A Church, in Darkness

Last week I went for the first time in some 20 years to the Holy Thursday service at my church where, by degrees, the whole sanctuary goes dark as the tale of the last hours of Jesus is read, and the experience reminded me  intensely of the long ago sleepover I once participated in with a couple of dozen 7th and 8th graders.The parents had brought the kids to the church for some brief prayer-and-meditation action and then had left them in the care of a couple of us adults, myself and the interim youth minister. That lady told the kids they could either sleep in the teen meeting room in the church basement where they could hear the rumble of the furnace and be all warm and toasty or else sleep upstairs in the darkened sanctuary, which was cool and drafty but which had that ruby-red center carpet and the stained glass windows and the tall columns yearning up to the leaping vaults of the ceiling.This youth minister, who served for only a matter of months,  a prim lady of middle age,  decreed that the kids who chose the smallish teen meeting room had to sleep head-to-foot. The 8^th graders didn’t mind; they liked the proximity. And so they took that option, with her, while I took the sanctuary with the younger kids, who wanted to really feel the scary thrill of the night.One 8^th grader did stay with us, I should say, a boy who never talked in Sunday school class but who was a whiz on the cello. He chose to sleep under the keyboard of the church's magnificent organ. I remember that.I remember that the 7^th grade girls spread out their sleeping bags in the side aisles where, until sleep overtook them, they buzzed quietly like a faraway hive of bees. I remember that the 7^th grade boys choose to sleep in the balcony from which, until they too succumbed to the peace of the place, they winged Skittles down onto the pews below. And I remember that I pitched camp next to my little daughter and her best friend, right at the place where the long center aisle crosses the aisle that goes from side to side – in other words the place where, in this church, the casket goes at a funeral.I had brought a couple of Bach CD’s and when all these children had subsided into sleep, I put on my headphones and listened to the music send its intricate branchings up into the darkness. Just for fun I thought I would cross my arms over my chest and pretend that this was my funeral. The minute I did that though, I felt the years of my life sort of collapse together as I realized that this was indeed the place where I would one day lie in a highly polished coffin of my own.I have never forgotten that night though for the life of me I can’t remember a thing about the next morning when the parents came to collect their kids at 7 so they could shower and get back to church in time for the service.But I remember this, I do remember this: I remember the way the quiet child who had slept under the organ's keyboard that chilly winter night thrilled me through and through four years later when, on the sunny June morning, as a much older teen, he played for us all the haunting tune Ashokan Farewell.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RMNoIzUY-0

This Old House ;-)

It's tough being a woman; for one thing there's thr chance that as the years pass you'll start looking like a man - even like Richard Nixon in a wig. Yet I see all these age-defying products and I have to wonder what kind of fools their manufacturers take us for.Just think of the skin creams that claim to be ‘age repairing’ and ‘youth restoring.’ I mean, come on: The human body isn’t some rickety old building whose floorboards you can pull up; whose walls you can tear down to let in more light.I came upon a jar of face cream at the pharmacy the other day. From reading the labels on these moisturizers and creams all these years, I 'get' how alike they all are, but I bought the stuff anyway and told myself it was the high SPF factor that put it in my cart (yet if I’m honest I'll admit I was mostly just mesmerized by the dark-crimson color of the jar, which reminded me so sharply of the votive candles of my convent-school youth.)Generally, though, I’m a lot harder to mesmerize in the beauty products department. I know very well what's happening in the regions north of my shoulders and I'm OK with it. I'm even OK with what's happening to the south of my shoulders – although I do wonder why men get away with so much more than we women do.Think about it: Men can have bellies the size of hot air balloons and still be cellulite-free, with thighs that look like marble columns on an ancient Greek temple. If their hair goes white, they just look more alpha male, more powerful. If it falls out, they just have to shave the whole dome, grow a beard, and they look like a dozen celebrities. (Think Bruce Willis. Brian Cranston. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.)For us women, it's a different thing. There’s a cultural expectation that we out do something about our cellulite. There’s an expectation that that we’ll be proactive about our hair, when it starts thinning or greying.And so… we use products to thicken it.  We color it.And if we start losing the hair on our heads, we sure don't turn to the male trick of growing it on our faces. Far from it. If we start to see the beginnings of facial hair, we pluck, baby. We pluck. Or we seek out the zap of electrolysis. Or we turn to hot wax as did my old pal from the ‘80s who would remark, in her Southern drawl, “Ah’ll be lookin’ like mah own Scotty dog soon if ah don't go get mah whiskers snatched off."And that's all aside from the many other signs of time’s passage – like what happens to the skin on the neck. Or the skin on the hands, which get all veiny.Still, even while noting these things on my own skin, I have to stop and be amazed at everything skin does, from acting as a barrier to passing on sensation to regulating temperature. Skin is actually pretty great. In fact all the systems of the body are great, and their aging is just a sign of their faithful service to us.So why treat our bodies like old fixer-uppers, knocking down walls to let in more light, when the whole time we all know that the best, ‘realest’ light is the light that comes from within.OK now WHERE did I put those tweezers? ;-)  

Irish Malarkey

I sometimes feel irked by the image of the cartoon Irishman with his pipe and his cocked green derby and that frank 'in your face' wink. It reminds me of a saying, heard on the playgrounds of my youth, about how there were two kinds of people in the world, the Irish and those who wish they were Irish.I never heard that kind of talk in my own Irish-American home.I think back to those early days and see again the people at our dining room table:My single-parent mom, who, having borne children at the last possible reproductive moment, was by then pushing 50; my sister Nan and me, both so young we looked, in those big oak chairs, like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann character from the old Laugh In show; two ancient great-aunties in their thick rolled stocking and Civil War-style shoes; and our widowed grandfather, also in his 80s, who had who invited all these people into his house, most recently the daughter who was our mom, a woman abandoned almost immediately by her charming blue-eyed groom.It was this grandfather who, every March 17^th, came home with the shamrocks in their wee clay pots, their bright-green foliage foaming up over the rims.“Why do you bring these home?” my sister asked one year.“Because we’re Irish,” replied the grownups as one. “But we're Americans first,” they hastily added.We lived in Boston, the nation's most Irish-American city, but that’s how people felt in those years: Happy to be American. We all might have ‘been’ from someplace else, but now we were here – and wasn’t Nan pledging allegiance to the flag in kindergarten each morning?Still, though at home we never heard that silly phrase about ‘two kinds of people in the world’, we knew the names ‘County Cork’ and ‘County Kerry’, practically before we could tie our own shoes. We knew that our family had come here in the 1850’s and in time we knew too the shameful tale of a people’s starvation.So, I guess I do understand that ‘in your face' pose struck by the cartoon Irishman. It says, “I’m still here,” which is just the attitude a person might well have after surviving the hardships most immigrants have faced in coming here - and the Irish certainly faced plenty.As historian Frank Russell writes in his book The Irish Immigrant, they were “the base of the social pyramid, the unfailing source of exploitable labor. Construction bosses from all over America sent to Boston for fresh supplies of Irish workers. They went as contract laborers, in coaches with sealed doors, the curtains nailed across the windows.“Along the Erie Canal and the new railroad lines, they died like flies.”Try substituting ‘we’ for ‘they’ and say, “We died like flies.”And yet, “We’re still here.” That’s how many people at the bottom of that so-called social pyramid might feel, from the willing immigrants, to the native populations they sought to displace, to the millions of Africans brought to the New World in chains.My grandfather rose, but he rose only with the help of the older brother who borrowed against their little family farm to send him to college, and the older sister who gave from her earnings as a nurse to help get him through law school. Then, over a long life of public service, he chased down rascals of every stripe, got the Boston schoolteachers their first raise, and helped establish the Massachusetts state college system.It’s a universal story. He benefited by the sacrifices of others and then gave back, as I believe we all wish to do and none more so than those newly arriving on our shores today. 

Back to Reality

It was so hard to leave the sunny desert, where even at 5:30am, in the dark, the Inn looked so lovely, with the moon still high in the sky..But isn't that the hidden tooth in all vacation idylls, that you have to come back?I had no idea how much I needed the time away. There was so much to ponder, so much to see once I opened my eyes in that clear light.I think the desert air really has cleared my mind and led me to ask myself certain questions:Like how much do I want to keep in my life and how much am I ready to leave by the side of the road?  And what is my path forward?If only all our paths were trimmed with flowers like these inn flowers, softly underlit by the lights nestled under them. 

Just Do What the Signs Says

Maybe I'll never learn to believe that a sign means what it says; I guess a lifetime of parking tickets will attest to that fact. Still, I really did think that the prohibition against going into this cactus bed was meant to protect the cactuses.Wrong.My family and I have been staying these last few days at an inn in Tucson that is a veritable oasis in the desert, where the branches of orange trees curtsy low with the rich burden of their citrusy gifts, and sunstruck lizards pose like wall art, and whole jewel cases of blossoms border every lawn. On top of all that here at this inn we have:

• the wide blue eye of a swimming pool, with gently eddying waters;
• a tennis court with nobody on it (racquets available at the front desk);
• a taut little badminton net on an emerald green lawn, its attendant equipment standing by in a sweet wooden cabinet..... and finally;
• a ping pong table sheltered from the sun by a hula skirt of undulating palms.

I have resisted the tennis and badminton so far, but the ping pong set-up proved too much for me just before lunch today: I began playing the game just by myself, hitting the ball here and then there, bouncing it up off the paddle until, inevitably I suppose, it rabbited down off the table and into the cactus garden.My choice: either to fetch it or  to abandon the fun. I thought, "Fetch it," right? Fetch it so I can play more now and somebody else can play later with a full complement of ping pong balls.I stooped under the above-pictured bush and scooped it up - and within seconds felt something like the sting of a thousand insects. I looked at my arm: nothing. Were these the bites of some kind of desert fire ant? Did I have mites under my skin? Had I developed a sudden allergy to the desert sun? I rushed back to our room, pulled off my top and saw…Nothing.And yet the pain was stunning and had spread as well, I now realized, to my back and all along one hand. But what was its cause? What could be the cause  of all this pain?It took going out into the bright noonday sun to finally see: at least a hundred infinitesimal cactus spines, imbedded deep in my skin.I couldn't rub them off and I couldn’t pinch them off - all that did was remove their heads. It took going out into the bright noonday sun with the medical tweezers I thank God always travel with to squintingly one by one begin prying them from my poor inflamed hide.It looks like it’s going to be l-o-o-o-o-ng night - and how I do sympathize now with any dog that meets a porcupine and comes away with a snootful of quills! 

The Guy Was Just Mad

 Hey, how’s it goin’?” the man called over his shoulder as I climbed in the back of his cab.The Boys of Summer were on his mind, I guess because of the start of Spring Training all over. “Those jokers, what a buncha crybabies” he said of our local team and then went loudly on and on about their faults, sprinkling his remarks with various peppery terms.“You sound like those call-in shows on sports radio,” I told him.“Seriously, talk about mama’s boys! Tell ya what, you don’t get BS like that in football. In football a guy F’s up and the coach is all over him. With these bozos it’s ‘Well we all have bad days,’ and ‘there are no bad players, only disappointing games.’  Gimme a break!”This guy was about 50, and stocky, with a tattoo running the length of his arm of naked lady cradling a guitar, and as I studied the back of his head he began to feel weirdly familiar to me, as if he had to be from the city where, long ago, I had been a teacher.“Are you by any chance from _ ?” I blurted, naming the place.“Where else?” he sneered.“And did you go to the high school?”“Ya, for about three hours after I left the Trade  School! Basically all I have is a ninth grade education. If you can call it an education. They kept passing me on from year to year even when I wasn't gettin’ it.”“Oh no! Did you realize you weren’t catching on like the other kids? ““Of course I realized! I couldn't f*in’ read! I still can’t spell for sh*t. But they didn’t have no ADHD or nothin’ then. ““But… can you read OK now? The sports pages, say?”“Oh sure. Well, I can take my time with them.“I grew up in the Projects,” he went on. “My old man was a real lowlife. Took off on us back F knows when.”“The Projects, huh? Did you know ___” I asked, naming some names from back then, including that of the famous local gangster who was then in his heyday.“OH ya! My ma hung out with his girlfriend,” he said. “Not the guy’s WIFE, mind you., his girlfriend. Ask me, any guy who’s got both is scum. Me I got three kids, never mind that they’re not talkin’ to me at the moment, and I paid their child support right up until the baby turned 21.“Their mothers are drunks” he added. “If I hadn’t been forkin’ money over to them all this time I could’ve maybe made somethin’ of myself.“Even though I only have ninth grade education,” he said again. “If you can call it an education.”“So what do you do for joy in your life?” I asked, just because I love asking this of people.“Play with my band,” he said, indicating the tattoo of the musical nude. Then he darted quick as a minnow to the curb. “End of the line, $24 even,” he said, with an abruptness that made me think maybe talking about daily joy was not the story he wanted to tell.No, I think the story he wanted to tell, during this cab ride anyway, was the story of how he had tried to uphold the social contract, to marry and be faithful to his kids, and of how the system had failed him, starting way back when he was a child.The man was angry, with a deep underlying anger, and right now in this country? Right now it looks like he’s not alone. 

Back Story

One morning last week while making the coffee, my mate David reached for the sugar and was stunned to find a live mouse inside the salad dressing carafe that stands on the same kitchen counter.Because the  lid of this carafe had been recently crushed in the garbage disposal, I had contrived a temporary fix by placing a sandwich bag over the top of the carafe and anchoring it there with a small inverted custard cup.

 But even with all this protection, the little guy  must have figured a workaround, because in one deft movement he seems to have dislodged the custard cup, nudged the bag off and dropped down inside the carafe where we now watched, astonished, as he wiggled and jumped, wiggled and jumped, executing a kind of high-speed pole dance in his attempt to get free.Being the guy who will escort even a spider outside by his little parachute lines rather than kill it, David rushed the carafe onto the grass and set it on its side and, sure enough: The mouse scampered off.
 And yet for days after, the image of the mouse in the bottle came back to me, along with that line from Shakespeare where Hamlet says, he could be bounded in a nutshell and still count himself the king of infinite space.But why did both that image and that line of verse linger so in my mind? I worked that question the way the tongue works the space left by a missing tooth until it finally hit me: They were lingering because of the injury I suffered some 11 weeks ago, when I broke a bone in my back and consequently became ‘bounded in a nutshell’ myself, told not to twist, or lift, or drive very far - and certainly not to stand or sit for more than 30 minutes at a time.The standing ban has actually been sort of nice, getting me out of more than one cocktail party or coffee hour marathon; and for sure the wisdom of the twisting and lifting ban was brought vividly home to me that day last month when I tried leaning out a second-story window to shovel a layer of snowpack off the back porch roof.  It’s the not-sitting-for-more-than-30 minutes thing that's been the most restrictive, in that it has forced me to find a whole new way to meet my readers in the paper each week.My writing method now is this:  I scribble out a column from a lying-down position, leave it a while, come back later, give it the critical squint and pencil in corrections. Then I leave it again to 'cool', and once again come back later to scribble and squint some more – until, finally, I take my phone and, using Siri, read the whole thing into the record, email it to myself, import it into Word and send it to the printer, so as to see it in black-and-white. This method has slowed me down for sure, but it has had its benefits too, in that it has paradoxically helped me to write the way I talk, which is what you want in a column like mine.And if I'm honest, I'll admit that passing the long winter weeks bounded in my nutshell has been kind of  nice. For one thing, I've spent my time reading so many family journals and letters that I think I am starting to levitate mentally, to lift above my own little life to almost – almost! - glimpse that ‘infinite space’ that Shakespeare is talking about.They say every trial brings its blessings, and certainly I am aware of the sense of peace I have enjoyed in this interlude. Really I’m only sad that things went a different way for the mouse, whom we found a few hours later, dead, not ten feet from his oily jail.               

Where Have All the Backpacks Gone?

I miss having young kids around the place - I mean as nice as it is not to have to leap from the bed mornings to work a bunch of socks onto a bunch of other people’s feet.  I look fondly back to our last child, who is a good deal younger than his siblings, and to the fun he and I would have once those older others had set out for their day:

Instantly the IQ level in the house would drop as I would pretend to gouge out my eyes with my grapefruit spoon, say and he would squeeze his food “to see if it screamed,” as he put it. Now and then we’d put an egg into the microwave, shell and all, just to see what would happen.

In that half hour before he too stepped onto the school bus, our talks ranged far and wide. One day when he was in Third Grade, I copied one of our morning exchanges down word-for-word in my diary. Here it is:“I tackled Phil three times yesterday!” he said. “I took Robert DOWN!” “This was in gym class?” I asked.“No, Recess. In gym we’re doing Our Developing Bodies. Also drugs and alcohol.’” These kids are nine years old! I thought.“So, uh, what gets talked about exactly?”“Oh, deodorant and showers. Then there are these sentence beginnings the teacher writes down that we have to finish.”“Like for instance?”“Well, one said, ‘My friends can't make me...’ and I wrote ‘Cool.’”“I see!”“Then a girl in the class had to finish the sentence, ‘One good thing about drinking is...’ and she wrote ‘Not getting caught.’”“Do you think it's all a little over your heads?"“Definitely,” he said, spooning back the last of the Cheerios and wiping his mouth on his shirt.I read this old journal entry and think  Oh for the days when your kids would admit that something was over their heads! Lately I sometimes suspect they secretly think things are over my head. Sometimes this former Third Grader in particular addresses me in a manner I find sort of strangely patient and forbearing, the kind of manner parents use when trying to explain something to their slow-to-catch-on child.He’ll come home for a visit from the big city these days and say something like, “Oh, this picture hangs here now?” Or, “So you like the kitchen walls Colonial Blue?”This is why I love afternoons with my young grandsons, who think everything I do is great and totally get it when suggest we paint all the light bulbs pink and then help me do it. Plus young kids are fine with changes you make in your home décor; it’s the ones that grew up in the house who want things to stay the same.But this son of mine has been good to me always, and even now on walking into the house on his visits home he will still drop his bags, pull out his same Cheerios chair and tell me all the news. Once in a while, we still even find ourselves taking an egg or two from the egg carton and heading for the microwave.God the kid was fun. Here he is at about 12, getting the word's hugest kick out of a game of Pictionary with his  honorary sister Susan.    

This is the World I Was Born In

On February 21st 1949 this is the ad that appeared on the back page of Life Magazine:I was born that very day, Feb Twenty-One, Nineteen Forty Nine and I have to say:  What a bill of goods the tobacco companies sold folks for all those years.  And how my mother and aunt loved their 'cigs' and smoked them at the kitchen table morning and night, in closed cars on the way to our cousins' houses, anywhere they could... Even when Mom  broke her pelvis and was in the hospital, family members came and mocked the sign that said "No Smoking" and lit up anyway. I distinctly remember my cousin Billy, then in his mid 2os, fake-reading that sign. "Nosmo... Nosmo King," he said, pretending to sound it out. "Must be a previous patient."We brought her home a week later and Aunt Grace put her in her own room, because it was six steps closer to the bathroom. (They were a pair those two sisters, together through thick and thin.) As soon as she was installed, the whole family showed up again, smoked them some more smokes and drank them some fiiine whisky, right in her room.  Here she is now on that long ago night with my great 'big sister' Nan perched beside her on the bed .Ah they were good times, tobacco-laden as they were.  Miss you so much Mom on this my 67th birthday!  And thanks, wherever you are, for giving me life (if not a lot of hair :-))  

Therapy on the I'm OK You're Crazy Plan

Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” an old vaudevillian once said. But comedy never seemed that hard to me, provided I didn't mind sacrificing my dignity some. I was just five years old when I first began trying to make my family laugh with a sped-up rendering of the "Look! Up in the air! It’s a bird, it’s a plane…" prologue to the old Superman show,  while standing before my captive audience in my little red jersey and tights, a dishtowel for a cape knotted around my neck.So with all due respect to that old vaudevillian, if you were to ask me for an epigram depicting one true thing, I’d tend to say “Comedy is easy. Therapy is hard.”I found out just how hard therapy is way back when I was first enrolled in counseling by my husband under the “I’m Ok, You’re Crazy” plan. Doing therapy under the “I’m OK, You’re Crazy” plan occurs when somebody you live with suggests you get counseling, although he personally wouldn’t 'open up' in a therapist’s office if you dragged him there in chains and threatened to pull out all his nose hairs.This husband, who I have  often wanted to drag places by his nose hairs, said back then he thought I should seek treatment.Because I seemed sad, he said. “Hey, all humorists are sad down deep,” I quickly retorted, but  I knew he was right: I was sad. Not long before, my mom had died, and I guess I felt too young to face life without her. Plus, she didn’t just die. She died in my living room. During her own 80th birthday party. So, yes I was sad. And finally I began seeing this counselor to try feeling better.Every week I drove to her office, all unwilling. Every week she asked me how I was. I could only tell her how everyone else in my life was. I told her a million stories, most of them richly humorous. I entertained the heck out of us both, but I wasn’t getting at the problem, and I think we both knew that, so after 18 months, I quit.Then ten years passed, and ....I was funnier than ever! - yay! - though still in full flight from every kind of sadness that had ever come my way. I just didn't want to feel it. Then one day, my oldest friend called to say she was doing counseling - over the phone of all things - with a gifted therapist in Colorado, who was at first reluctant to work with someone in such an unorthodox manner.“But it’s helping!” my friend said, and one day added, “and, you know, you should really do it too.”And so. And so I began doing it, though God knows it wasn’t easy.  I couldn’t seem to sit still as I talked to this faraway therapist but because we were on the phone, she didn’t know this.Sometimes I cleaned the bathroom toilets while we talked.Sometimes I stripped small pieces of furniture.Once though, she got wise to me. “Are you DRIVING?!” she said.I was driving all right.But the main thing is I was doing it, as I wish my mom could have done in her younger years, to ease her own aching heart. Because it did sure enough help. I faced my sadness and the sadness under my sadness, and the sadness under that, and so what if I did most of that facing after the therapist and I had hung up.. I’ll say it again and you can take it from this old vaudevillian: Comedy really is easy by comparison; and therapy is very, very hard.   

If the Shoe Fits

You hear these expressions and you wonder what they mean, really. Take when people say they don't believe in the holidays. “But they're real!” you want to say. “They come every year! Didn't we just survive them?” Or take when they say, “If the shoe fits wear it.” That's an expression that sprang instantly to my mind, when, the week after Christmas, I came upon a pair of women’s shoes jammed in a wastebasket.A pair of brand-new Kate Spades, in with the trash! As a former hotel chambermaid I thought I’d seen just about everything a person might put in a wastebasket, but this: this took me by surprise.Some delicate questioning finally revealed the fact that it was one of my grown daughters who had left the shoes, which she picked up at a consignment shop in the hope that, although they were a size 8 ½, they would fit her size 8 foot.They didn’t. They were just too big and so she left him here, knowing I would bring them to the Goodwill truck that spends its days crouched like a sleeping dragon in the parking lot of a nearby shopping plaza.“But wait!” I thought, pulling them out of the wastebasket and turning their finely crafted leather in my hands. “Maybe these shoes will fit me! Sure, I wear a size 7 but I think I have some of those round-cornered foam inserts with the adhesive backing around here somewhere.  I bet I can make them fit!"I fetched the inserts, stuck two of them inside the back of one shoe and tried it on. Alas, all my ‘fix’ did was create an inch-wide gap between the back of my heel and the shoe. It made my feet look like Minnie Mouse's.So I peeled the inserts out, and stuck them in again, this time up near the front of the shoe, figuring they would stop the ball of my foot from canting forward to give me that child-dressing-up-in-its-mothers heels look.Still no good. When I tried taking a few steps, my toes popped out of the shoe's front in a way that was comically reminiscent of that classic ‘wardrobe malfunction’ fashion.No matter what, the shoes didn’t flatter me. Plus, I couldn't actually walk in them. And so, as a child will do for her dead pet mouse, I nestled them into a small box in bade them farewell.And yes I do know, dear reader, that the old saying about footgear fitting isn't really about footgear at all. Rather it’s about how we react when people make an observation about our behavior. It suggests that we might want to heed them.If someone tells me that I’m tight-fisted, surely I should ask myself if this is so and consider becoming more open-handed. If someone remarks that I’m frequently late, surely I should ponder the effect on others of anyone's tardiness, my own included.And if someone notes that I can't seem to tell a simple story about shoes without bringing in dead baby mice, snoozing dragons and Janet Jackson's big moment at Super Bowl XXXVIII then I might not be a journalist at all, but just some classroom cut-up seeking to have a little fun at the back of the room.Possible? If the shoe fits wear it they say! Maybe what I lack on the gravitas side of things I make up for on the merriment scale. I can live with that. Because, I mean, how great is it to wake up every day to a job you really love? :-) 

So Cold the Flashers Stayed Zipped

But if you try sometimes well you just might find

He May be Dead (but He Sure Isn't Wrong)

Here below the thoughts of the late great sci-fi satirist Kurt Vonnegut writing about how one man among several such men in 19th century America grew rich and saw to it that they STAYED rich. This from his 1965 novel God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.  Food for thought as we enter primary season!

"When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each nation should be limited.

"This oversight was engendered by weak-kneed sympathy for those who loved expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone.

"Noah and a few like him perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal officeholders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land with Noah and his kind we're standing.

"Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream went belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of Cupidity Unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."

He had a great smile - here he as Writer in Residence at Smith College - but don't be fooled: he spoke in dead earnest. Truth to power, that was Vonnegut. 

Friends from the Start

While sifting through some old papers in this quiet season, I came upon a stack of letters.They detail a relationship begun some 100 years ago, when my then-eight-year-old mom first began spending some serious time with the seven-year-old cousin who would go on to become her very first friend.This photo shows my mom. She's the baby in the middle flanked by her two big brothers, born in 1905 and 1906. She herself came into the world in in 1907 (and yes she did have me at the last possible reproductive moment.) ...And this photo shows her cousin, also as a baby, and also flanked by his older sibs. He was born in 1909. By 1914 or so, according to my mom, you could find the two kids sitting for hours on the curbstone, waiting for the fruit man to clop by with his horse and cart so they could pick up his rejected berries and surreptitiously wing them just past the retreating figures of random passing grownups.They spent hours punished in their rooms.I first met this cousin the summer I was ten, when my mother organized a family reunion. When he stepped from the car to greet this friend he had not seen for 30 years he called out “Hello old partner in crime!” He then turned and christened me “Muggsy.” My willowy older sister he called “Stretch.” And in his colorful reminiscing, he showed us a side of our mother we had never seen.With their friendship thus renewed, he sent more letters, each filled with his signature humor:“Mike and Paul continue their education studying to be bums,” he wrote. (They were nine and 11 at the time.) And, “Son David is finishing college and doing a lot of singing, most recently in a performance for 200 college girls majoring in something that has to do with being kind to people.”In time, we kids grew up and this cousin wrote reacting to it all: Congratulations and think of it! Muggsy and Stretch having babies at the same time!” A few years on, when Mom went south to visit Stretch and ended up breaking her hip, his response was immediate: “That's what you get for going to Florida.”After she moved to a retirement home near me, my mother wrote to him to say, “It's like college all over again!” Since she lived five minutes away, I well knew how happy she was, throwing spontaneous sherry parties, and ignoring all the fire drills and raising a late-blooming feminist consciousness in many an elderly breast.Her friend from 1915 wrote to her in her new place:“Now that you’re settled in with all the old fogeys, I take it upon myself to send you a note. I have diabetes these days so I can’t walk downstairs anymore. I slide down the banister.“ And a little later: “How are you? Still running the Home? I can just see you bossing everyone around. I have had a slight stroke and it has affected my handwriting and speech. I couldn't write or speak before so it’s no loss."But soon after, there was this: “Back home after losing three more toes. Looks like I'll have to give up ballet.”The last letter in the folder was written not to my mother but to me, by yet another of this man’s sons, a singer-songwriter who I ‘re-met’ when his career brought him East on tour.“The old Da’ is in bad shape as you might have guessed,” it begins. “I can honestly say, Terry, after much quiet meditation that I wish God would let him go to the next great adventure.”Which God did, within days of his son’s writing.It was late August when we laid him in the ground. Four months later, my mother followed her first friend, without warning, or sickness, or pain.I want to salute those two frisky spirits from both horse-and-buggy days and to say once again how very lucky I feel to have known them.     

It’s all Happening at the Zoo

Some cruises I've gone on were crazy fun from morning until night, like the one I went on 20 years ago with my sister Nan where she joked that we had to be careful about getting too much blood in our alcohol stream haha. This cruise that I'm on with my old man Dave hasn't been like that, mostly  because on this cruise all I've been doing is getting a kick out of things generally and watching the people around us.It’s been more fun  than a trip to the zoo, it really has, which is not to suggest I think I’m any better than everyone else, far from it. And I know that anyone looking at the two of us would say, “Why didn’t those two just stay home? They’re not doing the Macarena, they didn't come to the bellyflop contest, they’re not wearing whimsical sunglasses with flamingoes sprouting from the frames, what is their deal?”Our deal is that mostly we've been reading, reading, reading.It's been heaven. I see myself walking in the reflection of the gym at the ship's tippety-top and think Who IS that lucky girl? but it's me! It's been like a dream is what it's been like. More on what else I've seen later.  :-)  

Big Calves

In my next life I'd like to be a woman with calves like duckpins.I’m seeing a lot of such calves on this cruise that I'm on. The women who own them seem to have more stability and be more stable than the rest of us ladies here on board.  More 'planted', sort of, like the legs of the big grand piano at the Schooner Bar where the red-haired Irish lady sings each night.They kind of roll with the ship whereas the rest of us scrawny-calved gals skitter around like sandpapers on our drinking-straw legs. We seem plain doomed to topple, kind of like these guys below. (Go 18 seconds in to hear the soundtrack. Love it!)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NawmpwHUVJ4  

30 Years Today: Christa and Me

This in memory of the events of January 29, 1986 which impacted me greatly since NASA had my application:When in the Spring of ’86 I became one of the final 40 contestants in the initiative to send a journalist up in space, the loss of the Challenger was still so recent the bodies had not yet been found on the ocean floor.Maybe that’s why the TV crew who came to my door the day my name was announced seemed so eager. “She even looks like Christa!” said one of them. Which I kind of did, though here I'm making a face. (I was standing next to Gandhi in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London, and trying to not smile while mimicking his dour expression.)“Have her children cling to her skirts!” said another.We were all still in a kind of shock, I think, and maybe that’s why that news crew was trying to frame things in such a dramatic way. We hadn’t yet adjusted to the new reality. Masters of technology that we imagined ourselves to be, we thought we were in control of everything.It’s a notion we humans cling to fixedly and relinquish with great reluctance.Picture being on a plane as it taxis toward takeoff, a rolling rec room in most of our minds, in which folks read and doze and look out the window -  until it picks up speed and the trees blur and the tarmac goes fuzzy to your sight and somewhere inside, all your instincts as a land animal cry out in disbelief that this big-bellied metal hull will ever lift and soar in flight. The tiny bubble in the carpenter’s level of your brain leans way over to one side, and a small frightened voice deep inside you asks of your death, 'Now? Today? This very minute?’ Then the plane straightens and climbs higher and with relief you turn back to your magazine, thinking, ‘Not yet then. Not this sight the last these eyes will behold.’In the months before Challenger flew, teacher and Mission Specialist Christa McAuliffe said in her motherly and reassuring way, “It will be like taking a bus.” But it isn’t like taking a bus and it never was, as every career astronaut knows. It’s like riding a Roman candle.Back when this first crew died what shocked us most was that we all watched it happen: one minute, seven hale and joshing Americans; the next, a blank sky. And then between that lost mission and the loss of Columbia in ’03 came that other event when, in an eyeblink, two mighty steel towers gave way to blank sky too.I was just 36 when I applied to be the first journalist to fly in Low Earth Orbit. In the days just after January 28th I wrote in the Boston Globe that we owe God a death, as Shakespeare says, and that the Challenger Seven had paid their death-debt. They now flew free, I felt, beyond caring about control, or planning, or how many days might pass until a tiny planet tips enough to bring what its creatures call Spring.I think of them today. “Give me your hand,” the black box caught one of them saying as their capsule hurtled quickly downward and the phrase is lovely, holding as it does all we can offer one another in love, or friendship, or at the Hour of Our Death. All, and perhaps enough.Watch this, is you can bear to.  And under it, President  Reagan's finest hour:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDRxK6cevqw[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JKIZ7j20EA&feature=related] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWPDNf9VMVo   

More ER Tales: The Good The Bad & The Ugly

More, even cruder stuff happened in that Emergency Room I spent four hours in and wrote about here. I didn't tell it all in part because I didn't think I COULD tell it without using the real language that I heard there.But it wasn't just the language I didn't tell about it. I didn't say that for my long, long wait I chose to sit by a man who woke that morning unable to move his leg from the knee down. I sat beside him because of his face, because of the expression he wore, that struck me as so socially ready and amenable in spite of the look of anguish that flashed across it now and then. Like me, he had come a long way to get here, and like me, he was alone. But his wife worked there at the hospital and he seemed to feel comforted by that knowledge and was with communicating with her regularly by text.We sat together trying to ignore the behaviors going around us - like the fact that the dowager princess lookalike who had tripped on the cobblestones had actually called the city workers she blamed "fucking assholes," an utterance that shocked me to my boots coming from a lady in her 70s with such an otherwise hoity-toity mannerShe was eyeing me pretty good, I noticed and maybe it was what I had on, I don’t know. But when she saw the Gloria Steinem book I was reading she said, "Do you like that?" in a flat level way but then said nothing more when I told her yes.The man with the dead leg and I really were right by the toilets, as I said, so after an hour or so I asked him if he wanted to move. “Sure,” he said, so with him in his wheelchair and I pushing, we rounded the corner to the semi-enclosed space that held the two tall guys I spoke about - only the chair would fit because an elderly lady wearing a sari and seated in her own wheelchair had been placed at the enclosure’s entrance in such a way that we couldn’t get him by it. It wasn’t my place to move her and I we could both see that. “I’m fine,” he said and wheeled himself back to where he had been.Here in my new spot the first tall man I told about, who had reddish hair and who had what looked to me like cellulitis on the hand that was attached to an IV, told me they had to keep him hooked up here all night at least and maybe for 24 hours past that.  “It sucks because I have to go to Florida this week on a job!” I agreed that it sucked, which I didn’t say in the last post.I didn’t say either that the sandy-haired, second, tall man, the one with the gash on his chin, had gone directly on from telling me that Gloria Steinem was a fraud to attacking what he called  “that whole Martha’s Vineyard crowd.” “Matt Damon! Fuckin’ Ben Affleck! You know his brother Casey Affleck? Guy’s an fuckin’ midget!”I didn’t say that when the ER staffer brought in the homeless-looking man with the long grey hair covering his eyes he had leaned in to him and muttered, "Behave yourself now.” Thus I shouldn’t have been surprised by what followed when the two tall guys started to mock him to his face, calling him "Shaggy" and worse. I didn’t say that he finally sat up from his slump and called them both faggots before the rest of the F words began flying thick and fast.“Guys!” I didn’t tell you that I said. “Guys, what about this lady hearing all this language?” I said, indicated the woman in the sari and who was 80 if she was a day.“Oh don't worry about HER!" snapped Shaggy. “She doesn’t even understand us! She’s an Arab! She speaks Arabian!” Then he shouted enough more bad things that the burly male staffer who had brought him in came flying into the room, took him by the elbow, hissed “I warned you!” and hustled him to a different area.Just after that they called my name and I got seen.Thirty minutes later I saw, in an exam room that they were escorted my quickly past, the man who had no ability to move a leg that was paining him terribly.We waved to each other and though there was no opportunity to get it, how I wish I knew his name. Because me, I just fell down while running on wet tiles around a pool and got a compression fracture in my back; but this man? This man I can’t stop thinking about. I can't imagine what it must have been like for him to wake one morning with such symptoms and I so hope he's ok today.    

Lord of the Flies at the ER

After a bad spill I took a few weeks back, I spent four hours in a busy ER, where, after being ushered past Registration into the vast waiting area, my main thought was, “Where do I sit?”I first saw a seat next to an elderly woman with a sort of Dowager Princess accent who was going on and on to her companion about the "horrid" job the city does in maintaining the public walkways. “Hmmm, not beside you,” I thought. Then I saw one by a guy I'd put in his late 30s who was scowling angrily and massaging his back. ”Maybe not beside you either” I also thought.I walked clear to the end of the row, down by the two public toilets, just happy to sit down and open the new Gloria Steinem memoir that I had just received as a gift. But as time passed and people kept trooping in and out of these facilities not three feet from where I sat, I decided to do my waiting elsewhere.I spotted a small semi-enclosed area with a television. “TV!” I thought, and entered it to find it occupied by two very tall men.The brow of the first man furrowed as he showed me his swollen hand. “I have to stay here all night attached to this IV,” he told me, indicating the apparatus he was connected to.The lip of the second one twisted into a sneer the second he caught sight of my book.“Gloria Steinem!” he snorted, his hand covering a gash on his chin. “She made all that stuff up, I hope you know.”“MADE IT UP? Seriously?” I thought, but said lightly, “Oh, I don't know about that.”Just then a third man with long gray hair over his eyes arrived at the entrance to this area and stood for a moment beside the staff member who was escorting him.“Jeez will you look at THIS guy!” yelped one of the tall men.“Hey, SHAGGY!” cried the other. “Get a haircut!”“Guys, guys!” I whispered. “He can hear you!”“Who gives a crap?” the first man replied. The man took a chair and slumped over an arm of it, cradling one hand against his chest.“Hey FOOL!” said the second of the two men, at which point the newcomer sat up and let loose a barrage of curse words seldom seen in a family newspaper.The two tall men cursed him right back. The air grew thick with profanity.“People!“ I finally pleaded. “Can’t we all just get through this?”“Come on!” replied the sneering man. “This is FUN!”And that’s when I realized: Here I was making judgments about what I thought I saw in these others, never imagining that they were very likely making judgments about what they thought they saw in me.And what did they see? Some kind of book-clutching post-menopausal woman in running shoes, a backpack and an ancient fur coat.They didn’t know I wore the coat because I had travelled 100 miles, by bus, on an eight-degree day to get to this ER. They didn’t see the holes under its arms, or know that it had once been fiercely peed upon by my cat Abe, right through the bars of his pet taxi. They only saw someone resembling those two Jacquie Onassis relatives from that ramshackle house in the Hamptons. Someone who thought she could teacher-boss everyone into behaving nicely.So I guess none of us knew very much about anything or anyone in that big ER on that cold wintry night; but it seems pretty clear to me now that no one understood less than the preachy lady in the ratty fur coat.

Hop on the Bus Gus

I don’t care about the weather, I’m going out this winter. I’m taking the bus. And the subway. And I’m walking . I’m doing these things because when I take public transportation instead of driving and when I walk instead of riding, I see things I would otherwise miss. The best way to get the sense of the newness of each new day is to get out there and swim in it, I now see.I did this ten days ago week when I took a bus, and then a subway car, and then walked half a mile to get to the medical center where I receive all my care. On the way, this is what I saw:

• I saw that people are becoming braver about objecting to the use of phones on public conveyances. I was taking a call from someone in my doctor’s office who was trying to set up an appointment for me. Just then a woman who looked to be in her early 80s rose from the seat behind me and tapped me on the shoulder to ask if I would mind moving to a different seat if I was going to talk on the phone like this. I so appreciated her forthrightness because we all do have to be mindful about everyone’s comfort when we are sharing public spaces - and this wasn’t my only lesson for the day.

• I also saw that money isn’t the only way to show appreciation when I entered the subway station’ and saw a man with a guitar, his open guitar case holding a few CDs and a flutter of dollar bills. I smiled at him as the last chords of his musical offering died away in that high tiled space.“You missed it!” he called to me cheerily. But the subway car had already screeched to a stop and I knew I had to sprint to get on it. “Next time?” I called, gesturing toward the dollar bills, but he shook his head and smiled that wonderful letting-you-off-the hook smile that people use to indicate that money is much beside the point.
• Once I was on the subway car, I found myself seated beside a girl toting three duffel bags, and wearing an Army jacket, a lip ring and a wool blanket arranged flying-nun-style atop her blonde curls. We had seen each other twice already, once as we both walked from the bus station to the subway and again when she had shouted “Happy New Year!” to everyone on the escalator so it seemed like a good time to say something. “I love your hat,” I whispered to her. “Oh yeah?" she smiled. "My grandma made it for me.” Then she sighed and said she couldn’t wait to get home, as it had been a long trip and her back was hurting a lot. Funny, I thought, because MY back was hurting a lot too because of the spill I took a few days before. In fact, when I woke up that day all I could think was “Get me to the doctor!” and “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.”

• But my best revelation occurred when I cut through the lobby of the fancy hotel next to my destination and saw a woman with arms that ended at her elbows. She was perched on a stool at the bar and laughing in jokey cahoots with the bartender, her shoes kicked off and an elegant goblet of wine before her.

So we all have restrictions, it seems, and long days too, some filled with pain. But if we can just get ourselves ‘out there’ we can grow self-forgetful, if only for a time, just by witnessing all the valiant life around us.