The Hunger Moon

Nineteen degrees again today and the ground is bare and the birds are hungry. This minute-and-a-half of silence brought to you by the spirit of the word 'glean', which means to go back over land planted to grain  in search of what the reapers may have missed.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqgZrgpztlA]

What Kids See

The day before last you’d have had to tunnel under your house to feel as low as I did: The dead and the little children of the dead and babies cradled in their coffined mothers’ arms, gad!  If you missed that post it’s right here. But today, with Nature shining an  innocent sun down on us here in Boston even as She kicks the states to the south square in the pants, I feel hopeful - maybe because of this great picture I found yesterday.These are the children whose young mother died when the little one was still in her high chair. That’s Julia, in the middle there, who turned out to be about the funniest person who ever lived. And look how happy Robert and James seem. Only my mom still looks sad who was the world’s second funniest person and always said she photographed badly anyway with what she called her ‘rotten-down-turning mouth.'But look at the mischief in little Julia’s face!  And I know James 'came back' pretty quick because the Christmas after the death he gaily signed his letter to Santa, “James Sullivan, a fat six-year-old boy,”  (this in an era when it was considered safer to have some extra flesh. )So I ask you: what can children see that the rest of us can't? And how can we acquire vision like theirs?

Not Gone

On a summer morning in 1910, a young father rode the train with a heavy heart. His young wife  was two weeks dead and he could not imagine how he would comfort their four small children. At the time of her death, Carrie was at her childhood home with the babies,  which is why Michael found himself on the train each week, out from the city on Friday and back again on Monday. They were all together on the Fourth of July weekend when she took sick so suddenly and died within hours, calling their names.Now, on this Monday morning train, he was trying to write his little ones a cheerful letter which his dead wife’s sisters would have to read aloud to them young as they were. The boys were four and six and to them he wrote,  “You are such good little fellows to write your papa every night. I will be up again next weekend and we’ll play and play!” The girls were two-and-a-half and 17 months and to the older, called Callie, he said “Be kind to your little sister Julia and teach her how to walk and talk.”I know because this man Michael saved every single piece of correspondence from those days. I know it because he did not die young but lived into a wise old age as the grandfather in whose peaceful home I passed my earliest years. But mostly I know it because in my family we tell all the stories, and the sad ones especially, because doing so helps us make sense of what has befallen us.Now, a century later, I visit the place where Carrie is buried. I stand over her grave peering so intently I sometimes think I can almost see her down there, still so young at 31, together with something tucked into the crook of her arm just before the lid of her coffin was nailed down  tight: her stillborn child, unnamed and unmentioned in all six newspapers that carried the news of her passing.I have long understood that my two girls find this story moving but I did not realize until recently that my son might find it moving too.  I discovered as much when I saw the five large charcoals he made as part of his Honors thesis in his final semester of college.They are immense and highly detailed drawings, all based on tiny photographs taken by that same train-riding Michael. My son maintains that they're mostly studies in form and texture but I can't believe they are only that to him. Especially I can’t believe it when I look at the life-sized drawing above, which all but stops my heart every time I come upon it. For these are the four little children themselves, only months before fate rendered them motherless. They're standing on tiptoe to peer out an open window and looking more real and alive than any mere photo ever could ever reveal: bald Julia in her high chair; the toddler Callie, who would one day grow up to become my mother; Little James and littler Robert, both squinting manfully into a lowering sun. Their father Michael is taking the picture which I know because I recognize the shadow of his hatted head. It lies across the house’s lower left hand corner, just as ominous thin shadows of a large tree darken the whole other side of the drawing.Their young mum does not show in this picture, but anyone looking at it can sense her there. Having gathered her little ones at the open window and pulled aside the curtain, she has leaned back and away from children and camera both, as she would all too soon do forever, until her face, and scent, and touch would be forgotten by them entirely, even by the former six-year-old James who, during his final hospitalization, told me he could remember her from the back only, as with silver brushes, in a bedroom in 1910, she combed and dressed her long brown hair.Some say the dead are dead and we should let them go and live life forward. For me though it is another way, because if they are truly gone, then why can we so sharply sense them at times, as if behind the thinnest of curtains? Why can we can feel them right here, only shrinking shyly from our sight, as if in respect for our busy living?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I post this piece for my grandfather, Michael, who died February 3, 1958. and also for young Carrie,  great-grandmother to my girl Carrie who I like to think is now living out some of her dreams.Born here as a first generation American, Michael went back to Ireland in 1899 to look up relatives. This is he on shipboard.

...and this is a picture of Carrie on her wedding day, taken by her groom. I love it for that human squint and because it's one of only two photos I have of her smiling so big that her teeth show. They are just like the teeth of my mother who I still  miss so much.

Coming Clean

I distorted the facts to decorate the walls of that pity party I threw myself the other day when I whined about how I haven't met with the kind of commercial success Joyce Maynard has seen. I'm re-reading that post this morning and see that I made it also sound like I'm some unselfish Mother Teresa who, rather than crassly selling her books, simply gives them away. As if I didn’t have a website devoted to marketing my own books never mind that its shopping cart is kind of cobwebby these days…I’ve been looking back to 2005 over the last hour in search of the column I wrote about my day  teaching in that Brooklyn middle school and though I haven’t yet managed to unearth it I did come upon a letter that reached me that year. It came from a deployed soldier who received some of those books I sent out into the world via Operation Paperback and reading it again just now makes me wonder why I am not grateful 110% of the time for the privilege of writing every days, whoever sees it on whatever battlefield of life. This from one James Burt, rank unknown to me, who at the time was embedded with an Afghan Army unit: "Thank you so so dearly for donating these books to our library here in Kabul, Afghanistan.  They are both books that I would not have fully appreciated while I was younger, but they are truly awe-inspiring in their poignant insight and humanity to me now.”This is he, sometime during that mission. I'm going to try to find him and get back later.

The Seller in the Rye

When I heard about Salinger’s death the first person I thought of was Joyce Maynard who left Yale during her freshman year and went to live with him. Because he asked her to. Because he wrote her a bunch of letters after he saw that famous essay she did for the New York Times Magazine "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life" and became infatuated. He was 53 at the time and with his raw-grain diet I imagine he looked like a haggard old guy in baggy pants. She looked like a ten-year-old who hadn’t eaten in a month as you can see here. The love match lasted just eight months before he sent her packing under cruel circumstances but 30 years later she sold the tale in book form. She had already sold another book that got made into a movie with Nicole Kidman; and last year she sold a third one. Now she sells herself, meaning her experience and her personality, by offering hopeful would-be writers a week in her company in the tropical venue she keep for this purpose. All this I learned about on her website.I, meanwhile, seem never to have gotten the hang of all this selling. Sixteen years ago when I began to think I’d like to pull together a collection of short pieces, I pitched the idea to a couple dozen publishers and received as many rejections. Then instead of trying to figure out what these people DID want and  giving it to them I formed my own imprint and made the book myself. A few years later I did it again with another book. Then I figured out how to get on TV and radio and did about 60 shows which in case you didn’t know nobody pays you for. Then I made two more books, audio books, using a back bedroom empty at the time. I gave 200 copies of Vacationing in My Driveway to our deployed soldiers overseas, 100 copies of I Thought He Was a Speed Bump to a public middle school in Brooklyn and another hundred of both to some places around here and still I have almost 2,000 books in the cellar. My mate of many years said the other day, “Why don’t we just throw them away, T?”  It stabbed me in my heart to hear it– which shows there’s some kind of lesson in here somewhere though I'm darned if I know what it is.

My Boy is Wicked Smart

Howard Zinn died 24 hours ago. I’ll let others mark the death of J.D. Salinger. The author of “A People’s History of the United States” is the man I admire. In his memory today these two great scene from Good Will Hunting, the second of which grows right out of Zinn's work.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s&feature=related]And then this one, the real killer, where he takes aim at the government types trying to exploit his genius:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJqWHDuOpc4]

Yes I Said Yes I Said Yes

A Day in the Life: Meet deadline for column. Three hours later see it popping up in papers all over, done for the week wo-hoo! Change sheets on bed, pop in Netflix DVD I don’t remember ordering. 30 minutes later still sitting on edge of bed, stunned into a state of pathos over tale of Michael Caine warehoused in home for old folks with death-obsessed child.Wash the blanket specially bought for this endless winter. Goes into washing machine so big it barely fits. Comes out like a Shrinky-Dink, like one of those loopy potholders kids used to make at summer camp. Pray for  miracle in drier but when I pull it from there out comes a wildly swirling cloud of fluff: what used to be the rest of the blanket. Find label and read “Dry Cleaning Recommended.” Oops.Pitch a story idea called "Just Say Yes" to a magazine, smiling at thought of Nancy Reagan in final chapter of Ulysses.Answer 40 emails. Experience head pain. Also neck pain, lower back pain, hip pain. “No spine ONLY buckles; it buckles and twists!" said my chiropractor gaily the other day so where's my witches hat, I’m melting….To cheer up read catalog from Purveyor of Tiny Bikinis, a few of which I bought the summer I weighed 120. Only thing in whole catalog without a plunging neckline is babydoll-type dress to wear OVER Tiny Bikini. “Cute!” I think. Put it in online shopping cart and who cares if it’s no more suitable for me than it would be for an 8-year-old boy? At least no plunging neckline.  How could I have guessed in my younger days that what would most embarrass me looking back would be what a pathetic self-displaying show-off I was? But what're ya gonna do as Tony Soprano used or say. Live and learn. Smile again at frilly frock. Press “Submit order” and go back to the goddam emails.

Freud Called!

Ohhhh! NOW I get what that dream meant the other night! It meant the past is out of sight, forgotten very nearly, the repository of lost things that live just above us there, untouched by time, relying on virtual sources of nourishment (and, to hear the cat tell it, episodic benders.)The walls down where we live grow suddenly wet and sometimes water runs clear across the floor because …well, because that’s how those Snow’s of Yesteryear are: they sometimes melt and trickle down and catch us all by surprise in the little Chamber of Forgetting that is the present moment.My slaughtered cat is up there living along as if coyotes were never created, and the ugly red curtains I made when we were too poor for real curtains, and all these big standing houseplants I bought to disguise the fact that we had no furniture..... Ah but it’s all there, our memories of the lovely young Sophia Loren below, and Linda Hamilton above with her killer muscles, oh and the young Jack Kennedy before steroids squirreled his cheeks out and of course, of course, of course Jayne Mansfield, seen here with Sophia who had scant reason to look enviously at anyone before Jayne came along: Resplendent Jayne before Death came and took her in that car wreck.

I Dream

I dream water is suddenly pooling on my kitchen floor and the wall to the dining room is soaked with it.  Dashing up the stairs to look for the source, I enter a room I've forgotten about altogether, with curtains from decades ago and the houseplants I favored then. In here the water damage is so great the plaster is peeling away from the timbers beneath. “What happened here?” is all I can think – until I suddenly spot her stretched out atop a moldy chest of drawers: my long-mourned cat Charlotte, (as a baby above) last seen lying on the warm stones just outside my back door and gone for good an hour later.“Oh where have you BEEN, Charlotte?” I cry, reaching to cup her small triangular chin in my hands. “In fields and meadows,” she anwsers.  "Alcohol came into it too."I laugh in the dream, not at the fact that she could talk but at the frank admission in what she has said and am just about to yell the happy news of her return to the other family members now tiptoeing in when my attention goes instead to the houseplants. They look like they need water but can it be that they're alive at all in a room not entered for decades? Charlotte looks like she could use some water, yet she too is down but not out. She is only smaller, flatter, merely diminished, like those promotional sponges that sometimes come in the mail with realtors’ names on them, flat as postcards on dry land but swelling into lovely fat things once you put them in water.And so there it is: a dream of a forgotten chamber with both too much water and too little, where things that should have perished live on. New Orleans 2005 was under this dream I think. Also Haiti 2010. Also all our yearning for those now gone from the shaky old house we call Earth, leaky as it, and imperiled.

The Loaded Goat

Watchin’ New England Cable News  this morning and the greatest thing happened: they ran a whole ad in which a woman in voice-over goes nattering on about her expanding waistline while the  images show a Toyota  dealership and all these zippy testosterone-fueled cars dashing along the road like so many sperm in search of  the egg party.It reminded me of my favorite TV experience when the viewing guide started reporting from the Planet Strange-O).  At 8pm for example the Guide said I could look forward both to a show called N-n-n-never (and d-d-don’t ask again!)  one called HopeSic (like homesick?) and a third called Moips Corner: Suicidal Women (Hide the razor blades! Little House it isn’t!)Also, many of the shows had thcuss-word symbols in their titles. There was one called Wiiiiiiiist%±*! (like an arrow flying?), one called Aaiiiiiiiii@#! (like an arrow landing?) and one called Timon and Pumbaaaaaa!!!! (in which Pumba falls from a cliff?)Then, when I tuned INTO these shows, exactly none of them matched their descriptions. A football game was labeled Tun Tun Tun,  The Daily Gicky Show had some guy de-veining shrimp, and an infomercial on curing excess gassiness was called Larry Kiaaawiiii*!@!, (Kiaaawiiii!*!@! being what? the sounds poor Larry makes in his distress? The protests of those seated next to him? ) It went on:A program called Fanatic turned out to be the local news and Newhart was an international soccer game. The Loaded Goat had a pleasant middle-aged lady displaying dangly ear rings, and Intimate Fantasies featured a little four-year-old playing with a bride doll.It was entertainment so rich I’d have been willing to pay for it - if I wasn’t already paying for it. I was almost disappointed when I tuned in the next day to see the shows all properly labeled. Still, I shan’t soon forget my two favorites:  (1) The famous news anchor gravely mooing on about the Crisis in Washington while its explanatory text read: “Telly Monster Fears That Big Bird Will Sit on Him;”  and (2) a program showing three mud-covered men using crowbars to pull down a ceiling. Mrs. Slocum Mrs. Slocum Mrs. Slocum, the Guide said this one was called. (When will you learn, Mrs. Slocum? You know we always find your husbands’ bodies!)

I'm Heartbroken She Said

Yesterday I went to the ocean because  it seemed a good place to go to get used to an altered reality. The day was mild enough so that someone had made a small sandcastle, now beset by the late-day tide. Alongside it long ditches were dug in the sand that I didn’t recognize as letters until I stepped back some:  An ‘S.’ An ‘O. Another ‘S'. 'SOS' the letters kept spelling to the empty sky. Distress. Help us.Several seagulls came in for a landing, then hurried along on their little orange legs, muttering to themselves. Only one settled and stood looking out over the water, like a person trying to consider the bigger picture.I saw a dead fish with only a head left for flesh. The thin membrane of its empty skin held only a backbone and ribs. I looked and looked at that delicate spine, along whose length was written that same familiar pattern we see in our own bodies, the same pattern we see along the keel of boats both great and small: a central element with radiating spurs. So we design our boats to look like our bodies; we repeat in what we make the design used in making us.I watched the waves for as long as I could see them, the white foam curling along their crests before they sank down and it seemed me as though a great hand was zipping them shut like so many body bags. That’s the mood I was in despite the jokey tone of yesterday’s post. I think, like that seagull, I too need to fix on the bigger picture.

You Gotta Hand It

As they say about the blind prostitute… You gotta hand it to her.And you gotta hand it to him too: nice campaign Scott Brown.

Sometimes Video's Best

Feeling I might need to keep my spirits up today I thought I'd post these two silly vids, each just 37 or so seconds long. When will that great sun shine again?Here's the first:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btsDEgt6fxg]And then, at my desk 90 seconds later..[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c5cE-9kur8]

My Secret Life

Recently, until troubles with my little Bobblehead doll of a neck forced me to stop, I worked as a massage therapist two days a week for four fascinating years - while being a writer because for me not writing would be like giving up your favorite hot drink in the morning. An account of what I learned doing this is appearing now in all the papers that run my column but when I did a Google search just now linking my name to the word 'massage' I came upon something I'd forgotten all about: a story one newspaper did on this little career-veer of mine. I remember I felt shy about going public about it so we kind of hid it underneath this hidden staircase way down at the end of a dark corridor on my writing website.The person you see on the table ( go ahead!  click on that!) was actually the man who wrote the piece. He was also a client but not that day. That day we just set up the shot for the photographer which is why I look so sort of tentative - I’m terrible at faking stuff - but as I look at it now I realize I miss that sweet room in the chiropractor’s office!  A wee chamber for healing it was, a womb of one's own for the clients I saw. The column tells about the big-picture stuff I learned but it doesn’t mention the equally important thing which was this: Infinitely complex  machine that it is, the body knows exactly what to do to bring healing and restore homeostasis. We need to just get out of its way and stop jabbering like monkeys; turn off our media; and breathe in and out. Someone trained in therapeutic touch administers a judicial tap here and but really Nature does the rest.

Speed the Supplies

Thursday night I found myself watching Good Fellas with the detestable Joe Pesci playing the character he always plays in these movies, all the times hooting people in the face and all.  Good Fellas, which may not be as bad Casino where he puts someone‘s head in a vise but still! I only turned to it because suddenly I couldn’t look at one more image out of Haiti where CNN's Ivan Watson was covering the half-buried 11-year old in her little reading glasses when what he called ‘part’ of a body was pulled from the rubble beside him. He looked for a second like he might throw up.As of that night the supplies still weren't reaching the people. Forty-eight hours and more after the quake they still weren't reaching them! It makes you realize: we think we live in a world of bright commerce, should I have the Boston Creme or the Honey Glazed  but the truth is we will all die, and some rather soon.The above is a penciled ‘study’ from an oil done by the 17^th century Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.  As a study, it is simpler than the original but all the more powerful for that simplicity: all you see is St. Francis and the Christ figure and at first you think St. Francis is reaching up to embrace and comfort Him, but wait! It's the other way around isn't it? Isn’t the Christ figure beckoning for Francisco to join him on the cross, thus illustrating the famous prayer attributed to this sweetest of all saints? "Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,” it goes, "not so much to be understood, as to understand; not so much to be loved, as to love.” The rest of it is the reward:  “For it is in giving that we receive, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.” Ah, may it prove to be so! But in the meantime, God, if you can hear us God: speed those supplies to your children, suffering so now on that lovely and devastated island.

Go Your Own Way

You know you’re in the big winter funk when you’re reading some stupid Goth catalog that dropped through your letter slot and the witchy, droopy-hemmed outfits look good to you.My problem is I keep forgetting I’m not Stevie Nicks circa 1978 and there’s no wind machine tousling my wondrous locks.  Chicks my age go for lots of hair and sleeves that drip like candle wax over the hands. In fact if it were up to me I’d still be wearing long hair parted in the middle but Ronaldo is in charge of my look now and he keeps me in the right century thank God. I go see him today to get colorized, like the old-time movie that I am.It’s always so mellow there at the salon. I get in that chair and read the Herald, Boston’s answer to New York's Daily News with its right-wing  furious  fed-up tone and - it doesn’t even bother me.Tell ya what though: if I had the dough I’d endow the place with a never-lapsing subscription to The National Enquirer, there’s a publication! Jennifer Aston is going to be 75 and they’ll still frame her as gamely waiting in the wings for Brad. And all I can say to that is So am I Jennifer, so am I. Well, if Barry Gibb is no longer available that is.And now, for a REALLY good laugh click on those two links above which are headlines from the Herald AND the Daily News. Who says we're a trashy culture? (Joseph Pulitzer Rolls Over In Grave.)

The Daily Grind

This is me at the daily grind. Ironing that is.  OK, not really. This lady's naked and I mostly stay dressed when I iron - nowadays anyway; it's not like that long ago time when we all heated  our houses to  80 and we could iron in bikini undies and a bra.  (Burned myself good doing that once. Still have this pointy little delta of a scar right next to my bellybutton.) As i say, I stay dressed while I iron now. I watch dumb TV at the same time so I kind of like the fact that no matter how many times I iron I still have a lot more ironing ahead of me in my life.This is the real me below having just ironed the tablecloths. I say tablecloths, with an 's,'  because you should always use two cloths in case the cat throws up on the table or someone has a nosebleed in the middle of the entree or something. With two you just whisk off the top cloth and you’re set (and don't try to tell me they don’t do exactly this in restaurants.)  The bow on that Christmas wreath is a hair thing from the 80s. (Remember when we all had poofed-out hair and wore all this fabric up on our heads?) That bookshelf  deserves a post all its own so I'll leave that alone for now but see that lint roller on top of the cookbooks? Again the cat. He sheds like mad and the lint roller picks up the hair . Just under that shelf and out of sight is the tube of tuna-flavored cat cream the vet made me get for old Abe. You smear it around the cat's mouth and he licks it for the nice fishy-smell, swallows some in the process and after a while - boom! - out comes a furball. Never mind that I have never once seen a  furball in 15 years of caring for him. I keep the tube around anyway for comic purposes. I try to pass it off as fancy lip balm and offer it to unsuspecting guests.

Strange Beauty

Last night when I stepped out of the sold-out I-Max theatre for a moment, I saw that I’d received a text from a young person in my life. “Hey, I’m at Avatar,” I answered. “It’s a truly phenenomal movie. See it twice,” he texted back and I think I just might do that because when was the last time I witnessed people clapping at a the end of a movie? When was the last time I saw folks talking so animatedly as they exited? One woman saw me looking at the crowd. “Were you as moved as I was?” she asked. “I cried!"A lot of people did as I could see since, with those 3-D glasses on, you can watch people without their knowing. I was completely swept away by what I saw. The great dragon-like creatures who fly against the human invaders with their death engines reminded me of the  Siamese Fighting Fish I used to  kept just to look upon the beauty of their  bright veil-like fins. The sight of the Na'vi  people  swaying like sea anemones in their religious ceremonies made me think how we could look like to God if we ever stopped fighting long enough to entwine our arms. And the main metaphor of Sully in his chair brought real tears to my eyes - not so much for what it says about so-called 'civilized' man with his shrunken and twisted legs, helpless as a fish on dry land without his ‘wheels,’  but for the pure force of that visual, repeated every time Jake enters the capsule that translates him to Pandora. It shows how, broken and weak, a human swoons down into Death; and then there’s that vortex of light; and then he wakes, a tall strong 'angel.' Ah that it might prove true!

Now I Ask You

Don’t some people just look better with eye makeup? I didn’t know until I began doing a little television that when I laugh my eyes just disappear -  Poof and they’re gone, engulfed by the folds of skin around them. In fact, last time I want to the eye doctor she lifted up one of my impressively iguana-like upper lids and said “you know you can totally get your eyes done and insurance will pay for it.”  “Really? How’s that gonna happen?“ I asked. “Well pretty soon you won’t be able to see out from under a lid like this.” (A Lid Like This – nice title for a book -  about haberdashery maybe.)But look to your left here. In the top picture: the Plain Jane of all Plain Janes: Gloria Steinem as she looked graduating from Smith College in 1956 . In the  bottom picture: Gloria as she looks today with those signature dreamy eyes. It wasn’t until I met her in November and was given this book of some of her public utterances that I realized: sometimes what God forgets to give you, you can get from a bottle - or in this case a eyeliner pencil. I took a lesson I can tell you. Click on the “Play” symbol and see:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBu8A13aMw0]

Who's Manic?

Whenever I see my friend Dottie (not her real name) she has already baked cookies for the whole county AND walked the dog AND practiced healing arts on three entire people before most of us have even had our coffee. We walked around the pond once, Dottie and I, she with her baby in a stroller  (grandbaby to be accurate, “the best thing I never did,” she calls him) and we  took those paths at 30 mph. That child’s eyeballs were jiggling. So were mine. I was completely out of breath 100 yards in and I was propelling nothing but my own increasingly porous skinny-white-girl skeleton.I saw Dottie professionally the other day and after scoring my bag of cookies asked her where she got all her energy. “Hon! I’m manic!" she laughed. "I take a shitload of meds just to say this calm!”She said ‘manic’ as in ‘manic-depressive’ but of course bi-polar is the term of choice these days and I've often wondered if I’m not a little bi-polar myself. Yesterday, for example, I was a mess. Partly because I couldn’t see out of one eye and partly because my messed-up neck hurt like hell I decided my creative powers were also shot and that nobody liked me. I whined to David the second he came in the door and fell into the bed at 8. He found a way to fall into the same bed (men! what can we say?) and today I wake up and whaddya know everything’s great. And today I’m not posting about pinned car accident victims and death's dark shadow.  In fact after I get back from my Global Grooves class at the Y and feed Uncle Ed and buy the food and work on the column and reread My Antonia so I can help a kid with his English paper tonight I’m going to start dreaming up tomorrow’s post about  - are you ready for something really serious? - eye makeup!  Onward and upward!