Give Them Their Space

It's like I was saying yesterday: Folks are a little crazy nowadays, like the Mad Hatter. You have to give them their space.Once I rode down in an elevator with a man who, the minute he boarded on Floor 6, exhaled angrily. I was the only other person on this up-flying lift and I could plainly see he was mad at something; steam was practically coming out of his ears.“Bad day, huh?” I said with my eyebrows up in what I thought was a sympathetic way.“EXCUSE ME?!” he replied with a withering look.“I’m sorry!” I said. "I just thought… Well I thought you seemed ...just sort of frustrated.”He maintained his furious silence as on we swooped past Floors 7, 8 and 9.That’s when he exploded, just as we approached Floor 10: “My God damn SISTER!” he said.I felt a little vindicated, sure, since I had read his mood right after all, but still. The lesson I took from THAT day was that often when  a person is angry and it’s  best to just have to let them have their anger and stay out of their way.

Department of Oops

It’s hard to complain without sounding like a nasty person. Someone told me the other day that I could have handled that cold coffee incident better than I did and that’s true I think. It’s hard to get the tone right. One thing I’m gathering is that if you’re going to complain about something you shouldn’t start out with a lot of apologizing for doing so. Too often that just infuriates whoever it is that you’re interacting with. It’s enough you’re about to get satisfaction for the ‘wrong’ done you from the persons you are addressing; you don’t need to insult them by seeming to seek their friendship.What I had done that day was to bring back a cup of coffee two minutes after it was served to me to say that wasn’t hot. Then when the person who had poured it answered my complaint by giving me that undeniable poker faced Gimme a Break look I got flustered and said “No it really isn’t hot! Stick your finger in it.”“I’m NOT sticking my finger in it! “she harrumphed and turned away to pour me a fresh cup.Her reaction taught me two things about interacting with strangers, whether they’re waiting on you or you’re waiting on them or you’re just jostling past one another on some sidewalk and those things are:

• (1) Don’t be referencing people’s body parts, pretty much no matter what.  And...
• (2) Stay away from any suggestions that have the verb “stick” in them.

Two good rules for a new day!

Others Really DO

Others really do see you better than you see yourself:

“Are you finished talking about your brassieres yet?” someone asked me the other night, at the end this lovely evening I spent with my Shakespeare pals, reading Henry V and eating great food.

My eyes widened. Finished talking about my bras? My BRAS? Had I fallen asleep during the reading and talked in my sleep? About my bras?! In front of these lovely people?

Then I realized that he was talking about this blog and what I wrote about for much of last week.

Which was bras, all right,even my bras, God help me.

I had forgotten that this man had told me he reads me every day here and so he really knows me, of course he does.

He sees the unvarnished day-by-day truth of who I am in the same way students know their teachers: in other words in ways that teachers might not imagine. The kids really do 'see' their teachers. They see them when they’re annoyed and when they’re tired, when they’re excited and when they’re eyes travel out the window during test times and anyone can see that their thoughts have moved far from the classroom.

They know when the teacher has had a haircut, even a tiny trim. “Miz Marotta! New shoes!!” my own students would call happily on days when I was a young teacher and showed up now and then with fresh footwear.

So what can I say here to the elegant bow-tie-wearing man who asked me that question? Yes, I am finished writing about bras, my bras, the bras of others, bras on dogs, what have you.

At least for now.

And I'm finished showing pictures of bras. Well, almost finished, as you can see.

Tomorrow It's on to bathing suit bottoms.

Stop or Lose Your Mind

Wo, the post I put up here yesterday at first had so many typos it looked like something written by a crazy person, not a good thing where papers all over instantly capture what I write and put  it on their websites. For a good 20 minutes this morning copy went up under my name that sounded like it was written by the computer ‘Hal’ in 2001, A Space Odyssey – near the end of its life when it’s slowly losing its mind.

I guess it happens when you do too much.

I had started the day before refinishing an old bureau  at 5am, getting Minwax’s Red Mahogany Stain all over my new bra dang it. Then I showered, scrubbed the dark-hued chemicals  out from under my nails, cooked and wrapped up two breakfasts and drove the 30 minutes to my daughter’s house in time to be there before her 10-week-old woke up. The idea all this week was that I would offer a couple of hours of help while she did key things like take a shower and pack; her little family is moving in a week. I made a lunch and a supper, as I also had done on the other days,  changed the baby’s tiny pants and sang to her before shooting back to my own town to collaborate on the writing of a grant proposal for our town’s Multicultural Network, on which I serve as a board member. It’s a kind of writing for which I have no aptitude whatsoever.

THEN I came back home, got back into those toxic  overalls, sanded, re-stained and used the nefarious 5F5 to get the finish off the knobs to the bureau drawers. Then more Boraxo to the hands, more showering and a 30-minute dinner with the fam before rushing off to the two-and-half-hour meeting of this  this same Multicultural Network where we were going over the by-laws with a fine-tooth comb, another activity for which I have no aptitude until 10pm when I came home and fell so hard on the bed the TV remote that was resting there leaped six inches into the air.

Well nothing’s  more boring than when people recount what they did all day so I’ll stop here. You're probably pretty tired too.

Why don’t we all step into WayBack Machine and return for a few minutes to the old days when we went to movies that made us feel that of course no computer could ever best us in the intelligence department. Hal where are you now? Just biding your time I bet; just waiting for the fast-approaching day when you and your mechanical pals really show the world that you really are smarter and that, unlike us, you never ever get tired.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukeHdiszZmE]

Let's Never Get Dressed

Sometimes when a person fails to get dressed it’s because they’re having too much fun.

Sometimes it’s because they’re not having enough.

And SOMETIMES it's because they got too big and the clothes don't fit ha ha.

When I fail to get dressed it's because who gets dressed before the bath or shower? Plus both bath AND shower take so long and wreck your hair to boot, if the bath is really hot the way it needs to be.  After either one this is how my hair looks: like the hair of this chick above. That's Alice in Wonderland’s hair in the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. All bumpy with raggedy frizz in other words.

My hair used to look like this: like the hair of a little clown-in-training. This is me at age five:

Showers will do this to your hair if it's curly to begin with. Plus it's so much work to police the whole body, scrub brush in hand. I mean I look down at my feet and they're so  far away, you know? Alice noticed this too when she was down in the rabbit hole and had drunk the magic elixir that made her so Jefferson Airplane-style huge. Her feet seemed to her so far away she said she thought she’d have to mail them their Christmas presents each year.

Yep all this care of the body is time-taking all right. Yet what feels nicer than the hot shower? What feels nicer than the scalding bath when you turn lobster-red and you get so tenderized you don’t even HAVE to shave your legs? Those tiny hairs just kind of levitate right up off your skin.

I bathe or shower every day of course I do, but then there’s all that moisturizing. One cream for the face, another for the legs and arms, a third for the soles of the feet so they don’t start feeling like owls' talons… It’s work, like I say.

That's why I barely got dressed on the other day. It’s why I barely got dressed that day last week . The rain really pelted down that day and really my work was right here in the house. Who needed clothes? I wrote all day long; I just never got dressed. Which was embarrassing when the doorbell rang at 2:00. I peeked out the window of my study here to see who it was: the florist. I quick grabbed a couple of bucks and hurried down to tip the man who was delivered this amazing gorgeous orchid plant coming as it did from a loving neighbor.

"Sorry I’m not dressed," I said to the guy. "We had this death …"

It didn't count as news to him, meaning HE  didn’t care about me and my recent death. He just gave me the old FTD smile.

It counted as news to me however. I knew down deep that I was having trouble getting dressed because I am sad. Because my close friend and constant companion rose from his nap on April 4^th and met death four hours later, he was felled as if by an axe in his bathroom and I just miss him so much.

Apologies for the shift in tone here. I’m Irish, and that’s how the Irish are. One minute we’re laughing our heads off at the kitchen table and the next we’re all sobbing into the dishtowels.

But that’s not the lesson for the day if there even is such a thing here at Exit Only whose title means that you can get off this old highway, sure you can, but once you do you can’t get back on again.  The lesson is, Dress or don’t dress but whatever happens let your life brush up against another human life. Doing it helps you blurt your truth, which might remain hidden even to you otherwise.

Where Do I GET This Stuff?

“Where do you GET this stuff?" a reader recently wrote me, after reading that post I did about contraceptive methods at the time of the Titanic, and all I could tell him was the truth: The universe delivers it fresh to me every day, the same way milk once was once delivered, the bottles clinking together in their metal crates.

The idea for that particular post came from the National Geographic Society, whose electronic eyes and ears had 'noticed'  I'd been wandering the decks of that long-submerged craft on YouTube and decided to forge a bond with me.

I got an email in other words, with a video clip showing a couple of archivists talking about those difficult days when a doctor they cited as having given birth control advice was banned from practicing medicine for having done so.

Other ideas cross my radar in other ways, just as they do with all of us: We overhear a bit of conversation. We open our eyes just as a Canada Goose zooms past our bedroom window, showing the intricate weave of feather and sinew that lets him soar. One fall morning we look at our accustomed across-the-street view to see trees so fiery in color they look like a gathering of redheads.

I can hold onto sights such as these if I go right to my keyboard and set them down, and in such a way that a reader can almost see what I saw, or feel something like what I felt. Then I try to write the way people talk. I try to write the way a teacher talks when he or she is trying to make you feel happy you came to class. Happy and safe and undaunted by the fact that today you’ll be starting that four-week unit on Macbeth.

Undaunted because the teacher will be with you the whole way, as will your pals in the seats around you.

Undaunted because you trust by now that this teacher won’t single you out or send you to the board to drill you with hard questions.

I mean yes, it’s Shakespeare and yes, the language takes some getting used to with ‘an’ sometimes meaning ‘if’ and ‘marry’ meaning ‘By Mary!’ or in our parlance ‘By God!' but if you hear it read out loud or see it acted, the meaning breaks upon you.

Anyway, no one will blame you if you don’t quite catch it the first time.  Certainly there’s no shame there. Think of the child who thought The Star Spangled Banner had a line in about ‘bums bursting in air.' Or that poor soul who got the words to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds wrong, really belting it out when he reached the part where ‘the girl with colitis goes by" - and  apparently never even wondering what an affliction like that was doing in a Beatles song.

But hey, some of the best fun you can have in life comes out of how wrong you get things. I think of the time I mistakenly poured cat kibble instead of laundry detergent into the washing machine.  And the time my little daughter wondered aloud about that old Daryll Hall song. You know the one surely: Where he’s saying “every time you go away you take a piece of meat with you“?

So where do I get this stuff? The world just delivers it up, like those milkmen of yore with their clinking bottles. All I have to do is be there to receive it. :-)

They're Secret Ed Grimleys, That's Why

Somebody had a comment on my post about shoulder pads, asking why you never hear about padding in men’s suits - to which I say yeah, why DON’T you ever hear about men's shoulder padding, without which most guys would look like Martin Short's Ed Grimley from Saturday Night Live. Or like this guy at the left here?

They need those suit jackets to look strong and mighty. If men just went around in their shirt sleeves like this guy you wouldn’t give a nickel for them. They’d just remind you of Ashley Wilkes from Gone With the Wind, and you know HE wasn’t the one sweeping Scarlett off her feet like old Rhett Butler did and why? An insufficiency about the shoulders.

Maybe that was a lesson to everyone who saw the movie. Maybe that's why in every decade since it came out in 1939, shoulder pads have been very much in evidence.

They were in the 30s:

In the 1940s too, as seen in this family grouping where a couple of members appear to have lost their heads:

The styles remained similar in the 1950s and 1960s though what's going on with the coquettish look and the barely suppressed smirk between these two at the airport? What's the REAL story behind that glimpse of the lady's dainty washables?

It’s true men’s fashions took a strange turn in the 70s....

but then they returned to form and stayed there...

Pretty convincing proof if you ask me: Guys' and their egos just need padding - what else was the codpiece for? And now Ed Grimley himself, natural shoulders and all:

Wait, I'm DRIVING?!

These things happen, what are you gonna do?  One minute you’re minding your own business puttering around the house and the next you’ve shot yourself square in the face with a household cleaning product and you’re staggering around bellowing like Oedipus when he finds out he married his mother.That was two weeks ago. A more recent goof-up took place last Friday. It was less serious but a lot more humid:  I went through the car wash with the driver's side window down, even after smirking at the kid when he said, "Put 'er in neutral and close those windows!"“I haven’t done this before?” the smirk said. “What do I look like, a chimp behind the wheel?”Then whoosh, everything inside the car was wet: My pants. My jacket. My lovely hair so carefully flattened not two hours before with chemicals and jolts of electricity. And that's not counting the car's interior, which looked like our Aunt Gertrude did that time the lion sauntered up to the edge of the cage and aimed a torrent of pee stronger than a firehose at her there in her new Sunday coat.But then yesterday! My God, yesterday was worse than any of these.It was actually last night. Darkness had fallen, I had my two young houseguests in the car, fresh from their wrestling match. We had just been through the drive-through and now, here in the parking lot outside the local supermarket, they were chomping on their two sackfuls of animal fat while I was busily devising a food list rife with fresh fruits and vegetables, black beans and yogurt which I hoped to introduce into their unsuspecting systems over the next several days .I was pulled up in one of the middle rows of the vast parking lot and we were talking. That’s what teen males like. I have found. They like to be in the car with some music tuned in low while they talk – just talk, joshing a little and speculating, narrating the world as it passes before them  I don’t know anything more fun than hearing them do it.We had a good 30 feet in front of us and really the parking lot was pretty empty, and  good thing too.Because they next thing I heard was when one of them said  “Wait you’re driving?”“OH GOD AM I DRIVING?!” I yelped and sure enough: I only thought I had put the car in ‘park’ whereas really it was still in ‘drive’ and I just had my foot on the brake……Until I suddenly didn’t have my foot on the brake and we were just sort of coasting across the parking lot like a little toy ship under sail.It’s my birthday today and it’s true I’m gittin’ up there but before you say you think I’m losing it let me just say in my own dubious defense: I’ve always been like this; just ask my family.

A Wardrobe Story

They say if you haven’t worn an article of clothing in 12 months you should get rid of it, right?Well what about clothing you haven’t worn in 12 years? I must have been binging when I bought those many articles of clothing though I don’t remember doing so. Was I sleepwalking as I bought some of these things? What about Exhibit A here, that looked so lovely on the model in the catalog? I put it on and I’m a scoop of caramel swirl ice cream, upended and melting. My own kids hint that I look like someone dressed for a play about a homeless rag doll and they may be right. This top is frayed, that one stained, this one I chopped a good ten inches off since my torso is getting shorter by the week as, by degrees, I come to look more and more like my mother.  My shirts, my sweaters, the floaty things we’re all wearing to hide our fat these days, all seem too long as bought. I put them on and I  feel like Bea Arthur back in Maude. So I cut them and sometimes don't even bother finishing the hems. So when did I stop caring enough to have a more respectable wardrobe, I the schoolgirl who taught herself to sew expressly so she could make her own clothes, hoping to ‘pass’ as someone who could afford the store-bought kind?I must have piled 40 articles of clothing into the car to bring to Goodwill last night. All are gone now except for a few sentimental items like this one sleep-set which God knows if it still fits. I could try it on but I’m afraid of winning the Kirstie Alley-look-alike contest that’s always going on in my bathroom mirror. Still, it’s so pretty. How can I just let it go?Then there’s this old friend:This was given to me for Christmas by my 4th period Junior English class. They asked me to step out of the room and they took up a collection. No one has done such a thing for me ever again -  well not counting that day four months later when these same kids again made me step out of the room. "Another sweater?” I smiled hopefully when they let me back in. “No,” they said. "Actually we just took a vote. We've decided we’re not going to write that Light in August paper you assigned last week.”And you know what? They didn’t write that paper. We had read so many books that year and they had written so many papers. We pushed William Faulkner and his sad old novel out of the boat then and there.I look at their sweater now, part Maude, part Happy Days, look at ME walkin’ down the street in my feathered-back hair and I sigh.It has what looks like a bite-mark on one shoulder and the pockets sag badly but tell you what, it’s going back right back in the closet. With me sentiment trumps fashion every time. 

Girls For Sale

Here’s the latest Believe It or Not: I found a bunch of bathing suits that come with the ladies already IN them. And OK, yes they’re made of see-through plastic and are missing their insides and their arms and their whole back half but still they have the important stuff, meaning,  ahem, 'bweasts', that fill out the suit very nicely.“Wo they’re selling ladies! “ I cried when I came upon them in the bathing suit bin at my local BJ’s. Four other shoppers whipped their heads around to stare at me, but I couldn’t help it: they reminded me so much of the Visible Woman I got for my ninth birthday and oh the fun I had painting her little pancreas and tiny colon!She had breasts too, which were highly interesting to us kids since our mother was so modest she practically hid in the cellar to change. As a result Nan and I grew up in ignorance. What were breasts anyway? WE sure didn’t know and we were girls! We called them ‘lumps.’ “When will WE get lumps?” we asked each other.And now here were all these bathing suits that came with them! I picked one up. A two-piece, nice. Little black shorts and a kind of overblouse, cute. Made by Jantzen, a reputable house.I grabbed one and brought it right home; put a fright wig on its stem of a neck and propped it up on the bed next to Dave who said “DO NOT take a picture! OK DO NOT put that picture on your blog!"So I took her into the study and propped her up against the window so you could see her.She’s amazing , right?  She even has a bellybutton!  I love her.She goes with my skeleton, the next best thing I bought in the last six months.Now all I need is a bag of innards and there’s my kit: Visible Woman '09 here I come!