Sneeze. Now Faint. Illumination!

Another holiday, bah. Bookstores jammed, malls jammed, people lined up out the door to get their fix at Starbucks, which is to coffee what unfiltered Camels are to cigarettes... Whoever said Hell is other people was talkin' my language yesterday. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after seeing that mother-daughter combo brought on the Today Show because the daughter sneezes ten times a minute.I felt bad for the mom because as nice as Ann Curry was, leaning forward to coax out the story, the house “expert,”  Dr. Nancy Snyderman, was pretty harsh saying (a) what kind of a sneeze is THAT, it doesn’t even involve the nose; (b) could be a tic of some sort like people get with Tourette’s and (c) could be Munchausen’s and your kid just craves attention. I thought the mum looked at old Doc Snyderman like she wanted to BITE this chief medical editor but I could be wrong. It’s just that she and her 12-year-old seemed so sensible and calm, you could tell it wasn’t THEIR idea to be on national television. Then here's the Today Show trying to justify it all with an appeal to the public: "Do YOU know why Lauren is sneezing? Send your cards and letters etc. As if any of us dummies know anything. but it does bring up an old memory: Back in the 50s there was this rumor that the Pope couldn’t stop sneezing. I was just a little kid but it made a big impression on me. Also, how about the news that he finally read the letter the Virgin Mary dictated through the Fatima kids that no one was allowed to open until then and when he finally did he  fainted dead away? So what did it say, did anyone tell us kids? No one told my sister and me who finally just shrugged, forgot, and went back to sticking Mr. Potato Head body parts into all the apples.Here's the poor child now: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jqIaRN1urg]

shit that im interested in

I wrote a Happy Birthday Terry Sheehy card to myself back last winter, Terry Sheehy being who I was before marriage hunted me down and took my name, my youth, my thick black hair boo hoo.As I sat down to write that post I thought I’d Google my old name and see if there were any other Terry Sheehys out there who HADN’T experienced Death by Matrimony and sure enough: Terry Sheehy is also a boy from Ireland. I quoted all the lovely nonsense he posted on his My Space page and now suddenly just now the boy's dad has written to me to say how very interesting it was for his son to find his face on my blog and also to assure me that the lad’s spelling had improved a bit since he wrote what he wrote. If you don’t care to click and read that old post from my birthday month I can quote what he wrote on his profile page.

Hay my name is terry sheehy and im 17 going out with susan browne i love u susan !… i like to 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 just leve a coment and ill comment u back. i like action films and films that kinda do with shit that im interested in and also comedy and going to the cinema

So hmmm... It looks like words really can last and last, and circle the planet too. And wasn’t Terry’s his dad gracious? ”PS: You should have kept your name,” he even added in wry good humor at the end of his email, but ah Mr. Sheehy it's just as well. I’ve been Terry Marotta for nigh on to 40 years and have lived into that person. Let the lad have my old name, this handsome lad from Ireland posting a a quick note to the world before jumping into his PJ’s and sleeping the clean blank sleep of the young.

In Memoriam

It was bright and sunny three hours ago when my husband David’s Uncle Ed said he wanted to go to the cemetery where his wife Fran lies. He just had to see the grave he said, tired as he was from our trip to the dentist, but for some reason we just couldn't find it, in spite of my sprinting down the grassy lanes like some kind of loony Irish setter.Uncle Ed is 89 and can’t walk on smooth surfaces never mind rough ones so I left him in the car as I did this; but it must have irked him that I kept coming up empty because at one point I looked back from some 100 yards away and there he was, handing himself tentatively along between the monuments.The thing is, Auntie Fran is buried right next to the grave I still think of as David’s father’s grave though his mother Ruth is there now too. Ralph Marotta sickened in his early 40s and was gone by 45 when his second son was a carefree 12 and the next brothers down were only nine and six. Ruth never told any of her four boys that their father was dying - those were different days, is all - and only big brother Toby, 15, seemed to understand. He  remembers him leaving for his final trip to the hospital; he remembers going to sit in his lap and kiss him goodbye.There’s more to this story, which I can tell on another such brilliant day that all too soon goes down to darkness but for now I will only say How we miss them: Pretty Aunt Fran seen here on her wedding night pointing mischievously to the bed. Meek-seeming Ruth Payne Marotta who was secretly made of steel and didn’t care what anyone thought. She modeled such great courage for me, a daughter-in-law scarce out of her teens.With his extra weight and congestive heart failure Uncle Ed knows well that he will soon be here himself. Maybe he just wanted to be sure that on future days I would know just where to find him.Go back now through these lines  and click on every word that's a different color, 'lit up' in hypertext and see their pictures up close: Uncle Ed with little David long ago, and Fran, and Ruth when all were young and the world was new and the grass was ever greening.

Human Rem(a)inders

And now it’s MIDNIGHT on Halloween! Click here for real human bones. This little man in the picture lives - well where else? - under my bed. I bought him when I was working as a massage therapist. He’s actually what they call a 'disarticulated skeleton' which means his parts come all separate and you get the fun of studying them and holding them in your hand.  When I get to doubting that there’s a plan in this here universe I take this guy out and study him. Look at the perfect ball that is the rounded part of his thighbone up top here! Yesterday in exercise class, a woman protested the 100th leg lift. “I have a great big titanium ROD in my leg! Have mercy!” she said.Well God didn’t use no titanium. God used calcium carbonate for the bones of the babies S/HE made. They're lightweight, affordable, and come in nice designer shades of cream and ivory, and THEN S/he went and installed these amazing little blood-production factories in ‘em. So don’t talk to me about the power of Evil. Anyone can kick a thing down but only love and attention to detail can make it!

What's That Coming?

Boo! Ha ha, WATCH OUT!  What was THAT?Dark things on the prowl tonight! Prey or be preyed on!

Plus.... Here comes the WIND! The whole thing puts me in mind of that other Robert Frost poem. Here it is:

"Once by the Pacific" (but you guys on the Atlantic aren't safe either!)

(scary underlinings mine)

The shattered water made a misty din.Great waves looked over others coming in,And thought of doing something to the shoreThat water never did to land before.

The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.You could not tell, and yet it looked as ifThe shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,The cliff in being backed by continent;

It looked as if a night of dark intentWas coming, and not only a night, an age.Someone had better be prepared for rage.

There would be more than ocean-water brokenBefore God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

Euthanizing the Weak?

Last week I wrote a column where I maybe came off like the Mother Teresa of house plants, like I've never thrown away a pot of sickly violets in my life. The truth is, my mate says he’s afraid to get sick around here for fear he too will get carted to the dump. So OK at one point in my life I did throw sick plants away, but it was years ago when I first started following the teachings of Thalassa Cruso, here pictured, who out and out recommended such measures: “Your gardenia will only disappoint past their bloomtime,” she'd say. “Treat the plant as cut flowers and toss it.”So I did toss my gardenia plant, and other plants too. But now I can’t throw anything alive away. These days my sick houseplants come to what I call the ‘infirmary,’ which is any place in the house I walk by often, so I can see them and tend to them.Last week all 30 plants came in from the porch for the winter. Two of the palms have spider mites and the gardenia plant, which by the way is is almost three years old and blossoms every spring is experiencing 'leaf drop' as it pines for the humid outdoors.  I'm keeping it in the bathroom where I see it five times a day. As for the palms, they're right here in the kitchen until I can take soap and water to every last inch of each little frond. Who knows though? They make the place look pretty cool right? Maybe they’ll stay here til spring! Anyway here are the sick palms as they look today just waiting for me and some Thursday night TV! (just out of sight to the left)

What Dressing Rooms?

I’m not done with the topic of fashion quite yet. Forget that whole post about the fashionistas, let’s talk Real World. My Real World truth is this:  I don’t care how popular Mad Men is, I don’t want to dress the way women they did in the early 60s. I did it once and the results weren’t pretty. That’s my mom on the left. That’s me beside her in the Porky Pig hat, I know, say no more, right? I wasn’t set free until the day came when I could  choose my own clothes and ride all the way to Boston on the train to do it, landing – where else? at Filene’s Basement where females dug fast as foxhounds through bins of newly discounted apparel and changed outfits right out there in the open.Filenes Basement closed in the summer of ’07, that wonderful get-it-for-a-song store in the bowels of its 1910 Boston building and for years as much of a tourist destination as the Paul Revere House over in the North End, as familiar to visitors as the Cheers bar just across the Common. I wasn’t much more than three the first time Mom took us there on a mission to buy her two little girls the ensemble that was the ‘look’ for all little girls in that far more formal era: a knee-length wool  coat, leggings to match and a little beaked hat. I remember we met Mom’s old friend and her two little boys at the Public Garden after, had a ride on the famous Swan Boats, had ice cream sundaes at Schrafft’s, then went to this woman’s apartment where the three-year-old peed on my leg, using this funny little faucet he pulled down his tiny trousers to find. It was my introduction to the difference between the sexes, the great engine that drives our small and weak species to keep on keepin’ on.Impelled by this same engine, I went back to that great den of bargains again and again in my high school years. It was there that my groom bought the suit  he wore on  our wedding day; there that that I bought the dress I wore that whole summer, a true flower- child frock which I loved with all my heart though it was so short I couldn’t sit down in it.Those were the days all right. Here’s a look-back. Watch it and weep.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joI288b2ByA&feature=related]

Glorious Gloria

Gloria Steinem has a button that says, “The Truth Will Set You Free (But First It Will Piss You Off)” which is funny because I can’t think of anyone who seems to be in less of a pissed-off state than this activist/ feminist/ lecturer/ author who spoke to a sold-out crowd of fellow Smith College alums last night at a gala celebration of her 75th birthday.

“SHE'S 75?” I said to myself when, lean and limber, she strode onto the stage at The Asia Center on the New York's Upper East Side. That thought came right before I moved on to the equally silly “Could I possibly look like that at 75? If I gave up meat AND dairy AND wheat AND possibly Thanksgiving dinner too?” But within five minutes of the time she entered into her conversation with Smith President Carol Christ I was asking myself if I could ever BE like her, be like any person who carries her gifts this lightly, and with so much humor and heart.

"Empathy is the most revolutionary of emotions" Gloria once wrote and she sure feels like a person who has lived into that insight. Not that she never gets angry. When someone asked her last night what makes her mad today, she quickly said, "The fact that women are still doing two jobs, one at work and one when they get home." And then she shared her most recent insight: “I figured out the other day that what women have are the jobs that can’t be outsourced. I mean to be a nurse you have to actually BE there, right?” But when at the end someone asked her to name the moment that had perhaps given her the most satisfaction, she described the morning she was crossing Lexington Ave. to get a bagel and a city worker popped his head up out of a manhole. "Hey GLORIA!" he yelled. "‘See that sign 'People working'? It took us FIFTEEN FUCKIN' YEARS to get it! Today my daughter is an electrician and makes as much money as I do! How great is that?’”

Pretty great, jaunty man. Pretty great, you Gloria of ours. Thank God for your 75 years here and may you get your wish and still be with us at 100.

The I'm OK You're Crazy Plan

"Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” an old vaudevillian once said but not to me it isn’t.  I’ve been making people laugh since I was four years old and first began doing my imitation of the old faster-than-a-speeding-bullet Superman prologue, which I’d rattle off in tights and bunchy underpants, a dishtowel around my neck for a cape.No, to my mind, it’s not hard to make people laugh, provided you don’t mind sacrificing your dignity. If you ask ME for an epigram depicting one true thing, I’d say this: “Comedy is easy. Therapy is hard” and I found out just how hard when I enrolled in counseling under the “I’m OK, You’re Crazy” plan, maybe you’re familiar with it?Doing therapy under the “I’m OK, You’re Crazy” plan occurs when someone you live with suggests you get counseling, although he personally wouldn’t open up in a therapist’s office if you dragged him there in chains and threatened to pull out all his nose hairs.To be plain, my husband, whose nose-hairs I have occasionally eyed, said he thought I should seek treatment. Because I seemed sad, he said.“Hey, all humorists are sad down deep,” I retorted, though I knew he was right; I was sad. Not long before, my mom had died, and I guess I felt too young to face life without her. Plus, she didn’t just die. She died in my living room. During her own birthday party. Within 20 minutes of when I offered the toast by reading a letter which her dad had written her when she was off in college, her own mom newly dead, and she homesick, grief-struck, eating too much chocolate and failing History. My reading it aloud these 60 years later made my steely mom cry, who never, ever, cried - something which I then somehow concluded brought on her death.So, yes I was sad, if not plumb crazy. And I began seeing this counselor to try feeling better.Every week I drove to her office, all unwilling. Every week she asked me how I was. I could only tell her how everyone else was. I told her a million stories, most of them funn. I entertained the daylights out of us both, but I wasn’t getting at the problem, and I think we both knew that, and so, after 18 months, I quit.And 12 years passed, and I was funnier than ever, still in full flight from every kind of sadness that had ever come my way. Then, one day, my oldest friend called to say she was doing counseling -  over the phone of all things - with a gifted therapist in Colorado, who was at first reluctant to work with someone in such an unorthodox manner.“But it’s helping!” my friend said, and one day added, “and you know you should do it too.”And so? And so I am doing it, though God knows it isn’t easy. I can’t seem to sit still as I talk to this faraway therapist. But because we’re on the phone, she doesn’t know this. Sometimes I scrub toilets while we talk. Sometimes I strip small pieces of furniture. nOnce though, she got wise to me. “Are you DRIVING?!” she said. I was driving all right.But I am doing it, as I wish my mom could have done it, to ease her own aching heart.I’ll say it again and you can take it from this old vaudevillian: Comedy really is easy by comparison; and therapy is very, very hard.

Sensitive Wallpaper

(This is the ivy at my window today.....)So what if I just SAID HOW I FELT here every day and added yet another layer of sensitive wallpaper to the walls of this Enormous Room the Internet. Sensitive wallpaper: that’s what Garrison Keillor calls personal narrative of the kind everybody’s writing these days, me on my post-nasal drip, you on the heartbreak of psoriasis, me on my inability to kick prescription laughing-gas, you on how you’re stuck in traffic and OK yes my two examples are fictional.  My faucets are all that drip but they drip all the time - we finally had to install a cat under each one because in this house the cats drink right from the faucets babe - come on over for supper, we’re running a special on bacteria! – so no, no nasal drip really, and who needs laughing gas when life is funny enough in a world where you can come down to breakfast one morning, reach for your vitamins, quick lift the bottle to your mouth to shake one loose and find a tiny BAT snoozing inside the thing, all folded up neat as Jiminy Cricket’s umbrella.That happened to me once.  And here’s what happened yesterday:I drove six hours so Uncle Ed, on the lip of his 90^th year, could see the full-on New Hampshire-in-autumn foliage maybe for the last time. His body is aflame with the pain of arthritis and I have some sort of freshly revealed case of scoliosis that has my own little skeleton starting to sink and torque downward like the Wicked Witch of the West in her big meting scene. End result: this morning we’re both pretty sore but it was worth it because we saw those leaves. And because they made me remember the poem Robert Frost wrote about this season.  Read it and just see if it doesn’t express what we’re all feeling right now here in these northern latitudes. It’s called “October” and it’s from The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. 1916:O hushed October morning mild,Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,Should waste them all.The crows above the forest call;Tomorrow they may form and go.O hushed October morning mild,Begin the hours of this day slow.Make the day seem to us less brief.Hearts not averse to being beguiled,Beguile us in the way you know.Release one leaf at break of day;At noon release another leaf;One from our trees, one far away.Retard the sun with gentle mist;Enchant the land with amethyst.Slow, slow!For the grapes' sake, if they were all,Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--For the grapes' sake along the wall.

I Wouldn't Trade

Just so you know, that sailing trip I took last week wasn’t some lazybones cruise where you’re always waddling to the midnight chocolate buffet. It was a lean mean expedition where the rules were all about having the smallest possible impact on our poor little planet.  Example One: right from the start you were told straight up how UNCOOL it would be to wander around your little stateroom brushing your teeth and looking for your underpants with the water in the sink even on 'trickle'. Example Two: you couldn’t flush your toilet paper ever, which is evidently the norm in many parts of Europe.  In fact sometimes all they have are ‘Turkish toilets,’ plain old holes in the ground over which you have to stand to relieve yourself, which can make you feel pret-ty peeved if you’re among the unlucky half of the human race NOT equipped with one of those dandy retractable gadgets the other half is so vain about.Here’s some comfort though: On a morning’s trek through the ragged terrain of one Greek isle, the expedition’s botanist pointed out the female of the cochineal bug, which (a) lives on the prickly pear cactus, (b) secretes white fuzzy stuff  and (c) when squashed, yields up the deep red-dye that was first used by the Aztecs but after the arrival of those pesky Conquistadors became All The Rage back in the Old World too.But it wasn’t until we were back  on the ship eating lunch with this same botanist that I learned the best part: the male of this species lives so very briefly - only long enough to get the female pregnant - that God didn’t even give him a mouth. So BOTTOMS UP and pass the popcorn, girls! Turns out there are compensation after all!

(some critters really don't have mouths!)

Also: to see what these little kids at the top are saying click here

Beauty and the Beast?

Vogue Editor Anna Wintour, left, is the very picture of fashion, yet in the film about that magazine, The September Issue, the audience groans every time she extends a well-polished talon and slices into some poor designer. In the movie theatre I was in anyway they gave their hearts instead to her second-in-command  Grace Coddington who is the film's real beauty.Coddington was  breathtaking in her younger days, before her 20 years at American Vogue and her 20 years at British Vogue - during the 1960s in other words when she herself worked as fashion model – until a car accident so twisted her face that even now after many surgeries she has a sort sewn-together, around the left eye especially.Anyone can see that she makes no effort to follow in Anna’s footsteps in that she doesn’t seem to “try.” Tall as she is, and reasonably trim, she makes no effort at looking fashionable. Her hair is wild and she has no eyebrows. She wears no makeup, her clothes are baggy and her shoes look like Susan B. Anthony’s –  yet the audience loves her because she seems so kind, and real.Think what this may mean as you click on the trailer here and ask yourself: Are we choosing the inner kind of beauty over the outer kind at long last? Is that great baby Western culture finally learning to stand up in its playpen? Stay tuned!  And when you get the chance go see The September Issue at a theatre near you.This is Grace Coddington young: Grace today, all kindness and humor:

Where Going?

Our guide warned us the minute we began picking our way among the rubble on the ancient isle of Delos: we could Look Where We were GOING or we could Look Where We WERE, lest we stumble - ‘bite the dust,’ as Homer said to describe what happens in battle. (Picture it: crying out in anguish as the solider falls and sees his mouth suddenly stuffed full with the muck undefoot.)For the hour I spent in Delos's museum I did only the Look Where You ARE Thing, living fully in the present as I gazed at this statue and the curve of its supple back. Like most moderns I spend much of my time Looking Where I'm GOING Thing, thinking “What next?” and “After that?” and “If the rain falls?”, “If I miss the train?” If I lose my job?”If I’m honest though I’ll admit I spend most of my time Looking Back. Where is my mother who I think of every day, even these 22 years after her death? Where are the kitchens of my childhood, my baby feet in my naps as I so clearly remember seeing them? Where are they now? Where is this young person caught in stone? This couple of the exquisite garments? Where ? Where ?

Touring Greece, or, Dept. of Whoopsixonassis

My mom had an old flame who, on meeting her 40 years later, told her she looked like Greek ruins in the moonlight. Finally, I’m getting what he meant.I’m IN ruins and this IS Greece and that old moon’s been shining so much I think it’s on the payroll of the Bureau of Tourism -  the Bureau of Whoopsixxonassis, to say it in Greek or some approximation of that. (I'm not doing too well with my street-Greek. I tried to order  fresh-squeezed orange juice and the kid behind the counter thought I wanted to buy the whole machine. “Ah too many moneys!” he sang joyfully. “Four, five hunderd Euros!”)I say I’m in ruins but really I’m just vacationing. At first I thought I’d keep mum about my travel plans because what if news of my absence fell into the wrong hands allowing thieves to break into my house and steal the Queen size, Suntan, Sheer-from Tummy-to-Toe pantyhose that all the cool gals in my demographic favor? But then handy family members offered to move in so I can be honest:  together with Old Dave and a couple we’ve been vacationing with since the days  we thought nothing of packing whole duffel bags filled with crib bumpers and  potty chairs.I’ve been in Athens since Monday morning in other words and now I’m bobbing like a happy cork just off the coast of Mykonos.Speaking of real Greek ruins in the moonlight we could see the Acropolis from our rented treetop apartment from which by night it looked rosy and romantic. But hiking up there and seeing all those tumbled Tootsie Roll parts and those friezes in the museum full of lions with Halloween-style creepy-teeth taking bites out of these poor guy’s backs just made me sad. All that beauty and might crumbled to dust in spite of the fact that here were the only people God ever made who look good in pleats! It broke my heart.To comfort myself that night I ironed everything in my suitcase and, as a kindness to our future shipmates, washed a few things using our little rental unit’s designated appliances. The only problem: the drier didn’t quite do the job even after 120 minutes in. Well a girl’s gossamer panties dry in the blink of an eye but poor Dave: off we went to the ship with four suitcases two carry-ons and one plastic bag filled with ten sodden pounds of extra-large Ts, tube socks and tightie-whities. As the Classical folks would say, Excelsior!  Onward and Upward!

This Just In: Brute Force Ultimately Ineffective

Where Western Civilization Went Wrong Part One. This from a guidebook on Ancient Greece:"Rising to prominence around 700 BC, Sparta became one of the most powerful city states in Ancient Greece where the male citizens lived communally in constant readiness for war. Warriors were selected at the age of seven and subjected to rigorous training: whipping contests with young boys as the victims. Sparta was able to support its citizens as professional soldiers because it had conquered neighboring Messenia, and its enslaved population provided all the food required. "Ah and it could have worked so beautifully! All that cheap slave labor! All the fun of warping tender young natures!  Alas"Its power was based on rigid social and military discipline as well as hatred of foreigners which eventually led to its downfall since it had no allies."Translation One: Everybody hated them. Everybody always hates bullies and wounders of children, however much they also fear them.Translation Two: Our man from Nazareth said it: Live by the sword, die by the sword.Translation Three: If  we women could have run things from the get-go we’d all be a lot better off even now. :-)

Girl! Get Me That Chicken!

Monday noontimes at the nursing home I got to feed Auntie Fran and as I waited for her to open her mouth, and chew, and swallow if she felt like swallowing that day, I’d watch what went on around us.Mostly I watched Edna, tall and big-boned, with wispy hair.“Girl! What time is it, girl?” she asked me once. “That poor soul,” she added, indicating another with a nod of her head. "She’s touched, you know!” I really liked Edna. “I’m going out for a smoke, where’s my purse?” she would say, just as if she could leave that locked Alzheimer unit, just walk on out whenever she liked. She carried that small black purse with her everywhere. Once I saw her bring it to the dining room and put it in the trash. Later in the meal she became agitated."Where’s my tea?“ she kept saying.“Right here,” said the nurse’s aide.“No! My TEA! ” she exclaimed, looking now under the table.“Is this it?” I asked, going to the trash and fetching forth her purse. “Yes!”Later, she spilled her actual tea and saw the erratic shape the spill made on the tiles. “Girl!” She hailed me. “There’s a chicken on the floor here!”In time, Edna fell permanently quiet, as sooner or later they all fell quiet on this ward.She was 98  by the time she died and to tell teh truth she was almost  bald. The wisps didn’t look like they had ever grown on her actual scalp. She had that big old dress like the oldest of my old people: two ancient great aunties born in the 1860s. She had that salty way of theirs too, and when  she finally died I cut out her obituary and carried it in my wallet til smudged into illegibility and came apart like kleenex.

Living Proof

Bryan just added a comment to what I wrote about him a few days ago but since it's sort of too 'buried' under all the other comments I'm going to put it up here too, as a posting.Again this is my former student and valued friend who in my book came back from the dead, thanks to the 12 Steps and the daily discipline of self reflection and self scrutiny:

Hi Terry: I'm writing in response to the story you printed about the way God led me to 'randomly' meet someone I had needed to make amends to for a long time. As heady and intoxicating to my ego having the story printed was, there were other more important lessons learned here, for me.The story didn't end there, at Bentley's, in that line, behind that guy, that day: Paul and I met two days later in my office. I was able to apologize for my behavior, after all those years. We agreed on a dollar figure for the car, $3,500, and I wrote him a check for $1,000, agreeing to pay the rest in monthly installments.I encountered fear again before writing the check. I had had a couple of customers, earlier that month, not pay me what they owed me. My initial thoughts were to use that as an excuse to either not pay Paul or to give him a much smaller check. But, that fear was quickly removed too and I made a "good demonstration" giving him nearly 1/3 of the amount we had agreed on. I was amazed that as I handed him the check, that all the financial fear was gone.Then I asked Paul for his mailing address, so I could send monthly installments, and he said " No. Why would you want to mail me the checks, when we could just see each other once in a while and you could give me the installments in person".Again, I was dumbfounded. I asked him " Why would you want to see me once in a while, instead of getting the checks in the mail?"He said, " Because you're a good guy. Why wouldn't I want to see you?"I still didn't fully understand. Why would anyone I had treated so poorly ever want to see me again?We've been out riding twice since that weekend. And I got a call from him today to come and look at some houses he's building, to give him  quotes for installing the heat and air conditioning, which, as you know, is what I do.Paul's reaction to me throughout this whole thing has amazed me. I expected nothing but bitterness and anger, but he's been just the opposite. I have a couple of resentments towards a few people I feel owe me amends from the past. I wonder if I would greet these people with the same compassion, dignity, and willingness to forgive that Paul has demonstrated towards me?AA's Big Book teaches us how to make an amend, but Paul has shown me how to receive one and forgive the person making it. If someone came to me to make an ammend, I hope I can behave as Paul has towards me.There were just so many lessons  to learn, all around this thing.I read some of the comments people wrote after reading your article and I was truly touched. It seems a lot of people were affected by this story.I'm just a schmuck who made an amend and told you about it. Then, you told hundreds if not thousands of people by printing it in your article.Judging by the reactions of those who responded, so many more people were affected by this than just Paul, you, or myself.There's a line in a Bruce Springsteen song titled " Living Proof". Bruce sings " I was looking for a little bit of God's mercy and I found living proof."Now, so have I, so has Paul, so have you, and so have your readers.And we've all been changed, by this, just a little bit.Living Proof.Love, Bryan (as he looks today)

Cryin'

Make of this what you will: Once, way, way back I was perusing the produce  at the grocery store and came upon a vegetable I did not recognize.“What’s this funny-looking stuff?” I asked an older man who put on such a mad face I felt like his kid coming home with a disappointing report card. “They’re beets!” he snapped. “What, you never saw beets before?”Then he hurried  away in case such stupidity might be catching.“Oh! I… I… I.. just didn’t know,” I called after him. “I guess we always had beets in a can! I‘m sorry!” Then – maybe he could tell he had me near tears  – he came back over and stood right beside me. “It’s OK,” he said with a whole different demeanor. “You have to ask in life. How else will you learn? You ask! It’s fine. It’s good, really.”So that was a nice grocery store exchange. I had the other kind yesterday when I was trying to check out:“Could you please separate out the perishables? “ I said to the kid who was bagging.“Whaaaat?” the kid said, looking past me and smiling an idiot’s smile at another employee.“Could put the refrigerator items- "  but he cut me off:  "Uh, dude: I know what perishables are.”“Sorry! But.... then why did you say ‘What?’“Whaaaat?”“You did it again!”“Oh. uhhh. well I always say What.""Well you’d best break yourself of THAT habit or people are going to be mad at you your whole life.”“NO ONE WILL BE MAD AT ME!” he cried, near tears himself it looked like.And all I could think walking toward my car was “Gad! Now I’m at an age where I’ve got people crying in the supermarket!” Or maybe we all get emotional there, when we look at those price tags.

Gates Unbarred

Remember that scene at the end of Pretty Woman when the Richard Gere character climbs the fire escape to the call-girl Julia Roberts character and asks her “What happens after the handsome prince rescues the princess?”“She rescues him write back!” says our Julia and the audience totally gets that because of course her smooth and deceitful Prince has been pretty lost himself.Listen to this:When I first met my friend  Bryan he was a chubby-cheeked member of the Advanced Placement English class I taught in my years at Somerville High School. Well a lot has happened in Bryan’s life since those schoolboy days: He went from Boston to Florida by way of California as the saying goes, meaning he made mistakes that even led to his being incarcerated, all because of addiction that proved as hard to cut through as the super-tough ligaments that tie the arm to the torso.Lucky for us both the 12 Steps came along. One day well into his journey toward recovery he and I did a prison ministry show called Gates Unbarred together and as I was taking him back to the Pre-Release, he told me I should go to meetings myself. He said this because he saw in me what I never saw in myself: that as a result of alcoholism in my family of origin I had terrible boundaries and exhibited the kind of ‘rescuing’ behavior that almost never helps anybody and dearly costs not only the person practicing it but those with the closet claims on that person.Today Bryan owns his own very successful business, goes to the VA a couple of times a month to talk with the guys there who are 'in program' and flat-out loves singer-songwriter Lori McKenna,  one of whose tunes caused him to have to pull over the first time he heard it on his car radio and weep tears for pain so old he did not until then know its name.Without saying more let me show you the letter he wrote me ten days ago which I have excerpted as this week’s column and which he says he is happy to have me copy here in unedited form. I titled the column “What Recovery Looks Like” but privately I think of it as “Bryan: May He Speak at My Funeral”:

Dear Terry: So how was your long weekend? Were you up north? I went to Maine on the bike all by myself to visit my Aunt Polly,  my father's sister. Stopped in York Beach to see the twins do you remember them? It was me, Ricky & Robby. Joe, Peter and Yuri all through junior high and high school. Their family has a house in York Maine and we all spent summers up there.Here's a story: In 1984 when I first started going to meetings, my first sponsor was a guy Paul. This was before I even started going to AA. We were going to Cocaine Anonymous back then. I only stayed sober a year and half that first time. Me and Paul stayed friends though. He was a good guy, a contractor, and he always helped me out.In 1988 I was really declining and I needed a car. I had totaled mine. I conned Paul into buying me a car. He bought me a brand new 1988 Ford Escort, he registered it and insured it and I was supposed to give him the payments. Since I was using at the time, I was always a month behind paying him. His car was the car I did those armed robberies in and since the car was registered to him, the police initially went to his house with guns out in front of his kids, the whole nine yards. He told them I had the car and that's when they came and got me.He took the car back, I went to jail and never saw or heard from him again.He's been on my amends list for a long time. I heard 10 yrs ago, he had moved to North Carolina.Fast forward to Saturday. I'm leaving my Aunt's house in Biddeford and I stop for gas with the bike. This couple also on a bike at the next gas pump start talking to me, asking where I'm from, was I enjoying the riding? they asked me if I'd been to this biker bar/restaurant down the road called Bentley's. I told them I hadn't. They were like “Oh, you have to go. It's wild, all the biker's go there, the food is good. Then this other guy at the next pump in a car starts telling me “Ya, you have to go there” Blah, blah, blah, blah.Now I feel like I’m in a Twilight Zone episode where I've gotten off the main road and everyone is a little "too" friendly.The other couple finally talked me into going and following them there. We pull in, I'm completely overwhelmed. There must have been 300 bikes there. Bikers, biker chicks, regular people everywhere. It's a huge place with like 4 bars. They had a mechanical bull, a big bar-b-q pit. Hundreds of people all over the place. I'm all alone, overwhelmed, in a place I had no intention of going to, brought here by two strangers I didn't know.I go get some food and I'm walking around with my plate, just taking it all in. I get in line at one of the four bars to get a coke. I'm standing in line waiting and there’s this guy in front of me with his back to me. He calls over to the bartender and I recognized his voice instantly.It was Paul. My first impulse was to walk away, but I knew I had been led to this very spot for a reason. I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around.I said 'Hi Paul.'He's looking at me not remembering me and he says 'Do I know you Friend?'I said 'Ya, you do Paul, it's Bryan.'He looked at me for a few seconds then he remembered me. He goes 'Bryan! Is that you? how are you. What happened to you? How ARE you?' I was expecting 'You piece of shit, you fucked me over and you owe me for that car.'I caught him up on my life. He caught me up on his. I noticed he was kind of buzzed and he was drinking. I got his number and told him I needed to call him when he wasn't drinking and make amends to him, including financial amends for the car.Before we parted, I told him 'Paul, you were a good guy and I took advantage of that. I just want you to know you were a good guy to me.'In the midst of all these bikers and all that was going on around us, I saw his face just crack and he started to cry. I don't think anyone had told him he was a good guy in a while. I knew exactly how that felt and how he felt.There were three gas stations at that intersection. Why did I choose that one? Why did I talk to those strangers? I never do that. Why did they talk to me, plus the guy in the car. No one ever just talks to me. I wasn't going to follow them, but I looked over and they were waiting for me.I could have just drove off. There were four bars at this place, why did I end up at that bar in that line, behind that guy?Today I drove back up to York in my car and sat down with Ricky (Robby had to leave) and I made amends to him too for not having been a better friend, for leaving the group and blaming them all these years like they had abandoned me. In reality, I abandoned them for drugs, my crazy lifestyle and being a criminal going to jail. Out of that whole crew, I'm the only one not still in the loop.My whole adult life I've felt the loss of those guys. They knew me, they really knew me. In a way that no one, since, has ever known me. Until I became someone they didn't know anymore.I blamed them for not caring enough to save me. But, how can anyone save you from yourself?I was looking at this Labor Day weekend as a sad end to a summer alone. I guess God didn't have self pity in the game plan for this weekend.  But, I started finding myself again after a very long time.There's a line in the first Lori McKenna song I ever heard called "Boston By Friday:  'I lost a lover, but found my best friend.' I've always known that the  best friend that was being referred to in that song was  me-myself.Love, Bryan

Bryan in 1984

The Sound of Their Falling

On September 11th of last year I posted a piece based on the image of people jumping from another tall building. I wrote it in 2002 with the memory fresh in my mind of that footage  by those French brothers who were hoping to make a documentary about the firehouse right there in Lower Manhattan. Of course they too ended up racing to Ground Zero and the images they captured show how dazed and helpless the firefighters look as they stand in the lobby of Tower One trying to assess the situation. Then the bodies start dropping and the elderly chaplain begins looking disoriented as well as dazed and the next thing you know he’s being carried out, dead of heart failure. I found a little of this footage on YouTube and I’ll post it below.

It was the sound of their falling that I couldn't forget - until I read that Robert Pinsky poem about the people almost a hundred years ago who also jumped to avoid the flames. That was the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire of 1911 and the dead, young women mostly, had been locked in at their machines, company policy.

Strangely enough, it comforts you to read the poem. I keep my piece about it at the top of my home page here. It used to be what I thought of whenever I thought of this awful day. Now I also think of the two people David and I knew who died there and how almost a full year later they found a credit card belonging to one and a little finger belonging to another. And I also think for all we might do wrong here in America, what other country would spend more than a year moving 16 acres of ash and rubble, then sifting, sifting, sifting and doing the careful DNA work too, all so that the families of the victims  might someday have some peace?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg8FQiJ-Rcw&feature=related]