Even More to Learn

Soon I'll go back to reporting on the kind of personal, certainly more trivial, thoughts I have been posting on this site for the last ten years - although even on the subject of Russia I seem capable of great foolishness: I found in my notes just now the observation that on sampling a thimbleful of homemade hooch at a Russian couple’s home, I felt my eyebrows instantly pluck themselves. But how can I end this series without offering one last glimpse of what I saw and learned in my brief stay in this vast country, only the small northwest portion of which I actually visited?The answer is, I can’t.One thing I have learned with all the reading I have done about the place, both during my two weeks in the country and during the two months since my return, is how sharply its citizens feel their loss of status since the time when Gorbachev, in their minds, simply ‘caved’, as they see it, ‘giving away’ much of their nuclear might along with their standing in the world. A further shame-inducing is the fact that this country, so vast, so rich in natural resources, today stands in only 12th place for GNP according to the International Monetary Fund’s annual tally. That’s after the US, the EU, China, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, India, Italy, Brazil, Canada and South Korea.A woman interviewed by author Svetlana Alexievich in 2011 about the brief moment of hope after the Soviet Union was first dissolved put it this way. At first, she said, "everyone had very high hopes for the future. I remember the conversations we had in the staff room: 'Socialism is ending – what's next?' 'Bad socialism is over, now we're going to have a good socialism.' We waited… Pored over the newspapers… Pretty soon my husband lost his job and they shut down the Institute. It was a sea of unemployed people, all of them with college degrees. The kiosks appeared, then the supermarkets where they had everything, like in a fairytale, only there was no money to buy any of it. I'd go in and come right back out. I'd get two apples and an orange when the kids were sick."How are we supposed to get used to this? Accept that it's how things are going to be from now on? How? It hurts your pride. That's why people seem so tired these days. God forbid you were born in the USSR but live in Russia!"The wealth in Russia is now concentrated at the very top. It is held by the oligarchs, as this gangster class is euphemistically called since the early 90s. That’s when the State stepped away from ownership of the factories, the farms, the oil and the gas, and this class of enterprising bandits stepped in to grab everything up.Oh, to be sure, Moscow today shines like a jewel. It's the prime showcase for all this wealth. But Moscow is also the place where, as our Russian tour guide advised us, the great preponderance of housing lies miles beyond the means of all but the very prosperous. And the GUM store, situated in Red Square formerly the world’s largest department store? The GUM store is a department store no more. Now it is merely an immense Fabergé egg of an indoor mall housing shops that as far as I can tell, not even prosperous tourists can afford to patronize. I spent two hours in the place, walking past the Louis Vuitton store, the Cartier store, the stores under signs reading 'Pierre Cardin' and 'Versace' and 'Hermès' and did not see a single soul in the process of purchasing anything in any one of them. I saw only the sales personnel inside and the security personnel standing at the doorways. As one disillusioned Russian said in an interview “Right now there’s a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they’re for?”Oh but see here, the government will say, the older folks still get their pensions. Only the skyrocketing inflation that followed the dissolution of the USSR almost immediately rendered those pensions worthless. As one older woman told oral historian Svetlana Alexievich “There IS no surviving on today’s pensions. What can you afford on them? You get yourself some bread and milk, and then there isn’t enough left over for slippers. It’s just not enough! Old people used to sit on the benches in their courtyards, carefree. Prattling. Not anymore. Some collect empty bottles around town, others stand in front of the church, begging. Some sell sunflower seeds or cigarettes at the bus stop…”I saw those begging elders, as I wrote in my last post. I also saw countless other Russians at these kiosks or under improvised canopies or just out in the open, attempting to sell what they could sell - and for sure most were NOT the glowing young people such as the one pictured at the top of this post.Some, like this grimacing man, sell trinkets outside the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, this on the June day when it was 38 degrees with a windswept sleet and all of us tourists were quivering like so many aspen trees.Some sell CD's outside the Catherine Palace, like this versatile gent who exemplifies three different ways to sing for one's supper, all in this 14-second video.[wpvideo qRqekmuP ]Maybe you can even argue that the Russian husband and wife we met are in the business of selling their very privacy - to the touring company that brought us to them - in the sense that many times a month they allow the various tour boats' large cushy couches to lumber down their narrow rutted road and visit them for a mid-morning snack.The man of this couple built the house himself, with the help of his dad, he told us through our interpreter-guide, adding rooms one by one over the years so that it is made of several different materials. Out in back, the two have a small vegetable garden, and chickens, and a tiny screen house that would maybe fit two webbed 1970s-style lawn chairs but when we were there was being used to store a bent plastic baby pool propped up on its side.They showed us some family photographs, like their wedding picture below......and with great grace they offered us food: half a piece of toast and a slice of cheese apiece, as well as a cut of an oblong pastry lathered in a red glaze.Oh and a plate of the ubiquitous pickles you find everywhere in Russia.And, to wash it all down, shots of that powerful hooch.But as I noted at the start here, it isn't mainly the straitened circumstances under which most folks live that they find so disheartening. For those old enough to remember, it is also the sense of all that is lost - and that topic I can address in greater detail tomorrow.

Old People, Begging

On my recent trip to Russia I saw so many lovely sights, both in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, both on the waterways linking the two cities and finally in the city of  Sergiyev Posad, some 90 minutes northwest of Moscow.Here, in this last place, stand several churches within the walls of a monastery said to be the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church, which these days, I can tell you, is doing a booming business: Ordinary citizens stand for whole hours together waiting to get into the holiest sites here, in order to pray and commune with the icons. I watched as the they stood, patient long queues of elders and children and people of every age in between. I watched  as they lifted receptacles to catch a little of the holy water from the fountain in the 'square' around which all these churches stand.The site in summer was nothing short of breathtaking.And in winter, from a distance like this, it simply glows.It's when you walk outside the monastery walls and no longer stand at a distance, that you see something:You see people begging, old people, stooped and bent.I myself saw old people, and especially old women, again and again at the edges of the prime tourist sites in Russia. They never looked up; they all each just held out the battered cup into which they hoped you might drop a couple of rubles.But who were they? Who are they? Simple math tells us they are among the Russian men and women who survived it all, from World War Two to Stalin's disastrous collectivization plan and purges and, on into this century, the spying of neighbor upon neighbor and the arrests.Quite obviously, these things did not kill the people I saw, yet the way they live struck me as a kind of death. What was going on here? By the time I came home from our one-percenters' tour of Russia  knew I had a lot to learn. I had enrolled in an eight-week course in Russian history before I left and had in that context taken reams of notes and pored over both our textbook and our many handouts. Still, by the time I got to the end of my visit to Russia itself I knew I understood very little.And so, on returning in mid-June, I began reading and I have been reading ever since.I read a book on Russia's cultural history. I read War and Peace. I read a book about Chechnya. While I was 'in country',  I read Secondhand Time, a vivid firsthand account of what happened to the real people, in their own words, after Communist ideals were replaced by the cutthroat capitalism that took over when everything that had been controlled by the state was offered for private ownership. It's an oral history very much in the Studs Terkel vein compiled by Belarussian writer and Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich who returned again and again to the people she interviewed, to be sure she understood all that they were trying to convey to her.I read the whole book on my Kindle, got to the end and read it all again. Then I sent away for the print edition and read that. From this book I learned of the privation the common people have suffered, with the inflation that followed quickly on the great move away from State-owned industry.Older people have suffered most especially, these survivors of the Great Patriotic War as World War Two is called therem this war that killed 60 million people worldwide, 20 million of whom were Soviet citizens.Inflation has reduced these elders' benefits so drastically that as one interview subject put it in her conversation with Ms. Alexievich, "“There is no surviving on today’s pensions. You get yourself some bread and milk, and then there isn’t enough left over for slippers. It’s just not enough. Old people used to sit on the benches in their courtyards, carefree. Prattling."Not anymore. Some collect empty bottles around town, others stand in front of the church, begging. Some sell sunflower seeds or cigarettes at the bus stop."This man is selling cucumbers. To judge by the many kiosks that have sprouted up everywhere, there's very little that isn't for sale - but there'll be more to say about that in my next post.  

Moscow Under the Ground

The Metro stations that form a ring around Moscow are famous for their beauty, and indeed they are beautiful. Opened during the rule of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and '40s, they  boast marble walls, frescoed ceilings and, most stunningly, an array of larger-than-life sculptures depicting the people of this vast country.As history teaches us, this stunning civic effort was undertaken in the decades just following the 1917 overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, 'overthrow' being the polite and highly inaccurate word for what really happened eight months later when Czar Nicholas and Princess Alexandra together with their five children and four family retainers were roused from sleep by the Bolsheviks and ushered, in their light summer garments, down to a basement room, where they were shot and stabbed, stripped and mutilated, burned and buried in two graves not discovered until that bloody century's second-to-last decade. (Ah, piteous story that! And weren't they darling children to judge by the pictures and the few silent films one can find, the youngest a boy and his four sisters as lovely and innocent a quartet of budding youthful beauty as anyone could imagine. (Did the head of the Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin in fact order these executions?  Lenin, whose noble visage presides of countless Russian squares and public parks? Lenin ,whose frequently-tinkered-with remains can still be viewed inside the walls of the Kremlin today? The debate on that issue still rages.)But this mass slaying is not what the tourist is invited to dwell on in modern-day Russia, any more than one is encouraged to dwell on the unparalleled Stalinist butchery that followed.The visitor to Russia is invited instead to look at the country's past with a soft-focus lens; to look on the high purpose of the Communist party ideal and not its reality as that reality played out in the years between 1917 and 1991.  And maybe it is easier to do that if one is a regular visitor to the Moscow underground and has the chance to daily pass these stunning likenesses of the Soviet men and women, the watchers and the workers, the miners and the laborers and the tillers of the soil, who first literally built and then later defended their country.  And they defeated Hitler, yes, but they did so at the cost of some 26 million of their number. 26 million!All I can tell you is that I was deeply moved regarding these works of art.  They are that heroic, plain and simple.One looks ahead, and they are here:One looks behind, and they are there:One looks above and sees their images on ceiling mosaics.Stopping to stand with each one, even as busy commuters bustled past, I felt the urge, almost, to weep.There was a fine ideal at play in the former Soviet Union, a fact that need acknowledging that. As one older Russian put it in a conversation with Nobel Prize-winning oral historian Svetlana Alexievich, "‘Under communism, in the words of Lenin, the cook ran the state! Workers, dairymaids, and weavers were in charge!...I was born in the USSR, and I liked it there. My father was a communist. He taught me how to read with Pravda. Every holiday, we’d go to the parades, with tears in our eyes."Or, as another person whom Ms. Alexievich interviewed said, "Remember the Soviet place names, Metallurgists Avenue, Enthusiasts Avenue, Factory Street, Proletariat Street? The little man was the most important one around!"(Was he though? Was the little man really the most important one around under Communist rule or were the workers only told that?)In spite of the many artistic tributes to this 'little man' I would say, based both on what I saw during my time in Russia and on what I have read in the six weeks since returning home to the States, that the little man is and has been quite UNimportant in the 26 years since Communism was replaced by the brutish sort of capitalism on view in that country today. And it goes without saying that now, in modern-day Moscow, Factory Street and Proletariat Street and Metallurgist Avenue are not to be found on any city maps.

Russia, on Closer Inspection

I saw things in Russia, yes, but I saw them from a distance. I saw them either as they were offered to us through the refracted lens of our Viking tour guides, or as I gazed out with my own eyes from the decks of the beautifully appointed ship on which we journeyed through that vast country's northwesterly parts.From on deck I saw both swelling waters with pastoral landscapes........and intimate-looking villages such as this one.On the one morning that I didn't keep the light-cancelling stateroom drapes drawn and so woke fully up at 4am, I caught a spectacular sunrise and even at that early hour saw householders patiently fishing for their breakfasts.I also saw from on deck this abandoned building, just between two other tidy structures, and I'll admit that the contrast took me aback some.Then this same juxtaposition was on display once again, on one of our long land days, when we spent time in the village of Uglich.Near the end of our walking tour there, we were meant to take 20 minutes to enjoy the riverside vistas and ponder  the local art.  All I could do, however, was to study the burned-out house just across the street from the riverbank:The contrast seemed so pronounced: On my right hand side, pretty awninged booths offering exquisite hand-painted jewelry boxes and delicate watercolor depictions of St. Basil's Cathedral; and on my left, this scene of  devastation.What seemed especially strange to me was the fact that no official attention had been paid to these burned remains. It was as if the building was invisible to the people parking their cars here.Here in the States you couldn't even get near a place in this condition. It would be boarded up, and even the lot it sat on would be crisscrossed with yellow crime tape.In the States you couldn't so much as look inside such a building, but here?Well, you can see for yourself: I could have crawled right in this window if I'd had a mind to (and if I were fearless and/or insane) for here it all was, open to its god as the saying goes, and open too to any interlopers bent on the scavenger's task.And so it was that on this day, fully halfway through my two-week visit to Russia, I began to realize that this whole Russian trip would be offering a study in contrasts. Tune in tomorrow for specifics and the decidedly darker chapters my curiosity had me turning to.

No Easy Life

One day, traversing Lake Onega on our way from St. Petersburg to Moscow, we stopped at the island of Kizhi, a remote windswept spot first settled in the 1400s, where there now exists the Unesco World Heritage site known as Kizhi Pogost. Here, we saw this fairytale of a church constructed centuries ago entirely of wood without the use of so much as single nail.It still reminds me of nothing so much as the popsicle-stick houses we kids used to make at summer camp and yet with the help both of the Soviet government 50 years and today's careful restorers it has survived winter snows and icy winds since it was erected in 1714.Here on Kizhi, we saw historical impersonators practicing ancient arts. This short video I took shows a woman who that day was submitting brittle stalks of vegetation through the exceedingly long  (three, or four, or 27-for-all-I-know)  part process that would eventually render it into thread. (And to think I complain about the three days it takes to get a dress I have ordered online!)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNFdrWB2KI8I watched fascinated as such ancient crafts were practiced by these modern Russian citizens - and I wished neither for the first or last time that I could speak their language, as they surely did not speak mine.Our tour guide, however, did speak English and she spoke it very well. Here she is describing how the people stayed alive on this island where arable land was so valuable and so scarce due to the very short growing season, that exactly none of it could be set aside for pasturage. A book I just referenced tells me that "because only small parts of Russia are south of 50° north latitude and more than half of the country is north of 60° north latitude, extensive regions experience six months of snow cover over subsoil that is permanently frozen to depths as far as several hundred meters (italics mine.) The average yearly temperature of nearly all of European Russia is below freezing, and the average for most of Siberia is freezing or below. Most of Russia has only two seasons, summer and winter, with very short intervals of moderation between them."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovEpRFXeED8&feature=youtu.beWhat she is saying, in case her accent it too thick for you, is that before they skinnied out entirely, any horses and cows that villagers owned would be transported to the mainland on wee fragile crafts like this one so as to have at least some chance of staying alive.Staying alive remains very much a concern in many parts of our world of course.Assured survival has never been part of life and certainly we in the west are kidding ourselves if we think it is.As Shakespeare says "we owe God a death," each and every one of us. But in the meantime, we can build beauty like this, that can outlast our own short moments in the light.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubcBHSl7gaU

Russia from on Board Ship

At 6 o'clock every night as we sailed along on our route from St. Petersburg to Moscow,  we passengers would be gathered like baby ducklings for an update about what we'd soon be seeing.One night the talk went like this - and I should say I purposely pointed my camera outside at the ship's deck rather than at the speaker's face so that I could better focus later on the cool throaty sound of his Russian-accented English:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TK9WWSNCEM&feature=youtu.beOur man was talking here about the Moscow By Night tour, which I turned out to skip, on account of how wiped out I felt after our Moscow By Day outings. By that point I had been marched through so many civic buildings, monasteries and churches I'd begun to feel that if never again saw another icon in my life I would still be able to draw half a dozen of them from memory, because there are just so very many images of New Testament apostles, Old Testament patriarchs and members of the Holy Family lining the walls of all these holy places: a whole race of sorrowful-looking, skinny-faced folks with improbably dark tans.Here, for example, is a typical Mary-and-Jesus pair: And here below you will see  one of our party, my own mate in fact, walking in the tourist's typical 'let's-get-this-done' fashion through one such sacred space. (I speak of the man facing away, the man with the white hair - and you may also note that all the women wear requisite scarves while even some dopey guy with a mullet gets to go bareheaded.So there was this aspect to our trip, where it was all your typical foreign-visitor stuff, with hordes of tourists jostling one another to snap more pictures than even Mother Teresa would lack the patience to look through later. One night we Viking Cruisers got hand-carried in our fancy coach into the heart of St. Petersburg for a cooked-down performance of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and were the only people in the little jewel-box of a theatre. Another night we were transported to the hills above Moscow for an evening of music where again the passengers on our ship constituted the entire audience.Here are some of our shipmates waiting for the curtain to rise and those long-legged tuu-tuu'd swans to skitter out onto the stage.So as I say, it was all typical tourist stuff. But then something happened. At some point, very slowly, there surfaced, for me, another aspect of this two-week trip.And that is the part I'll be writing about in the days ahead.

What Big Eyes

In one of the little towns on our Waterways of the Czars tour of Russia, we visit an actual school, where one is struck by the disparities: 800 children, ages six to seventeen, gather five days a week in a building that looks to have been built by a team of inebriates wearing blindfolds. There aren’t a lot of right angles, in other words, and many of the lintels seem to slant and dip. And yet, the curriculum appears to run circles around our typical courses of study.Here on the left and below, a typical classroom, not at all fancy, as you can see.And yet our Russian tour guide has this to say about the curriculum, "The pupil’s courses are compulsory, yes?"They study the Physics, the Chemistry, the Mathematics, the Literatures."All children are also studying the English beginning in Fifth grade and in high school are adding a second foreign language to that, either French to German, yes.'My guess, based on information we have so far exchanged in the last week?  That of the 25 well-fed Yanks stuffed into these slender desks not a one speaks or understands Russian. We are spotless in our ignorance.Next, we file into a small auditorium which I suspect also serves as lunchroom and gym as the auditorium did in my own 1960s elementary school. (We called it the Cafetorium, in my mind a wonderfully jaunty, sort of Jetson-ish Space Age name. ) Here, three young girls in peasant garb sing us a lengthy folk song, during which, at regular intervals the music calls for periodic vocal yips which the girls dutifully provide even as their faces remain bland. They also swing little wooden gadgets back and forth that look like miniature venetian blinds and make the kind of clattering sound you might get on tossing a handful of Scrabble tiles down a set of stairs. The girls sing, yip and clatter for a good five minutes before bowing, shyly and adorably, and hurrying off the stage, offer us the chance to buy fanciful cloth dolls which both the boy and girl students have themselves sewn.The dolls are female dolls, all with voluminous skirts and THIS one, we are told, is Little Red Riding Hood. But one has only to upend her, toss back her skirts and - whoops! - here under the ruffles of her petticoats is the child's own grand-mama,  of ‘What Big Eyes You Have’ fame! She has spectacles and grey hair covered by a babushka. Another flip of the wrist, yet more tumbling and here appears the head of the Big Bad Wolf in all his ferocity!Many of our group buy one. I do not, I think because as a child in the long ago Ozzie and Harriet years I had the American version of this doll which always unsettled me.On our way out of the schoolhouse, we pass a handmade poster honoring a young graduate of this school who, serving the Russian army, was killed in Chechnya. In this portrait, dressed in his new uniform, he gazes manfully at the camera and we study his gaze. His story, carefully inked in block writing around his image, remains a mystery to us however, as people who can neither speak nor read the language of this country.As we depart the school building, small and antiquated looking as it is with the cords for its electronics stretching from here to there in a way that no stateside Fire Marshall would allow, I get the feeling that these 800 children have minds far more fully furnished than our own minds here in the 'Like Me, Buy Me, Like Me' west.And it comes to me at the door that perhaps the reversible doll unsettles me still not for any Freudian beast-under-the-skirts reason but because it reminds me uncomfortably of the ostrich, who also hides his head so as not to acknowledge what he does not wish to acknowledge. 

That's MISTER Jackass to You

Heard onboard ship as four individuals find themselves lingering for a moment in a stateroom corridor:Passenger One, pleasantly, after introductions: So what is your husband’s name?Passenger Two: Jackass.Passenger One, not having heard quite right:  I’m sorry? You say your husband isn't traveling with you?Passenger Two:  Nah Jackass left me years ago for his secretary.Merry laughter all around.

Chilly Naked Guys

These are some pictures from our day in Peterhof, where the Czar called Peter spent large chunks of his downtime.NO DOWNTIME FOR US though in our forced march through his palace, where an hour into the tour I began to feel like a bite of salami getting ushered through an alimentary canal by the ceaseless process known as peristalsis.June or no June, the day was cold: So cold that even our native-born tour guide shivered. "We pass our year in two ways here in Russia," he'd told us on the coach that brought us here. "Nine months of anticipation followed by three months of disappointment!" Then the coach stopped and out we all got, while a three-man combo of Russian men in Brezhnev-style hats played highly whimsical renditions of God Save the Queen, the Battle Hymn of the Republic and When the Saints Go Marching in.Thus we did that: We went marching in, filing like school children past kiosks full of winter clothes, which I was delighted to come upon, since 50 yarsd into out trek, the stems of my earrings were carrying the cold straight into my bloodstream via the tender mussel-like lobes of my ears.I bought this red stretchy 'ring of bunny-fur for a mere 341 rubles - or six bucks.After the palace tour, our own small party of four decided to walk all the way to the property's edge where a stiff wind straight off the Gulf of Finland parted and re-parted our hair for us.Still there was great beauty both inside and out: a world of gold if you like gold, and fountains shooting off at regular intervals. Here's another chilly gold guy at a different part of the fountain:We'd been turned loose on the grounds, see, literally driven out of the palace in point of fact for a chilly 90 minutes. Then, just near the end of that hour-and-a-half, the sky turned the color you see here and a fine stinging rain gave us all facials.It was great though, of course it was great. It was the Day Three of our Russian tour, and our final day in the environs of St. Petersburg, the haunted city known called Leningrad during the Soviet years.

On Foreign Soil

I've always thought I'd like to go to Russia, to visit the famous Hermitage, and walk where czars walked, and contemplate the mysteries of an entirely unfamiliar alphabet....And now here I am in St. Petersburg which seems a lot like Venice in that it consists of so many islands. I should say that WE, meaning my mate and I and two good friends are in St. Petersburg where, just at present, the thermometer stands at 39 degrees Fahrenheit. Where snow sifted down from the sky when the ballet got out last night.That fact alone felt unfamiliar: that and the fact the sun could still be shining this brightly at half-past nine at night. See?It almost feels mythical, this St. Petersburg, where first snow and then a stinging sideways hail could be seen collecting on the shoulders of my ill-chosen wardrobe.A man I assumed to be a veteran stood, one leg of his trousers pinned up to reveal his missing limb, outside the amazing Catherine Palace. He was hoping to sell us a picture of the lady of the house herself, Catherine the First, who, in the official 1810 portraiture, bears a strong resemblance to Danny DeVito in the Taxi years.I saw a lot on our first day here, not just the on-legged vet but also apartment buildings of a decided bleakness, like this fully tenanted one, half fixed up and half not.Later that morning I saw stunning old statuary, like these two guys with their impressive six-packs outside the world-famous Hermitage Museum.Art celebrates nature and that much is for sure - both Youthful Nature, like this woman supporting this guy lounging around with his hand on his hip......and also Nature in Decay, like the mummy I stood by for a long time, free at last of all his Ace bandages and naked as an unwrapped present. He looked like a slice of overcooked bacon grinning with his 3,000-year-old teeth.I have much to learn on this trip and already I know one thing is truer than true: Art outlasts nature, as this stunning bit of clockwork shows.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9L6slBSw-0&feature=youtu.be  

Mine is a long sad tale…

Mine is a long sad tale, as the dormouse said to Alice down there in Wonderland - because this is really is my 'tail' here, along with a number of the little Tootsie Roll segments above my tail.

Sad, I know. 

But maybe it's not SO sad.

I went to the doctor today for my annual checkup and on the way into the building saw a man with a grey beard and long shaggy hair lurking by the parking garage; just kind of meandering along among the idling taxis and the little open-air 'jailhouse' they have these days to accommodate the smokers.

This man looked to be about 60 and wore khakis, an open-neck shirt, a suit coat, and, perched atop his head, a toy fireman's helmet. He was smoking as he ambled along and every 20 feet or so he stopped, pulled out a pint and took a long swig.

"Drinking,"I thought. "Maybe that's what I'll be doing an hour from now when I come out from this appointment. Maybe I'll be taking up smoking and trotting over to the packy for a tidy pint myself." 

Because you never knew do know what they're going to find out at an annual checkup where the ask so many questions, like when your last period was and whether or not you take Ecstasy.I was told that this time I didn't have to pee in a cup and that was a nice break. However they did weigh me, dammit, and the news was way worse than it had been last year at this time. Here's last year's rundown:Today I was told that  my blood pressure is113/70 and that my heart is pumping along at the rate of 65 good hard squeezes per minute, and that seemed great to me,Some of the rest of the news was less than great: My weight is up eight pounds.I felt happy to be able to say I run on the treadmill for 40 minutes most days and shy about admitting  I drink a glass or two of wine at night and, on weekends, sometimes take a slug or two of whiskey,I did complain to the doc about my weight gain though, and in response she said something I misheard. Because we're good friends by now, she looked me dead in the eye and said. "So you're deaf now?""Deaf as a haddock,"  I said  with a kind of confessional relief, ,and went on to tell her how this leads to of marital dust-ups sometimes, since I always think my mate is saying these critical things to me when really he's just asking if we have more  paper towels."But would you wear a hearing aid?" my doctor asked.I sure would, I told her. "It would hardly show in my wild tangle of curls and I need the help.  I spend a lot of time young male teens and you know how they are: they'll say a witty thing once but they won't repeat it, especially if what they've said ranks high on the hilarity scale."All right then!"  she said and we made arrangements to have my ears tested by an ear guy.Then we made arrangement for me to have an ultrasound on account of the crazy distention of my belly. We made arrangement appointment for me to have a bone density test since for a while now  I've been hurtling fast down the old osteopenia highway.The last thing I did was to pull up a picture on my phone of my poor crooked back which I didn't even know was crooked until I went to a yoga class at the age of 50 and the teacher sorrowfully said, "Ah! I see that you have soloists." By now even the neighborhood DOGS can tell I have scoliosis. Anyway, when she saw this image her dropped. "My god, this is the worst  curve  I've ever seen in a patient! You would have been 5 foot nine if you didn't have this!"  - which made me feel pretty good since I have  a sister and a daughter, each of whom is 5'9" and I did always feel a little "less than" around them.We said farewell and I went off  to get the blood work  that will show this and that, my lipids,  my thyroid level, and so on and hey, couldn't it be a worsening of my hypothyroidism that's making my tummy stick out so? (We cling to these hopes at my stage of life.When I walked back to the parking lot, I looked for that ambling guy with whom I now felt a distinct kinship. I didn't see him but he's  with me still in spirit. Sure,I have a lot of things wrong with me but as my nice doctor just said it's mostly just wear and tear on the old jalopy. Plus, wait, I just remembered!  She also said it's better for a woman to go into the older decades heavier rather than less heavy since the latest research now shows that women with a little meat on their bones have less of a tendency toward Alzheimer's. And  - more good news! - she said drinking coffee appears to be also good for you, along with  having  a drink or two a night.So there it is, on the whole a satisfactory visit. I feel pretty good. In fact I feel SO good right now I may just find my  own toy plastic fireman's hat and plop it on those curls that I just KNOW are going to hide any hearing aids. ;-) 

Gerald and Elton and Kiki Dee

Around here everybody knows that on the night of April 18th, 1775 Paul Revere and William Dawes rode out to warn the colonials that the British were armed and marching. For decades now there have been signs all over the place saying the two passed this spot and this spot and this one. I hope they at least went through the red lights I'd always think when I saw those signs as a kid.People who live IN Concord and Lexington do this anniversary up big. We call it Patriots Day and each year on he third Monday in April we celebrate by calling off school, shuttering scads of businesses and playing host to a little thing called the Boston Marathon.I live only a few hills and meadows away from Concord and Lexington so I too went there one April 18th, and in the middle of the night, together with my sister Nan, my cousin Sheila and our three young husbands. It was 1975 and to kick off this big 200-year mark of America's birth, President Ford was coming to the Old North Bridge to give a speech. The six of us wanted to see him do it and we so donned tri-cornered hats, packed a cooler of food and beer and drove to a spot by the Concord Boat House. There we spent the night, playing cards in the car and laughing and at 5am rented three canoes and paddled down the Concord River to that famous bridge - where we waited and waited and waited from a spot 100 yards distant until he finally showed up, his head a distant balding egg.There too we saw Caroline Kennedy, sprung from Concord Academy for the day, and heard many speeches blowing across the water. (Here's Caroline from back then, together with her mother Jackie, her grandmother Rose and her uncle Ted on the day she graduated from that fine private high school.)It felt like the beginning of something big all right, this two-year celebration, with the reenactment of battles, the first visit of the Tall Ships  and, for many of us kids, an Elton John concert on the Fourth of July, at the stadium where the Pats still play, with Kiki Dee doing the opening act.The longest game in professional baseball happened on this day too, played by two Triple A teams in Pawtucket RI. It lasted for 33 innings and took almost eight-and-a-half hours to finish, and that’s a nice American fact too.But what I will always remember about this date is laughing my head off all night in a parking lot, then paddling through waters as silver as mercury in the pre-dawn light. About the year too I'll always remember Kiki Dee doing “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart" with Elton. I knew at that concert that under the hippie-style maxi-dress I wore was the little bump that would six months later become my first chid and likely end forever my days of drinking and laughing 'til sun-up. But that was fine; I was ready.I guess I knew that life would go breakin' my own heart, as life tends to do, but I hope I knew too that there would also be joys both loud and quiet, and bright mornings - and music to give it all a soundtrack.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0qW9P-uYfM 

Dress Up Or Dress Down?

"Innnn your Ea-ea-easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it..." Remember that song from a million years ago? Remember when we all dressed up smartly come spring, the little boys in  blazers and the little girls in sherbet-colored dresses with matching ankle socks and hats? Oh and we wore little Mary Janes too!  My sister and I would bring our new Mary Janes to our grandfather reading in the wingchair of his bedroom and he would take out his pocket knife and scratch up the soles a bit, making it harder for us to slip and go down in all our ruffled finery.I’ll admit I miss those days, living as we do in an era air when people saunter onto airplanes wearing their pajama bottoms and clutching their bed pillows. I miss the days when we sat up straight while traveling on public conveyances. I miss the time when gloves covered the hands of many ladies, sometimes even the hands of the flight attendant. I know I wore white gloves to a job interview at age 19, just because it was spring and the dress I wore seemed to cry out for those them.Now of course all has changed and women rarely even wear dresses - well, besides the poor young meteorologists who are made to stand in profile in skin-tight sheaths against the weather systems they're gesturing at on the swirling screens behind them.For the last 30 I've been walking around in workout wear much of the time. Get up, pull on the gym clothes and get at that workout: that was the idea. Nike built a whole logo around it.But then, just today on Facebook, I saw a picture of a high school friend’s wife. She is slim. She is attractive. But when I clicked on the photo to make it bigger and saw the look of those under-carriage-clinging yoga pants I had my own Road to Damascus moment. I came to realize something and that something is this: The only person who go every got away with wearing such tight pants was Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie in the old Dick Van Dyke show.Something for me to keep in mind as I sally forth in the months and years ahead.So yesterday was Easter and for Easter I wore a crisp silk shirt, a long swingy skirt, a favorite pair of outback-looking boots and a kind of Indiana Jones fedora. I felt pretty good setting our for our relatives' house. I felt I had risen to the occasion.Of course it was hot yesterday.Way hot. So hot the cheeses all puddled - AND we were out in the bright hot sun for most of the day.Almost immediately, I tossed the hat under a table lost the boots 30 minutes later and 30 minutes after that slithered out of the pantyhose by ducking behind a tree and working fast. THEN I could really enjoy the day!Let's watch these two stars showing off their finery while singing that old chestnut of a song. 'He', Fred,  has always been an icon of male elegance and I think we can all agree that 'her' hat is fabulous. It's true that when I first saw her arms I thought I'd wandered into a commercial for eczema cream, or maybe a relief-from-psoriasis one, but no. That's no skin affliction but a pair of long pink gloves.  My expectations are that altered in the distinctly less formal world we inhabit these days. Over to you now, Judy and Fred!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_sVZ52vOTM

Bathing Suit Hell

When the latest spring swimwear catalogue dropped through my letter slot last week I thought Wo, here's one expressly made for me! It even said so, right there in black and white! It took me a whole minute to realize they  were talking about plain old terryCLOTH and not cloth made for me, the former Terry Sheehy now living under witness protection as Terry Marotta.All my life it's been painful to shop for swimwear even when I was a little kid going to summer camp and one of the suggested items for every camper's trunk was a forest green get-up seemingly made of wool. Anyway it was this heavy furry stuff, done over in a kind of waffle weave that caused even the slenderest camper to look like she'd been rolled in a thick layer of batter.God had the taken the trouble to roll me in my own personal coating of batter so you can imagine how I looked in it. However my sister and I were told we had to have it because our mother and aunt as the owners/directors of Old Camp Fernwood felt we should set an example. I hated that suit and was so glad when I could pull on the simple cotton one with the ruffles. I wanted badly to look like those glamorous older campers striding long-leggedly toward the lake for a swim.Instead I looked like this - and if I tell you that for all my life I've had wild curly hair, you'll pick me out at once in this little lineup:But all that was in the past. The task I now face is to find a couple of suits for the present.Some suits today have weirdly longish skirts. These I am unable to wear as I can't help but think of them as Eleanor Roosevelt Goes to the Beach.Some are tankinis, which means they have two pieces, a very nice feature that eliminates the need to peel off the whole tight cocoon of a thing every time you have to go to the bathroom.I tried one tankini with a spilt top two summers ago and looked like Who Pitched a Pup Tent on Top of THESE Two Solid Columns?Then last year I went with the full sun-repelling line of swimwear, consisting of a skin-tight zip up 'jacket' tight and bermuda-length 'shorts' but that was wrong too: too darn hot for summer wear and talk about Sausage Party!Accordingly last Thursday I ordered this bathing suit and it just came and it is perfect in that it covers my sun-damaged chest, spares the world yet another cleavage shot and lets me to dart free as a minnow through whatever waters present themselves.Now I just need a sarong to cover my thighs and a lightweight 'shrug' to cover the ruin of my upper arms and I will be SET!

What's HAPPENED to Hotel Rooms?

I'm thinking today about the hotel room I stayed in last week. Looks like the days of sending down for ice and whole bottles of Scotch are OVER, whatever those novels by Ernest Hemingway had you picturing.On first arriving at that Florida hotel, I felt pretty pleased, if just by the promise of free breakfasts that would turn out to include scrambled eggs and hash browns, waffles and bagels, toast selections galore and many countless combination of sugar, cinnamon and chocolate. "This place really WILL be cushy!" I thought to myself  - right up until I opened the door to my room and was instantly ushered into a state of mystification.  Had an occupying army come through and decided to detain their captives here? The last time I stayed at this place, the floor of my room was covered in soft carpeting, and delicate, cone-shaped fixtures above bed, desk and closet sent warm soothing pools of light down over all. Plus there were enough bureau drawers to billet ten separate mama cats giving birth to ten kittens each.But what did I see now? Under my feet a prison-worthy stretch of concrete that stretched from the door to the where the bed began, then gave way to the kind of thin, tough industrial carpeting you could take a blowtorch to without doing any damage.There were no bureau drawers whatsoever, though I did finally find four small wire baskets behind a cabinet door. AND to top things off, fluorescent lights and only  fluorescent lights casting the same sickly greenish hue you see in cop shows featuring interrogation sessions.Thus over the last few days I've been blaming this hotel chain for what I regarded as a real betrayal. But it came to me just this morning that hey, the room I took in New York back in December cost three times more than this one,  AND was three times more bleak.This was the view out my window at the Wythe Hotel ....You're supposed to think it's cool.And this was the bed, which to me looks an awful lot like what the Pilgrims slept on in the 1620s.Note too the rickety piece of junkyard crap that served as a bedside table. And... see that window to the right? Maybe that doubles as a two-way mirror for the interrogators.  Because, come on, what hotel designers would come up with a room that allowed any and all other guests present to watch you when you shower? A big picture window, looking in on the bathroom? Really?There was no carpeting anywhere in this place, but rather wall-to-wall concrete. And... there wasn't a bureau drawer in sight.The hotel said they would bring up a pastry and a tiny pot coffee for a mere eight dollars, but my family and I, with a four-and-a-half hour drive ahead of us, told our host in this fair city that yes, we'd love to take him up in his offer to meet us downstairs on our final morning for the hotel brunch.Only he didn't actually come to the brunch, which turned out to cost us three hundred and thirty dollars. THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS and we'd even said no to the mimosas!But maybe travel was has always been a challenge when it comes to accommodations. Remember the two crafty innkeepers in Les Miserables? Then OR now, I guess it's always been about that old bottom line.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I8KG7upwcw 

Unblocking the Block

I haven't posted a scrap of writing here in almost a month. Quite a falling-off since the time I used to post daily, even IF some of the posts were musings about deodorant ads, or the Expire-By sign on a Tylenol bottle found in the back of my medicine cabinet (1989!), or the sight of lashed-together porta-potties sailing gaily down the highway on a flatbed truck.I can't account for this silence without boring everyone to death so I'm just going to begin again here, and by way of breaking this quiet streak, resolve to start each post with a "Today I..." and see how that goes. But as one famous scribbler once famously said, nothing interesting happens to most writers after childhood - bad news for us all - and since I am today paddling quietly through the waters of a lazy weekend, I'll go back a few days in search of something.So: Last Monday I could have (and should have) written this:Today at the airport, a pig appeared at Security, inching along in line just like the rest of us. Though the pig was following all the rules and was connected by a conventional leash to a conventional-looking young woman, its porcine qualities uh, shall we say...stood out. It had a long skinny tail that it was wagging, a sleek body ending in a head on the scale of  Winston Churchill's head if you think in terms of us humans.......And it was walking on tiptoes, as pigs do, given the anatomy of their feet. Of course it also had that one-of-a-kind piggy nose, a delicate flower of an organ that seemed to tremble minutely in reaction to the foreign smells surrounding it.People were staring at this pig in utter astonishment, remarking to one another and pulling out their phones to capture a picture. It was as if Noah's arkful of specimens had never settled crookedly on the peak of Mt. Ararat at all.It's true that a TSA person immediately hustled into the line and ushered the pair away but then didn't both pig and person appear again? Yes they did: on the safe side of Security where I found myself sitting beside them as I pulled on my boots and the young woman pulled on her shoes. Since her pig  was already wearing the 'toe shoes' Nature gave it - the young woman and I had the chance for a few words."Is the little guy anxious?" I asked, noting the foam gathered around its mouth."Oh God no," the young woman replied, adding almost wearily, "We do this all the time."And with that the two trotted off, leaving me to marvel yet again on the sometimes-damnable quiet of my own usual days. But silent no more I here vow! Henceforth I'm going to by-God look for fit musings whether about adventures large or small, and come back to report about them here.     

And I'll Take it

When I was this little kid and my mom was teaching me the Lord's Prayer I found one part to be a little 'off.'"Give us this day our daily bread"  sounded to me far too bossy a thing to being saying to God. And so I would stop just after that part and add, "and we'll take it." I didn't want God to feel that He was just blindly giving stuff into the void. I wanted him to know I would be there, all set to receive this food and chow down on it.I was three when I had those thoughts, and on this, the day I turn 68, I find that with each passing year I more vividly remember the child I was then: in this autumn picture above; and in my little sunsuit playing in the grass one early June morning;I was simple back then. I remember being  simple. I also remember loving absolutely everyone, from my stuffed dog Pinky, to my mom and grandfather, from hero of a big sister to the aunts and the uncles and the cousins. I prayed for them all when I knelt down by the bed each night to say my "God blesses," as my big sister and I called them.Today, I see how much I changed as the years passed. For almost a decade, from the age of about 12 to the age of 21, I thought that knowing things was the big goal, because if you knew things you could maybe succeed in life, and also nobody could make you feel dumb at a party. I could habe gone down that road forever had I not found myself, September of my 22nd year, standing before a class of high school kids as their teacher.The kids were so lively and comical - but inquisitive and serious too. Plus they had such wonderful questions: about God and sex; about an adult world that seemed to them founded entirely on principles of hypocrisy; about the key question of how much a person should or could do for others without spending down his or her own stores. (There's a question I still struggle with!)

So yes, I changed a lot in those teaching years and then changed even more when my husband and I had a couple of children. My happiness was simply tied to theirs......and that was even before that third child arrived. Before the pets arrived. Before our old folks began needing us more and more. And well, after a while, I came to see that life wasn't about knowing a lot of stuff at all.So here I am all these years later, just happy to be going for another spin around that old sun. This wonderful Jesse Winchester tune sung by Jimmy Buffet pretty much sums it up for me here.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GXoBcTkJts

Forget Perfection

People judge you. There's no avoiding it.Example: Fella comes to my house one day, wants to clean a rug that lies on the floor of a room where a zillion dust motes dance in the golden bars of daylong sunlight. But the minute he walks in, his face goes pale. “What have you done here?” he shouts. “Your rugs are all faded!”I look and he is right: The rug he has come to carry off for cleaning used to be red, tan and navy when we bought it. Now it's rust, cream and baby blue. “This rug is losing RADIANCE!” he shouts again.“Hey I’m losing radiance myself,” I say. “It’s OK, it doesn’t hurt.”“Here’s what you have to do,” he goes on, ignoring me. “Pull down the shades. Draw the drapes.” He bustles around doing this until the room that has dazzled with sunlight a moment before looks ready now for a séance."But we love the sun,” I tell him,  feebly adding, “We sit in this window seat here, and...” “Then AT LEAST take a sheet and cover the area of greatest exposure!” he snaps. “You owe it to your carpets!” he adds, scooping up the carpet in question and hurrying out the door.Since that day I have thought a lot about what this man said. I was sorry to have let him down, but I just can’t run a house his way, keeping the rugs bright by locking the sunlight out. Keeping things perfect under plastic. Pleasant under glass.I used to visit houses like that when I was little, the kind that made you feel as though silken cords were stretched across the chair arms, and velvet ropes were hung across the doorways. I vowed even then that if I ever did have a house of my own, I would never run it that way.And I don’t. We LIVE in our house. We live all over those 19th century sofas in the living room, which are only done in velvet because velvet is the toughest fabric there is - well, next to maybe Naugahyde. And I'm proud of that fact.But now hasn’t the upholstery man just gotten after me too: He came here once for a Victorian sofa that I'd reupholstered myself a decade ago that ended up looking like a lumpy pink bed with a person sewn inside it. He took that old thing out and turned it into a pale blue dream of perfection.Then this past month, a small visitor set her little bones upon a sofa even older than the Victorian one and blam! one leg — ball, claw and all — shot straight out from under it. The upholsterer was here to perform diagnostics on the break, but his gaze fell first upon the toddler who was clumping quietly around in his little white shoes.“You let your CHILDREN in this room?” he squeaked, his voice ascending the scale of disbelief.“Sure,” I answered, as the child in question smiled sweetly and drooled a little onto the velvet.“On THIS couch!?” He squeaked. “MY couch?!”“It’s going to lose radiance!” I could all but hear him say next.He didn’t say that though. Instead he picked up this most recent casualty and started for the door. “Well it's your house,” he sniffed, washing his hands of us all.“You bet!” I told him, smiling big. Because really, it’s fine by me if our stuff is too worn out to pass down to our kids one day. What I'd much rather pass down to them is permission to enjoy the beauty of their surroundings; permission to fade, as we all must fade, gloriously, in the sun.  

Once as Alive as You or I

On the tour of a Norman castle I took last spring, I heard all about the moat and the boiling oil, the outer wall and the inner wall and the poor souls who got tossed over the latter, to fall screaming to their deaths below.I listened as hard as I could, trying not to be distracted by the vista surrounding us.I found it that fascinating.But for all my listening I heard very little of what the daily life in that castle was like, which is what I most yearned to know about. I had to come back home and dig out my copy of T.H White's The Once and Future King for that; because I had bought a paperback copy of this great tale of the Arthur Legend back when I was young and sure enough, there the tattered volume still stood, on the shelf where I had placed it. I flipped through the pages and there  was the passage I had remembered, outlined and waiting for me all these years later.In it White describes the great walls surrounding a castle of this same era in England. Then he goes on on to say how things looked from the inside in those far-distant days, and what a spell he does cast with these words:

"So much for the outer defenses. Once you were inside the curtainwall, you find yourself in a kind of wide alleyway, probably full of frightened sheep, with another complete castle in front of you. This was the inner shell 'keep' with its eight  enormous round towers which still stand. It is lovely to climb the highest of them and to linger there looking toward the marshes from which all these old dangers came, with nothing but the sun above you and the little tourists trotting about below, quite regardless of boiling oil. 

"Think of how many centuries that unconquerable tower has withstood. It has changed hands by secession often, by siege once, by treachery twice, but never by assault . On this tower the lookout moved. From there, he kept the guard over the blue woods toward Wales. His clean old bones live beneath the floor of the chapel now, so you must keep it for him.

"If you look down and are not frightened of heights (the Society for the Preservation of This and That have put up some excellent railing to preserve you from tumbling over), you can see the whole anatomy of the inner court laid out beneath you like a map. You can see the chapel, now quite open to its God, and the windows of the Great Hall with the solar over it. You can see the shafts of the huge chimneys and how cunningly the little side flues were contrived to enter them, and the little private closets now public, and the enormous  kitchen. If you are a sensible person, you will spend days there, possibly weeks, working out for yourself by detection which were the stables, which the mews,  which were the cow byres, the armory, the lofts, the well, the smithy, the kennel, the soldiers' quarters, the priest room, and my Lord and Lady's chamber. Then it will all grow about you again. The little people – they were much smaller than we are and it would be a job for most of us to get inside the few bits of their armor and  gloves that remain – will hurry about in the sunshine, the sheep will baa as they always did, and perhaps from Wales there will come the ffff-putt of the triple-feathered arrow, which looks as if it had never moved."

I have worked as a professional writer for over 35 years, penning essays and columns and autobiographical pieces and I just know that I would need another 35 years of study to even come close to the verbal artistry of this lonely and complicated man, who took a time 1400 years in the past and brought it to shining life.  

The Spirit of the Weekend

If you separated out the righteous anger we saw yesterday and focused just on the sense of hope and yearning there expressed, you could look to this song to sum that feeling up. I love that the singers are young and that the boy is seen scratching his leg just before the song starts. I love the smooth columnar strength of the darker girl's thigh and the frail courage of all clear and mortal voices. I love the way a fourth singer  responds to the gesture of beckoning offered part way through the song. I feel beckoned by this well-known round myself. Watch it here -  and see if you don't find your own self singing along.