cool hands soft

It was a nice Mothers Day for me. My girls gave me plants and our first honorary son and his bride sent some gorgeous flowers and called - twice.  A certain young man from Brooklyn forgot to call but we’re not much on these things in our family so that’s fine  - and maybe this evens us out finally for that time I stole a photo of him from one if his friends’ Facebook pages and used it in the holiday card.

The truth is, it was  a long day for me and my back muscles were screaming bloody murder by 6pm, probably because I began the day by driving 3 ½ hours, then food-shopped, then picked up a boy so he could harvest some blossoms from our yard to give to his honorary mom. (And what an eye for beauty he has as the vaseful showed, the azalea and lilac, the rhododendron and bridal veil all so artfully arranged by him!) Then I roasted a couple of pork loins before the rest of them arrived with the side dishes and David produced a 1990 wine just on the edge of turning from awesome to dirt-like.

Of course I thought of my own mom as I do every day, since, except for a sharp yearning for the sound of her voice, she is not gone from me at all, even these 22 years after her death. But for some reason I thought more of David's mom who lies at last beside her young husband, cut down in the prime of his life. Ruth Payne was soft-spoken and self-effacing, tolerant, free-thinking, and humble. This is what she looked like her senior year at Tufts when she was futilely trying to tell one Ralph Marotta a marriage between them would never work.. And this below is the poem that since her death has made me think of her every time I read it. Emily Dickinson wrote it about her own mother who she too missed very much, even as we all miss the ones who gave us life, remembering as we do our baby days and their cool hand soft upon our brow:

She bore it till the simple veinsTraced azure on her hand --Til pleading, round her quiet eyesThe purple Crayons stand.

Till Daffodils had come and goneI cannot tell the sum,And then she ceased to bear it --And with the Saints sat down.

No more her patient figureAt twilight soft to meet --No more her timid bonnetUpon the village street --

But Crowns instead, and Courtiers --And in the midst so fair,Whose but her shy -- immortal faceOf whom we're whispering here?

but seriously: who could be mad at this guy?

Babies, the Comatose and Kim Jong Il

What’s nicer than a list for America the illiterate?  Top Ten This, Top Ten That, we love ‘em. Time magazine made this week’s whole issue a list, the World’s 100 Most Influential People. Then they made their funnyman columnist Joel Stein think up 100 of the least influential people for the magazine’s web edition – aside, as he says,  from babies, people in comas and everyone in North Korea besides that Dear and Crazy Leader.Under LOSERS for example he proposes Tom Tom, category Car GPS device: “Six years ago, these were from the future. Now they come with your phone.” Under SLIMY BASTARDS, John Edwards, category Former Presidential Candidate: “He already was irrelevant, then he allowed news of an affair and love child to come out so slowly, we forgot he was already irrelevant.” Under MORONS,  Our girl Heidi Montag, category Star of MTV's The Hills: "You used to be famous for being famous. Then you were famous for getting lots of plastic surgery and selling only 658 copies of your album in its first week. Now you're not famous. That was fast.”And under FLAMEOUTS, three that I really loved: Grover, category Muppet, “Elmo is taking all your airtime, yo”. Any mother of any eighth grade girl, category Parent: “You'll regain influence in a few years, moms.” And Mayor McCheese, category Mayor; ‘Hey, 100 is a lot of people.”It sure is. Who among us could think up 100 of anything except maybe reasons not to clean out the garage? I tried doing that just once and  stumbled upon a whole raccoon family using their delicate fingers to sort through our cans and bottles. I shut the door quick and  never tried that again I can tell you.

Blessed are the Monks in Swimming

It’s not every day you get to feel superior to Idina Menzel but I did for a second when I heard her say on the radio that she went to Hawaii to get married to actor Taye Diggs.“Yup it was a destiny wedding,” she said and ha HA! I thought; she said it wrong! She meant a destination wedding, the kind where your friends and family have to cough up a couple of grand for hotel and air fare just to see you lurch around drunk on a dance floor. (That’s sure what I did as a child bride. I didn’t even know what a Sloe Gin Fizz was until that day never mind what a bright pink stain it would leave on that fancy white dress now sleeping its charmed sleep on the top shelf of the linen closet, the mummified remains of little Terry Sheehy late of the Drama Club and Special Chorus, the biggest nerd in the nerdbox.)It didn’t last; the superior feeling I mean. Thirty minutes after hearing Idina make this mistake I was sitting before an industrial bunkbed salesman who was telling me how his company’s wood was so much better than some cheap old crap like oak.“Oak just sits there for 30 years", he said.“Unlike your wood which you can milk?” I said.Exactly!” he said. “They make these spirally cuts on the bark and out comes.... latex!”Latex? I thought. All I know about latex I know from that box of slippery gloves the doctor keeps on his shelf to scare us with. I had just been going for the joke, comparing trees to cows.He thought I was smart. A half-hour before I thought I was smart. The truth is no one is very smart for long; It’s like my little girl used to say in her four-year-old attempt  to recite the Lords’ Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come I will be dumb.”“You’re tellin’ me!” God says to Himself on hearing that one. Are we sure I’m the one who made you people?”

It's Your Life; It's Not For Sale

Here on the Internet everybody’s on the hustle . There are sites that will sell you your own phone number if you let them. It’s a traveling circus really: "Duck in here to see the Bearded Lady!"  "See the strange and exotic Siamese Twins Joined at the Cranium!" Or.... "Just for the Gents: the Half Man Half Woman!"This was carny life circa 1930 and what red-blooded American rube wasn’t willing to spend a nickel to see a medical anomaly? Thank God we don’t do that anymore. Now if we want that up-close harrowing view we just have to watch the Operation Channel. (Seriously: ever catch a knee surgery? Scariest thing you ever saw; I  mean give me a chest-cracking over that any day. Do you know you have these globs of yellow chicken-fat all around your knee joint? Even skinny old Angelina does, with her Tinker Toy arms and legs.)Of course the Half Man Half Woman was  often just some poor lady with a prolapsed uterus.  And Siamese twins  we now call  'conjoined' twins and we pray them through their surgeries. As  for the Bearded Lady, it turns out we all have male and female hormones and how they’re balanced one to another shifts from person to person AND within each person over his or her lifetime.: “Mum, hi, you look great!” my oldest has been known to say on greeting me. "There’s just this one little hair coming out of your chin here!”  But seriously: think of the former Chastity Bono, now quite naturally called Chaz, in an interview from last spring: I'm so glad for her that she has finished transitioning now had a body that feels like home to her. And I HOPE we’re done pointing and smirking and setting up a peep shows when we encounter people who are 'different' because we can all agree that that’s not right, yes? If we have a little extra love/energy today let’s direct it to our girl Whitney, out of breath and struggling on her new world tour.  It’s true she doesn't look like herself these days. With Michael gone almost a year I know  she’s up near the top of MY pray-for list.Now here's Chastity-to-Chaz, the same as  she always was on the inside I am sure:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8M_-CJkO2A&NR=1]

"Ma'am? Ma'am?”

Here's what I’d like to do just once: go to the mall and NOT have to duck those young solicitors. I go to there now and have to climb right to the mezzanine to miss them. You know what they look like: young and bright-eyed and striding toward you, "Ma’am hiiii, would you like to try some special Whale Placenta Lotion for your dry skin?" You try to be nice, make a joke, say “Ha ha no! Sometimes if my skin gets TOO dry I just work a little shoe polish into it," but "I’m good!” you say, “Really!” you say and you try to keep on walking. You can’t even slow down on the first level because they just just keep coming at you with all these products.And you can’t be mean to them; it just makes them more chirpy. "Talk to the hand!” you might even say and still they won't take offense. "You have a nice day now!" they sing.It's easier to just avoid them. Only it’s sad because you know you’re missing some cool stuff down on that first level, like the hungry hordes milling about in front of the Cheesecake Factory, and the 14-year-old girls in their underpants and raccoon mascara all still wearing their Uggs even though it’s 90 degrees out - and sometimes even the 14-year-old boys too. Plus really all you get up on the mezzanine is the weird stores, for ecology-minded pregnant women, and,.... people allergic to air.... and,..... that those weird little hobby shops with clerks who look like Wallace Shawn in “The Princes Bride.”Not that I don't look like Wallace Shawn in "The Princess Bride" myself  but I'm fine with that. HEY I'M JUST HERE LOOKING TO SCORE SOME TERIYAKI CHICKEN, I’M NOT INTERESTED IN FLAMELESS CIGARETTES ! Now if they had real cigarettes for sale those might come in handy; one of those you could brandish like a sword and when the chirpers came at you you could plant the hot-coal tip SSSSSTTT!  right on the smooth young palms of their outstretched hands.You have a nice day now, hear?

As True in May as it Was in April

I once drove 200 miles over bumpy back roads to get to the place Naomi Shihab Nye was speaking and it was worth every pothole. That day she told her audience that we should all make time for the writing of poetry because doing so would keep us in a very distinct relationship with language. Her  own relationship with language seems so natural I sometimes feel like she's standing right beside me when I read her. Take the poem “The Art of Disappearing,” which I distort slightly by quoting only in part and  as if were prose:“When they say 'Don’t I know you?' Say No…   If they say 'We should get together' say Why?.. It’s not that you don’t love them anymore. You’re trying to remember something too important to forget. Trees. The Monastery bell at twilight. Tell them you have a new project. It will never be finished… Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you can tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time.”I sure hear that, waking today in this perplexing weather, torrents in Tennessee and Mississippi and hot and muggy here in the precincts north of Boston, even at 6am, not at all like our typical early May morning which is  normally moist, sure but as as cool as a corsage. As for our time it sure is limited, though only the real truth-tellers dare say so. It's kind of a forbidden topic in the perpetual adolescence of this age-denying culture.Nye says a  a young man once said to her, “Here’s my address, write me a poem.” And she responded this way:

Once I knew a man who gave his wifetwo skunks for a valentine.He couldn’t understand why she was crying.“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”And he was serious. He was a serious manwho lived in a serious way. Nothing was uglyjust because the world said so. He reallyliked those skunks. So, he re-invented themas valentines and they became beautiful.At least, to him. And the poems that had been hidingin the eyes of skunks for centuriescrawled out and curled up at his feet.Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give uswe find poems.

In the name of National Poetry Month just past I'd sure like to try doing that. And wait, is that a passing train I hear? Or is it the monastery bell?  I'm feeling more like a leaf every second  here.....muggy May morning in the precincts North of Boston

Leakage

We have leakage here tonight – a so-called catastrophic water main break is dumping eight million gallons of water per hour into the Charles River and the cops are going up and down the streets with bullhorns telling people 'Don’t drink! Do NOT drink the water!And speaking of leakage, I was at my local supermarket an hour ago taking  pictures of the Lays Potato Chips that boast half the calories on account of the secret ingredient Olestra, trade name Olean. I couldn’t believe they were back on the market when I first saw them on the shelves last week.  Ten, maybe twelve years ago my then-8^th grader talked me into buying them on sort of a dare. They were called Wow! chips and as the label said had this magical artificial fat Olestra. The only problem: it also  said right on the package, “May Cause Anal Leakage.”Now kids twelve think everything is funny and mothers of kids twelve sometimes think so too if they don’t get out enough. Suffice it say we bought the darn things - and spent a whole weekend tearing upstairs to the bathroom.Our friend the Internet tells me they were taken off the market years ago but if that’s so then what’s the deal with this new product?  When I saw these chips for the first time last week I grabbed a package and sent it right off to my former twelve-year-old as a birthday present. “For the good times,” my card read, but now I’m actually wondering : If we can’t drink the water AND we can’t eat the chips what are we going to do for fun tonight?(How do they do it? the package asks. Nothin' to it really.All it takes is a credulous public and a hell of a lot of nerve.

You Do WHAT While Driving?

The Today Show was all set to focus on Oprah's No Phone Zone Day this morning with a live phone interview with the great lady herself who assured wise Meredith and super-poised Ann and the perennially dressed-for-cocktails Hoda that of course she wasn’t calling while driving. She was going on and on in her folksy tell-it-like-it-is way when suddenly – bip! – the line went dead and she disappeared completely - which seemed pretty funny to me because it suggested that maybe even though she SAID she was Calling While Standing Still maybe even she was just then rounding a corner to pick up the dry cleaning.The worst thing of course is Texting While Driving. This is what's killing people, mostly teenagers. And if you haven't yet seen the horrific dramatization of a texting death and you think  you have the stomach for it you can watch it here. (Be careful though; it's pretty sickening.)But what I'm wondering is will Oprah’s efforts have an effect? We can only hope, because driving while texting really is insane and much, much harder to pull off than, say, driving while inserting a tampon, which believe you me many a female has done when she’s had to and her clothing allows it.The Today Show also spotlighted a parent showing her dead daughter’s student ID.  “How can this tiny thing remain when SHE is gone?" she basically asked the camera. But ah, that’s an easy one: Plastic will outlast us all; but a human? A human is as fragile as a ripe tomato – and that’s something we’d all do well to remember every single time we get behind the wheel.

Super-Soaked (again)

Every SINGLE time I turn into the Target parking lot I’m amazed by the gangs of people swarming storeward. They move as if on a conveyer belt with just that kind of Night-of-the-Living-Dead absence of personal will, as if chanting to themselves Target Store ahead, must enter, Target store ahead, must enter. And hey maybe that’s why the name and logo. Target stores are the dusky inner hallways of flowers and we poor suckers are the bees; they’re the nipple made purposely dark for the hungry milk-seeking newborn, the ♀ to our amorous ♂. "We got what you need honey, come on in!"So yesterday I did and in my tiresome schoolmarmish way immediately donned the Scornful Cloak, saying to my young companion "Look at this! People not from the west come into our stores and are stunned by the abundance and variety on the shelves!”We passed a brightly colored stack of  bubble-blowing kits. "They say our pupils dilate in the presence of so much stock!" "True that," said my young friend, studying the back of the Dr. Dre CD resting right beside a DVD of Sleepless in Seattle, that long-ago cry-on-my-padded shoulders film. They’ve got it all nowadays, from drugs to electronics to earrings so dangly they look like chandeliers. These days you can even buy a couple of noggins of iceberg lettuce or a brace of green peppers held up as taut and double-mounded under their plastic wrap as breasts in a bra ad - along WITH your peat moss and storage bins. But “Who needs all this?" I rattled on. "No wonder they hate us in other cultures!  Look at the tumbled stuff in these mini-aisles up front here.” I said, suddenly slowing, my eye on this nice little sword with its curved and piratey knuckle guard.Hmmm!” I said. “I wonder if they have another like this?” We made a quick dash up and down those halls of honey and sure enough, here was a second one tossed in the bin with the Super Soakers®. So, two swords, the exact right length and made of nice bendy foam. I threw ‘em quick in my cart and was through checkout before you could say Undead.

"Believe That?"

It was so dark and rainy yesterday  all I wanted to do was sleep. Then along came Rayvoughn arriving at the train station from New York where I was to pick him up and bring him back to the ABC house. “I’m always finding things!” he said with a big smile, tossing his backpack into the back.  “I just found this on the train!” he went on, pulling out that snazziest of reading toys, the Kindle. “Someone left it right in the bathroom, believe that?” He turned it on to show me the lady’s name and contact info, then flipped open his phone and called her on the spot.“Hello Kathleen Hanson! You left your Kindle on the Acela!”  (Let's just say that’s the lady’s name.)  She was visiting from Pennsylvania and staying in Chestnut Hill, she said, which any way you slice it as a good 40 minute drive from Winchester.  She said she’d take a cab over  after her dinner engagement  - "That’ll cost a cool hundred” I thought to myself”  - so Rayvoughn gave her his information, then spelled his name a few times because it is so elegant a name and unusual in its orthography.A few hours later she got back in touch to say the ride was just too pricey so Rayvoughn said he would ship it.  As we thought on this though, we realized it was a pretty tall order for a 15-year-old with school all day and Lacrosse practice after, so I said I'd take and Fed-Ex it today. Then, in a spirit of celebration, he had me stop at Target so he could buy a pair of long-saved-for Skullcandy headphones. Once back in the car, he popped open the package and examined them with such joy all I could think  was This is how to live! BE the one to do acts of kindness; BE the one to delight in the beauty and utility and design of every merest thing to cross your path and even the darkest rainiest days won’t get you down!

Thnax Grill Fiend!

Angry man writes me a letter, wonders where I got the nerve to take valuable newspaper space so that my ridiculous words could  stand in the place of actual news. He’s referring to last weeks’ column, versions of which you can see in papers from Harrisburg PA to Redwood Falls MN to good old Nebraska City News as well as right here at the top of my home page. My thesis there: that texting is doomed simply because when applied to a keyboard no bigger than a credit card the  thumb is one mighty blunt instrument.An example: the text you might find yourself sending to your colleague Tammy the night before that crucial meeting. It just shows what happens when those fat little thumbs miss their mark even by even a centimeter:"Tummy! Ate rou teady for the bog neeting? I’m feeping domewhat wirroed becalm my nimbles son’t seed to be adding up right. Con rou take a loop at them before hunch today?  Thnax grill-fiend!"Or the text I actually did send to my daughter the night Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” opened and Dave and I went to it:"Ho Hiney! Poops and I just saw “Malice in Wanderlust” wit Johnson Deep as the Mud Hitter, amazon! Fuzzy thong though: I kelp boing remanded of  some other actor,  I thank becalms of the bog spice between Johnson’s two frump teens. Who DOZE he look like? Mike Tyson? Lauren Hutton ? Waist, I know! He loops like Madonna! Minus the bivalves, bipeds, biceps ha ha.”My answer to the angry letter writer? Columnists really don't take space that would otherwise be devoted to the news. The papers set aside this space for us, come hell or high water, in the belief that our job as commentators is just as important - which it is, my friend, which it is.

Now for some good Tuesday fun, ponder these pix and you’ll see what I mean about a resemblance in the smiles. Pretty striking, right? I’d say “OMG!”, “LOL” and so on but call me old-fashioned: I still prefer whole words.

And,  just for fun, the Ear-Fillet-and- a-Side-of-Fries king himself  Mike Tyson, who has the ultimate in quirky smiles:

Glory Days

There’s nothing nicer than going to somebody else’s high school reunion because you can just relax and watch it all unfold. No one is looking for you or at you and except for when people hand you their cameras and ask you to take their picture you’re just on the sidelines.

This was David’s reunion that we went to last night. He was Class President which meant that when he walked into that function room a beefy guy yelled “Marotta!” and began loudly humming 'Hail to the Chief, ' which  of course  turned David redder than a sunset.  Then, when he heard he was the one meant to stand up and make the welcoming remarks, he immediately took his bottle of Budweiser and tried to lose himself in a knot of guys all laughing about some crazy long-ago stunt down at the Cape. He’s still pretty shy is the truth of it.“He’s just like he was!” one woman said to me later. "Just always quiet like that, and nice!" His theory? People liked him because he was quiet; because that way they could attribute all these good qualities to him.Well I’ve live with the man for 40 years, and except for that one football game when, thoroughly padded and helmeted, he punched a kid square in the face, he has never done a mean thing to anyone.  (And there’s more to that story too: At game’s end, kids from the losing team's side leaped from the stands and raced onto the field. One grabbed him from behind and swung. It’s just that when Dave swung back the Boston Herald got the picture and put it on the front page of the Sunday paper.We have that picture around here somewhere, in a scrapbook assembled by his high school girlfriend. If I can I’ll find it and put it up here too, as a companion to this picture, of how he looked the summer I met him, a mere three years after the Glory Days at Medford High.

Here's to You, Kid

It’s my boy's birthday today and didn’t we have fun when you were small, Mike, like that one time we used Magic Markers to make a big scary face on my styrofoam wig-head, then lashed it to the closed and upended ironing board so its base became its shoulders, then dressed the whole monster up in my big old bathrobe and propped it up so it was sort of leaning in over Dad’s sleeping form? When you called Dad’s name and he startled awake to see this hideously smiling ‘thing’ staring into his eyes, the look on his face was priceless. In our minds he deserved the shock  for presuming to be sound asleep on a Friday night at 7 when the rest of us were celebrating the start of  the weekend.Now here we are at the start of another weekend some 15 years later and God  knows what kind of crazy fun you’ll be getting into tonight with your pals down there in Brooklyn.... So this is just to say here’s to you, boy of my heart; you whose oldest sister once called  Our Best Final Project, even though you did bite her square on the bottom the summer you were four.So, readers of mine, this is Michael when he was little being given the ET-in-the-closet treatment by his sister Annie when he was little. And here underneath is his big sister Carrie looking over at her own new baby  a few summers back. Maybe someday, when Mike looks over at a baby of his own in someone's arms he might finally come to know how much we all loved him.

It's Just that You're Such an ...

I bet everyone knows about that internet 'glossary' for what women mean when they say certain things to their men.  Like when we say ‘Fine’ and it means ‘we're done talking now and you should shut up.’  Or when you ask us what’s wrong and we sigh and say ‘Nothing’ and really what we mean is 'It’s just that you’re such an asshole.’ Well, in my house we don’t have that. In my house we have one brightly chirping saint and one lumpish mammal resisting all chirps.Example: Every morning I tell Old Dave how great he looks. “Blue is your color! “ I gaily call, or  “Who would have thought you’d have such wonderful silver hair!” and so on. He just gives me this level gaze and goes on tucking in his Polo shirt. It’s like he doesn’t believe me. Or doesn’t believe that I believe me. Or doesn’t want to be yet another recipient of my Ministry of General Chirpiness.He has a million Polo shirts by the way, all given to him by companies hoping to do business with the company he works for. He hasn’t bought a shirt of his own since 1993 – and yesterday morning here he was unwrapping his latest free one before putting it on. We were in the bedroom where I was simultaneously returning phone calls, ironing and affirming the houseplants.“That shirt’s kind of BIG isn’t it ?” I innocently asked and got the deadpan gaze again – only this time he didn’t look away. “But oh yeah!” I quickly add. “I guess you always tuck IN your shirts, don’t you? I guess it’s ME who has stopped tucking in shirts!”“You know it makes me wonder how I ever got dressed at all without you in my life,” he suddenly said. As if he could really remember back that far, I think to myself, he who couldn't tell you the names of his childhood pets if you drove hot toothpicks under his nails.But the remark did get my attention and made me see myself; made me flash on the many times I looked at one or another of our hapless kids and said, “Is that what you’re wearing?”I felt a tad remorseful, so went for the amend.Sort of.“What’s wrong?”I said in my relentless female hunt-you-down-in-your-cave  way.“Nothing,” he said with an airy sigh.And never mind that the genders were reversed I’m pretty sure I knew exactly what sentence he was leaving out. It looks like men really are from Mars and women from Venus. And what  Oscar Wilde said about Great Britain and the U.S applies to the genders as well: we're two countries divided by a common language.

How You Know You're Old

Boston was so full of Marathon fans they spilled over like popcorn all over the metro area. And after whining here yesterday I felt so good I said the Hell with work and headed over to one of these burgs where birds atop statues sang their city tunes and every passing fist held a latte. I was standing in front of a park wondering how that street musician could manage to sound like two voices at once when this beefy guy beside me started hollering into his cell phone.“Yeah and I’m in this place I don’t know where and this dude is singin’ John Denver tunes and everything is  mellow – yeah.”“Simon and Garfunkel” I muttered. “He’s singing Simon and Garfunkel”.“Yeah some John Denver tune, I don’t know which.”“Sounds of Silence,” I said.“Yeah and the Marathon was  gooooood and you know very chiiillll and now there’s this  John Denver tuuuune....”“Simon and Garfunkel!  He’s singing Simon and Garfunkel!”He stopped talking and looked at me then and for just a second I thought I was going to get punched right in the face in my speedy little sneakers and hooded sweatshirt but no. His shoulders relaxed and he turned back to his phone.. “Yeah so this woman here says  Simon and Garfunkel.”  “Whatever,” he said.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Later,” he said. And he hung up and I got out of there fast.Maybe he’d gotten a closer look and caught my real demographic. Anyway I’m glad I said my piece. All my life I was shy on the inside however brave I tried to be on the outside. All I can say today is what a relief to have that gone (along with all those awful tampons!)

Monday Monday Can't Trust That Day

Mondays bring out the crazy in me. "A new week! Why not learn a new language?" I’ll say to myself (and don’t think for a second I’m NOT driving around with an untouched case of Spanish Behind the Wheel CDs.)  I have thoughts like this every Monday, never mind that it’s the day I have to meet my main deadline and catch up with all my writer correspondence.Last week I had to have something weird done to one eyelid so I canceled all my appointments and thought “Just rest, T" – but I had to practically lash myself to the stove not to think up all new jobs for myself. “Look at this nice new morning!” I said on my very first day post-op. “Why don’t I drive 60 miles to the memorial service of the sibling of that friend I haven’t seen in 50 years?” (I seriously almost did this.)  Or, on realizing the next day was the 98^th anniversary of Titanic’s loss, “Why don’t I go to Foxwoods and look at their Titanic exhibit?  Just drive two hours to see some glass bottles and some misshapen pieces of hull!”Am I completely abnormal? By most people’s standards sure, but evidently not by mine.Last year my primary care doc tried to tell me I was depressed and why didn’t I write and then pitch to ‘legitimate’ publishers that book I always said I’d wanted to write. I was ready to squeeze every other thing in my life to the side and do just that, only because she said to and never mind that I’ve already written four books AND marketed AND sold them all myself and it nearly killed me do you hear, it nearly killed me. A good friend saw where I posted about this remark and called me right up. “I guess I have to write that book now,” I mewed to her. “Oh screw that," she said. “I’d go on the anti-depressants before I took that advice!”I don’t know, I don't know. If there’s something wrong with me it’s been wrong all my life. Maybe right now I just need to finish the column, write the dozen letters, EAT something for God's sake and hang on for Tuesday.

Rare as Turtle Fangs

The great Wallace Tripp says illustrators are just word people who to happen to also draw:  “We work with one foot in a book, the other stuck in a paint pot; our shoes are a disgrace." I think of him here on National Columnists Day, so chosen because April 18th, 1945  was when legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle was caught in some crossfire on an island off  Okinawa. He was a word person if ever the was one, his dispatches going out to over 300 newspapers on the home front. They buried him in his helmet.Tripp also says "genius is as rare as turtle fangs, but talent is common enough" and I get that completely. For sure I’m no genius and even if I have talent it’s no more than the kind all humans have,  born story-tellers that we are - though I will say my pals on the board of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists are the wittiest people I know. I keep wanting to stop and copy down all the funny things that come across my screen during our online board meetings. I’ve been doing a weekly column for 30 years and sometimes boast about how I’ve never missed a deadline. The real pros though? They write three or four or five times a week. Like San Francisco’s Herb Caen did,  or Chicago’s Mike Royko. Did Molly Ivins write that often? Even if she wrote only  once a week you were glad you were there to see what she said: “The first rule of holes: when you're in one, stop digging" is one of hers. Also, “As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against  'em anyway, you don't belong in office.”All I ever did was stay the same person I was at age two when I set out alone in the big city to find my sister at kindergarten. I still go out each day wide-eyed, eager to see whatever I can see so I can come back and tell you all about it. This blog I’ll keep up for as long as I can but the column I will never stop writing so bury me in my helmet too and say I died in the line of duty.

Tonight I'll lift a glass to fellow Smithie Molly, gone from us too soon

Female Viagra

I just heard the delicately worded news  that the world will soon see a new drug to stimulate arousal in women, a female Viagra so called. Now I remember clearly reading the press about the Blue Bomb when it first came out and my understanding is it only keeps a guy in a state of arousal by sort of shutting the tiny trap doors preventing the blood from flowing back out of where it needs to be; it doesn’t get the blood there in the first place. The guy is on his own for that, the articles said but lucky for the species, getting to where he’s thinking about sex is not generally a problem for its males.The key piece of wisdom served up by those who study such things is this: men are aroused by visual cues, or information that comes in through the eyes. Like… Victoria’s Secret catalogs shall we say. With women though it’s a whole other thing and here’s the skinny on that: Women are aroused by verbal signals, that is by what you say to them. In other words dust off the sweet talk guys and if she wants you to sit in adjoining bathtubs sharing your feelings do it and the rest will follow. And, inside tip, never underestimate the number of points you get for pitching in with the housework!

Who Can Say?

I knew it when I caught myself smiling and smiling as I listened to the lady 60 with her long hair and her big hands sitting on a  pakr bench, singing a Moody Blues tune: I would be fine. The world would once again beckon to me, charm me, call me out of my private sadness.Wonderful people wrote me yesterday, Facebook friends, strangers, regular and first-time commenters on this blog, and many asked how the death went.This is what happened: The vet had prepared us well. Merry and tender Dr. Kevin Fallon bounded up the front steps of our house on Sunday. “How’s he doing? I’ve been driving around for 24 hours with this shot in my car! It’s a kind of super-cortisone. Let’s try it and see what happens..."He administered it to poor Abe who had lost so much in those last two days: the desire for water, the desire for food, even his remarkable  (A young friend of mine named Rayvoughn still swears he heard Abe talk. Once, when I left him here to go fetch his friend Tristan, he said Abe came right up in his lap, peered into his face and said, "Who are YOU?” “I couldn't believe it, I was speechless!” said Ray afterward. “But he kept looking at me. Finally I said “Uh, a friend, I’m I’m I’m….just a friend!’ and the cat got down and walked away.”)Anyway, six hours after this shot the cat stood and began gobbling from the food dishes we had set up on the end of our bed. Not just the special super-caloric kind that smells so good I kept almost eating it but even the kibble he hadn’t gone near in  a week. Dr. Fallon had warned us though that this would be temporary. “We’re talking sometime in the next week,” he said. “That mass we feel in his leg could be one of many.”Sure enough, Tuesday morning I was on the phone in tears. We made the appointment for early that evening.Dr Fallon was off that day but his associate Dr. Lisa Oswald could not have been nicer. Nor could the many compassionate techs who greet every arriving animal like their own long-lost pet.Once she gently confirmed the fact that we were all three ready to say goodbye, she explained what would happen: a shot of what amounts to anesthesia following which, over a course of five or ten minutes, the cat would grow drowsy and finally drop into a peaceful sleep. We were of course welcome to stay and hold him when that second shot went in, the one that would end brain activity, but sometimes there was a reaction, she said; twitching, or the loss of bladder or bowel control. But  Abe had always been so tidy in his personal habits; why would I want to witness that last loss of dignity? More important, how could I watch as all that lovely electric energy that is the life force so suddenly…. vanished?I had my hand on his back as he began to dream. David had his hand on mine. My whole shirtfront was wet with tears and David kept blowing air out of his mouth which is what he does in times of sharpest grief. In a few minutes, Abe extended his front leg in a long luxurious stretch and I knew he felt just fine. We left by the back door, sorry sight that we were, so as not to spoil the bright aura of heath and jubilation out front. We drove around for a while in the hills of Arlington. And when we got home, David send me upstairs and went to work removing every food dish, litter box and cat carrier in the place.I kept his collar and his leash though and set it on the window-seat of the upstairs study here where I do my writing, and yesterday morning - what do you think? - for the first time since I bought it last winter my gardenia plant offered up what you see here below. Who can say what life is then or where next it will flower forth?

The Bustle in a House the Morning After Death

"The bustle in a house the morning after deathis solemnest of industries enacted upon earth.The sweeping up the heart, and putting love awaywe shall not want to use again Until eternity."That's Emily Dickinson. It describes just how it feels for us today. Sick as he was, our nice old Abraham died quietly at the veterinarian's last night. First he and I sat for a long time in my car before the appointment, just looking out at the house and yard he knew so well, then we drove over and he waited so patiently for the shot that would end his pain.They don’t ever know, do they, how much delight they bring us?  Here are the neighbor's tulips, lashing the April breeze. We looked at these a long time too.