The Angle of the Dangle

Smith College the 1930s:Fire Drill/Escape the Burning Dormitory Trick

These gadgets were still in use when I got to Smith, just moments before college kids everywhere exploded into the flesh-baring, headband-wearing joy of the youth movement.

The girls in the picture are just 18, whether they look it or not. That’s when you had to do: take the Escape from Your Burning Dorm Room test as a freshman just a few weeks in. They look like they’re trying to hang themselves eh? Some of them look like they’re even OK with the idea.

I used this title just to be fresh of course but when I first typed it I wrote “angel” instead of “angle” which made me wonder if I should call this 'Angels in Danger', or maybe 'Angels Descending' and there’s my problem right there: I never know who’s going to be talking when I open my mouth, either that nice girl with the white gloves who started at Smith in 1966 or this crazy person who in talking about life with small children says the word 'penis' twice in front of an audience of kindly women in beautiful sundresses.

That’s what I did yesterday when I was the speaker at a luncheon put on for the members of the Winchester Boat Club. I guess there were 125 of 150 of them there, all in lovely sundresses and little shawls. Out of respect I wanted to dress beautifully too and at first put on a few killer outfits only to think Who are you, the bride? What is this, a short story by William Faulkner? I stopped then and called darling Ryan Dunn to wake him up, Ryan who helps me with much of my business life- only being just 19, Ryan was of course still sound asleep with his cell phone off. I thought “Be calm Terry.” Also “DON’T be a show-off with these fancy outfits" and so wore black slacks and a blazer and looked instead like a matron in a women’s prison but that was ok; we are meant to set self-consciousness aside are we not?

I really was getting a little panicked now about who would help me lug in the all my books which I had been graciously invited to offer for sale after the talk. I called Ryan four more times, then dialed up his dad at work who called their famous neighbor Bob Bigelow who walked straight into the house, straight into Ryan’s very room adn yelled TERRY MAROTTA NEEDS YOU AT THE BOAT CLUB GET UP I'LL GIVE YOU A RIDE and if you don't think getting yanked into wakefulness by a six-foot-seven former Boston Celtic isn't scary, well talk to Ryan.

The day went great anyway and the women laughed as I talked about all the fun we can have in life and also how we might die any day, all of it mixed in together as is usual with me. It's just my standard mode of expression I think, Funny With Death in it, Deathy With Fun in it. And right at the end one of the men that works there came shyly up for some small talk.

He told me his wife is about to have their fourth child who was pretty sure coming early. He also said that his dad had just died and his mom was feeling a little rocky and when he said that his own voice caught just a little. He ended up choosing the book with all the comical stories about small children in it and also the collection whose central message is that that OK sure maybe everything does die but then it all comes back again if you look at it the right way. Then he and his men helped Ryan and me get all our stuff back into my little red minivan and we drove away and the skies opened and the rained drummed like crazy on the hot asphalt and I felt about as happy as a person can feel, with angels descending all around her.

(and this is Ryan, who finally woke up and was wonderful)

Gandhi was not Bald: Poofy Coifs

When you sweat you feel virtuous; it’s how you know you’re a good person and I’ve been doing some serious sweating this afternoon, or anyway my right armpit has been. Which must mean either that I’m only half the saint I like to think I am or that my mind wandered and I only rolled the Arrid Extra Dry onto the skin of my left armpit which happens all the time, of course it does think about it you’re using your right hand and it’s a nice easy reach across the body to get to the left armpit but a much more constricted curl to get to the right one. Kind of like when you sing the I’m a Little Teapot song and act it out at the same time which David does for us all sometimes and is frankly why I married him in the first place.

Well now here we are on the weekend which means it’s time for me to put up the new column which happens to just BE about what happens when you get to thinkin’ you’re deserving of canonization like a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa . All kinds of papers used it this week so as well as sticking it up at the top here under This Week’s Column why don’t I touch the magic wand to the words Citizen.com and let you click through and see how it looked in in New Hampshire.

Pride really does go before a fall, just as the story says. I thought I was so great one time, because Smith College where I went to school invited me to give as talk at the big reunion, calling me the Distinguished Alumna Speaker. I bought a silk dress just the bright–blue color of a peacock’s wing as well as a small scarf of that same hue with swirls of burnt orange and coral thrown in. I looked like the kind of lurid cocktail an 18-year old girl with a fake ID would order her first night at the Tikki Bar.

So there I was in the big the lecture hall where I once sweated earnestly over midterms and finals. Now I was up on the stage! With a microphone and a screen behind me! And everyone had to listen to ME, with my carousel full of funny and poignant slides that I just knew would make those 400 women laugh til their bras popped open, then cry a little, then near the end finish up with a last gentle chuckle and off to the class cocktail parties. I looked out at that sea of faces, went to take a tiny sip of water before I began.... and poured the thing right down my front and ended up giving the whole talk with a dark stain resembling the map of Argentina reaching from just under my chin clear down to my bellybutton.

It happens anytime you compare yourself to the great. In fact here’s a photo from the summer of '93 when I actually  'met' Gandhi at Madam Tussaud's Wax Museum in London and Zounds! By gosh if I’m not wearing the same ugly dress I refer to in this week's column! I see that I’m also trying to look like he and I are twins both inside AND out but anyone can see: his hair looks WAY better than mine

(But Yay for the 80s and early 90s huh? Look at me and my sister Nan up top here! We sure did have the poofy coifs!)

Balls

I have to say, this new baby in the family is one tough kid. He falls down just all the time. He steps across a threshold and falls; walks and falls; just plain stands there and falls. He walks all crazy too, come to think of it. Kind of like Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage" with that little arms-up waddle. Kind of like the way kids in the old Peanuts comic strip walked - like  Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally seen here on the right.

Soooo he gets banged up, gets scabs on his giant head, then rubs the scabs off in his sleep by rooting around the way babies do and so has to start healing all over again

And the thing is each time he falls I’ve noticed two things: (a) a ball is involved and (b) he doesn’t mind a bit. It’s worth it to him to fall because he just loves balls, any kind you got going. He’ll try throwing 'em, kicking 'em, coming at 'em with a stuffed animal or a slotted spoon and whatever and just sort of whang away at them so maybe he’s a natural athlete I don’t know. Maybe he takes after his grandpa, my cute old Mate For Life Dave, that MVP all through high school, that darn guy who never even tried tennis 'til he was 20, never tried golf 'til he was 30 AND IS REALLY GOOD AT BOTH the son of a gun.

Well it’s this really gorgeous 72-degree day here with the so clear and sharp it looks like an ad for Kodak so let’s make this a short one and say that my newest little grandbaby has two mottoes, the first:

You Should See the Other Guy

Everyone Else Pays Cash

“Trust In God; Everyone Else Pays Cash”

Every Friday I post a copy of the column that is just then appearing in papers all over. I do this in case anyone here would like to see how the blog-writing lens and the newspaper-writing lens come together in a columnist's life. This week I’m a day late in doing it though on account of how I was very busy yesterday tending a 14-month-old who was himself very busy staggering around sucking on his little sucky thing while making wispy marks on index cards with his big brother’s pointy new crayons.

The column describes what it’s like to be a really trusting and open person and how far that whole way of living can work for you before it starts working against you. The Somerville Journal has titled it  “Dummy Up Or Just Let It Go And Be Friendly?” and if you go here you can read about the most open and trusting family in all of America - and about how, lucky for them, the person they were so open WITH was the most open and trusting individual in the country and yes I am that person.

I just trust people. I can't help it. When I was 19 a slimy old rich guy asked me to come to a conference with him and for $500 be his ‘assistant’ for the weekend. I actually believed that’s what I would be - and I almost went, innocent lamb that I was.

Way later in my late 30s, I walked through a night-time alley in Times Square, back in the days when the place was filled with pimps and prostitutes and skinnied-out AIDS sufferers and I had my 11-year-old child with me God help us. Annie and I were also attended by Roberto, a South Bronx boy and ABC scholar of 17 who was like a son in our family in those days. Rob feared no one and seemed to trust everyone. Together with Chris, his best pal and fellow ABC scholar, we had all just looked on as Annie had her portrait done by a street artist. Now, along toward midnight, Chris had gone along and Rob was leading Annie and me on his shortcut, the canvas in my hands. Sure enough, as we walked deeper into the alley here were two men and a woman, lounging on the hood of a busted-looking car.

Roberto smiled at them so I did too. “Look!” I said. “Annie has had her portrait painted!” And they slid off the hood of the car and sauntered over to examine it.  “A beautiful portrait for a beautiful girl!” they said kindly. Then Rob led us back to our hotel and went home to his mama on Beekman Ave.

So Trust and Openness won the day, that day anyway. It’s a day I've thought about many times since.

I haven’t seen Rob in a good long while now but I think of him often. He has children himself these days and I wonder if he and their mother are raising them too to begin with people in an open friendly way and just kind of take things from there.....Anyway here we are in that long-ago time, when my hair was blacker than black and Rob, with his big smile and his wrestling trophies, was one day out of high school, and college-bound, with everything before him.

You are Boring

The other day a reader took exception to the writing style of two of the columnists he sees in his Sunday paper and since one of them is me the paper’s Executive Editor to whom he sent his email sent it on to me. Here’s what it said:

“I HAVE NOTICED YOUR FEMALE COLUMNISTS CAN ONLY WRITE ABOUT THEMSELVES, THEIR FAMILIES OR CUTESY THINGS THEIR CHILDREN OR RELATIVES SAY OR DO OR A 'WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER' ESSAY. THEIR WRITINGS ARE FILLED WITH 'I , ME, MY, WE, ETC.', IN OTHER WORDS A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE COLUMN WITH AN EXCESSIVE USE OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS."

(In other words people and their darn families! Who cares about that?)

“IT IS VERY EASY TO TALK OR WRITE ABOUT YOURSELF” he went on. “ARE NOT COLUMNS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT THINGS? IDEAS? EVENTS?  FAR-AWAY-PLACES? OPINIONS OR CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM? THESE REQUIRE THOUGHT!"

(And, well, he may be right there and the idea realm is a good place to start so how about Intelligent Design for today, kids? Or perhaps Should Form Follow Function? Or, Benevolent Despotism: an Oxymoron or Our Future?)

“LET THIS BE A CHALLENGE,” this reader wound up. “CAN MS. X (as I will call her) OR MS. MAROTTA WRITE A COLUMN WITH MAYBE JUST ONE OR TWO PERSONAL PRONOUNS AND NOT ABOUT THEMSELVES?”

Can we? I have no doubt. Will I? Today anyway? Not likely.  On my writing agenda today I seem to have (a) an account of the bird the flew in our house and lived here undetected until the cat Abraham found him this morning; (b)something so sad I heard at the wake I went to yesterday that stayed with me all night and kept me from sleeping; and (c) a description of me falling face first, all dressed up, into the cargo bin of my minivan.

As to the 'Should I?' part, a Seventh Grade girl named Danielle wrote to the National Society of Newspaper Columnists last March, asking about what it’s like to have as your job the pouring of talk into a tall skinny word-funnel for the newspaper. I said I'd love to be the one to answer her and what I wrote I used as my column that week. It's is still on the NSNC website if you’d like to read it. It’s serious and I stand by it. But if I were the kind of person who enjoyed sassing back I might to “Two words for you Mr. Z who thinks people aren’t interested in reading about other people: Reality TV."

Talon Show

(that's me on the left)

The hands go first, that’s Aunt Grace always said when I was a kid living with her. She used to make me do my Latin homework for her every morning at breakfast and then forbid me to write down what I'd puzzled out. It worked though: I got to where I could read just about whatever scrap of Caesar/ Cicero/Virgil you set down in front of me like it was writin' on the ol' cereal box. She was a Latin teacher herself and she knew her stuff. She always spoke of the poor kid reading aloud his own earnest translation of a passage in which he had somebody or other arriving at the palace not ‘with one bare foot’ but rather with a naked foot soldier. (Uno pede nudo: you can see it. Plus hey, it got lonely way out there in Western Gaul!)

But to get back to hands, the story she liked best to tell was about the day her Latin One class was working on a passage about some magical vat whose waters could make youthful even the most decrepit old soul when a shy boy in the first row peeked up at her where she stood beside his desk. “They wouldn’t have to do that for YOU, Mrs. S!” he whispered admiringly – until his eyes fell again toward the book she was holding: “Well maybe just for your hands."

Ah your hands: once we girls could practically earn our living modeling them; then the day comes when we look down and they look like the hands of Ma Joad from The Grapes of Wrath. I look at my photo at the top of my piece two blogs down  and all I see are my hands. Where are those hands with their tapered fingers and their long oval-shaped nails?

When I took up massage in the year 2000 I had to cut my nails clear down to the quick and even below but I didn’t look back. Let me do good with my hands now I thought because this is what they are for: work and not display.

Then I saw this close-up just the other day: (of my right hand, on the baby’s tummy.)

and so for the first time in my life hurried to my neighbor’s nail salon. “Make my hands look like Mary’s hands!” I said, Mary seen here below holding part of our cherry tree which when it died in the summer of ’06 we ritually took down and saved parts of (part of a part of which she is holding in those gorgeous paws of hers.)

I wanted paws like that too I decided and so after 70 minutes emerged from her nail salon with…. absolute talons, plumped up in some ungodly way to render them thicker and rounded, with that white rim that makes them French-style.

I felt great, if a little fraudulent - until Saturday night when I tried to go to sleep, which I couldn't seem to do with my new appendages: They smelled too freshly of their chemical components when I brought my hands close to my face. Plus they’re so weirdly thick, they feel like the claws of an eagle when I try scratching my nose or scalp or ankle.So there have I lain, and for two nights now, sleeping only fitfully and waking to think WHO IS THIS PERSON IN THE BED WITH ME? WHO THE HELL’S HANDS ARE THESE?

The fact that they’re mine I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to.

I’m kind of a Woodstock girl is the thing so I don’t know… It’ll go one of two ways I expect. Either I’ll break all ten nails in the next 48 hours or grown too annoyed with how funny and foreign they feel, get out the mini-guillotine we use for the cats’ claws, lop ‘em all off and go back to being Ma Joad with the scary work-worn hands.

To Full Equality

This is My Independence Day Story: To Full equality, in marriage and everywhere else !

How would it be for you as a parent, if you gradually came to understand that your just-emerging-from-college daughter had fallen in love with another young woman, and six years passed and she loved her still?

How would you feel if you belonged to a church that around this time chose to examine the possibility of going on record as a place welcoming to any woman who loved a woman, to any man who loved a man, the same as it is to any person who entered there to worship?

And if one day during this 18-month-long period of study, prayer and reflection designed to let people really examine this possibility, a woman stood and expressed her concern about how “these people” might fit in, I wonder if it would surprise you to hear the man in the neighboring pew whisper to his wife, “She doesn’t realize: she’s talking about our son.” Or if it would surprise you to learn that a half-dozen other parents present that morning were likely thinking the same: “You speak of our children, onetime singers in the Junior Choir and assistants in the Sunday School; our children, whom you have known since their infancy.”

I wonder how you might then feel if, after that lengthy consideration, your church voted “Yes. Let the word go forth that we in this 150-year old community of the United Church of Christ unanimously choose to be known as an Open and Affirming congregation.”

And if you were yourself one of these parents and if your above-mentioned daughter and her beloved sought to undergo a Liturgy of Commitment here, I wonder how you would feel to have the Deacons say “Yes. By all means yes, and we are delighted. For you are our own daughter, and this one that you love is our daughter now too.”

I wonder how you might feel if, during this ceremony, your husband of 33 years with his hair now white but his manner still so gentle stood to recite a fatherly poem to the two; if he prefaced it by saying he knew he spoke too for the much-missed dad of your daughter’s beloved, gone now into death’s quiet corridor; if he then paused and looked over at this young woman where she sat beside your girl and said aloud to the very large assembly there gathered that he couldn’t be happier that his daughter had chosen her for a life partner.

I wonder: Would it not lift your heart to hear the verses he then read by poet Gail Mazur?“What you want for it you'd want for a child, “it goes. “That she take hold; that her roots find home in stony winter soil; that she take seasons in stride… “That she know, in her branchings, to seek balance. That change not frighten her, rather that change meet her embrace... that she find her place in an orchard.”

And if, in the year following, a baby should come to their house, would you not rejoice and be glad? As we rejoiced last month when we first saw this newborn with his grave and curious look, with his chest no wider than a lady’s hand, held so tenderly in their slender young arms?

I think you might, if it became personal for you in this way.

I think the realization might dawn within you that this is what is chiefly asked of us here: That we make a family. That over the long years we spend ourselves in many deeds of care and kindness, and make a place where such children as we are sent can shelter. And take root. And one day find their own place in the orchard.

Beware the Old Bait-and Switch

Hmmmmm….so my grandaddy here always used to say you should never say anything in any forum that you wouldn’t want read aloud in the public square. I know I sure believed him. He knew a lot, that child of Irish immigrants born in Famine-time. He came into the world in the 1870s, raised himself up from poverty and went on to become a lawyer, a judge and the recipient of an Honorary Degree from Harvard.

He was also fun and he gave us kids Hershey Bars. My sister Nan and I got to live with him for all of our first decade on the planet. I actually imprinted on him and not just because we looked alike with our black curly hair. We also act alike, I see now that I'm grown: He was always giving uplifting talks for no money at all, at places like the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in Chelsea. I also give talks for no money at all. In fact every good thing I do I do for no money because come on, did Jesus charge admission to the Sermon on the Mount? No he did not. 

Mostly though, I know I'm like my grandfather because even on my blog, supposedly a much freer forum than a column I still can’t use bad language or say anything I wouldn’t say in front of a Fourth Grade class. I mean pop culture is tacky enough adn I'm freshly nauseated every time I come across the double-entendres in CBS’s Prime time Two-and-a Half Men for example; sickened by the way they have that child repeating phrases which in the storyline he is purported  not to know the meaning of - all so the audience can have that nice in-group feeling of actually getting the  - wink-wink, nudge-nudge naughty - references. It's one thing if you’re a tired 40-year-old watching the show but you know very well it’s also millions and millions of Second Graders seeing it, and God that makes me mad. If there’s anything more shameful than using a child to sneak your dirty joke under the wire I don’t know what it is.  

So….are there any young’uns out there today? You kids on Facebook maybe? If so hear me now and you males especially: If you ever entertained the hope that associating with a woman was going to be like pulling into some big service station in the sky, well I've got news for you: That hope is all based on the ol' Bait-and-Switch and it's brought to you by people who are trying to sell you stuff: Sneakers and blue jeans. Music and push-up bras. It isn’t real in other words and sure I know there’s that whole pathetic world to whom it may SEEM real – pornography is a growth industry they say - but those are loser-men in the grip of an addiction and do you know what an addiction is? Look at the private life of Bill Clinton over the last 20 years and you tell ME if you think that’s a pretty picture.

Anyway all those images of panting women? they’re fake, kids; the women are acting. In the real world you’re going to be dealing with REAL women and let me tell you on the basis of l-o-o-n-g experience: whether they’re 12 or 112, women are interested in three things in their dealings with others: straight talk, mutuality, and respect. Whether they’re 12 or 112, women – and all the good men – and, praise God, a great many young people too - know that we’re all here to do three things: pick up after ourselves, live in a peaceful manner and bring along the little ones to do the same.

- and now here he is again, papa to my mother and to four other little ones too. coming home from work and happy to be home, in the quiet summer of 1905.

Be My Friend? Look, Here's My Allowance!

 Yesterday I seem to have invited everybody in my entire Contact list to be my 'Friend on Facebook' talk about embarrassing, since some of my contacts are famous people. Like Gloria Steinem. And Garrison Keillor I think maybe. And the POPE! and the Center for Wart Removal in Atlanta, and OK yes I’m making it up about the Pope and the Wart Lab but not the others. I HAVE these addresses but I never use them - or I use them only sparingly.

For example when I was younger, see photo, that's me in the chair sobbing, no of course not, that's me the mother, sorrowing over the first haircut... When I was younger my mom died at a party right in front of us all just as we were toasting her birthday, and this highly shocking event caused me in the 2 or 3 years following her death to do all kinds of odd things: Like wearing hats, I think to channel her old jauntiness. Like CRYING while giving speeches that were suppose to be light and funny, making the whole audience cry too, talk about your Typhoid Mary. And like writing letters to famous people.

I wrote to Ronald Reagan and sent him the column I did about him when I saw him in Concord NH. I wrote to the Prince of Wales after seeing him at the 350 birthday of Harvard. I remember sitting in the Yard looking up at all those ivy leaves declining like Latin nouns down the sides of the old buildings and thinking 'Damn you Ten Thousand Men of Harvard, why did you keep my kind out for like 99 % of your history?'

I wrote to Garrison Keillor when I applied to be the first Journalist in Space. I had mentioned him in my application essay and have always kinda figured that's why I got to the final 40 in that contest.

I even wrote to the great John Updike when I read a short story of his in the New Yorker that made it apparent his mum had died too. I sent him a condolence note and a copy of the column I wrote about Cal’s dramatic death – that was my mom's name, 'Cal', as jaunty a name as she was a person, a cigarette held tight in her teeth as she took the corners on two-wheels to get us to that convent school she enrolled us in by mistake where she was in a fight with the nuns from DAY ONE.

And they all wrote back, these famous characters: Ronnie R. wrote right back. The future King of England did too or at least His Honor Lord High-Fanny of the Royal Equerry wrote on his behalf. And Garrison Keillor and John Updike sent actual postcards, John Updike's saying a thing so nice about my writing it pulled me up out of obscurity like the wave of the Bibbity Bobbity Boo wand of Cinderella’s fairy godmother. In fact just last month he had another story in the New Yorker, this one so beautiful I was forced to write him again and what do you think? Another postcard came, as gracious as the first.

Now 15 years had passed between my first letter to him and my second, that's how careful I am. And I wouldn’t DREAM of writing to the Pope even if I had his email address, and the same goes for Lord High-Fanny who gave me some serious attitude in his letter just because my column said Prince Charlie wore the academic hood of his alma mater whereas in fact he wears the robes of the University of Wales just because he like OWNS Wales or some insignificant thing like that.

Gloria Steinem though? Gloria’s address I was saving for a special occasion, like offering myself to come be the jester at the next Inter-Galactic Women’s Conference. And now – agony!- my girl has called her girl if you can call an Address Book a girl and I seem to have asked her to be my friend on Facebook! The Queen gets invited to the worker bee’s after school party, Aaargh I could die! But, on the other hand in the last 24 hours I've heard from people I haven’t seen in decade and have admired their pictures and have written on their walls so why be embarrassed? Because really we're ALL members of the Class of '08, right? So really, why NOT write in each other's yearbooks?

Thy Belly is Like a Sheaf of Wheat

I just joined Facebook. Had to scroll down a million times to get to my birth year. Thought about putting ‘1910’ just for grins as Kevin Bacon keeps saying in the movie Diner and hey you can be old but you can still wear a hat is all I can say, even if it does make you look like Will Rogers.

 (That's me in my hat up top with Andrea M. who came to Barnes & Noble to see me at a book signing in 2003 and has been a dear friend to me ever since. )

When you wear a hat people think that you’re a nice, jaunty, what-the-hell kind of a person which you have to at least PRETEND to be in life sometimes God knows God knows, especially at book signings when decent people hurry by eyes averted thinking 'How shameless ! Peddling her wares in public!'

Speaking of public peddling I find it so sad to watch those prostitutes on the HBO series. They look so lonely out on their street corners with who knows what kind of a nut ready to pick them up and treat them to who know what kind of crazy violence… And then there’s all that holding in of their stomachs they have to do all the time.

When I was a girl in my 20s as I believe all female people in their 20s are (girls that is, mere girls and innocent in their hearts no matter what crazy mistakes they have made already and the 20s are the years for mistakes eh?)  Whe I was a girl we wore pants so tight you could hardly swallow, never mind breathe. They had wide Ace bandages for waistbands and they cinched even the ribcage – moved from the solar plexus clear down past the tummy and hips, like corsets of old,  all the way down til you got to the knee when they flared so much the cuffs completely covered your shoes, as well as any apple cores, car keys, small children you may have dropped onto the floor around you.

Now, as I seem to have just written somewhere we get to all wear pants that are actually roomy at the waist because  bellies are all right again <!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--> and THANK YOU DEAR JESUS FOR THAT or whatever perhaps-female deity is in charge of fashion trends up on the Heavenly runway. The clothes are bigger all around now and today you buy a size 10 pant and by God isn’t it designed for a little tummy! I never thought I would see it but the aesthetic is actually changing back to what it always was. Why? Because women are meant to have curves. Just look at one of the most erotic love poems ever written, that being the Song of Songs Which is Solomon’s: “Thy belly is like a sheaf of wheat,” the lover says to his beloved and he means it as a compliment and there by gosh is a thing that can help us ALL reach for the bread basket because hey it’s Sunday and the summer is just gittin' started and (I know you can sense it too) hats off to the electoral  process there’s a new time comin’ soon!

Peachy Keen: Dirty Pictures?

Here’s a shocker, found right in the pages of the June Vanity Fair and why don’t I say here that the column I wrote about it appears at the top of the Home Page (I will do this at the start of every weekend from now on: post a little more here at Exit Only about whatever topic the week’s column deals with.) This week’s is about things going in and out of style in general and about a new elderflower drink called Delice Du Sureau by Maison St. Germain in particular – it’s also about absinthe, such a kick-ass drink it was outlawed all over the place for decades and decades and also blamed for being practically psychotropic, which basically means you think your shoes are talking to you.

This picture just stuns you when you come upon it, which the folks brewing happily away at Maison St. Germain very well know it will do since they made the ad an actual postcard that you can tear out send in the mail to anyone at all except maybe your old teacher and your clergyman because look how shocking:

Or maybe it’s not shocking so much as it compelling, because it so thoroughly hijacks your attention in just the way the dark center of the flower does with the bee; in just the manner the dark nipple on its paler field of breast summons the infant.

It compels us because it's familiar. The  bottom looks framed in this way looks like a perfect peach, like aswelling, bifurcated, which when you think about it is a design repeated all over the body and in both genders. In the womb, you grow a bud and you grow two pillows. Nature has already tossed the dice to make you male or female and after a while the differentiation begins: If you’re a girl, the bud stays small and the pillows rise to cover it. If you’re a boy the bud grows and the pillows flank it.

So here’s to our common roots. God made us male and female. Male and female created he us. Now as Rodney King said,  WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?!

Hide-a-Key

I love my post office, not just because it’s so neat and compact, so Neo-classically civic in that built-in-the-1930s way, but because it’s such a beehive of activity. Outside this place it I have had my fender bumped, been bitten by a swan and seen an elegantly dressed lady pull back her head like a snake and spit! into the bushes. Once I even got propositioned there by a man 20 years my junior. (It happens, ask any woman who smiles a lot. It says nothing about us and everything about Testosterone and the bald truth that Nookie-Hope Springs Eternal in the breasts of those roiling with it.)

I live in the Aleutian Islands, of course. I say that so you won't try going to Post Office and wrecking things for the cheery 50-something man I’m going to tell you about now: He was bounding up the steps just as I was bounding down when I ran into a woman I know who stopped me mid-bound on the third step. As I stood talking with her and facing back up the steps in the direction of the Post office’s broad façade, I saw this man suddenly shoot straight up in the air, sweep his hand long the lintel over one of the windows and land with a look of immense satisfaction on his face.

“What did you just do?” I asked him.

“I keep my the key to my Post Office Box up there. This way I never have to worry about forgetting it!”

Now how adorable is that ? Just when you’re thinking everyone is lost in cynicism and mistrust along comes a sweet Jack-in-the-Box of a guy like this. It's what I love about life on this earth.

And now if you'll promise to respect his privacy and not swipe his key and steal all his mail I’ll show you a picture of my Post Office, which I harvested just now by Image-Googling the name of my town in the Aleutians and the word “Neo-classical.”

And Whoops! what do you think came up as well? A Neo-classical picture of ME in the tub after a long day’s writing, where hey I mean you can totally SEE why the young guy hit on me, eh? A babe all right, even WITHOUT my Wonder Bra on!

Eyes in My Eyes

For the past four days I’ve been in New Orleans where I found myself so completely out of my element that when a young woman kept calling me “ma’am” I took it for sarcasm.

I was trying to book an appointment through her and was confused about the billing process and so fumbled along with many questions.

“Yes MA’AM”, “No MA’AM”, “Whatever you want to do MA’AM” she said until I got so rattled I flat-out asked if she was annoyed with me.

“Annoyed?! No MA’AM!”

“Really? Because up where I come from nobody calls you Ma’am unless they’re trying not to call you something worse.”

Now it was her turn. “Really?!” she said. And her friend behind the counter chimed in: "If our mothers ever caught us failing to say ‘Ma’am’ we would get plain smacked!”

And that’s how it was for my whole time in New Orleans: I was in a world wholly new to me and found myself thinking again and again of what all my best teachers said to me in the years from 2000 to 2002 when I was studying to be a massage therapist: “What you think it is, it isn’t,” they’d say. “Be humble and before you lay hands on that body before you summon total attention and pray God he send eyes into your hands so you can ‘see’ what’s really there.” In other words, summon all your knowledge, leave your ego at the door and your fine notions too of how You Wonderful You, will bring the healing.

It’s advice not much different from what I have had from the people I most respect most in my primary career as a newspaper columnist. They too say you never can SEE a thing right when you first look at it. You can’t, either because you’re a little nervous, or a little rushed, or else you think you already KNOW what the story is or again you’re too enamored of the notion that Insightful You will bring understanding where understanding has been lacking…

I went to New Orleans for "We Have Not Forgotten," the Katrina-based conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and in these last days have looked at things I never thought to see in this country. Thirty-four months after the storm I saw a man struggling to control his tears as he spoke to us, even though as a public school principal in that hardest hit area of St. Bernard Parish he has likely told these stories of loss a thousand times.

At least I think I saw him struggling. I wasn't a foot away from him as he spoke.

Later, after we’d left him and were lunching hugely at Dooky Chase’s amazing Creole/ Soul Food eatery, I stepped outside into a sudden rainstorm. A brick housing project across the street was being razed and I looked at the sea of dark-red rubble dotted with the brightly colored remains: a bright lawn chair here, a splayed umbrella there. The rain drummed hard, both there and on the street and on the small patched-over houses next to Dooky’s and I looked and looked - for nine, ten, twelve minutes - and knew finally what I would have to do: I would have to come back here again, pray for eyes in my hands and eyes in my eyes, then roll up my sleeves and start in helping.

(Education at every level was affected.)

Happy Anniversary

Well it’s my wedding anniversary today and here I am about as far away as I can be from my man, at this conference that made my bottom hurt with sitting all day through the great programming put on my the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I talked to him on the phone at around 9pm but it’s not the same of course. This is the first time we’ve ever been apart on a June 20 and it feels sad here at five minutes to midnight, so I thought I might post something I wrote about him a few years back:

++++++

Dave Barry wrote a column once about women festooning their houses with candles you can’t burn, wastebaskets you can’t throw trash in, and frilly pillows and shams you must never sleep on. Why do they do this? Because they’re crazy, he says.

Now Dave Barry is a smart and funny man, but he’s wrong this time. We women don’t do this to our homes because we’re crazy. We do it to say, “This is mine.”

I read somewhere that most women just assume the inside of the house is theirs, and so mark it, as any cat or dog would do; and I have to say, it makes sense to me. After all, we’re the ones who pick up the place day to day, who furnish it and clean it – far more often than our male partners do, especially during playoff seasons. And studies show that even women working full-time jobs STILL do the lion’s share of work around the house. No wonder we come to feel the place is ours and begin taking it over, room by candle-filled room.

My man claims I do this According to him I have gone through our whole house leaving little pyramids and piles of my own invention on every surface. Once, he pointed to the rickety cane-seated chair in our bedroom where he parks his pants nights. “This little chair,” he said sadly. “In this whole house it’s all I have left.”

So OK, MAYBE I’ve frilled things up some around here too. When we first moved here, I did our room over in candles and lacy shams myself.

“Isn’t this awfully… feminine for a man’s bedroom?” his mom asked in that certain mom-in-law way. (“His bedroom!” I thought but did not say out loud. “This is my bedroom, into which he gets invited nights!” (I mean, isn’t that the fun of it on a certain level?))

All right so I'll admit I’ve sometimes taken the whole House Beautiful thing a bit far. I think of the night I was trying to sleep in this very bedroom, as my mate followed one ballgame on the radio while monitoring another ballgame on TV – only the video portion to that ballgame was blacked out in our area, causing the screen to be filled with wild and staticky scribbles.

“Hang something over that thing before I lose my mind!” I finally yelled. And when he got up and did that, covering the screen with an ugly beach towel, I screeched again. “No, no! A pretty towel, that matches the decor!”

He shot me a deadpan look, whisked the towel off the TV and let the scribbles at me.

So I lost that round, I guess. But I figure if a person understands that any house really belongs to the one who cleans its bathrooms, she can afford to lose a round here and there.

Anyway, I won a round just last week, when I decided to pay some bills in the bedroom. I so set a card table up among the candles and the lacy shams and pulled up to it the nearest chair.

My husband just shook his head on coming home that night and seeing me sitting in it.

“There goes my one chair,” he said wistfully. “Good-bye, little chair!”

It was adorable. And I like the guy, somehow, even though he’s never once cleaned the bathroom. He can bring in four extra radios and catch five broadcasts at once, if that’s what he wants. He has that sweetness, see.

Call me crazy, Dave Barry, but you find a sweet man like that and you just feel like inviting him into your bedroom.

+++++

And there it is: an old love offering for David Marotta who took my youth, my tiny waist and my last name too. We’ve had a lot of fun though haven’t we Dave? Here’s to 38 more with a man out standing in his field!

But CAN there Be Too Many Really?

Trying to get to New Orleans for the annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists this morning, I find out at the airport that the flight's been canceled but am kept occupied by some lively talk from the woman behind me in the LONG lone line to get to the What Now counter. She is trying to get down to New Orleans too, for a family reunion she says: “I’ve been to Louisiana, Mississippi all over the South and back seeing family but I have NEVER been out of the country! Next thing I get back I’m gonna get a PASSPORT, see some of those Caribbean islands before I reach my big never-mind-which birthday….

Because I am FREE now, my boy’s grown!!”

"Ah nice," I say and ask how old he is and she says 22.

"Be sure he votes!"

"OH yeah!" she says and after a bit adds that she loves that Hillary Clinton. “I mean what a classy lady! I hope she's lyin' around in her pajamas now, sending people to bring her coffee, bring her tea. She said some things that last speech just gave me some food for thought!”

"I know, I love her too.” I said. “ The National Enquirer says he’s still cheating on her though - and they’re pretty careful what they print, having been sued so many time in the past so you know it’s maybe true.. “

“WHO'S cheating?!” she says with a sudden fierceness.

“That loser husband of hers who ruined everything.”

"HE won’t change!” she snorts. “Some men just do that.”

“I guess.”

“My man, for example, a photographer, birthday parties, weddings, reunions . Out all the time I'm thinkin' ‘Oh he works so hard!’ Come to find out he’s photographing strippers for those websites they have!”

“And he didn’t tell you huh and that’s why you’re mad?”

“It wasn’t that! This stuff? I said 'Uh UH, no WAY with that nonsense? All kinda front-to-back and such? ‘Oh no you don't and live in this house!’ I said to him. I mean too many vaginas, come on!"

And so children, there it is: Your thought for the day that might even lead back to poor Hillary and her lost cause. A thought for you, and for me, and for every other person in line at the Jet Blue ticket counter.

Thanks From a Seventh Grade Class

This is the sweet letter I just got from a 7^th grade class from Arkansas whom our honorary son Gary brought to Boston and New York for an extended field trip – a really extended six-day, Iron Man kind of field trip and how he found the vision and the energy to plan it I don’t know.

Here in the Boston area he took the kids out on the Freedom Trail, to the Kennedy Museum, to Concord and Lexington, to the Boston Common, to Atwood's Tavern to hear artist/author Matt Tavares talk on the making of his book Lady Liberty, to tour Phillips Andover AND Harvard AND Yale before it was on to Manhattan for more sites and sounds beyond my ken.

Ah but I was the lucky one: I was their first ‘presenter.’ As soon as they’d dropped their bags in their hotel rooms they gathered to hear my talk. I gave each student a copy of my very first book I Thought He Was a Speed Bump, a read-‘em-in-any-order account of life with small children and chock full of the great things little children say, with chapter titles such as “When Will DAD Become a Woman?” and “I’m Not Naked, I’m Wearing My Penis!”

My talk was about how anyone can write if they can get to that joyous state where everything seems cool and interesting. I thought the story Kaela mentions here about the hamster and the two photos would work well for opening with and so had the pictures blown up big and stuck on foamcore and weren’t they a darling audience as they looked and listened and laughed. I’m not exactly sure where the little originals of those two pictures are but I’ll see if I can put my hands on them and post them tonight.

In the meantime here at the bottom is a Christmas Day '07 picture...

...of their teacher, Mr. Gary De Young, who came into our family in 7^th grade and more than any other kid hangin' around this place kept me company making the dinner. He’s also smart, that Gary: he was asked to give the big Honors Day address on graduating from UMass Amherst some six or seven year ago; AND so universally beloved by the women of my alma mater, nearby awesome Smith College, that at Commencement, which by the way was the last Commencement of our wonderful then-President Ruth Simmons, he got cheered as much as anyone by the 500-plus members of that graduating class.

So here’s to you, Gar. And as for you, sweet Kaela, I would LOVE to come down to your school in the Delta anytime - just invite me - and I’ll bring 30 copies of my second book Vacationing in My Driveway, just as sweet and funny as Speed Bump and together we’ll all try to get into that same joyous state where everything seems cool and interesting. Because I’m pretty sure that’s where God wants us to be, every single day, enjoying this world and feeling grateful.

Jeremy Bentham Goes to Head of the Class

Talk about your fun time! Uncle Ed and I attended a book discussion group in Story Chapel at the famous Mount Auburn Cemetery founded back in a day when most people just buried each other out back. OK well that's not really true: there were church-yards and there were potters fields but the Mount Auburn Cemetery of Cambridge Massachusetts was the first place to offer public burial in a tranquil park-like atmosphere where a person could think on the loved one laid to rest there and on the great cycle of nature too.

As it happens the great cycle of nature was actually the topic at hand; the group was discussing Mark Harris's Grave Matters, a book about ‘green burial’ which means basically “Hold the formaldehyde honey 'cause ah’m a-goin’ back to nature and the quicker the better!” - and the discussers there gathered were so cool and fascinating I fell in love at once though the feeling may not have been mutual because not only did we get there late, Uncle Ed thumping down the quiet chapel aisle to the beat of his cane and me offering six kinds of body language that said So sorry! Oh dear! etc but we hadn’t even read the book.

Plus with all of us gathered round this very large table and our voices curling upward in that tall space like smoke from so many votive candles, Uncle Ed somehow turned deaf as a haddock. “I CAN”T HEAR A THING!” he faced me and boomed, the only male in the reverent feminine stillness. “Jeez, keep it down!” I wanted to say but how could I when I love him so much and he's 88 in November (even though things can get a little dicey sometimes as when an extremely heavy 20-year-old male waddled into the doctor’s office where the two of us were cooling our heels. “It sure is a b-i-i-i-i-g country!” Ed said that time and in that same clarion voice.

The group talked about all the options for dealing with one's remains When The Time Comes and I can say more about that another time. For now though let's give a big shout-out to philosopher Jeremy Bentham who Ed and I now know had his body forever preserved upon his death in 1832. It rests in a glass chamber at University College in London with a nice wax head replacing his actual head (Don’t ask! Another botched job by the nip-and-tuck men!) Here it is now anyway and heck maybe I’ll go this route myself. The gloves give a playful Mickey Mouse feel to the whole thing and c’mon, who doesn’t look good in a hat?

Mystifed. The Kid Was Mystified.

(for all you young'uns: THIS is a harp.)

An Aubuchon Hardware store, one of 130 in the New York New England area, in its 100^th years of service to the public. I walk in to encounter a pleasant looking youth who asks if he can help me.

“Sure can! I need a harp.”

“A hop?” he says and I think to myself This is good old New Hamshah, and I still have to pronounce those pesky R’s? “Oh I’m sorry H-A-R-P, the basis for any lamp.”

“Hmmm,” he says again, looking puzzled. “We don’t carry those I don’t think.”

“Are you sure? Because you know most hardware stores do.”

He leads me to the lamps aisle where there are little desk lamps, utility lamps etc. “See?”

“But they wouldn’t be HERE, exactly,” I say.

Still he doesn’t think they have them so I give up and say I also need some spray paint.

“THAT I can do!” he says with his nice smile and off we go to the spray paint aisle where I begin studying the labels of two brands of white enamel spray paint Good on wood, good on metal, the really big printing on the front says,

“Hmmm, but t I need this stuff to spray on ceramic,”

“Ceramic?”:

“Yeah you know, like a pitcher-and-bowl set,” I say realizing there is NO chance he will know what this is, 100 years and more removed as we are now from the time when people had chamber pots and pitcher-and-bowl sets in their bedrooms. Sure enough , he looks pleasantly fuddled so “Can I spray this stuff on, like, china?” I ask.

“I really don’t know a thing about paint,” he says.

“Do you know how to read?” I say, though I am not at all grouchy - just incapable of reading the very tiny print on the back .

“Well I’m only 16 of course. I figure I have my whole life ahead of me, “ he says with a wink. He takes the can and reads it - but alas even then we remain mystified in Aisle Twelve.

“Hey it’s OK, I’ll just take this one.” I say. “Now let’s go back to the front of the store. I forgot I need finials for two lamps.”

“Finials! Another VO-cab word!” he shouts gleefully. “What are finials?”

“Well a finial is an ornamental element found atop a thing. Like the knob on your ladder-back chair, for example, or at the foot of he stairs the little sculpted element on your newel post...".

“Newel post?”

“Or the decorative thing on the top of a cupola even.”

"Cupola?" But just then comes striding along the lady 60 who has worked here for decades.

“I need a harp and some finials,” I say.

“Of course,” she smiles and leads me straight to a corner of Aisle Two where I find it all: harps, finials, even risers and I buy them all from her and my spray paint besides after she has walked me up to the counter, where the boy takes of his apron and gives me a big happy wave as together we exit the store and cross the parking lot in the warm June sun.

...and these children, these are finials.

Hashimoto's to You, Hashimoto's to You, Hashimoto's Dear Terry...

So I got totally yelled at here for taking those two Tylenol PM at 6am the other day but hey it was a mistake. Truth is, I'm super-sensitive to all drugs. When I drink a glass of wine I can feel the very first sip whanging into my brain in less then 60 seconds. When I began on birth control pills I could have told you six ways my body felt different within the first 48 hours.

Doctors always ask you what medications you take every day and I used to be so proud of myself : "Just Chapstick,” I'd say. "A little gets in my mouth when I smear it on in the morning." But then one day my blood work came back and my PCP who is very smart and cool and is a doctor at Mass General OK? and wears gorgeous suits and high heels to work every day said that I had Hashimoto's Disease, or under-active thyroid but not to worry because like 50% of all women over 45 have it too.

"I don’t have that, what are the symptoms?" I replied.

“Your mental processes slow down, you have no energy, you gain weight, you're depressed..."

"“DO YOU EVEN KNOW ME?" I practically yelled. “I’m not like that!"

“You will be if you don’t take Levothyroxine," she smiled.

So I take it, dammit. I take my 75mcg a day but five years in I'm still not happy about it. In fact I said as much to my girl Annie just the other day.

"Hashimoto's, yeah, the disorder that makes you cold, slow, sad, fat and stupid!" She knew all about it “Hey come on. I can’t WAIT for them to tell ME I have that. I’ll go on the drug and then boom! warm, fast, happy, thin, smart!”

She’s a funny one that Annie. Members of my family have spent decades saying things to me like “Wait, you’re going to give writing classes in prisons?” but Annie was never one of them. She works as an assistant Project Manager 50 hours a week AND became a professional chef a couple of years ago and so also works for Niche Catour, the catering entity owned by Boston’s award-winning No. 9 Park owner and chef Barbara Lynch (hey it's a link - click it!) – AND in September she starts grad school at Harvard and has no intention of quitting either of these other two things so you know? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But hey, fat thin smart dumb whatever: I’m toasting this nice June day with my thyroid meds and my Chapstick. And better yet Annie’s here with us today and she says she feels like cooking!

Two Night Sleepover with a Side of Fries

At the end of every week when my column begins to appears in papers all over I often wonder if the people reading it would like to hear more of the story than those 600-odd words can convey. For example, the piece up this week is about the double sleepover-retreat held at my church lately, “we” being 15 youth, three of us adult leaders and the Reverend Judith Arnold, Minister of Youth and Parish Life.

Remember how Elizabeth Marshall Thomas said in her great book about dogs that all they wanted was to be with other dogs? Any group of teens is like that too. When they’re together they're happy. These guys mostly pop and sizzle, joke and nudge, but when it’s time to get serious they can stop on a dime to flip the switch and go earnest. In the open, Quaker-style prayer portion of things they arise spontaneously, each to light a candle and say a word about some person or struggle or issue in their hearts. Sometimes, one will rise and say nothing, but only light a candle. Sometimes, any one of them will choose not to even do that. There is no pressure or expectation.

In regular life, this group meets Sundays nights when we can all feel the new workweek bearing down on us and most Sunday nights for the last four year we have seen the now newly-graduated Steven light his candle and offer the same prayer: “For procrastinators everywhere,” he solemnly intones. And so on that Saturday night a whisker before midnight, with the kids set to buzz and seethe like bees in the hive until sleep at last overtook them Judy would be the one sweating bullets.

Why? Because it wasn’t enough that she was the one who'd called the whole thing into being, produced all the food, kick-started all the discussions and led most of the prayers; she was also the one who would preach to the hundreds of regular church-goers set to show up in the morning. Thus, as we gathered in that reverent candle-lighting circle it was Judy, loved unreservedly by teens and toddlers, by the ill and the well, by the young and the not-so-young and the very dogs who see her stoop to pick up her morning paper – Judy who rose, lit her candle and borrowed Steven’s prayer. “For procrastinators everywhere," she said referring to herself, then blessed us all a final time and withdrew to start on that sermon.