Crazy Fun

You've got to love a holiday! We're here on this Glorious Fourth eating eggs for lunch and left over fried chicken for breakfast, going out on paddle boards and fishing off the dock. Even baseball right IN the water was on the agenda this weekend.Archer, this handsome Rhodesian Ridgeback of a canine, captured the spirit nicely.By day there was the swimming and the spraying of hoses on sturdy baby legs by sturdy baby humans.Then the  in-the-water baseball looked like this:...while and the paddleboarding looked like this:By night there were fireworks, every night leading up to the Fourth,  and man they were CRAZY fireworks, that went on and one for an hour, because this is after all New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state where nobody dares tell anyone else what to do. They were going off from every corner of the cove and from two towns both up and down the lake from this cove.To me the din was awful which seems strange since you'd think the older you get the deafer you'll be so no problem about the loud noises.For sure I am old: if I didn't know it before the weekend, I know it now. The little baseball player pictured above asked me the other night just how old I was."I'm sixty-seven," I said.He looked up at me with his large brown eyes and said so sweetly, "I knew you were old, TT! You know how?""How?""Because your face has those crinkles.  And you have to bend down to hear me. Also, your voice."I'm not sure how my voice gives me away. To me, inside the chambers of my old skull my voice sounds to the same way it always has, but who knows? Maybe to the young I sound like Ursula from The Little Mermaid. It is what it is, eh? All I know is I'm just glad to be here on this anniversary of our nation's birth! Here I am three years ago on the same day with grandson David. It's the kids who keep us smiling!    

How the Rich Get Richer

I saw a tastefully turned-out woman with a Prada handbag and perfect hair at Starbucks.I wasn't trying to 'see' her but she was lingering at my elbow as we both stood at the small station all Starbucks storefronts have. This is the place where management provides straws and swizzle sticks, napkins and a modest range of 'enhancers', from cinnamon to cocoa powder, as well as the usual range of choices in the general cream and sugar category. I felt I was holding her up, the way she lingered idly beside me and so I muttered an apology for not doing a speedier job of dribbling cream into my coffee from the tall cool carafe that stands beside the other tall cool carafes that hold the lowfat milk and the regular milk. I thought probably she needed access to the cream too.But when I stepped back, my own iced coffee enhanced to my liking, I saw more: She did treat her own coffee with cream, and Splenda, too; but then she reached into the mini-bin that held the sweetener in the familiar pale-yellow packets, closed her fingers around a good dozen of them and slipped them quick into that slim Prada purse.Maybe Starbucks can handle this kind of 'shrinkage' as they call stealing in the retail world, but it still made me shake my head.It also made me think I maybe don't belong in a coffee shop where the customers have Prada purses. It made me think I should maybe dump that high-priced decaf espresso and walk right over to my old haunt Dunkin' Donuts up Main Street a ways.Sure, they keep the Splenda behind the counter so you have to ask for it a packet at a time, but things just feel more HONEST there. Plus at Dunkin' you're far more likely to be greeted with a "Hey, how's it goin'?"  which I, for one, will take any day over a "What may I serve you?" 

Napolee-o-leon (& Others)

It’s two weeks now since my man and I got back from France, where the number of pictures I took as compared to the amount of food and drink I consumed stands in a ration of 1 to 1000 - and now here I am with little more to remind me of the experience but my new fat tummy. Lucky for us , we took this Viking Longboat cruise with two close friends who took tons of pictures. Even better, ‘she’ has written the whole trip up on her travel blog, a site which in my greedy way,  I have boarded as a pirate boards some poor sitting duck of a vessel, and helped myself to the photo booty. ‘He’ was my first friend when I moved at age 9 to our new house and found myself caught up in endless rounds of kickball and the chase-hide-and wallop game we called  “the Commies vs. the Americans. Good times.We two couples had also gone, via this same Viking cruise company, from Budapest to Nuremberg back in 2014, when the world felt to be in far less trouble than it feels to be today. That was a dream of a trip on which I got to hang out for a while with actual Mozart, or anyway an official Mozart impersonator.  He spoke about the hard life of a professional musician which he actually is. He's a serious guy.This time though it was not Vienna but Paris, a city which appears to do a lot of looking back. We passed the place to which poor Marie Antoinette was brought to meet Madame La Guillotine, she  paraded for mockery's sake in a crude wooden cart, her hair shorn and her wrists bound behind her back. We saw the monuments Napoleon brought back from Egypt where he went to further foil the British by messing up their trade routes. And, in our fancy tour bus as wide and serene as a clipper ship full-bellied with the breeze, we billowed along down the very route the Allies took after the brutal 100-day Battle of Normandy to at last reach and liberate this famous City of Lights.On other days we went to Giverny, the estate and gardens established by the Impressionist god Claude Monet who smoked 60 cigarettes a day, slept with his best friend's wife, and quarrelled sfrequently  with his one surviving son that the son wanted nothing to do with the place after the old man died at 86.We saw castles and clambered over their ruined stones. We marched up and down streets with ancient stone and timber houses and even a few thatched roofs. And finally we went to Napoleon's country house, where we saw with our own eyes how small of stature the man  really was. This is his bed, which, in the flesh looks like the the popsicle stick nest you might build for your pet hamster. Poor Josephine lived there as well until he divorced her for failing to give him a son.  We walked in the gardens of this estate, known as Malmaison, but the tour guide apparently ran out of steam because with an hour to go before we could board the bus and go back to our cozy longboat, she told us to enjoy the gardens and disappeared .It was 55 degrees,  the hospitality center/gift shop was closed and a layer of low grey clouds hovered above us like an omen of old.Our two pals duly circled the large garden, admiring the roses and chatting up the other members of our expedition.  The two of us did not. We went and sat on a stone bench - until  another Viking cruiser, from the American  South to judge by her accent, came by, declared us 'cute', and snapped this picture.Then she made us get up and walk to a spot 100 feet away  where she snapped another.The lesson of that moment? Stick around long enough and you too can become a monument. 😛 

A Rose by Any Other Name?

Here's a thing you're not ready for in life: The day when all of a sudden you'll get a new name.  I think of the way, for decades, my kids called me ‘mom’ and they called their father ‘dad.' But then we became grandparents and got issued new names, that now feel so permanent they might as well be on our passports.These days he's "Papa,” a name that for me recalls the swaggering older Hemingway with his white beard and his blather, and I'm “TT,” a circus monkey of a name if ever there was one.Of course, name changes happen in other ways too and certainly some people bring on the change themselves. The singer songwriter Car Seat Headrest certainly wasn’t given THAT handle at birth. Those in religious life also come to mind in this connection. A girl  could spend years thinking of herself as Eileen Casey, until the day she took the vows and became forever after Sister Sebastian, after the Christian martyr who got himself so thoroughly shot through with arrows that in all the art he looks like a human pincushion.Not so long ago, a woman, upon tying the knot, was simply expected to hand in her maiden name like a set of expired license plates. I began teaching school mere weeks after processing down two aisles, one to get my diploma and the other to be wed, and for that whole first school year every time anyone called “Mrs. Marotta!” I’d be looking around wondering what my mother-in-law was doing at my workplace.But! There can also be an upside to the name-change-upon-marrying thing.

If, like me, you had a surname people mocked, you might almost welcome a change. I used to be Terry Sheehy and believe me when I say that was one hard moniker to carry around. The boys called me “Terry Sherry” or “Tee-Hee Sheehy.” Or sometimes they'd just yell, “Hey, HE-She!”

I think of that girl who gave up her name at 21. I think of her as she looked in her 5th-grade school picture with her tragically flipped-up bangs and the cold sore on one side of her mouth and how oblivious to her imperfections she remained as she, say, affixed baseball cards to the spokes of her bike to get that nice putt-putt sound.

I think of her eight years later, happily dressing for her senior prom, which she attended all unselfconsciously in a gown her family rented for $15.

Sometimes I even visit the old me on the top shelf of the linen closet where a version of me slumbers in my white heirloom-pack wedding dress box. I pry open the cardboard lid and peer through the plastic window to see a version of the young woman I was once was, lacy sleeves folded over beaded satin bodice, a Sleeping Beauty of an image if ever there was one.

So is Terry Sheehy gone forever then? I hope not. I think of old St. Sebastian, who survived his attack and kept on keepin’ on, as the saying goes. I think of the former Eileen Casey who lives happily on in the nun who took his name for her own.  We are who we always were, only kinder as the years pass, let us hope, and more forgiving of both of ourselves and of others.

Visiting the Graves

 When we were kids, my sister and I went to the cemetery with our mother and aunt every Memorial Day, though it didn’t mean much to us, young as we were. We mostly danced among the graves, and dashed happily off to fill the dented metal watering can at the leaky old faucet. And anyway our dead had been dead for so long, the mother of our mom only 31 when she was buried there in 1910, her unborn baby in her arms. Then time passed as time will do and I guess I was almost grown when I noticed that we weren’t going to the cemetery so much anymore, even though our mother and aunt's own dad now also lay beside his dead young wife.  "Is it because we moved an hour north of Boston and Holyhood is too hard to get to?” I asked Aunt Grace one day as we stood in the dining room of our childhood home.“That’s not it,” she replied. “It’s because they aren’t there,” she said, and then repeated the declaration with a strange passion I had never before seen in her: “They aren’t THERE!” she said again, as if to suggest that any fool knows the dead travel to a place infinitely farther than we humans can conceive of in our poor imaginings.Was that why we weren’t going to the graves so much anymore? Because nothing was really down there but clay? Or dust? Or whatever remains behind aside from the metal hasps of the coffin? And if that is the case, then why, all these years later, do I still stand again at that grave and picture them all just a few feet below me? I see my mother and aunt in their favorite Sunday outfits. I see my grandfather with his dark eyebrows. I see the young woman whom I should have known as my grandmother lying in the high-necked Gibson-Girl-style dress they would have chosen for her back at the start of the last century. But what good comes of these vigils? I wondered at the time.And then one day I saw a young woman sitting on the grass of a soldier’s fresh and flag-decked grave. She was there when I came by at noon and she was there when I came again at 6:00. This was one month after we buried our last remaining elder who over the last six years of his life became in many ways my closest friend. In the long quiet days since that passing I studied countless snapshots of him - as a schoolboy in the 1920s, as a young man starting out in life and then suddenly in the South Pacific during the worst of the fighting there in World War II. I hadn't even understood his part in that war until the day, almost 70 years later when he shyly handed me a notebook of poems and sketches he wrote from the front.Then another day, which was a day just last week, I visited the place here pictured overlooking Omaha Beach where lie 9,387 of the fallen, almost all of whom died on June 6, 1944 and in the 100 days after as part of the Allied invasion of Normandy:I was with a group of about 80 people. In the impromptu ceremony  held for us, an offcial of the park asked any veterans among us to come up front and join her. About 15 people did and when she then read the poem written by a young man in combat just before his own death in Lebanon, one of our veterans wept openly.That might have been the moment I first really understood what Memorial Day is and why we mark it.Here then to "the lost" as they were called in that first awful World War, and to the man with the tears running down his  face and to  my own family's veteran, gone now too under the earth young as he once was and full of life.   

Musings at the Museum

Seeing France by cruising alone the Seine is amazing enough but then when you disembark and wander on your own, the wonders just multiply. The Museé d'Orsay in Paris which I spent three hours in was by far the most instructive and inviting museum I have ever visited, shocking as it was to see how laid-back the staff is. Dozens of people snap away with their cameras and camera apps with nary a word of admonishment from the guards. In fact, in the many small galleries, they don’t even have guards. It's true that a thin wire at about shin level walls each pictures off from the public but I felt sure that if I'd really wanted to I could have leaned in and licked the very paint on any number of them.I loved the sculptures too. The young David who slew Goliath is there. Not Michelangelo's David in his famous beefcake iteration,which you see above, nor Donatello's David either who looks like a sweet fey youth in his mother's Easter bonnet.These are both in Florence.Here at the Museé  D'Orsay, you see the Antonin Mercié David who looks like this: But really the  place is most known for its 19th century stuff, works by artists who looked not toward Biblical or Classical themes but more toward landscapes and still lifes and intimate 'candid' portraits, of ladies, say, undressing for the bath.Here inside these walls is Van Gogh, not dead by his own hand at 36, but alive, his spirit shimmering away in the lines of this cathedral he captured in paint.Manet lives at this museum too as I said here the other day and Gauguin with his island Edens,and  Cezanne, and of course that long-lived patriarch Claude Monet who could make the same haystack, the same cathedral front at Rouen look a hundred different ways by painting them at different times of the day in a variety of different lights.   The visit was just thrilling to me. I sat looking at the works as much as I walked those halls and chambers, all oblivious to the fact that inches away on the other side of the wall Time was also ticking away my own life as this video I took will show. I suspect it was a stiff wind and the limber shafts of the clock's two hands that did it but still, that minute hand is really moving. Signs and reminders all around us, folks, signs and reminders.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUGebbL2igA   

Another Fun Couple Takes a Trip

You get to the airport and find that your flight has been cancelled.It’s a flight to Iceland. And it’s cancelled.So much for the strange beauty of wide skies, and treeless plains!You wait an eternity to be told that now you will instead be flying to Frankfurt. Bring out the ketchup and mustard!Still, you know you can’t be TOO mad since your final destination is Paris and sure enough you do get to Paris eventually where, you are interested to see, the old sidewalk pissoirs have long since been replaced by wondrous new unisex sidewalks booths called Sanisettes, in which, when you touch a final button, cascades of water swirl in, washing everything in sight clean, clean, clean and disinfecting it all too. And the pissoir, in case you don’t know was for over 350 years the standard Parisian accommodation for any man who felt the need to make water. It featured a panel from knees to shoulders that blocked out the key parts of his anatomy while still allowing him to stand and chat companionably with his pals.

Hard to believe, right?

Anyway, now here you are wearin’ out your Nikes and seein’ the sights, and then at night inhaling the great food and tossing back the complimentary mealtime beers and wines on a riverboat that will take you, via the Seine, from Paris the City of Lights to Normandy and back with several bracing stops along the way.The ship’s windows are wide and the sights are lovely. (Here now: A man who looks to be straight out of a Van Gogh watercolor standing in the water and fishing! Here now: A windmill that goes back to the time of Marie Antoinette and her Marge Simpson hairdo!) And the rolling waters! The waters alone!You feel like a baby, and a fat happy baby at that. You turn to your travel buddies while dunking your face into your second glass of the good red wine.“What could go wrong from here?” you burble, “unless we break a tooth and see a giant jagged crater open up in our mouth.”You laugh hilariously at your own joke, and then, not 12 hours later, while eating the good French bread, exactly that happens, and it happens to you.But hey, it’s your all-too-short visit to this place. Your dentist will be there when you get back, and for now you're just another stylish couple having fun in France. :-)  

Let's Go Get Shocked

I'm going soon on a trip to France, via a Viking Riverboat Longship, secure in the knowledge that my house is safe with several family members staying there.I'll see Notre Dame, and the many monuments to that rampaging thief Napoleon. I will go the Musée D'Orsay and stun myself with the beauty of all that gorgeous art by Monet and Manet, Cézanne and Seurat and Gauguin and the others.I'll drink the red wine at lunch and at breakfast eat the croissant, a word which when pronounced right sounds like you're trying to clear out some serious post-nasal drip.I’ve also been busy trying to retrieve the exact right phrases from my four years of teenage French so I can tell the waiter what I would like to eat without having him think I'm saying that I desire him, because who knows what construction might be put on things in the land of oo-la-la?I really can't wait to go that Musée D’Orsay where the paintings by so many 19th century artists shocked! - just shocked the bourgeoisie in La Belle France - and none more than this guy Manet in his Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe, or 'lunch on the grass,' with two fully dressed guys enjoying the picnic together with one entirely UNDRESSED lady who has the guts to stare right back at us even as we stand staring at her."Oo-la-la!"  is the last thing I think studying this very large painting.  For me "You go, girl!" is a lot more like it.   

Sick Tyke Expert?

Need some last-minute childcare for your under-the-weather preschoolers? Send ‘em to my house for a safe and quiet day. Anyway that’s what my little granddaughter’s parents did recently, nursery school being out of the question what with the fever they'd seen the night before.The child arrived pale but cool. “What about some lovely toast with peanut butter?” I sang, - only the Jif had somehow been put in the fridge. “Watch THIS,” I cried, popping the jar into the microwave and pushing “start” – only to see a tall column of fire arise from a tiny arc of foil still clinging to its rim.Snack at last in hand, we climbed to the small third floor room that these many years later still holds toys and children’s books and a crib, all from the late 1970s. There under the eaves we worked on several jigsaw puzzles, none of whose pieces matched the pictures on their boxes.But the child was growing  paler now, so I suggested we drop down to the second floor and get into bed. This we did and I read to her for almost two hours, only then realizing that the lovely toast had fossilized for lack of attention.“I know! Chicken noodle soup!” I hollered and hurried down to the kitchen, where I found that we actually HAD no such item. So I quick cut up some leftover spaghetti, mixed powdered chicken bouillon with water, nuked it all in a large Pyrex cup, and proudly mounted the stairs with it, only to find that in my four-minute absence, the previous night’s fever had come roaring back to life. Down the stairs again I dashed for the Children’s Tylenol. Back up I then ran - this time to find my charge sound asleep.“I’ll just tiptoe into the study get a little work done,” I thought and what peace I found writing away in there, with a little child napping under my roof! It was just like the old days!Twenty minutes later, I tiptoed back to the bedroom and found it… empty.I looked in the bathroom: empty. Ditto the whole second floor and the floors both above and below it. Had I lost the child entirely?I rocketed up and down the stairs, caroming off the walls and calling the child’s name -  until, on a second frantic pass, I spied her curled up like a kitten in one corner of the crib.“No Tylenol!” she squeaked, but with many tries I did finally manage to get some into her down in the kitchen, where, in one corner we have a TV and a little sofa. On this sofa we both slumped, pulling on our sippy cups and letting a cascade of kiddie shows wash over us.That’s when it hit me that I had not eaten a morsel in almost eight hours. I walked to the counter and picked up the Pyrex cup that held that nice noodly broth. Thinking “Who needs a mug?” I tipped it up and was a half an inch from my first gulp when I saw it: a tail. A tail right in the broth. And then the whole toes-up corpse of a wee drowned mouse who, somewhere in the quiet hours, must have also liked the look of that brew and toppled in.I uttered not a syllable but returned quietly to our joint slump, and the day ended peacefully.So I’ll say it again: You need some pinch-hit childcare for your sick tyke, just send up a shout. Because truly I have got it all, from the rodents, to the missing-person alerts to the towering pillars of fire. :-)

My Grudge Against House of Cards

House of Cards is all well and good with the sleek lines of Claire's wardrobe and the sharp jut of her cheekbones - and  who doesn't love to hate old Frank Underwood with his gold cufflinks reading "FU"?But I have a beef:I hate the way the set designers did up the Oval Office in those vague neutral tones , so grey and unimaginative. That's my beef about cars too: Why does everybody want a grey car?My car is midnight blue and before that it was bright red.And why is it all that upscale togs at Eileen Fisher grey or black or cream? What happened to Cobalt Blue, I want to know. What happened to Plum? I tell you what I miss. I miss the Oval Office Jeb Bartlet had in the West Wing. Feast your eyes on THIS!What  a backdrop this set was for all the high-minded talk that cast engaged in. (Thank you Aaron Sorkin!) And thanks to those set designers too, not only for all these warm tones, but for reminding me that there's no decorating element nicer than the potted palm.I used to have palms all over my house and then what happened? Did I go all Claire Underwood/Eileen Fisher on myself? I have no clue but I tell you what: I'm going out today and buy a few floucy old palm myself and some nice lacy ferns too, because really why be alive at all if you're not going to swag it up a little?    

For Cal

I was 8 when my mother was 50, and sometimes, standing among the young moms in the schoolyard, she said she felt like our grandmother. For Cal, as everyone called her, had married late.Because there was a Depression, she said, and no one had money. Because there was a war, she said, and all the men were gone. We had heard both reasons as she described her young life as one of five children of a widower.They may not have had much money, but they sure had fun, to hear the tales: of evening dress at the Ritz and raccoon coats at the Harvard games. And yes, there were men on these occasions: young singles and the brothers of friends. “But to be honest,” she said of them all, “there was no yeast in the bread” - by which she meant they didn't attract her.Then she met our father, stationed during the war in Boston. They called him Hap, for his mild and cheery way. This time there was plenty of yeast in the bread so she married him. He had wavy hair and red cheeks and bright blue eyes. I know because I've seen snapshots; he left before I was born.It was when I was 8 and my mother was 50. By then my slightly older sister Nan and  understood how different was family ws from the norm.“Where is our father?” we asked our mom. “I don't know,” she told us truthfully.“Our dad's dead,” I told the neighborhood kids. “He kicked the bucket,” an old friend tells me I said, though Nan and I plotted in secret to write “Queen For a Day, “the TV show that identified women with difficulties, measured their hardship by audience applause, then put the 'winner' in robes and a tiara and offered to make her Dream Come True.Our Dream would be finding our dad - little realizing he preferred to stay lost.So Mom raised us without him, in her childhood home that was our grandfather's home that he shared with his older sisters. Each night she fed and bathed and tucked us in alone, the old folks being past all that. She crouched between our beds to stroke both our childish brows at once, and sang us to sleep.Often, we were naughty. But often we sensed her sadness too: we turned down her bed for her and wrote notes raw with love and apology. She told jokes and drove fast and made great faces. She also had a temper, and was late for everything all her life.I was 18 when she was 60. She sent me to college and listened on school breaks as I told her everything I was doing in those wide-open late '60s years. It never occurred to me to lie to her.But I did lie once: I said I was going south for spring break to see a friend. I saw the friend, all right. But I looked for the man with the blue eyes too. When I got back, I told her how I had found him. She listened, the tears running down her face.One day toward the end of that week, the phone rang at home. I picked it up and said hello. It was my mother, calling from work. "Tell me again what he looks like," was all she said.I was 28 when she was 70. Nan had a baby and I had two, just when she was beginning to think we never would. Shortly before my third child came, she moved to a retirement home in my town, where she hosted sherry fests and ignored the fire drills and nearly drowned, in her sunny little room, in subscriptions to every magazine from Prevention to Mother Jones.I was 38 when she died at 80, all unexpected. I felt wholly a kid at the time of her passing and no more equipped to do without her than in the days of the early bedtimes.But I am better now. And I hear from her in odd ways: Our daughter Carrie has her very smile; our boy Michael has her sense of humor. And our middle girl Annie, as wise practically from the cradle as any adult, heard this story at age 10 and said, in dead earnest and with shining eyes, "I will call my first boy Hap."Some cold thing in me melted then. And it causes me to say, as this fresh Mother's Day approaches, "Here's to you, Cal, who held out for love, and got it, however briefly, and two kids too, who loved you fiercely. And here's to you too, our lost father Hap, redeemed from blame at last, as we all would wish to be redeemed, deserving it or not.

Francis John Sheehy left before I was born, when Nan was 16 months old, but according to all our mother said, he did love his little daughter during their short time together.

Honey, We're ALL Dying

I’m sick. I might be dying. I think I have scabies, what with these weird little bumps on my skin all of a sudden.But really, it could be anything.Also, my stomach hurts, so I think I have appendicitis. Did I say I was sick? I might be dying.My head hurts too, so I could be having a stroke, like Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor had that morning she woke up with a killer headache. She’s a neuro-specialist and so knows a WHOLE lot about the brain, yet didn’t she crazily jump on her exercise machine anyway, stopping only when her vision swam and she started to hallucinate - which is something I just know I'd do myself. I would totally try to keep pedaling right through a stroke. Right through a heart attack.Come to think of it, I sort of did do that on the day I was working away at my keyboard and, out of the blue, got these chest pains, and every single thing I did from then on was dumb:First I opened up my browser and typed, “Am I having a heart attack?” then moseyed around several sites looking for  answers.Twenty minutes later, I finally phoned my paramedic son-in-law for advice. The advice came in a small tersely delivered sentence: “Call 911.” The person who answered old me that the ambulance was on its way and she would stay on the phone with me until it arrived. She also told me to open the front door and go sit by it.“I’m hungry though! I need to pack a lunch.”“Forget lunch,” she said.“And I have to go to the bathroom!”“No bathroom,” she said.“But I HAVE to duck in there! I’ve had like a gallon of water!””Take me with you then,“ she sighed.The next thing I knew, I had been mailed like a letter into the roomy ambulance, in which I lay flat on my back, looking up at the lovely sky, the passing trees.In the end, I spent five hours at that hospital ER until it was determined that my heart was just fine and all I had likely done was strain the place where my ribs meet my sternum by exercising with some overly heavy weights. Costochondritis they call it.All of this took place just a year ago, which, it now occurs to me is just about when I began having these health fears. It is only now, as I am setting these words down, that I see the possible reason and the reason is this: While being transported to the hospital, I was delivered straight back to the winter day when my mother was brought from my house to this same hospital, along the very same route, she too flat lying on her back.Only she couldn't see the lovely sky, the passing trees, because her own chest pains had claimed her life before the ambulance could even get here.And doesn’t that connection point to the great truth: When you finally tell a hard thing, and truly feel it again in the telling, you find that it loosens its hold on you. It just does.So chances are I’m not sick at all, really. And if I’m dying, well aren’t we all dying, carried along as we are on Time’s great conveyor belt - perhaps to glories unimagined, where pain, and even skin rash,  hold no dominion - and isn't THAT a loft thought for the start of a work week! :-)  

Crap Day: I'm a Clown AND a Narcolept

What a crap day it's been weather-wise. I have to admit it's gotten to me; it's had the effect of scrapping all my plans.Here I was all set to go to Yoga for starters. I was up and dressed before 7:00 even.Well, not fully dressed. I had on my clown-pant pajama bottoms and my favorite too-big tee. On a day with many tasks ahead,  I like to first fire up the old neurons by hitting the treadmill upstairs, and I'm totally fine with pulling on socks and sneakers even while still IN the clown pants because who knows what I'll end up REALLY wearing for the day? Plus, you know, who's going to see me? Thirty minutes and done, I thought.But first, I reasoned, I'd better eat a bite, and it was while my egg was boiling that I looked out the kitchen window at this cold grey rain. It was also then that I saw our magnolia with its buds littering the ground, murdered in their little bed back a few weeks ago when we had that freeze. In this time of vernal yearning, the tree is as bald as Walter White's head.And somehow that fact alone brought me down enough that I never did climb the stairs to do those miles.To say nothing of going to yoga. Or doing my real work. Or filing away those old photos I dug out last week. I was going to foodshop, and hit the cleaners. I was going to get stamps as well, and swing by the Apple store for yet another one of their quickly fraying chargers.But exactly none of that happened. David is away tonight so I was also going to call a pal and catch a movie but that's not going to happen either. I feel like all I really did today was fall asleep repeatedly and noodle around on Facebook looking for people who wronged me 30 years ago. And now here it is after 5, and me still in my clown suit. How I’ll spend my remaining six hours of consciousness I have no idea.Maybe the thing to do is pull on those sneaks and see if can find my way to that treadmill. Yeah, I'll try that. And maybe also send up a prayer that this rainy cold 'down' day gets followed tomorrow by a sunny ,warm 'up' one.     

Prince and Michael

I remember just where I was sitting when the news of Michael Jackson’s death flashed onto my phone: a conference room in a Santa Barbara hotel where the annual conference of The National Society of Newspaper Columnists was about to commence. Those of us of holding office in that organization were gathered at an oval-shaped table making last-minute plans and back then, in long-ago 2009, I was probably the only one impolite enough to have my phone out. (Nowadays even at weddings ceremonies you wouldn’t be surprised to see the bridal couple tapping and scrolling, tapping and scrolling during snoozy moments in the very service.)For whatever reason, in in that room, I was the one who knew first. “Michael Jackson died!” I exclaimed, interrupting.You just couldn’t believe that Michael was dead. You thought he would go on and on, having cosmetic surgeries and then corrections on the surgeries ad infinitum. You thought he would always be giving himself whole-heartedly to his audiences the way he did. (How many shows did he have booked for his upcoming London concert run at the  time of his death? Fifty, wasn’t it?And now, these eight years later, it any easier to accept the fact that Prince too is gone? We’re not even used to the idea that Bowie will never again sing for us.Still, there’s a new immortality available to us with this miracle of technology that we take so entirely for granted.When the news of his death went out yesterday, I spent a solid hour watching YouTube videos of Prince, the mischievous lad, the intelligent man. In 1981, when he opened for the Stones in nothing but bikini bottoms and a trenchcoat, he was booed and had things thrown at him by the audience. Afterward, Mick Jigger called him to offer comfort. "You’re ahead of them, is what it is,” Mick told him. "The world will catch up” and he was right about that. In the early 80s the Stones drew a macho crowd. Think of the way the Hells Angels themselves were hired to provide security at the testosterone-drenched Altamont concert where real violence erupted and one person lost his life. Big swaggering males aren't a big part of the audience at a Stones concert now, boy. The Stones evolved, and so did we all.Michael, in his teen years was marketed as a nice hetero boy, though really he was just a nice boy. (I never believed for a moment that he was seducing children there at his Neverland ranch.) The victim of parental abuse himself with the hitting and the shaming he suffered at the hands of his father, I believe he took refuge in a kind of permanently childlike, asexual realm.Prince, by contrast, was never asexual in his presentation He played with the idea of gender norms and rightly so when you get down to it sexuality is a mystery to us all. It's the sacred fire, the thing that brings the babies - or doesn’t – and in his celebration of it, he gave a whole lot of people the courage to be who they are. We will miss him.

San Francisco's City Hall, lit up in Prince's memory

Give Me the Manual

I just listened to a podcast where a political commentator talked about covering a speech Bill Clinton recently gave on his wife’s behalf. He said the thing he couldn't get over was the way Clinton “did this thing your uncle or your grandpa would do: He kept saying ‘there was an article on the Internet that I saw this morning,’ and ‘I read on the Internet where…’  “It was so…endearing!” the podcaster chuckled and his team chuckled with him.Now if you're like me and you too don't see why someone would find it richly comical for a person to say he or she read something on the Internet, it’s because you and I, dear reader, are ourselves no different from our own old uncles and grandpas: We just don't ‘get’ what younger folks assume, which is “OF COURSE you read something on the Internet! Where else does anyone read anything?”Well now.Some of us read things in the paper. And in magazines. And in books.Me, I love reading an instruction manual.Time was, we had in this house a first-generation sprinkler system with a big old wheel showing the days of the week and the hours of the day, all represented by wee white buttons that you pulled out or pushed in to arrange your irrigation. My dog could have operated it, and yet it came with a manual.Time was, we had a car with a clock whose time you could change just by poking the point of a ballpoint pen into this little bellybutton of a place right under the display. It had a manual too, but it's sure not like that now, boy.A kind of missionary from an energy-saving arm of our state came to look at our thermostats and ended up replacing what he called the “outmoded” one in the kitchen.“Ok, here's how you program this baby,” he told us breezily, talking a mile a minute as his fingers went boop, boop, boop on the instrument panel.“Then you do this to change your hours, - boop- and this to change your temperature, and then you save your settings this way – boop – and that’s it!"There was no printed set of instructions. He left us with nothing but our puzzlement.David and I actually read quite a lot “on the Internet” so I suppose we could go there and start noodling around for a tutorial on the darn thing, but ... I don’t know. I feel too cranky to do that, so we’re mostly hollering to each other to ask, “Did you turn the heat [up] down in the kitchen?”I guess I'm just a give-me-the-manual kind of a gal. And if it takes me 30 minutes in the car rental garage to go over all the operating instructions for the vehicle I am about to cross some entire state in, so be it. At least I'll be able to quick turn on the wipers when the next frog-strangler of a rainstorm hits. 

Spring Cleaning

Worked all day yesterday around the place. Found mouse tracks both in the seat of high chair and in the little plastic 'canoe' you use to bathe an infant in.A friend who cleans for us now and then swears she saw a red squirrel zoom along the baseboards while she was dusting the bookshelves the other day so there's that too.This is our summer place, which we come to as many weekends as we can all year round, but much of what I'm finding today seems fall-related:Like the mouse tracks. And the squirrel fur.And the acorns I keep finding in this one bed. Acorns and tiny little seeds, tucked neat as a folded pair of pajamas and hidden under the pillow! There was more archeology when we turned to the fridge:Half a can of frosting cracked like ice on a pond! A tub of cream cheese completely fuzzed over in green!And finally this skinny tall can of grated parmesan cheese from ...2002.Buyers remorse here all right, because who on earth think parm in a can tastes okay? I did once but that was a lifetime ago.Before I know any better.Back when I got all my pasta from the Franco-American people. (Ah their spaghetti was wondrous! Fat red worms in a can!Man, the food of the late 60s and early 50s was weird but it had its appeal, yes it did. If they told us we'd all be eating kale one day who'd have believed them?               

Keeping Track

Last spring I took this picture of what both my diary and my planner said I was doing a year ago now. Oh, I use Google's calendar too with its alerts and reminders, but man:I do love writing a thing down.I love writing it down both beforehand and afterward. I love the planning and I love the living-out of what I have plannedA year ago today, according to my paper planner, it says that I:One, went to the dentist’s to pay a bill;Two, bade farewell to the  8^th grader who came to look at our town’s awesome A Better Chance program;Three, went through a bunch of old columns I had written (always a humility-inducing exercise);Four, called Verizon - and the scowly face I drew shows I was not happy even then with the streaming speed in our kitchen;Five, - Verizon again! -  met my grown son at the Verizon Wireless storefront with the hope of getting him to eat a bite with me afterward.He was living at the time in Somerville, the Boston-area equivalent of Greenwich VillageThe planner doesn't show what my Google Calendar says I also did, like run on my treadmill for 30 minutes, catch a Stretch Class at the Y and take a moment to ponder the fact that it was the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. But now I look at the diary entry, and see that it speaks only of meeting my son at the Verizon store and talking with him at dinner.What we talked about if, you can't read the writing, was how happy his college pals sounded when he told them that after almost four years in New England, he would be returning in August to the town so nice they named it twice, to get an MBA at NYU’s Stern School of Management.He used to work as an artist, which means he is a creative person. I am a writer, or a 'creative' too, so he has always kind of 'gotten' me. He has comforted me so much the times we have spoken about the creative life.But now he'd be joining the business world.  My two other kids are in that world too so there it is: As my husband David merrilyput it, he who has been in manufacturing all his life, “That’s three for me, TT, none for you!” (He calls me 'TT'.)Since the MBA is a two-year program our son is still there in New York, learning all about the wide world of the marketplace. By all the signs, he loves the whole experience, loves being near his college friends again, loves the million new friends he has made and loves all he is learning, so I guess for sure he’s headed for that world. Me, I’m not in that world. I'm more in the noticing and remembering world.The pay isn’t great and let’s face it who is ever going to do more than groan over the sight of these bookcases full of planners and diaries I leave behind, but still: I am happy I have been a rememberer. I remember so I can be ready for that final moment they say we all get at the end when our whole life flashes before our eyes.“Hey!” I’ll say. “There goes April 13^th!Good times on that date, year after year whether recorded or not, whether planned for or not. Almost too many good times to count  and I thank you, God, for that.  These only LOOK like National Geographics. They're really Nat Geo cases with all my diaries inside . 

Here's a Fun Thing to Try

 I was closing in on 50 when, at my yearly checkup, my doctor asked that question we all understand to be key these days, about the medical history and cause of death of my two parents.“My mom: heart attack,” I said “but my dad left before I was born, so I have no clue how he died.”“Find out,” the doc said. “Do some digging if you have to.”So, I dug. It took months, but by the time I came back I had my answer. “'Intestinal cancer’ it says on his death certificate.”“OK, then. You're overdue for  a colonoscopy.”“ Hey come on,” I said, going for the joke. "I didn’t even know the guy!” He didn't laugh. "A colonoscopy is indicated for anyone past a certain age either of whose parents had cancer ‘below the bellybutton’. Here are the names of some people who do this procedure. Pick one and get it done.”So… I picked one, and in a month’s time found myself seated across from a white-haired GI doc for a little facetime. Did I have any questions? he wanted to know.I did indeed. "My sister has had this procedure and she says it's super uncomfortable and I should ask for medication, so I wondered: what do you give people?”“A muscle relaxant of course, as well as a drug called Versed  which acts an amnesiac.”“An amnesiac?! You want us to forget then, which means it MUST hurt!"But does it, really?" I asked, hoping against hope.“Oh, I won’t say I haven’t heard a few good groans over the years," he answered cheerily. "I mean think about it: You've got a five-foot probe and...three right angles."  I thought about it; pictured that flexible wand and its seeing-eye fiber-optics. Then I pictured the colon itself, an inverted letter “U” that you explore by 'driving up' a squiggly on-ramp.I went head anyway and booked the procedure.When the day came the two drugs, administered in painless I-V fashion made me feel fine. Wonderful, in fact."Let’s see that five-foot probe!” I gamely sang.“Here it is!,” the genial doc sang back.I turned then to look at the monitor – and then somehow a 90 minutes swath was cut from my life. I was lying on my side and it was 8:41; then suddenly I was sitting up and it was 10:11.I do have a vague memory of turning in protest once, but it seems more dream than memory and, as the saying goes, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a noise? If a highly 'personal' but beneficial experience is visited on you and you don’t remember it, can you call it uncomfortable? Maybe not.So line up and get it done if you're at the magical age. The dread snacks you get in the Recovery Room alone are make it all worth while. 

High Speed Chase

It was the sound of the helicopters that I heard at first: never a good sound but I thought Well, carry on, and so started off for my exercise class, weights and sneakers and water bottle in hand. I was swinging along through the side streets of Woburn, the town next door to me where our local Y is, when I heard it on the radio: A car seen going 120 miles an hour south on the Interstate had been chased for miles on that highway, and was now being chased on the side streets of the very town I was in.Two police cars came screaming past me and all I could think was, What if this fool is coming in this direction? I began eyeing places where I could dart out off the road entirely. These bushes wouldn't be bad, I thought, or hell, I could swerve off into this brook if I had to.I got safely to my Total Strength class in the Y's basement-level studio but nearly jumped out of my skin when an ungodly crash came from the floor above us. "SOMEONE up there doesn't know how to use the equipment!" quipped our instructor.As far as I know, nobody in the Y knew of what was happening on the streets, but I knew. And don’t think I didn't start eyeing places in the room where I could duck down and  hide.They caught the two perps, but not before people in two schools had been told to shelter in place. The passenger perp had jumped from the car as soon as they got off the highway and had fled on foot into the neighborhoods. The driver was finally found hiding, ironically for me, inside the Woburn Racquet Club just up the street.Sad it is to think that this wariness and jumpiness, to say nothing of the sirens and the news flashes and the sheltering-in place have become the new normal.  

On Entertaining

So what happened to entertaining anyway? These days, apart from your major  holidays, the only meals most of us eat outside our houses are the meals we pay for - and I guess it was in part to counter this trend that I decided to invite people over for a real St. Patrick's Day corned-beef-and cabbage dinner.The ‘people’ were my daughters and their four young children and I have to say, the daughters were all for it. “Only maybe no corned beef?” requested the one who in her own early years subsisted entirely on a diet of Smartfood.“I'll do a brisket instead” I cheerfully offered, “and serve Irish soda bread and... I know, bright green peas! And we’ll have tiny pots of shamrock dotting the table!” My zeal was like a delirium as I planned the traditional feast, though with certain modifications for the younger diners.I decided, for example, to (a) scratch the cooked carrots, which strike many small children as repulsive, and serve instead cute individual ‘bouquets’ of tiny raw baby carrots;  and (b) also scratch the cooked cabbage, which, let's tell the truth, smells to high heaven and instead set raw cabbage leaves on a platter to serve as pale-green “cups” into which I would spoon a sweet slippery sling of sliced canned peaches. Lovely!I’d go ahead with the boiled potatoes, I decided, but mash them up with plenty of butter and milk, to make sure they got eaten.I was on my way!The afternoon before, I shopped with an eagle eye, pinching the bottoms of the spuds, the carrots - even the brisket itself. And then I started cooking. The morning of the big event found me ironing the napkins and the tablecloth, then  dashing to several florists, where the tiny pots of shamrocks proved neither as darling nor as plentiful as I had remembered. So Ok, I'd use plain white flowers, and lay them on a rectangular tray, on a bed of greens, I decided.The whole rest of the day I sprinted from the kitchen to the dining room and back again, breaking only to speed-walk to the drugstore for some aspirin – where my eye fell on two bright-green baby dinosaurs, with big purple eyes and wonderful spangly scales.I bought them on the spot, speed-walked back home, nestled the dinosaurs next to the centerpiece and was just fashioning blossoms of bright-green ‘curly ribbon’ around their necks when – yikes! - the doorbell rang. The company had come, along with a big dose of reality, which is to say:The children gave the brisket a total pass. Ditto the pale-green cups of cabbage cradling peach slices. Ditto the Irish soda bread. And I forgot to even serve the baby carrots.Perhaps to set a merry tone when we first sat sit down at the table, my husband and daughters each opened a bottle of craft beer - at which point I shouted, “No, no! GREEN beer!” then jumped from the table, rummaged in the cabinets for the food coloring, and proceeded to accidentally dye my whole hand green, which I must say looked strikingly vivid next to the blood that began gushing out  when I sliced the tip of my finger open on my own humble can of Bud Light.“I hope the cloth is washable,” I heard one daughter murmur  as I sprinted upstairs to the bathroom in search of a bandage.It was there in the quiet of the bathroom, while perched on the edge of the tub with my improvised tourniquet, that I began to see just why people don’t entertain very much. All that dashing about! And the headaches! And not even getting a single SIP of the beer!Lucky for us all, we got invited out for Easter.