New and Hot (Lonely Smiley Girl)

Just got another email from my many friends in cyberspace, Natasha this time, shy pretty girl at internet café  lonely smiley please to write me so we can meet.... (Oh Natasha! Where would I be without you and your spiritual sisters with your daily offer of love?)

Where would I be without the offer of commerce either come to think of it, because here’s what came two minutes later from one Mr. Alwin who is 'pleased to establish Long-term & Solid Trading relation with you, our factory has been dealing in producing all different kinds of Fashion Jewelry for many years, our Idiomatical, Multigrade & Charming Jewelry and Ornaments Series, as follows: very New & Hot Fashion Necklace, Elegant Diamond Ring, Exquisite Workmanship Bracelet & Bangle, Beautiful Hair Ornaments, Brooch, Keychain, Extremely Pattern Earring....'

Well who doesn't love an idiom? Three strikes and you're out! Deaf as a haddock! Shove it! Bite me! And I’ve been a fan of extremely pattern all my life as haven’t we all am I right. Like when you throw up after eating too much of your pizza–with-the-works. I just look at that throw-up and think Watch out Jackson Pollock!  Plus Alwin is inviting me over, see? 'Besides we make sure the Excellent Quality, the Reasonable Price and the First Class after-Sale Service, if necessary, welcome to our factory and have coffee in our office, so that you are very satisfied to accept our items. If necessary, I will choose our jewelry attached price list and send you then, you will confirm whether we can cooperate with you then, thanks! Wish our Enjoyable & Successful Cooperation! Very looking forward to your prompt reply!!

Hey I'm answering the guy right now because you know I LOVE bangles.  I LOVE idiomatical, multigrade and charming jewelry and ornaments series!  And come to think of it I'M a pretty, lonely girl here skippin' church here and going on the Internets! Please to write me so I can hand you off to my boss who will steal your identity and clobber you with spam until you die!:-)

Leaves All Dead; Time to Turn Over a New One

below, Michelangelo's David as he would look today :-)

I knew I had to leave home for 17 days this month and there was so much to DO before I left, I just never thought past today, the 21^st of October when I would get home at last. I mean I had to drag all 45 of my house plants out on the screened-in porch so they could just pee right where they stood when watered, had to write all these columns to tide my newspaper readers over, had to get the international chip in my phone so I could call home if I really needed to and receive calls too and I did get one from a Madison Square Garden guy ecstatic about the mention I gave to the big annual Burlesque Festival in the paper a few weeks ago and tell ya what next year I am GOING to that thing because not only did they have the Pontani Family Reunion Dancers but also Torchy Taboo and Hot Pink Feathers. Not only Through the Keyhole and Ginger Goldmine but Kitty Diggins, and Twirla. Not just Skin Tight Outta Sight, Trixie Little and Kitten on the Keys but Miss Delirium Tremens herself and who in their right mind would want to miss a show like THAT another year?!

Anyway I had not given one thought to dragging out the winter clothes, say, or putting the bathing suits away; hadn’t thought ahead at all to Halloween or decided who to give my 40 Obama/Biden buttons to either but mostly mostly MOSTLY since around August 1st when I began to really feel this Italy trip comin' at me I did not give a single thought to Abstemious Living, the principle that normally guides my every action and so when I get home tonight and it’s 1am Europe time I will fall in the bed, then get up tomorrow and shop only the outside aisles of the supermarket, meaning the fruits the veggies the fish the chicken the eggs with no frozen pizzas, no sausages no sauces no quiches no ice cream, not even any dark chocolate of the tiniest size because for the last ten weeks it's been Feedbag City with me and I am now as broad in the beam as this guy in the photo with a girth to match.

Not in Kansas Anymore: A Final Word on Italy

In 17 days here in Italy:

1) Inspect (and utilize) hotel bathrooms in six different cities.

2) Discover bidets in every one.

3) Consider using them to wash doll clothes in as preschool cousin Kathleen once did with every toilet within reach.

4) Find an alarm in every bathroom, generally placed above bathtub. In America can DIE in tub and all they do is charge you the extra night.

5) Experience double-take moment regarding the many aprons and tea towels showing outsize images of male genitalia passing selves off as “details”of the David.  What happened to towels featuring dead Lady Di?

6) Learn to drink coffee standing up, down the hatch and strong as Drano.

Observe even more:

+ Modern young mums nursing in public. Nobody stares.

+ Little children out at all hours.

+ Absence of bug life. (How they DO that?)

+ Absence of litter. (How they do THAT?)

+ Presence of quiet dawns, raucous midnights, yummy wines and aperitifs.

+ Clocks in local basilica sounding the hours.

+ One fly, just ONE fly in this Ointment of Eden....... (Are you ready?)

+ Entire population smoking like chimneys.

Museums in Florence: the Lowbrow Tour

All these Holy Family scenes: you gotta love ‘em. You could write a whole dissertation on the expressions seen on the Virgin’s face alone. My favorite: that “How did  I get HERE ?” look of hers with Joseph’s face a close second. "How did YOU get here?!"And the Baby Jesus who sometimes looks a lot like Jon Lovitz? He often has a face only a mother could love. Sometimes in the painting he’s squeezing a bird and sometimes a pomegranate. Sometimes he’s got his fingers going in funny ways: "You got a little something right here," I thought one of them said but Dave insisted it said "YO! Keep your eye on ME, bud! I’M the main event here!" I could see it since I myself caught a look like that in the painting I call "So Whadja Bring Me?"You can entertain the daylights out of yourself with all kinds of jokey thoughts like this until one day, ONE DAY you stumble into the rotunda that houses the David and it just plain shuts you up. All around you are people sitting on benches just to be in its presence.That Michelangelo: dead on one level but still alive on so many others. Just think of David’s life: Pops Goliath with a tiny rock; plays harp for the king; BECOMES the king; takes another man’s wife, just because he wants her; sees the first child of this union die as punishment; sings in public for sheer joy though some find it unseemly. He does dumb things, he does great things, he is human. He dies and leave the throne to his kid Solomon whose Psalms are still singing in all our heads still especially that Song of Songs Which is Solomon’s, Arise my love my fair one....And all of this, all of this is in the marble that looks like flesh, like veins, like living muscle in this work that one man made. Ah!

You Think You’re a Saint but You’re Not

An Essay in Pictures 

When we got to Venice we were fresh from a visit to Padua and the cathedral shrine to St. Anthony who met St. Francis and demonstrated ever after in his life the power of that man’s example. There, in ancient glass cases, are St. Anthony’s lower jaw, teeth and tongue, the simple tools he used to spread the message relayed to him by one who heard it from one who heard it from one who heard it from One who, going back a good bit, said He heard it from His Dad.

What I learned about Anythony in Padua I know I will never forget. But it was his mentor St. Francis I was thinking about as I stood in front of St. Mark’s in Venice the other day. They say the birds flocked to him for his loving heart. They flocked to me for my chunk of bread. One minute I was just standing there, looking around at the brave people who would take some bread, hold it aloft and immediately be as covered with pigeons as the statue of General Patton there by the banks of my favorite River Charles.

Maybe I can be brave like that, I thought. So I crouched down and they climbed all over me.

Images of the REAL moment, when I looked like a living aviary, are missing and why? Because the person in this world who knows best how far short of sainthood I fall was laughing so hard the camera shook and the pictures came out blurry.  

 

Gaudeamus Igitur

Italy Day 11: Being on a guided trip is like being a baby again: you HOPE your caregivers know you need a nap and a juice break; you HOPE they'll check to see that you’re still dry. Our caregivers do know all this and have handed us along from dawn to forenoon to golden gloaming with so many of our needs anticipated that I find myself released somehow to range in thought over all of my tiny life, remembering, and regarding anew, and looking forward.

 What I’m remembering today is what it was like to be 18 and beginning my second year at Smith College, when a girl named Vicki James arrived.  Dewey House, where we lived, was a tiny dorm, the place where my Aunt Julia had lived in her own time at Smith with her big sister (my future mom) just three dorms away. It is for me one of THE key places of my life, a stage upon which unfolded so many new thought and fresh insights, a place gracious and formal and fine, staid and timeless - until Vicki came and changed everything.

She knew History, and believed in History’s lessons. She also knew what fun was and she believed in beer. The above picture shows her blindfolded on the lawn in front of Dewey House before the Freshman Sophomore picnic that ended with one of us spraining an ankle and another getting wedged inside one of the sinks at the Davis Student Center. It was Vicki who found out we could drink 35-cent beers in downtown Northampton. She liked the townie boys and so I liked them too, and the nights we walked down to see them we'd roll back up the hill toward campus singing the ancient Latin drinking song she taught us all.  “Gaudeamus Igitur dum Juvenes” it began. Let us rejoice now while we are young because “Where are they who were in the world before us?” As if we didn't know. We knew all right, but we didn't think for a minute that we would ever be anything other than young, with firm strong limbs like the marble limbs of the Greek and Roman youth we saw in our textbooks.

I had my first apartment ever with Vicki that summer while I worked and she took the courses at Harvard that would let her finish Smith in three years’ time.  A week into our living in that tiny Cambridge house I met the boy who would become my husband. Vicki went on to the PhD program at Harvard; David, then a Senior there, went on to get his MBA at the B School just across the river. And I, who had so earnestly hoped to go to grad school too, instead became a teacher of Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth graders and saw almost every value I had previously held turned on it head, in the best possible way. Those students changed me as much as Vicki had and when the letter came at last admitting me to my own Masters Program I tore it up, taught five more years, and four years after that began writing the newspaper column that has aimed always and only to delight a weary public.

Well, Vicki came a few days ago to see her two old friends in Bellagio. She is called Victoria now, Dottorressa Munsey in fact and has lived here in Northern Italy for the last quarter century. She and I walked the hills above the city while David toured the Villa Carlotta and then three old friends ate dinner together.

Our blindfolds are off now and we all see more clearly. And if we are old, yet are we happy.

So here below is old Dewey House that gave birth to our young dreams; and below that and larger for the beauty of the photo the clear light from our hotel room that helped me remember it.

 

National Banshee Day

Yesterday was Banshee Protection Day, World Poetry Day, Love Your Body Day, National Grouch Day, Mushroom Day, National Pasta Day, and Blog Action Day and if I had more time I’d look closely at each one of these “days” and ask myself how each applied to me. I didn’t even know it was National Poetry Day yet I managed to finally memorize a sonnet famous for being all one sentence (50 bucks to anyone who knows what it is!) I also ate pasta, blogged and TRIED to love a body that has begun looking more and more like those of the naked ladies you see on all these Italian frescoes.  Lake Como, Verona, Padua and now Venice.  (Venice you just can’t believe. If you came here from New Orleans you’d be terrified the whole time!)

And as for the banshees I have never met one but as members of that fellowship of the strengthless dead I’m sure they need our protection and good will at all times even as we need theirs.

Viva Veritas!

The graphic seen on all Exit signs here in Italy is of a little green guy running like hell for his very life, but let’s tell they truth here: when it comes to actual languages, some are a lot prettier than others:

Here’s the English on the plastic bag the typical hotel provides for your dirty laundry: “Linen to be washed and ironed,” it says. Then there's the French phrase for the same thing: “Linge à laver ou à repasser,” It's OK but it's nothing great, right? And forget the message in German: “Schmutz-oder bügelwäsche. ””Schmuz? Oder?” I mean how unpretty is that?

But in Italian? In Italian the message is just plain sublime. Dirty clothes or not you just can’t argue with “Biancheria da lavare o stirare.”It makes you want to break into song, am I wrong? And it almost- ALMOST - makes you forget how very frank and practical Europeans really are, because not only do the Exit signs tell it like it is and even though I myself just used it to wash my socks in, this little dandy gizmo which we have seen in four of our last four hotels really IS what Mick Dundee called it in that cute first movie that bears his name!

Naked Baby Angels Predict Future?

Yay! and Why NOT Drink? Day 6 in Northern Italy -  

Since I can’t possibly do justice to all the villas and all history we've witnessed over the last several days maybe I’ll just answer one pressing question and say that yes my man’s suitcase DID arrive finally and his blue polo shirt got a much-needed rest.

One by one I pulled his fresh shirts from that bag and sobbed into them. “I’m crying because they’re such beautiful shirts!” I burbled, oh but no wait, that wasn’t me, that was Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby when she realizes too late alas that she’d backed the wrong horse, married the rich bastard who cheats on her every time he gets the chance instead of waiting for the man who would love her til he died.

My own husband is decidedly other-worldly. He just doesn't care about fancy things - and me I buy at Marshall's and Dress Barn half the time and so I can tell you I was I was prett-y nervous about that bag of his because although he still happily wears clothes from the early '70s this time his suitcase held one fancy damn blazer from Brooks Brothers.  

He bought it after our darling honorary kids, the above-pictured newlweds Dodson & Veronica, gave him a few polo shirts from there for his birthday - and because it turns out that EVEN OLD DAVE can sometimes have too many polo shirts, he decided to take them in and exchange them for a new blazer, and a very nice blazer it was that the salesman draped round his shoulders even though it had no actual price tag on it - and, well, if you knew Dave you’d know he hates to spoil the moment with anything as crass as asking what a thing costs and so .... well, so when the suitcase came at last with that thousand dollar silk and linen blazer in it even the angels wept – even the naked little angels with no underpants on who adorn every villa and fresco we've been gawking at these last days.

And as we watch the action on Wall Street and ponder the days ahead; as we sip our wine and glance at this fancy piece of linen in his suitcase all we can think is heck, worse comes to worse we can always cook and EAT the sucker, buttons and all.  

Short Fat Slut

Where’s Waldo? Well he’s the guy in the blue shirt, see him? My old man?  Anyone who had been with us these last four days would spot him right away because he's been wearing the same shirt since Sunday morning, seeing as Alitalia lost his luggage.

When MY luggage got lost last May and our cruise ship sailed without it I was wearing the same outfit for three days, along with one or two cheesy supplemental get-ups which was all I could find in the ship’s one clothes shop. I was like Goldie Hawn in “Overboard” where she plays this rich spoiled thing who hits her head and gets amnesia and simple workin’ guy Kurt Russell who’s trying to raise his three kids all alone convinces her she’s actually HIS wife, sure she is, doesn't she remember their romantic past, how they had sex on their first date in the front seat of his car? He even goes and gets a muu-muu that once belonged to his real wife, now departed, and has her put it on.

“So I was short?! And .....fat?! I was a short, fat slut?” she asks, looking in the mirror at herself. See that’s how I felt in the cruise line’s skimpy tank tops and shorts: like a short fat slut who you could hear whining all over the Caribbean. Way farther way than that even since I blogged about it here.

But this man of mine? This man of mine hasn’t whined ONCE, even as he has kept on rinsing out his one blue polo shirt and drying it with a hairdryer... He was fully prepared to do that with his undies even until I revealed that in my deceitful wifely way I had sent away for some special meshy briefs, famous for their washablity and guaranteed to dry in less than two hours. I knew better than to give them to him before we left home, though; I knew he'd  disdain and refuse them then, these girly-seeming things made out of what, old Swiffer cloths? So I put 'em in my own suitcase and did not produce them until the morning of our first day here.

And was he grateful? Are you kidding, was he ever!  I mean how ELSE would a person feel in the land of wonderful light and the fine wines and the sobbing viloins? How ELSE would he feel toward the short fat slut who saved the day?!

Heaven's Gate

Foreign Travel Experience commences on Alitalia flight with Long Oyland woman across aisle braying for first two hours about places been to. (“Newpoht! Oh my Gawd when I tell you! Newpoht is very hoy-tone! And Santa Barbara? And last years when we did Hawaii?!”) and on and on ‘til panic mounts so high take out carefully prepared home-cooked food brought along just in case airline offers only one greasy cold-cut and a hard little fist of bread for breakfast. Consume in 90 seconds, then OOPS here comes Italian flight attendant, dead ringer for David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust to deliver small packet bagely pretzels swollen like dead fish in the tank.

“No!” think, “not good for!” then flip package, read fine print in Italian: “Nutritional Constituents” it reads, with, underneath, a rundown of ingredients, all meaningless to non Italian-speaking self; decide, heck, sucker its own constituents. MUST be good.

Eat, in two bites.

David Bowie returns, offering liberal pourings red wine, miraculously free of charge (provided airline ticket price not taken into account.)

Five minutes into vino, while listening to Long Island lady exclaiming in gravelly voice about Rodeo “Droyve,” Bowie comes yet again, this time with piping-hot school lunch look-alike: grey roast beef with grey-green broccoli both floating in taupe-colored sauce.

Turn up nose. Finally, take single bite. Stuff totally delicious! Suck up every bit, mopping gravy with napkin, practically.

Bowie approaches one more time, asks "Lasta leetle bita wine, Senora?"

Say "Maybe a touch heh heh."

Twenty minutes on, tummy full to bursting and with Long Oykand woman’s accent ringing in ears, fall asleep, not to wake til three-quarters of the way across Italy with air so clear it’s like something straight out of Central Casting, Alps themselves stretching their necks to tickle belly of plane.

Possible scenario: Plane actually went down mid-flight; wine-bearing angel on board, Heaven ahead, and this its front door.

Leavin' on a Jet Plane

The block party looked like such fun last night but we couldn’t go.

Our girl Annie wrote us all an email to say she wanted to see us.

More to the point she wanted to feed us because that’s what Annie does. She knew we were leaving today for Italy and I guess she just wanted to collect all her family members up and look at us all again.

I brought a very old photo album to her place to show them all, a pictorial account of my grandfathers' wedding trip from 1903.

I say 'his' : His bride was along for the ride too of course but because she died at 31 I have trouble thinking of her as a grandmother.

I think of her only as Carrie, who I have heard about all my life. the young mother who died of uremic poisoning in her fifth pregnancy in six years, Carrie with the blue eyes, Carrie who we named our own first child for.

It happens that I have all the letters this honeymooning couple sent home in 1910 and so last night I asked 'our' Carrie if should I take my new silver Sharpie and just carefully print some of the text of those letters inot the book, to illustrate various phrases of the wedding trip based on what they said about it.

"Hmmmm, I don’t think so Mum,” she said in her careful and diplomatic way. “I mean, this is so beautiful as it is, the old black paper, the leather covers. You wouldn’t want to take anything as new as Sharpie to it, would you?"

That’s the difference between us I guess. They are all aesthetically tuned, these three children of ours; they love a thing by leaving it alone. I am historically tuned; I love a thing by learning all about it and trying to pass on what I learned. I want everyone in our family to know our story and well - this album has no markings on it all. You can slide the photos out yes but even they have no writing on the back. Who will remember, I worry? Who will know and remember what happened to us?

That there was this early death and a baby buried in a mother’s arms?

That there was poetry and the Irish Virus which means drinking?

That my father didn’t even ask to see me when I was born and had been gone throughout the pregnancy anyway and then stayed gone for the rest of his life?

Who will remember my grandfather’s sadness? My mother’s willed jauntiness in the face of a society that shunned and feared her as an abandoned woman?

Who will remember and why can’t you write in an album and leave your own imperfect handwriting as part of the record because you will soon one day be dust yourself?

But my judgment is always shaky. And come to think of it my three children do know the story. Annie knows every least detail of it, right down to maiden names and birth dates. Carrie protects the artifacts and reveres them so much you can see it in the way her very hands look as she holds them.

Even our son knows it and talks about it in a very different way: when he was a college senior he did this charcoal at the top here. It is a huge canvas, five feet wide and three feet tall and it depicts the four children at a window just weeks before their mother's death would forever mar them.

He worked from a tiny photo just like the photos in the wedding trip album. In it you can see the shadow of a tree falling over their faces. You can see the shadow of the hat worn by the young soon-to-be widowed father who snapped it. I mean you couldn't think up an image so filled with such foreboding.

This grandfather, this photographer, was not a drinker himself, any more than our abandoned mother or our abandoned aunt who helped raise us and yes her husband drank and left us too so it was deja-vu all over again.

My grandfather was too nervous to let alcohol carry him away. He was like me in that respect and in many other respects and I know this because I lived with him. In our abandoned state we lived with in his house, my sister Nan, and Mom and I, and when he died we had to find someone new to take us and that’s where Aunt Grace and Uncle Jack came in.

Well enough of all this old sadness. I'm getting on a plane with David this evening even though as the classic child-of-a-drinker I distrust fun and fear loss of control…. Still, all of Northern Italy awaits and if a person can’t relax and enjoy 16 days there, I guess she can't enjoy anything.

I'll close with this image of Michael and Carrie from 1899. He is the one with his hands on her mortal head. She is the one already engulfed by waves.

I know but who else knows that the woman next to him perished in the great Influenza epidemic of 1918? I know but who else knows that the man next to her died three weeks before the Armistices, just two months after his wedding day?

And if we didn't - if someone didn't - know all their stories, who would they be to us but strangers on a beach?

Politics!

 So Sarah did OK. She smiled her face off. Sometimes it's all you can do. Never let ‘em see ya cry, I say.

Now should Joe Biden have the skin on his head yanked up so he can see again? Or DID he have all that head-skin yanked and that’s why his eyes have a slightly Asian caste? And how about them chompers?

I had forgotten he lost his wife and child in a car accident in the 70s but that second wife sure is nuts about him. Everyone should have someone who looks them in just that proud way. Unconditional positive regard, that’s what the shrinks call it. That’s what Jesus was handin’ out. We all need it who doesn't? And so what if he had some work done ? You make huge mistakes in your life, you lose people you love, then you wake up one day and notice you’re still here. Might as WELL get a hairpiece if that’s what it takes to put a bounce in your step. Strap on that colostomy bag and keep on dancin’!

I haven’t been able to write in a while. The inside of one ear got sealed up with dead skin and ear wax so I went deaf. Then the dentist opened my head like I was one of those Russian dolls. Last April my tongue turned black on account of Listerine's Teeth Whitening Mouth Wash which caused most of the flora in my mouth to die and the fungus to flourish – they were mushrooms basically -  and though THAT felt pretty bad, all this last week felt worse. Also I wet my pants twice but not in a urine-involving way.

Stories too disgusting for a blog I know; I put 'em in my column instead - (BIG smile! -  so WATCH THIS SPACE ON SUNDAY just before I leave for Italy. I’ll put it up above here where it says "This Week’s Column." Meantime you can read about my favorite four-year-old there.

That’s it for now. I sent money to my favorite campaign again. Still waitin’ on the buttons they said they’d send back. Gonna put a couple on our cats, the real ambassadors of our neighborhood but I’ll still have a lot left. Give me a shout if you want one, yo. Meantime, let's remember our manners and let cool heads prevail :-)

Drink to Sleep

I couldn’t sleep last night and kept thinking  how my mom dreamed once that she was on the 50-yard line going eyeball to eyeball with the Princes of the Church.  (Freud called, I know: Maybe Mom dreamed that because she got divorced way WAY back when it was like worse than sacrificing small animals, and yet she continued to take Communion which was grounds for a few more times around the ol’ rotisserie-spit in Hell but hey I don’t blame her. Her husband left her so now she has to just sit in the pew like I was always doing because I'd made out with my boyfriend for more than five minutes and was in a state of Mortal Sin?)

I envied her that dream last night just because she was dreaming! Everyone was dreaming last night,  people’s pets, their houseplants, poor George Bush on House arrest for another 100 days or so…..

My man, who CLAIMS he never dreams, was at least snoring to beat the band and even sort of smiling - which made me want to shave his chest hair off – dry - and harvest those eyebrows too, just out of envy, because I lay there NOT sleeping hour after hour after hour....

I hung my head upside down off the bed which usually makes me have religious visions and then pass out. No dice. I though about that fox-faced Eckhart Tolle who says we are not our minds and we should turn the darn things off but I couldn’t. So finally at 2am I, who am trying to diet here, got up and poured me some hot milk. Then I added cream, then cocoa, then a fat slug of whiskey, then sugar, then whipped cream and drank it down grimly. I thought maybe the alcohol would help but it didn’t, of course it didn’t. I always forget that alcohol keeps the body working especially that giant gelatinous thing under your right ribs known as THE LIVER, which thank God we have one, y' know? I used to eat cigarette ashes just to get the laugh and I suppose they’re still in my liver somewhere, along with the booze-soaked Belgian waffle-ful of calories in that creamy drink.

Anyway. I lay awake til 4:30, at which point I suddenly fell asleep and dreamed that the ceilings were all dripping rain and a young person I just met was here and my kids too and my kids were kids again and they were all busy talking with the new one and I thought  “Ah, my dear children living under this roof again, leaky or not.... “ - and then the alarm went off at and it was 5 and so I got up.

It’s raining still and I’m like 100,000 calories further away from thin but I was able to work and write and water the plants just now. And the ceilings AREN’T leaking after all and David seems to still have chest hair and I sure do miss Mom who lies in her grave these 20 years in her favorite little suit and I will never ever be sorry I took a picture of her in her casket even if the funeral directors did all scowl at me as I snapped it.

So here’s a shot of death, if you even believe in it. Me I don’t. I see Mom all the time out of the corner of my eye and I hear her voice, which was strong and full of fun. My idol Emily Dickinson wrote it to a friend: "There ARE no dead, Katy. The grave is but our moan for them."   So there.

Wednesday in the Park

Today it's raining though my column for this week evokes a sunny day. It's raining and Wall Street is crumbling but I look around and see this:

1) People moving about and smiling at each other's dogs just the same.

2) Acts of kindness: the liveried man outside the big hotel notes my troubled face when I find his lot full and takes my car for me and parks it smack in front and charges me just ten bucks though I am gone nearly three hours.

3) The chance always for a smile: The Gypsy Rose School of Pole Dancing is right there beside the fancy photographic studio where I am going to get my picture taken because the Girl Scouts have asked me to as a former Leading Woman. Ruth Bramson, the great new CEO of these Girl  Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts, wants to activate all us former Leading Women; hang our portraits and get us back to mentoring those 55,000 young ladies, which is more than fine by me. Last year, when I offered a class for their Beyond Bars program I had so much fun my face hurt from smiling. (Beyond Bars brings Girl Scouts and Brownies into our two women's correctional facilities so they can have their troop meetings with their mums.)

But I guess what I should say is that I saw these things rather than that I see them because it was yesterday really and the sun shone just as it did the day I wrote this column which you will also find at the top of my home page here.

So let's have some pictures of that day now: The smokers referred to there, looking so calm and iconic you'd think they'd been there forever, like the hillside they sit on. 

The new and the old: Boston City Hall finished in 1968 and therefore brand-new in our minds,  juxtaposed with the Old North Church of "One If By Land Two if  By Sea" fame built almost 300 years ago: 

 

 

And finally a man waiting for what he needs to feel normal...

 

    

...which is all any drinker is trying to do when he drinks: Just feel normal. Just feel the way the rest of us feel when we get up, come sunny day or rainy day. We stand and stretch and the molecules sing and the bright blood froths and even the dourest among us must think - HAS to think - "Thank you God, for quick life and this new day to enjoy it in."

May He - or She - watch over us all today, the dogs and the pigeons, the smokers and the drinkers, the pole dancers, the troop leaders and the elected officials especially in whom we have placed so much trust.

Not Just About Chicks

Ok this isn’t some women-only site where we’re talkin’ undewires and corsets all the time. Six months ago I was obsessed with penises.

Well, cat penises.

OK one cat penis  – and someone out there out trolling for penis references had this to say about it: “Jesus, lady, what kind of sicko laughs at an animal losing his penis, even if only for a moment? You should have let that poor animal DIE! “

But (a) how do you lose your penis for a moment, right?And (b) I WASN’T laughing, as anyone actually reading the post can see.

I mean poor little Abe! He had transfusions, catheterizations, they shaved his leg and gave him a lip wax. He lost so much weight he looked like someone’s old grey sweater slung onto a chair.

But really all I‘m saying is, THIS BLOG: NOT JUST ABOUT CHICKS, YO.

Having stated as much I can now return to what I really wanted to say:

Mary Tyler Moore at the Emmys: Wo.

Mary Tyler Moore! Dear Mary, America's sweetheart, our own Mary with the once-plump cheeks!  That bared skin on her upper body looked like parchment pulled tight over chicken wire. Her arms are cruelly thin – and yet she still has the swags of extra flesh coming down just like we all do after a certain age. (Even Mick Jagger has them but hey – you don’t see him in an evening gown.) And then cute old Betty White toddled out all dimpled and plump in tasteful brocade and she looked awesome.

My kid told me this the other day, all sweet-like:

“Mum, no offense but when people get older they shouldn’t get too thin because then they look kind of ....well, scary.”

Now I see what she means.

And if I’ve run too much with the girl themes lately forgive me; my man’s been gone for one full week. He just got back today at what was for him 4 o’clock in the morning but already the house feels different. Abe the boycat just picked a fight with his sister and even the plants can tell that the  testosterone levels are risin’ now! :-)

The Breathe-No-More Garment

Note to Self Regarding Compression Garments: Avoid Like Plague.

What they TELL you is if you buy one of these longline get-ups you’ll have no bra line, no unsightly bulges on the side, back anywhere and will in fact look, LIKE YOU’RE NOT EVEN WEARING A BRA except for that nice perky uplift of course. The reality though? you can’t get into the things and you can’t get out of them. Since they have no hooks, zippers or loops they have to go on over you’re head and be pulled down -  or else over your hips and be pulled up but your shoulders are in the way in one direction and your hips in the other; and either way you eventually run into your breasts which are not a bit happy about being squeezed into something  as big around as a tube sock.

This is a picture of me holding my new longline super-elasticized Whatever-it-is,  snapped by my pal Kathy at the dentist’s office, which accounts for the crooked smile since if I didn’t have a head stuffed full of Novocain you can bet I wouldn’t be smiling.Why? Because unassisted you can’t GET this thing on or off. With the help of several ladies in waiting you can finally get it on but then you can’t breathe.It has NO give. It would be too tight on my thigh. This one' i an Extra Large and I weigh what? 132? I mean you'd think it would fit! But I feel in it like a mouse in its last moments as the boa constrictor is doing ist final constrict.

To give you a better idea of how small it is I show it here with my cat Abraham for scale. I put it  on a small stack of toilet paper rolls and even items as small as these are screaming in their tiny voices "Aaaaaaargh! Don't Squeeze the Charmin!"

Abe: 'Get This Thing Away From Me - now!'

Flesh and More Flesh

Rereading this last post underneath here makes me remember that I actually prayed that my family would move, because of this same kind of 'exposure." It was after my big sister Nan pulled down my pants in front the neighborhood boys. A few weeks before that, she’d told them I didn’t have a bellybutton and then tried to get me to prove I did by showing it. I wouldn’t though: everyone knew bellybuttons were sex organs and anyway of course I HAD a bellybutton. You just couldn’t SEE it, hidden in the folds of my fat little tummy, so yes I was also chubby but Nan was working with me on that too: “Here’s what people do to lose weight,” she told me: “Every day they peel down a stick of butter and eat the whole thing.”  And I was doing it - of course I was doing it.

Maybe these things seem mean on Nan's part but were they no meaner than what I did to her a few years on, locking her out of the bathroom while she was trying to bleach her hair behind Mom's back. With me locked in there she couldn’t get at the neutralizer ha HA! And her hair would be just crazy bad straw tomorrow I thought from my perch on the closed toilet and was all the while reading from her diary in loud mocking tones.

The diary was all about boys, natch. As was the bleaching. As was, for me, a whole high school career spent worrying that I was so homely the very walls at the CYO dance would have to look away when I showed up.

Well there’s more to be said about boys, and flesh and girdles but too, but right now it’s time for me to go to the hospital so that a needle can be sent into three places a hair’s breadth away from that crucial tube the spinal cord. My cervical vertebrae are gonna be starrin’ in their OWN little TV show in just about two hours so I’d best jump into my pantyhose and get on over there. If the procedure doesn’t kill me I’ll be back with even more deep insights - and maybe, if I’m feeling jaunty enough, the tale of the fancy foundations lady who told me I was a 32F, then sold me the bra to prove it.

"GAD!" as Mom used to say, "What's next?"

 haha (this is not me by the way)

Muffintop

In my column last week which is also at the top here I wrote about the return of girdles and corsets, saying essentially “Sisters, no! GO BACK!!! Not only is it a trap it’s the same OLD trap!” etc... but some people took exception to my message, believe it or not, writing in to say girdles were GOOD things.

This one lady said she could not BEAR to see a young woman walking around with all those “muffin tops I think they call them,” the spillover of flesh above the waistband.

Me, I look at those girls and think “Good for you, honey.” Because I remember all too well the days when a girl would DIE before she would appear before the male gaze looking like what she was: a creature made curvy, with a landscape of rolling hills and valleys:  At one point when I was young waistbands were actually HIGHER than nature intended. They started just below the rib cage and that fabric covered you all the way to your toes and more, where they pooled in wide cuffs onto the floor  If a boy saw that we had flesh at all, never mind yeasty and abundant flesh around our hips and belly? Well: we'd just never be able to go to school at all! We'd have to move.

Vesuvius

Remember the old 1890s Baltimore Catechism that some of us could once recite quicker than our multiplication table? It went like this:

 Q. Who created Heaven and earth and all things?

 A. God created Heaven and earth and all things.

 Q. Which are the chief creatures of God?

 A. The chief creatures of God are angels and men.

 Remember? Well, I came upon a different sort of catechism while hanging around Mass. General Hospital this past week where my doctors performed their usual funny parlor tricks, resting their tummies on my lap to peer into my nose and eyes and so on. There in the lobby they had a special booth on aneurysms with pamphlets on Defusing the Time Bomb In The Brain, a video running on a  small TV and, behind the tables, a team of kindly people to help you once you have scared the living bejesus out of yourself by stopping to read them. See if you don’t think THIS little rundown has the same matter-of-fact feeling as that primer, that Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Council of Baltimore:

Q. What Is A Brain Aneurysm?

A. An brain aneurysm is a bubble that forms on the side of the brain artery, very much like a balloon. There are two types of aneurysms, ruptured and unruptured.

Q. Are There Any Warning Signs?

A. The classic symptom of ruptured aneurysms is the worst headache of your life.

Q.  Can Aneurysms Be Prevented?

A. Unfortunately, no!  (exclamation point theirs, believe it or not.)

Q. What Are the Odds of Surviving a Rupture?

A.  50% die outright. Of those who survive, one-third recover with some deficit, one-third with substantial deficit, and the final third may require institutionalization.

So there you have it, kids, if you had any doubt at all: We sure DO we live on the slopes of Vesuvius and either sooner or later that nice old God of Baltimore and Surrounding Towns  has fixed it so that every last one of us from the littlest sweetie-pies to the biggest bigshots, will, like it or not, ALL be together in Heaven - and there's a topic worth peering into for sure!