Scary Stuff!

It was late on a Friday at the discount drug, the right kind of night for conversation between a lone clerk and her one customer, me.

I had pointed to the cover photo of a fall magazine displayed on the counter. It showed a jack o’ lantern fashioned from a regular old pumpkin, but with twin rows of perfect little fangs and two large eyeballs hanging by a seeming thread from the two eye sockets carved in the its big orange 'face'.

 “Who carves a jack-o'-lantern this perfectly?” I asked.

 “Right,” said the cashier, also looking at the image. “You’d need to use a scalpel to carve that precisely!” 

“AND be Michelangelo!”

"Right!" said the cashier, ringing in a few of my items. 

“I know we’re midway through October but I keep hoping it’s still August,” I then said. “I'm don’t seem to be at all ready for the autumn stuff.”

“Totally,” said the cashier. “I feel bad. I haven’t done any fall stuff in years. When’s the last time I went apple picking?”

“I don't think I've EVER been apple picking, not in the real way where you pay money to do it,” I replied. “All I know about apple picking is from that Robert Frost poem where even in his sleep he still feels the rungs of the ladder against the soles of his feet.”

“I bet it’s been ten years since I’ve carved a pumpkin,” the cashier said sadly.

“The squirrels just eat them anyway. What a sight it was the last time I came upon that ruined cranium. I felt like I’d stumbled onto the set of The Walking Dead."

“How about doing a corn maze?” I asked. “Have you ever done that?”

“No, you know I never have!” she said. “What’s it like?"

“Well the whole corn maze thing was new to me until a few years ago.”

“And was it fun, making your way through it?” asked the cashier.

“Sure! Well, actually no, it was more scary than fun. “A corn maze is really kind of hard: You get lost.”

"Is the corn that tall?"

"The corn can be SO tall! We had no idea how to find our way out. And it got really cold. And then the sun went down."

"Jeez!" said the cashier. “It sounds like Stephen King’s Children of the Corn?”

"Horrible!"

"Horrible!"

"Let's never do any more corn mazes!” I all but yelped.

"I won't if you won't,” smiled the cashier, and handed me my bagged purchase.  

And with that I departed the store, glad for the merry exchange and resolving to carve up a pumpkin head anyway, and let those toothy little squirrels get in some noshing.

Written Last Fall - for 50th Reunion Book

smith 50th book

To give a full account of myself, the story has to go way back, to when my big sister Nan, our single-parent mom and I lived, together with a sheltering layer of three old folks, in a place where an actual lamplighter made his nightly rounds, and a tiny old man in a cap pushed a wagon crying, “Ra-a-a-a-gs! Bring out your rags!” It felt more like the 1920s than the 1950s, honestly, a feeling intensified by the fact that these elders were all born within a decade of Robert E. Lee's surrender at the Appomattox courthouse. (And what a thing that was, to listen to the musings of people who remembered the 1870s!)

When these dear old ones died, as they did within a year of one another, the house was sold, and we needed a new place to live. Lucky for us, our sweet Aunt Grace and her husband Jack invited us to come live with them in the new town they were just then moving to. There, for the first time, Nan and I lived a real Leave-it-to-Beaver-style life, replete with bike parades and ice-skating on the flooded vegetable patch in the Talbots’ backyard. It felt like heaven for four great years – until old demons returned to claim this uncle who, on the morning after my junior high graduation, cleared out the bank accounts and left us for keeps.

We were four females alone then, with creditors calling the house day and night in the wake of his manic spending. Mom and Aunt Grace seemed as upbeat as funny as ever at the kitchen table, maybe moreso with Uncle Jack gone, but I could sense that they were scared. That’s when I got the notion that I could save us all by getting a scholarship to a top school.

It was the first flash of insight I had ever experienced and it came with the realization that I had agency; I could make things happen.

A thousand high school all-nighters later, it did happen. I arrived on the Smith College campus where I was encouraged by most of my profs though not all, notably the one who covered my virgin effort for her with stinging comments.  “Whence this gratuitous observation?” she scribbled on my second page. (I still have the paper.) Her angry vehemence came as a shock to me since I’d always figured God liked it when we made observations of any kind, because it showed we were paying attention. How I got from that low point to a magna cum laude I do not know. I remember being so fearful of the sciences that when it came time for an oral presentation in my intro-level Geology course, I pretended to be so suddenly taken sick that kindly, no-longer-young Professor Schalk offered to give me a ride to the Infirmary on the handlebars of his bicycle. I still tingle with shame at that example of my low nature!

And then finally, there was Daniel Aaron, a giant in the field of American Studies, who just plain taught me how to write.

I cherished the friends I made there, and the way we gathered nights in the comically sloping hallways of dorm - an old frame house built 150 years before -  to compare childhoods in a semi-serious but-mostly-jokey sort of way. I cherished them too for not minding when I fell in love the summer before junior year and began taking off on weekends to be with the person I would marry three weeks after Commencement, the person with whom I have made a life.

That was when I decided to postpone further education for the sake of the really big bucks: the 'princely' $6900 a year I would earn as a high school English teacher in the Cambridge-adjacent city of Somerville. We rented a fifth-floor walk-up in Allston and David worked toward the MBA. But a year later, when, having been accepted into the Masters of English program at BU, I found I couldn’t bear to leave the classroom, and there came a second flash of understanding: I realized that nothing had ever felt more important to me than spending time with young people, who ever and always are doing the crucial work of growing a self that feels authentic to them. This remains true for me still and I continue to work with teens, principally through my town’s residential chapter of A Better Chance. Since 1982, I have driven to plays and movies and nights on the town with generation after generation of these young scholars in a vehicle with seven seatbelts. Now, for their sake, I am shortly to buy a vehicle with eight.

I adored having children of my own with their art projects and their Strawberry Shortcake dolls and that Cabbage Patch Kid I stood in line so long for and who, come to think of it, I’m starting to look like. I loved the long talks we got to have, sitting on the stairs or perched on the edge of their beds nights.

Still, I missed the wider communication and one day at naptime I opened my high school yearbook and saw a reference to my old dream of being a writer. I whipped up a quick 700-word bouquet of gratuitous observation and brought it to my local paper. “Can you do this every week?” The editor asked. I could and I did. I produced, marketed and sold this light personal observation column every single week for the next 36 years, and there came another insight: I loved comforting people and making them smile. I even worked in six years as a massage therapist to bring comfort and healing without using words at all.

In 1986, before the space shuttle Challenger exploded before all our eyes, I learned  I had made it clear to the finals in the Journalist-in-Space competition. I remember the morning my name went out over the wire. It was just before a local news crew arrived and I was in the bathroom watching David shave. “Do I really want to go up there?” I asked him. “It depends,” he said. “Do you want to see your name in the history books?”

I didn’t give a hoot about seeing my name in the history books and there was another insight: I didn’t care about accolades. and I never did go to grad school.

In my early years I craved attention; talked and wrote my head off; did all these magazine shows, ostensibly to promote my books but really just because it was such fun to improvise on live TV and radio.

I don’t do any of that now. Now I’d much rather listen than talk.

So here I am beginning upon this eighth decade of life. It can scare me to dwell on that that.

But my big sister Nan, who has been in Hospice since March of 2019 is still here and still the funniest person around: “Have you SEEN these diapers they put on me? They’re sized for Man ‘o War!” she said during one of my early visits.

Oh Nan, what will I do without you, you who earnestly told me, back in that first house, that girls got their periods at 12, and boys got theirs at 15? What will any of us do but keep loving whoever is ours to love?

Saga of the Sad Old Bathrooms

With all this COVID stay-at-home time, I've been circling around the rooms in this old ark of a house, where, for almost 20 years, even with TEN people living here, we had just one shower. We had to get up at 5:00 every day to squeeze in a mere six-minute sprinkling. That's when my spouse and I began to think remodeling.Usually, though, that was as far as we got - the thinking stage. And you have to know: these bathrooms were bad, with tiles done in weird unearthly colors, one a strange green like the nasty tongue-coating mint-flavored Milk of Magnesia with fixtures the exact queasy hue of Silly Putty.They dated back to the 1940s, which meant the strangely off-plumb sinks stood on skinny metal legs and were topped by medicine cabinets the size of cereal boxes. Their potholder-size wall tiles were ancient rectangles. Every few weeks, despairing perhaps of their out-of-fashion lives, first one and then another would pop out of its dry frame of grouting to smash itself silly on the floor tiles which, like ancient petrified Chiclets, kept lifting from their crumbling matrix to affix themselves like wee clinking ice skates to the bottoms of our showered-dampened feet. One friend, on seeing the awful truth about these rooms, delivered herself of the opinion that we were true saints, as otherworldly as Mother Theresa. “You’re so... non-materialistic!” she had exclaimed - by which she meant, “Gad, what crummy bathrooms.” And she hadn’t even used the one with the famous Toilet That Tilted, which, if sat upon too quickly, would give its shoulder a quick porcelain shrug and flick you off like a horsefly.But it isn’t that we were so ... other-worldly, so evolved. Our bathrooms were crummy because younger, pushier members of the household clamored for changes in their bedrooms, thus sucking up all their parents’ energies in the home-improvement department.First, it was one of our daughters, then 12. Suddenly, she despised her peach-colored bedroom. She wanted to spatter-paint it, she thought. I went along; masked every inch of molding and baseboard and painted the whole room white, walls and ceilings both. I tarped up the floor. Then, at the appointed signal, the two of us pried open four cans of bright primary-colored paint, dipped our fists clear to the knuckles in the vivid goo, and heaved it by the handful in every direction. It actually looked pretty good. (And boy was it fun!)Not two springs later, our then-sixth-grade son became desperate to redecorate his room. He said he couldn’t even study in it anymore; the wallpaper was that embarrassing. (Teddy bears in cowboy hats: we couldn't blame him.) He thought instead, a kind of God’s Eye View would make a nice decorating motif.First, we steamed off the old paper and pulled up the rug. I painted the walls pale blue and he hand-sponged them with fluffy white 'clouds'. Next, I made the ceiling a deep indigo, as directed, so he could paint upon it the nine planets, each in its proper relation to the sun.The whole project cost me three solid weeks of personal time and a permanent kink in the back from the night I knocked the black paint over and created an oil spill to rival that of the Exxon Valdez.But hey, the kid was happy. He spent all his time up there from then on. We would hear him from our own room, nights, zooming across the bare floor in his new desk chair with the wheels. And isn’t that a perfect metaphor for parenthood?  Your kids above, redecorating your world and sailing along among the stars; you down below, trying to limp to a crooked sink on rocky Chiclets. 

A Salute to Them Both

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

The Rumblings Abdominal

Over the past couple of years, my eyes grew so heavily hooded it was as if I was peering out at the great Street of Life from under a pair of heavy canvas awnings. Thus, late last month, I had an operation to open these peepers up a bit.

Everything went swimmingly the surgeon said, and so, five hours after the initial scalpel cut, he sent me home - with an Rx for a 10 mg dose of Percocet, which, besides some acetaminophen, holds within it a small but mighty hit of Oxycodone.

These pills I took in strict moderation, choosing to take only the one-, and not the two-pill dose at a time and stopping cold turkey after just five days. I still felt pretty crummy of course, and my eyes stung. I couldn't bend over, lift anything weighing more than a few pounds, or even read or look at screens. And so my husband and I decided that, come the weekend, we would seek a change of scenery. We would drive the hour and 40 minutes north to our summer place where we could curl up with our new kitty, stream some good shows and look out at the frozen lake.

Now I had not been outside at all in the ten days since my operation, but the morning of our planned trip I felt the need to join three friends in doing an errand of mercy for a fourth, very elderly, friend. And so I slowly dressed and, glad to be out at all, drove to meet these three, one of whom called out to me as she crossed the parking lot.

“Should you really be here?” she exclaimed, knowing of my surgery. “And also, WHY are you dressed like this?!” she added, her eyes sweeping down over what turned out to be one very ill-considered getup: a silk blouse, a crepe skirt with a voluminous hemline just brushing the tops of my high-heeled boots, and the fanciest coat in our front hall closet. “I mean, are you going someplace after?”

Well, I was going someplace, of course: to the lake, later, but first home to meet up with David, there to give the kitten a small palmful of kibble before settling her in the cat carrier for her journey on my lap, and finally to visit a drive-through for burgers to go. BUT, I told my friend, the far realer truth was I had dressed up just to feel better.

And mostly I did feel better, at least for the first third of the journey. David and I talked companionably, and I nibbled at lunch, balanced over the cat carrier that held our soundly sleeping kitten.

And then it all went south.

The little cat opened her eyes just as a certain.. scent reached our nostrils. It was a mild scent, reminiscent of the meek scent of a newborn’s diaper. Alas, she then began crying out,

Something was coming.

It was coming.

It came.

We sped like Roger Rabbit in his roadster to the highway’s nearest rest area, me whispering “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” into the cat’s wee triangular skull. Because I just knew that her troubles followed from a nurturing flaw. I knew that the only other time I had given her kibble - as the vet had said I could do now and then “just as a treat” –  she had had what appeared to be a kind of painful diarrhea that caused her to cry out just like this. 

And now it had happened again.

Once we had reached the rest area, I pulled the poor creature out of her foul prison and set her on the floorboard in front of the passenger seat, there to be looked after by David, while I shot into the Ladies Room and did what I could to dab at the many stains and pawprints on my silky blouse, my fancy coat, and that gorgeously wide crepe skirt. I made a spectacle as horrifying as the raggediest of the ragged Walking Dead, and people were shrinking from me, I could see, but what else could I do? I crawled back into the passenger seat and cradled the kitten in my arms, David doing 80 because you can go that fast in New Hampshire.

Nestled up against me, she went right to sleep, tummy up and legs splayed. After a while, in despair and alarmed by this new immobility, I whispered to David in mournful tones, "I think I've killed her." “Nah,” he said back. “She’s just worn out.”

Of course, he was right. She was just worn out. And once we reached the refuge of this house up north I was able to give her a bath, hose and scrub the holy hell out of her cat carrier, bag my formerly fancy outfit for later consideration by the dry cleaner, and treat myself to the world’s longest shower.

So all of that was Story One.

Story Two commenced at the end of that peaceful weekend when I met my daughters for a fun dinner out - only to find I couldn’t eat a single morsel, or concentrate, or say much.

I was just as sick the next day, and the day after that, or for all three of the days following. Finally, 18 very long days after my eye surgery, I began to both faint and throw up, a winning combination in anyone’s annals of illness.

“For heaven’s sake get in here to the hospital!" cried my PCP when finally I called her. “You need to be evaluated!"

David came home from work and into the ER I wobbled, to do my seven hours of penance among the suffering.

There were people coughing, people in masks, people spitting up and people passed clean out. As far as I could tell, though, I was the only one with blood puddles under me legs.

Long story short, after a CT scan with contrast and various other ministrations, the docs decided to admit me to the ER's observation unit 12 stories up. I felt I had died and gone to heaven. From the rag-and-bone shop of the ER, I had ascended to the hospital's uppermost floor, with a twinkling view of the Boston skyline.

I got to stay in that room for two blessed days, and though they discharged me before I was altogether well, I have done the remainder of my healing at home – or to be utterly candid, at home for two days and then in the cozy stateroom of a Viking cruise ship whose itinerary loops all around the Caribbean.

Both David and I have treated these 8 days as a rest cure. We pad about on deck, take gentle walks on land, eat amazing meals and toddle back to our cabin for yet another nap.

This - tonight - is our last night on board. Tomorrow we fly home to that new little cat of ours who has been well cared for by not one but two sets of family members nice enough to have actually MOVED IN in order to look after her.

I can’t wait to see her, keenly aware as I now am of our connection. For are we not all meek small creatures, utterly dependent on the intricate workings of our bodies to go about in the world? We are indeed, and in this connection the famous limerick comes to mind that gives this post its title:

I sat next to the Duchess at tea.

It was just as I feared it would be:

Her rumblings abdominal 

Were simply phenomenal 

And everyone thought it was me.

Well, it was me, this time.

The upside is that I now keenly sense my commonality with all beings, and I am content. Sure, my eyes still sting a bit and yes, some bruising persists. But these eyes are OPEN! – enough to see that whatever further surgeries await me in this life I will never, ever, again take the fiendish little pill known as Percocet.

See? My eyes DO look better, don't they? ;-)

A Crummy Cook Gives Thanks

A Facebook friend posted the night before Thanksgiving that she was really grouchy just then and wondered if anyone else was feeling that way too. I was, boy. I was feeling super grouchy though I didn't post as much, being at the time too grouchy to join in the spirit of generosity that characterizes Facebook at its best.I had a list of good reasons for my grouchiness that night, or so I told myself. For one thing there were the muscle cramps I keep getting as I sleep, which make me dread the night as much as the parents of colicky newborns do. I LEAP from the bed every time one hits to put weight on the troubled limb, even knowing that one of these days I could accordion flat down into a human puddle, like those collapsible tin drinking cups the Scouts used to use on camping trips.There was also the tedious chore of food preparation, a task I have not enjoyed since the Seventh Grade when our poor Home Ec teacher tried to teach me and 29 other snickering 12-year-olds how to make Prune Whip.

There was the personalizing of 200 holiday cards that I'd spent the previous six days working on. I wish I could just sign our names and be done but I can't seem to do that any more than I can plunk a big box of Count Chocula down on a dressy Thanksgiving Day table.

And finally, there was the way I looked just then, in worn-out sweat pants gone in the waist, a hand-me-down man's shirt in which I look like the old dad in Modern Family, and over it all an apron from a decades-past college reunion embroidered with an image of Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz.Well, I knew that much: I wasn't in Kansas anymore, if Kansas is seen as Martha Stewart’s version of the run-up to Thanksgiving Day.My husband David had gone up to bed before 9. I minded that and wished desperately to join him but instead stayed downstairs by the kitchen bingeing past episodes of This Is Us and inscribing another 40 Christmas cards while a slew of wee laboriously peeled onions seethed on the stovetop. (I'd been too late with my shopping to find the kind in a jar that comes all cooked, dammit.)I worked and I worked and finally at midnight thought The heck with this, pulled off the apron and crawled into bed.The next morning I spun up now less three bowls brimming with greens and various toothsome mix-ins. I made the bechamel sauce for the onions and blobbed the whole sucking lava-thick mess into a chafing dish even though at that point it looked to me like nothing so much as a mixture of Ping Pong balls and Milk of Magnesia.I spread all these dishes out on our kitchen counter and texted a picture of them to our daughter Annie, along with the "caption" Three Salads and a Funeral", the funeral being what I had come to think of as my Creamed Onion Surprise. She in turn texted back lovely pictures of the three holiday tables she had set up for the whole family and the next thing we knew we had set out Over the River and Through the Woods to her house. My failing Merit Badge contributions were added to the feast and we all sat down to eat on the all-too-short remains of the waning, amber-and-amethyst-colored afternoon.In other words, the sun rose and the sun set on that day, mere hours from Decembers' start, and we looked, and saw that it was good. 

On Being Backed Up By Your Mom

I get such a kick out of this picture; I don’t know why. I can't recall my own mother backing me up like this when I even metaphorically stuck my tongue out at anyone. Parent-child solidarity was rare when I was a child. Most people my age go on about how they got punished twice for wrong-doing, once by the teacher who discovered them at it, and then again by their parents when they got home at night.Come to think of it though, my mom wasn’t like those parents either, and actually may have BEEN more like the filly-mare team pictured here. For one thing, she was twice as old as all the other mothers in my Second Grade class. She'd seen some hard things in her life and at age 50 was not about to let anyone push her kid around. For another, as I gradually realized over time, she had a wee bit of a problem with authority and liked nothing better than to challenge it whenever she had a chance.I say this because two months after my seventh birthday I got kicked out of the much-becalmed convent school my sister and I attended - for talking, of all things. And I don’t mean I got sent to the Sister Superior’s office. I mean I got hauled out of my little nailed-down desk-and chair combo by my scarlet-faced teacher, handed an empty cardboard box and told, "Pack your books! You don’t go here anymore!” Out of all patience, the good sister threw my coat at me and told me to go stand alone at the abandoned edge of that urban schoolyard under the darkling shadow of the elevated train while she had the main office call my mother to come fetch me.I stood there and stood there. "What will I do now?" I remember fretting through my tears. "I think I'm too little to get a job!" And then I saw my mother bounding up the hill of the school grounds in our goofy old station wagon. She took me home all right, but the next day she brought me back and, on encountering the young nun there by the doorway, hopped from the car and strode right up to her.  "See HERE!" she began. "A child who talks in class is a child who is BORED!" and what could this green young nun say, especially since it did really kind of look as though my mother was actually sort of lifting her up by the snow-white bib of her habit?Anyway, my mother saved me, even though I didn't faintly deserve saving. Because the truth is, I did talk, endlessly, to the kids in the seats to the front, back and sides of me. I was guilty as charged. I have always suspected that Mom knew that as well as I did, a fact that remained unspoken between us for the rest of our time together on this earth.The funny thing is, her doing that for me made me more, rather than less inclined, to stay on that straight and narrow ever since.

Get Back to Work, You

On a plane ride home from Tampa, I saw a giant of a man in the seat in front of me who wore such a skimpy tank top that I had a chance to count every one of the thousands of shoulder and back hairs visible to me.Then, on that same flight, a mere 30 seconds after the pilot turned off the Fasten Seat Belt sign, a woman in one of the backmost rows began shouting “Jesus Christ,  will you people MOVE!”Later, as we were all proceeding along the lengthy peristaltic trek to Baggage Claim, I saw at the bar of one of the airside eateries a youngish dude in a cowboy hat who kept shoving his napkin up under his sunglasses as he wept and wept while talking on his phone.These were all things I noticed in one three-hour period.It has literally been months since I have come to this blog to write down anything at all, whether happy or sad. Suffice to say it was some summer. But now, finally, I think I’m ready to begin again, maybe because of the kindly dermatologist I saw for the first time just before that flight. He asked what I did for a living so I told him I had taught high school English in my 20s, and then added with a look that was unmistakably nostalgic, that for 36 years I had written a weekly newspaper column.“Had written?” he asked .“Yes,” I sighed. “A day came, kind of out of the blue, when I felt I just couldn’t do it anymore. Writing a weekly column is like having to produce a term paper 52 times a year, I could also have quoted author Sidney Sheldon's observation that a blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.It was at this point that the nice dermatologist said something that has echoed in my mind ever since. “But of course you still write, don’t you?” he asked, and I literally hung my head. “Um, well...” I stammered, shamefacedly – and felt lucky to get even those two words out.You know how when we were kids the grownups would sometimes say, “Let that be a lesson to you?” Well, I let that moment be a lesson to me. And it was only days later on my trip from Tampa to Boston that I suddenly noticed these three people I opened with above.Why was the cowboy crying? I would never know. You can’t intrude on private grief by going up to someone and asking but still: I wondered.Why did that mountain of a man wear what amounted to an above-the-waist thong on an airplane? Did he not feel embarrassed, the way I would feel if, say, my travel companion suggested I pull out a razor and start shaving my armpits? (Shaving on a Plane, now there's an idea for a new trend!)And I wondered even more about the yelling woman at the back of the plane who by now had elbowed her way to just two rows back from me. “Why don’t you go in my place?” I said to her.She looked at me quickly, maybe to see if I was being sarcastic.I wasn’t. “No, really,” I said. “I’m in no hurry.”“It’s just that I get panic attacks,” she said. “I have awful claustrophobia.” And I thought yes maybe she does, because hadn’t I noticed her at the outset of the trip joshing good naturedly with the people around her as she was stowing her bag?I had indeed. And maybe I would not have ‘seen’ her at all if that lovely doctor had not metaphorically lifted my chin, thus encouraging me to keep on doing what I so clearly love doing, that is noticing things and writing down what I notice.  Maybe, speaking of God, doing that is even a kind of prayer.

On the Road.. er, Ship

Water travel is always so broadening, especially in the hips. Especially if you’re spending nine days on a Viking Riverboat cruise where the food never stops, even at breakfast, what with the stout coffees and delicate teas; the fresh omelets and smoked fish and sausage; the veggies both raw and cooked; the breads and rolls and croissants; the cereals both hot and cold; the bowls of berries and the platters of sherbet-colored melon; not to mention the juices from every kind of fruit Eve ever thought to toss in her Garden-of-Eden blender.This tour I set out on last month made its way through the Netherlands and into Belgium. Some of us also took the optional excursion as well, to visit World War I battlegrounds near the border of France. (After such indulgence on board, it felt only right to bear witness to the suffering the people of these lands endured during the bloody century just before this one, and I can say more of that in another post.There in Amsterdam on that first full day, I learned about this old, old city that, staggeringly, saw over 17 million visitors last year. While threading through some of its 165 canals I learned too that it is home to people from 181 nations if you can picture it. I can't, as my own list of the world's nations stops at around 40.It has a population of 850,000 people, 40% of whom are under 30 and there’s a frightening thought. I mean, what if these youth kick off a real virus of a border-crossing movement to take out all us oldsters, wallowing in our nifty AARP benefits and discount movie tix?  What then? Oh, admit you’ve considered the possibility. I mean can’t you sometimes just feel them behind you in the subway stations, waiting ‘til no one’s looking and shoving you in front of the train, Frank Underwood style?)Still, they’re pretty adorable, the young, and here in Amsterdam especially where they’re all the time wheeling past on bicycles like so many American tykes in the great era of Hot Wheels. Sure, they drink and get high and amble over to the Red Light District to check out the patient ladies sitting bare as newborns in their cozily furnished display windows. And yes, in a typical year the city has to fish some 12,000 bicycles out of the canals, tossed there in moment of youthful high spirits. Nonetheless I am heartened by the sight of them. At the AnneFrank House there are at least as many young people as older folk waiting in line to get in. At the Rijksmuseum too where all the Rembrandts are kept. They are not innocent of history, the young people here. They know what has transpired here in this fallen world.One crisp morning I stopped for coffee at a Starbucks with a whole plaza of outside tables. It was a place overflowing with both older people like me and with the younger too in their practical backpacks and their jaunty scarves, and as I sat among them all in a freshening breeze, I thought this is what peacetime looks like. For if this isn’t what people the world over don’t want I’ll eat my hat as the old fogies used to say: What we want is only to sit together, the young and the old and the in-between, the babies, the dogs and the toddlers too, and feel the blessing of each passing moment.I thought all this. Then, it being almost time for another storied meal onboard, I trotted the quick mile-and-a-half quick back to the ship. 

Travel Don'ts from a Hapless Tourist

A few things you’d best NOT do when traveling for ten days to countries where you don’t speak the language: One, fail to pack a warm enough coat; Two, fail to pack the most important hair product in your bristling arsenal of hair products because you foolishly believed the cruise line when it said no blow dryers or flatirons; and Three, scratch the living daylights out of the oh-so-delicate tissue protecting your eye, necessitating a trip to an eye doctor with whose staff communication was impossible given the language barrier.But let me take these step by step, not necessarily in this order.I’ll start with the forbidden hair care items about which the cruise line was as primly stern as the evil governess in a 19^th century novel. No, you may NOT bring your own electric appliances, heavens no, it said the literature they send out ahead of time say. The current, you know. The strain on the ship’s energy sources. Anyway, they sniffed, you’ll find one of those leaf blower hair driers right in your stateroom.But the problem for me, see, is that with the type of hair God gave me I have never been able to get even an approximately normal look by wielding a round brush in one hand and some honking-huge drier in the other. Instead I have to use the kind of drier that has the brush attached right to the heat source, the kind that were designed for men in the great ago of disco. (Think John Travolta’s hair in Saturday Night Fever.) Most of the women onboard this Viking longboat sported fabulously fluffy and /or shiny hair styles come the Cocktail Hour and the elaborate dinner with all that complimentary wine that the waiters kept unstoppably pouring. I can’t imagine how even one of them managed to look so great when here I was at these events looking like the homeliest Chia pet on the block.Next, there was the issue of the warm-enough coat I had failed to bring which didn’t seem as it was going to be a problem when I unpacked that first night onboard - until it turned out that the weather report for the Netherlands and Belgium, which had PREDICTED temperatures in the low 60s with partly cloudy skies actually MEANT to say low 40s with a nice-two-for-one combo of pelting rain and hail. After one day-long walking tour on Saturday I couldn’t have said I had hands at all. You could have cut off all my fingers and applied nail polish to the bloody stumps and I wouldn’t have known the difference.And finally, there was the wholly unanticipated visit I had to make to the eye doctor in Antwerp after, in an effort to remove the contact lens in my left eye, the darn thing just would not budge. This was at 10 at night after one of the fancy dinners with music and trivia games in the lounge afterward. I dug and I dug  ‘til the white of my eye turned dark red. See, I just knew the lens was in there and had rolled up into that part of my brain where I keep the multiplication tables and the names of all the major rivers in the world.So the next morning I went to the ship’s concierge. He called a local ophthalmologist to make me an appointment. When the hour drew near, he called a taxicab to take me to the office of this good doctor.  Who peered with the standard blinding scopes and strobe lights into my eye said that whatever lens has been in there during that last elegant dinner was in there no more. Which means that what I had actually done was to cross-hatch with dozens of tiny slices the whole white of my eye. Death by a thousand cuts, in other words. But HOW after 30 years of daily putting in and taking out these single-use contacts, could I miss the fact that, before taking out the contact in my right eye, I had already taken out the contact in the left one?All I can think is, must have been the wine. :-)There'll be more to say about this wonderful trip in future blog posts. I just had to get the nonsense part told first.   

She Dug Up Her Mother?

I just read an article in The Times about the subject of ‘serial’ memoir-writing that names author Kathryn Harrison, who has penned a number of autobiographical works over the course of her life. At one point she is quoted as saying she knows she needs to write yet another memoir when a perspective on her life becomes 'an obsession'. For example, she writes, "It was only when I was on the phone with the funeral director out in Los Angeles, asking him to dig my mother up, burn her up and send her to me, that I thought to myself, ‘You’re behaving weirdly now. Perhaps you should start taking notes.'" The result: The Mother Knot, a book in which she finds peace of mind about her challenging relationship with her parents by scattering at sea her dead mother’s ashes.This topic of trying to figure out - and write about - what happened to you really hit me as I read about it just now because it's what I have been doing for 40 years: namely repeatedly beginning upon - and repeatedly not finishing -  a memoir of my own, filled with the often dramatic turns that both my life and the life of my parents and grandparents took over time.I myself have never once thought of having my mother's remains disinterred. Far from it. I like thinking of her in that old cemetery.  "Oh mom! You love that pale violet suit that you're wearing still! " I think even now, more than 30 years after she left us in such haste. I picture her there and recall how, on the cold winter day we left her on that little hillside,  I bent and scooped up a handful of the dirt that had been dug from the open grave. My cousin saw me, sidled over and said, "WHAT on EARTH are you going to do with THAT?"I didn't know the answer to that. I just know I needed it and I have still, in a slender glass vial. It is the more dear to me because it is dirt from the same grave where my grandfather has lain since 1958, with my sister and I looking on in our little Mary Janes and our new white gloves. It is dirt from the same grave where his bride lies, the young woman who was my grandmother, though neither of us had the chance to enjoy that bond since she died in the impossibly long-ago year of 1910.Having this vial of earth comforts me yet, as does the fact that I still have the bright blue blouse my mother was wearing, all dressed up and feeling fine, when she died in my living room in at her own 80th birthday celebration. I still have the little purse she was carrying that December afternoon. I still have her cane. So much happened to her, both as a child and as an adult. So much happened to her two parents. How can I not wish to get it all down on paper, and say how it affected me, and how these effects have played out in my own life?One day last year when I told two dear-to-me 16-year-olds only a part of this story their eyes widened in near-incredulity I suppose because truth really IS stranger than fiction and who among us, when young, can believe all that will happen to us in life?Will I ever get it all down in words then? I have less energy than I once did so I have begun to doubt that I ever will, and maybe it doesn't matter. I had a dream shortly after my mother died. In this dream, the two of us were trotting down a wide set of stone steps together, creating that rhythm people fall into when, sure of foot, they take on such flights of stairs. Halfway down, I looked over at her in surprise and said to this woman who in life saw most poorly and could walk only with a cane, "Mom! You're running!""I know!" she called back, still mid-trot. "I'm not old anymore!"It was a dream so vivid I'm not so sure it even was a dream. Maybe the idea of linear Time is a clumsy fabrication, the best we could do with our tiny minds. Maybe there is no Past but only an eternal Present, in which case why write your rueful memoir at all? 

For Bobbie at Year's End

The Christmas I was 9, our mother began an annual practice of giving both her kids a daily diary, which, for the next three years, I virtually never wrote in except to scribble “Had Gym today” on every Tuesday that school was in session.My older sister wrote in hers though. “Got a horse today,“ Nan fibbingly scribbled on one page of her own personal journal, and so I made a similar entry .Then, when she penned “my horse is expecting” some few days later, I told the identical whopper in my journal and never mind that these two facts could not have BEEN further from the truth for two children living (together with their mother and three ancient folks all born before the Election of 1876) on a narrow city street that trolley cars screeched past both day and night. The only thing that was true between the equine world and us was that we maybe accidentally smooched the televised images of Spin and Marty’s horses while going for the two Disney idols themselves. To put a finer point on it, kissing the TV screen during the Mickey Mouse Club show was basically the most adventurous thing either one of us did back then. So, apparently we thought it best to make stuff up.But then, when we were in Sixth and Fourth grade respectively, our sweet resident old people died within 15 months of one another. And so, invited to live in a new city with our Aunt Grace and Uncle Jack, Mom closed up and sold the old house and moved there with us, to a street with no trolleys, no lamplighter at dusk, no dusty elderly man with a pushcart bleating “Raaaags!” in an effort to collect folks’ unwanted textilesI did write in my diary in this new place, which to Nan and me resembled nothing so much as the set of a 60’s TV show with, instead of back alleys and in-ground garbage pails, there were kids on stilts and pogo sticks playing right out in the street. There were tough little crab apples for hurling at one another in the great The-Boys-Against-The-Girls wars, and endless games of kickball ,and skating on the crusty mirror of ice that Mr. Talbot conjured up every winter using just his flat backyard and a garden hose. THEN my entries were action-packed, all right, like this one when I threw my first party:But they only became more “inner” when I fell in love.Because in those days the Church said that kissing for more than five minutes was a Mortal Sin, I became haunted by a letter-of-the law-mentality that lurks just under the surface of most of my entries of my Middle School and High School years. I look now at the record of all that angst - about my immortal soul, and my homework, and whether or would do well enough in school to get a college scholarship - and how I do feel for that young girl drawing at the top of the diary’s pages a heart for the kissing, a church steeple to signify I had gone to Confession, a pair of googly eyes for the all-nighters I pulled trying to get those A’s!At age 13, I developed a friendship with a girl so much like me that we would read one another’s diaries at the end of every year. Thus, Bobbie saw it all, right up to the time, when, still a ‘mere girl’, I fell in love for keeps, and decided together with this ‘mere boy’ of a guy that we would marry as soon as college was over.Below is the letter she wrote me after reading my account of my very last year of life as an uncoupled person. It is a letter I found to be so loving when I drew it from between the pages of that year’s diary just now that I thought I would share it here. Here's what wrote, in long-ago 1968, as she returned that year’s volume:

"Here you are, Terry dear. I will no longer read entries about the Aprils-Junes-Septembers in Terry’s life and you, I’m sure, will stop writing them if you haven’t already. Such a progression from the scrawly writing of the young, young Terry, and then Mike in eighth grade, and Nan’s boyfriend, and that near-death experience when she gave him the Ex-Lax valentine! All that and the pink and golds of heaven and on to next-door Dicky B. and bedroom windows with walkie-talkies between, and Kathy Rodger. and Peter Paul and Mary and of course a different boy and the overstuffed chair in the basement study where that interfering religion made a lovely thing so hard and tortuous."So many entries over the school years with your tiny top-of-the-page pictures of the weather, the days’ outfits, the little church spires and stars - and later only weights at the top of pages and notes reading “Oh God it’s 2am!” or “up at 5 sewing clothes” (or making that facsimile of a 12th century manuscript, or just plain writing papers.) Then Senior year and the end of Special Chorus and the Keith dances but Terry’s list of duties continuing, on to college, where most of the pages now are too recent to be memories ….Let’s never stop knowing each other."

And we haven’t stopped.I record all this today because I want to report that I never stopped writing the diary either and have just this last hour made the final entry in the 2018 volume. There are 61 of them now, all in a row, all stored in old National Geographic binders in a third-floor bookcase.I don’t know who will ever read this centipede of a life story except maybe my children, if even they have the fortitude. I do know, however, what writing it has done for me. Week after week, month after month, year after year it has taught me to feel so very grateful for good friends like length of days and the peace of mind to live them out.   

Grateful? You Bet I Am

For 8 weeks this past summer I couldn't drive, or dress myself, or haul the heavy ropes of wet laundry out of the washer and 'thunk' it into the drier. I had had the dread rotator cuff surgery on my right shoulder, which left me hurting like the dickens, both day and night. Also, as a righty, I could eat only with my left hand, which meant I spent a lot of meals feeding my ear.Then, ten days ago, I had a second and unrelated fix-it repair and am now sporting a tidy zipper of stitches on my insides.I am grateful today to be on the mend from both interventions. I can drive again, a good thing since some of those Uber drivers gave me a hard time for asking to be brought what they considered too-short distances to be worth their while. Once, still very early in my recovery, to spare myself the sulky lamentations of those few, I tried walking to my destination in my sling and brace, on a 93-degree day, along a road whose sidewalk suddenly gave out, such that I found myself picking my way in flip-flops along a trash-littered soil embankment that was tilted toward, rather than away from, the road - along which cars were zooming by, 15 inches from my teetering body.Big mistake, that effort. I learned from it though, and am grateful for that. I'm grateful too that now I CAN haul stuff out of the washing machine. And almost dress myself without help. And deftly just fine with my right hand (and don’t I have a fresh little batter of fat to prove it!)But really today I am grateful for so much more, as well all no doubt should be.

• I'm grateful for the help of my family and for my women friends whose candor and open heartedness have created a kind of shelter in the storm for us all.
• I'm grateful for the guys at Kevin Ryan's Fells Hardware,  who routinely offer to cut the wrongly sized curtain rod I have brought in for a consult instead of having me buy the $40 shears that would let me to the job at home. "Why spend the money?" Kevin will say, he whose presumed goal is to get people to do exactly that. I have had such great talks with these folks over the years - about the pain of Shingles, about depression, about the War of Northern Aggression, as some Southern historians still refer to it.
• I'm grateful for Jimmy at the Post Office, who lost his wife last winter and lets me now and then gently inquire as to how he is doing.
• I'm grateful for John at the Shoe Hospital who gave me the name of a guy he said was the best window repair guy he had seen in his 87 years. The guy himself turned out to be on another project but he introduced us to his brother Mike Sheridan, who every day for 90 days from 7 'til 3, came to this house and worked, both on ladders and in the machine shop he set up in our garage, so as to give new life to every single window and piece of trim on this gracious old lady of a house. Mike, your gifts with the living wood, as well as your meticulousness and work ethic, are remarkable and I hope you know that.

I go on too long here so I will have to get to the many others in another post.My husband ALMOST went out to rake earlier but on seeing these frigid temps, settled for a morning indoors. He is in the shower now. Our son Michael and his Jen,  here from the big city, are still sleeping. And our daughters are texting hilariously back and forth to us all about the foods they're trying to prepare for this afternoon's feast. Soon we will get to be with all of them, plus a harvest of grandbabies and more family beyond that.My assignment is only to provide two autumn salads and a raw vegetable plate, and maybe offer a consult on the gravy when that crucial moment comes. I need to be about that work now, but how could I let this lovely claret-colored morning pass without saying how lucky I feel right now for my many blessings, I am who am no more deserving than the many who this day are hungry or far from home? May we all  feel ourselves cradled in Hands far larger than our own, and in so feeling. do more and more and yet more for others.

Whatever Follows

Whatever might follow in the weeks ahead I have to say this has been one beautiful season, and in spite of the usual vacillations. Temperatures hit the mid-80s one day and four days later we came close enough to a hard frost that a baby maple I see every day took a nasty fright and went instantly crimson. Now as I write, a big wind is muscling around outside,  giving even the grass blades a stern combing-back.I sometimes hear westerners say our old New England is just all damp and claustrophobic with lowering skies and too-near horizons.  I don't see it that way. Anyhow it’s sure not that way now on these bright tangy days that have us all feeling happy and energized as we kick through the leaves and set out those jolly toy balloons that the world calls pumpkins. My own personal housemate got to feeling so energized last weekend that he climbed out on two of our roofs to prune the limbs of trees that in actual fact didn't need pruning at all (but that's just me.) I watched with my heart in my mouth as he executed one deep squat after another while balancing inches from roof's edge and then extending to its farthest reach a 12-food pole with a lethal sickle on the end and – SNAP!  pulling the trigger. Here he is first contemplating the job...And beginning to execute it...I sent our visiting houseguest Machias out to spot him in case he started to pitch forward and fall. (Machias is six-foot-nine with a rower's mighty legs so I thought he could maybe execute a rescue.)    But "I'M FINE!" insisted  my mate -and by some stroke of luck he turned out to BE fine as this triumphant look testifies.Myself, I attempted no such feats of strength and balance that day. I just walked a few miles, set out some seasonal decorations and reveled in all this beauty.Here was the sun that day, glowing still strong at 5pm, behind one of our front porch columns....Then at the top here was the sun only moments later in the side yard, filtered through our little dogwood...And finally, out back, here was the sun setting our neighbors' tree even further aflame.All this was on the Saturday. Then, on the Sunday, we had the privilege of attending the wedding celebration of a couple who, together with their families, threw one amazing party.It took place on a hillside farm with 180 guests on hand to enjoy popcorn and cider, adult beverages of every kind and food that never stopped coming.Best of all, the two brides helped make the music. Bride Alli, from all I can tell, plays every instrument on God's green earth and her band was playing; whereas Bride Angela, by her own admission not a trained singer, took the mic and spoke of the meaning this one particular song has for them both.  Then, at first softly, and then in full and glorious voice, performed "Hallelujah,"  by the late Leonard Cohen.Here's my favorite recording of this wonderful song, that today seems to me to capture all the beauty and longing of earth's seasons, and even of our own too-short lives.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_NpxTWbovE

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?