Dying Isn't Easy

I miss people’s real teeth now that everyone’s trying to go for the makeover-fakeovers.  People seem to feel so apologetic about their teeth and I I get that: I tried the Teeth Whitening Mouthwash, hoping for the best, like when my mom used to put white shoe polish on my sneakers but what  happened? My tongue turned black; scared the bejesus out of the young tech at my doctor’s office. Seems the stuff kills the algae or whatever all that flora is in there, so then the fungi have themselves a field day, amazingI wrote about this nostalgia for people’s real teeth in a recent column and mentioned Ali McGraw, who has these two crooked teeth there along the center aisle of her upper jaw. I noticed this watching the last hour of the 1970 film “Love Story” in which nobody even tells poor Ali-as-Jennifer that she has cancer, even though her rich young husband knows it, as does the fancy Fifth Avenue doc they go to because they can’t seem to get a baby going.The doc uses that favorite Old Hollywood method of delivering bad news, meaning by the slow-drip followed by the sudden fatal dose.  He’s having a secret meeting with Ali’s young groom  Oliver Barrett III, played by Ryan O’Neal.  “I’m afraid children won’t be possible,” he gravely intones.  “So we’ll adopt!” counters cheeky young Oliver. “I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that.” “What do you mean?” “She’s dying.”Then there’s more schmaltzy music, a feeble walk or two in the park, some exhausted-looking kissing and the next thing you know she’s telling him she wants to bring the troops home by Christmas which means she wants to  die. Now please. And she does it too.Anyway if you read the column you’ll see that although Jennifer slipped away, Ali McGraw is still going strong at 71 with the same cute teeth God gave her.Really though I’m thinking now of her co-star today.  The girl Ryan O’Neal has loved for 30 years is now dying in the hard old-fashioned way and was there ever a smile as bright as Farrah’s?  Every man in America loved her and every woman used her hairstyle to pay her tribute.  Here on this matchless spring day I am paying it still.'

The Naked Truth

Dateline, Brooklyn: Give me frank talk and a sense of humor. This is some wall art from the Prospect park-area apartment where our boy lives and keeps his studio just three steps from his little bedroom. He’s an artist himself or is trying to be – he keeps the books for a fancy Manhattan gallery to pay the bills.Do New Yorkers tell the truth more than the rest of us or does it just seem that way? Cut in front of one of them on the subway platform say and they’ll tell you about it, not like us New Englanders who say nothing but seethe inwardly.Here’s some more truth distilled on this little sign, seen in the restroom of Brooklyn restaurant, a sign I’ve been dying to make for years: ('but really everybody') is right! These various flu viruses would hold a lot less terror for us if we all just made sure we washed our hands like ten times a day!

Florida to Brooklyn

I got back from Florida, that land of lizards in bed with you, and came right to Brooklyn with my 'driver' (what the old ball-‘n-chain calls himself these days.) It was hard to leave my sister still so laid up but maybe l’ll be back there soon since her groom is having major surgery at the end of June and who will help Nan while he’s in the hospital?  She’s not supposed to put any weight on that her foot full of busted bones each no thicker than the bamboo skewers that come with your shish kebab.  “You can walk in your cast that weighs 12 pounds,” they told her “but you have to keep your toes in the air at all times.” Try it. Try it for five minutes, your heel down and your toes in full foot-cramp salute and see how your back and your leg muscles feel. By 7:00 every night she had her head in her hands, just hanging on for bedtime.7:00 was the hour I got the dinner on. It’s the hour that marked the arrival of  Nan’s daughter Grace, all legs and long blond hair and just the ghost of the freckles that made her look as a child like a female Tom Sawyer. She was the first baby I ever fell in love with.Not much to say yet in old Crooklyn, to reference that awesome Spike Lee movie. We came here to see our boy who now lives in this borough so full of energy and a certain indescribable grace and a great day lies ahead for us I know; but right now my thoughts are still in Florida with Nan, and her Chuck, with the girl we once called Gracie, and the little lizard that kept me company on my breaks.Here at the top?  Nan with Grace at 18 months, the latter an unstoppable force of nature even then, And below here they both are now below. Back tomorrow with all new adventures, less about me and more about the world. Happy Saturday, ya’ll!

My Sister Myself

I’m in Florida with my sister Nan who snapped all the metatarsals in her foot when she whanged it in a fall. She was always thin and delicate. Even as a grownup she’d be subjected to idiot waiters pinching her arm at the table and saying “SOMEONE needs dessert!” (“Someone’s not getting a tip!”  Nan would counter with a big smile.)The mean boys in her Sixth Grade class used to hoot, “Sheehy! Go back to your toothpick factory! “ (Our maiden name was Sheehy.)Nan was the resident expert on grownups secrets when we were kids. She was on to that whole birds-and-the-bees thing by Third Grade and used a fake name to send away for pamphlets about it. She held these Sex Ed seminars for me and my stuffed animals. “OK here’s the deal,” she would say to us all: “Girls get this thing called their periods at 12 or 13. Boys get theirs later, more like at l9 or 20…”Well she was right about most of it anyway.She let me come down here as soon as I heard about this new fracture. She’s had the awful ‘super-virus’ known as MRSA three times already and in 2008 got a cut on her foot that caused her tto spend four months in the special costly five-times-a week, three-hours-at-a-whack hyperbaric chamber. It saved her foot if not her life. This break is on the same foot so we’re crossing our fingers that surgery can be avoided since hospitals are real breeding grounds for MRSA these days.I came to cook and keep her spirits up so we’re eating like mad and hitting the wine a little and talking about the fun we had when we were young. She composed a song about aging on her way to sleep last night and promises to write out the words for me. It’s to the tune of the Village People’s “YMCA” she says and if I know Nan it has a little swearing it but will be so funny you can’t help but laugh, like with that thing Mark Twain said when they asked him how he liked the opera. (Do you know it? Write in if so!)In the meantime that’s Nan on the left in this goin‘-on-an-overnight-hike picture, the year she was 12, with her best friend and cousin Mary Lou beside her. It’s how I see her still, young and wiry with the same look in those blue eyes always a little naughty, a little sad.I sure hope she gets better soon.

Belly-Up

I’m at the Starbucks at the Tampa airport looking for some caffeine after getting up at 4am to make my crack-of-dawn flight out of Boston  when two women in front of me have this exchange:Woman One: “Why don’t I get my enormous BUTT out of the way so you can get in here?"Woman Two: "You! I just spent an hour in my underwear in front of the liposuction man who said really what I needed was abdominoplasty! He took my belly-fat in his two hands like it was a Big Mac with this barely-disguised expression of disgust. I felt completely humiliated!”Woman One: “Hey, be like me, save the money. I step naked in front of the mirror and just humiliate myself!”My first thought: God I love travel. My second: In a million years you’d never catch a man running himself down like this. Most men I know  pat their beer guts and give them affectionate nicknames. So what on earth is wrong  with us females?

Move Over Zac Efron

At the supermarket yesterday the kid ringing up my items had the regulation nametag on, only it read 'Zac Efron,' which of course is the name of the star of all 20 versions of  High School Musical. Yep, ‘Zac Efron’ spelled the letters neatly machine-chiseled onto that small Chiclet of plastic.

“Manager off today?” I almost said to the kid but what did I know about the situation really? Maybe the manager is the one put him up to this prank. And what could I say that a hundred people before me hadn’t already said to him, plus he was busy joking away with the girl workin’ the next register so I just handed over the dough and moved along.

But he had given me an idea: I'm scheduled to give a talk tomorrow night and sometimes at events like everyone fills out a nametag so I’m thinkin' "Can I put  “Susan Boyle?” I’d LOVE to be Susan Boyle, with her little Scottish village and an old-time piano in the parlor and a voice to send those scary tigers packing for keeps. Good idea, right? I mean until I got to college and my roommate came at me with a pair of tweezers I sure had the eyebrows!

No TALKING to My Friends! Mum!

I drove 400 miles in six hours’ time and then kept myself awake until midnight yesterday so I could send a Happy Birthday text to someone whose fate was closely linked to my own in a delivery room once. Drove from Boston clear to Albany and back to record seven  ‘commentaries’ for  Northeast Public Radio, to me the best Pubic Radio station in the whole country hands down.

One of these pieces I offer below here, because it's about this boy of mine. Its tenderness makes me blush a little, but how can I not return nostalgically to those days, as someone who is still trying to get used to the fact that he’s not nearby anymore? The fact  that he doesn’t bang in the back door like his big sisters do, cracking open a beer and talking a mile a minute?

~ Sigh ~  Anyway, here’s who that boy was in the 8th grade. Who I thought he was anyway. Who we all were maybe:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

They say boys separate from their fathers either by beating them at what the dads do best or refusing to compete at all. How girls separate from their moms I remember well. Our oldest used to spend hours talking on the phone in my home office and writing little notes on my all my stuff. (“I’m not writing on your stuff” these notes sometimes said) but about how a boy separates from his mom I know only this: It’s isn’t quick and it isn’t easy.When my boy was 12 he thought I was the best thing since Tic Tacs. I used to go into his school every year to talk about Writing From Personal Experience, maybe even get the kids to try it.First we’d loosen up by telling stories, like the one about how my underpants fell down when I was seven. I was the Flag Bearer at a full-dress Flag Raising ceremony, with nary a hand to spare lest Old Glory touch the ground, when the elastic snapped and those little panties descended – and fast.Kids love stuff like this, and before we knew it, everyone in the class was laughing, and no one more than my own child.But by the time he turned 13 I just seemed to embarrass him.His teacher called up that year to ask If I’d help chaperone a field trip to see “Romeo and Juliet” on stage. I quick switched some appointments and jumped at the chance.Michael left the room when he heard the news.“OK, a few ground rules,“ he said on his return:  “No talking to anyone. No sitting near me in the theater. No explaining the play to the kids beside you.”Well, I failed on all three counts. We tried again with the carpools-to-out-of-town-soccer-games issue.“Parents don’t talk when they do these carpools!” he said through gritted teeth. “They just drive and keep quiet.”I failed again - repeatedly even.  He just needed a little distance, maybe.He got it that summer, He went away to a camp in the Berkshires called Emerson , a camp that happens to be on the same 130 acres as the one I went to for 11 years, owned by my family and called Fernwood in those years.Halfway though his time there we went to visit him.He was making some separation progress anyway:  a child who for years refused to even pick up a tennis racquet at his father’s invitation suddenly said, “Dad! Want to volley?” When they rejoined his sisters and me the two of them were  smiling, if winded. “I’m awesome!” reported the son. “I crushed him!” said his father.“Hey, Mike!” I spoke up then. “Let’s you and I walk over to the girls’ cabins.” I wanted to see if my name was still there, carved high in the rafters.“Are you kidding?  I’m not allowed to go there!”“C’mon it’s Family Day!” I said. “Even the girls cabins will be crawling with males! And if they ask, I’ll tell them I went to camp here.” And I started on alone.Suddenly he was right there beside me. “OK, go to Bunk J,” he said, walking fast. “Quick, got a pen?” he said. I gave him one. “I’ll stand guard,” I said. Then he ducked into the empty bunk, stood on a girl’s trunk, and amid 60 years worth of names, wrote “Mike Marotta” in bold caps high on the cabin wall.“A fine influence YOU are!” said his dad when we got back and reported the deed. My boy and I just traded a little smile I remember. And all I could think was “maybe we’ll separate next year.”

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I rarely get embarrassed these days and certainly the tubes of Astroglide and the extensive collections of sex toys on the counter of that fancy bra shop didn’t embarrass me.

“I see you’ve expanded into new territory“ I said to the young woman helping me, since really there was no avoiding these bright and fanciful gadgets.

“Yes, we thought a touch of something light and fun," she said, blushing as prettily as a contestant in the Miss America pageant.

“Well I’m all for sunlight. It was never right for a girl’s sexuality to be a mystery to the girl.”

“No,” said the young woman, who seemed so sweet I decided to tell her what else was on my mind.

“I really appreciate the fact that during the fitting you didn’t used the kind of slang I could hear other clerks using with their customers. “Let’s hoist these girls high!” one of them said in the dressing room to her client. I just find that so sort of ...awful."

She blinked – in surprise? - and said “Well I appreciate your telling me that and I will certainly pass it on to Management!  You find it inappropriate you're saying?"

"No, that’s not the word quite. Most times I hear the word 'inappropriate' somebody's using it to shame and one-down somebody else."

I went on, understanding my thoughts only as I talked.

“It’s just that in the old days we didn’t have the real words for things. We could only point vaguely, saying “here,” or “there” or, God forbid, “DOWN there. The only words for breasts were the guys' words for them and we couldn’t use those!”

"I was raised by two women and in all my life I never heard either one of them use the word 'breast,' which seems pretty sad. So a clerk saying 'these girls' or 'these babies' just seems terrible to me. We have the language now – we even have shops like these!” I said, indicating the virtual candy store of sexual aids “and it seems like all of this grows out of respect for and an appreciation of our bodies which work so hard every day to do our bidding.”

And there ended the conversation. She thanked me for my thoughts again, and the male shop owner, who I'd seen lurking in back, drifted out front to see who the HELL was assigning so much meaning to his inventory.

But he was nobody I wanted to talk to. I had said my piece to this young woman, sweet as she was and helpful, and so I took my two $85 miracles of engineering and walked out into the parking lot.

Yay for the First Amendment

I should be drinking champagne. It’s National Columnists Day and every week for the last 1486 weeks I have filed a column for the newspapers that run me.

I started before they tried to kill the Pope, or Ronald Reagan, or the germs causing bad breath even and by now I’ve written about it all: 9/11 and the death of John Lennon; what I overheard the lawn maintenance guys across the street say when it looked like I might get to go up in the Shuttle and what I myself said to our last president to make him so mad he went red in the face.

Columnists get to write about almost anything as long as it sounds a chord in their readers. Maybe they help people put things in perspective. Maybe they make a space, like the chapel in an airport, for people to come to and access their feelings, or look inside themselves a little, or consider the human side of events.

Our day is today because it’s the birthday of World War II  correspondent Ernie Pyle who died in the line of duty. He was a fine columnist and so was Eleanor Roosevelt of that same era who wrote faithfully from trains and fancy hotel rooms and the lip of the West Virginia coal mines as she criss-crossed this land acting as the eyes and ears of her paralyzed husband.

I’ve done a column since 1980 and now I do this blog too and when I look back at parts of it I sometimes blush for the honesty I betray here. You can write on a blog stuff they would never print in the paper. When I read Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck I sat right down and in two hours' time had outlined seven answering chapters that did her one better on every front. My Neck is the Least of It I dubbed this book in my mind and if I related its stories in the paper every outfit of born-again busybodies in the nation would be calling for my head on a platter.

Yesterday I went to a high-end foundations boutique  where I learned how open the society has really become: dear little pocket-sized vibrators for sale among the Double-D cups and the many kinds of squeeze-you-breathless corsets known as ‘compression garments’.

Well. You pretty much can’t even use the word ‘vibrator’ in a newspaper column but here we are in the land of blogging. So let me go to the grocery store, walk two miles and read my book about Abe Lincoln and then - yay for the First Amendment - I’ll be back just after that to tell you all about it.

The Taxes Are Done! Write a Poem!

I thought that spring was canceled,

With Wall Street in the john

But what is this beneath my feet

Green GRASS I tread upon?

It’s National Poetry Month kids and finally we can mark it with all those nasty taxes behind us at last! I was reading Shakespeare aloud in a group last night and it looks like you can only hear SO MUCH iambic pentameter before you start thinking in verse yourself, even if it’s based on the verse of others.

Check this out (and name this poem whose rhyme scheme I have matched exactly):

Whose face is this I think I know

Its look is unfamiliar though

I'm almost stumped to see it here

Reflected in that shop win-DOW

My younger self would think Oh Wow!

To see these hairs ascendant now

Above the lip, below the chin

Pig-bristly just like on a sow

I give my head a little shake

To ask if there is some mistake

These pouchy bags, this wrinkled skin

Do simple years such changes make?

The lines are furrowed dark and deep

And though this cream did not come cheap

It will work wonders whilst I sleep

It best work wonder whilst I sleep!

We're right smack on the bellybutton of the month made for poems so come on! Turn on some rap or hip-hop (or write a naughty limerick!)

Bless Me Father: Appealing the Ticket

To appeal a parking ticket you appear by appointment in the City Council Chambers, this gorgeous marbled room where you await your five minutes max with the official assigned to hear your sorry excuse.“What IS this place?” asks the woman behind me. “It’s where the mayor sometimes sits,” says the lady beside her. “Like the throne room sort of.” (Close enough, I think.)Being here is like going to Confession in the old days, though this same woman is stunned when she realizes as much: “You mean they take us ONE BY ONE?"  she says, appalled. (She thought maybe it would be a group pardon? Or maybe group punishment like 15 years ago when all the boys in my Fourth Grader’s class got denied Recess because one boy peed on the radiator and it smelled like the Monkey House?)You do all go up one by one, like Judgment Day, and you whisper into the side of the head of the official who looks kindly if serious.I watch them all as they go: Miss Civically Ignorant; the young white dude in his sweats and his stupid Red Sox cap worn backward swaggering like some big-shot tough guy; the young black man in a coat and tie earnestly clutching papers who, when he speaks, speaks in perfect, if heavily, accented English.I watch myself and blush to hear what I say: that I park every day in front of this apartment complex to bring food to my elderly uncle only this time I parked in the handicapped spot and came back an hour later to find some vigilante justice in this note. “YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF CITY STATUTES! I HAVE PHOTOGRAPHED YOUR CAR AND I HAVE CALLED THE POLICE!” and sure enough a $300 ticket was pinned under my wipers.My excuse in this appeals process? That Uncle Ed was not answering the phone and I simply panicked and for the first time in 18 years literally did not SEE the Handicap Parking sign.The upshot? fine reduced to $100 and next time they throw the book at me. My grave confessor proves to be as kindly as he looks.  I make my way to the door delighted by the lenient sentence; catch sight of the moron with his cap still on and uncharitably think  ' now there's a radiator pee-er if ever I saw one' and exit, a free woman.

Known and Found and Gathered In

Today dawned clear and I rose early in it knowing I had many jobs ahead. I’m  lucky because we’re eating at our brother and sister-in-law’s but I’m busy nonetheless: There's that bunny cake to make and I have to go get our uncle, 88, who will want to go sit by that special pond first. He has his eye on distant horizons now. And he’ll need some good hot coffee to wrap his hands around. And then there’s church and Skip and Miriam’s, and an airport run and an uncle drop-off and then back here with just our small family and the grandbabies and then to work at night to ready my column for its deadline in the morning.

Little Eddie called last night with his emergency voice on. “TT!” he said wasting no time on preliminaries. “Bring all my Star Wars guys to Skip and Miriam’s!” Only he still talks a little funny so it sounded like ‘Stoh Wohs.’

There is a stunningly capable young guy named Nick, soon to be 20, who helps me now in my business life and little Eddie and I went to his house on Friday where his beautiful mom and he dug out all his Star Wars toys to give to us. Then, while I went foodshopping, Nick and Eddie came back here and built a spaceship out of all the perfectly-sized boxes I had been saving to ship my books in when a clamoring public beat down my door to buy them.

Books by the thousand still fill the cellar. Not everything turns out the way you think it will.

But it’s true spring now, Easter, Passover, the season of release into new life. And this is our boy-cat at the top here, so sick a year ago and hiding behind a door waiting to die. He didn’t die, because he was found in the nick of time - just as we all hope to be found and claimed and gathered in, when we too set sail for that far horizon.

Easter PJs

 

       I couldn’t wait. I dyed Easter eggs a whole month ago and the little guys helped, the 22-month-old here dipping his from the red to the green to the purple so that in the end his eggs all turned a blackish-brown, the color of earth. The earth is cracking moistly open now. It looks like the surface of a pan of brownies set to cooling on the rack.

        Remember the bad old days when you could buy live chicks at Easter and they were dyed purple and pink? You could buy baby bunnies too if you didn’t mind spending the rest of your life toting bales of hay.

      I myself have always yearned to have a bunny but ‘Noooo’ intones my vet. ‘You never put a rabbit together with cats.’ An yet my new friend Jen tells me her cats used to curl right up against her bunny for their naps.

      Easters when I was little my mother used to make a special cake shaped like a rabbit which her diary says I called our ‘Eating Bunny.’ This was almost 57 years ago, the month after I turned three but I still have the heavy iron mold for it right downstairs, come to think of it. Was it her spirit that made me reach for the pound-cake mix at the store just now?

     I think I’ll get up early tomorrow and make her cake. And when those babies that would have been her great-grand-babies come later on, maybe we’ll dye the frosting yellow or pink - or,  if this Little One Who Doesn’t Yet Talk has his way, the blackish-brown of the earth after a good hard rain like today’s.

National Feng Shui Awareness Day

Today is National Feng Shui Awareness Day, Feng Shui being the harmonic relations of things in a room, fruits in a bowl, lines in a poem for all I know. It's an ancient system for achieving balance in the physical world.You know how you sometimes walk into one restaurant and feel instantly comfortable? There’s your Feng Shui at work! Walk into another and feel immediately ill at ease? Feng shui strikes again!I always have trouble understanding the menu, grasping what the specials are even when they're recited right in my face in the second kind of restaurant because I’m too busy mentally shifting the furniture around and moving the hostess’s station… And I don’t know about you but I can NOT sit with my back to the door. It just feels wrong and besides, what if somebody with a gun comes in and I’m the last to know?Wikipedia says figuring the Feng Shui for a place requires a super accurate compass, "for finding any auspicious sector in a desired location.” One location neither auspicious NOR desirable in an eatery? Next to the kitchen. That’s the equivalent of going to a wedding and finding you’ve been seated with the band. So it's National Feng Shui Awareness Day! So let's celebrate already! Electric Slide Boogie right after the ice cream. :-)

Why We Need Each Other

Comcast is down all over the country.The black cat and I are hanging around together at the lake today and with no email I’ve been noticing her more than usual. She went outside a while ago, looked around briefly, came back in and squatted her box.What is UP with that? I have always wondered. Why, when we bring our cats up here to the lake won’t either of them pee outside. like every other quadruped? Finally someone finally told me: It’s because they don’t want to leave their scent and be tracked by predators and I sure wish I remembered a while ago when I met that lady at the veterinary hospital.We were there together, I with my gravely ill cat and she with her gravely ill dog. We got talking and in time she told me she had recently lost her husband whom she loved to pieces. He loved her too and also this dog of hers whose systems were slowly shutting down in the Intensive Care Unit 100 yards away from where we waited.He grew ill, I can’t remember how, but was all right again – until the day she heard a thud and the dog came tearing into the kitchen looking wild and panicked. She followed him blindly running up the stairs and into the bathroom – where she found her husband in the last seconds of life. Something had happened inside him and he was bleeding all over the floor which was so slick with wave upon wave of his red blood that she fell down in it – and then saw something that to her was even worse :Their dog licking it up as fast as he could.She cried when she got to that part. I cried too.And I am so sorry I was ignorant of that bit of animal lore because it might have comforted her.It wasn’t until I told someone this heart-breaking story that I learned that the animal was actually trying to protect his master by doing this. “It’s OK! We’ll cover the trail! No one will find us and kill us!”I am so sorry that I had lost her phone number by the time I leaned this. We all complain about how intruded on we sometimes feel with all our emails but today I am feeling a different way. I’m feeling Thank God we have each other. We need to tell others our circumstances because so many times friends or strangers, it is others who help us understand them.

Down with Comcast!

I slept ‘til 10 today which I haven’t done since I was like 12 years old and when I woke the world had fallen apart: My email provider tells me it’s down all over the country.See I KNEW it was me putting the sun in the sky every day! Quick, somebody, find me a 12-step meeting!

When My Mother Did Her Nails

I used to think my mom was crazy the way she’d wait ‘til we were in the car on our way someplace to put on her nail polish She never wore it otherwise. Then she’d light up a cigarette and there's my memory of that old ribbon of highway: the car windows closed, the smell of cigarette smoke and nail polish, and us trundling along in the slow lane for one solid hour.

Didn’t she know it would smudge? I used to wonder. Why apply nail polish just then? Or when the party was at our house why put on nail polish ten minutes before the guests  arrived?

I could never figure it out but there she' be in her usual spot at the kitchen table with the nail file tucked just under the toaster tray and the bottles of polish crowded in close by her ashtray.

And she was no kind of fancy lady. If you noticed her hands at all you only noticed they were strong - so strong she could wring out a facecloth in a way that made you sorry for the facecloth.

She never dated after her marriage more or less evanesced 18 months in, so she wasn’t doing it for a man. And God knows we kids never gave her a compliment; we were too busy holed up in the attic talking Premature Burial.

So why?

I didn’t understand until last night that she did it for herself, when I, no fancy lady either, started putting on nail polish half asleep, in the bed, at ten minutes past midnight.

Mine was called Mirage as against her Cherries in the Snow; and there was no cigarette smoke involved as far as I can recall.  But I fell asleep five minutes after I applied it so rise today to find nails looking like ten tiny waffles with the imprint of the sheets.

I don’t care. I did it for me in the last eight minutes of waking and it made me feel great - so great I'm smiling big - and lookin’ around right now for a couple of facecloths of my own  to strangle. So once again thanks Mom in your old 1950s car for helping me all the way from Heaven to keep on truckin'!

Brokedown Palace

I'm a baby. Also I guess kind of spoiled because this rental house was actually nice in a way. All we needed to do was not LOOK in the sex bedrooms or the closet with the naked baby dolls; not take notice of the birds swooping through the living room or the bird-poop on the kitchen counters; not think about the fact that the bathroom doors didn't close or the bedspreads all had this nasty waxy feel to them.

We just had to not take note of the highly poisonous lizard ten feet from the pool which  in any case we couldn’t use because its heater was broken the whole time and it was in the 30s at night.

I showed just the bullet hole and some of the crappy busted stuff last time and here's more along these lines:

But some of what was there was nice:  you could have a nice bath, though not in private.You could listen to the ghost piano(See last post by clicking here for that spooky piano feature.)

And you could always could sit on the patio - if you had your coat on-  and forget all about the bedspreads

Really I guess the trick was to be like our little guys and just decide to have fun anyway and that's what we did. We couldn't sleep. We couldn't relax in the the bathroom. But we sure enough laughed our heads off the whole time - which I think is all that kept the bats from settling in our hair.

two of our party who loved the place no matter what

All That's Missing

I think maybe this rental house is where Boogie Nights was filmed - not the sex parts or Roller Girl’s scenes or the one in the men’s room when Mark Wahlberg looks down inside his underpants but the part where this drug lord in his bathrobe is brandishing an automatic weapon and there’s loud discordant music that just won’t STOP.

Yup, this stucco palace high in the desert hills feels like that scene.

The living room is the size of a hotel lobby, which is nice but the basement wall is kicked in and the fridge’s ice and water delivery system is broken with the wires all hanging down.

The dead moths are still dropping on our food from the busted ceiling panel and also: the fuse box in the basement is yanked apart and the pool’s heater is broken so the pool is so cold it makes your legs go eggplant-purple the minute you try to step into it. There are no clocks, and no blankets and not a single table lamp either so no reading in bed but only lying there waiting for the thugs to pull up outside.

The ceramic “decorations” have all been broken, then badly repaired with fat blobs of glue coming out the cracks (see?)

Plus there’s an electric piano that keeps playing “Winter Wonderland” and a bullet hole in the front hall mirror and finally a secret room in the basement that the kids are calling “Gimps’ room” but that’s another movie, that’s “Pulp Fiction.” And now all I can say is Where is Samuel L Jackson when you need him?

happy vacation. Incoming! (bullet hole, living room mirror)

Westward Ho!

When you get yourself west, you almost think you dreamed the dreary east, with the journey from Atlantic to Mexican border so long you feel as if you made it by covered wagon - covered wagon or else the long tunnel-passage of dying.

I wake up in Tucson today, where my whole family has come to visit David’s big brother Toby and all the places our girls Carrie and Chris came to love when Carrie did grad school here six years ago.

They love this land of cactus, snake and bobcat. A year ago when we came out here Carrie said “We’re totally retiring here! “

“Way out here? But can I come visit at least? “ I plaintively squeaked.

She gave me that mildly pitying look all kids give their parents. “Mum: you’ll be dead.”

But we’re not dead yet. old Dave and I. We woke today feeling like survivors,  yesterday’s hardships all but forgotten: the ten kiddie movies left behind on Plane One, the ear infection meds left on Plane Two, the agitation of the one-year-old, made frantic by fatigue who lurched ceaselessly up and down the aisles, his little head like a toy balloon drifting at armrest level from fore to aft and back again.

We got here at 10pm and it’s three whole hours earlier, Arizona being the one state in the nation that says a big No Thanks to Daylight Savings. We grownups didn’t get to bed till 1:00 since the AC seemed to be busted here in this rental and dead moths keep dropping from the busted panel of the kitchen light fixture and the last renter’s uncollected garbage is stinking to high heaven in the garage.

“Will you be OK ?” I asked poor Carrie as she stumbled toward their bed, as exhausted as Chris is from having held a frantic baby for at least five of our nine hours flying and who, in the best of times has insomnia.

“I’ll be fine," she sighed. “Maybe I’ll die in the night,”

But I guess she didn’t die either. I heard them all rattling around in the dark a few hours ago, the little ones up at 5:00 with the jetlag and by 6:00 they were all four of them off in the rental car, I assume in search of breakfast items.

As soon as I unpack here and find my camera I'll take a picture of these mountains with their thick tan folds like wrinkles on a bloodhound adn whoops! here comes that rental car full of our dear ones now! time to rise and shine and make some pancakes!