All This For a Mere Thousand Dollars

This day was our one chance to see Mexico. We were just yards away, pulled up at Cozumel and I was definitely going ashore - just as soon as I could drag myself away from Nan and Sheil and this big floating bathtub of an onboard pool anyway.

Back in the morning we had breakfast with six strangers and I was feeling pretty good so I said “Hey, Mexico you guys! Let’s go buy all the prescription drugs we can think of! Can you do that really?”

“Sure can,” my sister Nan said. “Just about anything you want.” “A few years ago we took this cruise just for the birth control pills!” said a cute young thing in a plaid headscarf and two little pigtails. “We had to keep walking and walking and ended up trying three different shops because they’d each only sell us fourth months’ worth.”

“Yup,” smiled her husband, a beefy guy with a shaved head. “And how’d that work out for ya?" “She has six kids now,” he joked.

“No it worked out great!” she said, slapping his arm. ‘Course then he goes and gets a vasectomy anyway.” “OK! Too much sharing!” said Mr. Beef and when the meal ended and a few hours had swooned by I did go ashore, and saw many people from our cruise ship and other cruise ship too at an open-air saloon. They were writhing in and out of doors in conga-line fashion and at a certain point in the line attempting a drunken limbo move, drinking a swig of booze poured straight in their mouths by a giant employee and immediately afterward receiving a hard slap on the fanny with a wooden paddle.

I’m so glad I didn’t try going on that rules-filled lecture-based Galapagos Island cruise instead, you know? Not only is this one like a tenth of the price but in terms of sheer zoology Carnival Cruise lines makes those guys look sick.

Dressed in Borrowed Robes

Day 3 on board the Fun Ship Inspiration with big Sister Nan, pictured, and Cousin Sheila whose landmark birthday we’re celebrating with this Cruise to No Place Much. Day 3 with just the clothes I wore on board, the rest of my stuff orbiting someplace between Tampa and the Eden isle of Cozumel.But Nan gave me a pair of sandals and Sheil lent me a nice fluttery thing for the big Captain’s Dinner. Other than that I’m wearing a couple of bought-on-board short-and-T-shirt combos, all imprinted with either Carnival Cruise Line’s logo or the kinds of sayings that appeal to smart-alecky 12-year-olds. (I am like TEN TIMES OLDER THAN THAT in case anybody thought I was first cousin and contemporary to  the blogger Heather Armstrong and don’t I wish, just for that jawline alone.) This on a ship with females who at every hour of the day and night look like total underwear models while I myself have no makeup, no meds, no hairbrush, no extra bras except a somewhat decorative but not altogether functional strapless number and… no underpants. I do however have a quart dispenser of liquid body soap attached to the wall of my shower, two or three ounces of which I squirt into a drinking glass. This I mix in the sink with hot-hot, sudsy-sudsy water, wash those faithful little bikini undies, wring ‘em out and what else? pop ‘em back on wet and go up to the pool deck to let the sun take care of the Dry Cycle. What else can I do really? I’m sure not about to walk around without underwear and did I mention I don’t have a bathing suit?Turns out I don’t care, really, and that’s the good part. I got the hot sun and a world of food; got “Soothing Tunes by Rick,” by day and “Relaxing Piano Music by Hrvoje” at teatime, and - can it get any better? - “Karaoke Kraziness with Sanjay” by night. Here’s Sheila on the left with me - the three of us just keep on drinking smiling!

Revenge of the Mocked

I knew I shouldn’t have tried to get a laugh on the backs of such fine people as Shirley Temple and the Carter women just because they wore frocks and blouses with cute little puffed sleeves. I never should have posted that piece here I realize. But the puffed-sleeved blouse I’d grabbed off the rack and bought without benefit of dressing room-time looked SO silly when I tried it on the night before this little four-day cruise that I sat right down and posted a whole array of smarty-pants remarks, even adding pictures, one of them of the Baby Jesus making that arms-outstretched Son-of-God gesture that means basically “Hey you’re a great crowd, I love ya, I’m here every night.”

I felt instantly remorse, of course I did. And since I seem to have turned into a person who believes not only that our pets can read our minds but that inanimate objects can get their feelings hurt, I began to feel sorry for that little blouse. Which is why I put it on at 5am Thursday thinking, to wear it just for the flight to Tampa and the easy cab ride to the pier where, once cozily aboard ship, I would trade it in for a bathing suit and a nice thick layer of Coppertone.

Ah but fate had other plans because here it is two full days later and I am still wearing the thing. Why? Because after my flight out of Boston was cancelled, the scrabbled-together set of substitute flights set me down on the runway in Tampa with just 23 minutes to spare before that ship was sure-enough leaving. After a series of frantic pleading phone calls to Carnival’s Emergency Hotline both before and during the screech of a high-speed cab ride to the pier I did in fact manage to get aboard in a last-possible-second way.

I did, but my luggage did not. And so here I am on Day Three, in the middle of the ocean, still without my suitcase; still living on borrowed toothpaste in this Whatever Happened to Baby Jane blouse with the little puffed sleeves.

They say God will not be mocked but it looks to me like you'd best leave child stars and the kin of Jimmy Carter the hell alone too.

Feline Insubordination

We have two cats, who have gone over the years from being little Slinkies of fur descending the stairs to cheerful adult loungers on the sunny sidewalks of our neighborhood to old cats, if 13 even IS old age for a cat. I actually think they’re about where we are in life, crimped up a bit with the Arthur-itis and heaving themselves out of bed mornings to crookedly make their way to the bathroom same as us.

Anyway I’m supposed to take the one named Abraham back to the veterinary referral hospital today so that the internist can make sure the wound from his sex-change operation is healing up nicely. (It was a guy problem, as with older human males and the slowed-down pee-stream: he got blocked. His bladder swelled and he couldn’t empty it and of course he didn’t SAY anything and the toxins built up and built up and he crept off to hide and die right here in the house and would have succeeded too if my friend Mary and her girl Rachel hadn’t come and used their Psychic Powers to find him in a dark tucked-away corner of a third floor bedroom. One catheterization, then another, repeated IV’s, five days in the hospital and a blood transfusion: all these were assembled like baguettes around a diamond, around the central centerpiece drama of the surgery that removed that last little length of the garden hose as the doctor called it where the urethra curls in a funky enough way to make trouble down the line. (It has something to do with crystals in the urine but don’t ask me what. I just write the check.))

So here I am this morning trying to get Abe to the vet, and he can’t KNOW that, right? I hadn’t even taken the cat carrier out or done anything except look at him in a “Don’t go far, pal” way when he came inside an hour ago! He’s usually right between my feet wherever I go. He follows me from room to room, speaking that kind of cat language that has a lot of r’s in it, maybe it’s Spanish I don’t know. He helps me write every day, even sitting on my printer which is convenient as ALL hell as you might imagine.

So I’m calling him for a good 30 minutes here. I’ve opened a fresh tin can of cat food, making loud spoon-on-the edge-of-the-can noises. I’ve whistled the special whistle which he can’t EVER not answer, conditioned as he is to respond to it since his kittenhood. His sister Charlotte pays absolutely NO attention to my calls OR my whistles but she was just here a second ago, lounging on the kitchen love seat. She looked up as if to say “He’s an idiot; we know this.”

But that darn Abe won’t show himself and I’m starting to have a thought here: Charlotte has problems of her own to the extent that our regular vet said “when you can line up six windows of time spaced at five-day intervals bring her for a series of injections that will mitigate her pain.” Because she hurts; she fell out of a tree once they think and her X-rays show that on either side the big knuckly ball of bone at the top of the hip scraping dryly, grating against the hollowed-out portion of the pelvis in which it’s meant to pivot easily.)

I looked at the cat carrier and I looked at Charlotte. She’s bigger than Abe with the kind of hang-down tummy a lady-cat gets. She looks like a big old hot-water bottle, only really kind of beautiful too, like a jet-black jacket of sheared mink draped in a luxurious tumble of folds over the arm of a chair.

I got under her gently and eased her into Abe’s carrier, yelled “Tough on you old grey Abe! I’m taking Charlotte out to get her high!” and OUT that door I went.

Lookin' Good Feelin' Nifty

A question I have to ask myself today is: does a grown woman look totally insane in puffed sleeves? It’s hard to believe because I mean LOOK HOW CUTE IN KINDERGARTEN but it may be so, alas. I bought a little puffed sleeved number for summer wear last month and donned it just now and, well, I think I look like Jimmy Carter’s wife in it. I look like Rosalyn Carter and how grouchy everybody did get about the way she was just doing her own hair every single day in the White House with no help from the hair-maintenance pros! Remember that? Or, wait, maybe Rosalynn had too much on the ball for puffed sleeves, maybe it's Jimmy Carter’s MOTHER I look like yeah maybe it’s old Miz Lillian, but wait that’s not it either. Maybe... I know! I look like Shirley Temple, when she got to be just a teensy bit Too Old For Cute and the nation turned its back on her and she was forced to become a Republican and seek exile in foreign embassies.What if I’m like the no-longer-cute-as-a-button Shirley Temple Black? Me, the once-cute-as-a-button Terry Sheehy?

You worry about these things a little but if you’re smart you don’t worry much. I was riding down in the elevator from Floor Twelve at last week’s fancy resort hotel. I was headed for the pool so I was barefoot. I had just dropped my bottle of spring water and was trying to pick up with my toes when the elevator stopped on a dime and the doors sucked open on Four and here was this woman. “Is this going DOWN?” she asked, as if elevators sometimes go sideways.

“Well the two of US are sure going down!" I smiled, pointing to my water bottle. “Hey you look terrific!” I said to her as she got in and she did too: shiny red nails on both feet and hands, a shiny matching lipstick of a quality that could make anyone’s mouth look like Renee Zellwegger’s mouth, a little flaring jacket over trim linen slacks… “No. I look awful,” she sighed. “Are you out of your mind?” I countered. "You look like six times better than the rest of these jokers.” But “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m dressed all wrong for this place.” And then boom there we were in the lobby and now even five days later I’m still trying to figure out what she meant.

We were in the sultry south after all and I did see lots of flouncy dresses going by on ladies wearing big floppy hats but weren’t they all going on some kind of garden tour? Those were just costumes; that’s what I figured but then what did I know? I was in a pair of shorts one of our kids left behind 15 years ago and a tank-top that’s been in my wardrobe so long the cloth is starting to wear through at the sticky-outy parts and hey I thought I looked jim-dandy.

It must just be what you’re comfortable in. Maybe this lady felt like a much-pruned piece of topiary in a landscape of swooning magnolias. Maybe she just felt wrong, like I seem to feel in this silly puffed-sleeve blouse.

I’d offer you a photo of it but I’d have to use the old hold-the-camera-and-take-a picture-of yourself-in-the-mirror trick since I wouldn’t feel like dragging out the tripod and all. It would be a good picture though and maybe tonight if I get a second wind after I do the ironing tonight

I’ll try it. In the meantime in the spirit of saluting the beauty of youth let me close here by trying to post a few images: Shirley Temple, young,Rosalyn Smith Carter, young, and that star of stars the Baby Jesus.

Ferry Ride

I had the best time on my last day in Savannah. I kept crossing the Savannah River on the free ferry and I swear Friday must have been Field Trip Day throughout the county because first I saw high school kids all in matching T-shirts at 11 in the morning, the beautiful girls walking two by two, arms linked because who can get away with in high school but the beautiful girls? Then the less beautiful ones bumping contentedly along in groups of three and four, then the athletes parading like peacocks together and ah yes a couple of male Drama geeks, one giving the other a piggy-back ride.

Then as I boarded that free ferry the Juliette Gordon Lowe here were 21 teensy little kindergartners and their four teachers all lined up on the varnished wooden benches of the old ferry; 21 kindergartners dressed up nice with bright white socks and colorful sturdy sneakers. It was the big finish to their unit on Transportation one of the teachers said. For sure it was the perfect small craft for people this size and with the trip’s 90-second duration, the perfect length too.

As they waited for the rest of us passengers to board they sat wide-eyed and quiet. On the port side, two small boys snuggled in close to one of the teachers and played with her long straight hair, which seemed endlessly fascinating to them as they lifted it and let it drop, lifted it and let it drop. Over here to starboard meanwhile, two little girls nestled against a second teacher, also playing with her equally long straight fall of hair, only twisting it into experimental plaits and studying the effect with wide serious looks. “I think I think my hair is PRETTY WELL SET FOR NOW LADIES!” the teacher finally said and the girls sat up nice and straight and just in time too because just then the engines roared into life.

The captain appeared to say a word to the kids about the craft and was just warming to his subject when a bright-eyed boy raised his hand.

“I’m Isaiah Bayrd. I from away,” he said.

“Is that right!” said the captain.

“Uh huh,” Isaiah said earnestly. “I from Virginia!”

“And you live here now?”

But this was a much tougher question. Isaiah knit his brows and gave it a good thinking-over, then seemed to decide he'd just ... start all over again.

He raised his hand.

“I’m Isaiah Bayrd and I be from away.” 

“Wonderful!” shouted the captain.

“'B-A-Y-R-D,” Isaiah said again, as if he'd just awakened inside Isaiah’s body; as if he'd just recently gotten done being somebody’s grandfather or Spiro Agnew or your own best great-auntie or even the family dog to which I say Who knows, maybe he did, maybe he did, maybe he did. And all day long that ferry named after the founder of the kick-ass Girl Scouts of America crossed and crossed and recrossed that shiny river.

 

Blimp Ride

A genial stranger named Tony and I took a ride together out past the Savannah airport for an hour’s ride up in the Liberty Mutual blimp – or, I should say, the blimp that for this week at least wears a big Liberty Mutual body-stocking laced around its ample tummy; the blimp that, once equipped with the special gyro-stabilized camera, will televise this weekend’s big PGA Champions tournament.

A blimp is a very funny thing, as I quickly came to realize. Even Andrea, the young woman who gave us our set of pre-flight rules, seemed to think so. “You should see the guys trying to fuel it up,” she told us. “It bumps against them and bumps away again and here they are chasing after it trying to keep the hoses attached.”  I got a mental image of a cow nudging the person trying to milk her with a big warm flank. I got an image of a mama-cat standing up and wandering off with a few mewing babies still dangling from her undercarriage.

When we clambered into its little bread-basket of a cabin, tiny against the immensity of the bag above, I invited Tony to sit up front. A man loves an instrument panel; this I know. I sat in the back seat which is maybe six feet across and Tony settled in beside our pilot Peter who had a gorgeous head of hair and looked a lot like Garrison Keillor if you could get Garrison Keillor to smile more. Evidently you steer a blimp with these two large wheels tightly hugging the pilot’s seated body, one an elevator and one a rudder as Peter explained to us and when I watched him maneuvering them he began looking to me like FDR too.

Now except for Andrea, the ten-person crew for this blimp is made up of ten big guys who sprang into action as soon as we got clearance from the control tower. Some of them nudged free the landing gear with their shoulders; some started running while pulling us hard using two long fat ropes. “Now I die,” I thought briefly as the engines roared in deafening fashion but no. We shot into the air at an angle that seemed steeper than that of a science fiction jet plane. The blimp climbed up up up to 1000 feet, leveled off and then just kind of … bumbled around there.  “I’ve never gone this slow in the air,” said Tony.  “It’s a little scary,” said I.

“Nah. You can even lose all power and it doesn’t matter,” said Peter. “You just drift downwind, notify the crew and make a free-balloon landing.” He let the engines idle to show us what it felt like before putting them back into thrust again.

Meantime, the scenery tilted madly and those two fat ropes swung this way and that. It was like being inside the head of a recently escaped beast with a wildly tossing head.  I studied the ceiling of the cabin so I wouldn’t feel sick and saw up there, jammed under a metal rod, a dirty roll of paper towels and a fat, bent looseleaf notebook imprinted on its spine with the words “Airship Flight Manual/ Ground Handling Manual.”

Up front the two guys were talking away. “So this looks like it’s just a little Tom-Tom,” Tony said of the GPS mounted on the dash. “Yes but it's navigational quality,” said Peter. “And what's that in front of you, a laptop?” “Yup. In case there’s a storm coming. So I can see it."

The tower was squawking on about one thing and another but I couldn’t make sense of any of it. All three of us wore these fat headphones and could only hear one another it all if we yelled into the tiny microphone each one had affixed to it. I didn’t care about talking anyway. We passed over the river like a stream of pure cool silver and the blimp dropped down. We passed over a giant yard full of cargo containers and it rose way up. “Thermals,” said Peter said. “Those containers send up a lot of heat.“ Stacked up neat as they were in their bright reds and blues and greens, they looked like a child's’ collection of Legos. The trees looked like lollipops, like fake trees bought to adorn the landscape of a kid’s model train set.

Was this a child’s model train set or was this the real world? It was the world all right and we knew it for sure when Peter explained our landing. “The fellas line up in a V. Can you see them down there?” he said as we neared the end of our hour-long flight. We looked down at the field at nine small white figures in chevron formation with a small red figure at the top. “The guy in the red shirt feels for the wind and stands in such a way that it’s blowing on the back of his neck. If the wind moves, he moves. We have to be heading straight into it in order to land right.” Then the engine made a new noise and those tossing ropes grazed the ground and the big men grabbed and pulled, pulled, pulled on them to stop us - and they did and landed us, light as ol' Forrest Gump’s feather, back on our momma earth.

It's a Tough Job (But Someone Has to Do It)

I want to write this quick before Dave gets home and by “home” I    mean to the hotel room here in Savannah where he’s just finishing the first day of play in the Liberty Mutual “Legends of Golf” Pro-Am tournament which on the weekend will roll right on into this big Senior PGA event which you can see on national TV and everything. The company he works for does business with Liberty Mutual and that’s why some lucky ducks like us are here, parking our little fannies in the gorgeous Westin Savannah Hotel Resort and Spa.

It’s a real hardship for me I can tell you. I was supposed to spend this week on Staten Island, sleeping in a church basement with 30 young people and working with them in soup kitchens and food pantries. Then home comes Dave one day and says we’ve been invited to this wonderful event and would I come do the wife thing so I said well I guess maybe I can. I'm a saint is what it is.

So every day he’s out there playing serious teamed-up golf with serious teamed-up people. The first day he even won a crystal bowl for “Closest to the Pin.” And every day I’m here lying by the pool, watching in-room movies and sitting down every 50 feet in downtown Savannah saying to myself “Was this Forrest Gump’s bench?” Was it this one?” Plus today I went for a ride in a blimp.

The blimp ride I just got back from and maybe I can write about it here tomorrow if the horizon ever stops tilting on me. Right now though I’m a on a kind of tight schedule. A significant portion of the famous Boston Pops Orchestra is tuning up just below our room for our evening’s entertainment and whoops, it’s 4:30 already and I have an appointment at the Spa.

The young lady that booked it called it a "Lip Wax" and that's what you see Mariah Carey getting above here, but if my Southern-fried pal of 30 years were here she’d call it what it really is. "Ah am goin’ to git mah mustache snatched" Liz would say and, I would only add, "all’s right with the world."

Happy Birthday Kiddo

Life is such a Dickens novel it slays me, the way it loops around and interweaves and characters not see since the early chapters show up again knitting at the Guillotine.

I wrote about an instance of this in my column this week, telling about what happened a few days before when, on a bus to Manhattan, I began thinking about a pal I first met over 40 years ago who now lives in New York and then didn’t she manifest right there in the tiny shop in Grand Central Station where I was going to meet my boy Michael for supper. If reading more of my stuff doesn’t make you feel like too much you’re doing shots of maple syrup you can see this column, and in all kinds of places, but most easily perhaps by Googling “Terry Marotta” and the phrase “kitten’s teeth.” Google my name and “kittens’ teeth” and if it’s the last weekend in April or later up will pop the piece as it looks in papers all over.

Three of our 'honorary' kids were at the dinner too which I don’t think I said in that column. An honorary kid in my book is anyone who has (a) lived in our house for a year or more, (b) launched college and/or grad school applications from here and (c) knows how to unload the dishwasher. Anyway three of the five of them came this night to see Michael because it was his birthday coming up and he is the family baby after all, born some 15 years after the oldest honorary kid and younger by a fair amount than his two 'real' sisters.

Sometimes he has no sense. I love that about him. You can read in a February post how he put his coffeemaker in the bathtub to clean it a while ago and when he lived under our roof he was no better. He spent his early years hiding behind doors to scare us and dressing up in odd costumes. He microwaved an egg still in its shell once just to see what would happen and oh wait that was my idea, but he sure loved the results more than anyone else. When he turned 14 he began at this wonderful place called Commonwealth School and never wore a coat from one end of the school year to the other that first year though he had to walk to the train station, switch to the subway, get out at a windswept plaza and walk yet more to get to the school. September to June the kid didn’t wear a coat I guess because the thought he looked cute in these certain vintage T-shirts bought for fifty cents and sized for a ten-year old... He could wear child-size clothes because right around then he turned skinny. He was round and darling as a child and then he just kind of skinnied on out and even now still weighs just 135 pounds.

He still wears those tissue-paper-thin T shirts from the 1970s too. He had one on the other night and over it this odd little military jacket that looked like something an organ grinder’s monkey might have on.

Anyway forgive me for talking about him so much. It’s just that today is his birthday which is also old Will Shakespeare’s birthday and I’m a big fan of both guys. May you live and live, Michael of ours and be like Willie Shakes if that's what you want getting married after the baby’s on the way and then having twins and going to the big city and doing what you love. To us you’ll always be what your big sister Carrie called you when she was a college sophomore and came home midweek for supper and you were saying funny ridiculous things and when you left the room to go back to your homework she called you Our Best Final Project. So Happy Birthday BFP, and TRY to keep the electrical appliances out of the bathtub. Can't wait to have ya back under the umbrellas some nice warm weekend soon.

Uggs & Gloves, Or Why Didn't You Call Us Part II

About three months back something sort of freaky started happening to an area of my body, and it finally occurred to me I’d better get myself in to the Quickie-Care section of my hospital, one of the best in the world as they all seem to claim these days and who knows but this one is pretty great and famous and without naming it let’s just say JOHN WAYNE came here to die, OK?

Now I don’t care how famous the doctors are in places like this, the frontline people who see you first are Just Plain Folks and the Just Plain Folks person who saw me last Friday tried that nasty trick of weighing me first. “No-no-no-no-no,” I quickly said. “No need to WEIGH me, what, in these moon boots which I need several family members to help me get out of?” (Because what can I say I’m one of those meager older skinny-but-with-some-cellulite gals who is just freezing cold all the time and so wears Uggs and gloves right up until the first of June.

I had my Uggs on and no one was getting them off of me.

She shrugged. She didn’t care if I got weighed or not. She was just nice, just a nice, easy-going young woman whose first language was Spanish. So I told her there was something wrong with my tongue, and OK yes it's my tongue, and when I said this, her eyes widened in horror.

“Why you wait so long to come in? Not to scare you or no thing but your THUNG? You could have Cancer of the Thung! Not to scare you or no thing.”

“Ha ha!” said I. “C’mon, it’s just funny. I don’t have tongue cancer!”

“How you know this?” she demanded.

“I looked the problem up on the Internet.”

"The Internet?! The Internet don’t know shit!" she spat and if that didn’t stop me cold. Because maybe I have Cancer of the Thung and maybe I don’t but if the Internet REALLY don't know shit we’re all screwed because in my book at least The Internet in general and Wikipedia in particular have replaced God, the cops, the FDA, the Norton Anthology of British Verse, the OED and the Encyclo-friggin’-pedia Britannica as the highest authority. Wikipedia is entirely Internet- based and gets contributed to by more Just Plain Folks who write in with niggling corrections until by consensus a species of truth is agreed upon so hey: THE INTERNET you can hang your hat on!

Anyway…. I did get to see the Nurse Practitioner after all this and she and I entertained ourselves hugely for a good six or seven minutes with pictures of all the things that can go wrong with the human tongue which we got from – where else? - the Internet.

I realize there’s more to be said about my little affliction and I’ll say it when it’s cleared up but I’ll stop using my poor sick tongue altogether; I'll seal my mouth up with Plaster of Paris before I stop believing in the Internet.

What’s your vote I wonder? Touch the "comment" link at the top of this post and tell me, please tell me that you believe too. And do it right away if you can, OK? Just in case our friend the Internet DOES know shit and decides it might simply subtract itself from our lives - like Tinkerbell can do whenever she feels like it, like GOD can do on a day when he’s sick to death of us - if we don't all just start clapping really hard right now to show it that we believe!!

 

The Gas Man Cometh or, Why Didn’t You Call Us (Part One)

There’s a theme running through my life this week and that theme is WHY didn’t you call us? It’s a story in two parts so gather round, children. We’ll have Part One of the tale today and Part Two tomorrow.

 I have a friend named Lois who will be 79 this year and one night about a month ago with a houseful of people due to arrive on my doorstep to read a Shakespearean play aloud, she arrived to help me set things out but became distracted by what she called the smell of gas outside your house. “There’s the smell of GAS outside your house, dear! You really must drop everything and call the emergency line!! Terry, dear, you really MUST,” she said again in her voice like Eleanor Roosevelt’s, the idea being What if it’s a leak?

But I was in no mood for that. Not only were 30 relative strangers about to descend on me but I’d just finished installing my post-surgical cat upstairs in sickbay with a clown-collar around his neck to prevent him from tweezing out the stitches with those pointy little teeth of his. Never mind that I couldn’t find the goddam COCKTAIL NAPKINS, and was fanning frantically through all the kitchen drawers thinking “OK shoe polish, plant food, tuna-flavored hairball cream, WHERE IN HELL ARE THE COCKTAIL NAPKINS? Am I going to have to set out folded squares of toilet paper for these fancy people? “ 

I found them finally and the crowd arrived and we read our Henry VIII and that day passed and the next and eventually a whole month went by and my poor cat healed up and his lovely pale green eyes the color of Coke bottle bottoms began to sparkle once more and Lois came again to my house, this time to pick me up for more Shakespeare at somebody else’s house this time and uh oh now I was in trouble because she said again that she smelled gas out on the sidewalk. “You really must call the gas company in the morning!” she said sternly and a third friend who was also going to the reading said she’d write me an email when she got home to remind me and she did and so I did. Call I mean.  

And not 20 minutes afterward, the doorbell rang and there was the gas man.  He identified himself but he didn’t make eye contact. He asked me to show him where we were getting the smell from so we stepped out on the sidewalk. 

I said a number of friendly if not out-and-out wheedle-y beseechingly co-dependent things and finally he sort of thawed out enough to actually look at me.  “Not to be fresh or anything,” he said “but my work order says you smelled gas outside here a MONTH ago. Why did you wait so long to call?” 

“Well see I didn’t really smell it” I said and told about the 30 people and the sick cat and ended with “I mean what’re you are saying, that houses, like, blow up or something?” 

He narrowed his eyes for just a second, then opened them really wide. “HELL YES THEY BLOW UP!” he bellowed. Then he just sort of came to life.  

“There are these two gay guys a few towns over not that that enters into it, and they smell gas at 1:00 on a Sunday afternoon only they want to watch the football game, see, so they don’t call it in until 4:00. And when our guy comes he doesn’t even have to set foot inside to know what’s happening. He tells them, “Get out! Get out of the house now!' and then BOOM! she blows. The House is GONE! Follow?”  

He named three other houses  in neighboring towns that also blew up, then told me he would have to use his various long-nosed sensors to probe around outside every OTHER house on the street too. He said he might have to knock on all their doors and get inside those houses too.  

“But like that neighbor right there: she’s not home in the day.” 

“Don’t matter!” he shouted. “We get a reading of gas leaking, we’re goin’  in! We break a window if we have to.” 

“Hamm, well if the people ARE home, will they let you in always?”  

“Hah! Sometimes they don’t want to let us in even if they called us. I get this one lady calls us up and I come and she won’t let me in.  ‘I need to see some ID,’ she says . So OK ‘Here’s how I looked 20 years ago’ I say, showing her my badge. ‘And how do I know that’s really you?” she goes. “How do I know you're really from the gas company?’  ‘Lady YOU called ME!’ I mean, what did she think? Was this Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory? She thought I, what? intercepted the call, caught up with the real gas man, knocked him out, took his clothes, rang her bell?! Gimme a break!” 

After all this fun he came inside at last and spent a good 20 minutes in the basement positioning his delicate proboscis of a sensor here in there in the foundation and whew the inside of my house looked OK even if I did wait a month to call him and by then we were practically pals. “I’m going out now to check on all the neighbors’ houses” he then said, “and either you’ll never see us again, which means it’s basically nothing to worry about, or you’ll see us immediately, which means there’s a serious leak. OR,” he said, “You could see us within the week which means it’s a leak all right and we’re there to fix it.” 

Well I guess it turned out to be the last thing, because all of a sudden today what do we have outside but TWO gas company trucks, a big yellow backhoe AND an actual policeman workin’ the paid detail. They’re making a huge racket and that asphalt just doesn’t want to bust up as the backhoe tap-tap-taps on it with the back of its gorilla knuckles. It will bust up eventually though, I'm sure. Because even I understand this much by now: this the bloomin’ gas company we’re dealing with here, and when the gas company says jump you just say, “How high?”  

 

When the Last Pope Came He Came First to Boston

When the first Pope ever came to the States in the person of John Paul II he came first to Boston and said Mass on the Boston Common and boy did it  pour - just rained cats and dogs on that patch of real estate where autonomous powerful women were hung for witches, where over the centuries assembled the Redcoats and the famous evangelists, the America Firsters and the Sacco-Vanzetti supporters, the Legalization of Birth Control advocates and even little Judy Garland before a crowd of 100,000 just two years before her death at 47, pre-embalmed as she was by the sauce by then, poor lambie.

Everyone loved that John Paul II because he was so young-seeming and athletic; because he looked like he might have played the lead role in one of the Tarzan movies from the old days.

I was 30 when he came. I could have gone to see him and would have, in a heartbeat, and brought my two babies in their strollers too, but the little one was SO little and still subject to such fits of supper-hour suffering I just couldn’t chance it. It was that and the torrents of rain that kept me home.

In a way though I feel as if I did see John Paul, up close even. I say this because my Seventh Grade boyfriend Perry “Mike” McDonough was by then a Secret Service agent and the very first person in the country to touch that great man’s hand when he clambered out of the plane at Logan airport. Mike was about the cutest middle schooler you ever saw, with wavy blond hair and eyes of a fish-tank blue. We stopped dating in Ninth Grade but 25 years later rekindled a connection that conjured those early years back in living color thanks mostly to Mike’s amazing memory. We see each other maybe once a year, going to reunions or concerts or visiting one another’s houses with our respective mates and I just love him, both for his positive outlook and his faithfulness of heart.

So here on this warm East coast Friday a toast: to Former Agent McDonough, now retired, and the Secret Service too and any Pope at all with the courage to come to see his flock here in the land of the Freethinkers; here in the land where something like 80% of the people polled say they don’t believe in Hell but they just KNOW there’s a Heaven and they’re prett-y darn sure they’re going there. And now back up to this picture of our last Pontiff back in ’79, doing for the first time here in the States what he always when his plane landed, with my old friend Mike to his right, looking simultaneously both fiercely alert, highly tuned-in and as sweetly humble as a shepherd at the Manger.

The Sap's Confession

I got panhandled, if that’s what it was, during my very last minutes in Manhattan yesterday.

I was waiting to take my four-and-half-hour bus ride home, standing outside the Hilton when a frail woman came up to me with a look of woe on her face. She was pushing a stroller with a baby in it and walking beside a girl of about 14, who she said was the baby’s mother.

“We need money. We have no thing to eat all this day,” she said in heavily accented English.

“Have you come far?” I asked, putting one hand on her shoulder and one on her arm. I couldn’t help it. She just looked so lost and woeful.

“Yes,” she said, nodding sadly. “Today we have come all the way from the Bronx looking for the food.”

That stopped me for a second. The Bronx?  “But another country? You’re not from another country?” I asked, because she did have a serious accent.

“No, she said. “No other country.”

I gave her a ten because that’s the bill my hand folded around first when I felt in my pocket.

She thanked me, the three of them moved on down the sidewalk and I returned to my place in line just in time to hear the man standing next to me in a pair of soft wool slacks.  “Con artists!” he muttered, with an angry look on his face.

“Hey what can I do? It’s my church’s teaching!” I said, trying to keep it light.

 But I couldn’t just leave it at that.  “Con artists?” I asked in a tentative voice. Because to me they just seemed like three uncomfortable-looking people fighting a wind so harsh the little green sword-blades of the Hilton’s daffodils were leaning dangerously over in their boxy concrete planters.

“Gypsies.  Thieves.” he said. What had we, wandered into that old Cher song from the early 1970s? “Roma,” he added, as if that explained everything.

“Oh the ROMA! You mean the people who were shot on sight by Nazi soldiers and maybe those were the lucky ones because all the others were stripped of their citizenship, brought to concentration camps and gassed, even the old men and the pregnant women and the little children? I‘ve  heard it said that Hitler caused between 200,000 and 800,000 Roma to be killed in the name of the ‘racial purity’ he saw as being so central to his plan for world domination.”

But I didn’t say any of that really.

I just said “What does that MEAN though? Where are the Roma FROM? I mean is it a country or just a region in Europe?’”

“Romania. Parts of Bulgaria. Other places,” he said. “They’re gypsies,” he said again. “Con artists,” he repeated.  “And you are the worse sort of sap,” he all but added.

 “You’re lucky you didn’t just get your pocket picked” he said. But how that frail woman was going to pick my pocket when I had one hand on her shoulder and the other on her arm I don’t know. Her 14-year-old stood dejectedly on the other side of the stroller with her hands down at her sides the whole time and the baby – well the baby was a baby.

Then the man looked at me full in the face for the first time. “What church do you belong to?” he asked, going back a couple of sentences.

“Oh I’m just a Congregationalist. Just the United Church of Christ,” I said.

“Ah the Congregational Church, that rock-ribbed New England institution!” he said.

“Yup,” I said, leaving out about six other things I could have told him about all the ways we’re about as far from ‘rock-ribbed’ as a denomination can be. I love my church. Love, love, love it for all the ways it has helped me to join any day’s ‘party’ with an open heart, leaving all judgment and suspiciousness at the door.  But that’s not the church I meant, really.  

I think the church I really meant is the one I ‘joined’ the very first time I read Walt Whitman’s first Preface to The Leaves of Grass, which he wrote in 1855 and which I read the winter I turned 19: 

“This is what you shall do,” it goes. “Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and the mothers of families, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, AND YOUR VERY FLESH SHALL BE A GREAT POEM AND HAVE THE RICHEST FLUENCY, NOT ONLY IN WORDS BUT IN THE SILENT LINES OF ITS LIPS AND FACE AND BETWEEN THE LASHES OF YOUR EYES AND IN EVERY LAST JOINT AND MOTION OF YOUR BODY.” 

The caps here are my doing but you tell me, all you have ever waited for a bus in a stinging wind in a city of many strangers: Are these ideas not every bit as moving and revolutionary as those expressed in the Sermon on the Mount?  To me they are.

Anyway the bus came eventually and I found a great seat for myself in Row Four just in front of the man with the beautiful pants. I put all my stuff down, then on an impulse as sudden as it was sure, picked it all up again, went to the back of the bus and rode my four and a half hours home from there.  

 

 

A Blessing, Papal or Otherwise

This morning I was hanging around Grand Central Station again where the tourists all seemed to think the Pope had already come and I could see why in a way: There were a good 20 police cruisers lined up on both sides of the street with lights flashing and the tourists, who are all from other countries and are absolutely everywhere in New York these days what with the dollar being in such PITIFUL shape, were snapping pictures like crazy and muttering to each other in excited voices.

I wondered myself what was up – and so picked out the most native-looking guy I could find and asked what the deal was with the cop cars.

“Oh they’ve just been doing this, ever since 9/11 really. It’s supposed to be like a show of force or something,” he said and added that realy the cops were just hanging out - which would explain why so many of them were strolling between cars like teens at the drive-in, leaning into each other’s windows with their ample fannies pointing streetward.

Still, I felt safe when I saw them. But then I always feel safe when I come to New York: all those people reading in the park, some sound asleep with their mouths open; all that yummy food to be had in a zillion little restaurants and that’s not even counting what you can get from the pushcarts...

In the Grand Central Market you can get fish so freshly pink and moist it looks like somebody photo-shopped it.  The meats look like an Anatomy lesson (in the best possible sense of course.) They have awesome breads, cheeses of every description, fresh flowers so fat and happy you think you died and went to Heaven, and behind every counter people of every age, shape and size ready to take your order.

I was standing at the produce counter at one point when a couple moved past me, the man sexily compact in that Paul Simon way and the woman taller and softly pretty. They had a baby about six months old in a stroller and that baby looked at me and his face just said it all: “Is this great or what?” And you know I have to agree becasue what a blessing really: Morning in a safe city and here we are at the market, with kindly grownups all around us.

So God bless us all, the tourists and the babies and the cheesemakers too. And God bless this poor new Pope and I hope he kisses the ground like the last one. And mostly God bless the cops who do the hard work and deserve every break that they get.   

   

 

Grand Central Hoedown

Today when I came to New York for a conference I experienced the rare joy of early check-in, meaning it was 1:30 when they let me into my hotel room instead of 4:00.  I'm writing this from my bed here in the Grand Hyatt hotel which is actually attached to Grand Central Station so that right at eye level out my window I can see the classical statues that hover over the great clock on the building’s exterior. 

That’s the messenger Mercury standing up there in his underpants, trying to look like the boss. The literature I found down in the station says he’s supposed to represent COMMERCE, since this is America and all, and those two figures flanking him are one, Hercules, meant to suggest Commerce’s big-boy helpmate Physical Might and two, Minerva, designed to convey the idea of Wisdom in All That We Do but who I think you’ll agree looks a little depressed and pre-menstrual.  

It’s pretty great to be so close to actual deities like this and I’m thinking to myself “Fan-CEE!” right? As in “I am in some fancy hotel!” But an older couple just entered the room next to mine and I can hear not just the television they snapped on but every SINGLE word they are saying and all I can think of is the time two years ago when a person was attempting to cough herself to death in the room next to mine in a Dayton Ohio hotel and I was seriously close to breaking down the door between us to get that pillow over her face in such a way as to cure that cough for keeps. 

So there’s the outrage of being able to hear two people burping and flushing the toilet and asking each other where the toothpaste is, and then there’s the fact that there is NO COFFEE MAKER in the room and how can that be when even the most modest $49-a-night places supply these as a matter of course?   

I’m worried about what I will do in the morning. Someone told me lately that millions of Americans leave their homes every day for the morning coffee and these must be the people you see in the loose-fitting flowery pants that really do look a lot like pajama bottoms come to think of it. They’re all heading for the coffee shop to get their daily fix and so MAYBE MAYBE I can do this too. MAYBE I can wake up at 6:00 and make my way downstairs to find a Starbucks but it seems mighty hard to me right now as someone who has just in the last year had to move her coffee maker up from the kitchen to a second-floor bathroom so she can get at it immediately on waking. Hell, some nights I bring it right into the bedroom and set it up 20 feet from where I sleep. Pretty soon I’ll be begging my nurse friend Mary to run a line for caffeine into one arm, using a timer to get the drip to start some 20 minutes say before my alarm clock goes off. 

I'm feeling pretty crotchety about all this anyway - or at least I WAS, until just now when I heaved myself up off the bed and moved over to the chair here by the window. I opened the window (and God bless the Hyatt for having windows that open!) and up, up from the street came the roar of the city like a punch in the nose but I like it, sort of. And now here’s Mercury so close I can practically touch him and I sure do wish I had my camera so you could see him as I see him here, so cute and sort of Club Med in his little toga-slash undies, with the two seriously more powerful figures beside him letting him have the spotlight.

 Even if he DOES think it’s his party I can tell that he really wants us to have fun at it.  "So do that!" I tell myself. “Enough kvetching! Put on your high heel sneakers and go meet that boy of yours who’s coming in from East Harlem to have dinner with his momma. “And so I will. And so I will.  And come home early enough to tap on the wall and tell my next-door neighbors all about it.

 

Koko For President

The Writer at Work

Koko is the gorilla who came as a baby to this special lab in California and now gets by pretty well by signing to make herself understood. I wrote about her in my syndicated newspaper column which anyone at all can see by going here or Googling my name with, say, the phrase “Brad Pitt recently spotted driving around Toontown in Roger Rabbit’s car.” (Never doubt that I am a serious person!)

Stanford-based Dr. Francine “Penny” Paterson is the one who’s done all the heavy lifting to make this happen. She wanted to see if she could be made to understand simple signing and all these years later it looks like the answer is yes.

All I know is I could look at pictures of this gorilla all day long, as of course you can also do by visiting her home page. But I think my favorite place to go is the link where you can read the talk she once had online where an audience writes in questions which Penny then puts then to Koko. Koko signed back and somebody types Penny’s description of what she is saying.

In this interview somebody asks her if she'd like to have a baby. “Pink!” she replies. “They’d been talking about colors earlier;” Penny starts to say but then Koko signs “Listen Koko loves eat.” In other words never mind some baby that isn’t even around yet. Somebody then asks what her favorite food is and she says “I like Drinks” (Smart girl!) Somebody asks what the name of her cat is and she says “Foot.” Penny says “Foot isn’t the name of your kitty” and we already know that because we know that “Foot” is what she calls all male humans. She calls female human “Lips,” which I find really cute. “Hey lips honey! Get that foot-slave over there to bring us some drinks!”

Somebody asks her if she likes people and she says “Fine Nipple,” which Penny tried to gloss over by saying that the word “people” sounds a lot like “nipple” but the truth is she was brought up on sexual harassment charges some time ago. Seems she was always trying to touch the female lab worker’s breasts and get them to show her their nipples. (Doubt me do you? Go to her page on Wikipedia and see for yourself.

“She wants a little refreshment. She just gave a little vocalization,” Penny then says and Koko says “Lips hurry good give me.” She’s got a toy alligator. “She’s playing with her alligator and her lady doll” Penny says, again narrating the action, but then “Oh My!” she exclaims, “She may be doing a little acting out here!“ Then Koko picks up a scrunchie and puts it on her head. “Fake hat that,” she signs.

Someone asks her how she feels about a worker named Michael and she says “Foot foot good.” The she says “Nipple!” again, then she somebody asks her about her ape pal Ndume and she says “Toilet!” “That’s her word for bad,” Penny explains. She is evidently mad at her pal today. “He did something that was obnoxious but I didn’t see what happened,” Penny explains.

There’s a little talk about the 70-acre preserve in Maui that the Foundation hopes to establish for Koko and Ndume and then Koko says “Fake!” again, which Penny says means it’s not happening now; it’s hypothetical; pie in the sky in other words. Then Koko has her alligator bite the lady doll and the whole thing fades to black.

I love her. And I note she’s pushing 40 now and I’m going to try to get invited to the party. Because I believe ALL us older gals ought to hang out more, just for the fun of the drinks, and the trashing of the men, and the Fake-Hat-That wigs alone.

It's All About the O-Rings

“You should come to the gasket convention in Orlando the first week in April,” said my husband David a few months back. 

“Gaskets! What are gaskets anyway?” 

“O-rings. You know, GASKETS, things used to make a joint water- or air- or particle-tight.” 

“Come on there are no gaskets anymore, only microchips,” I said back, just to get him going. He’s in manufacturing, an industry which here America is diminishing like a cookie-tin-full of Shrinky-Dinks in a hot oven.  

“Hey don’t kid yourself, you couldn’t live without O-rings,” and if that wasn’t the language of courtship I don’t know what was, and so Yes, I said yes, I said yes, I will go with you. 

And thus do I write this in sunny central Florida, where over the heads of a cool 1,000 conventioneers, families and staff, clouds of infinitesimal bugs hover like wee guardian angels. 

This morning I spent a few hours at the kiddy pool, which I chose for the democracy of the place, the lack of all display except for the simplest display.  

“Dis is my bellybutton,” a three-year-old said to his new friend and I felt I was in Heaven itself, just being alone and looking around. There was no preening by the young and unlined, nobody worriedly studying the backside of anyone else, just me reading a story in which the main character finds herself touring Ireland as a passenger in the car her mother has to rent because the mother could drive stick. Every day she sits on what should be the driver’s side but without the steering wheel until she begins to feel like a child again and thinks, “I’m back.” 

That’s how I felt: I was back, a little kid again with just these small splashing strangers and the solitude. 

I’d had solitude at breakfast too and there swooned so deep inside myself that when afterward I stopped at a little table to dig out the apple and the yogurt that I’d tossed into my tote bag I almost tripped over my very own husband sitting and sitting having coffee with his co-worker Moe. 

“Brian didn’t come in til 1:30,” Moe was saying of a third compatriot. 

“Wait, does he make you share a room?” I asked, mostly to tease Dave a little as the president of this company they all work for. 

“Nah,” said Moe. “I couldn’t share a room with anyone anyway. Even when I got married I said to my wife, ‘Maybe we should just live together like three nights a week.’” 

“I get that. David and I are second babies; both our moms said we loved just playing alone in our cribs. I just feel safe when I’m alone. I can’t even sit with my back to a door. It’s like I was in the Mob in a former life.” 

He was looking now at my food items. “A little something for later, eh? You should’ve seen my mother in a restaurant. When she got up from the table that table was BARE. Rolls, cole slaw even: right into her bag. I do it too, a little.” 

“Sure. I’m on the road a lot myself. Take today: here’s this giant breakfast buffet and all I had of it was an egg and some toast and coffee for my $15.95.“   

“And you never know when the next service plaza is.”  

“I’ve often thought with adult diapers in my life and I could keep on driving forever. I’m grateful for good muscle control though.” 

“I’ve said it before,” my husband piped up. “We’d all be sunk without the O-Rings.”  

 

Shine a Light

I heard about the new Scorsese documentary on the Rolling Stones from Bryan who was my student in the 70s when I taught high school English. We’ve stayed in touch through good times and bad and now both find ourselves washed up on the same far shore where hair grows grey and waistlines expand.

Anyway he wrote me an email last week about this sensational Stones movie, saying he was going to see it at an IMAX Saturday night and he’d bought all these tickets and why didn’t David and I come see “Shine a Light” too? I knew Dave and I couldn’t go that night but like a good girl I dropped everything, looked up the film and watched the trailer which you will see here in a sec; then in my answering email told him how it affected me. I found myself strangely moved I said and he wrote right back in an email that reached me on my Blackberry while I was standing by the Conventional Broccoli section at the food store. “You're such an English Teacher! It said “’I felt strangely moved.’ You don't feel strangely moved by the Rolling Stones! You feel adrenaline, you get goose bumps, you feel horny, you filled with anticipation, you’re not ‘strangely moved’!

Then to add insult to injury a few minutes later he texted to say he bet I didn’t even know that Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” was directed to Mick Jagger.

“I bet I do,” I texted right back, thinking that’s givin’ it to him right between the eyes, and then when I got home and read Outlook’s copy of that first mocking email, I hit ‘Reply’ and said a little more: “Hey, my reaction is my reaction and please note I am 60, or almost 60. The Stones’ ravaged faces, the passage of time, the energy they put out despite how tired they must be... That’s all very moving to me. I don’t speak to how they affected me at 23! And also let me just note that I don’t have testosterone."

“So you never got high and danced to the Stones?” he wrote back.

“Of course not, I was a teacher! And even before I became a teacher I was a serious person.” Heck by the time I was old enough to drink I was married. Plus we were always broke. Or always reading our books or working on lesson plans or studying or in David's case blowing bubbles so he didn't have to clean the closets.

Ah but I did love the Stones. My brother- in-law Toby and his partner Rusty would have these parties in their Cambridge apartment and this one night they invited the whole family, David and me and the other Marotta brothers and even their mom and we ate some sort of chicken-backs in peanut butter sauce and danced to Sympathy for the Devil. I remember that like it was yesterday. I even went and dug out this blurry picture of us from that night and emailed it as an attachment it to Bryan.

And when he opened it this darn kid who has mocked me for over 30 years and indeed even in a subtle way when he sat in the fist seat of the row that was one row in from the windows wrote back once more: “Wow is that you? I had never seen you before you had a mature, sort of professional demeanor. I guess I forget that before you were Mrs. Marotta the English teacher, you were just Terry Sheehy, a regular young girl.”

I felt grateful to him for saying that; for seeing me or trying to see me as I was and I studied the picture more myself as I am studying it again now. I see that I had heavier eyebrows then. And God I remember that dress which I bought at Filenes' Basement for $7. That’s Rusty peeking over the counter and David’s brother Skip with the mandatory 70s-era mustache and their youngest brother Jeff with the Twelve Apostles hair. Toby must have been taking the picture and I remember that their mum was surely there that night it must be that she and David must have been off in one corner talking.

I look at it now and I go back to the top to look again at this picture of Bryan, still a hopeful boy sitting with his old car in his old back yard. I look again at me with my daring dress and my Janis Joplin hair. I look at the photos of the Stones and think how little Bryan, or I, or the Stones themselves knew what was ahead for them in the way of joy or suffering. Then I go back to the trailer for Shine a Light and I watch it again and again and again and believe me when I say that I can’t WAIT to go see this movie which I will do with Old Dave and his insane-Stones-fan Len and Len’s wife Mary the very first day it comes out. And David and I are going there directly from the airport even though we've been away all week and the cats are so fed up they're rigging the place up with booby traps. Because we might be old but we’re sure enough still dancing - just a little more slowly…

And now let’s watch that trailer!

Crooked Little House

I went back to my old friend the chiropractor this week because my main doctor practically screamed when she walked around to my back to have a listen to my lungs. I had a johnnie on of course so the little keyboard of my spinal column was exposed.

“Oh! Your scoliosis is SO much WORSE!” she gasped.

See I didn’t KNOW I had scoliosis until a year or two ago. I took an exercise class in a room full of mirrors where it became clear that though what we were doing looked like Yoga’s Child’s Pose on everyone ELSE, on me it looked like a mound of ice cream slowly melting down to the left.

The good thing is nobody seems to care very much if you have scoliosis when you’re old. They do screen for it when you’re young though because it can be serious then, compressing internal organs and so on. The screening process is a mere eyeball test: the school nurse has you bend at the waist and hang your arms down toward the floor. The rib cages of straight-backed people look symmetrical side to side. The rest of us well, it’s another thing.

A website I looked at just now says a person with scoliosis might also have OTHER UNDERLYING diseases, signaled by such things as "colored markings, a hairy patch on the skin or a deformity of the foot."

Well I HAVE colored marking on the skin but it’s because I draw on myself by mistake. My underwear too is covered with multi-colored inks. I take no notice. And hmmm, looking down at my feet here I see nothing amiss; just the vestiges of my first and only pedicure obtained on an island off the coast of Charleston SC sometime last summer but since the girl used a pearly white polish I just let it stay there, growing out as my toenails grow. Because my feet are just so far away, you know? (Hello feet! How was your Christmas? Did you do your taxes yet? )

As for the hairy patch of skin well I have to surprise that PCP with SOMETHING the next time I see her or she’ll be all out of gasps . I’m thinkin’ now a little Rogaine applied to sole of one foot. Or maybe my chin. Or how about my beautiful girlish CHEST Doc?

I’m not worried generally. I know a good tailor for the twisty clothes. And my chiropractor himself was very sweet. I just have to see him once a week for the rest of my life.

Keep Comin'

I’m skipping my Weight Watcher meeting today even though I love going. Going to Weight Watcher is like going to AA: you can fall off the wagon and skip meetings for like six months and STILL when you go back they’re nice to you.

I stayed away for one long time over the holidays so I know. In the final days of that particular binge I got to where I was standing at the open fridge drinking heavy cream straight from the carton, POURING IT ON MY ICE CREAM even, which hey don’t knock it 'til you’ve tried it.

I’ve been on every kind of diet because when I was a child I was pudgy. My big sister loved it when our mother put me in this certain little homemade sweater. “The Pinch Sweater” she called it because she just couldn’t NOT take between her fingers the little kielbasas that were my baby arms and squ-e-e-e-eze. Later, she settled for telling me that if I REALLY wanted to be thin I should peel down a stick of butter every day and eat it like a banana.

Strange, right? But the actual weight-loss regimens I began following a short decade later weren’t much less strange. I did the Grapefruit Diet in high school which was punitive but what could I do? I was getting so I looked like the late Anna Nicole Smith at her chubbiest. Only not blonde of course. Only not, you know, pretty in any way.

Then in the college years they were serving us Yorkshire pudding and hot fudge sundaes every time you turned around so I really packed on the pounds and the next thing I knew it was real-world time and I began teaching high school and believe me you don’t want to be feeling vulnerable about your appearance with 200 teenagers a day studying you instead of their books which is what they do during class time. I remember the September day my fifth period class filed in for the first time. “She’s fa-a-a-t,” one girl mouthed to another, a look of glee on her face.

It was at that point that I joined Weight Watcher and went from 155 lbs to 130. Then seven years later I started having babies and soon my rear end looked like a big old sanitation truck lumbering down the street. This time I tried the Scarsdale Diet which on Day Three makes the inside of your head start buzzing. The pounds come off but they only stay off for like a week and a half after you stop. THEN, lucky for me, an au pair came to live with us, started going to Weight Watcher, dropped 60 big ones and looked so changed when she flew back to Austria at the end of her year with us that her very parents walked right past her at the airport. With her inspiration - and may we say her special Weight Watcher recipes - the fat fell off these little bones of mine and I went down to 118 and looked like Flat Stanley.

Life being what it is of course I inched up again during my 40s and so Zone-dieted. And so Suzanne Somered. And so I did everything but slap at my thighs with leather belts – oh but wait I DID that too back in the 70s at a salon-like weight-loss emporium called Gloria Stevens which was ALL ABOUT leather belts and jiggling machines.

But finally finally FINALLY a year ago I went back to Weight Watcher where they're so sensible they TURN YOU AWAY if they think you don’t need them, which is why I stuffed little two- and three-pound weights into my pants the first time I went there, the idea being I could start high enough for ‘admission’ and then kinda progress no matter what heh heh, take a weight out here this week, take a weight out there next week and get praised at the weigh-in!

And sure it made me walk a little funny but I had to do it since you might look at me and SAY I’m not overweight. Maybe you Weight Watcher police really might NOT have let me join but hey, I’ll say hey, I’ll say hey again: you guys don’t see my in my underpants.