Exit Only
“Because once you depart from this one-way road of life, there is just no getting back on.”
Talk About Name Your Poison
I woke at 5 today, bent on doing every crazy thing on my list: writing a column; writing here; editing fat sections of the new audio book that I’m rushing to production; recording all that; looking in on a funeral; seeing the Fitness Together people for my neck; sitting for three hours as the dentist begins the delicate process of covering two of my tender-as-eggshell Irish teeth; food-shopping; ironing;: bringing down the summer clothes from the attic if you can believe that on June the 11th; making dinner; and going to a three hour meeting.
All that, only here I was at dawn with some especially bad neck pain and so at 6:00 popped a couple of Tylenol AND NOW FEEL A HUNDRED TIME WORSE. I keep falling asleep as I type and God that last post was full of errors which took me forever to fix because my eyes just keep closing after every word I type. That part is sort of funny because then I have a whole lovely dream about that one word and can you imagine how boring, dreaming about conjunctions and prepositions? Dreaming about conjunctions and prepositions that are spelled wrong?
A sinking sense of certainty came to me a minute ago and I went back into the bathroom to check out the sink area where my worst fears were confirmed. Sure enough, the two capsules I took were Tylenol PMs.
I guess I should lie down and sleep - I seem to have no choice but to sleep - what about the dentist? and the summer clothes? And that interesting column about the Green Fairy which is what they used to call absinthe and talk about Name Your Poison and what a way to go- dead of a head injury sustained by toppling clear our of her chair sound asleep!
View From the Edge of the Bed
Well my Tuesday posting about the Skinny Guy in a Diaper sure did offend one person, who wasted no time letting me know as much, and in a public forum. She said if all I knew to do with the Bible was make fun of it, mocking the son of God in whom a whole lot of people believe then it was a sad state of affairs and why didn’t I get out my Bible and go right to the Book of John now, to see if I couldn’t wise up my sorry blaspheming self.
I wrote right back of course to say that I never make fun of anyone else, either human OR divine, but only mock myself and that’s the sure-enough truth. In fact the one time I did make fun of somebody else was when I said of Elizabeth Taylor that at least one of her chins was still pointy. Boy did I get a lecture that time!” Who do you think you are?” this woman from Bridgewater MA thundered in an angrily scrawled hand. “Where do you get off making fun of others when I can see by your picture that your eyes are beady, your teeth look false and your hair is out of style!” Ouch!
But instead of dwelling on the insults that have come my way over the years I have comforted myself today by going into the bedroom to really look at the wall where little Eddie saw this crucifix that once hung inside my mother’s casket; and I’m wondering now what kinds of things other people put near their beds, what cherished tokens to serve as the last thing(s) they will see at night and the first they will see in the morning. Maybe someone will click on 'comments' and offer answer.
Anyway here are “labels” for what you see in this photo:
1) that crucifix, which also hung inside the casket-lid of my mother’s father, a man born in the 1870s but one who lived long enough for me to have sat beside him at every supper, every single day until he died when he died in '58.
2) Two watercolors that this same man bought in Montreal in the winter of '23 when he brought his whole family there for a trip, just months a before a death came that permanently darkened all their lives.
3.) And those gorgeous orange lilies? Those lilies were done by David’s great-uncle, we think, an amateur botanist and man of letters born in the early 1890s . He and Robert Frost were friends for a time in their early manhood, exchanging letters and jokey poem, and one of Frost’s recent biographers speculates that the two lovers for a time before awkwardness or circumstance made a breach in the friendship. (Maybe David’s elder brother Toby will weigh in here with the details on that. Toby?)
It’s this last picture that really has my attention right now because it just seems to tie me to my husband and to all his people, making his side of the family my side of the family too, in the miraculous-yet-everyday sense that through the three babies we made and the ten zillion germs we have swapped this man of mine and I really are now related.
4) Oh! and that little teeny picture tucked in beside the birch chest is a snapshot of my mom, taken in 1927 when she was a humorous but secretly shy girl just on the brink of flunking out of college.
Every morning I hang my head off the edge of the bed, chiropractor’s orders, and look and look at these objects - until they shimmer and grow so nearly transparent that I seem to pass right through them, exiting the present moment altogether and joining these here remembered in whatever place it is that they now dwell, where no offense is intended and none is ever taken. is ever taken.
Skinny Man in a Diaper
Skinny Man in a Diaper, Or, Your Child is Safe in MY Hands!
The kid’s only four and already I’m in trouble every time I babysit - like I was the other night when he came for a sweet little sleepover with Poppa and Grandma TT.
Faithfully-attending Unitarians though they be, his two moms are NOT, to say the least, big fans of the bloody rites of traditional Christianity. I, meanwhile, am a Dr. Spock-raised Woodstock girl who grew up believing all children’s questions are good and should be answered promptly and honestly and so when Eddie pointed to the wall above my bureau and asked what “that X” was, I went right over and got it down.
“Well this is actually a cross, or, technically what they call a crucifix because see there’s this skinny many on a diaper on it…”
“But who IS he TT?” said Eddie and I thought Uh oh.
“Ah! Well his name was Jesus and um everyone just loved him because he was like the nicest person you ever met!” I twinkled.
“But what’s happening to him?” asked the child, appalled by the sight of the twisted, head-bent figure and what could I say? That sometimes if you're TOO nice you can kind of upset the applecart and the next thing you know they’re coming for you with torches in the night? Could I say instead ‘Oh I just have this crucifix here because it hung inside the satin lid of my mother’s coffin 20 years ago and by the way I still have the clothes she died in and would you like to see them? Noooo. So I said, “How about that fun bath you were going to have with the spray bottle and the watering can?” and the bullet was dodged… UNTIL, for his bedtime story, he rummaged through every children’s books we have in the attic, relics all of our own kids’ childhoods back in the 80s and came up with this cartoon book of Scripture called The Beginner’s Bible.
The Beginner’s Bible is a small fat book with very large print, and the characters all look really harmless with these large googly eyes and when our boy Michael was around eight he read it from cover to cover and pronounced it awesome.
So. We started with the Creation story, which takes up seven or eight pages. Eddie’s remark: “Where are the dinosaurs?” Then we turned to the page with what western Civilization calls The Fall of Man, here labeled “A Sad Day." I began wildly editing as I read, leaving out all kinds of things around the picture of the cartoon angel holding aloft a flaming sword as he kicks Adam and Eve them out of Eden.
But Eddie knows menace when he sees it even though he doesn’t watch television: “Who is that knight and why does he have a weapon? “ he asked, looking worried. "Oh! Well, he’s lighting their way out of this garden because they’re moving to a lovely new place!” And then doesn’t he wants to go on to the story of Ark and Noah and what, I’m going to read how God takes a notion to just destroy the world because he’s in a bad mood that day? But lucky for us all humans we’re quick when we need to be: I fanned through the pages to get to Jonah, glided past the Big Man’s threat to flatten Nineveh if those Ninevites didn’t shape up NOW, and also past Jonah’s reluctance to be the one who warns them, his attempt to high-tail it on out of there and get as far from Nineveh possible etc etc , - even past the falling-overboard part until AHA!! I got him inside the whale - where I could start talking about Pinocchio - who of course also did time inside a whale and darned if this didn’t work because I just happened to PLAY the Puppet Who Becomes a Real Boy at Camp Fernwood in the big Parents Weekend play by the same name the summer I was six and so there was my salvation. I tossed aside that children’s Bible, leapt from the bed where we were reading, sang “I Got No Strings to Hold Me Down,” every single line and the chorus too and did a little jig besides.
“Oh TT!”, Eddie smiled when I got done. Then we picked up the original Winnie the Pooh book with the funny old pen-and-ink drawing and had another go at bedtime.
Dyein' it Terry-style
I love dyeing stuff. Every few months I have an urge to change the color of things and so dye the towels, my clothes, even the lampshades if I don’t like the way they look on a particular day; then sometimes, well most of the time actually, I end up making the colors perhaps a little TOO vivid and have to try toning them down with a quart of Clorox.
It’s a wonderful way to pass the time and it’s what I’m doing right now. Today here at the lake I’ve been dyeing lampshades, a process that involves:
A) filling the bathtub with hot water; adding the liquid RIT - and never, EVER use the powdered form which, careful as you might be, fills the air with so much richly-hued dust the next thing you know your nostril hairs AND the cat’s whiskers are a bright crimson;
B) taking the lampshade, dipping it very quickly in the dye and rolling it around for evenness; then
C) getting it out of that water FAST so it can dry before all the glue that holds on all the ornamental braiding dissolves.
The whole thing takes ten minutes, tops, the only drawback being if you yourself have to step in the tub in which you come out dark red from the knees down and look as though you’ve been murdered, then stuck in a closet standing up til all your blood pooled in your lower extremities… But LET’S ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE HERE FOLKS and instead of showing a picture of my lower legs how about one of these lampshades! Pretty sweet, eh? SUNSET PINK! And all for a mere $3.79 a bottle! 
The Grouchy and the Hurt and the Kids All Going to Proms
Kind of a cold rainy darn day here. I had my session with John at Fitness Together where the motto is One Client One Trainer One Goal, the goal being to separate you from your money as fast as possible, JUST KIDDING GUYS, John is wonderful! I have a messed-up neck because I jumped out of bed during a leg cramp six years ago, fainted, fell to the floor like a tray full of dishes, woke after a bit, got up and thought I'd better go to the bathroom and see if my head was still attached, lurched toward the john and fainted THERE, this time smashing the corner of my skull on the pointy Corian vanity top, bouncing off the tile floor and coming to rest at last, out cold. I have scant memory of that tumble to be honest and not much more about the one before it and only really KNOW that I had these two falls because when the lovely people hosting me at this gracious home saw me in the morning they said “Um, how did you sleep?” and when I said “Great!” they said “Then WHAT IN HELL were those two loud crashes five minutes apart at 1am?!"
Anyway it yanked my neck into a state of permanent weirdness and then I got the arthuritis in it so I have to be careful is the best I can say. Oh and plus (how boring is this?) now I have scoliosis too and a rib cage that’s trying to screw itself into my pelvis, rotating down and down to collapse entirely onto my hips (and do what? send my internal organs out through my mouth? ) So John stretches me and we strengthen the weak parts and note the places where movement is constricted etc… He is very kind and also funny and smart and he can really “see” structure.
Some bad things happened in the last 24 hours: I got into a very uncomfortable situation with a guy who I was slow to realize has HATED ME FOR YEARS plus I’m still bleary with fatigue and now I've burned the onions I was making to bring to Uncle Ed along with the pork tenderloin I made him and the fresh corn and all but some good things have happened too: David was supposed to go to Kentucky for three days yesterday but they cancelled his flight and he basically decided 'Screw Kentucky' and came home to his nice wife instead and we went to be early, and he’s coming home to me AGAIN TONIGHT and we’ll make a fire and drink wine and read our books and how great is that to be a married lady? They HAVE to come home to you every night! And then there’s this awesome gizmo at the top here that I saw in a catalogue and so maybe I'll send away for that and stretch my little neck daily while going to see John too of course. I haven’t leapt out of bed with leg cramps since my doctor told me to embrace the pain instead so maybe all’s right with the world after all and let’s bring that food to Uncle Ed and then come home and get COZY!
The young people in our town have their senior prom tonight so maybe if he finds a minute God could look in on them and keep them safe, and all children and even stupid Bill Clinton who broke our hearts and his poor exhausted amazing wife too and really all of us, the ones we love and the pains in our ass and even the ones who hate us Amen.
Even Jesus Loves a Pizza
LAST YEAR'S FUN
Here it is Tuesday night and I’m STILL not back to normal after the big retreat weekend, a dirty-sock, shower-free sleepover extravaganza that’s not normally held right in church. Last year it took place at the Marotta’s summer house and here on the left is an example of the fun we adults had sealing the faces of the kids up in cement to keep them off their cell phones (kidding!) Masks and Why We Wear Them" was the theme of that particular weekend. The part here pictured was just the making of the masks which the kids then decorated and talked about on a metaphorical level as they say, then later spilled ketchup on or else wore as crash helmets or codpieces or who knows what when the old folks were out of sight.
All that was last year though…THIS year we had the big retreat weekend really late, and we had it right at church and here’s how the whole thing went down as best as I can recall:
On Friday at 6pm: 15 teenagers and four adults gather in the designated Youth Room, a basement ‘bunker’ redolent for as long as I can remember of that chicken soup-smelling-kind of human sweat.
At 7 we begin tackling the retreat’s theme, Making Time for God When You’re Almost Too Busy to Shower and at 7:30 curl up to watch The Golden Compass , which the religious right thinks exalts Satan though these kids don’t see it that way. They see a strong girl-child who does not wish to become a lady, and the search for a father, they see the quest for meaning, yadda yadda and so forth. In other words what they see mostly is a craftily concocted and slightly cynical amalgam of a half dozen other blockbuster films from Star Wars to The Mummy to Harry Potter and his many his cinematic offspring. Kids are sharp: they don’t just understand movies; they ingest them, like food pellets.
Then at 11 Judy tells her little flock that it’s time for Taps and they can sleep anywhere on this level or else one flight up in the cozy pinkness of tiny Ripley Chapel. If they don’t want to sleep but talk instead that’s fine too only no going up into the sanctuary and no going outside.
On Saturday it becomes clear that they have NOT slept that much but they are young and clear-eyed still and begin the day by going outside to look for God in a blade of grass so to speak. Then they return to talk about what they saw, then we eat lunch and do some physical stuff, then talk about forgiveness: when do you let a thing go and when do you not? Some kids counsel others that it is never worth it to carry a grudge, even against that lazy and unkind teacher who doesn’t even read what he makes you write but glances at it and gives you the check-plus or the check or the check-minus strictly on the basis of length.
At 4 I do a little journaling seminar with an assignment attached and off they go to write for 40 minutes the darlings, each one finding a place alone to scribble for 40 minutes, later sharing what it felt like do this but not necessarily sharing what was written, because that is personal.
For supper Judy announces that she has bought steak tips of all things plus a big green salad plus some lovely hot rolls and they all smile at her because they love her so much but she knows what it means and says “OK how many would eat pizza if we got pizza?” and 15 hands go up so we order four giant pizzas and they eat them all and the steak tips too and the salad and everything from last night along with six or eight bags of cookies and chips.
Then a stab at meditation as a way to call God closer. Then the drawing of names as we use tissue paper and cardboard and glue and bits of Scripture to make something for our person and that’s it for Saturday. The grownups all sleep and the kids just keep on talkin’ - all night long I suppose - and darned of they STILL don’t look great Sunday morning. And Judy has on her clerical garb and looks super-great. And even the two guy chaperones look good if slightly more bearded than they did Friday night whereas I myself look like some deranged old dust mop if a dust mop can be said to look deranged and I realize that I am in fact deranged when, having nipped home to shower and dress in Sunday-Go-to-Meetin’ clothes I return to church and am just ascending the big stone steps TO SEE MY WHOLE SKIRT FALL TO MY ANKLES BECAUSE IN MY EXHAUSTED STATE I NEVER EVEN ZIPPED IT NEVER MIND BUTTONED IT.
But so what? I was pretty much alone out there and in any case as my 11-year-old once said to me “Nobody’s looking at YOU Mom!” - but how about we all look at the kids now in these two imperfect snapshots and you try telling me they don’t look ecstatically happy, even three-quarters of the way into the comfort of the slow-moving Sunday morning service!
The Swift Completion of His Appointed Rounds
I made a promise in my latest column. Just click on that word and it’ll take you right to that piece and yes, young ones, I know you think everyone already knows all about this but it just isn't so. Think of that poor soul who called the tech support hotline to say that that handy “cup holder” on his computer was broken and yup he was referring to the D-drive port that pops out when you push the button. Over these last few months I have been dragging to this site thousands and thousands of die-hard, and in some cases, older newspaper readers for whom all this web stuff is still pretty new.
The column was about our former mailman now retired and I said I would tell another story about him here so let me do that now:
I heard someone call my name at the local nursery and I didn’t even have to lift my eyes from the geraniums to know who it was. “Hello MRS. MAROTTA!” boomed this voice, alive with mischief.
“Joe!” I yelled from my spot 30 feet away.
“How’s business?”
“Here today and gone tomorrow!” he cackled.
Joe now works part time now as a sometime pall-bearer and general funeral home associate, and I guess I this is the place to say that though I’m calling him Joe, really that’s not his name. You never who’s going to feel shy about having his name spread all over the galaxy so I thought I’d just christen him anew here.
Anyway, after we’d made our purchases and left the nursery we continued talking out in the parking lot. There was lot to go over since his nephew taught at the same high school where I too taught way back in the days of platform shoe and feathery hair. Plus we had to dissect the news of the neighborhood that he once so expertly stitched together as for year after year he executed the swift completion of his appointed rounds.
We must have lingered a good 20 minutes before partying anyway and every time I see him I think afterwards of the story my friend Mary told me once about the day he helped her when she was new to our neighborhood and didn’t really know anyone. She had thrown her back out and when her eight-month-old woke up suddenly sick to his stomach she realized that with her muscles spasming the way they were doing she couldn't even lift him from his crib. It was then that she spotted Joe just passing under her second-story window and so called to him. He slung that bag down and came inside, changed the baby and called Mary’s husband at work to say that she needed him home now. It was a bold act of kindness all right and for year after when that baby grew into a boy three and five and six and eight he would often say to Mary with endearing eager earnestness “Mum! You never have to worry. If something goes wrong. I’ll just go find Joe!”
And that’s the story of Joe who I hope I see again soon, at the plant store or outside some church in a black suit; walking down the street or just plain anywhere. And if my kitty disappears again as she did the time I told about in that column, well I might have to go find him myself.
Disgruntled Would-Be Memoirist Bitten on Fanny
Hey who wouldn’t want to write a disgruntled memoir about all the shady stuff they we're forced to live with? Back when it was Howdy Doody Time for all us early Boomers how frequently did I myself want to set down in black and white the abuses I suffered as a toddler when mothers would routinely shut their wee ones up in the ingenious Gitmo-style restraint knows as the "Snuggle Ducky,” a sort of zippered cotton envelope which prevented a person from sucking on his fingers or toes, forced him to lie as if crucified, unable even to scratch his nose - I choke back old tears writing this - able only to do what my three-year-old self bravely, gamely, spoke of as ‘making cookies ‘ which meant using the only thing I had, my little rosebud of a baby mouth to suck little circles of moisture onto the cloth as the only source of sleepytime fun. ~ SOB! ~
Plus, I was also given enemas, right in front of three, sometimes four wildly smiling older women. (What was it with the enema and the woman of former times, can somebody tell me?) Also, my sister and I were taken out on leashes, in public! Also tied to the maple tree out front so we wouldn’t wander off.
In other words I can totally identify with this Scott McClellan dude and his exposé of life in the White House. And the only thing that stops me from taking pen in hand and writing up my own book of Humphs and Grievance is the sad fact that I myself live in fear now: of my very own cats of all things who I can just tell in the twilight of their careers have totally forgotten the meaning of loyalty and are poised to start talking to the media. And I know what they’ll cite: The tuna-flavored lip balm designed to bring up hairballs; the odd thermometer addressed to their nether parts when such a thing proved needful; the cry of genital mutilation from our boycat, just because he got his pee-pee cut off this spring BUT NONE OF THESE WERE MY IDEA, they were the vet’s, and the vet is my superior and nothing is my fault ever and all right so I won’t write my memoirs but continue instead to hold my tongue and lick my wounds poor me, poor sainted, sainted me.
Dear Diarrhea
Sun, rain, sun: yesterday was of those days I guess. One hour it was 80 and sunny here and I was thinking how I really should go outside and scrub the patio chairs and then – boom! - the heavens opened and the rain drummed so hard the lilacs on their bushes knelt right down flat like obsequious courtiers and yay I was off the hook for the scrubbing anyway.
Somebody said this about blogging: Nobody cares what you had for lunch; they just want to know what you’re thinking and feeling. (Could this possibly be true? Should we ask everyone who read about Gawker editor and blogger Emily Gould in the New York Times Magazine Sunday?)
But OK I’ll play along: At the moment I’m thinking about how happy I felt at the airport after my visit to my pal Bobbie last week – until an old lady with blue hair pulled out a cell phone and starting talking.
Loudly. And for quite a while. “MAUDE? WELL YES MAUDE I GOT THE DIARRHEA DON’T YA KNOW BUT I’M TRYIN' TO HOLD IT TOGETHER HERE!”
At first I thought, “I won’t look over at her, I don’t want to embarrass her.” Then, five minutes later I stole some little glances at the other people there at the gate to see if anyone else thought this was as funny as I did. "Nothin’ doin’ there. Then five minutes after that I thought 'What the HELL lady!' and I did look at her, neutrally the way you have to so the person you’re looking at doesn’t jump up and beat you to death with his carry-on bag - and the woman paid absolutely no attention but rather made a second phone call to a second friend and began again with her fascinating account.
So there it is: sun and clouds on just about any day you care to name… and that’s what I’m thinking right now. And oh right, I almost forgot: Yesterday it was tuna salad, a handful of almonds and a chaser of Crystal Lite - and you?
Separated at Birth; Reunited in the Lakes Region, NH
I met somebody over the weekend because a mutual acquaintance said we should meet since he thinks we have a lot on common. This somebody lives in Center Harbor NH and I live six miles away, on the weekends anyway, and so we met at this eatery in downtown Meredith.
I got there late, and rushed in full of apology. Oh she was late herself she said. In fact she was glad I was late because it gave her the chance to read this poster here about free English lessons and she has someone new in her family eager to perfect her English. So do I!
I told her I often carry my meal to a restaurant and just round it out with stuff from their bill of fare, just to drive up the tip, really. She does that too. And she too sits near the back for sneakiness.
She has three kids. So did I! Her man’s name is David. So is mine! She knows everything about one half of her parental unit and nothing at all about the other. Me too! I had a relative who spent serious time in The Institute of Living in Hartford CT for ECT and many other therapies. She has relatives who have both worked there and consumed the services.
She told she always has to sit with her back to the wall in public places. So do I! She says she tells her family it’s because of her days in the Mob; I say that too!
“You’re my first friend in the area” I shyly told her as we parted and she said she was mine.
“But how can that be if you’ve lived here for ten years?” I said.
“I’m just really fussy when it comes to friends ” she smiled and maybe I’m pretty fussy too since come to think of it I’ve been in the area myself since the fall of ’99.
So maybe we will become friends because now I’m remembering this too: When I told her over coffee that I didn’t actually like fun she laughed out loud but in the nicest possible, exact right way. She ‘gets’ me all right and maybe I ‘get’ her too and what a thing that is for two strangers, what an amazing amazing thing.
Sex and the Ninth Grade Ninny
The column I wrote for this weekend is a tribute to my middle school teacher who just last week departed this life at the ripe old age of 102. You can see it at right now by clicking here.
In it I told of the English class we had her for and her sweet vexed utterances at all our hi-jinks. (“What AILS you people?” she was always saying to us.) I did not tell how naughty we really were, especially my best friend Kathy and I. For example we had a music teacher named Miss Priest, a maiden lady, young and pale in a cashmere sweater and pearls who disapproved of the two of us, perhaps because we held our violins under our chins in Orchestra and those instruments just shook with our laughter the whole time we were rehearsing up under the sweltering roof of that Civil War-era schoolhouse. Kathy always got assigned the cool complicated part with many curlicues and arpeggios, while I was always given the dumb part that no matter what the tune was went basically “Uh uh, UH uh, uh uh, UH uh..." - just the two sounds, just what you could saw out for the low notes without doing too much violence to the melody. A monkey could have played my part and this was what we found so killingly funny. We laughed all through "Scenes from Carmen" and even, preparing for graduation, through the grave and weighty bars of "Pomp and Circumstance" itself
We thought we didn’t like Miss Priest; probably we had crushes on her. Anyway we found a greeting card designed for an ordination, tore out the real message inside, wrote a new message in a demented-looking scrawl and slipped it under her door. “Thou Art a Priest Forever” the real part of the card said, then in our writing on the inside, “That is, until I crush you in my arms my little PASSION FLOWER ha HAH!” We didn’t get suspended but we sure-enough got caught and so set out to compose a long and earnestly over-the-top letter of apology that made us feel wonderful connected to the side of the angels, just wonderfully forgiven if only by ourselves.
And that wasn’t half as bad as what we did when we found out the youngest male teacher in the school was getting married: We put a jar of Vaseline on his desk which carried the strong implication that of all things he would need in his new conjugal state Vaseline was uppermost – just as if we actually knew Thing One about the marital act, which, uh, we didn’t.
Back in the late-90’s, thirty years and three kids into my own marriage I remember a youth group leader telling the high school kids we both worked with that they really and truly would be a lot better off postponing sex until much later because it was, well… it was just too complicated.
“Complicated?” said one of these sweet kids, looking truly puzzled. “Why complicated?”
“Let’s just say it involves a lot of towels,” she said with a meaningful look.
Dave! I rushed right home and said to my husband, “I think we’re doing it wrong!”
Ah dear…Our old English teacher was great all right but how could she answer the pressing questions of her middle-schoolers? How could anyone have answered them when what we really wondered about was sex which of all things in this wide world is STILL the most mysterious?
Senior Bike Day
KIDS FIRST GLIMPSED 6:55AM
The noise grew slowly at five of seven this morning. First it was just a tiny squawk outside our bedroom window as if maybe a baby blackbird had fallen out of a tree. Then another squawk followed and some small shrieks too. I went to the window and saw Charlie Chaplin shoot by on a dirt bike followed by two girls in pigtails and baby clothes also on these short little bikes. The Charlie Chaplin guy was in a suit with black bushy hair and a drooping mustache and the girls looked ALMOST like they normal girls and at first all I could think was that they were some insane family like my sister born-again neighbors who she once looked out the window at 1 am to see silently running down the street down the street in utter silence and holding hands.
Then the noise grew louder and here came a guy in a clown suit and a girl in roller blades; here a helmet, here a Rambo-style headband. A safari hat here, and over there on one boy a pointy headpiece drooping at the tip that looked like a lot like a condom and before you knew it here were 60 people 30 feet from my house and even more clambering out of pickup trucks and SUVS whose backs were loaded with more bikes.
At lat I realized what this was: I knew what this was: It was: the special day when tradition has the town's 12th graders either ditching or rather lightly attending school and beginning it by roaring through the streets of our little downtown on bikes, then heading straight for the high school just when the underclassmen are arriving, to take a kind of taunting victory lap. It’s funny to them but it’s poignant to those of us who have already left high school and maybe we roared past the old place and maybe we didn’t but in neither case did we know how quickly and completely the gates of that Eden would close against us. This morning’s kids don’t sense that yet and why should they with the prom and graduation and one lovely long summer all still ahead for them. Let them enjoy it all and believe as we all once believed that the old friendships would never end and Love Always was a promise you could hang your hat on and not just a quickly scrawled inscription in a yearbook.
Outside my front door they fell into formation on their bikes and roller blades and a shriek went up like the sound of ten thousand magpies and off they moved, up the street and around the corner and out of sight.
AND SO GOODBYE
Rainy and Cold With a Chance of Sunburn
I was heading for Swarthmore PA to see my friend Bobbie who tried to tell me it was going to be 49 and raining in that leafy little town but I guess I didn’t believe her. I showed up in sandals and a couple of flouncy, Cher-style angel-sleeved tops - only to be greeted by a day that was 46 degrees and raining so hard the goldfish in her Koi pond out back were seeking cover - and fish are already wet, you know? Lucky for me she lent me sneakers, some fat wool socks and a heavy sweatshirt which I wore the whole two days I was there, over not one pair but both pairs of the pants I had packed.
to lift our spirits We thought we’d go to Yoga and when it was over this nervy young class member came up to me and said she could see I’d been having trouble with this one pose where, with your legs wide open and knees locked you bend from the waist and yes, rest your head on the floor. She said she thought we should take a minute while she helped me get it right. Now the teacher had just told us when we started that she never lets people face toward the mirror since in Yoga the journey is supposed to be inner. She didn’t want us looking at ourselves, never mind having other people look at us.
I didn’t know WHAT to say to this young woman.
“Come, shall we try it?’ she said like some camp counselor. “Oh but look I'm not barefoot now," I said lamely pointing to the fat wooly socks Bobbie had given me and which I had just donned for everybody’s favorite part of Yoga when, right at the end of the class, you get to do Corpse Pose and pretend you’re dead for six or seven minutes.
“I’ll brace your left foot with my foot so it doesn’t slide,” she said brightly, and, dope that I am, I let her and I tried to DO the pose, and in that totally unbraced RIGHT foot starting slowly sliding so far from the midline I thought I’d break right in two like a wishbone. Instead - boom! – I fell clean over and saw my little skeleton clatter onto that hard wood floor like a stack of tipsy teacups, which caused the young woman to apologize quickly and and hightail it on out of there.
Bobbie was fuming. “Who did she think she was? We should report her!” she sputtered. Instead though, we went back out into the deluge, ran a couple of errands and went home to her house which was as dark and cold as crypt in that the 8th hour of rain.
Then – sigh - I couldn’t get manage to get online and do the whole column writing thing that I’m paid to do and when I finally DID get on and wrote for a while and came here it was to discover that all my nice photos had one by one erased themselves. Then I called my spouse back home who said, “Nobody misses you, the cats haven’t even asked," which I know I’m supposed to know by now is code for " I miss you and the cats are suicidal" but still… Plus I spilled coffee all over my sweatshirt and had only my Gidget Goes Hawaiian get-ups and so was getting really really cold and also now my bones all hurt.
But Bobbie drew me a bath and she and her husband built us a fire. She made this amazing homemade food, lentil soup and rice pudding and a salad with many lettuces fresh from the garden, which we washed down with some fine wine except I decided to pretend I was in a Hemingway novel and so drank whiskey with lemon juice, and we were all in our beds by half past nine.
All this was on Tuesday. When we woke yesterday morning the sun was shining and some total SAINT out there in Internet World had read my plaintive query about why my pictures were disappearing and gave me some tips for fixing the problem, and I had a bunch of nice emails about this week’s column which I wrote in honor of a favorite teacher of mine, just deceased at 102 and Bobbie and I took a walk on campus and by 4 o’clock yesterday I was home again in Boston and sure the cats are a little sore but I think they’ll get past it and Bobbie has just now emailed me a photo she took that morning showing the Koi pool where the fish were so happy in yesterday’s bright sunshine I bet they were just about swimming tummy-up.
(This is the pool. Goldfish not available for comment.)
Our Dumb World
So it turns out cheering yourself up by listening to people call each other names on the Internet works, but only for a while. I got sad again last night but then did I get lucky! Around 10:00 I got a ladder out and began checking out the top shelf of my bedroom closet - I smelled dead mouse, I know I did - and instead found a copy of an "atlas" called Our Dumb World written by those merry online jokesters at The Onion. I'd bought it to give to one of our kids, then lost it, then forgot about it, hey HEY! here it was now, right next to this cute little sparkly nightlight still in the package.
The book has two pages for every one of the world’s countries, one with funny comments and one with a map - like their map for Greenland, which shows all kinds of key areas. (My favorites: “Mt. Enormous," “God-It’s-Cold,” and a large area up by the northwest coast labeled “Shitload of Fiords”
Pretty funny stuff for a tame country like Greenland, right? But the stuff they have about France is even better. At the top of France’s page it says, in boldface, “One Nation Above God” and then launches in: “Located directly in the heart of the universe around which everything else revolves, the nation of France is the sole beacon of life in an otherwise black and empty void… The French have produced every great achievement in every field of endeavor in the history of mankind including the sculptures of Michelangelo, the symphonies of Beethoven and the writings of William Shakespeare …The people of France are extremely proud of their cultural achievements and offer no apologies for giving the world such things as self-indulgent cinema, the awkward ménage à trios or the Frenchman.” Then the map shows places like “Toplèsse,” "Whine Country” and “Sole Acre of Country That Has Never Been Surrendered to a Foreign Power.”
Egad! And I thought seeing people make fun of individuals on the internet was amusing! I know the world will never improve if we start mocking whole countries; but I used to be a high school teacher and it seems to me the writers at The Onion are like that witty kid in the back of the back of the room: you were grateful for his energy, even if you did sometimes have to send him to the principal's office.
Man in the Mirror and My Blue Day
I felt slightly blue today maybe because the garage is brimming with things I’ve been told that I personally should take to the dump, just because I’m the one who put them out there. That I should be the one to get my hands dirty handling a bunch of broken coffee makers and blow-driers, never mind the bath mats that have had bleach spilled on them and so look like victims of vitiligo, the bleach coming into it because every few months I go through a stage where I feel like changing the colors of things and so dye the towels, my clothes, even the lampshades if I don’t like the way they look on a particular day, and then sometimes well most of the time I end up making the colors perhaps a little TOO vivid and have to try toning them down with a quart of Clorox. All right so now I feel bad about mentioning “vitiligo” because just think how hard it must be to have that pigment problem and be spotted all over like Michael Jackson. Wait a sec, now I’m Googling Michael who I have been worrying over ever since his nose fell off and would you look at that! There are scads of videos on You Tube where you can watch his face change over the years, in, like, time-lapse photography practically.
‘Course now I feel even sadder thinking how people love to criticize poor skinny MJ who certainly did NOT molest any children and I should know. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who really knows him now that Diana’s gone, the only one who’s been there for it all, the Liz Taylor friendship, the Barbara Walters interview, the Oprah one, his own descriptions of how would take him to the mirror as a little fella and say “Look! Look how ugly you are” and all.
But hold the phone maybe I’m not the only one! Because here’s this chat room I’ve just entered where people have been really dicing him up fine and a young woman weighs in and says to this other moron “How OLD are you anyway? All you ‘teens’ need to grow up so you don't become lame donkey-ass adults. Grow up, teenager!” Well now I believe that’s done it! I feel completely cheerful again. “Lame donkey-ass:” now there’s a phrase that’s worth remembering!
Renegade Son Checks in Late for Moms Day
If you go two posts down and read the one with the waving bridal couple at the top you’ll see that I heard from a number of our great young people on Mothers Day though not from our youngest and this had had me worried since, as you may remember, he’s the one who washed the super fancy electric one-cup coffee maker we gave him last Christmas by submerging it in a tub full of soapy water.
I didn’t want him to feel guilty natch so I just sent a tiny little email saying basically ‘Hey honey I had a great day yesterday,’ but he didn’t answer. So the next day I sent him a second email saying ‘I wrote about you in my blog, ha ha’ But still nothing. Then the day after THAT the email I sent said ‘Well I guess you’ll be home in a few weeks but are you OK honey?’ Finally though, light dawned and I said to myself what on earth am I doing sending emails when i know very well that everyone under 30 now feels free to ignore all emails?
So I went to the method of communication I knew would work: I texted him.
‘Are you the hell all right or what?’ is what this loving message said and sure enough within just a couple of hours he called. Of course I was in with the vet having the cat’s nostrils inspected at the time and so missed his call, but he left a voice-mail which I set down here without change, edit or emendation:
“Hey mum. It’s me” (comfortable sigh.) “Just want to let you know I’m fine and good and everything…. Sorry I was MIA and didn’t call on Mothers Day (now in a perplexed voice) : my calendar has a Mothers Day ‘M’ and a Mothers Day ‘C’ on it, on two separate days (very perplexed tone here) and I didn’t know what those letters stood for… though I guess I should’ve known it was Sunday when all my friends were calling their mothers.” (another yawn here)
To condense the rest while still using his words he said that anyway he was fine, just busy on the job; that he’d been out in Brooklyn all weekend doing what he called ‘various fun springtime activities’; that he and his pal Scott were celebrating a joint birthday this weekend so he was trying to find an Inflatable Bouncy Castle to put in Scott’s apartment; that they’re actually cheaper than you’d think (said with mild exclamation) and that he loved me and so good bye.
Hey Nonny Nonny Nonny Nonny No
TIRED tonight, boy. I haven’t had any down-time since Monday morning when I was unexpectedly summoned to the airport to meet a bunch of Seventh Graders from rural Arkansas and bring ten pieces of their luggage, 200 pounds of their food, three of the young scholars themselves alive-alive-o, oh plus one of their teacher-chaperones to the hotel where all 30 of these young sojourners would be staying for this the Boston leg of their big History-related field trip to the North.
As soon as they'd all checked in I was asked to go right “onstage” and talk about the pleasures of first-person writing, which was fun since they were such a cute audience, laughing at all the best parts of my stories like when people fall down and little naked kids say funny things and when I got done one of them stood and led the others in a little chanting cheer of appreciation.
Then yesterday I went to an out-of-town funeral that took all morning, then bought a new pot to replace the one I burned the bejesus out of making the rice on Sunday night, bought a new iron to replace the one I have dropped on the floor so many times it doesn’t even get warm never mind hot anymore, brushed my hair, changed my clothes and zipped over to a lovely old Cambridge home to act out my part in a reading of Shakespeare's As You Like It , a piece of cake I figured since it consisted of like three short speeches as the so-called Second Page - only whoops! -it turned out the First Page and I were supposed to SING that whole passage at the end of Act Five, did I not see that those 24 lines were actually a song? And surely I knew the melody did I not, that famous centuries-old tune with the Hey Nonny Nonny Nonny Nonny No? The room grew dim. My head swam. A faint threatened - until a kindly soprano lady took me aside and taught it to me then there and even sang along with us both when the time in her clear, practically see-through soprano voice so whew! I got through that.
Then today I got up at 5:00, wrote 'til my back hurt, went to a Weight Watcher meeting, brought David's 87-year-old uncle out into the sun for two hours, did exercises for my messed-up neck, drove to a more commercial corner of Cambridge this time and watched the highly accomplished young author and illustrator Matt Tavares take his turn presenting to the Seventh Grade kids, then went accompanied them to the famous JFK Library and did the tour with them, trying my best to answer their questions. They asked about Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. Also about Kennedy and James Meredith whose enrollment at Ole Miss he made possible by kicking ass and taking names when the backward-thinking governor there tried preventing him. Considering the life of President Kennedy is for kids born in 1996 and '97 a lot like considering the life of oh, Alexander the Great, say, and when I told them I had met the guy once they looked at me as if I were Methuselah himself.
But really they had long since forgiven me my decrepitude. We had wonderful fun and I even got a few pictures before they climbed on the bus to go see Yale and finish up their field trip with two-and-a-half days in Manhattan. They were adorable and who cares if I’m too tired to iron or make rice the right way it was a great three days and yeah sure I’m pretty tired now but hey I’ll sleep when I’m dead, you know?
Mothers Day Post-Mortem
When my sister and I were kids, Mothers Day meant sneaking outside at dawn in our pjs, picking blossoms, glomming them together with electrician’s tape, wrapping them in tinfoil because tinfoil was of course so pretty, then impaling the whole top-heavy thing on a hat-pin and presenting it to our mom. She’d pretend to be surprised and would never get mad about the grass satins on our pajama-bottoms or the tree-bark clinging to the great lifting cloud of my curly black hair (talk about biscuit head, which even today my spouse calls “The Net”.)
I got one card for Mothers Day, from the dazzling couple shown here. That’s our Favorite Oldest Son (as he calls himself) Dodson, the first-in honorary kid in our big shambling family, Dodson who came to us back in ‘86 as a barely five-foot-tall freshman in the ABC Program and that’s his bride Veronica. They sent me flowers AND a card AND called yesterday. And I heard from three of our other honorary children too, darling Susie and handsome Gary and Deanna whom I met when she was 18 and now seems like a lovely pale lily of a younger sister to me.
So they got in touch. And I got to actually see all my girls because I invited them over and made salmon and swordfish and roast beef, rice and a salad of Boston lettuce, strawberries and goat cheese in walnut oil. Carrie's my oldest girl. She and her partner Chris brought their two shorties who got right to work dismantling the place. And my younger daughter Annie came straight from the airport and four days in Chicago. Our youngest, Michael, living above a dry cleaners in East Harlem I did not hear from but poor Mike: him I will hunt down in a hour to proof my column which has to go out this morning. Michael edits everything I write and has done so since his Junior year in high school and if you ever find a typo here you’ll know he didn’t see it first. Each week he takes my column, a mere 620 words long and he sits with it for a good 15 minutes, finding the stray grammatical goof-up or the logical lapse, pointing out the turn of phrase that is awkward or that repeats or that has become in his mind an annoying verbal tic of mine and who knows more about those than a person’s own kids? Annie looks at my work too I should say and Carrie as well and these poor kids: when I die they’ll say, “Thank God! Silence at last!”
So anyway the baby and I patted the cat and his pre-school brother and I went out to my car and pushed buttons to make the doors and windows open and close so many times the things began to resemble a big gilled sea-creature breathing hard. Then with supper we drank a Frei Brothers Chardonnay and a Hess Select Merlot. Chris, who is Carrie’s partner and as dear to me now as my own child started with wine, but then switched to beer. We talked about doing childcare for them in two weeks when they go to an out-of-town wedding and Annie told about eating at the finest restaurant in Chicago. Carrie and I also spent some time studying pictures of our family from over 100 years ago and she again said how she wanted to go out to the Berkshires and see that old old house where our family story started.
They say Michael looks just like me. Annie looks like her own gorgeous self and is her own bold and funny self too. But the more I look at this first child Carrie, the more she looks to me in moments like my own mom and also like the pictures of Mom’s mom who died as a girl barely 30. If it were now instead of 1910 she might not have even been pregnant by that age. As it was she’d been pregnant five times and the fifth pregnancy killed her. Here they are now, the daughter I know so well and the grandmother we none of us knew, Carrie Maloney, married in 1903, and Carrie Marotta, married 100 years later, almost to the day. You tell me they don’t look alike.
I think of that young dead woman. I picture her often lying there just a few feet down below the grave I visit. Alas and alas I now also picture my mom, who lies there too at the feet of the mother she could never remember.
It got late fast last night and I was too sleepy to write. So let me just say this morning thanks, guys, for making me a mom. And thank you, husband of mine, for doing all the dishes and drying them; for putting them away and wiping the counter-tops same as you do every time. And finally thanks to you, Mom, and here you are as a newlywed of 38, pregnant with her first child before the troubles came that rendered you single again, but even then this is what I remember: you with your big smile, telling it like it was and making everyone laugh.
Medium Well Done?
This 'medium' I went to see last night with my pals Janet and Robin was, like most mediums, a person who departed spirits can COME THROUGH to say reassuring things to us saps left holding the bag here. Like Patricia Arquette in the TV show, only without the cute little protruding eye teeth and the crimes. This lady doesn’t DO crimes so much as she envisions lots of floral arrangements. Also poses keenly insightful questions to the audience members who stand tremulously, offering their meek necks to her X-ray vision. Also Manner-of-Death as in “I see something …sudden? Was it sudden, the death of this person you just told me got flattened by a falling anvil?” “Did your mother have hair on her head at all, Charlene?” Our tickets were free but I heard tell some folks paid $38.50.
We lasted less than an hour. Well, l lasted 15 minutes, then fell deeply asleep. We revived once we got outside when Robin started talkin’ trash again (scroll down one for that!)
We always have fun we’re together. That's Janet and a deranged person up top here, posing before some street art in Paris the City of Lights. I’ll look for a picture of Robin now to add here at the end, hold the phone. I THINK I have one of her on her wedding day in our back yard. If memory serves her gown is hiked halfway up those long legs and she’s doing the limbo...... Hmmmm, nope. This picture is the closest I can come to showing what she's like. We danced in the streets. Her groom Dan, back-to, has been dancing ever since.
