Where's My Bed?

You can get pretty disoriented, pretty easily see the Past melt into Present, like watercolors in the rain. Writer and speaker Kurt Vonnegut used to say he had one thought only when he returned to his home town of Indianapolis: "Where’s my bed?  Where's my bed?”It’s how I feel every time I go back to Smith where I went to college.I was there two weeks ago for the big Women in the Media conference.  Many luminaries came, the news director at National Public Radio, the woman who got to spend three hours with Jackie Kennedy in 1960, and who rode in a limo with Ringo to get the story for Life Magazine during one of the Beatles' first trip to the US.....Gloria Steinem was supposed to be there and offer the keynote - yes she's our too I’m proud to say, as is Betty Freidan and Ann Morrow Lindbergh and Terry Marotta ha ha – but Gloria felt she had to be at the bedside of her good friend Wilma Mankiller,  a feminist in her own right and the first female chief of the Cherokee nation who died last week at 64.But when I see that campus! When I see those trees! Even now when on business I find myself passing through Northampton, a town so cool Tracy Kidder wrote a book about it, I always go straight to the campus, change into a pair of jeans and sit under one of those trees. None of the young women look at me funny. They see me the way I saw each of them: as a sister.But talk about 'Where’s my bed?' There are days like the day I am having today when so much is whirling and  so much ending that I still yearn for that little room under the sloped ceiling in the ancient house where the college was born, all 14 students and the faculty living there together. There are the old elms up above and down below here is  my little room freshman year. I walked down to the Five and Ten and got that weird gold cloth for 35 cents a yard to make the round pillow, which I found so beautiful. Then, because a child without money never knows when to stop, never knows when it’s too much, I also covered the lampshade with the same stuff. That’s how you knew me in high school: the girl with the problem bangs whose blue plaid headband matched her blue plaid skirt. Ah that callow hopeful girl: Where is she now? Where is my bed?

Wherever You Go There You Are

When you’re in one place you think of the other. I always notice for example that a mall in Florida isn’t like a mall up north. Our malls don’t have ice skating rinks in them yet well do I remember my little niece climbing into a wee skating skirt such as you’d put around a 20-inch Christmas tree and heading off to the mall. Up north, you want to skate, just fail to look down for four months of the year. Up north, you want an early spring you paint it on your windows like this lady is doing at the neighborhood food store.People in Florida look different too, more burnished-seeming, even in winter, the people of color a well as the white folks. Up north all winter we look like a bunch of root vegetables, he’s a potato, I’m a parsnip. Sometimes I look down at one of my knees and think I’m a mushroom. I’m even checking for those specks of black  you get on mushrooms,  bits of  humus they say it is but we all know it’s really what the night-soil gatherers brought down from the mountain, only reduced now to a harmless powder.Southerners are fatter too, the state with the most obesity being Mississippi, no doubt on account of the fact that there’s a Waffle House on every corner. We don’t have that, not in Massachusetts anyway, and I see now where our state boasts the very lowest rate for obesity in the nation. So what DO we have on every corner? Nail salons. Day spas where you can get a tan sprayed on you by young women in low-cut tops. And of course right now a million storefronts offering to help you prepare your taxes. Don’t forget those taxes people! And remember to note that whatever city, state or kingdom you find yourself in today there’s always the chance you’ll round a corner and run into a sight like this one, ahhhh!

Hard Work Dying

They say the nodule is really a mass and that’s why he’s almost stopped eating. “Have people moisten his lips," the vet said “and try to get a little food into him. Next week you’ll bring him in and we’ll figure out how to keep him comfortable.”But he runs from us; seeks quiet corners, the way soon-to-be-mama-cats do when the time comes to deliver…And oh to have watched this handsome and muscular boy shrink and flatten; to see emerging his fern-frond ribs and the innocent buttons of that long backbone: so sad. Do I bring him to the vet and slink away? Hold him ‘til the end? If I could carry home some secret elixir and set him free myself as he dreamed of mousy glories wouldn’t I do it! …..Or maybe some turn of fortunes awaits us yet.Hard work, being born; hard work dying.

Why Men Go to Prostitutes

A cultural anthropologist once told me men go to prostitutes to cede control; to have even just a short space of time when somebody else is responsible and this makes sense to me. As a onetime teacher I feel this way every time I go to a lecture that I’m not giving. As a person who gets asked to give talks that bring people to that itch-at the back-of the-throat moment when laughter and tears vie I feel it too: thank God it’s not me up there trying to pull of that high-wire act.  (And if you’re not sure who the experts are at getting you to that moment doe think Billy Crystal in his one man show 700 Sundays; think Robin Williams in his best movie roles, like when he played Adrian Cronauer in the 1987 movie Good Morning Vietnam. (Think of his face as he watches the troop convoy passing him? Boy after doomed golden boy laughing and waving, recognizing him as the funny guy on the radio who helped keep them from losing their minds in that terrible Through the Looking Glass war.)I feel control ebb away every time I have to go Massachusetts General Hospital to have some painful piece of fixing done, like when one of the particularly deft magicians there uses an electron microscope practically to insert kenalog into the messed-up joints of my cervical vertebrae.I feel it leave very time I lift off in a plane, at that alarming moment when with an unsettlingly loud thunk! the landing gear gets sucked back up into that big bird body. You look down and think Aargh where is earth? What if we crash? What if I never see those dear faces again? And then you just…. let go. Because somebody’s in charge and it isn’t you and for once, for this one little short while , you get to practice the spiritual gift of surrender.Now here’s Robin as DJ Adrian just doing the funny thing. Good way to start a Friday I think.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8gndbh4ZMo&NR=1]

New Lows from TigerTown

My vote is it’s creepy, Nike’s new ad featuring a mute Tiger Woods staring morosely into the camera while his dead father’s voice seems to be giving him a sober ‘talking-to’. Take a look  below if you haven’t seen it. (And  I used to think Natalie Cole singing duets with a father many decades in the ground was a little unsettling!)  An ad expert  raved on about how brilliant the Nike ad is on the Today Show just now but to me Tiger’s sorryface has the same authenticity as the segment a few minutes later showing the dog who could smile. Well the dog once sort of seemed to be smiling over a plate of food and its owner captured it on camera. It didn’t smile on the Today Show of course. It just has one of those wide straight-line mouths like George Washington’s in the Gilbert Stuart portrait that, with a slight twitch of a cheek muscle, could sort of turn up into something resemble a smile.Making an ad is hard work especially when the shot is this tight. It maybe took eight or ten takes before the Nike people got the look they wanted and chances are the guy was more bored or exasperated than anything else underneath the Emmett Kelly face. Is he sorry about this whole huge mess? I dare say he’s sorry! Should his remorse be used to sell shoes, effect a little damage control for this huge corporation long associated with him.? Well it sure rubs me the wrong way. I was fixin’ to buy some of those nice leg toning sneakers that build muscle clear to the glutes and I'd been looking for a while at Nike's Shox Turbo shoe. Instead I think I’ll head for the Skechers aisle; anyway they also throw in pretty sparkles on the sides.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIYejgkqd0o]

Tiger You Cad, We Forgive You

My man flew south today to go to the Masters and see naughty little Tiger in the flesh. Isn't it just so typical what we've done with him though? First he gets put on this big pedestal and treated like a god; then he gets exposed as being – well gosh, flawed after all! a mere messed-up mortal like the rest of us! Now we see him on TV Monday doing his mea culpas and everything will change again.Glorify. Bring down. Forgive again: We do it all the time. We did it with Nancy Kerrigan when she skated her way into our hearts at the 1994 Olympics (and of course it didn’t hurt that the hubby of her adversary-on-the-ice Tonya Harding arranged to have her whacked in the legs at that practice session.) But remember when she was flown to that Heaven For Athletes Disney World and on a float with the giant-headed Mickey was seen mouthing the words, "This is so corny”? People were awful about it. You’d have thought she was a baby-killer, a traitor to the country and the Whore of Babylon rolled into one.We got some perspective about that finally but still. They say in the PR world that any kind of press is good press. I bet Nancy and Tiger don’t feel that way. Anyway Nancy is what she always was: a kind and gracious person. Tonya seems to be what Tonya has always been too: an inventor of excuses to prove that nothing’s her fault.As for Tiger, maybe fame caused him to lose his bearings and go all crazy for sexual encounters and maybe he would have behaved that way anyway. He sure wouldn’t be the first guy. Anyway that’s his personal life. I say let the kid play golf and keep your speculations to yourself. But hey Dave, see if you can get a picture! (Or else I'll photo-shop him into this one ha ha)

Awesome Weekend

Can’t let the day pass without saying it was one of  the all-time an awesome weekends. At the start of it I came across two  people I love tossing a football around on the town common...

Then I talked with Mel and Vera who the day before had become citizens at Faneuil Hall Boston where the Sam Adams that isn’t a beer got everybody worked up about freedom for the colonies. “Four Hundreds people there!” said Mel who is from Brazil. “So beautiful ceremony. I cry!”

Saturday David raked leaves and I walked and wrote and made entertaining entries in my diary.

And yesterday? Well yesterday was such a lovely day even the panhandlers at the intersections where happy. One held up a a sign saying on one side “Happy Easter!” and on the other “Just Smile, People.”

As described , Annie began cooking in our kitchen at 9am and Dave stayed behind to support her. Me I went to the Mt. Auburn Cemetery because that’s what the Irish do on holidays: they drag the dead into it.  Not really. I went because Carrie and Chris  wanted to go hike around with their two little boys and admire the views.So .... we read the inscriptions and jumped around some,then came home,  looked for eggs, feasted grandly, played some Wiffle Ball out back and came back in when the sun went all tawny to eat some eggs and watch that classic film “Annie.”

Full tummies, tired muscles and relaxin’ on the couch to end the day ah!

Like in Fatal Attraction?

I think April stirs up greed: for the warmth, and the length of days and … let’s face it, the loot. What I’m remembering today is a greed-related chapter from my parenting days.My girls, seen here at the time, were nine and eleven and at the tail end of one very long day they were fighting. The younger one was looking for just the right spot under her pillow to put a tooth for a Tooth Fairy I seriously doubted she still believed in, when her big sister, perhaps suspecting the scam of feigned belief, suddenly winged a bean-bag at her, causing that tiny chip of enamel to fly from her hand.Try as we might, we just couldn't find it, which caused her to send up a wail like an air-raid siren."But the Tooth Fairy will find it and leave the money," I assured her in my best June Cleaver way."No she won’t!” lamented the child."Oh, but she will," I cooed on. "Because the Tooth Fairy is like an angel..."But she cut me off. "She WON'T!" she screeched again, eyes now rolling with panic."Well now Annie," I said, in a badly misguided appeal to reason, "The Tooth Fairy… well you know there ISN’T any Tooth Fairy, really. People’s parents…"  It was horrible. I couldn’t seem to stop myself, even as the child’s eyes widened. “You see it’s like with the Easter Bunny...""YOU MEAN THERE ISN’T ANY EASTER BUNNY EITHER?" she bellowed.As I say: my biggest parenting error ever. And I see by what I feel telling the tale, I’m not over it yet.I'm pretty sure she is, however.  She went to culinary school between college and grad school with the result that once again this holiday she is doing the cooking for the Whole Darn Family and at 2pm we’re set to sit down to: Morel Mushroom Tarts and Semolina Gnocchi with Pea Puree and Burrata, a main course of Beef Tenderloin with Horseradish Cream, Chicken Baked in Bread (whatever that is) Asparagus and Leek Bread Pudding…. And oh yes, for the pasta course?  BRAISED RABBIT over Pappardelle with Fava Beans, Black Trumpets and Ricotta.So maybe kids survive their parenting after all. We can only pray.Anyway, enjoy this day, all you great people, for whatever reason it might be holy to you!

Annie now, aproned up for the job ahead 

For Lew on His Birthday

Today is special to millions, what with Passover and Good Friday but to me it's mostly just April 2^nd, the birthday of our old friend Lew, who in perfect health one night in his 41st year sat up in the bed and died. He and his wife Jacquie were among the first friends we made in this town. Scarcely knowing us at all, they had us to dinner and our four little children felt so instantly comfortable they were three rooms away before we’d even sat down to the cheese and crackers.Lew was a genius - everyone said so - an MIT guy and one of the key people NASA contacted when the Shuttle shedding tiles like baby-teeth. He was a born teacher too, and could explain anything to you, even if you forgot to take Physics in high school; even if you thought you were dumb in Math. If Lew understood it – and Lew understood everything – he'd find six, or seven, or nineteen ways to make sure you could understand it too.He and Jacquie moved to Chicago not very long after the birth of their child Will, now a young father himself and a veteran of  the Iraq war. When the awful news of  Lew's death came, seven or eight of us dropped everything and flew out there, and someday, if his family doesn’t mind, I’d like to tell what I remember about the days they devoted to memorializing his life. It’s a story I still can't tell without weeping afresh for the pathos that’s in it.He traveled a fair amount, toting that amazing mind around to anywhere it was needed and he told me once he never drove home from the airport without fighting the urge to go faster and faster yet, fearful that something might have happened; fearful that his young family might have been taken somehow.In the end. of course he was the who was one taken and all the best minds in medicine could not say why.He was a good friend to us and we think of him still; and even now, when I drive to my own home after a time away, I too speed up as I grow closer, remembering his fond eagerness to see his dear ones. I speed up and then, when I see my house, I circle it entirely and look in every window. I do this every time, and  offer thanks to God and to Lew for helping me know what’s important.

From 37 years ago I just found this likeness of him  on the internet

April First, Sun and Clouds

I felt awful last night that I seemed to be making light of the plight of the people who can’t flush their toilets with all this flooding. When I saw on the news this morning how many people have raw sewage bubbling up in their houses I felt even worse. That’s how it always is with me: I’m laughing AND I’m feeling so squeezed by empathy I can hardly breathe. It’s a weird combination.First, here’s some more of the empathy part: in connection with the plastic bags that our trees are wearing like brooches, I mentioned a tent city outside Tijuana many of  whose ‘houses’ are made of plywood, tar paper, even cloth. In this community of  La Morita,  uncountable numbers of plastic bag bits cling to the barbed wire fencing off every vacant lot for miles around. I worked there for a week helping to build a house and the plastic bags looked like dead birds to me, their wings lifting and falling in the wind. Plumbing and electricity, phone service and trash removal: none of these exist in La Morita. The unpaved streets run in mud, and when it rains, no one gets in or out.And yet here were children in crisp uniforms walking toward the small school; adults perfectly turned out, picking their way down the rutted hills to ride the series of buses that take them to the factories.But it is April 1^st when we're meant to laugh some. There’s nothing funny about raw sewage of course, or about having your friends pass out on you the one time you ask them to stay awake and help you mentally prepare for whatever crucifixion awaits you. But it’s also the third day of Passover and what a great thing that memorializes: Getting free after centuries of servitude. Making it out at last with that old Angel of Death sparing everyone you love..... So what’s a principle common to the three things that make this day notable? Maybe that you’ll be all right as long as you keep your spirit free, no matter what gets done to your body. This cartoon regarding that new God the computer is meant to keep that spirit up. I say stay awake to this day and to everything it offers you even IF you have to  keep feeling your backside for Kick Me signs.

Venice!

Here are the streets of Winchester today. Just kidding ha ha. This really is Venice but Winchester is hot on Venice’s heels with the waters rising and rising, hiding entirely the eyebrow-shaped arch of the bridge by the Post Office, coursing fast toward our Upper Mystic Lake and on out to the insatiable ocean.When the floods of two weeks ago receded, they left a sorry sight: a thousand plastic bag parts clinging to tree branches even ten and twelve feet off the ground. The improvised neighborhoods outside Tijuana are strewn with this same harvest. So are many barren hillsides in Israel where Palestinian people have set up their woefully inadequate tents and lean-tos. If extra-terrestrials touched down for a quick tour of the planet they’d report us as a strange and warlike people drowning in our own waste.We're spoiled of course as Americans. When word went out last night that the people in certain communities should not flush their toilets for at least 12 hours they stood saucer-eyed reporting this fact to the TV reporters. We never think of what we leave behind; we've never really had to, with the services that have come to feel like ours by right.I took the above picture just a month before Venice was once again flooded and in the days after saw an account of that most recent event in a British newspaper. In reporting the story, it described two American women, suitcases on their heads, trudging across St. Mark’s Square in knee-high water and – what else? – sobbing loudly.

Doomsday AGAIN?

Well once again it's raining and the rivers are rising and the graves might yield up their dead for all we know. End-Of-The-World Time, Panic-Button Time, Get Up On The Hilltops and Await The Rapture Time. Remember that scene from “Independence Day” with all the drunk  people partying on the skyscraper roof, swaying and waving their arms to welcome the spacecraft? And then its vast door slides open and a single ray comes out and blasts them all to Kingdom Come? It makes you laugh, a scene like that, similar to the scene in "Raiders" where Indiana Jones is confronted with a black-clad bad guy slicing the air with his scimitar and here's our Indy with nothing in his hand but his whip so to speak. The music builds. What WILL he DO?.....

What else but take out his gun and shoot the guy. Not too sporting but it does get your attention. Maybe that’s what God is doing with all this rain, so what are ya  gonna do? Why not mosey over to YouTube and watch a bunch of classic clips like this one?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anEuw8F8cpE]

Expert Babysitter for Hire

When the little ones came for a sleepover the other night, all it took to get the older one down was 1,000 or so words of Harry Potter. As for the little one, remember the baby-sitting scene from "Tootsie" where Jessica Lange comes home from her date to find the baby still up, an apartment that looks like it's been tossed by robbers and Dustin-Hoffman-as-Dorothy splayed in dazed disarray on the floor? That was me.He said he wanted 'Papa' to tuck him in and I could hear stories being read aloud from the tiny third floor room with the crib in it. Alas, Papa was just the appetizers in his baby mind, the main dish being old 'TT' which is what he and his brother both call me.  "Read dese books!" he joyfully cried as I entered the nursery. And so I did: dese books and dose books and other books still until at last we came to the crib moment, which brought real tears to his little eyes along with several declarations: that he would sleep sitting up, that his blankie must not actually touch his body, and that what he really needed was a some bacon. "Uh, how 'bout a little applesauce?" I asked and descended two flights of stairs to get some, which he ate all wreathed in smiles while standing in the crib.Once done, he still wouldn't lie down, so I tried a different tack. "I'm just going to lie on this little bed over here under the eaves." I said and went and did that.Then, from the shadows, more bulletins, issued over several minutes' time and explaining that (a) he was sweating, (b) he was cold, (c) it was really morning, TT, and, (d) he was still hungry.  I chose the last statement to respond to. "Well, let's see what happens when the applesauce really goes down.""Ok" he said miserably. Then there was silence for 90 seconds, followed by a swaying-and-chanting combination right out of "The Exorcist." Lulled by its eerie rhythms, I began to dream.Then "TT?""Yes honey?""The applesauce already GOED down.""Ahh!" (Me. Ambiguously.)Next, there was more chanting, along with some rocking and head banging, the combined sounds of which propelled me back into dreamland. Then, "TT?," this in a strangled voice."Yes?" "I need you TT!" So up I got and lurched toward the crib: "What is it, sweetheart?""Dis came from my nose," he said, and handed me..... something, it was too dark to see, but I took it anyway because that's what grownups do."O-KAY! Great! Now we're set" I cooed inanely, at a loss as to what the proper response might be in such cases."Yup" he sighed, and finally, finally, finally whumped down onto the crib mattress like a bagful of laundry and was snoring before I had the door shut, leaving me to wonder, "Didn't I used to be sort of good at this?"

Reload or Shrug It Off

Looks like I was in Tucson just a tad too early to see Sarah Palin manifest like the Virgin Mary but tell ya what: even the BVM herself would look awesome zipped up in a tight-fitting leather jacket like Sarah's. It would give her that same Wild One outlaw look that old Six-Gun Sarah likes to cultivate these days.My family had its our brush with lawlessness a year ago right now when we rented a place that we now realize had to belong to some kind of drug lord - or worse. It had vast rooms with busted cherub sculptures; no lamps or bedside tables of any kind; no door on the master bathroom; and a big old bullet hole in the wall of the foyer. And also a thing we didn’t see until we really went looking in the immense basement: dug out of desert rock a room that was inside a room that was inside another room; a chamber capable of holding a good 80 people with, chillingly enough, a single king size bed in the middle. I wrote about it back then.We guessed something was wrong when no one responded to our calls to fix the busted AC or repair the supposedly heated pool that was so icy you couldn't dip so much as a toe in without seeing your whole foot go eggplant purple; we knew it for sure when the two individuals we had dealt with in renting turned out to have disconnected their cell phones. Oh and when we never did get that outlandishly huge $500 security deposit back.It was a week ago today when, back in Tucson to visit family, we gathered our courage and drove up into the hills to see this Brokedown Palace. We climbed the front stairs, which were in even worse repair than they had been. Then we peeked in at the rooms: empty. Every stick of furniture gone and only the wind howling in the brown palm tree by the pool and a dead bird lying beside it. I guess the joke was on us back then and everyone knew it, even this cactus that looked like it was ducking its hatted head and slapping its knee in mirth. Kinda makes ya want to be like Sarah and say "Reload!" yourself.

I've Got Joseph Biden Eyes

Last fall the eye doc peered at my eyes and said, “If these upper lids get to drooping  much more we’ll want you to get a Visual Field Test to make sure you can still see” - and didn’t I have that very thing just yesterday.The Visual Field Test involves getting cozy with a machine right out of Young Frankenstein where you put your chin here and your forehead up against here and now please look unwaveringly into this bright yellow circle of light in an otherwise grey background and every time you see the smallest flash in the periphery click this clicker.This I did with the right eye nor problem: three minutes of clicker-clicking went by lickety-split as little pops of light like tiny fireflies winked on and off around that small blinding sun. The left eye, however, they needed seven whole minutes for, during which time I by turns (1) intermittently stopped noticing the fillies, (2) most assuredly stopped caring about the fireflies, and (3) experienced such an altered state of   consciousness I began to wonder if fireflies and  eye doctors and even I myself had ever even existed or if we weren’t just all abiding in this brightly-lit space waiting to be born – OR if we hadn’t already died and were all now seated in another kind of waiting room like the accident victims in the movie Beetlejuice each bearing large traces of the tire-tracks or knife wounds or cigarette damage that had killed us.“OK that’s it!” they gaily called at last and freed my head and flipped on the room lights, leaving me able to see…. almost nothing. The room was still dark and my vision was blurry. Then to show their perennial spirit of fun they dilated my pupils and sent me out into the world 40 minutes later goat-eyed and wincing at the light with vision that stayed blurry until midnight. I had to write a dozen emails before falling into bed and I just called them up in my “sent” file now: Pure cuneiform. Pure gobbledygook.I’ll say this about growing old and falling apart: every day there’s a new adventure. :-)

US Scare

Just flew back across country on US Scare and would not have been surprised to see people holding chickens in their laps, it felt that primitive. By which I mean:No movie. Maybe we all got spoiled with the movies but a six-hour trip with not even the distraction of a safety video?No food. Well, no complimentary food. They have big signs saying “You’d better buy it now!” outside the gates but my guys didn’t realize. (I myself always travel with my own food which embarrasses them no end. It’s not the entrees, it’s the cutlery I think.)An odd sort of flight attendant, like the one who came pushing along the food cart just after takeoff. He barreled down the aisle saying “Food? Food?”, not individually but in a kind of Greek chorus voice meant for all. “What have you got?” asked the woman beside me. “Well it’s all right here!” huffed the guy as if we had X-ray vision and could see through the cart’s steel sides. And…The bathroom got into trouble and nobody fixed it. Enough said there.The whole experience reminded me of the time we took the train from Boston to Tampa one frigid winter and the cold followed us the whole way like a yelping bloodhound. There was that same kind of mute suffering then. The cars were freezing and somebody threw up in the bathroom which of course caused other people to throw up when they came upon the mess. Then the sinks stopped working. “The sinks don’t work! I think the pipes all froze!” I said, near tears, to the conductor. This was when we were just north of into DC.  “Oh ya,” he said. “But they’ll thaw once we hit Georgia.”I was a wreck during that trip and I was wreck during this one. Plus I just found out from my friend Scott that he flew across the country this past weekend too but he flew Jet Blue, so doubtless paid less AND he got a movie. Just sayin’. I won’t ever try going from A to B with these guys again; I’ll take a rickshaw first.

Hope Springs Eternal

On a gentler, more hopeful note on this the first full day of Spring how about some Kurt Vonnegut. Herewith about the loveliest 'vision' in all of literature, belonging to protagonist Billy Pilgrim in the fourth chapter of Slaughterhouse Five:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve.

Happy spring Kurt. I hope they love you as much in Heaven as we loved you here on earth.

This Is Peacekeeping?

The Titan Missile Museum here in Tucson is a mighty eerie place with its recurring theme of how enlightened the U.S. was with its Peace Through Deterrence program. That's the program that basically said  "If you even think about hitting us first your sorry cities will be ash within 30 minutes of the time we push this here button." I guess I’ve just never really understood how we kept the world safe for future generation when wait, weren't WE the ones who killed all those people on the Japanese mainland on two lovely August mornings? And, as the museum keeps saying, wasn’t this newer bomb six hundred times more powerful than the ones we dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki?I actually began to feel sick touring the place, which can ALMOST seem sort of harmless with its padlocked metal file cabinet holding the day’s secret 'code ' and its fat padded pipes like you had in the basement of your built-in-1930 grade school. But then I kept wondering how the other visitors could bring their small children to a place where in the waiting area before the tour you have to watch repeating images like the one above; where the minute the video starts you see this classically horrific footage of a building exploding into flames. (It must have been within 17 miles of the blast, poor building.)I taught high school for most of the 1970s and I have to say: I took one look at the film below and suddenly understood why that whole generation of teens born in the 50s seemed to want nothing more than to get stoned before lunch and stay that way for the rest of the day.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr76hNngqts&feature=related]

Sad Weirdo

What a sad weirdo I am. All day today vacation or not I’ve been reading Tracy Kidder on Haiti,  Jonathan Kozol on the Shame of the Nation and Sylvia Plath on the thinly fictionalized thoughts of an author who before her 31st birthday have will put her head in the oven, all the while trying to figure out if Abe is secretly dead and our niece Joanie who is caring for him at home is just afraid to tell us. The coyotes are everywhere, like the squeegee guys in Manhattan in the Years Before Giuliani.Abe’s sister was killed by coyotes, I know she was. One minute she was lying on the sunny patio and the next she was gone for good, and she never went anywhere, knowing well that her fleet-of-foot days were far behind her. The coyotes are just part of our lives now even in winte; last month three of them went right up onto our neighbors porch to bully and taunt their two dogs safe behind the family room windows.I couldn’t sleep in this vacation bed last night, for worry about  many things (and maybe partly because I’d just watched all two hours and 25 minutes of the movie  2012 in which the earth’s crust spills down into the void like brownie mix dumped from the pan just five minutes into the bake cycle. ) Anyway  I woke thinking mostly of Abe. I had told  Joanie last night  in a frantic text that really he won’t eat at all unless you pat him on the head with the same encouraging firmness his mamma used to use licking him to get him to nurse.  But then about three hours ago came this picture of our nice old boy in my sunny home office, as dazzled by the strong New England light as I am dazzled by its even stronger version down here by the Mexican border.

Home Thoughts

I left town Tuesday morning. It rained for three days and I  slogged around suffering like everyone else and then on the fourth day I left and the second I left the sun came out. I’m 2500 miles away in the desert today and back home a soft northern spring is bringing those little green shoots up out of the earth lickety-split.I’m happy to be on vacation but I miss my real life. I miss going to the Y and seeing the odd little kid in the child care room who just had to wear his leopard costume. I miss Uncle Ed and worry that he’s lonesome without me.  He’s a great one for reading and doing the crossword and scrubbing the bathroom floors on his hands and knees though, and he was after all in the South Pacific for three-and-a-half years so he's probably OK. He is one tough, tough guy.I guess the one I really worry about is Abe, our nice grey cat born 15 years ago next month who almost died in the spring of ’08 because of a blocked urethra. In the end he had to have what remained to him of his little male parts cut off and at the time I got many humorous posts out of our joint predicament around that very pricey hospital stay but now (since I suddenly seem to be old myself) it’s not funny to me . Now I worry about him all the time and when I get up in the night to go to the bathroom I ask him if he’s all right and when he gets up he does the same. I’m not there now to check on him but people are staying in the house so I know he is probably fine.Still how funny that just yesterday someone should comment on those long-ago postings and leave this very instructive video.  Watch it and think how funny you’d find it to have your bladder so painfully distended:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlK7nF8rTj4&feature=player_embedded]