Some Last Thoughts on the Judge

Earlier this week, I heard a few things on NPR that gave me a slightly altered perspective on Brett Kavanaugh: Someone who knew him at Yale said he was always the one standing by the keg hoping to get the girl. “He never got the girl,” this person added.A friend who also knew him from Yale spoke of how surprised he and his friends were  to learn at graduation that good old Brett had done quite well, a fact he attested to last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Through his whole student career, Kavanaugh said, (rather inelegantly) “I busted my butt in academics.”And, as we now know, he also partied. Fifteen times in his testimony he spoke of beer. “I drank beer. I liked beer. I still like beer.” He wouldn’t answer when asked if he had ever had so much to drink that he blacked out. With a face contorted by anger at the presumption of this question by Senator Amy Klobuchar, he said, “I don’t know Senator, have you?”So here’s a man about whom it can be said that he worked hard, and he partied hard.Perhaps in his mind, as in many of our minds, he thought that the one thing justified the other. Many prosperous Americans seem to feel that because they work hard, they richly deserve the fancy car, the ski vacation in Aspen, the great rambling house surrounded by wide green lawns, and never mind that others in this country also work hard; work at two, even three, jobs and stand at bus stops in both the dark of morning and the dark of night. Only these others know that they can never let loose and party hard because of the silent judgment directed toward all those who have less, especially if they are people of color or people otherwise judged as ‘other’. Think of the still closely-held belief that reveals itself in that old American taunt, “If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?” That tells you what we value in this culture all right. The accumulation of wealth is the primary measure of a person's worth.Still, my mind keeps returning to this image of that 19- or 20- or 21-year-old boy who was said to stand so often by the keg hoping to get the girl and 'never got her'. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was virgin in high school and “for many years after.” I’ll admit I laughed out loud in my car on hearing that last week but maybe it was true. I dare say many of us were virgins in high school and even stayed that way for one or two years after but not for ‘many years’. By the age of 19 or 20 most of us had begun seeing ourselves as adults and were getting about the business of living. But to believe that in the self-indulgent, feel-good 80s Brett Kavanaugh was still clinging to his virginity for the 'many years' he speaks of? That strikes me as unlikely.I know the Senate may well cast their vote to move the nomination forward before I get these scattered thoughts posted. Still, I had to set them down. The Judge’s notions - as well our own notions of what we are entitled to - expose dark trends in our possession-loving American hearts. We want what we want and we're sure we deserve what we want. And that’s the best way I can state it at the moment.

Can't Cook, or Clean, or Do Laundry

I still can't cook, or clean, or do laundry. That's what the surgeon still says, God help me.It's been some summer I've been having, as full of twists and turns as the classic Wild Mouse ride that almost yanks your head clear off the celery-stalk of your dear little neck. (Or wait, maybe it's more accurate to call those twists and turns 'ups and downs' in honor of all the Big Boy roller coasters out there.)The story is, I had one of the tendons in my shoulder repaired in mid-June and it's kind of sad, because even all this way through August I dread the nights for the pain that they bring. When you're moving around as you do during the day, see, you're sort of ok, in part because your movements pump the healing blood up into the site, a badly needed thing since, as I understand it, the shoulder doesn't have much of a blood supply on its own. Most nights, by contrast, I'm so sleep-deprived I keep thinking I'm the parent of a newborn again,Ah but the mornings! The mornings this summer have been lovely. This is the view from the guest bedroom, a view I relished every morning as I sat sling-bound in my rented recliner chair. 

So an undeniable upside has been having the time to look out the window at Nature.

A second downside, however, is I can't near do near enough walking, since walking any real distance makes the pain in my shoulder worse. (Now if I were a NUN, gliding along on the roller skates my sister Nan and I always suspected the nuns in our convent school had hidden under their robes, it probably wouldn't hurt much at all.)

But the upside there? I'm getting a LOT of reading done.

A third downside is that I can't blowdry my hair. Oh, I can wash it, sort of, using my one functioning arm. I just CANNOT lift both arms in the way you need to do to blow it dry. And without blowdrying, my hair looks like a stainless steel  scouring pad after months of use when it loses its integrity and just splays out in runaway coils. I shouldn't complain about that, I know, because now I get to go to this walk-in salon where I can get any one several operators to style and blowdry my hair FOR  me - and really only once did I get a stylist who gave me a definite Phyllis Diller look.

Fourth downside, and I'll stop here, I promise:

I can't wear the contact lenses I have relied on for nearly 30 years. I just can't get them IN, where I need both hands for that operation and I can't get my dominant hand anywhere near my eye. I've never worn glasses in my life until now and frankly I'm not doing so well with the whole progressive lens thing. But the upside here if I'm honest?  What I'm really doing this summer is getting a whole lot of binge-watching in, and God bless the invention of TV!

So here we are...

 I slept poorly last night, natch, but again this morning I woke to a matchless summer dawn.  Below, the view from my office-that-is-an-office-no-more since I've left the column-writing game but is instead just an airy upstairs room that anyone at all can relax in. In fact you guys should come by anytime! I have a fridgeful of eats from the Prepared Foods aisle and I can show you my newly mastered trick of tucking in the top sheet on even a king-size bed using just my own little toes.

(Click on the video if it looks askew. It plays right when you do.)  [wpvideo ySFtA7Ms]

The Upside of Being on the DL

I think where I last left off in this absorbing tale  I was two days out of surgery and throwing up on my new recliner 'lift' chair, an apparatus that still looks to me like a still from a Stephen King movie where somebody's long-suffering furniture comes alive and goes after its idiot owner.

Today though, I'll spare you further grisly tales and say only that there are real silver linings to recovering from an operation. I mean, where would the world be without the caregivers, whether paid or voluntary? Immediately after 'losing it' in that grab--the-towels way,  I called two RN friends, both of whom manifested like a couple of  heavenly apparitions, one bearing an analgesic far less terrifying than the oxy the surgeon had prescribed. (And THAT stuff, whoo! You take it and you still have the pain, all right. You just also have a whole lot of other weird sensations too. On oxycodone I felt like a wildly scrambled swirl of hurt wrapped up in a cotton candy cocoon.)

Besides remembering that I was the recipient of a lot of good care in those first weeks spent feebly sitting around in my ice-filled sling I now recall watching a super long, multi-episode documentary about the Roosevelts.  Visitors came and went and I would greet them with  "Look! It's the Roosevelts!" to which most would reply, in somewhat puzzled fashion, "Ah yes, the Roosevelts."

I also remember in this early time of confinement actually looking at some of the seeming thousands of catalogs that drop through my mail slot every week . It seems I am now officially, and universally, targeted as a likely customer for catalogs with names such as "A Time for Me", whose translation might as well be "Make Your Own Damn Dinner," and "As We Change," whose primary message is "Of Course WE Like Your New Mustache But Should You Ever Wish to Get Rid of it Our Newly Patented Mini-Taser Will Do the Job Nicely.)  Mostly of course such catalogs are marketing just two main items: (1) Loose-fitting clothing and (2) Vibrators. Who knew?

And look at that: Even setting down such a racy observation shows me that now, with the knife eight whole weeks in my past, I'm at last getting back my ability to smile. :-)

24 Hours Post-Op

The initial 24 hours following my rotator cuff surgery were event-filled all right, but mostly for the hidden gifts they brought me.  The first gift came when, on returning home just two hours after the surgeon had packed up his saws and chisels, I saw that my friend Sarah had alighted like a benevolent fairy on this house and left an entire meal, along with an array of wildflowers that looked like they were straight from the opening scene of The Sound of Music. She had even set the table with two goblets, a nice wine for David and some sparkling water for me.I ate it all, if a tad tentatively, then spent that first night quaking with dread over the  real pain that was sure to ensue, while an electric ice machine with a Mr. Snuffleupagus-like snout nuzzled around inside my giant brace.I’m pretty sure that by morning David couldn’t get off to work fast enough, but THAT WAS OK, THAT WAS FINE because we both knew I had a heavenly host of caregivers - well, two caregivers - arriving at 9:00.Aisha was the actual caregiver and Gayle was her supervisor. Gayle had come twice before, first to interview me the week before the operation and again several days later to lend me two chairs, one for the shower and one with rails to set over the toilet, this one being designed so that, having sat down, a person could hopefully, with a mighty one-armed effort, stand up again without pitching over into the wall and onto to the floor.Aisha was from Uganda as she told me, and a more sensitive companion I could not have asked for. I vaguely remember her helping me down the stairs and settling me into the amusement park ride of a reclining lift chair we were told to procure. I recall the two of us speaking at first about Idi Amin and Lake Victoria and later about how meaningful she finds it, in her other job at the nursing home, to sit in the presence of the dying. Weeks after her visit I came upon the notes she had made about her time with me. She called me 'a wonderful lady'  - this in spite of my exceedingly sparse knowledge of her home country - and added that I was "alert and oriented. "Ask her what she wants you to do for her and she will let you know. She has been a little shaky walking but is generally very strong. The shift is ending now at 3:30, and Terry is resting in her chair. She has had plenty to drink but has eaten very little.”Eating very little doubtless because within an hour of her departure I threw up and lost not only the breakfast in bed that my mate had made for me but all of Sarah’s lovely food from the night before. "David! Dodson! A bowl!” I yipped to my husband and honorary son seconds before it was too late,  but didn't they hurry into the living room, the dears, reassuring me that this was no big deal and quickly wiping away all the ‘evidence’.This was just the first 24 hours of my 50-days-and-counting post-op period and if it will help any other candidates for this surgery I can tell about other days as well. I can’t write in my diary yet – too painful to hold a pen – so this serves as a record for me as well.In the meantime here are Dodson and David way back in the old days when ONE of them, at age 18, was still just a little shy about open displays of affection. :-)

One Bad Wing

All through May and half of June I knew I was about to have the famously painful rotator cuff surgery, and what I pictured was so bad it practically scared the hair coloring right off my head. Day and night I lived in the kingdom of panic.HOW, for example, would I go about the so-called Activities of Daily Life with my dominant arm immobilized in the large contraption I would have to wear day and night for six or eight or even (gad!) ten weeks? What about bathroom tasks? Should I be fashioning hundreds of little ‘corsages’ out of toilet paper like the ones we made from Kleenex for our moms when we were kids? I knew I wouldn't be able to reach over that big sling/brace to reach the ol' Charmin roll, affixed to the wall on my dead side as it is. And what about feeding myself? How would I one-handedly slide a baking-panful of heavy raw chicken into the oven, much less heave a pot of water onto the stove for pasta? How would I even SEE, since I wouldn’t be able to reach my eyes to put in my contacts?“You can lift a coffee cup and a fork and that’s it,” the surgeon’s assistant had told me a month before Scalpel Time. “You cannot send your arm out to the side. You cannot  lift it to the front. And you, cannot, under any circumstances, reach it behind you. BUT HEY YOU’LL BE FINE!” he crowed gaily. "Just think of yourself as half a T-Rex with one tiny arm!”As warnings go, these were dire but they were honest too. And once the knives and saws and drills came out on June 14^th at two o’clock in the afternoon, I set aside all feelings of dread and got down to the business of getting through.The surgeon did too. He and his team yanked the two ends of my severed tendon together and stitched it over with what I picture as the kind of indestructible packing tape you use when you’re mailing packages. He drilled and sawed and sewed for two-plus hours and sent me home three hours after that with the admonition that I was not to lie down for eight weeks but rather sleep sitting up, either propped with a million pillows in the bed or else in a reclining 'lift' chair.That was almost seven weeks ago and during all this time I haven't been able to write with a pen. Even keyboarding hurts like the devil. Oh but there have been  so many things I have wanted to say here, most of them not even about this procedure! I just wanted to get this grisly tale told first.

a week post-op

So yes, I’m severely limited still. Flossing too is about impossible, I can't drive and I couldn’t chop an onion if I wanted to. But just thinking here about those toilet paper corsages has me smiling, and that’s something all by itself. :-)

Call Me Eeyore

Back in the long-ago 90s I did therapy for six months (a) because I felt sort of busily jazzed up trying to save the world at all times and (b) because my husband thought I should. Maybe he detected a sadness under all my over-functioning I don’t know. I started going all right but every time I went to that therapist’s office I could tell her how everyone else in my life was but not how I was. After a few sessions she told me that as fascinating as my lively tales about other people were, she felt frustrated that I couldn’t talk about myself. If there was sadness underneath all my rushing-about what WAS that sadness? Darned if I knew.Well LIFE SURE CURED THAT and these days anyway I do know why I’ve been so sad, so off my game, at times so bereft-feeling at times that this mate of mine sometimes finds me standing outside the bathroom door waiting for him to come back out. (I know! Pathetic!)So, without further talk, here is my litany of reasons for sadness, some general, some specific to me.

• Like so many of us, I am still sad  that we lost Bobby Kennedy. Fifty years ago this coming Saturday I watched his funeral and well do I remember the quaver in the voice of his one remaining brother as he gave the eulogy,  and the sight of his children crowding around his casket, and the sight of is that widow, newly pregnant with the couple's 11th child.
• Again, like many of us, I am sad about the changing climate with its ever-more-devastating weather events. I'm very sad that we in this country are doing so little to ward off what looks to be the very dire consequences.

Less catastrophically,  I'm sad about my own small stuff:

• I’m sad about the way time is passing so fast. I can still picture the color, style and fabric of the dress I wore the day they buried Bobby, and now I am… how old? I said to my mate only last Christmas, “Just think! In 15 years I’ll be 73!” “Um,” he replied with a kind smiled, “in 15 years you’ll be 83.” Where did it all go?
• I've been very sad that I can’t seem to write much anymore. It just hurts to sit, to stand, even to lie down for any length of time with a spinal column that has come to resemble a Crazy Straw the way it veers right up by my bra-line, then veers sharply left around my hips, then ends with a flourish of two additional veerings that together deliver pain not only to my back but also clear down one leg. Sigh.
• I’m sad about my digestion-related insides since I now have “bacterial overgrowth” in there, which is diagnosed by having one blow air into a glass tube and send it off  in the mail. That part was kind of fun, to be honest, a little like capturing fireflies - only these turn out not to be fireflies at all but rather a dense civilization of little sea monkeys as I picture them. These tiny tenants  now renting space in there have apparently moved in for keeps, the doctor says, so that for the rest of my life if I wish not to suffer I can’t eat wheat, barley, dairy or really any kind of sugar including the innocent fructose that comes in apples peaches, nectarines and so on. Who wouldn’t get sad on being told this news?
• And finally, to conclude this tale of woe, I am about to have rotator cuff surgery, which sounds both so picturesquely dreadful and immobilizing that I’m actually looking forward to the adventure of it . More on THAT another day.

So there it all is and maybe that stern therapist was right: I do feel better for having told all this.  Also, there's a real upside to the thought of being unable to so much as wash a dish or fold a pair of underpants for ten whole weeks. Plus anyway come on: Who doesn't love sea monkeys?

On the Path

It's nearly three weeks since I began taking that increased dose of the thyroid-boosting drug and, if I'm honest, nearly three weeks since I began also taking an antidepressant. Who knows whence cometh my help as the Bible says? Will it have come from those loving individuals who reacted to my last post? For sure. Will it have come as well from lifting up my eyes unto those hills that the Psalmist talks about, especially now that their trees have set their petticoats to flouncing? Very likely. And it also seems that the process of paying closer attention to everything outside myself will help. For example: The other night I sat parked next to a 100-foot stretch of bike path that emerges from a wooded glade to create a small ‘stage’ before disappearing back into the foliage. This path passes through a number of towns just north and west of Boston here, so in itself it is far from rural. In fact I found myself beside it in this parking lot because I had just met my grown daughter and her two babies for an early supper. And when I returned to my car afterward, the light of the May evening was just billowing so that I had to pause and watch as an ever-freshening stream of people passed. Here zipped past a whippet-thin cyclist curved like an apostrophe over his handlebars.Now here came an identically dressed brace of young women, high-stepping like a couple of drum majors.Now I watched a man lope by at an easy trot, plugged, like almost everyone I saw, into his ear buds.As I sat I saw that for ten or 15 seconds at a stretch, the path would be empty. And the sky was so blue. And the light was so golden.I watched as an older lady in a sari appeared. She paused as if winded, settled her fists on her hips, and called out repeatedly the name of an unseen child. It was like watching a play, for now, as if on cue, came the long-awaited child, a boy of perhaps five, zooming into sight on his little scooter to describe several small circles around his exasperated companion,  I watched these folks and others for some 25 or 30 minutes. I would have gladly stayed another 30 but the light was now changing, growing both more luminous and more coppery and I knew I didn't want to see it fade.So instead I came home, tucked away the memory and remembered again that as the old Irish adage says, it is in the shelter of each other that the people live - and find freshly, every time, a sense of peace. 

Bouncy No More

I wanted to write something about Mothers Day last week but lately I have felt put off by the idea of even opening up a blank page to create a post, and now it's been over three months. What has happened to me?I had an invitation 30 minutes ago to speak before a journaling group.I turned it down.I turned down two other offers too, in the last months. I'm just so tired of talking, tired of being a person who always speaks up, who thinks it's her job to make it a 'good class' for the people around her, as if I did as a young teacher, eager to make every minute count. These days, I often sit through whole meetings without saying a word. I find I would much rather listen.'And this is OK’ I've told myself. 'It's an ebbing of ego is all, which can only be good'.But now it comes back to me that near the end of my annual visit to my primary care physician last week, she asked me something as she was listening to my heart:"So," she said.  How's the writing?"I was slow to answer. “Well… I know I told you a year ago that I stopped producing the column…”“I remember. But beyond that?”“Beyond that, I.... I.. don't write anymore." The words alone caused me a pang."Oh, that's just writer's block," she said cheerily. “It’ll pass!”I looked down at my lap and remained silent then, leaving her to her tappings and palpatings. It was during that pause in the talk that a memory came back to me of an exchange I had had with some old old friends, my college roommates and co-member of the Class of a Thousand Years Ago, when we travelled to Italy together. Midway through the trip one of them said with a laugh, “So Terr, we just have to ask: What happened to that wicked wit we all remember? You're just sort of ... kind these days,” and laughed again, to show she loved me anyway.Looking up from my lap I related this freshly remembered exchange to my doctor who took the stethoscope from her ears and looked me full in the face.“Are you sleeping?” she asked.“Sure,” I said. “In fact, most days I can hardly get up." And I told how I stay in the bed, awake and looking out the window for 60 or sometimes 90 minutes until my husband gets up.“Listen to me,” she then said. “I get what your classmates meant. For more than two decades, every time you have come in here you've been practically bouncing, in high spirits, and full of stories. These last two visits I haven't seen that. At all. I think we have to consider the possibility that you have dysthymia, a term for chronic low-grade depression.”Normally I would have laughed, the way I did back in the 90s when she told me my bloodwork revealed hypothyroidism. "Hypothyroidism?” I had said. “What are the symptoms?” We looked up the condition on her computer and she swung the monitor around so I could see. “Low energy, sadness, sleep issues,” it read, along with 40 other unhappy signposts.I was almost offended at the time. “But you know me! “ I said back then. “Does my busy life sound as if it comes with any of these symptoms? And now you’re saying I have to take a pill every day for the rest of my life? What happens if I don't?”“If you don’t, you’re facing all of this and more,” she'd replied, indicating the screen.So, these 25 years later, I take the Levoxyl, which is no big deal. Last Friday though, the bloodwork from this latest visit came back, indicating that my level of need has increased. She has upped my dosage therefore and I guess we’ll see. Either that does the trick or  I'll need additional help.In the meantime I want to aplogize to any of you out there who have been wondering if I'm still here. I'm here. And from now on I'll be taking some advice I learned from the Recovery movement and fake it til I make it, which means,  “performing actions that are known to be positive even if one is not necessarily comfortable with them.” In other words “the mind may be willing, but the emotions may not be there yet.”I’ll do that now. I'll fake it 'til I make it. I'll try just ‘showing up’ which, after all, is what most people do every day, whether they feel like it or not.         

To Every Thing There is a Greeting Card

As the Good Book says 'to every thing there is a season, and a piece of merchandising for every purpose under Heaven.' This point was really driven home for on this special day of  February 14th, the day when guys all converge at a supermarket’s greeting card-and flower-displays to buy any card at all done in pinks or reds, any hunk of vegetation that could be construed as bouquet-like. I just saw one guy eyeing a bunch of broccoli, no word of a lie. I saw another slap down on the counter a bunch of roses so far past day-old they were brown at their every petal-edge. (“Hey, it’s the thought that counts!” he said to me, seeing me look first at his rusty bouquet, then up at him.)“The Thought” is the part Americans evidently have trouble conveying - or so it would seem, judging by the sheer size of the greeting card industry.What did we do before they had greeting cards to oil the social machinery? Can people even write letters anymore? If they could, they wouldn’t have on the shelves not just individual cards but a myriad categories for them, each set off with its own cardboard marker.I visited four card shops this week. First off, there are categories within categories for birthdays, both the single digit, double digit and triple digit kind; also categories reading “29th,” “Brother-in-Law,” “Step Mom,” and the wonderfully convenient “Blank Inside.” Under the umbrella of cards meant to communicate general fondness, I found “You Are Perfection,” “I Want To Hold You Forever,” and “Suggestive” (sample card: a cartoon pig saying “Talk dirty to me” to another pig.) Also, “Hurry Home Tonight” (related to “Suggestive”) and “Keep Your Childish Wonder”In a grouping I think of as “Troubled Waters,” you can find see “Let’s Work Things Out,” “I’m Sorry,” and “I Want You Back;” also “We’re Different but I Love You” (You Have a Tail?), “I Want to Know More” (Do You Have, Perhaps, an Udder?) and “Consider the Possibilities.” (The possibilities are clearly limitless.)Equally, there were whole shelves devoted to Things Beginning: among them categories for cards dealing with “New Baby”,” “New Babies” “New Job,” and “New Venture;” also “New Home,” “Adoption,” “New Grandson,” and “Baby Boy Religious".There are categories called “Get Well”, “For Extended Illness” and “For Shaquille O’Neil” (No lie. And under this one was a lone card: “Shaq and I Heard You’re Not Feeling Well.....”) They also had “Extended Voyage,” “Encouragement,” and “Goodbye”; “Thank You”, “Cheer Up” and “Cope”; “Clean Your Room,” “You’re Feeling Yucky?,” and “God Bless Your Daughter”I read lately of a service you can engage that will pick up your deceased in their van, treat him to a little hair gel and makeup, crate him up, and place him in a budget plot - all for a 'mere' $2,000. Pretty soon you’ll be able to avoid seeing the grieving family altogether. They’ll have drive-up windows where you can call up the dead person’s name electronically,  view his casket and be home and in your pjs room in 15 minutes. Even now you can just send a card, and several categories suggest themselves for this purpose. “Goodbye”; “Extended Voyage” and “New Venture” all come to mind.But the best category for all who think rented words are any substitute for face-to-facing it with another human being? “Blank Inside.” It works on every level.

Al Fresco Freezing, FLA-Style

So any vacation's a gamble, right? There's the good and then there's the bad. There's the mini-bar stocked with every drink/snack you can think of but who can fork over 15 bucks for a fistful of almonds? Who can spend 20 bucks for a mouthwash-sized hit of bourbon? These days as the bellhop advised us, if you but touch, never mind take out, any of these treats, boom, you're charged for it.I however am always ready to take the bitter with the sweet. Also, my standards are pretty low. All I had hoped to do on this getaway weekend was bask like a salamander on a small sun-warmed patch of sand.It didn't happen that way though, of course it didn't. When my mate and I arrived at this Florida's Coast hotel it was downright NIPPY, with 30mph winds gusting to 50, such that when we went on that first afternoon to get some lunch at poolside eatery, two waiters dashed over and wrapped us in towels, heads and all. We looked like the poor souls in the lifeboats in Titanic. I thought David looked especially like this. "Jaaaack! Ja-a-a-a-ack!" I croaked at him in my best impersonation of Kate Winslet calling for her blue-eyed lad shortly before she has to watch him sink down and down into the icy North Sea.Still, we were happy. From my point of view there could have been insects the size of butter plates bunny-hopping across the floor of our hotel room and I'd have stayed happy. We had fat terry cloth robes and fluffy white slippers and if we couldn’t quite SWIM, or even comfortably SIT in the poolside lounge chairs, we did have in our room both a Romeo-and-Juliet-style balcony as well as a big sliding door.For intervals while we were down there, we got to visit some dear friends but we spent the rest of the time here in our pretty room, reading our books just inside that wide sliding door and every few minutes glancing up to take in the lapping wind-tossed beauty of that blue, blue Gulf of Mexico. Ah!

The Dailiness

Always with the daily tasks of life! How they do bog us down and keep us from soaring up to the higher realms of thought! For me these tasks include: (1) Inspecting my toenails to make sure they haven’t yet starting turning into hawk's talons as they show every sign of trying to do. 2) Putting my contacts in, never an easy chore since I need to be able to SEE my eyes to do that and how can I see them since without having them in I’m like one of those giant eyeless worms that live in deep undersea caverns? (3) Taking my contacts OUT again and doing it before 10pm. After that hour they seem to get velcroed by teensy invisible loops to  - what? - a series of teensy invisible hooks living on my eyes?  But if I give up on the task it will only be to wake three hours into Dreamtime clawing at my eyes like poor old Oedipus clawed at his upon learning that all this time that foxy chick he’d been sleeping was actually his mom.So yes, it can be hard to keep up with the quotidian nature of our lives – unless, and this is a big unless.... you can figure out how to take pleasure in tracking them. Me, I love to record my daily tasks. Give me a planner and I am one happy camper. Here’s my planner for the week of the great freeze, which in our part of New England came accompanied with a whole lot of wind-borne snow. Look at those cancellations, ah! If there’s anything more fun than scheduling a task it’s discovering you don’t have to execute it!Then, once you have a few things in your planner you are ready to make your list. Here’s a list I made just last Sunday:Surprisingly I was able to actually DO all these jobs, right down to scoring some edamame at the Chinese restaurant without succumbing to the temptation of also ordering any of the ridiculously high-calorie Orange Chicken ‘n Cashew Shimmy. Even down to buying the forgivingly sized pants that I'll need this week when I have two nasty-looking growths removed from the part of my back where my waistbands all hit.The final satisfaction, of course, is writing down what you have done in a journal or a diary so that you can look back over time and be amazed at how much more productive you were in your 40s (or 30s, or 20s) than you are now.This entry comes from the week of that great cold and as I reread it here I see that I am now making entries quite different in kind from the entries I made in my diaries of yore, diaries I first began keeping the year I turned nine.Ah but the tale of those diaries will have to be a tale for another day I fear, as it is now time to approach the highly magnified mirror I keep in the bathroom, face the music and tweeze out these two new comical chin hairs.:-)

And So it Came

This year I got what for us was a good head start on Christmas. Three whole weeks before the day I bought the big tall tree, just as my son told me to do as he left for his post-Thanksgiving train: “Nine feet, remember!” he had called over his shoulder that Sunday night. And then, magically, there was this fine nine-footer riding home on the top of my car and what a beauty she looked to be, even though standing outside for 8 days still trussed in her plastic netting, she came to look less like a tree and more like an outsized tampon.My problem is my mate sees putting up the tree not as a task but as a kind of whimsical 'notion', a project we might get to it if the time should ever seem right. I, meanwhile, am more of a fretter; I like to get a thing DONE if I know I have to do it. Even at 6 in the morning I’ll hop up and get our bed 90% made when he goes out to the porch to get  the paper - even if I know the both of us are likely to get back in it. David couldn't be less like this. When I first met him as a college junior I distinctly remember him expressing the belief that if you postponed doing a thing long enough you might never have to do it at all, didn’t I realize that? Why write your paper early when who knows your professor might be dead by the time it’s due?In our house putting up the Christmas tree falls into that same paper-writing category...Every.Single.Year.Finally though, we did tackle the joint task of wrestling the thing inside, which is when things started going a bit sideways:For some reason I’m not as good as I used to be at reaching three feet in through those thick piney petticoats to hold the tree trunk stable AND SAY WHETHER OR NOT IT LOOKS STRAIGHT while far below me my man writhes around on the floor attempting to drive the stand's long skewers into its trunkWe stepped back for a look. Suffice to say, the tree was listing badly, 'tilting,' to use a more accurate word, every bit as much as this hardened little ball of PlayDoh we call Earth tilts on its axis.“That’s good enough for now, David genially opined even as he ambled back to the coach and his waiting book. "We’ll wait for a big strong guy to come by,” he added, meaning somebody who could pull it straight up out of the stand while he once again coiled around the trunk to screw those long metal rods into its pink and tender flesh.For three long days I racked my brain trying to come up with such a person, even as the tree’s top branches yearned beseechingly toward the topmost corner of the living room windows. I got so I couldn't look at it. I stopped going into the living room altogether until in a flash it came to me: I actually did know a big strong guy, two big strong guys in fact, a couple of dear-to-me high school seniors.I went and picked them up. My man dropped once more to the floor to loosen those long, long screws while they wrested the big heavy thing free, then held it straight up in the air for five long minutes while he made the necessary adjustments.And so it was done. Three days later we put on the lights. Though we seemed to be short a string or two, they looked just fine to us, anyway no worse than if a very nimble chimp with a stepladder had put them on.Then, two hours before the clock struck 12 to usher in Christmas Eve Day, our son arrived at South Station and, a brief Uber ride later, walked into our living room.He smiled that certain forbearing smile your kids send your way once they’re grown."Nine feet tall!” I yelled hopefully."It’s nice,” he said in a musing sort of voice.And do we mind that he undid the whole lighting job and did it again a better way? Not a bit. In fact now that I think of it his dad might have been right those many years ago after all. Maybe if I can learn to postpone things the way he does I can get out of it that whole Easter basket racket too. :-)

Good Times on The Year's Best Holiday

Back in the day, we used to get a free local turkey from my husband's work for Thanksgiving and for some reason the thing was always huge, more like a pterodactyl than a domesticated fowl, so huge that one year we had to tie the oven door shut and brace a chair up against it to hold the beast inside. I remember too the year when, taking some bit of turkey-roasting advice I saw in the paper, I cooked our bird breast side down for the whole time, only to extract, at the end of six hours, a roasting pan containing something that resembled a skeletal sunken ship, a sort of scaffolding of bones perched over a world of turkey fat and what could just barely be described as meat. If memory serves, that was also the year the whole roasting pan shot out of the oven and onto the floor.Ah, but does memory serve us very well, or are you, dear reader, not yet at the age where you tell a story about something that happened to you only to be wryly advised by a family member that no, actually that whole thing happened to her? Anyway, isn't it better sometimes if we look ahead rather than looking back?Who is to say?I know my sister and I still love looking back at the Thanksgivings of early childhood in our household of five grownups, four of whom were female and all of whom could be seen laboring away in the kitchen for a whole week leading up to the big day. Our grandfather meanwhile, as the sole male among those aunts and great aunties and our mom and our pretty Aunt Grace, sat in his easy chair smoking a cigar and reading biographies of the great men of American history. Though come to think of it I do remember hearing about that one Thanksgiving eve, when he did what he had said he would try to do and actually brought home the turkey  -  still attired in its longjohns as you might put it, in the form of hundreds of soft under-feathers that took forever to pluck out.  "How did you ever manage?" my sister and I squeaked in delighted horror as young adults which we were when we first heard the tale. "Ha!" she replied. "Well, the first thing we did was pour a few stiff drinks!")That ease-taking grandfather is gone now, as are the ancient great aunties. Gone too is our merry Aunt Grace, and also our funny and irreverent mom. I have my own children now and they have children themselves and I write this from a house that at 10am bears no scent at all of the cooking of a turkey. We are to eat at the home of one of our daughters, and our duty is light duty: We're bringing the beer and the wine and I am to make a salad (which is funny all by itself since really who eats salad on Thanksgiving? I mean, besides me and my strikingly slim, pure-foods-only sister-in-law?) Oh but wait I am almost forgetting! I am also to do the gravy because our daughter confesses herself shy about pulling off a good gravy and for sure I feel ready for that task. We're going over to her house at 1:00 but I have already set out my full-length chef's apron, as well as the special lump-defying  flour and the steel spatula for prying up the pan drippings. I have a pocketful of chicken bouillon cubes too in case we need to make gallons of the velvety stuff,  so I'm pretty sure I can do the task justice. Really all I need do is close my eyes and I can see - see  as if they were standing before me - the literal gravy-making movements of all those hard-working women in whose kitchen I spent one happy childhood.

A Strange Peace

A strange sense of peace has descended on me over these last few days, following, I should probably say, a strong desire to tear out all my hair. This happened because some robot somewhere hacked into my Gmail account, then showered a million droplets of spam in the direction of every last person in my Contacts. The account was promptly suspended by Google and, I was advised, on the page where one might plead one's case, that it could easily be three or even four business days before they got around to 'hearing' it.In the meantime how odd it is has been to look down at the phone I practically bring into my morning shower and see nothing waiting for me! There is such quiet all of sudden! And in all this quiet I am noticing things I had previously missed:I’m noticing how nice it is to wake in the morning and NOT see a lot of urgent headlines  summoning me from the little cigarette-pack that is the iPhone 6.I’m noticing how nice it was to look out my bedroom window at the dawn sky the other day and see a tiny silver dart of an airplane. It pierced the rosy clouds in its ascent from the oceanside airport next to close-crowded Boston with its jumble of buildings like the tall quilt-looking vanilla cookies you'd get as a kid when some kindly grownup thought to crown your scoop of as ice cream with a few. Why have I not spent ten minutes looking out at this slice of sky every day? I ask myself.I think too how simultaneously alarming and comforting it was for me that morning to look in the bathroom mirror a little longer than usual and discover my mother's very face looking back at me, though the lady has been gone these 30 years.I also had time to notice too a long silky hair I had never seen before, sprouting from a new place on my chin. With my new shorter hair and my now far more meager eyebrows I also had a shock: "Hold on!” I thought. “Am I actually starting to look like a man? Like maybe Paul Giamatti in his role as Sam Adams?"But no, I told myself at that point. If I am to be without the incessant pinging of  incoming emails for this interlude, then let me harbor thoughts less and silly self-involved.I walked back to my room then and opened the curtains wide.  My husband had left our bed at 4am to make a 6:30 flight across the country. I crawled back under the covers and looked out at the sky - just in time to see a second silver dart rising from the horizon-hugging clouds. "It's him! " I thought. "There he goes!"And isn't THAT a much better way to start the day than with that brackish tide of awful news? 

No Problem?

An erstwhile reader of my column has just advised me about a piece he just read in the Wall Street Journal about the use of the phrase "No problem” in place of "Thank you." This man remembered that I had written about this same custom myself few years back, and so I had, as I saw when I went hunting for it on the web. "No problem," one young waitress had told me back then when I thanked her for bringing my order. “No problem,”’ the young barista had said after I thanked him for my decaf latte.Now happy as I was to hear that it was 'no problem' for these young people to have done what they did, the fact remains that the transactions that brought us together in those two instances were, in fact, commercial transactions, in which one party offered a good or a service in exchange for pay from the other party. Thus, as far as I have always understood, the notion of a problem doesn’t enter into it.Consider, by contrast, another part of our common life, that of the daily commute. It’s darn hard to spend two or more hours on the road to get back and forth to your job week in and week out. It’s hard to have to stand out in the elements in wet or cold or sizzling-hot weather waiting for the bus that will get you there and back again. Ask any random group of adults what time they have to GET UP in the morning in order to get themselves and their family members fed and dressed and out the door to work or school and what you learn will back up the statistics: Americans are among the hardest working people on the planet. And yet you rarely hear them using the word ‘problem’ about what it takes for them to get to their jobs, so I have to ask: what’s with this ‘no problem’ phrase that has become the norm among so many younger people? I don’t mean to be grouchy here. It’s just that ‘No problem’ is the wrong response to ‘Thank you’ and don’t we all know that? Don’t we all remember the right response, the one we were all taught as kids? The right response to ‘Thank you’ is ‘You’re welcome.’ In Italy and Spain they say, ‘It’s nothing’ in response to a ‘Thank you.’ In Germany they use the word for, ‘Please,’ which, handily enough, also means ‘Thank you’, ‘Care to have a seat?’ ‘After you,’ and a host of other things as well.In English we sometimes say, ‘Don’t mention it’ when someone says ‘Thank you,’ which, come to think of it, feels a lot like ‘It’s nothing.’ So too, the German word 'Bitte' serves to say "You're welcome," as well as standing in for  ‘Please’, Thank you’, ‘Care to have a seat?’ and ‘After you.’‘You're welcome’ means ‘You are welcome to my help’, or, in these instances, ‘I am happy to be the one providing you with your coffee/ dinner. No matter if the person is not all THAT happy; we say ‘Thank you,’ ‘Please’ and ‘You’re welcome’ because it is courteous to do so; because it oils the social machinery.But enough beefing from me on a lovely October morning. Let me save my complaints for the next weekday morning when some postal clerk, who knows at a glance that I can name the entire cast of the Howdy Doody Show, tries calling me ‘Young lady’! 

Oh It's Cryin' Time Again They're Gonna Squeeze You

You're almost done at your doctor's office door when they drop it on you: "And of course you'll have the yearly mammogram before the end of the month?" chirped my primary care person last April, with the same merry tone as when she orders up the dread colonoscopy.Oh, I'd  go get the darn mammogram, of course I would - and I know I am lucky to be someone who can show up and fulfill this yearly obligation. Still, we all vividly remember what it's like, don't we ladies? The way the tech lifts and nudges those poor delicate tissues onto that cold glass plate? The mechanical squeeeeeze as she brings the second plate down upon them? The way she then tightens that diabolical vise to 'hammer' them flat as a couple of veal cutlets?  It's a never-changing ritual, only this time as I held my breath the way they make you do, the room started to wobble in my sight, causing me to begin my internal mantra of old,  "I will not faint, I will not faint..."I didn't faint  but this was the first time in many, many years that I had come so come close. It would be a real bummer if I had, since fainting right in the doctor's office means forever after they will label you as a 'faller' and snap a plastic bracelet on you advertising the fact to everyone in the place. This is the worst. If you have to faint you want to do so anonymously.In my childhood and teen years I got to do a lot of anonymous fainting: I fainted all the time in church, first going fish-belly white and then melting down in the pew until large male hands heaved me up by the armpits and hustled me up the aisle toward the back of the church, limp feet dragging behind me. I fainted when a doctor unfamiliar with wart removal burned two cigarette holes in my right arm, scars I bear to this day.I fainted once in the Men's Department of a fancy store and woke just in time to hear the manager say, "just drag her behind the counter" because you can't have a lot of passed-out people standing in the way of commerce.But looking back now I see that the most embarrassing lapse into near-unconsciousness occurred at my own wedding, up on the altar. Cocooned as I was in a complex wedding veil and a peau de soie gown with full-length sleeves that came to a point at the base of the finger bones, I felt my young self mist over with a sudden wash of fine perspiration. Ah, I can see it all before me even now: Here was the priest intoning away. Here were the wedding guests, a sea of blurry balloon faces out their in the congregation. My bridesmaids were there too but I was unaware of them in this moment of need.  The only help I could look to at all came in the person of my similarly young, similarly perspiring groom. We were each facing the priest and not each other so I had to whisper my SOS to him out of the side of my mouth, like a gangster."I'm going to faint! I hissed, my eyes on the priest and my face frozen into a death mask of a smile as we stood there holding hands as instructed.Fake smiling himself, he hissed right back. "You can't faint!" he said and punched the side of my leg, pretty hard too, under cover of all that silk.It worked. I didn't faint, we were officially joined in marriage seven minutes later and have remained joined, basically thigh to thigh, every day ever since.All of which leads me to wonder if I shouldn't bring HIM to my next mammogram to help keep me awake and upright. Though as I think about I'm guessing that even one quick look at this whole Inquisition-style process would have out cold and flat on the floor before the tech had time to even duck back behind her screen to start taking pictures.

How It's Done (not me however)

You Hate Us, We Get That.

We Baby Boomers have become one of society’s favorite piñatas, that much is obvious but why? Is it because we’ve always acted like our music was the best music? Is it because many of us still have all those heavy dark furniture 'sets' from the 70s and the kids are jealous haha?Really I think it’s because we rode such a long wave of prosperity when we were young. We acted like it was just normal when, as soon as our school days were behind us, lots of us said say sayonara to the folks and set ourselves up in funky little walk-ups with candles stuck in empty rosé bottles and wooden-bead curtains to separate our sitting area from the so-called kitchen. In the apartment my cousin and I sublet the year I was 20 the fridge we inherited with the lease was found to have, in the 4-inch thick ice cave of its freezer, many jagged shards of a broken whiskey bottle and a lone human hair. Even so, it was all ours and what joy it was to do your underage drinking in a place where nobody ever yelled you to cut out the foolishness and go do your homework. Those were the days all right.So if you guys coming along behind us envy that far more affordable life we had, well, I get that. I get why you're sore, but I have to ask myself: Why do you have to go after our CLOTHES? A person can’t turn around these days without seeing list after list of Fashion Don'ts for us Ike-and-overs. (And, of course 90% of these lists are directed toward us women, since a man in this age group can go out looking like one of the Walking Dead and nobody thinks a thing about it.It stings, kind of, in no small part because half the things on the list are things most of us ladies are still wearing.I speak of sleeveless or cap-sleeved shirts. These we're not supposed to wear because people will recoil in horror and be turned to stone by the sight of our upper arms.Also, a pair of shoes with a matching bag is now a major no-no. But didn’t we used to pay people to have the bag and shoes dyed to match the dress?And how about the fact that we're told never, ever to wear a fleece outside the house? Instead, the list makers say, we should wrap ourselves in "cool, slouchy cardigans," presumably over large loose ‘boyfriend shirts’ and never mind that this get-up is exactly what I wore in 8^th grade while pacing the floor and trying to memorize The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained for Mrs. Meehan in Fourth Period.To top it off there’s this most galling prohibition that makes it to every bossy list I have seen this season: We women over 55 aren't supposed to ever, no matter what, wear “neutral" pantyhose, which I first thought meant the really pale kind that make your two legs like a pair of uncooked sausages, because surely they can't mean those nicely tinted ‘Suntan'-hued L’Eggs that I have favored for the past 40 years?Alas, they can and they do. Instead of wearing any type of translucent pantyhose we're meant instead to pull on black or solid colored TIGHTS. Tights, like a babies wear over their diapers! Tights, like court jesters wear under their bloomers and inside their curly-toed shoes!  So now - what? - am I expected now to wear tights with a cocktail dress?Oh no, they say, heavens no, certainly not. In these cases we are invited instead to - get this - go barelegged, which to me is truly insane since what if it's freezing out? Or what if we have long walks or waits at a bus stop in our daily working life? And how, in the name of all that is holy, does it make sense for us 'elders,' who are asked to hide sight of our upper arms to then inflict on the world the veiny fireworks going off ON OUR LEGS?I’m on to these youngsters though. I know they’re trying to make us all crazy so they can lock us up, or put us by our millions out on a giant ice floe off the coast of Antarctica. I know they’re just dying to take a big old bat to the piñata that is us.Well, let 'em, I say. For revenge, we'll die and leave them all our dark old room sets with the faux-carved wood - like this one I just found on the internet - and see how they like that haha!

Dodging the Falling Anvil

Many Floridians feel that they dodged that old falling anvil in the wake of Hurricane Irma, and I know the sense of relief of my own family members in that area is immense.  Anyone lucky enough not to be flattened by the falling anvil,or the falling safe,or the falling piano......is bound to feel relief, though sometimes there is guilt too, or at least a heightened compassion for the folks who were not so lucky.I'm thinking of the people of Cuba, of St. Martin/St. Maarten and Barbuda and Antigua. I'm thinking of the people of St. Thomas and St. John – any of these places where things are very bad indeed right now, with no power and scant food and structures that look as though a gaggle of elementary school kids just walked away from a giant game of Pick-up-Sticks. The New York Times described things most vividly in their lead story yesterday: "The wind whipped the tops of palm trees around like pompoms in the hands of a cheerleader," it said in part. "The flooding in Key Largo had small boats bobbing in the streets next to furniture and refrigerators like rubber toys in a bathtub. Shingles were kidnapped from roofs; swimming pools dissolved into the ocean...."Here's a picture I took a couple of winters ago when, due to promised financial inducements, we got talked into staying at the Ritz Carlton in St. Thomas, a hotel the likes of which I have not been a guest at before or since. (I posted about it back then if you'd care to take the detour.) Until last week, this was their pool. That’s the ocean in the background of course, but the whole foreground is pool. I had never seen a swimming pool this lovely where, on the ocean side, the water brimmed up clear to the rim, as on a spillway, and did in fact trickle gently over.I don’t know what this pool looks like now. I only know the hotel's website advises the world that the hotel is closed until further notice.I can only think that the vast cleanup effort to get back to where folks were before the storm must be keeping them in that unhealthy-over-time state where the stress hormone cortisol just keeps pumping and pumping.I felt stress myself this past summer, though in a very minor key by comparison. Back in the first part of the summer while we were on a ship in Russia for two weeks, our hot water heater died, peed all over the cellar floor and left us, on our return, with a waist-high pile of travel clothes in such a state of UNcleanliness that it was practically steaming, like grass clippings in a compost pile. Lucky for us in the modern world of detergents, you can also wash in cold water.Then, some weeks later, we came home one day to find that the handle-slash-control panel of our dishwasher broken. Just broken and hanging off, so that for 15 days we were washing glasses, china and cutlery by hand until the repair guys could get the part shipped here from Louisville and they could come install it. That finally happened yesterday.The point is, we lived. We were fine.The real falling anvil that we dodged, we dodged at the end of August when, in their regularly scheduled walkabout, our local utility discovered a major leak in the gas going into our house.As it happened, we were away that day too, but a close, near-family member had offered to look after things for us.  When he walked up our street from the train station after work, he was greeted by the sight of a big white truck, a team of workers busily moving about our property and a trench two feet deep and three feet wide running in a wide gash from the far side of our street, over our lawn and clear over to the house's foundation.“Are you the homeowner?” they asked our kind caretaking friend.“No, but I can call them.”He did that and ten seconds later I was on the phone with the job’s boss.“The pipe from the street is very, very old and very narrow!" he said with what seemed like genuine surprise.  It's leaking," he said, "and we need to stay right here and fix it. Will that be all right?“More than all right!" I yelped, "and thank you SO much! I've been smelling gas outside my house since 2008! I called then and when you guys came you said it was just minor.”“It probably was back then, but it isn’t minor now,” he said. “Can we get inside and fix it? Will somebody be here?"Our friend agreed to stay, though he was just home from work and mighty hungry. He stayed until they were done some three hours later, a little bit after 8pm.So our house did not blow up which is what happens with a gas leak and we felt relief. My Florida-based sister and her husband did not see their home on the bayou destroyed, either by the winds or by that predicted  storm surge. Their kids' home was fine too, as they learned yesterday from the place where they sheltered after their mandatory evacuation last week. Miraculously, they none of them even lost power and maybe all that was because of prudent building, and strict codes, and careful planning.But prudent foresight will only take you so far in this world. At the height of Irma's fury on Sunday, when the winds were so strong they sucked the water right out of the Tampa Bay, that city's mayor Bob Buckhorn said it best:  "Everybody's got a plan 'til they get punched in the face." He was quoting Mike Tyson.Look more closely now at the sign in that cartoon of the falling safe here at the top. It does  "Warning," yes, but it also says "This is a Safe Area." As IF there could be such place on this old earth!

10 Tips at the School Year's Start

I guess we’re ALL back to school now, so how about this: How about we pretend I’m the teacher seated on one of those pint-size elementary school chairs and you guys are on the floor in front of me. Pretend we're sitting in a sunny classroom where dust motes from the chalk lazily circle. Pretend everyone’s tummy is nicely full and we're thus all feeling peaceful enough to take in some words of advice.In that hope, I offer the following:One, sit up front, whether your classroom is a literal or a figurative one, and let yourself be known, by both your teachers and your fellow students.Two, if the teacher writes something on the board and you're at an age where note-taking is the norm, then copy when s/he has said in your own notebook, even if it's just a few word. If your teachers are going to the trouble of setting down something large and neat enough to be read from 30 feet away, then you should go to a little trouble too.Three, make sure you actually LOOK AT this notebook after class. Even just glancing at what your teachers said and what you heard and copied down will help you begin knitting things together in your mind. I know someone who, for the Con-Law class she took in college, copied out all 27 Amendments to the Constitution and taped them at eye level around her dorm room, then read them twice a day as she brushed and brushed her waist-length hair. Does that sound old-fashioned? Maybe, but who can sniff at the reward of  a Magna Cum Laude served up with a side of Phi Beta Kappa? I can tell you the effort felt worth it to her!Four, don’t wait ‘til the last minute to write that term paper, composition or Compare-and-Contrast paragraph. Doing so will cause you to become unduly fond of what you have finally managed to get down on paper, just because it IS down on paper, and falling in love with your first draft is like growing fond of your shortcomings. If we are very lucky in life, the people who love us will grow fond even of our shortcomings over time, but that's for them to do, not us.  Waiting until the last minute will also cause you to panic and freeze as the deadline approaches, leading you to decide not to complete the assignment at all and take the F.Five, never give up and take F. Making the effort in life counts way more than you can imagine at this stage of things.Six, stay strong, as the saying goes. Remember who you are. Be mindful of the dignity of your family and of their struggles, and the dreams that have been dreamed for you.Seven, about ganging up on others, even "in fun": Do not participate in such behaviors, ever.Eight, Don’t engage in gossip, or listen to gossip. Ugly speculation about others harms everyone. It withers the soul.Nine, since sexual gossip is even worse, there is corollary: Do not speculate about what other people may or may have done or be doing in the sexual realm. If there was ever a topic that was none of your business this is it.And finally, Ten, never laugh when someone asks a question.  We're here to ask questions, the little questions and especially the big ones. So ask away and think hard with your well-rested post-summer minds. Then come back and teach the rest of us what you’ve learned. 

A Last Word

This picture illustrates in a woefully small way what the people of Russia went through in the last century, one such horror being this Great Patriotic War - World War II to us - that cost some 20 million of them their lives.The once beautiful city of St. Petersburg became Leningrad after Czar Nicholas II was overthrown in 1917 and it was renamed. Then, just 25 years after that, this 'Leningrad' became.... a graveyard: Hitler's Nazi troops laid siege to the city in early September of 1941 and held it by the throat until the end of January in 1944.For those 900 days, it was surrounded. Supplies of coal and oil were cut off. Then, because the siege began in the autumn, the cold weather began bearing down, bringing nights below freezing as early as in October.As winter set in for real, and with no heat source, the pipes all froze.There was almost no food. Potable water was scarce.And then there were the daily shellings.According to an account by someone who lived through this unimaginable time in Leningrad, the unlucky souls who collapsed in the streets in the morning were just a few more snow-covered mounds by night. Even after the ground thawed enough to allow for burial, the dead were interred without coffins, their families standing by hollow-eyed and in silence. One witness to this history reports that "on the whole men collapsed more easily than women, and at first the death-rate was highest among men." Was that because women have more adipose tissue you wonder? He goes on: "However, the women felt the after-effects more seriously than the men. They stopped menstruating and many died in the spring, when the worst was already over."People no longer smiled, it was reported. The city's four-legged creatures began to disappear, killed and eaten, even the rats. By some silent accord it was agreed that one would not speak of 'real' food. In the end, by the time the siege was lifted ,fully a million of the city’s residents had died.It is hard for us Americans to even imagine this kind of suffering. I have learned from reading my own family's diaries and letters that during that 900-day period here in the States my mother was pursuing her life as a hale and energetic woman running the family business, ordering all the food, hiring and managing staff and maintaining its 120-acre grounds. Her 70-something father was, for his part, still happily working as an attorney and a district court judge and keeping a journal in which he marked the comings and goings of the birds he looked for on his long strolling walks.It's true that there was some privation stateside: gasoline was rationed, as were shoes. Butter also 'went to war' so folks had to make do with oleo.But as far as I have been able to learn, people didn't go hungry ,and women didn't stopped menstruating because their bodies had shut down all functions not necessary for survival. In fact mother and my aunt were living so far from survival mode that they were still delivering babies well into their 40s.Here is my mom now, pregnant with her first child a few months after Victory over Japan Day in August of 1945. (VE, or Victory in Europe day had of course occurred the previous April.)  The only thing World War II did to her was to deliver to her doorstep the blue-eyed coast Guard officer who would one day become my father.I've been home from Russia for more than two months now but I still can't entirely process what I've learned about its history. There was this war, and then there was rule of Stalin who with his purges and the famines his decrees caused brought about  the deaths of another 20 million people - and 20 is the conservative estimate. Then there were the grim years under Khrushchev, and Andropov, Brezhnev and  Chernenko. Then came Gorbachev in the 80s with his talk of Perestroika and Glasnost but all that ended with his resignation when first Yeltsin and finally Putin took up the reins of authority.Now, those Russians who remember the Soviet era look back in a kind of sad wonderment at all that has changed in their country and in their lives.“The Soviet regime?" recalled one in Secondhand Time, The Last of The Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. “It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than what we have today. Worthier. Overall, I was satisfied with socialism: No one was excessively rich or poor; there were no bums or abandoned children. Bela Shayevich who was Secondhand Time ‘s English translator, called the book a kind of update of 19th-century Russian literature for the 21st century. “People read Russian novels not for the happy endings because there is great catharsis in great pain and then something that is sublime.” I get that.But then what happened? The abandonment. The Save Your Own Life phase of Russian living that arrived almost overnight. It had a devastating effect on the people:"Imagine working that hard, your whole life, only to end up with nothing. All of it took the ground out from underneath people, their world was shattered; they still haven’t recovered, they couldn’t assimilate into the drastically new reality. When they started selling salami at the privately owned stores, all of us ran over to ogle it. And that was when we saw the prices! This was how capitalism came into our lives... Wild, inexplicable avarice took hold of everyone. The smell of money filled the air. Big money. And absolute freedom—no Party, no government. Everyone wanted to make some dough, and those who didn’t know how envied those who did.""I get indignant whenever people start talking about Marxism with disdain and a knowing smirk," says another. "It’s a great teaching, and it will outlive all persecution, and our Soviet misfortune, too. It wasn't just about labor camps, and informants, and the Iron Curtain, it's a bright, just world, where everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others. "I find this last the most touching part of all: the feeling we all have about what our country could be. I think of a section from Reg Saner's short poem "Green Feathers" which expresses our universal longing:

In the early air we keep trying to catch sight of something lost up ahead,

A moment when the light seems to have seen us exactly as we wish we were.

Like a heap of green feathers poised on the rim of a cliff?

Like a sure thing that hasn’t quite happened?

Like a marvelous idea that won’t work?

Routinely amazing -

How moist tufts, half mud, keep supposing almost nothing is hopeless.

How the bluest potato grew eyes on faith the light would be there.

And it was.

We all still look for that light and we pray, like the small and buried potato, that it will one day reveal itself to our sight.