Got Stuck There for a While

Personally, I’m thrilled to have a brand-new aquarium of a year to swim around in. I feel as though for the last two or three months I was moving my little fins through mud instead of water. Put another way, I couldn’t move forward. I mean, I had 95% of my Christmas cards done on December 8^th but I simply could NOT finish the rest. I called my husband at work: “I’m going to just throw them all under a bridge somewhere, like that mailman in New York turned out to be doing for months and months.”He laughed, but I wasn't joking. I truly I was stuck, the same way I used to get stuck as a kid in various turnstiles and revolving doors, what with my violin case and that bulging book bag over one shoulder. Time simply stopped for me around the first week in November.Example: I had put a pumpkin on my porch some weeks before Halloween, along with one of those purple kale plants and a pretty sheaf of wheat like they talk about in the Bible when the speaker in The Song of Solomon tells his lady friend that her belly is like a sheaf of wheat.Well, the kale died the death of most extravagantly colored plants and the stalks became dental floss for the squirrels, but that pretty pale-peach pumpkin I simply could NOT throw on the compost pile, even when neighbors up and down the street were decorating for Christmas.Instead I set it on the stone wall out back, where still it sits.Even now. Even with that stubborn snowbank sullenly hanging around the edge of my driveway like a schoolyard bully making a silent point about who's really going to win this battle we’re now joining.Winter will win it of course, just like the House always wins at the casino. A few more days and we’ll be shin-deep in snow again and quaking like the leaves on an aspen tree. And I know, I know: It’s not as if this is the Yukon, where hardy men send straight strong streams of pee into the frigid air which then freeze into stout shafts for use in their damaged dog sleds. It’s not as if this is even Minnesota, where people’s eyelashes get cemented together while they’re trying to crack open the diamond-hard shell of ice encasing their cars.Still, it’s winter and winter is cold. And we mind the cold, hothouse tomatoes that we are.Yet already the days are growing longer and in just eight weeks that old Uniform Time Act will have us all reading the paper in the park until almost 7:00 at night. Until almost 9:00 by the end of June.Then what? Then the days will start getting short again alas, because Time is a big old ferris wheel that never does stop moving, except ever-so-briefly, to let new little folks on and the rest of us less-than-new folks off, each in our turn.So what is the universe trying to tell us? Maybe to love the pumpkin for all its beauty and then to let the pumpkin go. Maybe to love what is given today.It might also be hinting that no matter what bleak, stuck place I find myself in, I should really never throw 200 handwritten, sealed and stamped Christmas cards under a bridge, because does it really matter if they arrive a little late?Let's hope not! You guys should be getting mine any day now. :-)

at the post office

Forty Years Ago Now

Forty years ago just about this minute, which is to say at 7:46 on December 31st, I was in the delivery room with my OB/GYN who had decided to induce labor even though I wasn't even due yet -  so that, as he put it, "he could give Dad here the tax deduction, har-har." (Oh the sexism in those days! He had also told us two weeks before the birth that while I did my "huffing and puffing," my husband was welcome to "come in and heckle" if he liked, - as if this were all about HIS brilliant performance!)When, at 6 o'clock that morning,  we showed up at the hospital as we were told to do, he ordered the full humiliating 'prep' done and then personally inserted a kind of knitting needle into me to make my waters break, so of course the child was born with tiny cuts on her head. Then later, when things weren't moving fast enough for him, he brought on the Pitocin and as the time passed, went on to crank the dose up and up until I was almost levitating off the gurney. Someplace in there came the Epidural, one of life's great blessings, so everything else was easy. But if my body was blissed out, my mind was as clear as can be and I do remember him telling one nurse to call his wife and say that he'd be at the New Year's Eve party by 10.And I guess he was. By 10 the three of us were cozily ensconced in a room. At 11:55 exactly, the nurses on duty brought us a split of champagne and we toasted the future.Ah memories!We see backward so clearly. We see ahead so poorly. We didn't know this baby would be the first of three, or that she would be such a mild philosophical child. She was easy from the start - well, except for that 8th grade year when she was doing the hard work of separating from us.

in 9th grade with her cousin Katy at the beach

Today though, she is altogether launched. Today she is 40, thirteen years older than I was when I gave birth to her. Can that even BE?  We had a wonderful first winter as I think back on it. I wrote thank-you notes for baby gifts and the three of us napped and napped......resting up for the excitement of watching that landmark series Roots based on the remarkable book by Alex Haley.She was too thin at first and then she chubbed up - and before we knew it, Spring came and she crawled down from our laps and away from us, as all babies must.How blessed we are though, because all these years later we can still get to her in 22 short minutes. Oh Happy birthday Carr! What a joy it has been to watch you grow!   

7:40 in My Bedroom

It's 7:40 in my bedroom. It has been 7:40 in my bedroom for some months now, and a comforting sort of hour that is, whether morning or evening.The reason it is 7:40 in my bedroom is that for some months I have awakened to the sight of a sweet clock, small and round and newly-broken, but dear to me still, a thing of brass and glass, and fashioned to look like an stop-watch.This time-stopped clock sits on a bureau which is time-stopped too in its way, as I realize while slowly looking around for a timepiece that's actually accurate. The bureau once belonged to a very old lady I lived with in my baby days, my Great-Aunt Margaret, who would sit for hours at the whim of us kids, pretending to be a queen, or an ogre, or a conductor on the “train” we made by lining up the empty chairs in the dining room.Quite near this old bureau sits another, this once belonging to an even more ancient lady, my Great Aunt Mame, who lived with us too. I treasure it because it just feels like the 1860s, the decade when it and Great Aunt Mame came into being. In its slender spare quality, it feels too like that lady, the famous-to-us creator of endless pies and jellies, of moist cookies and plump and steaming biscuits.As a sort of bachelor brother to these, a third chest of drawers stands over by the window, tall and narrow-shouldered, with a marble top and ebony-colored drawer-pulls as long as the ears of a cocker spaniel. It is the one thing my groom and I ever bought at an estate auction, for the princely sum of $187.50.Here too stands the knee-high table that my grandfather had built for his “little dearies” as he called them, the four children under six whose blue-eyed mother died in pregnancy at the age of 31. Here as well are the silver hair brushes of that young woman, who left life all too early and took her fifth child with her.Here in this room, where it is 7:40 always, stands the old bed we found left behind in the attic of our first house, a two-family in the city. At the time, its headboard was black with coats of varnish. I refinished it and we sleep in it still. Three babies got their start in this bed and kept coming back to it, on unquiet nights, with  their blankies and their little afflictions.My mother died some years ago now. A swan-shaped planter from her last bedroom sits on my night-stand, together with a photo of her at 22, squinting shyly into the sun.In this room Time is stopped. But outside it, Time, and messy life, have hurried onward, I remember the December that the furnace fainted and cooled, and one of the cats dragged a still-warm squiggle of mouse-life into the kitchen. Around that same time someone spilled soup on the living room sofa. A revolving band of environmentalists kept coming to the door to ask for money. A revolving band of Boy Scouts kept trying to sell us evergreens.And every day real winter loomed. And every day the Holidays threatened.When you're young, you think “Hurry, Time!” You want to be 10 or you want to be 20. You can’t wait for the birthday or the big game to come; you can’t wait for prom night, or for summer vacation.Then things change and you grow older. Time moves plenty fast enough without your urging, you find. And suddenly a room where it’s always 7:40 is a lovely place in which to wake up, and nicer still when  Mister Sun hoists his own old self high up enough to bring true daylight. 

Easy Street

I was pretty spoiled as a kid. Raised by a mother-and-aunt combo, I never had to do a lick of kitchen duty. Instead of enlisting my help, this  were forever shooing me away so I could rest up for the night's homework.Man, was that a sweet deal.The amazing thing is, they  didn’t even seem to mind all the holiday cooking they had to. Rather they seemed to actually enjoy the job, perhaps  because of the amazing tales it yielded up over the years - like the one about the Thanksgiving Eve deep in the Depression years, when their lawyer-father came home with a peculiar kind of payment for handling somebody’s case:A turkey, slackly wet and freshly slaughtered. "Here you go, girls!" he cried happily, slinging it down on the kitchen table and walking away fast to take up his pipe-smoking ritual in the deep peace of the cozy front parlor.As the story goes, the bird had been butchered, sure, but not completely plucked, alas and alack. Decades had passed by the time my sister and I first heard the tale of this night and our grownups’ frantic city-slicker efforts at getting those feathers off . There was the tweezing attempt, the singeing-over-an-open-flame attempt  and more. We never forgot the gory facts, and them every November from then on begged for more details about out how they finally got the job done. (“Six words,” my mother finally said in a show of merry candor: “A good big bottle of Scotch.”)So for years Thanksgiving meant pure ease for me, right on through the first chapters of married life when my young groom and I would nervily show up at each of our childhood homes in turn, to gorge ourselves and stretch out like fat lounging hippos in the living rooms afterward. We didn't cook a thing.THAT sweet deal came to an end about five years in to our marriage, when seeing us off, my tiny mother-in-law sidled in close and gave it to me straight: “Next year? Your turn."From then on, I TRIED with the turkey every year, I really did, but so much went wrong: There was the one I roasted with the giblet-mess still inside, smelly and dark in its butcher-paper wrapping; the one I cooked upside down for added moistness which, when I went to remove it five hours later, disintegrated like papier-mâché and came to the table looking like a fourth-grader’s failed art project; and let's not forget the one rendered SO moist at cooking’s end that it shot straight out of the oven and slid into home plate on the kitchen  floor.Those were some hair-raising meals all right. Luckily there were only about 30 years of them.Now, with this reputation going before me - AND a daughter who wedged culinary school training in between college and grad school - I am back on Easy Street, with Thanksgiving at her house and the lightest of assignments for me: The salad, and come on, who eats salad on this High Feast Fats and Flour?Finally, a picture of me back on Thanksgiving back in the early golden years at my mom-in-law's house, she bustling busily around the kitchen amid her pretty-spoiled sons and me, her brand-new not-quite-getting-it daughter-in law, perched on a stool and sampling some grapefruit.  

White House Decor Then & Now

This is a picture of the Yellow Oval Room in the White House during the all-too-brief Kennedy years. Tradition dictates that the walls stay yellow in this room, and that there be some of those white-legged French Provincial chairs and tables. Here's how Jackie tricked the place out.I know she had a great eye and all but I'm really not wild about this look. To my eye the yellow in the wall covering is too coercively cheerful somehow.  To me it looks like a house in Palm Beach circa 1960, maybe that very Kennedy house where Teddy, old enough to know better, wandered around half-dressed, before waking up his two nephews to get them to accompany him back to the bars when they were both in their beds and half asleep. And really couldn't you almost curse just anticipating how you'd catch your foot on those spindly glass-topped occasional tables?So that was the Yellow Oval Room as the 34th president and Jackie arranged it.Now here's that same room the way the 44th president and Michelle have set it up:Of course we see it from a different angle with the three windows in view and that makes it more appealing right there. But I so much prefer this buttery yellow, and the particular green of the window treatments and the sofas - and of course the deep sherry colors in the carpeting and velvet chairs. It all makes me want to take a bite, just like when I see a freshly scooped bowl of Mocha Almond ice cream - yum!I'll admit I had to smile at one thing though: the sight, flanking that center window, of the two candelabra, each teetering atop a slender pedestal. Weren't Sasha and Malia just little girls when they moved in here in 2008? When my youngest was barely two, he took his little white baby shoes on walkabout, ending up in our living room where an immense Boston fern perched, regal as the Queen Mother, on a mahogany fern stand. The minute he went in there, we heard a whooshing sound followed by a muffled crash. The whole rest of the family tore into the room - where our baby boy, in his uncertain Diaper-bottomed stance, turned toward us eyebrows in the air and lisped out one of the few phrases he had learned. "Just kidding?" he lisped hopefully. That flouncy old dowager of a fern was never the same.Now let's go back in time and see what patrician Jackie told the TV audience when she gave that famous White House tour in 1962.  And if you don't have time for that, check out Vaughn Meader impersonating JFK at a press conference during which his pretend wife Jackie also raises a questions. You might as well laugh as cry in life, and I hope Vaughn Meader felt that way too, even if his career doing send-ups of the Kennedy family came to a crashing halt on that fateful November day in '63.  

Let's Get Scary

Sometimes, come Halloween, I ask myself: Who would I dress up as if right now today they announced an actual Halloween for grownups?Back in the old days, little girls went out dressed as princesses or kitty-cats on Halloween; as witches or ghosts, if they could stretch far enough toward the dark side.Little boys seemed to resist the whole dress-up thing somehow, maybe because they got stuffed into jackets and ties a lot more back then. Maybe it felt to them like yet another conspiracy on the part of the females in their lives to deck them out like fools - then go taking their pictures even. So I guess they went out dressed as hobos, most of them, borrowing outsized cast-offs from a handy male grownup, smearing their faces with charcoal.My sister Nan and I went out as hobos ourselves, come to think of it. Nan set the whole tone for my whole childhood, with her nose for the slightly ‘transgressive’ as the saying goes. For one particularly instructive period during a certain autumn, a dead cat came to our attention in an alley we then began visiting the way pilgrims visit a shrine. "A corpse!" we exulted on first discovering it, giddy with that blended jolt of joy and revulsion. We'd have gone out that Halloween CARRYING the dead cat if we'd dared to. If we hadn't by then taken the common childhood pledge to shelter our grownups, innocents that they were, from life's spicier side.Today of course males of every age are far more "plumed" than they once were, and less fixed on the need to seem macho too. It’s my sense that these days little boys' costumes are as elaborate as little girls.  This year they will once again going out dressed to the nines, in masks portraying horror-movie villains: Jason. Chucky and the rest. Every now and then you sometimes even see old Tricky-Dick Nixon, who still enjoys a strange afterlife in the Rogue's Gallery of your standard costume shop.And the point will be what it's always been: To startle. To counter expectation.We had a good friend back in the 80's. Didn't smoke. Didn't drink. Took old bikes from the dump, fixed them up good as new and gave them to kids who didn't have bikes. On the Halloween immediately following one lunatic's murder of several people by slipping poison into random Tylenol bottles, our friend took his kids around for Trick or Treat, himself dressed as a giant Tylenol capsule - and was actually surprised when another dad offered to punch his lights out. THAT escapade countered all our expectations.By partying indoors on Halloween, you can cut down on offers of violence (depending on who you friends are of course) and have fun too - by seeing the dedicated beer guzzler come dressed as a Mormon elder, say, or the biggest Don Juan in the group come decked out as the Pope.I don't go in for much in the way of girlie stuff as a kid; never even wore makeup til I got to be 50. But one year at an adult Halloween party I dressed as Early Cher, in heavy mascara and spangly bathing suit top and hip huggers, and of course a giant wig exploding in cascades of inky curls.I looked ridiculous. It was awesome. And my mate, Sonny to my Cher, looked even better, in the 70's-era peasant shirt our kids found for him, and some baggy bohemian pants and a Prince Valiant wig.Of course with his wire-rimmed glasses, he looked more like early John Denver, or actually with the wig more like Moe of the Three Stooges than either of those two, but still - he SEEMED like Sonny Bono.That’s the fun of Halloween: getting to seem like someone else for the night.So whatever you might be up to tonight, just be careful, like my old cat Abe here. 'Cause you just never do know who you're going to meet.

Acting Your Age

“Act your age” grownups were always saying to us when we were kids. I recall vividly one time I heard it. It was the time my big sister Nan flipped me onto my back, straddled me, pinned my arms out to either side and began ever so slowly lowering a long string of spit down from her mouth toward my screaming face.That’s when our mom suddenly loomed in the doorway and boy, did Nan get it then. “Here you are almost 20 and acting like this!” she shouted by way of winding up her tirade.In fact Nan was all of 12 at the time. And she was acting her age. Sort of. Certainly the 12-year-old boys we knew were doing this kind of thing to each other all the timeWhether or not Nan ever did heed the command to act her age, I know I could never quite seem to. I say this because when I was 14 I acted like I was 40, probably as direct result of the sad thing happened in our family that year. All I really know is that within a month of this terrible detonation I had changed completely from a carefree self-involved 9^th grader to someone who had committing herself to a habit of over-functioning that lasted for more than 50 years.Give you an example: Every Thursday night in my early 30s I would leave the house to tutor some young people in English. I would get them started on their essays, tear over to choir practice at the church just across the street, then tear 90 minutes later to work with the young people for another 90 minutes. I thought I could add in anything, help anyone, transport some ride-needing youth clear across the state and still be back in time to make the supper. Of course I could! I’d just need to get up a little earlier in the morning.I might have gone on like this indefinitely if the year 2016 had not offered me some surprises.First, I broke a bone in my back by running around the edge of the swimming pool to get to a shivering grandchild. Then, six months later, I tore my biceps tendon by lunging for the ladder of a dock while attempting to leap jauntily from a moving swim raft. And just last week I twisted my fists into my eyes, causing one of my contact lens to fold in two and shoot up into my head, where it remained for four excruciating days and causing a painful infection that had me just about blinded for almost week.But what did I expect, knuckling my eyes so childishly? And trying to stretch like Gumby between a moving swim raft and a stationary ladder? What did I think would happen when I ran around an indoor pool past no fewer than four big signs that read “NO RUNNING“?It’s a mystery to me. At 14 and all through my teen years I behaved as if I were 40. Now in my 60s I’ve been behaving as if I were ten. Will I ever come to understand how old I really am and start acting accordingly? Check in on me when I’m 90. If you find me in long sable curls and my bell-bottoms from the 70s, take me aside and counsel a wiser course.PS. Of course I did also fall into the lake when I practically yanked my arm out of its socket reaching for that ladder - and that reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from On Golden Pond. Enjoy!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KUVXUGzKaE   

I've Stopped

A couple of weeks ago I stopped writing the column I have been producing every week since the fall of 1980.This is what I looked like when I started. I'm the one in the puffed sleeves, I should say, the one with the post growing out of her head.in  those 35+  years, I never once missed a deadline.I leaned in, you might say.I wrote it recovering from an early miscarriage and the fierce spinal headache that put me back in the hospital two days after the D & C.Two years later, I wrote it as labor began and finished it in the hospital the morning after the birth of our third child.That time, my husband took the copy home, typed in the final two paragraphs I had composed there in the hospital, photocopied it and put it in the mail to all my subscribing papers. (Transmitting a thing electronically to a newspaper was almost unheard of infancy then - heck,  faxing seemed to us all like a literal miracle - and for years there, filing the column meant quite mailing two fat handfuls of envelopes.)But this past summer, for the first time ever, I did take a little time off, only because the media group who was my biggest customer needed to cut its freelance budget,  and knew for first time what it felt like to be on  vacation. I enjoyed the break, though I felt kind of floaty as week after week passed and I stayed silent.But slowly, slowly over that time, I began to realize that for quite a while now, Change has been knocking at my own personal door. And so, a couple of weeks ago, I notified all my various editors to say that I was quitting.The Winchester Star's Melissa Russell who is among the most talented editors I have ever worked with, did this piece about my stepdown.In the next little while I'll come back to the topic of what it has felt like to stop doing a thing I have long been doing, and maybe I can ask you others what that experience has felt like to you.No longer the girl in the puffed sleeves with the wannabe Farrah Fawcett hair  I am content to be  just Terry,  just another blogger, peeping away in that vast blogger meadow.  

You're Doing That Wrong

In  my post of a few days ago, I did all this bragging about how competent women are; about how we women GET THE JOB DONE.This  Harry Bliss cartoon shows the flip side of that in that it illustrates our need to control and/or comment upon just about every aspect of life around the house.Maybe that's a human thing more than s a gender thing though, because in truth we all have our domains.My husband's domain is Pantry Management. Every three or four months he takes every single item off the pantry shelves and lines them all up on the kitchen counter according to category. That way, when I note an absence of, say, cornstarch, and go to the store and buy some, he can do what he always does: With neither fanfare or remark, he walks over to those many shelves  and take out all three, or four, or five of the boxes of cornstarch that I somehow didn't see.Come to think of it, I guess I should count myself lucky that he never, in our many years together, has said I was doing the shopping wrong. (It's true he never buys the food or helps me bring  it in from the car - "I have no shoes on!" - but he does put it all away God bless him, and that's a job I hate even more than. emptying the dishwasher!  

My Classic Nightmare

My recurring nightmare isn't the one where you're naked in public on the subway platform  with only the odd stray animal there to help cover you up - though I have had versions of this nightmare.I've also had the one where I'm 15 again and walking toward my 10th grade locker, only to look down and see that I've forgotten my top and - darn it - my real-life bras just never look like the bras you see on the Victoria's Secret cuties.But the phantasm scenarios that really haunt me are the dreams like the one I had last night. These dreams , which I have had a million times, involve being unprepared:

• Unprepared to give that speech I am slated to give, with not a notion in the world  about what I'm expected to speak about, as I stand  before an  audience of 1,000 people.
• Unprepared to talk off the top of my head while being videotaped for a news site.
• Unprepared as a teacher to give a math lesson in front of the principal because I didn't even know I was teaching math this year....and there  are a dozen others.

Last night's bad dream had an education  theme like that third  one. It took  place at a school completely new to me  so I didn't know my way around the building. Worse yet, I was a student yet and it was a Spanish II class I enrolled in and  was expected to attend , only I had apparently skipped all of Spanish I, skipped it for whole months at a time over the previous school year.This is the kind of thing that really makes my vision wobble and pulse in any bad  dreams: the idea that I didn't just fail to prepare for one single event, but that for  dating back who knows how long , I had been derelict. I had failed to do the work.I'm a woman, so  you can see why this would terrify me. Because women do DO the work. Women do the reading. Women wouldn't dare  close their eyes on a school night without knowing just what clothes the kids will be able to put on in the morning and just what food they'll be able to eat before they get  home from school again tomorrow.Women get the job done -  not unlike the more than 300 years of immigrants to these shores have done. Take a minute now and listen to this cut from the runaway Broadway hit Hamilton. It's about the embryonic nation and Washington's victory at Yorktown. To me it's very inspiring and illustrates the truth of what the hitherto marginalized can accomplish.  Plus the music! Ah, that music ....! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpsuEcKW8ZE

Remember the Ladies Indeed!

I found this cartoon in a satirical book about old-time etiquette. I'll hunt down my copy and put the link up here as soon as I can put my hand on it again.In case you can't quite read the text here, it says "No lady should stand or linger in the halls of a hotel, but pass through them quietly, never stopping alone for a moment."What it’s suggesting is that a woman who does choose to sit or stand as she waits in the hotel lobby is soliciting; is, in other words, ready and eager to offer herself to any man with the cash.Do you get that that's what the advice is suggesting, you young women lucky enough to inhabit a far different world? Or, wait, is our modern world so different really? "Remember the ladies" Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John when he had left their working farm in Braintree to help build the new American government at the Continental Congress. Maybe America’s problem all this time has been that we remembered the ladies too much. Remembered them as 'the fairer sex', 'the sacred vessels', the delicate creatures with finer sensibilities that suited them. Some might say that even now in many corners of the American landscape women are still seen as inhabiting a category. Rather than being regarded as a freestanding human being with her own plans and goals, a woman can still be seen as a prop, a cardboard cut-out, a life-size breathing "bracelet" on the arm of some... man.The summer I was 20 in my work at the Massachusetts State House, I was introduced to man in his 60s who promptly asked me to lunch to talk about a two-week work opportunity.  Baby lamb that I was, I went to the lunch, at Anthony’s Pier 4, a landmark eatery looking out on Boston harbor. He was a heavyset Tweedle-Dum kind of a guy with a cigar and a waddle, somebody's kindly grandfather as I saw him, a good man eager to empower the young. The day of the lunch I wore flats and a sleeveless boat-necked, knee-length linen dress in an effort to look like Jacqueline Kennedy though in truth, as old photos now show g me, I looked more like a highly unworldly version of  Anna Nicole Smith, only without the makeup.  Because I didn’t really know what makeup was. My body looked like her body is what I’m saying, though it never occurred to me that that’s why, when we walked into the restaurant a number of equally old Tweedle-Dees, also with cigars, hooted their hellos to my host.He walked me over and introduced me to them all before we sat down to the lunch, during which he offered me this wonderful opportunity: to be his companion at a two-week-long conference at the Cape. He told me what my salary would be. So much money! I could get a real jump on repaying those student loans I was racking up!That night I told the boy I had just become engaged about my great opportunity. "Are you out of your mind?" he said on hearing and I believe this was the first time he asked me this question, though five decades into our life together I can tell you it was far from the last.The point is, he saw what this old guy with the cigar was really proposing. The guy was assuming he could get me at the very least to stand by his side and act as if we were together. Me, the former Terry Sheehy who was mere months past believing that kissing for more than five minutes was a mortal sin that would land you in Hell.I have smartened up since those days of course. I have learned all about the guys who even when you’re over 50 will follow you out of the Post Office or the coffee shop or the supermarket because they say they could tell by your smile that you’re really into them and why didn’t we go someplace where we could talk.Really into them, jeesh. Where do these guys get the nails to say a thing like that?What I am really into is hotel lobbies. In fact, I love them. In a hotel lobby you’re out in the stream of humanity and yet you are safe. Your little bed is an elevator ride away and the man behind the desk might as well be Hector Elizondo for how nice he is to you.So rush through a lobby or fail to smile because of the construction some guy might put on those things? Fat chance I say, fat the hell chance. :-)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNYalWdtPSA  

Could be the Keys

Last night I dreamed I parked at our local transfer station, turned off the car and climbed out, tossing the keys back in through the open window and onto the passenger seat. That was safe to do, I figured; I was only there to throw a few bags of trash onto the conveyor belt, that great River of No Longer My Problem.But as I was doing this, I happened to see out of the corner of my eye that an old white guy had slid in under the steering wheel, picked up my key ring and was fumbling with it in search of the key he would need to turn the car on. I remember thinking “So here’s the value of carrying so many keys around! It foils thieves!”He got away with my car anyway, as well as my money and all my credit cards, but that isn't the part of the dream that sticks with me.Really the dream got me thinking about all the keys we carry these days.Used to be, people carried their keys around in a small hard-shelled key case. All three or at the most four of your keys could be tucked away in there until you flipped one out when you were ready to use it. But now most of the people I know don’t use key cases. Instead, they have what I have: a series of strong rings from which dangle five or six or eight keys, some from rings that in turn dangle from the big ring.So who do we think we are, Mrs. Hughes from Downton Abbey, managing a household brimming with larders and linen closets for a late-sleeping landed family and a large live-in staff? Do we think we're St. Peter and these are the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and its Many Mansions? Why do I have literally 13 keys that I carry around in my fist? They weigh a pound if they weigh an ounce. I mean, I could use them as brass knuckles.I recently read that some 80% of Americans complain about back pain. Under our 20 pounds of skin and the circuitry of our nerves and blood vessels, under the mighty muscles and the tendons and the strong, strong ligaments we have a skeleton,  this delicate scaffolding that we must  keep balanced like a tower of teacups as we move.Isn't it just possible that it's these 16-odd ounces of  keys that throws us  out of kilter and gives us pain? If we keep them in a pocket they pull down that side of our pelvis. If we carry them in our purse, they yank down that side of our shoulder girdle.THINK ABOUT IT! And then pray for the day we can start our cars AND open our houses with retinal scans that let us walk around free. And who knows? Maybe by then all our official docouments and our credit card info will be neatly imbedded in our skulls. :-)  

Farewell to Summer

The Summer came and the summer passed and now it's mid-September and the dauntless ivy has once again taken over the screens on the front of our house . So is too late to look back at this season of long days and steamy nights?I hope not.In July, our  niece and godchild Grace celebrated a big birthday here, with all her siblings who came from all over; and also my own sister Nan from Florida who is her mum, and her husband Troy and Troy's parents and so many great others. It was a happy day, with food and drink and maybe just ONE small pack of smokes.

There were games...

There were drinks, and strolls, and smiles.

Lots of smiles..

And this  was just one sweet weekend in July.

August came and Nan had elective surgery the complications fro which kept her in the ICU for 8 days and THAT was sure scary, for what would any of us in this family do without Na, the mother of Grace, this first friend to me her little sister?

[gallery ids="243,2009,2008" type="rectangular"]

Thank God she is mending now. In fact, apart from learning to walk with a titanium knee joint implanted in her living flesh, she is sharper than ever, more 'Nan-like' than ever, as I saw when I flew to Tarpon Springs to help with the transition from the hospital to home.

And so the season wound down. We had a whole week with three of our four grandchildren and a little guest and that was great, though some old guy tried to hustle them at pool.(Haha, no. That's my husband David, their grandpa.)

During that week we climbed ev'ry mountain, we forded every stream..

Also in August had a Marotta Family Weekend with all of David's brothers and their kids and played  baseball..

A sort of an unrecognizable kind of baseball.

One day we all got back-to-school haircuts.

 Always we dressed for the sun, I in a get-up that USED to button, back in my skinny-day 40s..

And finally we had one last weekend together, on Labor Day when we we sat around some more...

The children joyfully in the moment

and we older one often in more pensive moods.

Because we knew it was coming: The Autumn.

And now here we are on the lip of it and I'm remembering all over again that the descent into winter is in fact every bit as lovely as that long slow climb into summer.

Because, I mean, what's nicer than a view through a latticework of ivy buzzing with the happy bees?

Unhitched

I wake these mornings without the daily dread of a deadline. Like the dog that sleeps in the bed with you, I sigh and turn onto one side for ten minutes to look out the window. Then I sigh again and turn to my other side. I think about Time. Then I shift to my back, take up my phone and read about the daily horrors as recounted on the various news sites. After that, I really sigh, and as antidote, read my book for ten minutes, which right now is The Boys in the Boat. I read this book both because a young person to whom I am deeply committed recommended it and because as a lover of old things - see awesome photo – I delight in being transported back to a long-ago time like the 1930s, when the action in that true story occurs.

You wonder who once sat on these porches of a summer night, with the dews descending and the fireflies winking.

Speaking of summer nights, this summer just ending has been a strange one for me, because for the first time since the years when gals wore poufy hair like this…...I have not been filing a weekly column. And as it stands I'm not going to be filing any, until October at the soonest.I both chose this non-writing path and had it chosen for me in that the parent company that owns most of the papers I appear in announced in July it had no budget for freelancers at least until then. I know I could have done a Gandhi and kept writing for free but to do so would break solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the scribbling game. For about six hours after hearing the news though, I did feel I should go on sending a fresh column to the other papers that subscribe to me column and are not part of this giant chain. But then, sitting outside the dry cleaners at around 4 that afternoon, it dawned on me that this could be the universe sending me a message.I asked the editors of these independent papers if they‘d mind my taking a break and they couldn’t have been nicer. "Take it!“ they said. “Take it by all means and we’ll be glad to have you back in October."And so I decided, I would take the time, and wouldn’t I have scads of it!I didn't have scads of it, of course. For one thing, our span of time is brief and swiftly passing no matter what we are doing. And for another, there were some family events, some joyful in the extreme and some that same degree of terrifying and to them I turned all my attention.But over these weeks I did learn this, I did learn this: I learned that I feel at my happiest when I write, and that I feel most lost and somehow lonely when I don't.So, I’m back, ready to catch more small moments of Time in my little net and tell of them here.Of course we writers never know who is reading what we write, if indeed anyone reads any more, but that’s fine. It’s the writing that counts, the saying what we saw. I have always felt my purpose in life was to do just that. Just as it says in that early-days Elton John song with its lyrics by the great Bernie Taupin, “My gift is my song and this one’s for you."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzdVHTNpXs&list=RDRwzdVHTNpXs#t=96  

Grandma

I  saw this picture of Cher taken at a Clinton rally the other day and it has me  wondering: When did she start looking like an Italian grandmother circe 1930?It must be the ruffles at the wrist. If you're getting up there in age and your relatives don't strictly forbid it, the undertakers will try dressing you in ruffles for your viewing; this I have noted at more than one wake.Though I don't look at all like Cher with my thin lips and map-of-Ireland face, I definitely do feel like a grandma on this family vacation anyway, which is to say:I'm doing a LOT of laundry.In fact it feels like that's all I'm doing.I have learned this week if I had forgotten it, that kids shed clothes like a snake sheds skin. One of these grandchildren of mine yesterday had so many clothes strewn about his sleeping area  that there was no telling which ones were clean and which were dirty.So, I washed them all.Another, the first one's younger brother, seemingly had no dirty clothes at all, since, as I just this morning realized, he has been wearing basically the same clothes since he arrived last Saturday.The third grandchild, their four-year-old sister,wears long tea-length early-20th century 'frocks' pretty much exclusively , which I find myself not only washing but also  ironing God help me. Still, she looks very nice in them, even when she wore one to climb Rattlesnake the day before yesterday with her doll.Her mom's job that day was to forge the path up and up and up the hill. The job of her dad, now called "papa," was to keep things moving in the middle portions of the line of march. My job, I was told, was  to be last.As it happens, I did an excellent job at being last but I have to say: the Grandma who does all the wash and can be counted on to go slow is not exactly the Grandma I had hoped to be. I liked it much better last summer when I was the Grandma who took the kids and bought the kind of stuff that was instantly condemned by their parents and summarily confiscated.At least that job had some fun to it.But I'm not complaining, not really. It's kind of nice being one of the old ones, the  ones who are definitely NOT in charge of much of anything even though this is still our house. Just please, if any of you are around when I finally kick the bucket, put me in tattered workout clothes like these before those undertakers begin coming at me with the ruffles.  :-)   

CAN You Think Too Much?

We all know this guy: Rodin's The Thinker, the original version of which is housed in a special museum in Paris  which I tried to get on a trip to Paris once, but couldn't it was so crowded. Instead, my friends and I hung out in the museum's sculpture garden where we capered like second graders, putting our arms around the statuary and making faces - all before showing up in the nearest cafe for our 11am feeding of baked goods so rich and buttery they made you mourn all over again the state of your bad cholesterol (though not enough to stop you reaching  for that second croissant.Anyway, I saw the casting here pictured, a copy of course, on Wednesday at the Peabody Essex Museum which has mounted a special exhibit of Rodin's works that will be "up" until early September. The museum sits in the heart of historic Salem Massachusetts, a place that until the last couple of decades was a sober working class burg  and now belongs to the tourist trade, which is to to say everything witchy, with a focus on images of luscious looking lipsticked witches dressed as if ready to begin the night shift at Hooters.Those ladies celebrate the human body you could say, just as Rodin did in his in his work -and in case you didn't know more than a few of his smaller works show something yet more intimate that what we now so mincingly call 'full frontal nudity.'What would Rodin make of this wonderful statue of of Roger Conant, credited as the founder of Salem, a man who had nothing whatever to do with the 1692 witch hunt that that brought about the deaths of 24 innocent people?  

the guy who had nothing to do with it

He would have liked it, I think, monumental as it is, with the living folds of the cloak.  The statue of this Puritan was sculpted by H.H Kiston, a man who himself has just the quirky kind of looks Rodin enjoyed capturing. (I mean look at the face of literary giant Balzac, whose likeness we also saw in that Paris Garden.)

Balzac's face, as rendered by Rodin, and H.H. Kitson's, caught on camera. (Love the hair!)I sit just now delighted by all I have learned by hopping from one site  to the next to learn some things . It's fun  to think and learn and then to think some more as we are all called to do at all times in our lives. But look now at this final shot I got of Rodin's signature work. What is that tiny filament stretching from the Thinker's nose to his fist but a spider web? And look, there's another the same little arachnid spun farther down.What might this say  but "Enough thinking!  It's time to stand up and move!"I'm thinking that too right now because you know what they say:  Sitting is the new smoking. So arise and stride out, hot weather or not. Blaze a fresh trail! Be the pioneer your immigrant ancestors were!   

The Nicest Kind of Houseguests

For me the nicest kind of houseguests are the ones who:

• Sleep until noon haha.
• Know where everything is in your kitchen.
• Don't just ask if they can help with the bacon and eggs and coffee but get up and start scrambling and frying.
• Don't ask where the vacuum is because they know  - and they know what it's for too.
• Are enough younger than you that they understand your electronics better than you do.
• Are just plain fun. (Who knew you could drink a Heineken while IN the water in a lifejacket that eliminates any need to even try to stay afloat?)
• Really know what an oar is for (See below. Maybe this  6'8" guest will be one of the 'Boys in the Boat' at the 2020 Olympics :-))

• And finally, and most importantly, are happy to hang out at the supper table, laughing and talking about everything from what it's like to be an identical twin, to the nature of time to the worst job you ever had.
• We had six guests at the lake here Friday to Sunday and ended up feeling almost as young as they are - good times!

    

3 Summers Pass in a Flash

Here‘s a piece I wrote three years ago almost to the day, from the exact spot where I sit now. So happy to be visiting friends and family this weekend at the Cape!A Fresh Wind, July 29, 2016

Yikes what a summer this has been, just weatherwise alone. One minute my grass looked like this kind of grass, bright blinding green and so perennially wet you couldn’t mow it. Then in blew the searing heat and within three days it looked like someone trained a blowtorch on it. It’s no longer even grass, by the look of it. It’s Corn Flakes, just Corn Flakes. Once a year we get to go to the summer home of our friends at the beach for an all-too-brief 48 hours. This past week, I didn’t see how I was going to live long enough to get there.. A family of three is moving in with us for a while as they continue to look for a house in this daunting overpriced market.We're crazy about all three –  they’re family! – but all week long I could NOT stop stressing over how I would make space for them. I spent five solid days taking our stuff out of closets and bureaus, bureaus and closets and trying to figure out what to do with it all.  Of course I also had to work every day as everyone does, plus get to the doctor,  oversee some details around the estate of our much missed Uncle Ed and feed the hungry young mouths of a few other people, also staying with us this summer.I was a tight bundle of stress by the time we pulled late into our friends’ driveway in other words. It was pouring rain and the trip took hours. and while David gamely went out to a karaoke bar with the guy half of the couple that is hosting us, I fell exhausted into bed.Then, in the night, the wind came up. It rattled the bedroom door and set the window screen to singing and I slept like a stone – and woke in the morning to the sea across the street and the sun overhead and one gorgeously crisp flags-snapping day. Deliverance!

 

Sleeping Outside

When my big sister Nan and I were simple kids living in a house thick with ancient relatives, we yearned for that rare occasion when we got to sleep outside.We never did that in our own yard, so small it could hardly fit its in-ground garbage can and its creaky old clothesline. But oh when we went to visit our cousins in West Roxbury!There were no trolley cars screeching past the end of their street. There were no alleys between brick buildings like the one we had with its revolving store of interesting things, bits of brightly colored glass, a discarded lady’s scarf, and once, for a thrilling six-week period, the remains of a small dead animal, flat as an envelope.Their neighborhood felt like the neighborhood we saw on Leave it to Beaver. Their mom wore an actual apron. They had a real screened-in porch, and we could roller skate as much as we liked along smooth sidewalks.And best of all I would get to “camp out.” Nan would do other, older things with the other, older cousins but I was always matched with cousin Mary Lou, who was closest to me in age, and boy did Mary Lou know how to have fun. For our big campouts she would fashion a little tent for us, expertly pounding its pegs into the grass. She would produce real sleeping bags, the old-fashioned kind, made of cotton and lined with plaid flannel.There, as evening gathered in, we would feast gloriously on Franco American spaghetti heated up over small cans of Sterno and lie back in that soft grass, telling ghost stories and waiting for the starsIt was heaven. And I believe I remember it today because last week I came upon a passage I had copied out just 20 years ago from T.H. White's wonderful bThe Once and Future King. The passage goes like this:

The boy slept well in a woodland nest when he laid himself down, in that kind of thin but refreshing sleep, which people have when they begin to lie out-of-doors.At first he only dipped below the surface of sleep and skimmed along like a salmon in shallow water so close to the surface that he fancied himself in air. He saw himself awake when he was already asleep.He saw the stars above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axis and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises the footsteps and soft-fringed wing beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened but interested him so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left them all together as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the unending waters under the earth.

Perhaps it was the part about trust that moved me to copy this out in the summer of '96. Anyway, it's the part that moves me now. And tonight when the darkness gathers, I want to look up at the still-swollen moon and those steady stars and remember to trust more; to trust, as Lincoln said in his farewell to the people in Springfield, that all may yet be well.     

On the Starship Colonoscopy

Sit with any group of 50-somethings long enough and sooner or later the talk will turn to the various strategies for getting through the  colonoscopy prep.This regimen, in case there are small pockets of the population who have not heard, involves the drinking of eight 8-ounce glasses of a thick chalky cocktail, at 15-minute intervals, until the entire 64-ounce pitcher has been drained.That’s a gallon of gritty sludge, downed within the space of just two hours.As one who was recently contemplating her own date with destiny, I consulted my 900 stranger-friends on Facebook for advice on how best to approach the ordeal.“Make the drink as cold as you can!” many said. “Use a straw!” advised a second faction. “Skip the straw and just fire it down!” counseled a third group.I had used all three techniques by the time I was finished, and let me just say I wasn’t exactly yodeling out a Julia-Child-like “Bon Appetit!” with each glass.But as unpleasant as the prep is, everything turns rosy when, in your hospital gown and booties, you are escorted into the hospital’s ‘scope suite, where you all at once feel like a guest on board the Starship Enterprise, with the many uniformed crew members circling and circling as they tend and monitor.You are ushered to a gurney where, alongside 15 or 20 other pre- and post-procedure folk, you stretch out like so many limp strips of bacon.Someone comes and covers you with a warm blanket.Then a cheerful medical professional in a pirate-like headscarf comes along to take your vital signs. His hands make a sort of Sign of the Cross as they move from your left arm to your forehead to your chest and then over to your right hand. This is where the needle goes to deliver the I-love-everything drug that cancels all fears. You will then discover another cheery young crew member sitting inches away and peering into a monitor that offers a minute-by-minute account of what’s happening inside you. You feel like the coolest guest at the dinner party. Everyone finds you so interesting!At last you are wheeled into the operatory for the “periscope up” procedure that has brought you here. A neat slice of time is cut from your life, and the next thing you know you’re back in Mission Control with your fellow strips of bacon.After a woozy interval, the doctor materializes and, with a somber clergyperson’s air, tells you how things looked. He dematerializes again and you yawn.Somebody brings you a snack of juice and crackers.You yawn again and have a little snooze. It’s like being in pre-school again, but without the singing.In short, it is Heaven and you  have come through. you have been seen, and accepted for who you are. And when you depart, you depart smiling, with a strange but unmistakable sense of blessing, and bits of graham cracker crumb still clinging to your lips.