I'm Irish

My friend Dot just sent me a list about how you know you’re from an Irish family. Herewith a few items from that list that sure enough resonate with me.You can’t make a long story short. True enough in my family where for 90 minutes every night my sister Nan and I had to sit at the dining room table presided over by the much older version of the guy in this picture, here seen as a young man returning to  Ireland to look up his parents’ kinfolk. Also,Many of your childhood meals were boiled. Make that ‘most’. Poor David with his rich Italian heritage! I met him at 19 and brought him home for dinner and he could NOT believe what passed for routine meals with us: Squash, boiled. Peas, boiled. Even the beef  was boiled unless it was a Sunday when we roasted it grey. I also identify with the statement that...There isn't a big difference for you between crying and laughing. I point to my whole 30-year writing career and especially that oddly toned second book of mine Vacationing in my Driveway in which even the most sudden wrenching deaths are served up with an odd garnish or rue and mirth. Then we have...You spent a good portion of your childhood kneeling in prayer. Don’t get me started on Mortal sin and the Catholic Church. I will only say that in Lent after the 90 minutes listening to our grandfather hold forth at the table we had to kneel next to our dining room chairs and endure the drone of the Rosary as delivered over the radio by the nasal-voiced Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston.The last way I will quote that lets you know you’re from an Irish family is that 'at least two family members don’t speak to each other' but I have to say I can’t identify with that. The more time goes by the more connected I feel to everyone in my family including even the most distant thrice removed cousins who I know better and better now thanks to this frisky little Internet. Plus it all goes so fast; how sad would you be if you didn’t believe that the dead are all still around? Look at these two young women: one is my girl Carrie born in 1976; one is my mother’s mother born in 1878 and just look at the similarity!  Here too for history our family pioneers: in the top left the father of the young man at the top. He was Dennis Sullivan born in 1830 who got off the boat in Boston and had this picture taken with his four brothers just before they got their legs under them and went off into the vast American landscape.

Floodsville

Not a whole lot goin’ on at the old town Post office today. I stood on its steps to take this picture. The floods here are epic yet still some poor dunce tried to drive up to the drop box with his fistful of letters.  The cop was none too nice. “What part of the orange cone signal don’t you understand sir?”Inside the P.O. though, it was business as usual, at least for the two or three customers who had hiked and waded and hopped the rivulets to get there “32 inches of water in the basement!” crowed my pal at the window, cheerful as ever – "We have to close when it gets to 36!" I asked if she could break a $100 l for me and her eyes lit up. “Guess what? we got a counterfeit twenty yesterday, want to see it!?” She went and got it and gave me a quick tutorial as to how you can tell (no watermark, no ghost of a dead president when you hold it  to to the light, the wrong color squiggle over on the left.... plus it just feels wrong;. She let me feel it and sure enough: pure paper. No rag content at all. My pal wasn’t at work yesterday else she might have laid hands on the one who passed it, maybe pressed some sort of invisible button that would call in the Feds.Looks like we’re gonna NEED the Feds around here and because this water just keeps on rising. And unlike the fake 20 here it's the sure-enough, Old Testament, God-must-be-really-mad thing. Nice Try Department but it's as fake as they get!

Not REALLY for Children

Had the grandbabies over last night and so dragged out the old children’s books – including a collection of nursery rhymes compiled and illustrated by Wallace Tripp back in ‘76. Looks like Wallace was riding the Jim Henson wave  maybe, trying to produce something  grownups would like too.I know I found this book absolutely delightful back when my babies were small but come to think of it I was still walking around in green nail polish and platform shoes back then. Thing is, it left the grandbabies cold. Tripp doesn’t seem to be mocking childhood as the sainted Mr. Rogers accused sly Paul Rubens of doing with his Pee Wee Herman character but he's not exactly talking to them either. Check it out. Funny, sort of, but…. Well, what do you think?

Under the Gun

Me and my big ideas. I invited the grandbabies for a sleepover tonight so their parents could catch a break.

Sometimes  it’s really easy, like when they literally beg to be put to bed and we’re back downstairs celebrating by half past eight. (We turn on HBO, 'Look it’s Casino! which for 20 years we’ve been to scared to ever watch. Or  'How ‘bout the classic Weekend at Bernie’s and we’ll make fun of the 80s the whole time?'  Or, 'Why not really break out and co-tackle the tricky crossword that you cut out of the paper every day!'(The little ones call David 'Papa'.) Me I'm ‘TT’ which is what David calls me anytime he’s not really mad at me, and the drink I carry everywhere is TT-juice, as one of them named it, a zesty combination of mint iced tea and Crystal Lite lemonade. Some people have asked me if it’s a gin drink or chock full of vodka but it isn’t. I don’t need to drink.

Tonight though if we’re really under the gun with these short people, I just might wish it were. What if it turns out to be like the babystitting scene in Tootsie? Great movie, Tootsie, let's watch a little of it now:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPRXgr9LEOc]

Do it Yourselfers

Yesterday I talked about the crocuses growing up out of my sad dry Shredded Wheat of a lawn but I didn’t get to say what I like best about them: they color outside the lines. One year they just jumped their beds and started sowing purple in amongst the clover. Then the violets heard about it so come June they’ll be doing the same.I say God Bless all the creative improvisers! Like my young cousin who decided one day that she'd just about had it with those stupid braces, and so went and got out a few tools out and took ‘em off herself!

On Time and the Beatles

Is it true that there’s no death? That we’re all still as young as these lads from Liverpool? It sure seems that way now because here come the crocuses,  thrusting their little mouths up into the light like baby birds eager for breakfast. It just makes you feel hopeful.Yesterday I took Uncle Ed out. He’ll be 90 this year and at five-foot-three  and 230 lbs. you could say he’s on the heavy side. You look at him and think “Heart attack!”  Then you remember he gets down on his hands and knees every week to scrub the kitchen floor and so what if he got stuck in that position when his back went the time he was replacing a nut at the base of the toilet bowl. He’s 89. And he has a very big tummy, and he was on his hands and knees, replacing a nut at the base of the toilet bowl.On the little urban pond we drive to every day we look at the seagulls perched on the ice melting away fast now like manna at noontime. “How do their fannies not get cold?” he asks. “I have no idea, let’s Google it” I say. I peer down into my smarty-pants phone and wonder how to frame the question. And we feel like a couple of Second Graders there in the sun. Maybe like these fellas above in the youngest picture I have ever seen of them, or like the earth right now: so full of possibility. So full of life.

Spaceballs

(what can I say, it was the 80s)“I know you have been Journalist Astronaut candidate for the NASA Journalist in Space Program," read the email I opened the other day. “Hello from France!" it began. "I am Stéphane Sebile, a young space exploration fan. I agree your indulgence for my bad English!”Stéphane has a website on space exploration it seems. And he's right about me: back in the day I did somehow make it to the final 40 out of a field of more than 1,000 journalists hoping for ride on the Shuttle - until the mission was put on hold in the wake of the Challenger disaster.Here's our exchange:Stéphane: “Why have you decide to become candidate for NASA Space selection for journalists?”Me: “When they announced the Teacher in Space Competition all I could think was ‘Oh WHY did I leave teaching after only seven years? If I’d stayed in the classroom I could apply for this!’ Then the next fall, with Christa McAuliffe in flight training at the Johnson Space Center, a new competition was announced for people in my current career. A shiver went down my spine. A second chance?”Stéphane: “I suppose you would like to go in space. But why?”Me: “All my life I've struggled for a kind of perspective that has mostly eluded me. But each time I fly in a plane I can suddenly see my life whole; see our lives. I feel this sudden sense of exaltation, and want to tell everyone, “There’s so much more than we can see! We don’t HAVE to live like ants! ‘”Stéphane: “Did you think it's important for the mankind to have a step in space, to send man in space and why?”Me: “OH yes. The human race is in its infancy! We’re babies, still in our playpens! But we’re learning fast now. It’s time to leave the house; to look around some. And this little solar system? It's just our front yard.”Stéphane: “What represent for you Yuri Gagarin?”Me: “A Russian the first person up there?! Americans were horrified. And sure, back in ‘61 we kids played endless games of the Commies against the Americans, but we had this young President, and a dawning sense that there just might be room for all of us in his New Frontier.”Stéphane: “What represent for you Apollo 11? Which memory(ies) have you of this event?”Me: “July of ’69. I stayed up all night with my new boyfriend to watch it with his mom on her black-and-white TV. We waited and waited to see that first boot set down on moondust."Stéphane: “What will be your most incredible space dream?”Me: “That someday there will be more people like you, fascinated by the prospect of space flight. With only a handful of missions left, I realize NASA won’t be putting me up there but maybe you will go, Stéphane, and how’s that for a dream? And when you get back, maybe I’ll get to interview you!”And that was it. You have to admire people like Stéphane, keepin' the dream alive eh? And wasn't I the brave one back then, offering to on that mission, babies or no babies?

Strange Bedfellows

I’m no better than the next guy in that sometimes I just feel like phonin’ it in myself. That’s when I get out Patti the See-Through Date and set her up in the bed in my place. She’s like the Visible Woman only cooler ‘cause as you can see, No Real Entrails!

An Offer You Can't Refuse

I just  got one of those emails, this one claiming to have  come from my own little author site.  “Beautiful Russian women waiting to meet you!" it says.  What I like even better is its subject line:  “I CAN DO FOR YOU IS WHAT NOT NO GIRL” it promises, presumably in an effort at sounding adorably new to English.How sweetly naïve this Eastern promise is! Especially when you remember that we’re all uniform construction sets, our little bodies assembled according to just one design. Hence, people have pretty much figured out how to put the Tinker Toy parts of themselves together in just about every way they can be put together.So I ask myself: what exactly is this saucy minx who speaks from my site going to do for you? There's one thing I know I can do for you 'what not no other girl can do' - what not no other girl will do either. Click below to see what that is:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lE1mP0BmFE]

The Bad Hair Clue

I just saw Crazy Heart with the wonderful Jeff Bridges who looks like such a wreck in the early scenes as a down-on-his-luck country singer. His hair is oily, his belt's undone, his face looks as bad the face of Nick Nolte drinkin' again. But here's what I really liked: in every scene where his hair's a mess, bad things happen. When the hair is bad and the face gets all dour you just know he's going to start throwing up again. You just know it'll be cryin’ time again for Maggie Gyllenhal and her kid with the Cabbage Patch face. Then, when Jeff is nicely barbered and NOT sweating clear through his clothes, you know that kissing is up next and you think they just might make it after all. (You have to go to the movie to see if they do.)My one criticism: he seems to get sober in an awful hurry. We see only about 90 seconds of one of the doubtless hundreds of 12-step meetings he'd have had to attend and hey: the Steps deserve more credit than that. But my favorite part, besides getting the chance to see him work with Robert Duvall? Realizing that the great Jeff Bridges once had chickenpox  because there it is, as plain as day when he lies on top of Maggie: the little crater that marks him as one of us after all.

Bras Bras Bras

Bra-makers love me. I get all their ads.Today I got an email featuring the Va Bien Ultra-Lift Strapless Bra which my high school French says  either means Have a nice day or Go fuck yourself I’m not sure which. It has 'Ultra-lift cups featuring Three Magic Fingers molded between the layers of foam, a back reinforced by inner layers of strong powernet to support and keep the bra in place with top and bottom elastic that is treated with silicone and adds a gripping effect to make the bra extra secure.’Do you know what the Bra-llelujah is? Because I can tell you! Instead of just squeezing you around your ribcage and sternum it will squeeze you from the top of your underpants clear up to your armpits!I started at 12 with training bras which are little more than two little spans of jersey held together by straps. Then it was on to the Cross Your Heart bra (in the days when fashion said that breasts should look as pointy as nuclear warheads), the no-bra bra, the halter top bra, the bra that runs a few straps around your waist so that your whole back can be bare. You wouldn’t believe how many kinds of bras there are out there.Bras are serious business and women spend real money on them.  Last year I came across a lingerie store  so expensive it didn’t have a single bra for less than $125 – and for some reason they also sold sex toys right on the front counter. You can look here for a rundown of that visit. In the meantime …onward and upward!

Camp Hug 'n Sing

I could write a book about the camp my family owned, where my sister Nan and I spent summers, from the time we were babies in our mother’s arms to that final day when, with the place sold and all of us awash in tears, we hugged Millie a final time, climbed into the old beach wagon and drove into an uncertain future. Millie had been there for over a quarter of a century, since that day she walked up the driveway looking for work, a war refugee with heavily accented English and a babe in her own arms.“I have a conviction that a few weeks spent at a well-organized summer camp may be of more value educationally than a whole year of formal school work” said Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard for 40 years and maybe he’s the guy who started the whole summer camp movement that fed my family for another 40 years after that. When my friend Bobbie wrote about the days she was my counselor at good old Camp Fernwood, our common friend Maggie weighed in with this quote.Being there was like having 70 sisters and we had such fun putting on plays, swimming and running and short-sheeting the counselors’ beds – even sneaking through the woods after Taps to meet boys from the camp down the road and sit shyly beside them for ten minutes before our fear of discovery hustled us back to our cabins. Still, what I remember most about my years there is the singing we did - all that singing by the campfire.....Up top here are some of us little campers in the Parents weekend play. (I’m the one on the left.) And down below here are two more pictures, going way back to when our mother and Aunt Grace were just starting out themselves. That's Aunt Grace smack in the middle who later taught and mentored so many young people. And that's Mom with her back to the camera, hands on her hips. It must have been the last day of the season because she sure-enough hated high heels and yet she had them on, presumably to greet the parents fetching their children home after eight weeks away. I especially like the second picture below it with the mad hugging of the adolescents, who, I sometimes think, are the only people who get what’s really important in life.

You're Done All Right

People are so dumb. I was at the UPS shipping center and I wasn’t sure but I thought the young guy behind the counter had sort of snorted when he saw the address label on my package. He had!  "I hate that outfit," he said. "I’d never do business with Amazin’." "With who?"  said I. "With Amazin’ who you’re sending to here. I’d never buy nothin’ from them.""But I’m not buying from them; they’re buying from me. This is a book I wrote that somebody ordered."  "Then Amazin' should pay for the shipping!" "But it doesn’t work that way. The customer pays AND I pay; and they make me send it by UPS!""So, but it’s costing you $17 to send this thing and that’s the cheapest slowest rate! What are you selling it for?""Nine bucks."So see? Dumb and dumber. It’s like an epidemic! ;-)

It's My Birthday

I’m having a great birthday so far - it’s not quite 3:00 as I write this. When we first woke up today David patted me the way you’d pat a dog. “Old TT,” he said. “Another year older.” Catchin’ up to you old man,” I said back. Then I saw that my friend Bobbie had written about me on her blog which I always love reading.  Then my big sister Nan called and we talked for a good 40 minutes. “Happy Birthday Wormhead!" she said. Then she reminisced about when I was two and she buried me in the back yard in one of those set-in-the-ground garbage cans you opened by stepping on this rusty little pedal. Then she described some people she met who were drinking what she called “Pop-Skull Vodka and Tang" and "had children who looked like they were straight out of that movie Deliverance." Then for good measure she recalled the time I wandered off at age three and the cops carried some other poor lost kid up the front porch steps and into to our house instead of me. I was missing for hours. Our mom and aunt, our ancient great aunties and our grandfather - everyone we lived  with in short: all were frantic and even looked in that sunken garbage can but as far as I can remember - and I remember this incident vividly - no one ever talked about how it was for little Nan, five, to lose her baby sister. She said for the first time today, “I was beside myself. I was a MESS.”Well I’d be beside myself if I didn’t have Nan in my life. And our cousin Sheil who texted me from outside the country just before midnight last night. And our cousin Kath who sent a card AND a Facebook message. And all those other wonderful Facebook friends. And our boy Mike who called from Brooklyn. And old Dave who picks up after me and never gets mad even when I flood the place by leaving the water on. And our niece Joanie due over in an hour along with our girls and the grandbabies. And Bobbie too, always Bobbie, and now Bobbie’s old pal Maggie from camp who I am getting to know here on the internet better and in a more heartfelt way than ever I knew her at good old Fernwood in the Berkshires where we were all young together.It’s 3:30 now and I insisted on picking up lobster for this little feast so I better go. Hope all of you out there in Radioland are having as nice a day as I am!

Crazytown

Got up at 4:30 this morning and staggered to the bathroom to stop up the sink and open the taps for our old cat Abe who works up a powerful thirst doing nothing all night. Left the water on to form a nice pool for him since he has trouble twisting and lowering his head enough to get that little Velcro tongue under the faucet these days. Wandered into the guest bathroom to make the coffee, and, while waiting for it to brew, lurched over into my writing room  where I opened the package from Macy’s that came last night to see that I’ve managed to order only HALF a bathing suit, just a cute pair of ruffly bottoms.  “Oh well,” I thought and sat down to finish a letter of recommendation for a friend, not remembering anything about a faucet left on all this time – until I remembered about it. I TORE back into our bathroom to find the place flooded and everything in the cabinets below the sink swimming in three inches of water, fish-oil capsules orbiting like tiny canoes. I spent 40 minutes swabbing, sponging and bailing and I know have to go downstairs now and see if the rooms below have become a rain forest, my big potted palms all happy under the lushly dripping canopy that is the kitchen ceiling. “Jeez T!” I said to myself and looked in the mirror – and saw that my fine silk nightie is not even on my body but is sort of dripping out of one arm of this ratty old bathrobe. Should I go back to bed now and pull the covers over my head or should I simply welcome a day rife with comic possibility?

St. Francis Called

When the sun came up today after that wild little storm the world was all pearl and opal, with a sky the color the streets of Heaven are said to be and I would have felt entirely joyous - if I weren’t worried about the animals. It’s been a hard winter and there's just not much to eat anymore.

For Christmas this year two of our kids gave David and me this amazing motion-activated camera that you mount on a tree to catch the animal-action around your house. So now when I start feeling sorry for myself I call up their images and try to telepathically say to them that Winter is almost over, which now that I think of it they probably know better than I do.

I also have my eye on those neat little slabs of seed-covered suet you can buy and hang outside. They'd be nice for the birds and squirrels anyway, though David always  says they’re a bad idea. “Once you START feeding them you can never STOP and what're you gonna, keep it up til you die?" he says, an argument that seems to me to offer lessons all its own.So yeah think I’m going to buy one or two and hang them this afternoon. I figure I can do something for these little ones even if I can’t think what to do for the raccoon, or the flouncy fox, or that dapper little skunk or these delicate deer here coming as a family to see what they can find.coming all together to see what they can find.

Afterglow

Last Valentine’s Day this youngish dude showed up beside me at the supermarket register and slapped down six wilted dyed-blue daisies. He saw me look at them. “Hey, it’s the THOUGHT that counts!” he said, going for that most classic of Nice-Try maneuvers.Lost in memory, I held my tongue, because back when David and  I were first married, we marked our special days the right way, with flowers and candy and little dinners out. Love was in the air!  Later, when babies came, dinners out turned into Shake ‘n Bake chicken on the saggy back balcony of our saggy old apartment and that’s when we began having “issues,” over such questions as, “Can it really be called ‘minding the baby’ if you’re watching the ball game AND reading the paper at the same time, as the infant sits ignored beside you, ingesting soggy fistfuls  of the Sunday supplement?”With little ones around of course, we couldn’t really AIR these issues - except on joint vacations with other couples when we’d go off on what I came to call our “Fight Walks. “You should ask yourself if this FEMINISM stuff is really making you happy,” old Dave said to me on one such walk. And again I held my tongue, merely employing my special telekinetic girl Voodoo powers to stick mental pins in all his underpants.He got his revenge though: That year he gave me a can of 3-in-1 Motor Oil for Valentine’s Day. The next it was a book of Chinese love poems, still in Chinese. I meanwhile gave him boxes of fudge, small potted plants, dozens of stuffed animals because hey who doesn’t love a stuffed animal? But “You know,” I said one year, “you have never once in all our time together told me that you love me! So I think maybe you - (sob) - don’t!”“Don’t be ridiculous,” came his icy retort. “I wouldn’t have had CHILDREN with you if I didn’t love you,” a sentences I found to be so bleak and barren I embroidered it and hung it in the kitchen, right above my Cinderella mop.But all that was long ago, when I was first married to this odd fellow. More recently I was attempting to do therapy over the phone with an awesome Jungian psychologist when he said out of the blue one day, “I don’t get this therapy stuff. Why don’t you just DECIDE TO FEEL DIFFERENT?”My eyes widened and widened– and this time I couldn’t keep silent. “Are you kidding me? As if YOU’RE not an absolute Child’s GARDEN of Messed-up-ness!”We both laughed then, because lately... well we just seem to have called a truce. Anyway, last year he bought me a big fancy Valentine he was very careful not to sign in any way, which I found hilarious. And for his present this year I bought us a matched pair of travel mugs we can take on our Fight Walks, which, believe it or not, we no longer even fight on.So love is a minefield, yes it is but still all these years later I have to say: it's also one dandy source of humor!

Travel Day

Big travel day today. Makes me want to go in to the train station and sit at one of those tiny tables with the wire mesh tops because when you do this people feel they can come join you. There aren’t many seats and why should YOU be hogging an empty one and you not even going anywhere?An old lady sat with me once. It was maybe 1:00 pm. “Am I late?” she asked. “My train leaves at 5:25!” Once a guy sat down and said he was feeling sick. Turned out he’d been doing drugs the whole previous day and night. We  drank our Snapples and looked up at all the airy light you can still see now, same as in 1908 when the place first opened. And once a man in a suit leaned in and told me he liked the satin stripe down the side of my pants.They were tuxedo pants and remembering them now makes me think of my teaching days and 16-year old Barbra. This was back in '74, long enough ago so that as a lesbian she was about the first openly gay teen most any of us had ever known. She had quit school by the time I met her but she showed up a lot anyway. She would sit in the back of my English classes and  just listen, and the following Spring she went to the prom in a tux.As it happens I ran the prom that year and that night the principal called me over.  “What is that young woman's status?” he asked me somber-faced. “She’s a girl at her prom,” was  all I could think to say. That summer when she enlisted, we drove past lovely  South Station for her induction at the Army Base. Then, her status was Private First Class. And now? Well now she’s a Molecular Biologist and one of the deans at UCSD. And to think I wouldn't even know her today if she hadn’t had that nice train-station openness and come into my class one day to say hi!

Paging Mel's Handlers!

The ant-Semitic remarks Mel Gibson made while resisting arrest for drunk driving in 2006 hurt him and I admit I wasn't thinking of them when I posted about his new movie yesterday. As a Jew, journalist Sam Ruben felt targeted by him with his "You got a dog in this fight?” remark. For sure he's testy these days: he got really sore at entertainment reporter and critic Dean Richards who was interviewing him via satellite feed. You can tell by his  body language, and the way he handles his coffee cup. You can tell by the way he calls the reporter an asshole when he knows very well the man can still hear him. All I can say is I hope he doesn’t carry a gun these days. In his new life. With that young model. As the father of seven or maybe eight. As a devout Christian/Charismatic-Catholic man.... His PR people must be tearing their hair out.  Hmmmm. Maybe next time he should try saying 'asshole' in Aramaic.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TJ3Ss4Q8BY&feature=related]

Tough to Get Your Tongue Around

One of my kids gave me the Flip mini for Christmas and on hearing me enthuse about it a few weeks later cautioned me not to be 'one of those sad people making videos of themselves and posting them on YouTube'.Silly boy. I’m one of those ridiculously merry people making videos of themselves and posting them on YouTube.And here today, a video report card for Mel Gibson on how he did with that tricky old Boston accent in his new revenge film Edge of Darkness. His poster boy looks are gone now – with the deep naso-labial folds he now has he looks a little like the old guy in Disney-Pixar’s Up, with enough cross-hatching under his eyes to make a chain-link fence of - and don’t get me started on what’s going on inside the man’s head these days - but by Gosh he nailed the accent. Check out these sample phrases and see if you don’t agree:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAuZBSVbMao]