentist’s model of a bite in it,” advises the book. And here is now is the boy child, who has decided to stand up to eat his bread, which he chooses to eat with mouth wide open.
• “Nothing is less alluring than a smile flavored with parsley,” I read on. And yet here is such a smile, garnished too with a slippery finger.
• “It is a breach of etiquette to assume a lazy lounging attitude in company.“ Now one child stretches out full length on the banquette, where, within moments, the bread course complete, the smallest child on his head.
• “Cast not thy bones under the table,” one sage warns in the old book and surely something has been cast under the table, as Alice now slithers off her brother and dives down after it - bringing us to the rueful observation “A vacant chair at a dinner party is a melancholy spectacle.”

But I for one am feeling far from melancholy now, for I begin to see who the rules of etiquette are for: the child in us all at the great feast of life, who, tired and restless and cranky, would like nothing better than to slip beneath the table from time to time ourselves, as the below image from Bluntcard.com suggests. ;-)

For the Soldiers

A strange thing will happen to you if you ever visit Gettysburg, where the largest battle of the Civil War was fought. When you ascend the eminence known as Cemetery Ridge, an eerie silence will envelop you and maybe a little wind will lift you hair as you stand looking out over those Pennsylvania hills. You will study the glass-encased photograph of the very spot where you are standing, taken within days of this ruinous encounter. “Look at these stone walls” you will likely marvel, “the very ones against which so many fell dead! And these trees with their branchings just so, the very same trees, alive and green and growing still!” But you will whisper, saying this. And you will feel astonished.Because you thought you had prepared yourself for this visit, through the reading of many books and the viewing of the four-hour long film Gettysburg, shot here in great exception to the strict rule that preserves this place as holy ground. Yet in truth nothing could have prepared you for what you will feel in this place, where for three fierce days, more than 51,000 men were killed or lost or wounded, and the earth went spongy with their blood.It’s so human: When we’re not in pain we don’t wish to even acknowledge pain’s existence. When we don’t feel threatened with immediate danger we try to forget that living is dangerous.I went to Gettysburg last spring and in the weeks following watched that heartbreaking film for a second, then a third time, and sent away for four books and DVDs, all edited by William Styple of Belle Grove Press in New Jersey. The two DVDs show ancient footage of the battle’s very participants, in 1913 when they met as thin-boned old men, Yank and Reb, and shook hands across those same stone walls. The books, called Writing and Fighting from the Army of Northern Virginia, A Collection of Confederate Soldier Correspondence present letters penned by soldiers on both sides, just days or even hours after the war’s many battles.So starting late yesterday, in order to understand the past, I watched and I read: “I am so tired and broken down” wrote one weary soldier. “We fought all day yesterday and marched all night,” wrote another. “I am still your own dear C.,” wrote a third, in what proved to be the last letter his wife would ever get from him. Then, in order to understand the present, I went to another site, where our men and women in uniform can post words of appreciation to all the volunteers stateside who get addresses from Operation Paperback and send along all the gently-used soft-cover books they can lay their hands on.I’ll copy here the letter one young man wrote when he got back from his recent tour of duty:"I am a soldier who is currently deployed here in the desert. I had some time on my hands and there was a whole shipment of books sent by your organization, and I read and enjoyed one of them. It helped take my mind off things and was solid tangible proof that there were people who had us in their thoughts. Thank you very much for your support of the troops.” (Signed) “John, one of the guys sent to the desert.”All of our soldiers had friends and families, of course, and lives every bit as filled as our own lives are with that poignant mix of the suddenly dramatic and the blessedly routine.Today I am thinking of those three men from the 1860s; and I will think too of young John, trying to find some sense of peace and equanimity as, in the desert, he sat quietly reading his book.Learn more important details about Operation Paperback by going to https://www.facebook.com/OperationPaperback/ 

GO to Your Reunion!

I always tell myself “Go to the reunions!” but then this strange reticence overtakes me. Maybe it’s common to us all, the worrying that no one will talk to us but the classic what-do-I-wear dilemma weighs, I think more heavily on the females.Take my case.  I’m pretty sure I'm no longer in danger of going in a tangle of long Country-Western-style curls and a fringed leather miniskirt, but what if I end up walking into a room full of evening gowns, only to look down and find myself dressed like Pinocchio? Because, you know, this has happened.But then I remember what my 11-year-old said to me back in the late 90s when I was I fretting about what wear to wear to a certain wedding. “It's fine," he said not unkindly. ”Nobody's going to be looking at you, Mum.” True enough! And so it was that on a recent Saturday night I started getting ready. I climbed into this caramel pantsuit I had bought in the spring of 2012 only to realize I looked like the last cruller in the bin. A mist of cold sweat bloomed down my back. Then I spotted the black dress I had just for $69 in a catalog. I threw it on and headed for the car with my husband.That's when the great realization finally came on me: This wasn’t my reunion! This was HIS reunion! I wouldn't have to do a single thing but smile and listen as people spoke to him.I figured he would have an easy time too, because as the Class President and Football Captain, he's be remembered.He was remembered him. But if people remembered him, they also remembered one another, after the quick peer-down at the nametag for the rapid calculation that aligned this older face with the face they had known at 18.All night, people literally called out to one another in joy.“THIS guy!” a burly ex-football player said to me, his arm tight around David’s neck. “THIS guy went in head-first every single time!”“You know what it was like being in class with Dave here?” another guy said to me ten minutes later. “He’d walk in to class seconds before the bell and find the rest of us frantically studying. ‘Is there a test today?’ he’d go. He hadn’t prepared! Then, what do you think? I’d get a 95 on the darn thing and HE’D get a 98!”In general, the expert remembers like these two carried the evening aloft, bringing people’s thoughts vividly back to the past. It took the woman who spearheaded this whole reunion effort to carry their thoughts back to the present, by arranging class gift of backpacks and bus passes for those current students at the school who could really use them.People danced plenty, though not as much as they had done at earlier reunions. They drank plenty too, but again not as much which one could plainly see when the swarms huddled at the bar slowly morphed into clusters gathered around the coffee and tea.Anyway, I myself had a super time at this reunion that wasn’t my reunion, and by evening’s end I saw how silly it is for any of us to ever worry about who will come talk to us, when it is entirely in our power, as members of the great old Class of 2015, to go up to anyone at all and get the conversation started our own selves.

Don't Be Dumb Tonight

I believe in the young, who in many ways are miles ahead of the rest of us. Still, they do make some super-dumb moves at times.Below, four tales by way of illustration. Let's call this a Halloween Night Sermon For Us All.'EXAMPLE ONE : On a morning suddenly overcast, a young person called home from his workplace to ask his dad to put up the windows in his car, which was parked on the street. “Sure! Where are the keys?” his dad asked. “Where they always are: in the ignition,” responded the kid.“You leave your car on the street? Unlocked? With your keys in the ignition?” squeaked the dad in disbelief. “You don't think it might get stolen?”“Oh no,” said the kid. “Who would do that?” Let's see, I can’t help thinking here: Maybe the person who took my neighbor’s bike right from his garage? Maybe the one who took my baby's stroller from off my front porch and pitched it in the lake? Maybe one of the five separate individuals who stole my car on five separate occasions?EXAMPLE TWO: A s16-year-old girl took a notion to go running. At 10 at night. On a street with narrow twisty roads. “But it’s not safe to run now, especially not there!” her mother told her. “Don’t be silly!” replied the daughter. “There aren't even any streetlights!” (Huh?)EXAMPLE THREE: One morning at a convenience store, a young stranger stocking shelves turned to me with a radiant smile and said this: “I get off work at 2:00 every day. Then I take a shower and go get drunk.”  “You don't mean that,” I said. “I do. I get drunk! Every day! Right after work!” “You'll regret that one day," I said. “Maybe when I’m 40," said the kid.(If you GET to be 40, I thought.)EXAMPLE FOUR, and this by way of showing that I have been plenty dumb myself: When I was 18, I used to hitchhike. Kids did back then. Of course I always wore my good blue dress to show I was well brought up. I hitchhiked to western Massachusetts. I hitchhiked to New Haven, Connecticut. But when I hitchhiked to Cambridge to see the boy I would one day marry, he said I showed bad judgment.It took putting my thumb out that next weekend to show me how right he was:The man who pulled over that day had baby gear in his back seat of his car and looked a lot like Mister Rogers. When I approached his passenger-side window to find out his destination, he asked if I would do a particular thing. When I recoiled in horror, he asked if I would maybe just watch.I hung up my thumb then and there.And so, in this final hour before the blowout that Halloween night now is, I would say only this to the young: Sooner or later Time will claim your bike and your baby carriage; your brand-new car and that bright young sparkle in your eye. Earth is a beautiful place and and it's ours to live in. But it's also the place where we will die. It just seems foolish to invite an early departure. Other than that I say have a ball! 

Trapped in an Elevator

Imagine you and a stranger find yourselves trapped in an elevator and by some stroke of fate both your mobile devices are stone dead. Imagine you've already used the elevator’s emergency phone to report your plight, but the guy on the other end says everyone down in Maintenance is off celebrating the birthday of this other guy's 30 years of service. They'll get to your problem in an hour, he says, two tops . Then let’s further set the stage by assuming that the two of you share a common language and that neither one of you has to go to the bathroom. Thus, on these two fronts at least, you can relax and really inhabit this little soap bubble of time in which you find yourselves floating.Now the question is, not what you're going to DO, as this list drawn up by the funny people at The Onion, but rather what are you going to talk about? You know what you’ve been taught NOT to talk about: the forbidden trinity of religion, money, and politics. Stay away from all three subjects in polite company, you have always been told, but you can't just look over the person’s head like people do on the subway. That would just be weird.Soooo, what subjects could you turn to pass the time?Well, people turn to the topic of their kids pretty quickly, so maybe you could start down that avenue, sharing information about their ages and so on. There would be no turning to your dead phones to get at photos of course, but that’s ok: you could paint a picture with language, old-fashioned concept as that is.You could also say a few words about other family members, though this can be a tricky arena.  I once spent a mere 60 seconds alone in an elevator with a man who was so furious he was hissing like a teakettle. “Bad day?” I finally asked. “EXCUSE me?!” he hissed, greatly offended by the question. “I…I'm sorry, I shouldn't have spoken,” I stammered. He only paused for about 20 seconds before blurting out, “My damn MOTHER-IN-LAW!”So I guess you have to be careful choosing your topics.Here’s an idea: People love explaining their scars, I’ve noticed, though this might not be the right setting for that particular show-and-tell.Ailments also make a reliable topic but they too might be dicey in this context, especially if your elevator-mate has been on earth long enough to have a nice long medical history. I mean, you might never get your own turn to talk!The weather’s a pretty tired topic and sure there’s sports but what are the chances you’re both fans?I’ll tell you what I go to when all else fails:Television. You’ll never go wrong with TV shows. I don’t care if you’re Cleopatra the Queen of the Nile, you watch TV. At least a little.Admit it.Even if your tastes differ as to genre – I, for example find sitcoms almost unwatchable these days what with all the wink-wink of sexual innuendo – I bet within two or three minutes you’ll find common ground. And then you won’t even realize that the guys down in Maintenance have moved on from eating cake to doing shots. You have another human being and the chance to talk and talk, and really, what’s nicer than that?

Why I Volunteer - and HOW I Do It

For mother of three Terry Marotta, connecting her volunteering to her early career as an inner-city teacher was essential. Finding organizations whose missions matched her youthful goals felt instinctively right, something she recommends. Marotta works for two nonprofits devoted to diversity: A Better Chance, which identifies talented young people of color for study at top middle and secondary schools; and her town’s Multicultural Network, helping people build inclusive communities.“As a high school English teacher in my twenties, I had had the chance to live out and uphold similar values to the ones these two boards cherish. In Room 334, we all listened with respect to one another, we learned to celebrate our differences, and before long got to [a point] where we were all really glad we had come to class each day.”Marotta knew the nonprofits were a fit when she felt the same way she did as a young, ambitious teacher. Her feeling of purpose has been key to her success as a volunteer.Many people are passionate about causes but unsure if they have the right skills. “Banish all such thinking!” Marotta urges. “Try to see if you can identify a couple of people—even just through social media—who work with the nonprofit. Ask what the joys and obligations are.”Then, she says, observe how the group acts. Perhaps you can sit in on a meeting. Get a sense of the organization’s tenor. Just visiting the group’s Facebook page may help you see how members interact.Most of all, Marotta says, consider your legacy when joining a group.“How do I know that ‘my’ work will live on? It sounds corny but I think I know it because of something that Mother Teresa said: ‘All that is not given away is lost.’ So give it away, your time and your love and your attention, and you will never be sorry, because the people you have given these things to will in time give away their own store of them,” she advises.Of course, volunteering can be taxing, especially with family pressures. Marotta worked  with  the Winchester (MA) Chapter of  A Better Chance for ten years when she was young, then took two decades off before returning. When she did, Marotta says, “I was a different person with a new ability to laugh, to survive setbacks, to keep things in perspective.” Now, she says, “I have much better boundaries. I know how to practice self-care. What I give, I give with a full heart.” Make sure you have the time and the energy to devote yourself to your chosen cause, so when you give, it’s without resentment or pressure. When this is the case, the gratitude—for both the volunteer and the recipient—is immeasurable.“I’ve seen this again and again,” says Marotta. “There is almost no greater force for good than the power of careful attention to another person.”So thanks Kara. Thanks for helping me say what I deeply believe. And thanks to my fellow board members on the Network for helping me stay mindful of the many good reasons I do any kind of volunteer work. I'm a lucky girl. 

My Lucky Day

All I can say is sometimes you just get lucky. Me, I got lucky three times in a 24-hour period, and each time it was because I put myself out there, either by picking up the phone or by walking instead of riding to run the day’s errands.The first time was on Sunday morning when I used my feet instead of a car to cover the two miles downtown and back. Just as I was passing the doughnut shop, I spotted a 12-year-old boy striding along with his father. They were both laughing and the dad had his arm slung affectionately around the boy’s neck when suddenly he stopped them both mid-stride and kissed the child smack on the side of his head.Seeing that would have made my day all by itself, but I got lucky again just a few hours later when I made myself call the cable company to see about locking in a good rate.“Your wiring is extremely old!” exclaimed the customer service rep. ...AND, you need a better router," she added. “I can actually send a technician out tomorrow, would that work?” She said he would be here for several hours, she and no, there would be no charge (!) And didn’t that technician sure enough come, the very next day. He slapped a ladder up to the side of the house, descended into the Land of Lost Things that is our basement and in general worked here for three solid hours, leaving me at day’s end with a signal strong enough to let me Facebook with the folks on the International Space Station.Then the last piece of luck came along the next morning when, headed into the city on business, I left my car on its perimeter to save on parking costs, then took a taxi the rest of the way.My driver was a woman in her 60s with dreadlocks and a big wide smile, whose cab was filled with the most wonderful music, to which she was singing along. Finally, I just had to ask: “What IS this?"She tilted the rearview mirror so she could see my face. “Caribbean music!” she said laughingly. “The music of Haiti!“ And then she gave a five-minute tutorial, with examples, on the difference between her Haitian French, called “Creole,” and the French that is spoken in Paris.I loved the lesson. “But I have to know,” I said then. “Who is this singing? ““Oh!” she said. “My friend and I made this CD. My voice is the deeper one,“ she added, and resumed her singing by way of demonstration.  When we reached my destination, she picked up a worn Bible from its place on the passenger seat. “This was our text,” she said. “It’s from the Book of Acts, Chapter 20,” she said and showed me the passage, all in French. “Take a picture of it with your phone!” So I did take a picture, and once I got home, I  looked up the English for this piece of Scripture that in part  has God saying, “I will show wonders in the Heavens above and signs on the earth below.”“Isn’t that the truth!” I thought, because today it seems to me there are signs and wonders coming thick and fast all around us - and all we really need is the eyes to see them.

Not The Best Day

When I lose my focus I overdo things, and spin off into all this activity around taking care of other people, forgetting every time that a person is  supposed to take care of her own self first.Today for example: I tried to go into the city to hear a speaker at the JFK library whose glass walls reflect back so beautifully our cold Boston Harbor.I never did get there, because I also wanted to:One, mark the birthday of a dear friend who is just turning 86. I had already mailed her a card and I knew she was out today but, I thought, I'll bring her a book. No, two books. But first I'll wrap them in this nice gift paper if I can find it. Oh and I know she doesn't cook much anymore so why don't I stop at Whole Foods and get her something she can enjoy for supper.Two, sand and paint an old bookcase I want to use to house the books another who is dear to me left in my basement a couple of years back because he had no room for them in his dorm room. "You can just throw them out, it's fine," he said when I wrote and asked what to do with them. But how could I do that when I know how much he loves these books? When I know that every book he reads, every sky he looks up at, every walk he takes feeds his poetry, for he is a poet born? So today I worked on the bookcase. Then I drove 20 miles north to get more of the paint which that the manufacturer isn't making anymore in my color, as my four phone calls to hardware stores all over revealed.Three, make two flower arrangements to say thanks for two people who have given unsparingly of themselves in service to others, one a medical man who for the last 30 years given free care to  those who need it, and the other a chef who has made our local ABC house a real home for the dozen people she has fed every weeknight for the past five years. She leaves tomorrow to work more intentionally on her Master's degree and will she ever be missed.The flowers took a long time because I'm choosy and because the hydrangea blooms outside my house were so heavy with moisture I had to stop and go put on a raincoat to harvest them. Both bouquets are done now but as I look at the clock I see that it's hours and hours too late to deliver them.I didn't get to deliver the two books or the hot food either. A two-hour medical appointment I had mid-day spoiled that whole idea.I didn't get on the treadmill, which my body fervently prays I will do every day, to pull it out of its stiffness.I didn't work on my weekly column, which is due Friday.I didn't connect with my sister by picking up the phone and how hard would that have been?So I guess I will close now, at almost 10 on this school night. I I don't feel great about how I operated today but maybe I'll be better tomorrow.  In the meantime I'll take pleasure in the pretty blossoms that came into my hand today.

My Almost Famous House

A text arrived from my next-door neighbor saying that a “location manager” had just spoken to her about using both her house and ours as the setting for a major motion picture. Could he ring our doorbell too in a bit?“Sure,” I said, and 20 minutes later he was here.This wouldn’t be the first time a film crew had chosen our house. Fifteen years ago, a public utility made a commercial here using just the outside. Then, five years after that, some college kids used the inside too, to make a movie that affixed so many wires and cable to our newly painted trim that we had cause to muse on the futility of any and all home-improvement projects.“Oh, but this is the big time!” said the man, and that sounded true enough to me when I heard the names of two of the actors who have already signed to the project. “When we leave, you won’t know we were here at all.”“Even with that crew of 80 you mentioned?" I asked. “Even with that crew of 80," he said. All we had to do was (a) agree to be relocated for “seven weeks give or take”, (b) allow all our furniture be relocated too, and (c) give permission for the walls be repainted and the wallpaper be covered with other, temporary, paper as the film’s visionaries saw fit.But! All would be restored when the project was complete. AND, besides covering our housing costs, we would be compensated for our trouble with a fee to be mutually agreed upon.He took scads of pictures, talked more to my husband David, newly returned from the office, and left, with the understanding that he would come back in a week with six even bigger bigshots.When, that evening, I told my cousin about this potential offer, her reaction was swift. “WHY though? Why would you do this at all?” It was a good question.Over the next few days I began to see that I would say yes to the project mostly to see if we still had wings, as well as roots. Were we still capable of signing up for such radically new “dance suggestions” from the universe?Because we have been here one very long time: Little House on the Prairie was still airing fresh episodes when we got here. For almost four decades, I have watched the morning sun touch the tops of the tall oak trees across the street.David, who is equanimity itself, thought it might be an adventure, but I happen to know that he can be happy anywhere as long as he has his books and the daily crossword.I am not like that.I got worried about my houseplants, all still at ‘summer camp’ on the screened-in porch? Where would they go, some storage facility in South Boston? And could I actually live in a hotel, even for those seven weeks 'give or take'?As promised, the man came back with the bigshots, who spoke not a word but slithered like eels, all silent, around our rooms. As they left, our man thanked us and said he would call in a week with the decision.And when he did call, it was to say that they had decided to go with an another house in another town.Was there disappointment around here? Not for my houseplants. Not for the two rooms we freshly repainted just last month. I walked outside to where I could see those trees that greet me each morning and felt a slow smile cross my face. Because how lucky a thing is it to go from youth to age looking out at the same window at the tops of the same stately familiar trees, not just those oaks across the street, but this ginkgo and her graceful final shedding.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVv1vsHXHmQ[/embed]

Originality is Overrated

Speaking of writing your own poems as I was here, the more I think about it the more I realize how hard it is to be really original. I mean, who among us CAN be original with all, 'pop pop fizz fizz oh what a relief it is' buzzing around in our heads? (And if you remember  that jingle, you’ve probably been receiving AARP the magazine for at least a decade.)Used to be, folks memorized things not accidentally because of commercials and popular songs but on purpose, because our teachers made us memorize. Used to be, every kid with an 8^th grade education was walking around with all sorts of lines in his head: The poetry of the ages. Scripture. The second and even third and fourth verses to all the patriotic songs.Wouldn’t we be better off if we 21^st century types had that rich lore at our fingertips today?We pay too much homage to originality anyway, which I really do believe is mythical in the first place. Example: I once thought of myself as quite the witty one-of-a-kinder; but the then why did I name the journaling manual I wrote The Trail of Breadcrumbs. The reference is from Hansel and Gretel natch, with the subtitle “Journaling to Find Your Way Home”. Pretty UNoriginal that one!Now I’m wondering if all the titles of the books I brought out were also pretty derivative I Thought He Was A Speed Bump may SOUND original but actually it isn't at all since I stole the phrase from the little boy next-door who, when he was three years old, ran over his friend's tummy, not once but twice, with his tricycle. It’s true I haven't yet heard of a book besides my own called Vacationing In My Driveway but I’m sure people use that phrase in every day life. I mean, that’s why people laugh the minute I give its name: they get its message at once. Nope, the real originals are few and far between. I give Francis Scott Key a lot of credit with the Star-Spangled Banner whose lyrics are seriously original even if he used an existing drinking song for his tune. I mean, seriously, who else ever wrote lyrics like this? The "Oh say"  phrase alone, never mind those bums bursting in air as a million little kids so lustily sang? For really original stuff we should look to the lyrics the kids think are the real lyrics to any song or prayer. Theres bound to be some fun in mining that vein: Blessed are the monks in swimming and Round John Virgin" alone, from the Hail Mary - and that's before you even get to that someone in the kitchen with Dinah strummin' on the old man's joe." ;-)

What a Dope

Grouchy little poems have been writing themselves in my head all month.It's the strangest thing. Take these lines that were composing themselves behind my eyes when I first opened them one day last week: "The leaves are limp, the grass is dead, I'd like to stay right here in bed. Dawn comes so late, how can that be When birds once sang at half past three?”What's wrong with me? How can I be feeling so dark with this kind of beauty greeting us every day, the fog rolling slowly off our inland bodies of water?I wouldn’t mind if they were good poems, poems of a polite praising nature, like the countless others written for this threshold moment of the year. I think of the one called “September” by Helen Hunt Jackson that my Seventh Grade teacher made us all memorize:"The Goldenrod is yellow, the corn is turning brown, the trees in apple orchards with fruits are bending down.” Nice, right? There are several more stanzas, equally nice, like this one:“The gentians bluest fringes/Are curling in the sun/In dusty pods the milkweed/Its hidden silk has spun.” Even nicer! So why can’t my silly creations hold even a little of that lyricism?I think it’s because this particular September doesn’t feel right to me. It doesn’t feel right at all.For starters it stayed hot for too long, hot enough that in this house, we still have the air-conditioners in. There they still hang, our sad old window units, stuffed into our sad old windows.By now I hate these air-conditioners, which I have come to believe make each room smell like some old bag of frozen peas. Plus they’re ugly, especially on the outside, the way they lean out the windows like rude boys showing the world their backsides. Added to that, birds poop on them, leaving wispy white streaks that fan out from under them.And then there's the grass. The grass in our yard looks like somebody seeded it in Shredded Wheat.Aren’t September’s evening dews supposed to refresh the grass? I thought by now lawns would have begun greening up again and looking like bright chopped salad, the way they did back in the spring.Come to think of it, maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I’m grouchy this September because I got to thinking it should function as a second spring, almost.It doesn’t though. It can’t. If the trees and bushes are starting to sport small dabs of crimson, or coral, or amethyst, it isn’t because they are flowering. It's because they're dressing up for the farewell ceremonies.Sooner or later I’ll get on board with this fact I’m sure. But right now what keeps going through my head are the final lines of the Robert Frost poem called Reluctance, which ends with the speaker asking, “When to the heart of man/ Was it ever less than a treason/ To bow and accept the end/ Of a love or of a season?”But then? Then I look at this image of our deck at the lake, as it looked just after 1:00 yesterday afternoon. I see the new, early shadows, and I repent of my grouchiness and feel freshly grateful each day's particular beauty.