This is Your Brain on Boil

It was a tough week and then it ended thank God, thank God.Even my new pink bra couldn't cheer me when the temperatures climbed.I felt like a tea cake on a hot summer day in Alabama.That's from To Kill a Mockingbird, that image.Here's another: Sometimes when I'm looking out the windows of my office at the schoolchildren waiting for the bus, or the little boys wrestling one another to the ground, I feel like shy Boo Radley peeking from behind his curtains. "I'm the Boo Radley of the neighborhood," I sometimes say to the younger moms and dads, who smile nervously and edge away. No doubt in another ten years I too will be leaving notes in the hollow of the old oak tree.My point is, your thoughts DO melt and slide around in the heat. Slider thoughts they are and while I'm at it whose idea was it to name little burgers 'sliders'? Talk about cue the paramedics and brush up on your Heimlich Maneuver! Burgers don't slide down the throat, you have to chew them, kind of a lot in fact.And why was Chewbacca named Chewbacca? Was that some sort of product placement for the smoking lobby? Freud died of throat cancer I'll have you know... So sometimes a cigar really is a cigar and cigars give you cancer.Well that's it for me. Slammin' this little 'book' shut and heading for the country where it's all so QUIET.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw_-THlcyHc]Y'all have fun now too, heah?

Alive & Talking

In the park, a leashed and bounding pup gave his master a pretty bad case of bark-burn when it suddenly shot toward a tree and climbed six feet straight up it. Then a fat worm, just pulled from the soil, provided two small birds with a dandy workout as they dribbled, and intercepted, and hip-checked each other for ownership.It was morning, when all such strivings seem called for. By evening though, most striving has ceased.It had surely ceased at the little pond to which I came at that day’s end as so many others had done, to quiet myself, and take a final sip of daylight and look out across the water.

• Here, two primary-school girls in bicycle helmets were skipping stones across that liquid dance-floor. There, a boy and a girl were fly-fishing. Their lines spooled out from their extended arms with a long graceful flick to land – splish! - on the pond’s burnished surface.
• A fleet of ducks set sail from shore, the high-necked mama leading her twelve small charges in such a straight line it looked like sewing, she the needle and they the stitches, all small and evenly spaced and perfectly following.
• A human mother arrived, a brightly-colored palette of tattoo painting both bare arms from shoulder to elbow. With her was a tiny child, the skirts of a pink sundress belling around her legs. She squatted in the easy way little kids can, and plucked up first duck feathers and then a discarded bobber from someone’s tackle box, all the while naming the world in loud unintelligible syllables and making the same approval-inviting, one-hand-up gesture that a magician makes at the completion of yet another astounding feat: Ta-Da!
• A beefy dude in his 30s appeared then, attended by a beefy child who marched up within six inches of this small magician. “Say hello to the little girl,” the dad advised.

“Hi, little girl.” the child said.“How old is he?” asked the young mother.“I’m fwee!” declared the stout child sternly, and then, turning to the baby, said, “What YOU got?”“It’s a bobber,” said the mother. “Like in fishing.”This registered not at all with the child, who decided to try again.“How old are you?” he shouted, as if to a deaf person.“She’ll be two in October.”This he also ignored.“Why don’t you talk?” he cried, now nose to nose with the toddler. “CAN'T YOU TALK?”I’m not sure  of course, but what I think the toddler was saying, with the deadpan look she gave to her mother, was something along the lines of, “Is this person insane?” Because of course she could talk, in a way that both she and her mother understood.Late that night I dreamed about my new grandbaby who, settled in my lap just post-nap, yawned sleepily, then alerted and brightly remarked, “Well, hello there!”“I didn’t think you babies could talk!” I exclaimed.“I didn’t think you big people could think,” she replied in perfect parody.I smile to recognize in that dream the day’s lesson repeated.Because don’t we all think at first that we’re the sole stars of the show, and that everyone else is just…. scene design? But then, after some time here, we see the truth: this bird, dog and duck; that worm and babe and trout are as alive and feeling as any one of us, whether at busy striving dawn or restful end of day.

Thoughts From the Closet

Thoughts from the closet: Maybe that should be the name of my next book.I’m thinking of life in the closet because of yesterday’s memory (seen here) of being held captive in my own bedroom closet.By a little Christopher Robin of a four-year-old.All by myself for 40 minutes, which is an unheard of amount of time for any of us Americans, addicted as we are to Sights! Sounds! Movement!! Shopping!I say alone – all alone – with nothing to keep me company but a dozen pairs of stiletto heels and a bald babydoll named Bruce.As it happens, Bruce and I go back.I gave Bruce to the child six years ago and isn’t he the jaunty fellow still, in his stylish pajamas sewn permanently to his body at neck and wrist and ankle, the only way to keep a man in his pajamas in my experience.He remains a great favorite with the boy, who, on the lip of Second Grade, still sleeps with him every night.Along with Pedro Hispanic Boy, named just that way by the well-meaning folks at The Kaplan Early Learning Company.This is Pedro and the name amazes me yet.Sure, people from the first half of the last century thought of people in terms of ethnicity but haven’t we gotten past that?Even my mother, who was an outsider all her life and seemed in most ways so accepting and cool, couldn’t seem to help herself when I came home from school with an unfamiliar name on my lips. Samenuk let’s say the kid’s last name was.“Samenuk,” she would repeat. “Now what kind of a name is THAT?” she would say before he said anything else and you could just see her riffling through a mental Rolodex of names in her head. “Dutch? Russian? Polish?”She liked pondering Poles: “The Poles are smart!” she would say out of the blue sometimes, tapping the side of her head. Or “The French are very tight!” she would remark apropos of nothing. “the Italians? When Italians marry the Irish, the children are said to be handsome!”It seems crazy to us now, but that’s how people thought.I guess the folks at Kaplan are still thinking that way – unless they’re just trying to open the white-bread minds of the Mercian people. "Multicultural babies are a world of fun and snuggles!” their blurb reads on the Amazon site where I first found Pedro.The child of course and wonders not at all what ‘kind’ of name that is, any more than he wonders what ‘kind’ of name he has. But adults are slower than children and some supermarket still have an aisle marked “ethnic foods.”SMH as the kids say: Shake My head.You can do a lot of that in the closet. Ponder I mean and reflect. More tomorrow, deo volente.

What's Fun

Over these last few weeks I’ve been trying to be less obsessive about writing every day.I thought it would feel like a vacation - and so it has - sort of. But the truth is I'm uneasy with vacations. They throw me.I don’t like surprises either.In fact I dislike any unplanned forays into the unexpected unless I’m the author of them. By which I mean I do like to follow fire trucks sometimes – at a discreet distance of course - but I don’t like it when somebody in whose car I am a passenger decides to do that. Then it feels like a hijacking.I remember once a friend was really pushing me hard, trying to talk me into some last minute escapade. “Come on for heaven’s sake!” she said. “It’ll be fun!”“I DON’T LIKE FUN!” I answered, which is of course is crazy-sounding but that’s what I’m sayin’ here.  I like the fun that I plan for myself. Also the fun that little kids plan for me just because their fun puts me in comical situations.I once spent a good 40 minutes in a darkened bedroom closet, forbidden to even open the door by my four-year-old jailer. I was supposed to be pretending something, I forget what now, but I felt so Patty Hearst imprisoned by the Symbionese Liberation Army, me a bald babydoll named Bruce, I just couldn’t stop smiling.For the last two years I promised myself I would write here every day and aside from some stutterings over the last two weeks I’ve done that. Then just in the last few months it’s gotten harder to do. I sometimes feet like a standup comic who booked to ‘work’ every day of the week.So to ease up or not? Think I’ll step into the closet with Bruce and think it over. Pass me my beret would you? I want to look good for my captor. I think he likes me .

Jump Away!

Here’s how we’re all feeling as we contemplate going back to work tomorrow after this awesome Rec Swim of a week with the nation’s most important  holiday smack in the middle,.

The bath is your regular life.

You are the cat.

Jump away! Jump away now!

Maybe you can hid under the bed until NEXT weekend. :-)

Humor in Uniform?

Remember that old feature in The Reader’s Digest called 'Humor in Uniform'? Well, as a follow-up to my tribute yesterday to our family’s last remaining veteran, I offer the following. letter, printed in the Hairenik Weekly for which Uncle Ed wrote in his three years stationed off the coast of New Guinea during World War II.Says the faded clip by way of introduction," From Headquarters, Far East Air Forces, Office of the Commanding General, this letter was received by Mr. Krikor Haydostian of Roxbury, Massachusetts  advising him of the Department’s pride in his son, Staff Sgt. Edward, for his outstanding service in the Pacific and Far East operations for more than two years."Read the official letter, then scroll down for the punch line…..

FOR OUTSTANDING DEVOTION

                                                         Headquarters,  FAR EAST AIR FORCES,   Office of the Commanding General

September 26, 1945Dear Mr. Haydostian:For his outstanding devotion to duty and for his exceptional skill, your son, Staff Sergeant Edward K. Haydostian, has been personally commended to me by his commanding officer.I feel sure that you will share my pride in the excellent record he has established as a member of an Air Force team during more than two years of sustained operations in the Pacific and Far East.Your son typifies the many specialists who are a vital part of our organization. Without the crew chiefs, the bomb loaders, the engineers, the mess sergeants and the clerks, it would have been impossible for our combat crews to carry the war to the enemy.Sergeant Haydostian has been chief administrative clerk for one of our Medical Supply Platoons. The consistently high quality of his work has won the respect of his officers and fellow soldiers. His fine record is a credit to himself and to his organization.His has been a real contribution to victory. I am proud to have him under my command.

The joke is, Uncle Ed wasn’t IN the Air Force. While waiting to hear back from them,  he finally lost patience and joined the Army. He told me this story three days before he died. Otherwise we sure would have wondered! 

Many Dreams

I had so many dreams Sunday night I felt like I’d serially sneaked into all 8 movies at the old Cineplex.

The dreams were:

1) About riding my bike on an eight lane highway. Not a single accident !

2) About riding a souped-up ATV and going off a cliff. Major accident! Heartening fact: did not die during dream about dying.

3) About finding out that Old Dave was dating on the side. Dating! On the side!

4) About present when someone who looked a lot like Old Dave but was maybe his brother (?) or some kind of doppelganger was buying presents for the ten-year-old love child he had had with this person he was dating on the side.

5) About going to see a high school production of Hamlet where my party and I were seated outside the theatre. From what I could see from numerous sneak-ins , the production was so bad I came to see that ours were the best seats in the house.

Old Dave got up at 5:30 yesterday morning and I slept until 8. There’s basically no doubt in my mind that you have the best dreams after the other guys vacates the premises, why I don’t know

Our family's new baby has for the last four months slept all swaddled like a burrito in her bassinet but is just now graduating to larger accommodations. In this bigger venue called a CRIB she stretches out like a little Buddha, with her arms up over her head like this guy at the top - and I bet has dreams every bit as entertaining as mine – and with no vehicular mishaps either.

Marriage! Or...Taking Sides

There's always some new thing to argue over when you’re married.

A month ago Old Dave made me switch sides on the bed and he  took the good side.  ‘Course I admit I made him change the room all around that very morning, which is why he took my good side: to punish me.

It was nice to win the room-arranging fight. Very satisfying indeed.

Only now here he is on what was once MY perfectly taut side of the bed.

And here I am on his side, trying to get to sleep inside the virtual trough made by his body with its ropey muscles and heavy scaffolding. (My side, I should say, has this super-shallow almost undetectable dip that really I can’t take any credit for; it’s the porous bird-bones I was talking about the other day.)

Anyway it feels pretty strange, and not just because of the trough.

It feels strange because the room looks so different when I open my eyes: the window that used to be above the bed is now across from it and I now have to reach to the right instead of to the left for that glass of water I keep on the bedside table.  I feel like we turned the place over to new people who changed it all around, only we’re the new people.

He’s used to turning to the right - away from me - when he settles into the night’s deepest sleep only now he can’t because a turn to the right brings him in contact with the whole Argentina-long country of another body: mine.

When he did this last night it startled me awake because here he suddenly was, right on the set of the action adventure dream I was having.

It woke me right up.  “What‘s happening?” was all I could think.  Was he about to heave one of those 50-pound legs across my wicker breadbasket of a pelvis?

“Dave! I’m right here!” I said from my trough, meaning Don’t steamroll me.

He opened one eye and gave me that wry look he sometimes puts on. “Thanks T.” he said. “I feel so safe!”

You could die from such a man, you know?

see that trough? You could water your horse in it!

Gluttons & The People Who Envy Them

That scowling cat was just too cute to pass up yesterday but you have to realize what happens inside your head when everyone around you is heaping thirds onto their plates and you can’t have a second tiny glass of wine. You just feel like pinching them hard on the fat of their thighs, these people with their Sweet and Spicy Doritos and their special darn beers and those shiny marconi almonds that come all slippery with oil right? I mean, right?

Eh. Not really. All that passes pretty quickly, to be replaced by immense delight that just for today as people in recovery say, you are patrolling your borders and not tipping whole refrigerator shelves into your giant maw of a mouth.

I started Weight Watchers when I first started to date Old Dave “Dude, your hair’s out of style” I told him about a month in, when it seemed safe to offer a little constructive criticism.

“Yeah well you’re a little FAT!” he said back with a merry smile and maybe that’s why I liked him. While there has never been any cruelty, there has never been any of the old BS either. The man doesn’t lie.

SO ….. I began on Weight Watchers and went from 146 to 125 and that lasted until after my first baby, when I went down to 118. After my third baby I hit 112, if only briefly and these many decades later have evened out at around 132 - though of course now much of the muscle has gone to that something like you see in those bags of fluff you buy to stuff pillows with. And of course here in the waiting room that is Osteopenia, my bones are like Sponge Bob’s bones.

 It’s OK with me. The men in my life eat their fried egg and bacon. I eat my banana on plain Shredded Wheat. They have a Coke with their meal. I have sparkling water, pepped up with my special mixture of mint tea and no-cal lemonade. And yes sometimes I get to put a splash of red wine into this mix and boom! Sangria! And sometimes I put in a splash of whiskey and boom again! A whiskey sour!

But mostly I am able to abstain from these little extras because of the great satisfaction I get out of the fact that JUST FOR TODAY I am not ending the day by strapping on a feed bag drooly with Ben & Jerry's best.

And that, ladies and gentleworms, is a victory all by itself.

Darn DIET!

This is how I feel lately.

I have a giant boy living  here who can sit down in front of a bird like this and have most of it gone in 30minutes.

I also have a man excellent at batting cleanup.

I'm the cat in the picture, always on a diet, always scowling sourly away at what others are feasting on.

Maybe I'll just stab it with one bacteria -laden claw and hope they both fall sick.

Someone Did What in the Pool?

Under the simmering sun yesterday, with a hundred hot people in their bathing suits, the big pool's bright blue cube of water was suddenly still, and as empty as a mirror in an abandoned house.“What’s this? Adult swim or something?” I asked, on coming out of the Ladies Locker Room where I had been holding a baby who, having only lived on the planet for 15 weeks, was definitely NOT happy about the heat.Then five people at once said "Someone pooped in the pool!"Not just the five-year-old walking beside me and the 12-year-old we were walking past but two 50-year-old moms and somebody’s grandfather.And the lifeguards were confirming it.In just that language.It’s a new world, all right. In the old days no one dared refer to such events. There were euphemisms for everything. Why, when I was a little kid at summer camp, the counselors would ask us every night if we had had a 'B.M.' It took me years to even figure out what that was, and once I DID find out, I lied about it. What ten-year-old wants to divulge that information? (Hmmm though as I think of it now no wonder the camp nurse was always coming at me with the enema kit!)But there were fake, cutesy names for everything then. Evasions. Circumlocutions.One lunchtime at this same summer camp, two horses began wildly mating in the horse-riding ring, which was no more than a football field distant from the wide-windowed, screened-in dining hall where 75 young girls sat happily belting out the words to "Bingo Was His Name Oh". On the camp director's immediate hissed orders, six counselors leaped to their feet to bang the shutters down -Which only made us kids think a kind of murder was being enacted.Hmmm.I guess it really is better to call things as they are, and someday I’m sure I’ll get used to the word ‘poop,’ much as it makes me blush now. Anyway it’s better than the cruder alternative.

They Seriously Blocked Me?

 Huh? Did Facebook really block a link to my innocent blog just because of a comment somebody made with the phrase “make it a threesome” in it?  I was writing about all the scurrying around I had done the weekend before and my cyber-friend Joan posted a comment that said “You leave me breathless! Think about getting yourself cloned, and make it a threesome! In the meantime, why not delegate some of the responsibility?  Yes, I know, no one can do it just as you would.  But, girl, you've got to let go.  No one can live at that pace for very long.”

Now I listen to Joan. Joan is funny and full of heart . She's also been around the block a few times.  She once told me her birth year and if calculate right she is 85. So what, now Facebook is imputing salacious thoughts to senior citizens?

Not that I think of her as a senior citizen because I don’t. For me her comment did send up a red flag but not the kind Facebook had in mind. I felt alarm bells going off because I actually DO want to live a very long time, at least until my grandchildren have children, and how hard can that be? Sure, one of them can’t even sit up yet but the other two are five and eight years old already! They'll be dating any minute, right?  They’ll have kids in middle school and I’ll still be only.... 90.

But the people at Facebook doesn’t care about my longevity, of course they don’t.  They just want everyone to keep it clean. But speaking of middle school it does seem to me kind of middle-schoolish to me the way they suspect every ordinary word of being a double entendre. It’s like the music teacher we had in Eight Grade who withstood so bravely the unceasing mischief made by the naughty-boys in back who broke into peals of laughter every time they had to practice singing “This is My Country” slowly to get the enunciation right for the big assembly. It's like when the author of Up the Down Staircase said she could never teach Emily Dickinson’s “There is no frigate like a book” without seeing the doltish males in the back of the class dissolve into giggles at the syllable ‘frig.”

It just seems so silly to block people like us. I mean, two people whose ages practically add up to 150?  WE’RE going to be talking about group sex?

There’s a French phrase that functions as the motto of the Order of the Garter in Britain.  “Honi soit qui mal y pense” it goes. ‘Evil to Him Who Evil Thinks,’ is how I’ve always heard it translated meaning in other words ‘It’s all on you if you have a dirty mind, pal.”

Warm Weather Thoughts

A thought I never have in winter: Maybe I’ll paint my toenails.

Myself.

Just for fun.

Green like I wore them in my 20s.

And listen to some Santana.

Wearing shorts.

And sipping a Tanqueray gin and tonic.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpPb2cVswlI]

Seasonal Sneezing

Seasonal allergies are worse than labor. At least labor eventually ends, you get a heated blanket and everyone tells you to Just Rest Dear.

It’s been a BAD year for them all right. We’ve had so much pollen that when you go outside mornings your car looks like my kitchen looked that time I accidentally left the top of the blender off while trying to whip up a batch of guacamole.

The thing is, when your nose gets stuffed up it’s a torture. The last time I was afflicted this way I took some drug that turns out to be the very last thing you should take because it has a rebound effect.

“Hell, never take that stuff!" someone posted in a chat room about it”

“Throw it away!” another wrote. “If you can’t go cold turkey, use it one nostril and the next night in the other,” somebody else said.

“Use Benadryl instead...” “Eat raw foods only.”

I remember thinking I might as WELL eat only raw foods since I couldn’t taste anything anyway

The night of this last spell I was up for hours and didn’t finally crawl into bed for keeps until 4am, at which point Old Dave (who I despise because he can sleep ha ha) opened one eye.

“I’m dying!” I croaked.

“Nobody ever died from lack of sleep,” said the brute.

“But I have chest pain too! And I think it’s radiating down my arm!” I improvised

“TT,” he said, patting my arm. “Old TT!” That’s been his name for me forever.

That’s the thing with physical suffering. You’re just so alone with it.

Anyway… Here’s how the parking lot outside my dermatologist's looked the other day: a ballet of pollen. I even gave it a little soundtrack. My hand is kinda shaking but that's what it does to you. The Zapruder Film all over again.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUWzT-jZ0xI&feature=youtu.be]

This was three days ago.. I'm almost afraid to say this but maybe, just maybe, it’s almost done now what with all the rain we’ve had. Do we dare hope? Do we?

God Bless 'em They're in Finals

Almost every day I thank the Good Lord that I will never have to take a another test - unless it's that one your kids bring you in for where they make you draw the numbers on a clock-face and tell who the President is.

Back in the day, I studied like a crazy person for every exam I ever took and turned in a highly nervous knee-jiggling performance when the hour finally came to take each one.

My specialty was memorization. Intellectual baby that I was, It took me a good year and a half in college to realize memorization would only get you half the way there.

Just yesterday I finished re-reading the whole textbook for the 11th grade Honors U.S. History class so I could sort of 'walk with' a boy I love who is taking that exam today. We talked about it all yesterday afternoon, from the contested Hayes-Tilden election to William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech to Nixon's Peace with Honor.

The kid has it all down cold.

May he and all the test-taking kids out there acquit themselves well as they sit for these tests.

May none of them try this crafty little maneuver that Bill Watterson has Calvin resorting to below:

Little Orphaned Undies & Other Tales

I bumped over into the pathological with my too-busy ways this past weekend when I signed up to be in two places at exactly the same time.

Even I knew that was crazy.

I had signed up to work booths at our annual Town Day both as a volunteer with our local ABC program and as a Board Member with the Multicultural Network, both from 11:00 to 1:00. How was I going to do that?

Also an out-of-town colleague had written me the night before asking me to stop by the bookstore booth with as many ABC guys as I could collar so we could all meet Brian Walker, author of Black Boy White School. Oh and then there was the two-hour graduation ceremony in the middle of everything.

This was all the day after I had three young male house guests, all members of the Class of 2011, all joyfully reunited now after a year at their different colleges and here to see their brothers from the Class of 2012 graduate. From my bed I had heard the popping of Nerf Guns ‘til 2:00 in the morning. It was like being in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. When I staggered downstairs four hours later to make the coffee, every rug in the place sat slightly askew from their circuits they had run to catch and shoot each other.

They were all still sleeping when I tossed my water bottle in my backpacks and hurried downtown to keep my promises. It was spitting rain and when I got there not only was I damp on the outside, I was damp on the inside: the water bottle, poorly closed, had spilled all over the inside of my backpack.

I looked for but never did find the Network booth. I did work the ABC booth, met the author Brian Walker and brought one of the ABC scholars to meet him too. I also bought his book, bought Sourpatch Kids for the boys, attended graduation, and drove out into the country with David to see family members.

This took place on Sunday and I  haven't stopped yet. There was my column to file, food to buy and cook same as always and all the linens from my young male houseguests to wash , along with that pair of Pirates of the Caribbean underpants I found over by the bookcase. A truly dashing pair of boxers, are they not?

All these days later, I still feel jangled in part because when that water bottle spilled it wet one of my electronic devices whose little screen immediately clouded over like a cataract in the eye of an old hound dog.

“Bury it in a bowl of uncooked rice till the moisture gets absorbed,” one of the house guests advised me. "Don't try turning it on until three days have passed!"

So today is the day I get to take it out and make that try. If it’s dead it'll be a lesson for me all right and one I should embroider onto a pillow:

“You’re Only One Person” it should say on one side and on the other “Slow Down Babe. Nothing  Beautiful Happens to Hurriers.”

Litt

Fun in the Fallout Shelter

I guess you can get used to anything and learn to call it normal. I sort of saw this last week when our grandson was so sick in the hospital: Instead of waking up and thinking  "Aarrgh! How will I do all my work today?" or "Why do I get these crazy foot cramps after an hour of ironing?" it seemed almost normal to be wondering “Has his fever gone down at all? Did his mother and he get any sleep at all there in Room 608?” (Well not really normal. That famous stress hormone was coursing through my body like an electric current but you get what I'm saying.)

And speaking of stress of stress hormones, check out this rosily-imagined scenario cooked up for a Sunday supplement from more than 50 years ago.  This article too attempts to normalize something pretty awful.

It has in it a shot of a father-son team cheerily pounding stakes into the ground to make the shelter. “A Lad and His Dad Enjoying the Weekend” the caption might as well read.

And here in the picture we see the iconic ‘teen-age girl’ blabbing cheerfully away on the phone. It’s after the blast of course – she’s inside the shelter - but she's happy, doin' what gals do, is the idea, chatting away on a phone that somehow, miraculously,  still functions. Gossiping about the upcoming record hop is the idea. Never mind that she's in the bunker.

Under a naked light bulb.

With clouds of radiation swirling around just outside the walls - to say nothing of the splintered trees and the dead birds, who left only their shadows behind.

Pity the poor ad agency the government gave this 'campaign' to!

I suppose it's pretty brilliant for the way, in a horrifying time, it comforts with familiar images. Not that I remember much about that time. The year these fears were really flying I was busy attaching pom-poms to the handles of my goofy balloon-tired Schwinn to get ready for the big Bike Parade.

I do notice one thing in the picture below kind of raises my eyebrows though: Check out the shot below of one family's attractive new backyard shelter which doubles as a kind of rec area.

The father’s takin’ it easy on a lounge chair.

The two boys are lounging around playing shuffleboard.

And what about the mother?

The mother is working. The mother is toiling away like Noah in his post-flood garden, doubtless worrying over what to about dinner that night.

It kind of sets my teeth on edge but I guess a blast was dealt to that scenario in the years soon to follow. And it wasn't the nuclear kind now, was it? :-)

Food Fights

A division has opened up between my man and me, even after all these years of marriage: It seems what he really craves is pasta, something I have never heard him say once in all the years since we first met in the days when Old Tricky-Dick Nixon was still flashing his hunch-shouldered victory sign to a puzzled nation.This  son of an old Yankee mother apparently adores the stuff. News to me! I myself meanwhile would  be fine if I never saw a squiggle of pasta again. What I like is a potato, which, it further seems, he doesn’t even regard as food and would no more pull from the fridge to cook and eat than he would reach for that little yellow box of baking soda that’s supposed to keep the butter from smelling like onions.All these years into the marriage and I’m just hearing all this. Plus there’s more: it doesn’t end with the starches: I no longer cook a whole lot of your red meats like beef and lamb, or even your pink ones like pork, but when I do prepare these meats I roast them. I figured what man doesn’t like a big thud of meat on the platter?But I figured wrong, because last week I bought this nice pork tenderloin. I rubbed it with a freshly quartered onion and sea salt, then roasted it at what I regarded as the perfect temperature so that when it was done the outside had that lovely caramel color and the inside was still juicy.And what did the man say on seeing the leftover portion in the fridge the next night? “Well that tasted kind of blah. You need to do something else with these meats that you roast.”Can you imagine? Then he added insult to injury by telling me it’s because my ancestry is Irish and all the Irish know how to do is boil a piece of meat until it turns as grey as the fog over London. Fooey. He’s just not over the fact that my mother and aunt cooked a roast every single time we went there for a meal but it wasn’t GREY for heaven’s sake. It was kind of PINKY-grey, but with the frozen squash and frozen peas they always served with it, I sure thought the plate was sufficiently colorful.Almost 25 years my mom has been gone and still he won’t eat either squash or peas. His idea of the five food groups?  Pasta, tomato sauce, cheese any  kind of cold cuts, even the kind that’s shot through with disks of solid fat and a  giant bags of salty snacks. taken as a chaser. That’s what he would eat if left to his devices.By contrast, my diet consists of fruits and vegetables, peppered with an occasional two-ounce rib chop of lamb; enough salad greens to stuff a sofa with; and so much broiled salmon it’s a wonder my hair isn’t pink.Thus our common food ground is slipping out from under us.Oh  and here’s the real kicker: I’m the one with the high cholesterol.“You’ll be burying me!” he always says. “Men die first.”"I sure hope not," I say back.  "But if I’m the one to go first, just dig a hole and bury me in salad. (Dressing on the side, same as always.")    

Still Our Baby

Today I'm taking some time away from the usual weighty drivel since it’s the birthday of our girl Annie, seen here (as a baby on the day of her christening) in the arms of my old pal Kathy, one of a small group of women with whom I wouldn’t have survived those early parenting years.

Annie was the second-born so we didn’t teach the daylights out of her like I had done with her poor big sister. We just enjoyed her.

Like any second-born, she had the sense not to take parental expectation too seriously: She told us  about the big Fourth Grade project on Native American Myths just hours before it was due, choosing as ‘her’ myth “Why the Buffalo Fears the Chipmunk,” and drawing for her buffalo a wobbly picture of a seeming mammal that bore an eerie resemblance to Herbert Hoover and using for her chipmunk our hamster-of-the-moment, decked out with tiny Indian props.

The next morning at school the hamster ate the box, Herbert and all, and escaped its shoebox to make mayhem in the classroom. Everyone loved it.

Annie knew even then how to take things in stride.

She also had amazing powers of observation. Such amazing powers of observation I decided to try apprenticing myself to her so I could notice more in life. She could 'sketch' for you any person in her class, not by pouring the whole dictionary n them as I tend to do but by naming just one feature and then, eerily ‘showing’ the person to you by making her face look like that person’s face. You know how that Saturday Night Live’s Darrell Hammond ‘did’ Bill Clinton mostly by biting his lower lip? It was like that. I thought even then that Annie could get a job doing impressions.

Add to that the fact that she’s funny; was funny, right out of the gate. She was only 15 when one of her big brothers said of her that no party really started until Annie got there.

Here she is one last time on the day of her graduation from that awesome school in Northampton, together with her godmother Sheila and that her big brother Dodson. Happy Birthday Annie Marotta! May you get three times the number of years you have now!

 

You Only THINK You Look Good

Writing about mirrors has me thinking of the True Mirror that shows you how you really look.

I just heard a podcast about it by the two fun guys from Radiolab.

The idea is you MAY look better than you think!  (but don’t get your hopes up.)

"At the physical-appearance level, there are some very useful applications of the True Mirror," the website pitch says.

"There is a 3-D effect from the two mirrors used in a True Mirror, which gives a better idea of how clothes fit on your body"

Because it’s two mirrors placed at right angles, see, with the seam that joins them masked  in some ingenious fashion we don’t quite understand.

So you may think you look dashing in that new suit jacket but really you look like Fiorello LaGuardia as depicted in the poster for the Broadway show.

Also, the pitch goes on,  you have to realize that “hair styles have very distinct ‘looks’ depending on if an asymmetric hair part is chosen - something we believe contributes very strongly to the impression people have of us” - and they advise us to read their theory on where you part your hair for more on that.

“In addition, hats and glasses styles and any accessory can be accurately viewed for the effect. For example, if you wear a brimmed hat in an angle, your choice of which angle looks the best is probably exactly OPPOSITE from the angle that you should be wearing the hat!”

TRUE ENOUGH!  I wear this hat you see above sometimes and only sometimes is it actually workin’ for me. “Hey, nice LID!” guys call to me from across the street and maybe they’re not being sarcastic.

Other times I wear it tipped too far back and I just turn into Will Rogers minus the quips and the lasso.

“Is the True Mirror for everyone?" the site blurb goes on. "Frankly, no. It isn't much use for shaving your face or plucking your eyebrows. Not after a lifetime of learning to do these things backwards!" (And in high heels.)

“And the novelty value of the effects described above wears off rather quickly."

BUT -  big but, which the mirror can also help you with identifying truly,  “learning about yourself is a different matter. Introspection and the journey of self-discovery is a multifaceted adventure involving many processes and tools. Adding this new way of communicating with yourself privately can help you validate feelings and thoughts that you may already know about yourself -- aspects of yourself that are conspicuously absent in a traditional mirror. With the True Mirror, you can more quickly understand yourself and subsequently reach your own goals more completely.”

Communicating with yourself privately: just what this ego-mad culture needs more of, Gad!

So let's hear it now for the nation’s favorite occupation: Dancin’ With Your S-eh-elf. And have a good, selfish Mem-Day weekend, y'all.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=812HHetzbe4]