Locked in a Public John

Here’s some karma for ya; just when you get through making fun of your local paper's Police Blotter you end up ON it.I’d been amusing myself with what passes for criminality here in Tinytown. (Somebody winged a cigarette butt out his car window, somebody got pinched for texting behind the wheel, somebody broke into at childcare center, played on the ride-on toys and ate all the ice cream etc.) but now I’LL be the in the paper too, shame of shames, just because I got locked in the bathroom of my favorite coffee shop.I knocked faintly on the thick steel door once I realized it really wouldn’t open.“Yo! Lady stuck in the can!” shouted the man at the table closest to the unisex bathroom.The manager arrived on the door’s opposite side. Then the police."Couldn’t we just cut through the sheet-rock?” I heard somebody say.By the time the fire trucks arrived I was super-hungry and wondering if they could maybe slide a really flat cookie or two under the big heavy door.Also, my feet hurt but the only seat was that prison-cell-style toilet.Meanwhile the consulting went on outside.“Ma’am! Are you all right ma’am?” the manager kept asking, maybe because I was preserving a dignified silence.Also because I was also busy trying to text the family member who might be likeliest to see a text.Also because I was trying to figure out if you could actually eat tampons.But after an unknown interval they finally succeeded in busting me out.“The cops wanted to shoot the lock but we wouldn’t let them!” the firefighters crowed. They were tickled  that they'd been the ones to solve the problem.The manager was tickled that they hadn’t had to introduce her walls to the Jaws of Life.But the most tickled people of all  I think were my own family members, some of whom confessed to guffawing loudly on hearing of my predicament that it caused heads to turn all over the office - and what can I say to that but GLAD TO BE SO ENTERTAINING!

The Column I Sent to Updike

The Life is the Light

I was at the beauty parlor a few months ago, and Randy was washing my hair before cutting it. As I lay back in the chair passive, inert, feeling his fingers work­ing in my scalp, a question came into my mind:“Have you ever done a dead person’s hair?” I asked. “Sure,” he answered.“And was it scary?”“Not really,” came his reply. “In a way it’s easy. You just do the front, of course.”We were silent then. As he worked, I thought about my own little skull and how the day would come when it would lie all quiet beneath that Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone that Emily Dickinson refers to in one of her poems.“Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?” I asked.He looked at me for a long moment. This was not, I knew, standard beauty parlor gab. But Randy is not your standard person.“I don’t know about the body,” he said. “But the Bible says the dead are a great crowd of witnesses.”“Where are they though?” I asked, a question I have thought about every day of my adult life.He took a breath.“What I think,” he said, “is that it’s like theater here, and we’re on the stage and the dead are in the audience. They can see us but we can’t see them. You know how that is on a stage? We can’t see them because of a bright light in between...”“And they’re watching us?” I interrupted, “and think­ing, ‘such a fevered dream, this living of theirs. Such tiny strivings’? Do they look at us and think, of our actions, ‘how paltry and insignificant?’”“Oh, not at all,” said Randy emphatically. “They’re watching us because our actions are significant. We’re the ones now. It matters very much what we do.”I’ve thought about this conversation many times since we had it back in June.A few people are as clear as Randy is as to our place in the grand scheme of things. Many more aren’t.A young person said to me the other day, “You’re born and then you die. And the whole time you’re here you don’t have a clue as to what it’s all about.”I look around myself, to see what it’s about:A little cat hops quick as an eighth-note to the kitchen window sill, arranges herself in a pool of sun that shines on the white stone slab of counter. I see the bright China blue of a fruit bowl next to her, the dazzling large-pored orbs of orange within it, her soft pelt electric with life, as she smoothes it with a wedge of pink tongue.A cellist rises from her chair in the symphony orches­tra and sits in front, to perform an extended solo. Seated again, she takes the instrument between her legs. As she draws the bow over its strings, and the deep rich tones of the cello roll out over the audience, her throat constricts, as if with great emotion. Her nostrils flare. She keeps her eyes closed as if against the insupportable beauty of the music. When for a brief moment in the piece she opens them, she does not see the audience.A young man, full of life and high spirits, goes on a youth retreat the first September weekend of his Senior year. Boarding the bus to return home at week’s end, he collapses and dies within minutes of what the autopsy will later show to be a cardiac infection. Another young man, unknown to him before that week away, speaks at his memorial service. He has worked with the sick at a nursing home, he says; he knows this is no fainting spell. He holds the dying boy, in the few seconds remaining. “God loves you, Jermaine,” he tells him. “I love you too.”If the dead are all around us; if they are watching, as Randy believes, they may say, “See how they shone, at their moment in the light: the little cat; the cellist; the boy who left life early, and the one who helped him to leave it.”Mother Theresa cradles yet another sickly infant brought in from a dumpster on the streets of Calcutta. She presents him like a bouquet of flowers to the visiting British journalist.“See!” she says with shining eyes, “There is Life in the child!”The life is the light. And to all those who feel the light—in them and upon them—this world is shot through with glory.

Notes from a Nobody

Back in 1993 when I was a serious Nobody (as opposed to now when I’m a Nobody with damaged hair) our late national treasure of a novelist and poet John Updike sent me a postcard in response to a column I sent him about an ABC boy who died young. I guess it was also about my mom dying in front of my eyes, the beauty of oranges piled in a bowl and how a woman cellist looks when she takes that instrument between her legs, which both embarrasses and moves you at the same time and makes you realize how Sex and Music and God really ARE all connected.)I’ve been reading Updike to cheer myself up. Others would read him to feel jealous but the thing with the guy is how generous he always was to everyone; how gracious, even to us little people: Back in ’93 he wrote a short story for The New Yorker about his mother dying. Anyone could see it was his real mom, so the column I sent him accompanied a condolence note. When he answered it he said I wrote ‘like a dream’ which is nonsense but such gallant nonsense. I’m writing for 1,000 years here and still no book offers! Still no requests for my endorsements on bras for your full-figured girls! I have never been on staff at a newspaper; haven’t earned a salary since I stopped teaching high school, topping out at the handsome figure of $12,000. But I have five books which I by-God published myself. And I make a princely ten dollars a column from the papers who still bother to pay me, who haven’t themselves gone under for the third time. And every April 15^th my husband David says “T, you couldn’t be earning LESS!” - to which I say 'So what?'Remember that great thing labor leader Eugene Debs said 100 years ago? "While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”? Well where there's a way to lose money I have found it, all unwilling, or else it has found me. At the same time I do know this, that the best fun  I ever had was on the day I took the train to New York on my own dime, went to The Ethel Walker School in Brooklyn, taught the whole day and gave away five cartons of my funniest book, the one from my children’s childhood with all the pee-pee and bum-bum jokes in it.It's what God wants of me I think. And to have written all your adult life is such a privilege.These last seven days I have been writing my way out of sorrow over the death of my cat Charlotte and now here I am on the zillionth rainy day of this rainy cold summer and I feel swell. We’re on vacation with our mildewed clothes and Old Dave is doin’ the crossword ten feet away. Our remaining cat Abe is calculating the minutes 'til his next pig-out on fresh shrimp, eight strangers are coming over for drinks at 6 and God bless you guys I'm writing to you.To read what I said about the dead boy, the oranges and the cellist give me a minute. Takin’ a quick walk for the sake of the old bones, then I’ll put her up.Signed,The Cheeseball as she looked last month.(Took one look  at this pic and went straight to the beauty parlor. "I have black curly hair, dammit; Throw out the peroxide and the straighteners and let me be what I am." Today it's the color of charcoal ready for the steaks. And by God if the curl isn't comin' back at the edges too! (that's what's known as FAKE HAIR stuck to the back of my head in the photo. Marie Antoinette called. Cue the guillotine guys.)

Not in My Book

On her blog yesterday my friend Bobbie wrote about the Bored Drawer she kept as a kid. “I’d write things to do on little pieces of paper and fill the drawer with them. Then, whenever I felt that frightening bored feeling coming on, I’d pull one out, make myself do that thing, and get un-bored. “She also mentions Russian-born writer Joseph Brodsky in this connection who got kicked out of the Soviet Union for parasitism, which I know, sounds like he was eating people’s good wool sweaters, then came to the States and mastered English so well he won a MacArthur award and was named our Poet Laureate. But in one speech Bobbie quotes him as having told hsi audience never to run from boredom "because boredom teaches you the most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance.”Well with all respect for a guy now dead I say: To Hell with That. Was Mozart insignificant? A show-off at times and maybe a bit childish but look at his work! And what about Beethoven, whose music was considered so erotic by his contemporaries some said it must be kept from the ladies whose passions would be stirred and then what?  Was my sister’s cat insignificant who figured out how to use her paws as hands to grasp the pulls on Nan’s bureau drawers so she could hop in whenever she liked and scrabble among her dainty washables?Ah and here I am at cats again.Eighteen months ago when our cat Abraham almost died of a raging infection her now-missing-and-presumed-dead sister Charlotte did an unusual thing. Generally Charlotte thought Abe was a big dummy and ignored him completely but on that rainy night when we found him after three days’ hiding, holed up, waiting to die, hot with fever, and papery with dehydration, she came over to him and began licking his head and face, whether for comfort or in farewell we never knew.Was she insignificant, and also her whole little life, now ended as it seems? What about her brother's life of single-minded devotion to us? What about your life? What about mine?I think of the line from Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town where the character known as the Stage Manager, posing as the minister at a wedding, freezes the action for a moment and, addressing the audience as he does throughout the play, recalls all the young ones he has married, naming the cottage, the Sunday drives, the children, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will -  then pauses and says, “Once in a thousand times it's interesting,” but in such a tender and affectionate way you think  he must mean the opposite.So are we significant at all then? To ourselves and to the ones who love us surely but how about to the One who created us if such a One there be?  Which brings me to what is said of the life Jesus, namely that even if he was no son of God and never rose from the grave at all, still what he said about Giving What You Need to Get and Placing Love First seems so bright and true and real you feel you could just hang your Jiminy Cricket umbrella on it and fly clear up to Death, and past and above it until Death is revealed at last as what it well may be: a tiny dark point on an endless shining line.

For Charlotte

It’s all I can think of today: that time I came upon the black cat dead in the road who I just knew was my own cat Charlotte, black like her and wearing the same collar, her small spine facing outward toward the cars speeding past; toward the speeding cars like the car that had struck her and kept on going.I tore home and blurted the awful news to David, who folded his newspaper and stood slowly and walked me to the window. “T, no,” he said putting his arm around me. “Charlotte is right here napping on the patio, see?”Last night I dreamed we had this same kind of happy ending but I wake today and it isn’t so. Our poor old Charlotte with her bad hip has been missing since last Monday and she never wanders off this way. At age 14 she knows all too will what she can and cannot do. If she were a person she’d be hitting the Early Bird Special and going right home to get in her PJs.I’ve been telling funny stories all week but maybe I can give in to my real feelings now. Maybe telling the rest of the story about that other poor cat here will help me find the release I need. Anyway, what follows is the rest of what I wrote in the summer of '03 when I came upon that other poor creature:+    +    +    +    +   +    +    +    +    +    +    +    +    +   +  +    +    +    +    +   +    +    +    +All I could think was "I’ll go to Mary’s! She's an RN. She'll know what to do about this poor abandoned creature!’Mary answered the door with her two kids besise her and though quick tears sprang to her eyes too, she was calm.‘I’ll get something we can put it in,’  she said and went to do that, while her boy Ben, eleven, and her girl Rachel, nine, followed me to where the animal lay.First, Ben turned the collar of the little thing in a vain search for identification. Then Rachel crouched and stroked the fur. Then we all three crouched, a mournful silent trio.On seeing us from across this busy street, a woman walking her dog called over.‘Was it yours?’When we said no, she told us that she had recently moved to this neighborhood but she thought it might be her neighbor’s cat and why didn’t she just go see. Then Mary came with a big blue towel. She spread it out and gently lifted the motionless creature, perfect but for a spot of blood at the mouth.And then we were four, keeping silent vigil.And when, from the dog walker’s side of the street, came two young women striding purposefully with an empty carton, I felt more tears rise.‘Are you the family?’ I asked in a barely-controlled voice, dreading the witness of a sharper woe.I can’t describe to you the voice of the one who answered. The kindness that was in it. The comfort.‘No,’ she said gently, ‘But I am a veterinarian.’ And straightaway she knelt by the little cat and placed her fingers soft upon its breast.‘Is it dead?!’ the children blurted.  ‘Mmmm,’ she murmured. But it was not us that she spoke.'What are you then?’ she whispered to the animal, gently lifting the legs. ‘Ah you’re a little girl!’ she crooned. Then, with both hands, raised the delicate head in a gesture like a caress.“She’s gone,’ she told us, and in one easy motion lifted the cat in her blue shroud of towel, settled her in the box, and closed the lid.‘What will you DO with her?’ the children cried.'I’ll bring her to where I work and keep her for a while, and then... we will cremate her,’ she said gently.And so it happened.nd in a day or two a sign went up about a lost black cat and we had the privilege of meeting the family whose pet this was, and of telling them things which to me stand as proof of all that lives and does not die. Because to them we were able to say, Not the shovel and the city truck, not the passing hours and the coating dust, but instead quick witness, and an honor guard, and escort, in the form of a young veterinarian. Escort, like an angel’s escort, out of this place, bright as it is, and lovely, and dangerous.

Did You Say Intercourse?

So in my column this week I told this nice story about jail and the bees and the Bill of Rights and quoted the famous scientist/ priest Pierre  Teilhard de Chardin, right? Only one of the papers that uses me got mixed up with its spell-check and called the guy DIEHARD de Chardin. DIEHARD, like the battery! Like the movie !I guess it’s funny. And I’m hardly one to get on my high horse,  being such a lousy typist myself. My poor spell-checker is as courteous as the kindest of English butlers, offering me alternative words when it has trouble making sense of what I've typed. For example when I try to put ' actually' it politely says “Sexually?” Did I mean sexually? When I try to write 'of course' and I garble the spelling it asks 'Intercourse'?  Are we going for intercourse here?Well I’d say most people are goin’ for intercourse most of the time to judge by the baby population but jeez. My immigrant ancestors would say it’s a good comeuppance for me for gittin' above myself with the fancy French talk!

Mission Impossible?

I TRY to be mad at them but the truth is I like the mice who live  in my kitchen, because they accept me as I am. In spite of the spilled flour, the boxes of bran bought back in the early ‘90s, the  potato chip crumbs lining the shelves of my cabinets. Still they choose and befriend me. They appreciate my pantry.And I feel just awful having to kill them. But just yesterday a person newly arrived on our shores told me it’s the mice or my health. “Their pee-pee,” he said. “It brings death.”My pals at the hardware store sell me the classic wooden mousetrap, which you can buy for a buck, bait with peanut-butter-coated string and boom! But of course it is then that you really see them in the perfection of their small forms: The tiny feet. The little tails. The guillotined necks you can hardly bear to look upon.It makes me nostalgic for the era when pee-pee and related 'matter' were prized as fertilizer, as it still is in China where, under the name “night soil,” it proudly stands as the inspiration for a patriotic song. I say sick of “The Star Spangled Banner?” Try having to sing “The Night Soil Gatherers Are Coming Down from the Mountain” at the start of a few ballgames!

Pus-Colored No More!

I am sick to death of blondifying and straightening my hair. Who talked me  into a color like an infected cut anyway?  I have black hair; black and unruly with silver comin’ in and what’s wrong with that? My girl Carrie always says Let it go curly, let it go grey but do you know they say they can’t help you let your hair go grey and you just have to cut it all off and start again?The last time I cut my hair short was on the day I turned 28. We threw a party that night and the first guest to arrive took one look at me and said “Nice hair! You look like a toilet bowl brush.” (Never forgot it, the bastard.) So why not a return to my roots?  Hair the color God made it and doing whatever it feels like day to day?  And how ‘bout I lean over like this wherever I go  like in the picture. It fits my motto, I’ll say that: talk about 'look at it this way'!

Man in the Mirror

Here at the annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists I’ve just heard a talk by Jeff Zaslow, author of The Last Lecture on Professor Randy Pausch’s amazing final talk before his death from pancreatic cancer and the sound of gulped-back tears filled the room.Randy left behind three small children even younger than the three left by Michael Jackson, God rest his troubled soul.These children of Randy's won’t remember their dad and he knew that. It is the cruelest and yet the kindest thing that happens to you as the sorrowing left–behind one, the way your spider of a heart wraps the time immediately following the death in such thick numb bunting you can’t recall them.When, at 45, my sister Nan lost her young husband Tom to death on the tennis court, she blundered blindly through the whole following year. Then one night she 'saw' him as she lay in their bed. He stood at their bedroom door in the tennis outfit he had died in. “I want to come back,” he said plaintively. “You can’t!” she exclaimed through fresh tears.  “Your friend took your job and I gave away your clothes!”Was it a dream or did Tom really come to her that night? And if so, did he repent the pack-a day cigarette habit, the six-hard-boiled-eggs-and–six hot-dogs suppers chased down by whole pints of ice cream?  Does Michael repent the fact that he exhausted his frail and pain-wracked body in preparing for the superhuman task of a 50- show tour? We can’t know. But if we could speak with our dead just one time more I think they would have us take a long look in the mirror and resolve from here on out to spend our own remaining days loving all those of whatever age who shelter in our care and nurture. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcYv5x6gZTA]

Goodbye Angel

Poor Farrah, the original California Girl... I thought I had her hair for a while there, only mine was curly so I actually looked more like an English barrister with bangs. That  TV special where she’s seen alternating between throwing up and dutifully scribbling away in her illness journal was so sad. That’ll be me, still trying to write in my diary in the funeral home. (Remember what the young lady says in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest?  How she never travelled without her diary because a person should always have something sensational to read on the train ha ha ? Those were the days when my diary was so racy with the adventures of a 13-year-old that my sister stole it and used it to blackmail me!It's Thursday morning and I'm in the LA airport with my own diary. Noticng that they really are all tanned  around here and some sensational-looking man-made breasts just went by. This just to say goodbye Farrah with your courage . I only wish you hadn’t been talked into that lip-altering facelift; you were gorgeous just the way God made you.

My Bra is Your Playground

I just took a 4-hour journey wedged into a 12-inch-wide span of space between two little ones in car-seats, and SO GREAT was the love of these two for each other that all they wanted to do was clasp hands in a show of kinship – which they accomplished by having the one reach his hand under the left straps of my bra and sundress while the other reached his hand under the right two straps until – success! - they could touch at last, cutting off my airway only a little.Then, because I’m routinely forced by the older tyke into making Stalinist-style confessions on the theme of Naughty Things I Did as a Child with an emphasis on Acts of Peeing in Strange Locations, I was thinking hard for the full 120 minutes - during which time the littler child gently patted me on shoulder, arm and torso with hands painted in the fresh juice of the berries I had been foolish enough to pack for the journey. Then, as I struggled to free-associate, pulling forth this and that bright scrap from the costume trunk of memory, my chief listener, now riveted by my talk, dreamily pulled the UPC labels from the small toys I had also brought along, affixing them to various places on my body.‘Who’s the old lady in the stickers?”  I told him people would say when we got to our destination and they saw my many bar codes. I was  wrong though. When we got there and I toppled from the car so  red-skinned with touching and berry-mash that I looked like I had been molested by angry seagulls what they really said was ....“Who's the slasher victim and why is she on sale?”++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++The painter:The collage artist:

From Toes to Bustline and Beyo-o-o-o-nd!

Pity us over 50s:  we have these little spider webs around our anklebones that make us look like bad gremlins have been gnawing on us.  I know this. I worked as a massage therapist for six years. I saw a lot of feet. I also know the cosmetics industry is poised to offer us makeup for all parts of our bodies which sounds GOOD TO ME. Look as good today as you’ll look in your casket! Makeup so richly hued you’ll be mistaken for a Hollywood star! So full-bodied even your 3-D moles won't show! So cleverly made that yes, even the Milky Way of your exploded blood vessels will be safely hidden from view!The heck with these youngsters who think they don’t need pantyhose. All winter they go about with bare legs and wonder why they’re cold. and they probably think they look prett-ee fine with the tanned legs in the summer but hey,:They don’t get the kind of tans WE used to get, no-siree Bob. Baby Oil I'm talkin', with Tincture of Iodine to give us that real Oven Stuffer Roaster look! Baby Oil, and a sheet of tinfoil to reflect those rays upward to the face and chest – which may be why we have now have these curtains of pleats running along our chests and upper lips.So hmmm come to think of it when will they give us aging Boomer women what we really need?  Hosiery for ALL the body-parts, starting at the hairline and going right clear down to the toes!

(at least we'll always have scarves!)

Rainy Day Fun?

A rainy day like this reminds me of the spring I was ten, when, visiting our super-fun cousins in upstate New York, five of us came whining into the house to say we had nothing to do - at which point our extra-super-fun Uncle David smiled big and shouted “Why not go out in the yard and hang yourselves?”Everyone loved Uncle David and especially his first cousin, my mom, who the world called Cal. While nervously working her way toward his casket in 1987, she suddenly exclaimed in real pain “He was my first friend!"They were the same age, younger kids in their respective families of pushy older sibs. ‘Cal’ was shy, and naughty in secret ways (winging a rotten strawberry at the stately fanny of a passing matron) while her pal was publicly naughty (telling us all when they were both in their mid 70s how he used to get her to join him in peeing behind the ice house.)Here’s a picture of their idea of rainy day fun anyway. Mom is the one on the right who looks like she’s just come from being punished, a pretty good bet. And Uncle Dave? The guy in the hood, of course, who went on to vaudeville and Hollywood, family life and years and years and years of community theatre.

Felt Up

Kid walkin’ down the street, mindin’ own business 15 maybe 16 years old. Lone cop in squad car activates flashers, screeches in front of oncoming early afternoon traffic, rockets up ONTO sidewalk to accost him. Kid looks stunned, offers his best here-comes-a-grownup-what-now smile. Cop utters unintelligible commands. Kid produces papers of identification. Cop reaches up, pats him down: on both breasts,  arms, waist,  thighs, flanks. 30 seconds later boy is walking again in my direction, tucking away his papers and trying to look nonchalant as cop zooms manfully back into own lane, dousing the big blue flashers.

Another victory for public safety… or  not?

Long Time Passing

Rain again jeesh. I'm sitting here watching a ladybug trundle around in the vase of peonies I brought in quick before they get all slashed and flattened by the downpour. Thinkin' back to a week ago when Annie got that diploma under the very same trees I once stood under myself, clapping  for the boy who would one day be her father. Ah the years do compresses themselves at times, like those novelty sponges that are flat as pancakes 'til you plunge them in water.... All these guys look young and fresh and adorable but it's the half-glimpsed one with the dimples who caught my heart and kept it.

Where Have All the Flower (Children) Gone?

I Pahked the Cah in Hahvahd Yahd

I went to Harvard's Commencement exercises last week to see my girl Annie get her Master’s and was amazed to find myself steeped in the same resentments I feel every time I step into that famous Yard.First I think about how when I was applying to colleges they didn’t take my kind at the Ivies - meaning women. I remember looking at my future husband’s  Freshman Classbook from this place and thinking “I must be as smart as at least some of these jokers, yet I couldn’t even apply here!”Then I think about the snooty guys who turned away Uncle Ed 60 years ago when he applied to the Medical School, he an Armenian-American, small  and ‘swarthy,’ a code word for  ‘not of our pure northern races.’  They rejected him and when he asked for an appointment to find out why, the man across the desk lifted an eyebrow and said “Tell me,  Mr. Haidostian, where did your father go to college?” His father, a man born in the 1880s when even here in the States the average young man never even finished high school!“My father is a graduate of the University of Tarsus,” said Uncle Ed simply. "In Asia Minor,” he added when the guy seemed unable to answer, and maybe he really was speechless but it  didn’t get  Uncle Ed any closer to his dream of being a doctor.So when I first walked into that Yard last Thursday all I could think of was grievance.And then I looked around – and saw among the graduates and family members as many people of color as you would  see in any of our larger cities.Of those accepted into this class of ’09, as I have since read. a record 10.5 percent were African American, 17.8 percent were Asian American, 8.2 percent were Latino, and slightly more than 1 percent was Native American. And fully two-thirds of them received some form of financial aid, with an average total student aid package approaching $30,000.So I ponder all this. And then I remember something else too: My own husband, a Harvard grad himself, is the son of a man whose father was a tailor from a little village north of Naples. My youngest child, a very recent Harvard graduate, is, on his mother's side, the great-grandchild and namesake of  a man who grew up dirt-poor on a farm with a mother able to read and write in Gaelic only, but who yet became a lawyer AND a judge AND such a tireless worker for the public good that fancy-pants Harvard itself once gave him an honorary degree.So let me chose thanks over resentment here, because don’t we all believe that here in America the best can rise and rise?Anyway Annie rose, she who once thought she was the dumb one and her sister Carrie the smart one. Phi Beta Kappa in college Annie, you whose infinitesimal penciled numbers used to float like wee party balloons to the tops of all your math papers, making your primary school teachers cry Eyestrain!  and also Intervention!  Master of Arts, Annie Marotta, and isn’t your sister Carrie as proud as she can be of you, even as you pull her hair here in this picture?We are all proud of our graduates and humbly remember why our own parents sent us to school when it was our time as the young ones. They sent us to make things better. They sent us to learn to serve.

Flyin'!

We had a party in our back yard on the weekend. I’m not over it yet.There were three of us in this neighborhood with landmark birthdays, so we put our heads together, rented a tent, called the barbecue wizards at Redbones and laid in some hooch.It poured the morning of the party and the temps couldn’t seem to climb out of the 50s so we quick called the tent guys and added heat.180 people showed up dressed for the weather but it was still freezing those first few hours; all the heat seemed to do was roast the caterers’ ankles. Then the DJ cranked the sound and the part took off.  We asked 200 people and darned if most of them didn’t come.The grass out back is still flat as a pancake and burned in places , just like the caterers' ankles. The guests though? Those guests were HAPPY!

Breakin' Our Hearts

Our nice old boy-cat Abe went missing again yesterday, and came home 20 hours later hot and listless and refusing all food and water. I kept him in our room last night, something I never do because generally he’s all over me, telling me in a thousand pink-tongued ways how much he likes me.Not last night. Last night he stared straight into the darkness like a man bracing himself for the worst. And so this morning I brought him to the vet who has him still. An hour ago his staff called to say that he's full of bacteria with two ear infections and a UTI and the last time he had the latter they cut off his penis so Gad what’s next? I am wondering.Abe and his sister Charlotte came into this house as the big present our kids gave us for our 25th anniversary. Here below is the story of that day, from way back in the days we were all a lot younger and death and illness seemed a million miles away:++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++When the plush velvety cat we all doted on was killed by a car, we almost felt we couldn’t get another one. What if the next one were killed too? How could we bear another such loss?The kids, of course, wanted a new cat immediately. In fact, they wanted two, and campaigned unremittingly for them. We put them off.“The house is so out of control!” we said. “Just let us get a little organized! Let me try to prioritize things for once and see if we can’t first sit down for meals together, without someone always standing at the sink like a stranger wolfing food at a hot dog stand.”But still they wheedled. Until quite suddenly - almost overnight - they stopped.Our anniversary was approaching and they began dropping the kind of hints that suggested they were planning something big.What did they have in mind? A pool table in the basement? A 30-foot trampoline in the yard? It wasn’t until the actual anniversary that we found out, as the two of us approached the supper table, after an especially psyche-shredding day.“Sit down, sit down!” cried the younger two excitedly. “OK, close your eyes and hold out your hands!”The two little cats were fresh from a shelter so meticulous they had had to bring with them not only an in-the-flesh adult relative, but actual documents proving we owned our home and were therefore free to take on the care of two tiny apostrophes of fur. Dave and I just looked at each other over the heads of the softly treading creatures in our laps.And so it was that instead of achieving an orderly household, or even dwelling on such a concept, we have spent the weary tag-end of this long long winter raising up a couple of newborns: Abe, the exact shade of pussywillows in March, and his sister Charlotte, all black and weighing not much more than your average candy bar.They were so small trying to climb our big stairs, they looked like a couple of Slinkies, tumbling up instead of down. They ate too fast and got sick and harbored various little hosts of the mite-and-worm sort. But under our good vet’s care, they have grown to be clean as whistles and today eat with table manners nicer than ours. Having had their Leukemia, Rabies and General Plague shots, they now begin to taste the pleasures of a delicate tails-up stroll in the dews of morning.And sure, one keeps sneaking into our room nights to sit on my head and scrabble wildly in my hair for 10 minutes, before falling asleep and waking to do it again so that not even our bed is organized. Yet I am content with my graying groom and my babies both old and new. Now I just close my eyes nights and pretend I am at the beauty shop - and that new girl, Charlotte, is doing Shampoos. Charlotte in her baby days

Screw the Baby-Jogger!

Sorry about that last All-About-Me post. I’ll be returning periodically to the none-too-fascinating tale of my diet again I’m sure but for now but for now how about a little captioning contest like they have at the back of the New Yorker every week where you get to decide what the characters in the cartoon are saying to each other? strong>What would YOU call this spontaneous creation by the man on the left? All I can dream up is "Screw the baby jogger I’m takin’ the bus”  but I’m not good at this kind of thing. If not a name how about a What’s Happening in This Picture suggestion? One thing’s for sure: the little man on the right is pretty riveted!

Hello. Can I Bite Your Head?

Back on the diet. All it took was going up four pants sizes in 18 months. Oh and having a doctor say my stomach would never again be flat (you childbearing sow you) unless I had a hair-raising procedure whose recuperation involves not just the wearing of a corset with the squeeze-powers of a boa constrictor but also actual drains dangling down like a lady’s garters in the Naughty But Nice catalogs. S-o-o-o-o-o back on the diet.Now I’ve been going to Weight Watchers off and on for centuries but never did write down what I ate. Big mistake, as it seems the only way to lose the weight it is to make a full confession every day of every single thing that has passed your lips.Last Wednesday was my first day and I did great. Ate an almond; recorded it. Ate 4 tablespoons of powdered milk; recorded it. Drank the juice squeezed out of this morning’s half grapefruit: recorded that. I‘ve eaten 10,000 green beans in six days’ time because Glory Hallelujah green beans have no points at all.I was doing great for a while there. Then I went to the celebration of our grandbaby’s birthday party for which his cheery Aunt Annie made a cake shaped like a monkey’s head with jug ears and a big smiley mouth and Junior Mints for eyes. She said she was going to serve it on a platter like the head of John the Baptist and sure enough: she did.“What kind of cake IS this Annie?” I moaned, tasting a tiny morsel and drooling down my chin. “Banana, get it?" she said. "With my special chocolate frosting of course.”When she graduated from Boston’s best culinary school a few years after college she won the Julia Child Award which she claims is like being named Miss Congeniality but come on: Julia Child is Julia Child. Suffice to say I had three giant pieces and had to use the next FIVE DAYS in the Weight Watcher food diary to list all my points.But I’m hungry again now and frankly I’m turning a little mean. The diary has a place where you’re supposed to record Other Victories This Week I wrote “I didn’t kill anyone - yet” but tell ya what I make no promises.