Resurrection

All week what a sad grumpy girl I was. The day I stopped in at the frame shop the nice man there told me "Happy Easter" when we got done with our business. Oh I’m not much on Easter I said back nobody seems to care about Easter anymore except to give their kids two-foot-tall Easter baskets filled with crap, and anyway it’s too early, the ground looks like a dry old scab..... Not that I have anything against Jesus, I’m actually I’m a fan of Jesus! “I’ll be sure to tell him that next time I see him,” came his mild retort.

What a burden I often am to myself. It’s like having this embarrassing relative around all the time only I’m him. Her. She. I’m the relative.

I cheered up by degrees as the week went on. Sitting in the cemetery in the rain Wednesday night helped some since I do love a cemetery. Then I went to the  Holy Thursday Service that I hadn't been to in like million years and I’d forgotten how it moves me to see the way the church gets darker and darker the deeper into the readings we go with Judas nervously fingering his prayer beads and the fellas telling Jesus how they’re with him all the way Man only then they’re all passed out and it’s the big moment when the soldier gets his ear cut off and Jesus sticks it back on and then the scene with Peter saying he didn’t know him when somebody asked him after the arrest. I tried that once when my doctor told me I had to find out what my father died of. “Nah," I said. "I don't have to really. I mean I didn’t even know the guy!” Which I thought was pretty funny though the doctor didn't. he STILL made me go digging back 50 years through a world of painful old papers until I finally did find a copy of the death certificate which some saint sent to my mom when he died in ’73 not having laid eyed on her since the day I was born. I liked saying that I didn’t even know the guy. It felt good to deny him. “You did it to me,” I remember thinking at the time.

And then Good Friday and I went to my favorite little pond and looked out at the water and the wind was so strong it was refreezing the wave as they splashed against the overhanging twigs and breaches, making this kind of beaded fringe like you used to see on lampshades in the 1920s and 1930s and the fringe clicked as the wind blew and I kept falling sleep trying to read my book about the Civil War dead and how nobody thought to mark the poor soldier’s uniforms with their names and there were no ambulances or hearses, no system for carrying away the wounded or burying the dead. (Cheerful reading I know.)

And then yesterday we had the wind again but a crazy bright sun too and I bought enough flowers for a mobster’s funeral and brought then home and mad ea giant mess in the kitchen with the vases and the stems and the scissors and the greens . A mess! But I began to get really happy and then I made a salad with cumin and artichoke hearts and these really fat oranges, and then we went out and saw a production of The Tempest and I cried when the mean old bastard of a brother who years before snatched the Dukedom away from the rightful ruler Prospero and then washes up on Prospero’s island ha HA after the big storm that Prospero made using his magic…. When he sees his boy and realizes he hadn’t drowned but was actually just fine and more than fine because here he is sitting cozily with this lovely girl Prospero’s daughter and he weeps with joy and is a mean old bastard no longer……

And then it was today. Then it was Easter Sunday and our little boy cat who was hours from death just 20 days back sashayed into our bedroom and hopped light and quick the tub edge while I was in the bath and I saw that his sutures were clean gone and the wound was healed and he looked at me with his bright green eyes and lifted his chin as of to say Hey momma and I just started to smile and my smile got wider and wider and wider and wider as the day went on and we got all dressed and went to church and had a meal together and the sun shone down all day.

 

The Rain It Raineth Every Day

Today I gave a talk to 30 lovely church women at the venerable old First Baptist Church of Lexington MA and the weather was again terrible only this time it was raining little needles and the day had dawned snowy so the walking was awful.

But the second I walked into the basement of that old church I felt happy.

Church basements all have that same great smell and the Sunday school rooms looked so dear with their wee tables and chairs and some old hooked rugs and bright yellow walls.

When I found the main gathering place the ladies were just tucking into a hot lunch that one of them had put together all on her own: pans of ravioli with sausage and broccoli; Caesar salad; baskets of bread; and home-made carrot cake. I had said I wouldn’t eat the latter but it smelled so much like childhood and a school cafeteria I thought How can I not? and so sat down.

I was the only outsider of course and they did the nicest thing they could have done while smiling warmly at me from time to time: they went on with their regular conversations which let me see right into their lives. This one was having trouble with her dog. That one was going crazy because her husband is always saying she doesn’t talk loud enough. A third one leans forward to say that she was born in this town made famous by a Revolution and still lives on what remains of the family farm. Her mother, in her late 90s, lives there too.

She and the woman beside her described exactly how this town still seemed even just 60 or 70 years ago: pastoral. Quiet. Like the farm town it was before 1775.

The talk and the rain outside took me back I think and when it was time for me to rise and talk for 40 minutes I talked about that past too and these great women laughed and sighed and remembered back too.

I told them what was next for me; how three hours after I got done with them I would be unpacking a picnic in a cemetery as night fell. The picnic was my romantic notion and I'd invited to it a lady 60 and a lady 80.

I'm writing this at 3pm. I have made a beef stew and a salad of Boston lettuce with almonds and berries for this picnic. I have sourdough bread and some cookies, wee little oranges and two kinds of wine, a straw picnic basket and some elegant stemware, fresh-brewed coffee and two thermoses that between them cost 50 whole bucks because they’re guaranteed to keep hot things hot for 24 hours.

We’ll see I guess. But the cemetery we are going to is Mt. Auburn, such a beautiful place rain or shine that  I’ve been thinking lately it’s the place where my man and I will one day go for keeps,  where all day and all night we can look up at its wonderful trees and imagine that we too can still feel the rain on our faces, steely-needled or soft, and the snow when it snows and the strengthening vernal sun.

Grey Gardens

Once you get used to high drama you begin creating it all around you, ever notice? I’m noticing it today and wondering if in fussing over this poor post-operative cat of mine I didn’t start turning into someone really odd like this little person you can see by double clicking on these words. Or like that old Bouvier lady who lived with her crazy daughter and a million cats in that tumbledown house in the Hamptons. (You’ve heard of Grey Gardens right? and the two of them spending day and night in this one messy bedroom eating ice cream right from the carton while the cats ate their cat food right from the can and circled and stank and wove in and out like snakes?

I’m thinking now that I maybe HAVE gone a wee bit OVERBOARD with worry over my poor kitty with his stitches.

I got him home from his second trip to the world’s most elaborate quadruped cat hospital and 24 hours later he still hadn’t wet for me, which I knew very well because the doctors had said in no uncertain terms to mind his comings goings, as it were. “Put him in the bathroom for these three weeks, where he won’t be tempted to jump up and hurt his stitches,” they said. “ And keep an eye on him at all times. “

“So what, I should sleep in the tub” I asked.

“Ha ha, well ya, kind of.”

Instead I put him in a back room here in a special doggy bed with a hot water bottle and this worked fine after the first hospitalization. After this second visit though things took a downturn. I crept into his sickroom at 7am today and he was up on the brand new ottoman, and gave me that look, you know the one? “Yeah I'm on the furniture and sure I bled on it a little but fuck you, know what I ‘m sayin’?

Naturally it’s a shock when you’re cat swears at you but the worse news was that he hadn’t gone to the bathroom AT all. His litterbox was dry as a bone.

And when I lifted him oh so gently and placed him in there, he got right out again.

Then, when I carried him to our, bathroom normally a palace of beauty and order now crowded with tuna-flavored cat meds and a food dish and a SECOND litterbox and tried putting him in that, he lay right down in it as if to say “I will sleep in this thing and I will DIE in this thing before I use it the way you want me to use it.”

That’s when I panicked and called the hospital. “He’s blocked again!” I said. “Even with a giant stoma in place of his little garden hose, he can’t pee !”

“Someone will call you right back,” they said

But could I wait? I could not. I put him right in the car and started for the place so when they did call back and say “Bring him in, Mrs. Marotta, by all means bring him right in,” I’d be in the door like a flash. I was literally in the parking lot and on the actual brink of hustling him inside when I suddenly thought Wait a minute T. This is gonna be 200 bucks more. JUST IN CASE why don’t you drive over to Target and buy YET ANOTHER kitty toilet and even more paper towels on account of how he absolutely can’t let regular litter touch his little underside. Let’s so this and just see if he’ll go to the bathroom that way, right in the back of my nice little minivan.

So I turned around and headed for Target and ten minutes later was back in the car with the goods . I let Abe out of his cage and placed him in this newest rest room. And gain I got the look. And then … and then …he noted a little spilled litter from a week ago when I’d bought a 400 pound sack of the stuff because nobody told me he wasn't going to be able to use it…. A teensy dusting was spilled on the rug in the way-back…. And this he saw. And this he took a sniff of , scratched. Took another sniff; scratched some more- and then went to the bathroom both ways right on the rug.

And the scary thing is I was thrilled. I’ll worry tomorrow about the fact that I’ve invited two elegant older ladies to enjoy a kind of indoor picnic at the country’ oldest cemetery with me right in this very car on Thursday.

Because you know it as well I do: cucumber sandwiches and sherry under the sheltering trees in a gorgeous historic venue are all very well. And I know we will have a lovely lovely time. But having a pet who can find relief when relief has long eluded him – well that’s even better. So crack open a can of tuna and bring on the Mocha Almond, Aby babe. Tonight in our porcelain palace we are CELBRATING !

Grateful

It was a hell of a week between hosting all those Shakespeare enthusiasts and giving First Aid to our little boycat Abe - and then 30 minutes before that big soiree began I got told I had to bring him BACK to the hospital for some critical care. He just had no interest in eating and drinking. He just sat in his doggy bed looking resigned. Abe HAS a doggy bed instead of a kitty bed for two reasons. Because (a) are you kidding, cats don't have kitty beds, they have YOUR bed; and (b) he’s such a wild man ordinarily that we had to buy the bigger, doggy-style bed and then stick it inside a giant metal rabbit hutch because it’s the only way we can transport him without having him undergo a total freak-out. And sure we feel like crazy peopled  carrying around something the size of a doghouse but it’s the only way  we can keep from going stark raving mad with a cat yowling on the seat beside us. In this cage he can see where he’s going and that calms him down some. Here in his sickroom I’ve taken the cage part off and put a fate up at the door. I figure it gives him something soft to sit on instead of just having a bare floor in his solitary confinement.

 

The next morning when it was time to go back to the animal ER I couldn’t face that gigantic contraption. It was just too big and me alone with the chore. Instead I put him in soft sided gym-bag of a cat carrier, the kind cat-owners use, the kind his meek sister Charlotte rides in without complaint but we weren’t half a mile into the journey when he started fighting his way out. First, his head nose emerged. Then his head popped up like a jack in the box head. When his shoulders began emerging it seemed to me like childbirth all over again and he with him struggling so mightily I just started laughing. “Abe I’m going to lose control of the car and we’re BOTH going to die! “My blood is on your head Abraham!” I was yelling as I pressed on that small stubborn head.

But we didn’t die. We got to the hospital where the lovely internist spoke gravely of steroids and feeding tubes, of possible bone marrow investigations and I don’t know WHAT else, all because Abe’s red blood cell count was still dropping. I was there for four hours while they went back and forth with the tests and the deliberation, four hours as they finally took me into the back room to clue me in as to the actual dollars involved.

 

So Abe stayed another two nights and God bless him began making his way back to relative health with just a blood transfusion and an appetite stimulant.

 

As I drove away without him Wednesday I felt guilty relief.  15 minutes before the Shakespeare lovers has arrived the night I was in my nastiest clothes and covered with cat hair. Luckily our girl Annie came to do her magic with the food. While we read the play she squeezed heavenly substances out of a pastry cone and dragged bits if roast lamb through a trail of gorgonzola melt.  Then when the reading was done, her dad appeared and started opening wine bottles. The Shakespeareans loved the wines and the foods and positively inhaled the traditional hot chocolate and at evening’s end announced they were coming to this house every month, never mind once a year.

 

I had a great time talking with them all, these men and women in their 60s, 70s and 80s but the nicest moment came when I had a minute with the one named Max who did such a great job reading Falstaff last year I remember it every time I see him. Tonight he had also read his part with such expressiveness and verve that I just had to say something.

 

I love to hear you read Max. In fact I love just seeing you! And you look so great.”

 

“I’m 97 years old!” he said with merry amazement and I thought to myself this is they way to be! Live to a hundred and go to every party!” And isn’t that what Abe’s trying to do, just a month shy of his 13th birthday in a world that seems to have ‘torn him a new one’ as the saying goes?

 

He’s home again as if 2 o’clock this afternoon and eating and drinking to beat the band. He has a shaved crotch of course and the fur on his legs where they attached the IV and the catheter are bare still too. And then of course there’s that crazy satellite dish he has around his neck so he won’t bite out his stitches but never mind all that. He’s here. He’s right here next to me on this double-wide chair, curled around a hot water bottle and watching me write.

 

David‘s in the other room reading the latest New Yorker and I can hear the girl cat Charlotte padding around wondering where the supper is.

 

Guess I’m starting to wonder that too. Guess it’s time to pull a little food out of the fridge, make a fire in the fireplace and let the weekend settle about us. Here in this house we’re feeling pretty good. Even though our purse is even lighter today than it was on Tuesday that’s OK I think. These two casts are part of our family, same as everyone else.

 I feel grateful to both Dr. Haber who sure does know her Internal Medicine, and to Dr. Corti who can whisk off a whole penis like a magician whisks off that special tablecloth, and STILL leave enough in the way of “utensils” for a kitty to process the daily intake.

 

I’m grateful to Old Dave for opening all those wine bottles, for mixing it up so generally with a bunch of people he’d never laid on eyes before, and just generally for being a man outstanding in his field.

The doctors initially said “Put Abe alone in a small room with a paper-towel-lined litter box and a food source.” But now today they told me "Actually put him in YOUR room so you can watch him.”

 

So I guess that’s what we’ll try to do here in a couple of hours. But even if he’s loudly at work all night long trying to get around that cone bib and dig at his stitches, still: I’m pretty sure I’m going to sleep like a baby. 

Wipe That Smile...

Sure it all SEEMS very funny to write about a cat who’s having a penisectomy until you go to the hospital to bring him home and there he is looking so thin and compromised, wearing one of those ridiculous-looking satellite dishes around his neck so he won’t use his little exacto-knife/tweezer teeth to pull out every last one of his stitches.

My junior high history teacher was always telling me to wipe that smile off our faces and helped me do it too, with a hard wooden paddle he used freely, even on us girls, swinging the thing fast to come down hard on the tips of my fingers where even just the one blow stung like you wouldn't believe.

Well, life wiped that smile of my face 36 hours ago when after six days of IVS and ultrasounds and dips down into the Land of Anesthesia poor Abraham was released at last to my care . Even as I write this he huddles some in isolation some 30 feet away in a back bedroom where he must remain for another 14 days. He cries from time to time but that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is going in there and seeing him: his expression of pained resignation; the way he can’t set his head down or stretch out on his side because of that foolish cone; the way he can’t seem to pee much; how when I lift him ever so gently into my lap to give him some water, which I can only seem to get into him using the syringes his pain meds came in and we have now used up the last of the pain meds. I may have to use my mother’s universal remedy straight from the Emerald Isle and give him whiskey.

I’m kidding about the whiskey, but all my kidding falls flat now. It’s not funny what we have done to save his life. Is it wrong of us to order up these heroic rescues for our animals just because we can't imagine doing without their sweet company while we shine our shoes or pay the bills or watch TV?

David saw where the surgeons were getting at before I did. He saw our oldest girl on Friday and said to her “I’m not sure but I think Abe is having a sex change operation today.” I thought it was going to just be a couple of catheterizations to drain the bladder then boom he'd be fine and home, trotting through the yard and snacking on his favorite foods.

Tonight because I promised the use my house some 10 months ago, 30 Shakespeare enthusiasts are coming here. We spend three hours reading the play that has been chosen and carefully cast. Then at 10:30 or so the is we adjourn to the dining room of the hosting house to enjoy the collation as has been the custom since the group’s founding in the 19^th century when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s brother, and daughter, and grandson were enthusiastic members.

Lucky for me our girl Annie who is a professional chef is coming over after her other, more mainstream 9 to 5  job, to prepare the rest of the food which she began upon over the weekend. This means that in the next several hours all I have to do is go back to the animal hospital to ask them how the HELL to get the cone off just for meals since Abe can’t even get NEAR  his food dish without knocking it over. Then I need to get five bags of ice and a little more wine, try to see to it that the whole HOUSE doesn’t smell like animal illness and then have another look at the living room whose furniture we shoved all around last night so that the Shakespeareans can see one another as they read the play aloud.

Then, until around 6 tonight when I have to jump into my pantyhose and start setting out the salted nuts I can sit with the patient, my pal from his babycat days in 1995 when he was a small grey ball of fluff who when he came down our big stairs one a time looked like nothing so much as a Slinky toy. I’ll sit with him and MAYBE try to write a little, but mostly just try be with him I think, as he makes his way through this moment and the next and the next one following, even as we all must do until day comes quick or fast when for us all both time and moments are forever done.

Cat-a-tonia

I had to rest for a couple of days. All that jauntiness about our cat that I was trying to maintain didn't match my real feelings and I would have written lugubrious sentimental things about Pets and All They Do For Us which is true; they do do a lot God knows, God knows, but less is more in the old expression-of-feelings department and I didn't want to be emoting all over the blogosphere. But he’s coming home today finally after six days in the hospital so I thought maybe I could screw my courage to the sticking point (that's from Macbeth) and carry on.

We drove up to our place at the lake for the weekend. We brought Abe’s sister here so we could examine our consciences and ask ourselves if we knew how to take care of cats at all. Here is Charlotte now, sitting in her favorite chair under the charcoal portrait of Bob Dylan that our boy Michael did as a junior in high school.

(I know, it looks like a photograph huh? His work is all like that. Only problem: it takes him like three months to finish one drawing.) It was just snowing a minute ago – a quick squall but now that seems to have stopped and the sun is coming out. We have to leave soon but I’m trying to hold back the time. I wanted to go up to my other favorite room here:

and read This Republic of Suffering which is Drew Gilpin Faust's book new about death and the Civil War, and also write in my poor forgotten paper diary which is getting short shrift lately.

But in five hours I can got get Abe who has had a one prett-y prett-y hard time (say that the way Larry David does on Curb Your Enthusiasm.) They catheterized him as we know but when they took the tube out at midnight one night and watched him the next day he still couldn’t empty his bladder completely. Also, he appears to be anemic but no one knows why. Was it Kitty AIDS? Feline Leukemia? Should they work him up for both? By all mean, yes. Hmmmm, but then the news came that he's OK in that department so what was the deal? The hours passed; they called twice daily. Now they had to catheterize him again… Finally on Friday they called and said “Let’s do an abdominal ultrasound, because he has to have surgery and we should know what’s in there. It’s the only thing now: a Perineal urethrostomy or PU – which, in fairness, they had told us about the first night Mary and I brought him in.

 

"With a PU they just reroute the urethra” I thought the young doctor said that first night. “They create a new opening in the perineal area.”( This, in case your mother told you never never to look down there, is the smooth shiny stretch of real estate we all have between the Department of Waste Management and what Shakespeare (Shakespeare again, that show-off!) called the Organs of Increase..)

 

But I must’ve understood wrong because this time they gave a different explanation. Friday’s doctor said, “Think of it like a garden hose that used to be nine feet long and now we’re gonna make it six feet long, that’s all - because the part of the urethra that gets jammed up is the narrowest part, at the end….

 

“So we’re going to basically cut off his penis.”

 

Poor Abe. “First they came for my scrotum when I was too young to measure the loss and now this!" he’d have thought he’d overhead them.

 

Well it’s history now. They operated and he came through. Except for the worsening anemia which is probably just from loss of blood and should we transfuse him? We think so? Of course by all means, is it complicated? Not at all. Costly? Mmmmm yes…

 

But just two weeks ago I heard a re-broadcast of that wonderful program about penises that Ira Glass did on This American Life. OK, OK it was really about testosterone. And don’t we all know what testosterone has done to the world! With my own estrogen levels ebbing daily the see-saw of hormones has caused testosterone to come into new prominence. (Ask my oldest girl who when she sees me nowadays says “Hi Mum you look great! You only have this One Whisker!”)

 

Thus little grey Abe won’t be fighting anyone, not that he ever did. He was always meek and self-effacing as anyone can see.

He won’t spray anyone, not that he ever did that either, his cruel owners having nipped that urge in the bud when he was a baby. He won’t even get to stand up to go to the bathroom. "He’ll pee like a girl" the vet had said and so he shall I suppose. The important thing is that he’ll be home with us soon.

Soooo initial sleepover bladder emptying and work-up: $1400; added evaluations $2000 more. Transfusion, morphine cocktail, enemas: a grand total of 4500 balloons. But Abe eating and peeing and trotting around with the enjoyment we all know? Priceless! So hang on old friend we’ll be there soon. And they say the drugs are great!

Whadda Day

ABE AMONG THE FLOWERS

Is it OK to whine in a blog? I swore off whining in my diaries out of pity for my poor kids who’ll have to go through them all some day and who wants to find out their mother was so petty, writing down how misunderstood she felt all the time or else primly recorded every time her husband looked at her cross-eyed?

No I’ll not burden them. I’ll burden you instead.

On Monday our nice crazy cat Abe disappeared - just vanished into thin air. I noticed it at suppertime when he didn’t come downstairs talking his little black gums off. (He’s one of those really chatty animals.) I asked his sister Charlotte where he was but she wasn’t talkin’. David went out to play tennis and drink Scotch with his pals so I made a fire in living room fireplace thinking “this is the center of the house; if Abe is anywhere in here I will hear him.”

I didn’t though and when David came home and heard he was gone we searched the whole house twice; then he went back outside with a flashlight and looked and listened, even drove around hoping Abe would pop out of the bushes since he loves nothing so much as a ride in your car so long as you’re just going around the block.

No luck though. “He’s in the house,” I told David. “I can feel him; so for the third time that night we searched all three floors and even the cellar. Nada. We slept with our bedroom door open for the first time in 20 years the way we used to do when the kids were babies. “What’s this about?” I asked Dave when he swung it wide. “So he can find us if he comes looking.”

He didn’t though. So the NEXT day I looked for him all over the town and every old newspaper, every piece of tree-limb looked to me like a little grey cat huddled in the gutter, killed by some ruthless fool in a car.

Finally I called my pal Mary, school nurse, veteran of the Oncology Department and the AIDS ward at Mass General Hospital. She’s the one who helped me through my last cat crisis which, when I made it into a column, brought in more letters than any other thing I have written in 27 years. (You can see it - hell you can HEAR me tell it in my own voice but you have to buy my $30 audio-plus-read-it book first ha ha.) Mary said she’d come after supper that night and help me look. She brought her lovely 13-year old Rachel and not eight minutes after they got here we found him - in the skinniest little space behind the door of my son’s third floor bedroom, empty now with Michael off in New York subsisting on a diet of beer and Ramen noodles.

He just stared at us, listless. Mary touched him, studied his face and said “renal failure?” We went right to the all-night animal ER, this gorgeous well-lighted temple of wellness and they operated on him within the hour.

All this was yesterday and I felt OK; I felt as if we were making progress. Because he wasn’t lost anymore, see. I felt as good as you do when you HAVE the baby and then the nurses suggest you let them take it down the hall to the nursery so you can rest and you say yes sure because you’re no fool you know it’s gonna be a LONG 20 years.

So yesterday I was happy. But today when the vet called at 6am she said he was no better really. His bladder didn’t burst and kill him but the catheter in his little neutered pee-pee set up some inflammation and his bloodwork looked iffy and he just couldn’t go home today forget about it and we’re now heading past the $2000 mark billwise but that was OK, right?

So at 6:30am I made my way down to the kitchen and opened up the cabinet with the flower vases, thinking to bring a bouquet to Mary and Rachel and out fell the one thing I have from my mother’s wedding day: a low chunky water glass saved as a souvenir. She used to keep one of the napkins in it from the reception hall. “Longwood Towers” it says in blue embroidery. The napkin was fine but the glass smashed in a million pieces.

Then, not six hours later I was thinking about the 20 Shakespeare enthusiasts who are coming here Tuesday night so we can all read Henry VIII aloud in my living room . I went to the dining room and was vaguely pawing some nice china service pieces when Smash! there went the fine china platter from my mother’s wedding in 1903 and you wouldn’t mind but this poor lady died at age 31 and what kind of a thing was THAT to do to her memory?

So I felt like hell all day and began thinking what were they doing to my baby down the hall in that nursery? I want him back! So I went to visit him. He has his leg in a sort of cast to support his IV tube and he seems to have dandruff or something all of a sudden and at first he tried to say some things about how sore his pee-pee was but in the end settled for purring like mad while I held him.

And now I’m home again and the column is due tomorrow and still has a zillion mistakes in it. But Dave’s got his bridge pals over and they’re drinking MORE Scotch and watching the Celtics so that’s good. That means I can iron and watch my new DVD of Eastern Promises, way too scary a move for David to even see a single scene of. I didn’t eat any dinner so maybe I’ll take that up with me too, then when I’m done put my sorry self to bed, asking forgivingness of my mum and her poor young mum and pulling up the covers to hide my head just like Abe did when we brought him in to the Catheter Cathedral.

Everybody Drink!

Flying home from my little vacation I had a chance to check out billboards and posters in what seemed like dozens of eateries and I have to say: Some of them are wicked lame.

Take the fuel that "America runs on" for example: the poster I saw for that shows a big white Styrofoam cup imprinted with the familiar orange and pink colors and the phrase "Readin' Emails!" That was it, that was the whole ad, as if there could be no higher kind of fun than readin’ emails while sippin' your Dunkin' Donuts coffee. "OH yeah,” we're supposed to say to ourselves. “I'm a cool person now!

Still, the Dunkin' posters are better than the ones Starbucks comes up with. Up until this past week my favorite has been this misty-looking painting-like poster showing a path (from coffee grower to coffee drinker) that looks exactly like somebody's colon, right down to the little off-ramp at the bottom. Where it starts there are happy cartoon peasants driving cartoon tractors; where it ends, happy cartoon people holding coffee cups the size of their heads while the words wind up down and around like ant tracks, set off in odd little sentences, like Buddhist koans perhaps, pearls of wisdom for you to ponder while you're waiting in line for your $5 fix. Also some are capitalized, and some not, and for no apparent reason which I find incredibly annoying. See?

"Of the earth but heaven sent, coffee starts out as a CHERRY." (OK, now here imagine a gong sounding: whaaaaang.) "Within the cherry you have the taste of the PLACE it was grown." (Another gong-dong, bwaaaaaang.) Fire is the magical element for it is in the ROAST that it truly becomes coffee upon the SECOND POP" (Double bwaaaang.) And now here you sit with a cup in front of you, ready to ENJOY. A sip leads to an EPIPHANY. INSPIRATION and IMAGINATION await. The journey goes ever ON ..."

Is it me or is this NOT ONLY AMAZINGLY STILTED AND NON-CLEVER BUT OBSCURE IN ITS MESSAGE? It's as if it was written by people who speak a whole other language than English, who, like, use a different alphabet.

I just thought that was the dumbest Starbucks poster I ever saw – until Monday morning when I caught sight of the brand-new March poster for the a mint-flavored drink. “Leprechaun Latte” it says over the image of a capering member of the wee people, and then “I looked into my literacy-loving soul and AIEEE! there was a latte!"

"Aieee there was a latte"? Why don’t these people just become accountants?

You want to see some good example of advertising go to the site where you can see all of this year’s Superbowl Ads. My favorite shows a real baby sitting at a seeming keyboard in his nursery and talking in a deep male voice. What's great is this ironic and laid back voice coming out of a real baby's mouth. Also the fact that it has a little throwing-up in it of the kind that a person comes right back from, the way my godmother did as a young woman in the 1930s. This lady, born in 1909 if you please, had had a few, sure, but no more than anyone else at the party. She was playing sing-along tunes on the piano for a gang of tipsy revelers and singing herself – then glanced down to see that oops! she had thrown up all over her dress without knowing it and c'mon, what’s funnier than that?

Well let’s close this high-minded post by looked at that great ad right now.It has a sister ad that came on later in the game so we’ll put that in here too.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vW9gUmooFg]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdfvWAp5GUw]

Babies, man: you can’t beat babies for funny. Maybe some of these corporations should hire THEM to write their ads.

Saturday Night Fever

So here we are on vacation in Paradise and our little boy is sick. Somebody has to stay with him at all times since when the fever decides to spike he can't even wake up never mind sit. Yesterday afternoon his poor sun-starved mother spent three hours in the hotel room while he snoozed on, simmering like a little tea kettle in his fold-out bed. She is such a good mother, this green-eyed girl. You can tell just by looking at her what a nice mother she is. Here, ha ha see if you can pick her out in this photo with her grad school classmates. (My kids tell me everyone already knows this but clicking on any picture in this kind of setting makes it VERY BIG. (It's fun, try it! It's like accordion-folding the paper that comes wrapped around your drinking straw, then S-L-O-W-L-Y releasing little drops of water on it, see? Cool, right?)

Anyhow just as she was getting ready to dress up and go out to this fancy dinner with the rest of the family when he woke up from this three-hour nap.And his temperature in the ear was 103.8 .Which is why she had him in the tub when I knocked on the door of their hotel room.I had long ago offered to do babysit on this night. I have trouble with long fancy meals anyhow: ninety minutes in I'm either fighting the urge to lie down under the table and blow spit bubbles or else I'm saying things like "What about the POOR? Why don't we give all these food dollars to THEM?!"I hurried right in to the bathroom, expecting to see a bright-red child, but no. He was pale and floating on his back, his little body stretched out full length. "Hi, TT" he said in funereal tones but then the Motrin must have started working because by the time his mum has left and I had dug into my pocket and pulled out the little gel capsules with baby dinosaurs in them he'd perked right up.The Sex Ed seminar he had in mind for me started there.I had told him about how we could just toss these capsules into the warm water and the babies would emerge, but no; he insisted we help "deliver" them.Which led directly to talk about the wonderful world of underpants. He pointed and said that HE had a penis whereas I was just flat on the bottom."Wo!" said I and asked if he had never heard of Mister Rogers and "Everybody's Fancy," the world's most instructive song. Then I sang it a few times. Care to join me?Some are fancy on the outside.Some are fancy on the inside.Everybody's fancy.Everybody's fine.Your body's fancy and so is mine.Boys are boys from the beginning.Girls are girls right from the start.Everybody's fancy.Everybody's fine.Your body's fancy and so is mine.Girls grow up to be the mommies.Boys grow up be the daddies.Everybody's fancy.Everybody's fine.Your body's fancy and so is mine.I think you're a special personAnd I like your ins and outsides.Everbody's fancy.Everybody's fine.Your body's fancy and so is mine.Then we forced a couple of more dinosaurs into the world, he chanting "Come on Little Baby!" Then he turned to me and said "YOU never pushed anyone out.""Oh I didn't, huh? You know that green-eyed lady that just kissed you goodbye 30 minutes ago? You know the two others that look kinda like her only one of them has a hairy face?""Did you push Mum out? And Auntie? And Mike?""You bet I did."He floated a little longer among his foam menagerie thinking and singing. Then I toweled him off and tucked him back into his little sickbed."I need my children," he said and gathered to him both Bruce the babydoll and Pedro Hispanic Boy, so named by the surely-well-intentioned but still-slightly-missin' it toy manufacturer Kaplan, who, I clearly remember, also provided the cheerleading phrase "Multicultural Babies are a World of Fun and Snuggles" under Pedro's picture where I first saw it on the Internet."I pushed these two out," said our little boy with sleepy satisfaction and who would argue with that? The point is they were here with him now. And for all I remember of any pain associated with the pushing-out that I did so long ago, my own kids might as well have been ordered up in gel-caps. And his fever was down, for now anyway. And I could go to the next room with my book and listen to his sweet breathing all free of the need to blow spit bubbles or denounce dining out in fancy restaurants.

Nits 'n Fevers

You know you're a parent when sweet tiny white lights strung across a quiet lane of grass stop you in your tracks because they look so much like nits on a strand of hair..

Nits of course are the eggs that head lice lay and if you’ve cared for children at all in your life you have probably seen them. It happens on the day your child comes into the room scratching. Scratching in the morning, still scratching at noon. Along about suppertime you see him again and still his hands are in his hair and think WAIT A MINUTE YOU DON”T SUPPOSE?! And you pull him onto your lap and there behind the ear and along the hairline where it's nice and warm you see them: elliptical shaped eggs sticky as all Hell. No fingers can remove them and no tweezers for they are too numerous. Only the special shampoos will do the trick which you must immediately rush out to buy.

You lay the child back in the bath and soap him up. Many small bugs float out into the water and that’s the easy part. Then you towel the child off and do all you can to distract him from this next worst step which involves going at the critters’ eggs with a metal comb whose teeth are so close together that an angel’s daydreams couldn’t get through them.

There is crying and lamentation and heavy sweating and it’s all coming from you, your child having passed out 90 seconds in.

I thought about Bad Times on Vacation because here we are in a gorgeous oasis of a place called The Arizona Inn in sunny Tucson and what do you think? Within three hours of deplaning our little grandson Eddie got the flu.

Kids always get sick when you travel with them. It was never vacation for us unless we were in some clinic or ER when our kids were small; watching the pretend television of the washers and driers at the Laundromat tumbling the clothes that had been so amply thrown up on etc.Tonight I got to stay home with sick little Eddie while the others went out to a fancy restaurant. I had already volunteered for this duty even BEFORE he got sick and was happy to do it. When I got to his hotel room his mum had him and his 103-degree-plus fever were in the bath trying to ward off whatever horrible things come to you when the heat gets turned up that high.

Well I can tell more about what happened in that there room tomorrow but for now let us enjoy these images together because we are all God’s creature are we not? And the insects? Honey the insects are gonna be here LONG after we’re gone!

Mr. Fix-It Practices Home Repair

"Hey, Mum," says my son, "remember that weird single-serving coffee maker you gave me a while ago?” and of course I remembered it; it cost like $150 bucks.The way you get coffee out of this pricey gizmo is you stick in these small impregnated disks that look a little like diaphragms and cost like a buck apiece. Then there’s an almighty whirring noise and 30 second later out spurts the java into your favorite mug.I thought the kid would need a thing like this. He was just out of the College People Don’t Like To Name For Fear of Having Everybody Hate Them. I’m told they call it “dropping the H bomb” when you do this and like most nice normal kids, he does it very little.It’s not that Mike isn’t a great person; he is, as you can tell he is by the sweet mild look on his face as seen here a few winters ago holding our first grandbaby.He’s just a little .. strange; the kind of kid who thinks a T-shirt he imprinted himself with giant bloody-looking handprints all over it is just the thing not only to wear to the big Halloween party but who then insists I use this picture and not any other picture on the family Christmas card that year.I was pretty sure he couldn’t even make coffee on his own and a felt he would need some when he moved to New York mere months after graduation and was looking for a job.Turns out he used it for guests and not for himself. You know how the young are. “It’s such a cliché, ‘Oh here I am in my New York apartment drinking my coffee and surfing the net,’” he says to me. (Do you understand this? I don’t understand this but maybe that’s because my whole LIFE is a cliché.) Anyway so this other day as we four ate together he says, “I decided I needed coffee in my life again and so I pulled out that thing you gave me and opened the top to see if it needed cleaning. And out came all these exoskeletons. Insect parts, cockroach legs.”“Eeww!” we all cried. “What did you do?”“Well, shook it a little and more came out.”“Yeah And THEN what?”“I shook it again. I even held it upside down and they kept on coming.”“Mike, did you throw it away? “I hope you threw it away!” his two older sisters cried practically in unison.“Nah,” says Mike. “I filled the bathtub and submerged it.”“You put an electrical appliance in the tub?!” I said. “Then what? Did you get in there WITH it and plug it in?”No I just let it soak a while. Then I put it on my radiator to dry.”“And?”“And it works fine,” he said in his mild way and my first thought was “And THIS person is going to be caring of me in my old age?” But then maybe it’ll be OK after all. Because doesn’t everyone say God looks out for the simple-minded and the crazy? And isn’t that what’s protected ME all my life? ’cause one thing is sure-enough for sure: the apple just don’t fall too far from the tree.

Big Night

The Oscars are tonight and I know what that means: time to throw a low-cut gown over my push-up bra and those underpants with the padded fanny, prop my slippered feet up and catch all the action. (With no red carpet in your life it’s like being in your casket: footwear optional.)

Time was, I always got ready for the Oscars by dressing up. Back in the 80s I used to go in for suspenders rising out of high-waisted black slacks with a stripe down the side, and this cute red bow tie. I did it as a kind of homage to all the tuxedoed gents up there on the stage. That worked great when I was still young and sassy-looking with my giant winged hairdo. I tried it a few years back though and I looked like Mork from Ork.

But the real best way to get ready for the Oscars is by trying to catch all the nominated films ahead of time. I had the most fun doing back in '97 when I asked my then 8th grader if he’d like to spend school vacation week going on a business trip with me that we would make 60% business and 40% fun.

“Let’s go to Hershey Park!” I sang as I pictured it. It’s just a 14-hour drive!”

“Sure!” he sang back and it wasn’t 'til we were halfway across Pennsylvania that he asked to look at the brochure and saw that the place WASN’T EVEN OPEN FOR THE SEASON YET. I made it up to him by saying “OK here’s what: we’ll go to three of the year’s best movies all over the state as we make our way home.” And we did just that: caught “As Good as it Gets,” “Titanic,” and “Good Will Hunting” all within the space of 24 hours and boy was that fun.

This year though? Well I did see "Juno" but as for most of the other movies I got cold feet; I just couldn’t bring myself to watch them.

I mean "Sweeney Todd" with some crazy guy singing and slitting people’s throats and what, getting his ladyfriend to cook them? I don’t think so.

And "No Country For Old Men" with its title yanked by the neck from sweet old William Butler Yeats? It’s from a poem about how he can’t believe how old he's getting, a very big subject with these guys; Shakespeare couldn’t stop talking about it in his sonnets. "That is no country for old men" Yeats says, "the young in one another's arms” etc. and while it’s true he doesn’t go ON and on the way Shakespeare does with the dying fires and the limp sad leaves and all, he does make it sound pretty bleak. He also says that an elderly man is like a coat on a stick and that age is like some nasty thing that gets tied to you the way mean boys will tie stuff to a dog’s tail just to confuse and disrespect him - all of which give you EXACTLY NO CLUE about what No Country really focuses on, which is this big droopy-looking guy with a Prince Valiant haircut and a Fred-Gwynne-as-Herman-Munster face who’s a cold-eyed relentless killer. A killing machine. Such an earnest snuffer-out of life that some viewers and critics are hiding under their seats by saying, “Oh it's OK! Because the guy is allegorical, see! No REAL people could ever be that robotically murderous.” (Hel-lo! Can you say “The Twentieth Century?")

So I was going to go see that?

And as for “There Will Be Blood” if that isn't the most nakedly obvious thing you can say about human life I don't know what it. Honey, there will be blood and there will be cramps. There will be cuts and their will be throw-up. And not only is it all completely obvious to say so, it's dreary and boring. And it’s the night of the Academy Awards! How about “THERE WILL BE DRINKING"? It’s true my padded underpants make my spouse laugh so hard the veins stand out in his forehead; also true that I look like James and the Giant Peach in the push-up bras and the low-cut dresses. But I do still have the bow tie and the suspenders, though with these new hinge-marks appearing in my aging face I look less like Mork than Pinocchio. So the hell what though? Just for tonight I’ll be a real boy, Daddy, I will! So cut my strings, Papa Gepetto, and pour me some o’ that bubbly. It’s time to turn on the Oscars!

I Begin on My 60th Year

It was my birthday yesterday. I was at the lake with my old pal from camp days who came to see me from her home in Swarthmore.

Bobbie was the counselor of my cabin for three summers running when I was 13, 14, and 15. She taught swimming and wore the baggy sweatshirts and the skin-tight Bermudas of the times over her two-piece bathing suits. Some nights after Taps she got to ride the ten miles to McDonald's with the other counselors who were also "off" and came back two hours later and woke us up to give us flat little cheeseburgers and soggy sacks of fries which, coupled with extra-thick shakes made of honest-to-goodness ice cream, were about the best thing a person could imagine tasting at 11 at night.

Bobbie comes up at least once a year and I go to her house in Swarthmore.

This time she came to our vacation house at the lake where we all like to go in winter when we want to see what it’s like to be eyeball-deep in snow.

Early on this morning of my birthday I was stilled holed up in my bedroom writing when the phone rang. It was my big sister Nan who for the last 20 years has greeted me on this day by saying “Happy Birthday, Little Wormhead!” We talked a while and she made me laugh as usual and by the time I hung up I felt so great I popped open a screen and wrote an email that went to all three of my kids at once and also their dad my husband holding the fort back home. “It’s my birthday!” I wrote, and “No need to call!” and “Drop me a line!” and other such annoying and typically maternal mixed messages.

My middle child did call, halfway through the day. My oldest child later sent an email saying among other things that she thought I should quit writing a column and just blog full time. And at 7 at night my youngest kid, who leads the glamorous semi-poverty-stricken life of all young people living in New York City, texted me. He said he really enjoyed all the typos in my email, especially at the end where I tried to sign it “A girl who expects to be around for another 30 years,” but so mangled ‘girl’ that Word mistook my intent, did that blindingly fast mid-air correction that Word is famous for and wrote “grill” instead. My son’s message in brief: that you had to love any grille with THAT kind of durability.

Someplace in there Bobbie and I went food-shopping and I overheard two young guys stocking the shelves. “No no, anyone can go to the frat party,” one was saying to the other. “You just have to bring two girls with you to get in.” An older man and I both heard this and traded that special smile, three parts delight and one part rue that the young always elicit in us the no-longer-young.

Bobbie bought us a special New Zealand wine that the guy at the liquor store said was famous for its grapefuity flavor and we stopped in at an antique store where for 20 bucks I got a beautiful bowl to set fresh flowers in. Then we walked two miles just for fun and I holed up again to write some more.

It was then that Dodson called. Dodson “became” our oldest child when he joined our family as a 15-year-old freshman at Winchester High, in our town’s chapter of A Better Chance. He was tiny then, the shortest kid in the school but he isn’t tiny now. Here he is with me nowadays, all grown up and remember, a mere click blows this way up:

Anyway he called together with darling tiny Veronica of Buenos Aires by way of Sarasota Florida whom he married last March.

As I raced to finish my column Old Dave called to say that yes the cats were fine and he was just fooling around with the taxes and I should cozy up and have fun with Bobbie – who really capped off the day by making me a wonderful dinner to go with our New Zealand wine, a recipe involving lentils and tarragon, chopped-up bacon and a fried egg of all things and for dessert a homemade fruit compote with Crème Anglaise on top.

And we ended the night watching ancient home movies from our days at Camp Fernwood, movies in which Bobbie and Nan are seen to be dominating the Track and Field events with their long, long legs. Nan and I, we went to that camp through all of our young lives because our mother and aunt were the directors there. Our mother had in fact taken all these movies.

Oddly enough the movies inched backward in time. Here we were one minute at 12 and 14 doing the Long Jump and practicing at Archery and now suddenly here I was only one while Nan was three. And then those scenes gave way to a wavery color film of Mom’s wedding day in 1946 when such a blizzard blew in that that the photographer never got to the event at all.

Somebody with a movie camera did though and these images are all we have of our father, who was Gone Baby Gone not two years down the line. I never saw what the man even looked like 'til I saw this movie, as a woman grown.

It’s funny though: it wasn’t his face I couldn’t take my eyes off as this very nice birthday drew to a close; it was Mom’s. She was 38 years old. She never thought she’d marry, but she did and had the two of us and almost 40 years later - the last time we saw this very in fact – she laughed and said to us, “Be careful what you pray for girls! I wanted children! I never prayed for a man!”

I thought about my mother, now 20 years in her little grave. She gave me life and she stuck around to help me live it, guiding me through the vain, wildly fibbing, self-centered years to land me here, still feeling about 12 in more ways than I care to admit. Here, on this far shore of 59, where last night I watched large clouds sweep in out of nowhere and in one quick swipe like some angry teacher erase that lovely moon, so lately full and moist and brilliant.

WTF?

So here’s a new low: the Postal Service swore at me.

Hard to believe, I know, but I have it right here: a naughty abbreviation thickly scrawled on the envelope of my nice neatly-lettered envelope, which was only addressed a LITTLE wrong in the sense that I had a city that didn’t go with its state, and a zip code that didn’t go with either one.

Somebody there at that Mississippi post office not only wrote, “No Such Address” – or I should say checked the “No Such Address” box on the inky, stamped-on grid that lists all the possible reasons why your letter is coming back to Sorry Old You - but then scribbled the naughty phrase on there too.

“WTF?!” it said right there in black and white.

Now not so long ago I wouldn’t have understood the meaning of this tidy little acronym, for I am old and limited in my understanding generally. I only know it now because I have so many young people in my life, most of whom can hang out a whole clothesline’s worth of vividly bad language once they get going.

For others like me out there I will explain that the phrase means basically “What in tarnation?” (I told you I was old) or, more exactly, “What the HECK?” only with a certain other word in place of “heck,” the whole phrase perhaps being another one dreamed up by enlisted men, along the lines of “FUBAR” which we’re all now familiar with, having seen “Saving Private Ryan” back in the late 1990’s.

I felt hurt a little hurt, I’ll admit. I mean, I make mistakes all the time and no one else in my life finds it necessary to talk in to me in curse words and the Post Office most especially. The Post Office is really nice to me.

Last year I had a whole envelope stuffed with a whole month’s worth of paychecks sent me by the papers that subscribe to my weekly column, which instead of bringing to the bank I accidentally mailed. Mailed in an unsealed envelope, with no address on it of course and no stamps. (I was hand-carrying it to the bank so why would it have an address and stamps?) Luckily, I had used one of my business envelopes with my name and return address printed right on it.

So even though I dropped it in the mailbox instead of bringing it to the bank back it came to me, the very next day: I found it in my post office box with not a single check missing and more to the point no saucy talk scribbled on the envelope.

They look out for me there at my P.O. and I am very grateful for this fact. I get mail all the time with just my name and “Winchester MA” written on the envelope. Plus once some unsavory looking guy approached Sam at the window asking where Terry Marotta lived. “Why?” said Sam accusingly. “Because I want to mail her something.” “Give it to me and I’ll see that she gets it,” Sam said coldly and the guy turned right around and left. And once I walked in to the place and Sam said, “I don’t like the sound your brakes are making. Go right to the gas station and have them looked at,” and I did and they were on the brink of total meltdown.

So with that kind of loving-kindness directed at me you can totally SEE why I’m shocked to receive this piece of nasty commentary, right? I mean right? Talking like that to a nice older person like me? Heavens my word! as my most old-fashioned friend regularly exclaims. Land sakes! Or, in common parlance and stooping to this guy’s level, What the frickity frick?!

Premature Burial

It’s 4:30 in the morning and I’ve just stumbled across a website about the Anatomy of the Foot and Ankle. I use the word “stumbled” just about literally since I haven’t slept for one single second of this long night – not since I climbed into bed just after the 10 o’clock news. The foot and ankle anatomy lesson starts this way: “At some time in your life you should experience foot, heel, or ankle pain.” How’s THAT for a cheerful notion? You should experience foot heel or ankle pain.

Well if you should then I by God will. It’s my fate is how I feel right now, with the worst cold I have had since I stayed home sick from school for a solid week at age 15 and missed not just factoring in Algebra but also the whole darn unit on Silas Marner. My head feels like someone drilled a hole in it of the kind you might make to drain the milk out of a coconut. It feels as though it’s first had very drop of moisture sucked out of it as if by a Shop-Vac and concrete poured in. I feel completely walled up respiration-wise, buried, sealed in the tomb, like the poor guy in the Poe story Premature Burial.”

I have this cold presumably because someone sneezed on me. (click on any pic to enlarge):

I’m not sneezing like this woman; I’m just in gridlock. In fact I’d welcome a good sneeze which at least would show some movement . If I had snuff right now I’d take it to make me sneeze. What I did take was Afrin which whoops I just read TURNS OUT TO BE THE LAST THING YOU SHOULD TAKE because even if it’s just the third time in three days that I have used the stuff and they say that’s ok, I got the rebound effect. Chat rooms I have just now visited say “Hell, never take that stuff” “Throw it away!” one person wrote. “If you can’t go cold turkey, use it one nostril and the next night in the other.” Somebody wrote “Use Benadryl instead” and somebody else “Eat raw foods only.”

I might try this last since I can’t taste anything anyhow

++++++++++++++

Anyway I finally crawled into bed again at 5:30, hoping for a few zzz’s AND MY HUSBAND WHOM I DESPISE BECAUSE HE CAN SLEEP 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!”

“TT,” he said, patting my arm.. “Old TT!” That’s been his name for me since oh, 1972.

Sooooo, I lay there for another 90 minutes trying to breathe through the desert cave of my mouth.

Then, just at 7:15 the room suddenly bloomed with a flood of coral-tinged light that lifted me straight out of the bed.

Here is what I saw from our deck at the conclusion of my miserable night: a series of vistas that that filled me with such a sense of wonder and unreasonable joy that, speaking of feet and ankles, my best friend Self Pity couldn't even set a toe down.

Fax Me, Chill Out, Oh Baby of Mine

They’re something so touchingly dated about Necco’s gritty little “Sweetheart” Conversation Hearts. I mean who exclaims ”My Baby!” these days, never mind “Love Bird!” Of course “Fax Me” is in its own category of out-of-it-ness because when in the last 25 years has anyone with romantic intent excerpt for during a moment back in the 80s when we were all still blown away by the new technology? I faxed a birthday greeting to my brother-in-law in California and could hardly wrap my head around the fact that he’d be getting it at 9am when I had ACTUALLY SENT IT AT NOON! He was getting it BEFORE I even sent it! This is the kind of ecstatic mind-altered thinking that led to people sitting on their office equipment to photocopy their fannies (which, ha ha funny stuff, they would sometimes then FAX it to their friends.)

Bottom line: if a would-be suitor says “Fax Me” you’re dealing with some kind of culturally handicapped person Andy Kaufman's Latke Gravas character from the old show "Taxi."

But to get back to hearts which come to think of it are shaped like the human bottom when it is compressed on a flat surface, Necco’s website offers some history too. Seems these candy hearts go way back to the 1880s when they were much bigger and used the kind of high courting language we just don’t see today. Messages like “Dear One” and “Be Mine” are all I could find remaining of that era in the little box I have here but once they said things like, “Please Send a Lock of Your Hair by Return Mail,” and “How Long Shall I Have to Wait? Pray be Considerate!”

Now the only thing you’ll find on a heart is what fits in two short words or maybe even one. It’s kind of a falling-off if you ask me. Plus where are the QA guys? Half my candy hearts are smudged or stamped on crooked, the way American automakers are said to be putting your new car’s door on if it’s a Friday and they’re just kind of phonin’ it in there at the factory.

Let me tell you about the ones I have in my lap here. OK the one I just ate a minute ago said “Love (smudge)” and the one I’m tossing back now says “Sunshin,” the ’e’ having slid away and out of sight. Some are blank entirely and some are so crooked it looks like the sugary “ink” got stamped in the dark by helper monkeys.

Plus another lame thing this year: they’re going for a meteorological theme. That’s where “Sunshine” comes in and also “In a Fog” (which is supposed to recommend someone to you?) Also “Chill Out,” which sounds to me more like the prelude to a fight than a kiss but what do I know?

I say if they’re going to pursue themes they should really branch out, to the wide world of medical care, say and give us hearts printed with “Hold Still” or “Open Wide” or that phrase we all tingle to hear, “You'll Feel a Little Pressure."

Hey but wait! I just took a quick look around the Internet and look at this! two people from Minneapolis have offered a tallying-up the inky message inside their own bag of these little confections. The ones with a zero next to them are the ones they’re just making up but they offer them in such a great deadpan way. They say they found all of these and more: two Smiley Faces, five Unreadables, six Angels and five Call Me’s; but none that said “WWJD,” “Recently Tested,” “My Ho,” “Bad Rash,” or “Mammogram.”

“Mammogram,” see? There are others out there whose minds work like mine!

To see more and marvel along go to "How Much is Inside Converation Hearts?"

Then hurry out quick to the store to get something for your own honey; something living in this season of the brown grass even if it’s a box of yeast. I saw a guy trying to pass off a bouquet of purple kale as flowers for his lady last year. “Hey, it used to be alive!” he told me at the check-out. “Plus she can cook it up after. “

I wished him luck as we all should wish one another luck in this perilous season of the valentine. And now I have to run out and get something for my own main squeeze who’s going out to play cards and drink with his buddies tomorrow night instead of spending the evening with yours truly. He’ll be home around 1 and maybe a little muzzy with his evening’s fun. I bet he won’t even notice I’m keeping watch camped out in the guest room across the hall. I might be gittin’ up there agewise but by God I still know how to short-sheet a bed.

Life, Sliced Pepperoni Fine

Ben Coonley was in our living room on Superbowl Sunday, not just to watch the Patriots- Giants game but to record it in his own unique way.

Ben is a video artist and the creator of several memorable pieces you can see on YouTube. A couple of Februarys ago he made one of those videos that zooms all over the globe in 24 hours. It’s called “Valentine Perfect Strangers” and it stars his dead-pan formerly-feral cat Otto who is looking for love over the internet.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETQ0urHjSIk&rel=1]

He’s also famous for his Pony series, with such works as “ One Trick Pony” and “Every Pony Plays the Fool,” both starring a blissed-out looking Hobby Horse scored from everybody’s favorite big-box toy store.

Ben has been making these videos for years and years and in a way my kids were in on the ground floor with him. Meaning that my oldest girl with her three-foot-long fall of maple-syrup colored hair appears briefly in his “documentary” of a middle school rock concert that gets shut down when certain of the musicians start yelling bad words out at the audience. (“Don’t point that thing at ME!” she is heard to exclaim in the quick shot that shows her.) And, speaking of bad words, our youngest is the out-and-out star of “The Homework Diaries” in which, over a period of months, he disgustedly recites the list of all he has to do for school the next day. Even our middle girl worked behind the scenes on a couple of pieces not yet orbiting in the vast junk-filled Internet asteroid belt.

But the technique of his that I love best is the ones where he uses the “intermittent record” feature on his camera, which allows him to set it up on a tripod and capture one-half of one second of every 30 seconds of lived life. He used this feature to document our kids and their pals as they watched the three other Superbowls that the Patriots played in and he used it again last week. And I have to admit I just love watching these very short works, where the unattended camera just takes tiny biopsy-sized chunks out of life and serves them sliced up fine.

Take this year’s effort: people appear and then instantly disappear. This chair has a person in it and now it is empty. It is bright sunny and it is utterly dark. The lamps are off and the lamps are lit. There is a truncated whoop of joy and a bark of dismay; leaps of exaltation and dejected slumps. Now here comes someone’s pants walking toward the camera. Now a Bud Light passes by in somebody’s hand. A baby’s head flashes in the foreground and is gone. A small child in footed pj's does a nano-second of hula dancing and is also gone (but gone where? To college and a career?) And we are all shown continually eating and drinking and eating and drinking; flashing into existence and out again and all I can think is: this must be what we look like to God.

Take a peek at these stills to get the idea. Clicking on them blows them up, natch.

Ben may be doing an installation using this technique in the future and then you maybe can see all these pieces. They’re all just five or six minutes long.

Life is short but art is long they used to say but maybe all the best art is short too. A good lesson for all us bloggers!

What You Need

Princess Diana is buried with the rosary beads Mother Teresa gave her when they met. That was a year or more before she was hunted down like the poor bunny by the ravening foxes.

She wasn’t religious as far as I know but she admired that little gnome of a Mother T, cruelly 'outed' after her death as a doubter like the rest of us.

And I totally see why Diana took to her. Mother Theresa was very blunt and most people like bluntness. She was also quick to dismiss what stuck her as trivial. I remember when she came here once to look in on one of the modest urban dwellings of her order of nuns, some good soul tried to give the house a few air conditioners. “We don’t need air conditioners!” she told them, swatting away the idea.

Sometimes when I’m feeling sorry for myself lately – with the stress of modern life and the insomnia that’s been driving my husband David crazy for the last six months- (I’m perfectly quiet on my side of the bed which is how he can tell, I guess: no deep breathing. “Stop being awake!” he says – and I TRY to stop. Lately we take turns with our insomnia. I finally get out of the bed and stun myself with a scalding bath. I climb back in – now it's 3 am and I haven’t slept yet – and at 3:05 HE climbs out and goes down to his couch in the living room where he reads his endless whodunits ‘til sleep overtakes him at 4 or 4:30.) As I say lately when I’m feeling sorry for myself it comes into my head that I’m not in pain, not hungry, not unsafe - and all the rest falls away, thank God, thank God. It's so tiresome to be self-involved.

One day I will give away all my possessions (maybe to my kids first if they even want them) and then I’ll give away my diaries. Smith College has graciously offered to accept and guard these volumes begun upon in 1958 when I was a little girl lying through my teeth on paper.

"Give them to Smith?! Give them to your children!” David says and maybe I will but what a painful and stinging thing it is to read your mother’s diaries (as I well know who have read all my mother’s going back to 1916 when she was a sad-faced uncertain girl not doing her homework and getting lousy marks in school.)

And yet I have her 1921 volume next to my bed and I read it before sleep sometimes and think “I am the only one who gets these references.”

I get them because when we were little our mother and aunt who raised my sister and me told and told – all the stories. All the non-stories. Everything. In the end when Mom was in ER after ER I would say to her “Let’s leave this place Mum. Let’s time travel” and out would come more stories.It’s true we might not need air conditioners; but we sure do need that connection with the past.

Back in Your Mother's Belly

The secretary of my college class sent out a group email begging for news of us all. How were we really? she wanted to know

Well let’s see now, is what I thought. I think I'm in better shape than my mother was at my age since women didn't even walk in the old days, never mind exercise. Men didn't either plus they all had these little fat tummies which they wore UNDER their belts for some reason.

Everybody was soft, I guess, takin' it easy after the War maybe - never mind that they all smoked their brains out. My own mother smoked in a closed car on the hour-long ride to our cousins' on holidays; smoked madly until the summer of ‘74 when she got a bad bronchial infection and was ordered to her bed. She dragged a little TV into her room to watch the Watergate hearings. “That man is disgusting!” she yelled at one point about poor old Nixon, “and this is disgusting too!” she yelled again, looking down at the cigarette in her hand. She stubbed it out and never smoked again and lived until her 80th birthday party when she died within the space of about ten seconds, a little plate of cookies on her lap.

But I figure we’re all going to live so long with our annoying Boomer talk about enhanced sexual performance and all that our kids will be just dying to put the pillow over our faces.

I guess I expect to live up into my 80s - IF I can start paying pay better attention that is and not step off the curb into the path of some big old bus.

So in general I feel pretty much as I did at 19 though God knows what color my hair REALLY is. Still, it’s fun to grow older. I lie in bed at 5 in the morning when the alarm first goes off and time-travel all the way back to crib days. I like that: the way we're lifting a little every day as we get older and can sometimes survey the whole landscape almost.

My oldest girl wanted to have her firstbaby at home last May and I was a wreck. We watched him kick and we could sometimes feel his little spine right through her skin. We all drummed on his little bottom: "Hello hello are you OK?" we said the way you would to someone trapped in a cave…

Along with not knowing what any body's real hair color is anymore I find we don’t know what natural labor is like. The doctors hurry everyone along so with their Pitocin and then oops labor slowed down! and oops the baby looks upse!t and then it’s C-sections all around.

I was proud of our girl for wanting to do it God’s own way with her two midwiveswho said “Put sheets you don't care about on the bed and under those a set of waterproof sheets and under THOSE your very favorite sheets in the world." There's the progression of the thing right there, peace at the end of the struggle.

In the end the medical establishment won of course. They took their tests when the baby was ten days overdue and said the amniotic fluid was draining clear away so in the end it was Induced labor and Pitocin and an Epidural after all - everything but the dread C-section.

I wrote all that in my email to the college and they printed like three lines of it in the Alumnae Quarterly.

The moral of the story I guess?How I am is how they are, meaning my children, and right now anyway my children are just fine and that new baby smiles away alone his crib like he was getting paid to do it. Even his big brother three is growing rather fond of him. He said recently that you do too get to go back inside your mother’s belly. “WHEN YOU DIE” he said and well who could argue with him there?

Spit and Blogs and Secret Fermentation

Here’s more from last summer, which to tell you the truth is when I started taking notes for this blog.

A blog is a hard thing to get off the ground. Someone told me it was lame to start with just one entry because you’d seem like the kind of person who nothing happens to; the kind of person picked last for the big dodgeball game which come to think of it I sort of was.

I have a couple of friends who write blogs and one guy just does it about every day which is what you’re sort of supposed to do I guess. (I’ll list him over in the corner here soon as I figure out how to do that.) But I know other people who only get to it like once a month and I’m not sure but I think that’s no good. If I did that it would seem so labored and you’d think I was making draft after draft and trying to get an A in blogging and all and I don’t want to do it that way.

I want to just let fly. All the funniest and sometimes the truest things people say they say without expecting to; it just comes out of their mouths. I want to write like that here, not for your sake only but for mine. It makes you feel so free to talk off the top of your head and you can’t do it most places. You sure can’t do it in a newspaper column unless you want to start getting bags and bags full of hate mail.

Blogs are still new so there aren’t a whole lot of rules about them yet. Sometimes you write long and sometimes you write short. Heather Armstrong, whose blog is called Dooce.com writes about everything that happens under her roof to get at the dailiness of everyday life.

I like that.

The same person who told me to store up a couple dozen before I 'went live' says the idea with a blog is that you can slide right down the bloggers' words and picture them sitting in their living room. They let themselves be known to that extent.

If we’re doing that now you would know that I’m sitting on a couch that for some reason smells strongly of fermented fruit today. I do carry a lot of fruit and lots of times it leeches out of my pockets and seeps down into the upholstery and all so maybe when I get done I’ll stand up and take out the cushions.

Everyone else here is asleep even though the sun is blindingly bright and it’s 9 o’clock in the morning. The Patriots won last night but it was a near thing and I think it wore away at all their nervous systems so maybe they’re still recovering.

I skipped that Pats game. My plan was to watch DVDs, sort through old photos and go to bed at 10. Instead I ended up watching one tenth of one DVD, sorting no photos at all and toppling over from my sitting position on the floor to fall dead asleep at 8pm so me I’m fresh as a daisy.

But here’s what I want to live like when I’m old:

I saw this lady last summer. I was trudging along the street on one of those sweltering August days, with a sun so hot the drops of perspiration falling from your poor sweaty head sizzle like spit on a griddle when they land on your forearms.

“If I can just get to that air-conditioned deli!” I was thinking as I eyed the place shimmering like a mirage some hundred feet away - when just then an ‘80s-era sedan bigger than your average bedroom cut me off.

It had an old man at the wheel, almost like a paid driver.

I could tell though that he wasn’t paid; he just felt like the spouse or the brother or the domestic partner of the person in the back – who was an old woman with slate-grey hair falling straight down in a bob of the kind little girls wore in the '20s and '30s, the kind Scout Finch had in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

She was wearing a baseball cap and a baseball jacket.

She swung before my vision pretty quickly but I could see she was chewing gum. At least I thought it was gum - until she rolled down the window and spit mightily into the bushes.

"Maybe I’ll be like that!" I said to myself. Because that would be OK, right? Better to be like that than be some fancy old broad who everyone’s afraid of with pink hair and fingers encrusted with jewels.

"I want to be like her!" I thought with my nice old husband Dave wingin' around the corners in his big old sedan.

Because there are worse things than being a public spitter who looks like Moe of the Three Stooges, right? One might be sitting on fermenting food. We found the nicest little mouse footprints in the old orange juice can full of hardened bacon-fat last night and that was sure entertaining. Plus one of us keeps finding tiny acorn-parts under her pillow so there it is: you just never know what a day is gonna offer you.

Yeah I guess I’ll get up now and take a look. Shakespeare says we have a nose between our eyes so we can smell out that which we can’t peer into. Guess I’ll try doing both now and if there’s screaming, too bad for the others. How much recovery-time do they need? Land sakes, it’s only football!