Cat Detectives

The snow is melting but not fast enough. You still can’t walk up north here we come on weekends. The only melt is around people’s docks where the aqautherm heaters they put in to keep a pool of open water so the docks don’t break up in all the ice.Otherwise: tundra.The cats can’t believe it. They go out on the porch and get no farther. There is no vegetation to sniff, no rich earth to dig in after using it for the purpose the Cat Gods intended.So they come back inside with me and together we climb to the room over the garage, the house’s highest point. In one direction: a gritty driveway. In the other: more tundra.There is however a little balcony off this room too small for more than a single chair in summer.  Both cats are out on it now, noses pointed southward. They lift their chins. They sniff the air. They smell something I am missing. Oh for a nose like a cat and a cat’s eyes too when March has us all stuck in neutral!

Omar Sheriff, Porn Star?

Omar Sheriff Porn Star? I thought he was a porn star anyway when I saw the email with that name on the top, an obvious riff on the name of actor Omar Shariff. “Oh right,” I thought, “click on the link and here’s some guy in nothing but a pair of chaps and a cowboy hat.”

But I was wrong:

"My name is Omar Sheriff, a merchant in Dubai who has been diagnosed with Esophageal Cancer that defiled all forms of medicine so that I have only  a few months to live acc  ording to medical experts."

Ok first of all I like the “acc!” – A nice touch for a guy with throat problems. And who hasn’t wanted to 'defile' all forms of medicine? Write graffiti on the examining room walls? Stick “Kick Me” signs to the doctors’ backs?

"Though I am very rich, I was never generous. I was always hostile to people and only focused on my siness as that was the only thing I cared for."

Well sure but sinus trouble is terrible! Who can blame him for focusing on it?

Of course he regrets all this today:

"Now that God as called me, I have willed most of my  assets to my family and friends. So far, I have also distributed money to some charity organizations but the last of my money which no one knows of is the HUGE CASH DEPOSIT OF TWENTY FOUR MILLION DOLLARS that I have with a Security Company in Europe for safe-keeping. I will want you to help me collect this, deposit and disburse it to charity organizations so please send me a mail to indicate if you will assist me in this disbursement of this money, 20% of which I have set aside for you. While I await to hear from you, remain blessed. Signed, Omar Sheriff."

And he gives his email as youareasucker@hotmail.com and OK yes I changed that just in case some of you crazy kids try clicking on it and get swept up by who-knows-what. I myself however am going to write him right now and, since he’s so rich, ask him to just jet on over here and leave my  cut in small bills under the porch.  And who knows, maybe when I click there really will be a picture of some young cowboy in chaps or not. :-)

French Kissing

It’s not that Americans scorn the French, we love the French, where would kissing be without them? It’s just that when Pee Wee Bush was trying to get us to turn on them for not supporting his Big Adventure in Iraq he tapped into one of our deepest inferiority complexes: we’re all pretty sure we sound like fools when we try to speak their language.Dave and I speak French with a Boston accent, as we found out when we went to Paris once. Me I thought I was so great in languages in high school (“98 for the year in Latin, 96 in French!” I’d boast to my few (and where's the surprise there?) friends but when I GOT OVER TO PARIS I could only speak the language in a way that made them fall over laughing: “A thousand pardons is it that I might purchases some of these purchases why not because?"  And, “Excuse me if you please step on your foot could tell me perhaps how many monies these object are costing?” - And then when they answered - after they finally stopped howling - I could not understand a single word.Lucky for us, Old Dave, who would speak French with a Boston accent if he’d agree to so much as open his mouth and try, saved the day because he seems to be set on ‘receive; where I am set on ‘transmit’. He understood everything they said the whole week and conveyed it all to me, so I could try composing my next baroque utterance.We had a great time anyway, mostly because in Paris all they do is sit in cafés drinking the good coffee in the morning and the good red wine at night while smoking cigarettes and laughing at Death and there sure as hell is none o' that timidity and guilt we have here in Les États-Unis I can tell you.Sigh. Now I want to go back - brush up on the vocab and see if the strengthening dollar I read about in today’s paper might permit another trip sometime down the line.'Pamplemousse’ means ‘grapefruit’, I know that, and ‘douche’ means nothing more than ‘shower’ and it makes me furious every time I think how it got twisted into some nasty slangy insult here. And as for ‘Nescafé’ that means ‘I never-did-learn-to-make-coffee-so-here’s a fake-French-word-to-go-with-your-instant, BABE.’

Another Day Another Fire

So I was excited, see, because I got such great flowers - plus FOUR gorgeous pots - for my birthday. The pots came  from our niece Joanie Marotta, 23 next month, and they were so pretty I decided to bank them all together on the kitchen counter  by 'all' meaning One, the begonia and calla-lily plants, from my two girls who we mistreated in childhood by sitting on the low ends of  their see-saws so they could never get down see above ha ha; Two, the lovely purple blooms from Dodson who is like son to us and his bride Veronica; and Three some basil which I bought so the cats could have some normal greens to nibble on after they got totally drunk eating a catnip plant

... and snapped the picture - AND was just congratulating myself on having such a fine eye and being such an altogether awesome person when I noted that my coffee was no longer hot. Well, the carafe is metal I reasoned and so put it on one burner for the quick fix; then forgot it and wandered to the other side of the kitchen to check on the cat’s food when whoosh! Another FIRE AT THE MAROTTA HOUSE which smelled really awful the way burned plastic does natch but LOOKED so great I almost took a picture before extinguishing it.

I did extinguish it first but here's the aftermath.

Funny, right? Stalactites coming down even!

Finally just for more beauty is Joanie, as pretty as the little crocuses with their pointy bishops’ hats just now trying to struggle up through the snow:

So Enjoy the Day and remember: everything is funny til you die (and then of course there'll be jokes at the funeral.

Snow Day (early morning)

I'm sitting in the little corner bedroom where our babies all slept and the snow is coming down hard. Dave fell back asleep waiting for the snowplow and the cat has spread herself out like a fur stole at my side here. The house is so quiet I can hear the clock ticking all the way down in the kitchen.

I have to file my column today and compose the entire ABC newsletter. I feel like the editor of a small town paper, gathering the news, taking the pictures, writing the stories, doing the paste-up but it’s such a great organization and I am in love with all eight boys that have come to our town as part of it.

I also have to enter the annual column and bogging contests conducted by the National Society of Newspapers today and  check on Uncle Ed who is 88 and hurts a lot when the weather is wet, then fight my way to the car and bring it to the service station because last night as I drove down Washington Street hoping to go to the grand opening of the brand-new Next Door Theater there was a loud BANG! and my window disappeared. I screamed. I thought I’d been shot, and even circled back to see if I saw glass on the street but no. The window, frozen shut with yesterday’s snow, had suddenly let go and disappeared down into the door.

It was a mighty cold ride home and it‘ll be a colder ride to the service station with no window and all this snow and the winds gusting to 50 miles an hour - and that’s if we can even get out of the driveway.

But all this effort is for later. For now all is quiet. The cat and the husband are faintly snoring, the coffee is perking, the clock is  ticking and I am writing to you.

Girls For Sale

Here’s the latest Believe It or Not: I found a bunch of bathing suits that come with the ladies already IN them. And OK, yes they’re made of see-through plastic and are missing their insides and their arms and their whole back half but still they have the important stuff, meaning,  ahem, 'bweasts', that fill out the suit very nicely.“Wo they’re selling ladies! “ I cried when I came upon them in the bathing suit bin at my local BJ’s. Four other shoppers whipped their heads around to stare at me, but I couldn’t help it: they reminded me so much of the Visible Woman I got for my ninth birthday and oh the fun I had painting her little pancreas and tiny colon!She had breasts too, which were highly interesting to us kids since our mother was so modest she practically hid in the cellar to change. As a result Nan and I grew up in ignorance. What were breasts anyway? WE sure didn’t know and we were girls! We called them ‘lumps.’ “When will WE get lumps?” we asked each other.And now here were all these bathing suits that came with them! I picked one up. A two-piece, nice. Little black shorts and a kind of overblouse, cute. Made by Jantzen, a reputable house.I grabbed one and brought it right home; put a fright wig on its stem of a neck and propped it up on the bed next to Dave who said “DO NOT take a picture! OK DO NOT put that picture on your blog!"So I took her into the study and propped her up against the window so you could see her.She’s amazing , right?  She even has a bellybutton!  I love her.She goes with my skeleton, the next best thing I bought in the last six months.Now all I need is a bag of innards and there’s my kit: Visible Woman '09 here I come!

Head Lice No Big Deal

A four-year-old of mine came home once with head lice. It happens. It’s no big deal. But the case was so bad even the doctor was amazed. “I’ve never actually SEEN so many of the actual creatures"  he mused, fascinated.

The lice look like this:

Not really but what a cute picture huh?And the hatched eggs, also called ‘nits’, look like this:For the most part the nits are what you’ll see, mostly hangin ‘out behind the ears or at the nape of the neck where the temperature is toastiest. They’re white and elliptical in shape and they stick like glue, which is why you have to go get the hellish steel comb to drag along each affected strand of hair.Head lice are of course different from pubic lice, also known as “crabs.” If you’re partnered and you come home with a case of crabs wellllll… you might just have some susplainin’ to do as Ricky used to say to his bride Lucy.But let us look up rather than down here. We could quote Robert Burns’s  “To a Louse” but it’s such unintelligible old Scottish not even Mel Gibson could understand it. We could quote John Donne’s “The Flea” in which the smitten narrator grows jealous of the little critter he assumes has just trundled from his own person to the person of his still-chaste beloved. “It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee!" he gushes and gimme a break I know but what can we say? The man was an innocent, and head over heels to boot.Well lice are innocents too and only doing what God intended them to do, so if they come to your house for heaven’s sake take it in stride. As the Kids Health website says, “Don’t panic; this ISN’T a major drama.”Think of how animals look when they groom one another. Pretty mellow, right? So just use the special shampoo, surrender your scalp to your closest pal and pretend you’re both monkeys. Better than a day spa, yo, and at a fraction of the cost!

Witness Protection Terry

Today as Terry Marotta I'm having a big birthday but before the summer I turned 21 I was someone called Terry Sheehy. Before the Witness Protection Act left me married with a name change.I needed the new identity because Terry Sheehy was such a sad little worrier: would there be Heaven for ME? How could I know which bus to take if I was too scared to ask the other people at the bus stop? Anyone who went to Camp Fernwood in the 60s saw how this little worrier blossomed into a full-blown workaholic. I ruined two summers the two years I was Captain of the Gold Team by staying up all night and skipping meals to get ready for the two “Team Parties” that were held one in July, one in August and talk about clueless: I decided that one of them had to be in honor of Shakespeare’s 300th birthday and the campers would have to come dressed as various characters from his plays. The campers! What did a ten-year-old know about who Othello was? How in the world she dress up like Oberon King of the Fairies? Like Bottom with his ass’s head? So I had to assign each kid his character THEN enclose a paragraph about who the person was and how he might dress, THEN nestle all this into my special hand-calligraphed, hand-colored ‘invitations,' all cut in the shape of the stage at the Globe Theatre. And all that was over summer vacation! You don’t want to know what I was like during the school year. Let’s just say that you certainly can have a raging case of the measles and still get yourself to school for your History test, IF you borrow the thickest makeup your mother has and smear it smear it everywhere that shows.Well Jesus Himself would get bored hearing how being a workaholic as a teen played out in my adult life so let’s skip all that and end on this high note. I just now Googled my old name and darned if MySpace hasn’t revealed a new ‘me’ in the person of a handsome Irish lad, check it out:

hay my name is terry sheehy and im 17 years old and im going out with susan browne for and wats 9mounts and i love u so much i like ot play basketball .football i also like to watch UFC and figthing sports.. thanks to my fab sis! whoohooo and just want to say befor i go to bed amm just leve a coment and ill comment u back. i like action films and films that kinda do with shit that im interested in such as.. coach carter, like mike.. etc... i also like comedy.. GO ON TOMMY TIERAN!!!!!and going to the cinama with susan

So yeah! Go on Tommy Tieran is right, whoever he is! The Terry Sheehy born in ’49 says hello and good luck to the one born in 1990 and don’t worry, we can work on your spelling abd vocabulary. You obviously have all the important stuff DOWN! the new terry sheehy

Thank For You See This Introduce!

So here's the cutest email I’ve had in a while:“Dear Sir/Madam: Thank for you see this introduce! Our factory named Runyuan Electric Equipment HuZhou factory is in China and specializing in the manufacture and our company export power juicer and blender of our factory."On one level you feel like 'Where’s my red pen?'  right? But then on the other level it just seems so sweet. And it goes on:For more than ten years, our factory has completed R&D and production for international famous brands and becoming excellent cooperative partner of global household electric appliance manufacturers.” Ok kind of a run-on sentence but still it just ... well it speaks to me in a big way. I want to know this guy. My whole married life I have wanted an excellent cooperative partner!Then there's this: "Our product description i will show you attach to annex, please see it," which is like the best part of all because hey this is a business letter; its language is SUPPOSED to obfuscate! - and when I actually clicked on the link I felt my love double in size: “Fashion and Delicacy as well as focus on life creation is our designing ideology,” it says and if that isn't me all over!I mean, Fashion? You should see me in my long sleeved tee cleverly slit up the sides for extra 'breathing room'! (See below)Life creation? HOW many babies did I have? A lot, right? Delicacy? Even my cats say it: I'm really delicate! So delicate I could've been a geisha girl AND a diplomat!The guy even gives his personal email address here and I swear if this newspaper business I'm involved with hemorrhages much more I am going to China myself and join the copy-writing team at good old Runyuan Electric Equipment HuZhou factory, I mean it.For starters though let me sit down here and order me a juicer. Could be I need to focus just a TINY bit more on the old fruits and veggies anyway because I mean how many more times can I let out my clothes? breathing room for the muffin-top

Valentines Day Proves Pane in the Glass

Seen at left : the busted paneOn Valentines Day, I left two guys here for an hour while I went out to buy a special little supper for One of Them.

I was at the store when the One called.

“You may want to come  home now,” he said in his best this-is-no-big-deal-so-don't-over-react voice. “The cat broke a window in the study and you need to decide if you can work in a different room for the next six or eight weeks.” (“Wait, the cat?” I thought. "Wait, the STUDY? The room I spend all my time in, in every single day of my life?!"

The Second Guy was our carpenter friend Mel who was here fixing one of our old curved windows, whose upper and lower sashes don’t even meet anymore never mind lock, thanks to the Funhouse-style dip the whole house took at some point in its long life. He’s been spending six or seven hours per window around here lately, fitting precisely carved shims of wood into the frames to TRY making rectangles out of parallelograms.

And on this day he was in my study with one pane of glass out and leaning against the bookcase. But when he turned on his electrical drill, it startled our sleeping cat Abe so much he leapt a foot in the air and shot toward the door, knocking some books off the sofa arm and propelling them bang! like a couple of missiles straight into it.

I felt sad because it was such a great window with its wiggly glass that made the whole outside world look moist, and trembling - new-made almost.

I don’t know if Dave felt sad. He didn’t say he did but I recall how sad he was the time our three-year-old put a similar crack in one of these old windows just as was working so patiently to re-glaze it. He had to sit in a chair and stare into space for an hour to get past it. And I remember too how ten years later when we finally had enough money to replace that curved pane of glass it took eight long weeks for a new one to be made.

At least it was warm then.

It isn’t warm now. It’s freezing in here as I write her, and the noise of the street is drifting up through this hole-in-the-side-of-the-house where a window used to be - in spite of the plastic sheeting Mel taped over it:

The whole thing kinda took the shine off Valentines Day I think because in the end David didn’t want to drink wine with me and ate my nice little supper standing up at the kitchen counter.

I guess it didn’t matter. It was just a bunch of stuff from the Prepared Foods Aisle. And all I really wanted to do was go to bed and look up at the moon.  “It's a new day tomorrow!” I told myself.

And when the new day arrived and I put on a coat and came into this room I found it so filled with the smell of the outdoors that I could tell right away: with the snow melting pretty fast now something very nice is starting to happen with the soil: it’s coming back to life.

So I'm content really – and heck I still I have two other windows to look out of.

OK DON'T Cut Me!

Jeeze, never have a facelift. Remember how Demi Moore used to look? Even in the over-40 years she was lovely but not lovely enough it seems.

Never MIND that she now has as set of giant fake chompers, she also must've wanted the plumper cheeks of youth back or something because it looks to me like she had the skin on her face picked up and filled with foam or something. Plus she’s had her nose carved down so it looks like the nose of a witchy old lady and I mean come ON: Mother Nature does this for us so why would anyone ASK medicine to do it?

I’ve always marveled at the change in the face of Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda in the all-too-short years of her public life before mental troubles landed in her in the 'home' where she burned to death, leaving a single ballet behind.(Ballet became her obsession in her late 20s, though she was years too old to take it up.) She once had that same plump look. Then all of a sudden she looked well, hatched-faced.

This all began occurring to me when I was talking here about Linda Evans and saying how for years I had a hair-style like hers. (You can see it by clicking here. I call it Dave and His Cheeseball Wife.)

But here’s how Linda once looked.

Darling, right? Natural, approachable - basically gorgeous, right?

Well here’s how she looks now with her old rival Joan Collins:

Goin' for that rounder young face, see. Goin' for God-knows-what in the lips department. She looks like she put her mouth on the exhaust pipe of a Harley after a long hot ride.

Now I'll admit it: I used to look in the mirror and think Man, if I could just find the money to have those docs hike up THIS old face! Just untack the carpeting, give it a good stretch, nail it down again and boom, there I’d be again, little Terry Sheehy just as she looked singin’ in the Special Chorus at Lowell High School.

Instead I look like Zelda myself these days and now after that incident at Christmas my family has taken away all my matchbooks. (click here for that one.)

But what are you gonna do hey? We've lived through what we've lived through and our faces just mark the journey.

Home Again Home Again Jiggity Jig

Home Again Jiggity Jig (sigh)

Back to reality today and feeling just a little bit smug because with all the vice freely available on a cruise-ship I managed to indulge only in Sloth and Gluttony – and all right yes they are two of the Seven Deadly Sins, but look at all I DIDN’T do. I didn't:

(1) Smoke, though smokers were everywhere.

(2) Drink – much. In fact the two of us ended up with a pretty tiny bar bill, especially compared to the one we  racked up a cruise we took 15 years ago with my sister and cousin and our six kids where we found out at voyage’s end that we had drunk the equivalent of a whole other passenger. This was MAYBE because we were younger and wilder ourselves but it was also because the kids were teens and that cruise line's rules were lax and well how could WE know they were downing these tasty red drinks and charging them to their staterooms every night after Taps?

(3) Set so much as one foot in the brightly-throbbing casino.

We’re just not gamblers, the two of us. We're a couple of scholarship kids who just can’t bring ourselves to bet, though I do seem to remember that back when I met him in college Dave did gamble a bit. Mathy little guy that he was, he could count the cards almost a good as Rainman.

So what DID I do? Read. Napped. Spent hours on our stateroom balcony just looking, mesmerized, as that big old ship plunged tirelessly through the blue, blue water.

And oh yeah and I got me a haircut, done by Christopher Marks of Dundee Scotland and the Vidal Sassoon Academy in London:

so that now, instead of having out of style Linda-Evans-in-Dynasty hair:

Or my recent fave. the Fake-Hair-from-the-Mall-for-Weddings-and-Other-Special Occasions-Updo:

I now have whatever THIS is...

and am hoping that its short and sporty feel, together with a the fresh, cruise-induced determination to have more fun generally will bring a matching jauntiness to my whole life..

And NOW! To the foodstore for celery sticks and rice cakes!

Miso Hongry

No this is NOT me standing in the food – but it easily could have been!

Diary of a Cruise Days Five and Six:

The food is so abundant on this ship I think I just might have stopped hoarding for the first time in my life.

This is billed as an International Cruise and anyway the food is sure international. This morning FOR BREAKFAST I had Miso Soup and a Papadam, Roti, Curried Eggplant and some Naan – all before I even hit the bacon and eggs.

To counteract any guilt I might be feeling over all this abundance I’ve been rereading Dream’s From My Father, our new president’s first book and whoops looks like there’s no avoiding your conscience because what do I come upon midway through it but the author’s only slightly satirical remark that the food thrown away on your average cruise ship in one day would feed the whole population of Haiti for a week. And we were just IN Haiti. Well, in Fake Haiti, anyway the cruise- line-owned island just off the shore.

Later at the Spa where I went to get my bangs cut I put it to Christopher, my young stylist from Scotland. “DO they throw away all that food we don’t eat?” I wanted to know.

“Nah, they feed it to US!” he said with a big smile, meaning the 1600-plus crew members who spend their days catering to the whims of all 4,000 of us cruisin’ fools.

The other thing young Christopher did was raise in my mind the question of whether it might be time for me to try something new with this handful of over processed straw I call my hair and so in a minute here I’m going back up to Deck 12 to let him cut it shorter than I have worn it since old LBJ himself sat in the Oval Office.

“It’ll be MUCH better, TRUST me,” said Christopher and I sure hope so because lately it’s been lookin’ a lot like Heath Ledger’s hair in The Dark Knight . Also I know myself: the second I get home it’ll be back to my regular life of worry and over-work, diets and self-denial and falling asleep ten minutes into the movie I’ve waited a month to  see.

So out with old and in with the new then! Streaks of dark brown in the front and hair shorter in the back than a poodle’s underpants! Then buffet-time again and the cruise is almost over so welllll, maybe just a COUPLE of muffins stuffed in the old carry-on bag. :-)

Diary of a Cruise

Day One: Wind so fierce that to walk on the deck is to get sandblasted, only by water from Deck 11’s three swimming pools, all swirling gigantically as in ad for toilet bowl cleaner. Too cold for this pale northerners to sit out!

Day Two: Discover that all virtue has its limits. At home I eat salads, fruits, raw veggies. I juice, meaning I make healthful cocktails of carrots, cukes, apples, what have you while casting scornful glances at David as he drinks Doritos straight from the bag. At home there is no living with me I’m so virtuous. Here on board however, I find I am drawn to the white breads and the rices of every description and have not gone NEAR the salads. I look at them all and think “Eh!” then get myself chin-dip in mashed potatoes and gravy. The Lesson: keep an eye on the virtuous. They can turn in a minute.

Day Three: Warm at last! Much undraping all around by fellow cruisers, highlighting the difference in genders when it comes to aging. Aside from the hair dye on the ladies and the beer guts on the men, the men on the whole look younger. We women wizen; why IS that when the men still look rosy and apple-cheeked? DAMN!

Day Four This Very Day: Decide to take my problem hair to the Day Spa as all beauty salons seem to be called these days. Need my bangs cut. Sick of looking like a cross between Karen Carpenter and a My Little Pony.., steeling self for today’s Funtime Cruisin’ Special: Analysis of What’s Wrong with YOUR Hair (and How We can Help!)

More later. The Drifters sing to us tonight and MAYBE we can stay awake long enough to hear them. David on his fifth nap in 36 hours, me flying high on third soft-serve ice cream of the day, available 24/7 at “Sprinkles,” Deck 11.

You Bet Your Ass There's Global Warming

There’s this guy I love to fight with because while MY politics are based on rationality and the highest impulses ha-ha, his are based on fear and hysteria. One time when he got all worked up talking to me about the environment he shouted “But it’s ALL fake don’t you see? There IS no Wobal Glorming!”

Well you’d best believe there sure as heck IS ‘Wobal Glorming’ with these extremes of weather we’ve been having and if I didn’t see that the other night when the outside came IN I sure know it now: One columnist friend from Arkansas has been without power and telephone for six days and another from Kentucky has been living in his car for a week, both on account of outages due to the bitter cold. Even in South Beach FLORIDA where I was on Saturday, temps were just in the low 40s with a 20 mile-an-hour wind. (It was amazing! Finely turned-out young men were blowing clear over! High school girls in belly shirts were screaming and clutching at their hairdos!  I sat on the cozy bed of a hotel room hanging just above Ocean Street and watched it all.)

Then at 3:00 that same day I boarded a cruise ship.

They have that special drill at the start of any cruise where you have to assemble at your Muster Station by the lifeboat that will carry you to safety should the worst occur. Dozens of us were crushing together by the exit when without looking, a big lady in front if me THREW her arm back, lassoed the long belt of MY lifejacket and bucked it tightly to her own.

When she turned and saw what she’d done she burst out laughing.

“If you jump I jump!” I said, channeling Leonardo and Kate Winslett from the ever-compelling Titanic.

“We’re all goin’ down together!” she said - and if that isn’t THE metaphor for our times I don’t know what is.

But oops I gotta run now. They got them Frozen Mojitos on Deck Five and after that there are some deck chairs that need rearranging.

Go With the Flow, or 3 Rivers Run Through It

It was so cold for so long the pipes in our downstairs bathroom froze.  “Do something!” I squeaked to David when this first happened. “Ah, well. January you know,” said Mr. Implacable, troweling a mortar of mustard and mayo onto some cold cuts.

Then another foot of snow came, then that same day a thaw, then such downpours it started raining INSIDE the house. Water streamed down the window pane and formed a triple-branched river that coursed across the living room floor.  Was our house turning into to city of Pittsburgh perched on three rivers? In which case build us a stadium and send us to the Superbowl.

But “Do something!” was all I could again yip at the sight of the three rivers, the lace curtains I labored so to make now sagging with water wicked up from the floor.

“Hmmmm,” said Dave. “But then this kind of thing happens – and what can we do tonight but put down towels?”

So…. we put down towels. Then, since it’s 55 degrees at best in our downstairs come night we effected a strategic retreat: repaired to the upper levels to climb aboard the fair ship Forgetfulness where Old Dave went instantly horizontal.

Hell I thought, and kicked off my boots, shed my clothes fast and slithered quick into my high-necked nightie. I spread the heavy quilt on this life-raft of ours the SS Beautyrest.

The cats, already in their PJs, came aboard too. Outside, the rain still pelted. Inside, the floorboards gave off a smell like ancient documents.

I sighed and turned over. What can we do tonight? I thought too and in ten minutes’ time was asleep like the rest of them, two-legged and four.

Thank You Mr. Updike

Years ago, John Updike had a short story in The New Yorker about the death of a tall and salty woman who anyone familiar with his work could tell was his mother.

I knew it was his mom. I also knew he lived not 30 miles from me because my oldest girl's Ninth Grade English teacher told the class as much. Her husband played cards with him and she had these kids reading some of his stories and I guess she just mentioned the town.

As soon as I heard it I got right on the phone to Directory Assistance and there he was, street number and all, so I wrote him a condolence note, enclosing with it something I had published about my own mom cracking jokes at her birthday party one minute and dead the next. It also had in it a small black cat and a woman playing the cello; a white slab of pastry marble set into the wooden counter top of our 1890s pantry and the even more stunning death by heart failure of a much-loved youth in front of 20 pals at the close of a church retreat.

Mr. Updike answered immediately, on the first of three postcards I have had from him over the years. He said his mom had 'keeled over' in the kitchen and the neighbors had found her body. He thanked me for my thoughts and then made a remark so wonderful about my writing that when I was preparing to bring out my first book I wrote again to ask if I could print it on the cover. Again came an immediate postcard: "OK on the quote. Good luck with the book," it said and this one act of generosity is what has kept me going ever since.

I am not writing this to thank him for making me famous. I am not famous. I'm just a newspaper columnist looking to catch people at their best, or quirkiest or most outrageous. I am writing to thank him for showing me what joy you can feel if you let yourself see everything as connected, which Physics teaches us it surely is.

Look at this short passage from "The Full Glass," one of his most recent New Yorker stories and see if you don't think it simply shines. In it his narrator and alter-ego is remembering a long-ago barn dance to which he invited a pretty and popular girl he had loved since kindergarten but rarely spoke to, a girl he never thought would say yes.

"I had been to barn dances before with my country cousins and knew the calls. Bow to your partner. Bow to your corner, All hands left. Women like all that, it occurs to me this late in life - connections and combinations, contact... As she got the hang of it, her trim waist swung into my hand with the smart impact of a drum- beat, a football catch, a lay-up off the reverberating backboard. I felt her moist sides and the soft insides beneath her rib cage, all taut in the spirit of the dance..."

Connection, combinations, contact. The drumbeat, the lay-up, the catch.

Who wrote about sports the way John Updike did? Or art for that matter? Or books? Or even love? It seems to me that in everything he wrote there are these surprising and wonderful revelations: that the sexual IS the spiritual, that all math is really music, and that friction brings heat and sometimes, if we're lucky, babies.

"Never stop!" I earnestly wrote in my final letter to him last June, "and don't even think about leaving the party early!"

He did though; he left it much too early and I see now that when he wrote this piece he probably knew there was a taxi outside waiting for him.

I hope that his ride in it was easy and that he is safe now in the shining world he could all but feel lying just beyond this world. And I know that strangers though we were, I will miss him for the rest of my days.

John Updike Died Today

John Updike died today.I know where his house is and just how it sits on his lot.I know the route I could drive to get to it. I know all this because I loved him. I read Rabbit Run in the summer of ‘62 as an 8th grade girl. Three times in my adult years I wrote him and all three times he answered me in his courteous way: with typed postcards, hand-signed in the same blue ink he used to correct the mistakes and always with his own true street address, just as if he weren’t a great man and the best writer of our time who influenced so many of us, writers and non-writers alike.He honored the whole created world just by describing it so exactly and anyone could see his talent. Once I was crossing the street in downtown Boston when a letter carrier coming the other way saw a copy of his Self Consciousness tucked under my arm. “John Updike’s memoir, I read that!” he gaily called. “The guy can even make psoriasis interesting!”I want to say more tomorrow but for now all I can think to do is worry if I ever really told him how much I loved his work - for the way it helped me to see, and feel, and accept my own bumbling humanity and the humanity of others.“Thank you, Ms. Marotta, for your ever so encouraging letter,” he graciously wrote me last June.“Never stop writing,” I had written to him three days before.He seems to have stopped now and some would say for good, but ah, here’s the magic of all art: in his more-than-50 books he is talking to us still.

Standing Tall

For over 20 years Liz Walker was a new anchor with WBZ-TV Channel 4 Boston. Last week I wrote about what great things she said as the keynoter at the recent Girl Scouts Leading Women Awards Breakfast, which you will see at the top here under “This Week’s Column.” It's worth looking I think for the way it so exactly matches the spirit of the times.These days she does amazing things in the world, both close at hand - as an ordained minister on staff at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church – and far away in her work with the many innocent people in Dafur and the Sudan who are daily asked to suffer on a scale you and I can scarce imagine.I first met Liz back in 1986 when she came to my living room with a Channel 4 cameraman to ask me what it felt like to be the only print journalist in New England to get to the finals in the NASA-sponsored competition to send one of us up in the Shuttle. Earlier that day another network had also sent a news team.“Have the children cling to her skirts!” said the producer. “She LOOKS a little like Christa McAuliffe!” said cameraman. This was just four months after the Challenger blew and it was pretty clear they were setting this up as another Mother of Young Children Dies For NASA Story.With the camera rolling, the reporter placed her big microphone before the small face of my Fifth Grade daughter. “Would YOU like to go up in space one day?” she asked her. “No WAY!” said the child.“And how about you dear?” she then asked, lowering the mic to the height of our Second Gradeer – who pushed her hair quick behind her ears, took a step forward like one about to recite an ode and in a calm ‘teaching’ voice said, “No - because when I get big I’m going to be a mother and I don’t think a mother should leave her children.”Thirty minutes later the news went out over AP wire: “Children of New England Space Finalist Oppose Her Going.” A news veteran pal was on the line to me within 60 seconds. “Don’t let them NEAR your kids!” she said – and so when Liz came to my living room that evening they were safely upstairs with their dad.She asked me intelligent questions and I answered them and there was only kindness and thoughtfulness in the exchange. I still have the videotape of that interview somewhere and maybe I’ll dig it out and put it up here too. I wasn’t used to talking on TV back then so I seem really stiff and robotic, like a person who'd just had Novocain in both jaws and three or four Botox shots to the face but you’ll see Liz Walker just as she still is today, natural and curious and lovely.Right now I’m watching the sun rise over the snowy rooftops and trying to line up all the work I have to do day. I don’t know what Liz has lined up for today but it’s a good bet it’s work on the side of the angels. You can see what she's up to right now by going to her blog  On the Road.

Open Your Mouth and Say Ahhh!

“I got this PAIN doc.” Bet that’s what our man Obama heard  from 20 different places the second he walked into the Oval Office today and boy don’t we ALL have pain.

I have a steady pain in my neck that requires me to see a specialist in ghost-buster gear at the world-renowned Mass. General Hospital. He puts me on my side like a horse, covers my face with a cloth like I’m dead, then takes a lethal-injection needle left over from the Dead Man Walkin’ wing at Alcatraz and slides it THREE TIMES into the wee facet joints of my neck, the teeniest places imaginable where the delicate shell-like bones of the cervical vertebrae touch together - tap! - like the baby teeth of the littlest children.

The needle has in it this super-steroid called astroglide, no analog, no no wait I know, kenalog that's what it is and the first time he gave it to me in the fall I nearly threw up on his shoes. Two weeks later when he asked how it felt I had to give it to him straight. “How did it FEEL? It felt like gray death entering my body! Tell me, Doctor, has anyway ever done this to YOU!?”and he blinked a second, not really getting it, the joke of it, a doctor having a taste of his own medicine, but then burst out laughing: “NO no one has ever done this me! I’m about the only guy who knows how to do it!”

So off I went today to have this second injection because I was desperate. My man was desperate. Even my cats were desperate because no one wants to be around a person with neck pain.

The Doctor finally admitted today he could give me a couple of little pills ahead of time to take the edge off, like what people take before that big Roto-Rooter Exam everyone over 50 has to have and as I swallowed them I thought of our shiny new friend walking into the Oval Office for the first time today to see 300 million patients just like me lined up at the door.

“I have this PAIN Doc, I lost my house, my kid is both fat AND anemic and I’m out of work…"

If we had a cloth over our eyes for a while during the last eight years it is sure enough gone today, and we can finally SEE how bad things are..... So now here comes your medicine; just open your mouth and say Ahhh!