Gay Youth in McDonald's Ad

My blogger-friend Bobbie just posted this Youtube link to a French McDonald’s ad revolving around a gay teen and his dad. We’ll know there’s hope for us as a nation when we too can see a mini-drama like this among our TV ads and feel only a tinge of nostalgia for young love.“Come as you are” they’re calling the campaign. Good for McDonald’s.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBuKuA9nHsw]

Letters to the Dead

I knew Memorial Day was coming when I saw this lamppost decorated with red, white and blue flowers and the handwritten note that a mother had penned to her son dead in the mideast. This was on the Boston Common Wednesday. Today on the Common there will be a major event to commemorate those who have fallen in those wars and, it sometimes seen, been largely forgotten.  Today's Globe cites a finding of the Pew Center on People and the Press which reveals that from May 13th to May 16^th just 1% of news coverage was devoted to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.I took this picture with my phone which is why it's not very good. Also, there were two old guys on the bench right next to it and I didn't want to disturb them by trying to get closer. Still, I wasn’t so far away that I missed the pathos of the way the ink was starting to run and blur in the elements. "My dear son," the letter begins.The closet cemetery to us here has so many flowers always. Italian families take wonderful care of their graves. My family is Irish and our memorial stands as bare as it has stood since 1910 when it was purchased for the girl I never knew as my grandmother and the baby she died with. David’s mum is from old Yankee stock and when her young husband was taken with cancer she bought a simple stone and pretty much left it alone too - until forty years passed and we brought her there to lie once more beside him.I understand Puerto Rican folks visit their family members’ graves all the time and feast there and talk and try to include the strengthless dead in all the fun.  It seems like a wonderful thing to me.I can feel the workweek looming now but I did just finish my column, and this is my posting, done now too. Maybe Dave and I can get ourselves to the graves of our own dear ones today and walk around them some and TRY in our human futile way to make them live again.

Aaron Glantz photo of teh father of slain Lance Corporal Alexander Arredondo,

Happy Birthday Annie M!

Our son came from New York for his sister Annie’s birthday this weekend. The two of them and their big sister the real boss had dinner in Boston to celebrate, then actually texted their two out-of-it parents and asked us to come in town for drinks afterward, at a place so fancy they don’t have chairs. A place where you’re meant to stand like horses in a stall. A place so upscale you say to the bartender “I believe I’d like to try something interesting, something of your own devising, with, say, Bourbon, and bitters, and some surprise ingredient of your choosing ” and she asks a few more questions, then makes you a drink so very interesting  that you who get up at 5:30 every morning of your life, sleep on past 8:00.

All that was last night. Tonight Annie, who has been cooking for us all ever since she finished culinary school, is cooking for us again, even though today is her actual birthday. So as soon as I get done writing this I’m copying, in my own imperfect human printing, a poem for her, in which the speaker-cook thanks all  the ingredients in her soup and right at the end the blue flames from the gas jets that work all the magic. It's lovely and I'll copy it below.

This above is Annie at 15 with her honorary big brother Dodson, the first family member to see the funny, smart and fearless woman inside that timid tenth-grade girl. (Here’s to you for that one Dodson!) And especially here’s to you, Anne Payne Marotta: we would love you even if you didn’t know how to roast a chicken inside a flaky feathery pie-crust shell!

Acceptance Speech  by Lynn PowellThe radio's replaying last night's winnersand the gratitude of the glamorous,everyone thanking everybody for making everythingso possible, until I want to shushthe faucet, dry my hands, join in right hereat the cluttered podium of the sink, and thank

my mother for teaching me the true meaning of okra,my children for putting back the growl in hunger,my husband, primo uomo of dinner, for notbegrudging me this starring role—

without all of them, I know this soupwould not be here tonight.

And let me just add that I could nothave made it without the marrow bone, that blood—brother to the broth, and the tomatoeswho opened up their hearts, and the self-effacing limas,the blonde sorority of corn, the cayenneand oregano who dashed inin the nick of time.

Special thanks, as always, to the salt—you know who you are—and to the knife,who revealed the ripe beneath the rind,the clean truth underneath the dirty peel.

—I hope I've not forgotten anyone—oh, yes, to the celery and the parsnip,those bit players only there to swell the scene,let me just say: sometimes I know exactly how you feel.

But not tonight, not when it's allcoming to something and the heat is on andI'm basking in another roundof blue applause.

Swept Away

The ivy is once again threatening to overtake us here. Every year it grows over the window frames, sending out armies of sticky fingers just like Fagin sent out his child thieves.  Only these are second-story men rather than pickpockets; they climb up the shingles and let themselves right into this upstairs room, pushing their way under and around the screens with their springy young muscles. By late June they will have made a Conga Line across the top of the baseboards and be heading for the bookcase.That’s what this season brings: the feeling of being overtaken by nature, first by its vegetation, then by its swoon-inducing warmth. You get just ... swept away, and it's not your fault.It's like the way women used to feel about sexual passion: that they couldn’t choose it because choosing it would mean they weren't 'nice' girls. Instead, they had to let it sort of overtake them, and if that isn’t a dumb way to live I don't know what is.I think of poor Marilyn Monroe. If it's true that she had a dozen abortions, I bet it was because someone as comfortable with her unclad body as she seemed to be did not feel comfortable saying 'no' to a man. Or if not 'no', then 'not now.'  Or, 'get some protection and we'll talk.'When she was married, first to Joe DiMaggio and then to Arthur Miller, she yearned to have babies. Instead, she had miscarriages, perhaps because of  the very severe case of endometriosis that some say resulted from all those procedures.But to get back to the summer riot of growth: Looks like you can stock up all you want on window fans and herbicides, Nature is still going to have her way with you. Maybe it’s better to just lie back and let her.

the other window, this one swagged in both silk AND ivy.

The End of Parenthood

I thought NBC’s Parenthood would be lame, a remake of the old movie by the same name but then March 3rd came here they all were: Craig T Nelson, so perfect as patriarch Zeke (even though I’m not 100% convinced that a vet from our earliest years in Vietnam would actually BE proficient in acoustic guitar.) And Bonnie Bedelia, who shows me my own future with her ringlets and her angel sleeves and her dangly earrings. She dresses as if it’s the 70s again and why not? Viva empowerment!  The Blond Kristina is sure in her own boat: "I was a teenage girl once! You never were!” she yells to her husband, played by Peter Krause. Still, I'll admit she's pretty sweet in that scene where she disappears into her closet in search of an outfit for the big  job interview and comes out in such a giantly shoulder-padded jacket her two sisters-in-law hoot with derisive laughter. (“Who are you, Cybil Shepherd”?!)Dax Shepard is in it too. He's  the rangy big-eyed dude above  you know him: he who played  Tina Poehler’s  partner-in-deception in “Baby Mama”. I like that his name is Crosby in the show. I keep looking around for family members named Stills, Nash and Young.Plus even the kids are great, especially the older ones. That mild boy-teen trying to get a foothold in the new school. And pretty-girl Sarah Ramos. And Mae Whitman with the sad eyes and the slumped shoulders.But my favorite character?  Hands down it's Lauren Graham as the merry-eyed slightly screwed- up daughter who has to move home with her kids and then begins thinking she should move back again and stop causing everyone so much trouble. Her daughter’s English teacher falls in love with  her for her funny vulnerable way.  That's what did it for me too. Take a peek from the promo clip to see what I mean:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUIK17oJuRA]

Dress Cool

Here in the provinces north of Boston your senses grow more alert when it's over 90 on a May day and you just 8 miles in from the icy churn of ocean. Maybe it’s the response of the animal self to Anomaly.My own senses noted that the iris bed smells like cat pee, a strange sad thing with our old pal Abe not six weeks in the ground; with his sister Charlotte in some unmarked grave, carried away as we think she was by coyotes. When I tap into my Medium self I sometimes ‘see’ what remains of her, a small Pick Up Sticks toss of bones in the undergrowth by the water’s edge.They noted the presence of manure on a lot of gardens and there’s another sharp deep scent that shoots up your nose to settle in the base of your brain.They noted this small flotilla of geese on a quiet road. Any goose clothed by God in enough feathers to stuff a mattress with and a blizzard of pollen shooting up its own little nostrils might get a mite testy on days like this. Maybe that’s what happened with these geese, who looked so peaceful to me as I first came upon them weren’t. Weren’t at all. Because seconds after I took this blurry shot two of them were screaming and diving at each other and the rest jeering loudly. Five minutes after that the grass was littered with great fan-like feathers bigger than a big man’s hand and one of the geese was limping.Was it a fight over territory? An  attempt at mating? How vain and silly we humans are, sashaying around causing oil spills and acting like we own the place, when in fact we understand so little..... Hot again today, they say. Good plan for this dumb human to dress cool and take things slow.

Locked in the John Part Two

I have to be ready for anything I find. Didn’t I get locked in a coffee shop bathroom that time and the cops and the fire department were all tap-tapping on the door and the store manager saying “O My God! O My God!” (What did she think I was doing in there, holding the espresso grounds hostage?  Giving birth? Dying?)Since that time I never go into any bathroom without my phone. I started to faint in the tub last year and, well, Old Dave is as deaf as a haddock when he lies on his left ear. So I phoned him, woke him up that way. I was going down for the third time when he staggered in to the bathroom and hauled me out; his expression was like the one a Midwesterner might wear at the pale and sorry sight of his first beached whale.So just today when I ducked into the Ladies Room of a largely deserted building and then couldn’t get out again I thought “Dang!’ Then “Let me at that tricky little phone of mine.” I had just downloaded Twitter  so that was good anyway. I could send a little message-in-a-bottle that way and maybe some 12-year old in Korea would get word to the building superintendent.  First though I scratched at the door some, like a dog will do when you lock him up. Then the plots to at least three Edgar Allen Poe stories came back to me and I was just looking up to see if a giant pendulum was lowering itself down to turn me into luncheon meat when I saw it: the other door. “T, you dope,” I said right out loud because this wasn’t the door to the bathroom at all; it was the supply closet!Disaster averted for another day anyway. Now click here to see what happened last time. The giant  coffee company sends me a check every month not to mention their name. :-)

March When It's Time to March

Why do people come back for their reunions, in some cases from around the country, in some cases from around the globe? Not because they’re looking that great or setting the world on fire usually. I think they come for those late-night conversations.At my Smith reunion this past weekend we had all the human drama you’ll find among people anywhere: cancers conquered and cancers fought to a standstill; pain on rising and pain on going to bed, no matter HOW many time a week we go to the Y. We had here and there a ripening cataract; here and there a worn-out hip. But our hip replacement girl is back dancing  and our future cataract patient will still be running a whole corner of her state.  One of us hoisted a bike out of her car single-handedly and rode all over campus, just like she did at 19. And this one with the long hair above left is a golf pro at 61.We were college kids in a time of war and assassination, and last winter when ten of us  got on the phone to dream up slogans for our class signs we thought a lot about that: the pain our country was in back then what with deaths from war and protest and assassination. But we thought too about what rose up in so many young people as as a result, which I would call a readiness to stand with the excluded and help make a place for them. Yesterday at the Alumnae Parade someone from a younger class saw us approaching with our signs and our outfits and called to her pals, “Here come the hippies!”Hippies? Aren’t we  doctors and lawyers, artists and actors and scientists, designers of laws and landscapes and buildings? Parents, some of us, and even grandparents? Hippies, never. No Hippie ever studied the way a Smith girl studies.Now if you have the time watch Rachel Maddow talking last Sunday to our newest graduates; then, for a real nice chill up the backbone read this real short excerpt from her speech that day. I believe I'll sit down then and memorize it.

In the big picture, standing at the age you are now at graduation, looking for your own deep-water horizon, consider the possibility that you might very well get old - everybody hopes you do. Be part of good decisions because the stuff you do now you will want to be bragging about when you become 90.How do you become part of good decisions in the absence of a crystal ball? The best way is to get smart and get smart fast, to take the opportunities you've got very seriously, to continue your education not necessarily in a grad school way, but in a lifelong way, be intellectually and morally rigorous in your own decision-making and expect that the important people in your life do the same if they want to stay important to you.Gunning not just for personal triumph for yourself, but for durable achievement to be proud of for life is the difference between winning things and leadership; it's the difference between nationalism and patriotism; it's the difference between running for office and devoting yourself to public service; it's agreeing that you're part of something; taking as your baseline that you will not seek to reach your own goals by stepping on your community; it means coming to terms that your country needs you…”

So I say: march when it's time to march.....

and dance when it's time to dance.

Home Again

What a difference a day makes: Thursday's nasty hotel cost $150 per night and the one I’m in now? $120 for three nights. Why? Because now I am home in the arms of my alma mater, the place I still can’t drive past in my hamster-wheel travels  without  ditching my car and walking in the gates to sit once again under that big copper beech that’s been sheltering young women for a hundred years and more.It’s Reunion Weekend here at Smith and I'm staying in Room 109 Comstock,  as nicely monastic a cell as you could ask for. I have a window, as you can see and a desk, a bureau, a bookcase and a sweet single bed.Last night 4o of us hung out for a couple of hours in Comstock’s living room, once as  formal as all such living rooms were in women’s colleges. (This  is the place Julia Child went to school, remember - and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Sylvia Path and Barbara Bush  when she was Barbara  Pierce. I mean you can just picture the pearl necklaces.)My class was like that for oh, maybe about five minutes Freshman  Year. Then in came the Youth Revolution. I remember I cut a full 12 inches off that blue wraparound I came with in September, traded in the bra  for a halter-top and let my previously just-so hair tumble down in the curls God gave me.

We may not look much like the girls we once were but I can tell you this about the 102 of us here this weekend:  We seem as happy to be on this campus today as ever we were when youth and strength were ours and the days ahead were poised to open and open like flowers.

Girls Gone Wild My Foot

The worst thing about a bad hotel is when you can sense the ghosts of previous guests in it  - and when I say “sense” I mean “smell” as in the smell of all the disinfectant it takes to banish them. The smell in my hotel room last night was acrid, overpowering. “The windows don’t actually open,” the clerk had said to me when I checked . ‘That’s OK,’ I aid blithely back, thinking ‘I’ll just crank the AC.’   Who knew the AC would be so busted and the smell so sharp  that this morning  my lungs feel burned?  All night I kept looking out at my car in the parking lot. and wondering why I didn’t  just go out and sleep in it.Two key observations this morning:(1) Tylenol PM doesn’t work AT ALL until about 2 hours before you have to get up when it holds you under like a drowning victim at the hands of his murderer.(2) You think a lot less of HBO when you see the ridiculous porn they screen late at night.  Pity the males addicted to these images; how can we tell them that it’s the old bait-and-switch? That they’re never going to find women like the ones they see on their various screens wearing nothing but stiletto-heeled boots and fondling their own breasts? I hate to crush your illusions guys but women just aren’t that interested in the auto-erotic, just like God is not that interested in Football.  If you’re a 14-year old male you may think the best fun adults can have involves a lot of bouncing and yipping but it just isn’t so. Sure, in the state of arousal all else falls away but that’s Nature’s trick to get what Nature’s really after which is: procreation.  There’s a thing called 'the erotic trance' and the decisions you make when you’re in it often seem a tad  ... questionable once it passes. Even those half-naked 20-year-olds in their Naughty-Schoolgirl get-ups will tell you: Women are nesters and tidy-up-ers . After sex we mostly feel like…. vacuuming! :-)

Recipe for a Smile

Josh tutoring at 826 Boston

Josh with two young scholars

Yesterday I drove our seven ABC scholars to Roxbury again. Fresh from school, they piled into my car and got right to work on the two fat bags of dollar-apiece regular-size burgers, 'regular' these days meaning a little smaller than the size of your head. There were the 15 burgers and four large sacks of the Dead Man’s Fingers known as fries, which, along with a cooler of milk, juice and fruit, soon made the atmosphere joyful. Joyful in spite of the cold rain and the oily slither of traffic on the Expressway. Joyful in spite of its eventual crawl and stop.

Because what did we care about traffic? We had music and full tummies and high purpose, the purpose being the chance to sit once again with the high-spirited school-children who come to  826 Boston every day to start on their homework and read and write and consider the world as only people new to the planet can do.Once we'd settled in, I sat for a bit by Cameron,  who was matched yesterday with a 2nd-grader working on Whale Facts. He filled out his homework and Cam 'heard him' on his definitions while the child, with a smile bigger than Christmas, recited and only every six or seven minutes stood and make bunny ears behind Cam’s head.At other tables,  Cameron's six fellow student-tutors were equally engaged, one helping with math, one reading a pleasure book with his young charge, one watching as a highly competent first grader spooled out an essay in Spanish on the important of rules in sports.Then suddenly somehow it was quarter of 6 and the day was over.We piled back into my humid and still-burger-ish car, by now as familiar to these seven  as their own living rooms. The radio came on and the rest of the juice  disappeared and within 15 minutes every singleone of these smart-as-a-whip teens was fast asleep. Then it was my turn for that that smile bigger than- Christmas, which I wore for the whole rest of that 50-minute ride.

cameron on the common

Cam, on a spring day sunnier than yesterday

You've Never Laughed

Fire Marshall Bill: that’s what I almost called that spoilsport who prevented me from lighting my grandchildren on fire at the birthday the other day. I didn’t because well,  how many people would get the reference to one of Jim Carrey's first characters on the 1980s show “In Living Color produced and largely acted in by the Wayans Brothers with the fabulous Fly Girls providing the beat? These days people's memories are SHORT.Jim Carrey played Fire Marshall Bill by drying out the inside of his lips and tucking them up away from his teeth, then lecturing to pyros like me in this bullying buck-toothed way:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdR2T6YKAUc]Anyway, a few weeks ago I was waiting for the movie to start at a film festival  a few weeks ago when a young couple behind me started talking. “I just saw this dark  film 'The Ice Storm' with Kevin Kline, and someone said he also did a film called ‘A Fish Called Wanda’  have you ever heard of it?"  “Nope” said the woman and I could not believe my ears; just could not believe that anyone could have missed a film with Jaime Lee Curtis and John Cleese and Michael Palin and if any of you  out there haven’t seen it do me a favor and go to your Netflix queue right now and rectify  the situation because seriously. If you haven't seen "Wanda," seriously….. Dude. … you’ve never really laughed.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqAJUlSRCwo&feature=related]

An Older Lady Reacts: Sex and Severed Heads

flowers and Carrie's sofa

What’s more old-fashioned-looking than a bouquet from your own garden? I look at this picture and suddenly it’s the 1890s again and my grandmother Carrie Maloney is home from college playing the piano in the parlor. (OK If I’m honest I’ll admit this bouquet was supplemented by a few gorgeous blooms that came my way on Mothers Day.) And speaking of  mothers and earlier times here below is a picture from my kitchen of  the framed sampler our famous friend needle-genius Ruth McDowell once made for me. It memorializes a phrase my mom used all the time, whenever she was confronted with the crudeness of modern life. “Oh Say!” she would shout when she saw kids making out in public. “Why aren’t those children home studying?”

Oh Say Sampler

Mom was born in 1907 which is hard even for me to believe since I still see myself as a mere girl. Her mom was born in 1878, the young Carrie who wrote sweet passionate letters and was dead by 31. Imagine a couple of people like these two fending off today’s many assaults to gentility! Imagine that I actually took my mom to see "The Godfather" when it opened! Because it had been such a good book? Because I totally forgot about that sex scene up against a bedroom door between Sonny Corleone and one his sister’s bridesmaids? The theatre was pin-drop silent, and suddenly there was mom’s clarion voice dripping with shock and scorn - and that was even before we got to the severed horse head in the old gangster’s bed:  “OH SAY!” she yelled. I almost melted with the embarrassment.

Fireworks

What can we say about a month like this month? A weekend like the weekend just past which held not just spectacle and an email from someone I had not seen since I was 11, but a birthday. At the party yesterday a piñata took a real beating and there was pizza, and a cake that looked like a sleeping badger, and sparklers from across the border in New Hampshire, the famous Live Free or Die state  where you can still go helmetless on your big old motorbike if you’re that crazy.I’m the one who brought the sparklers, which anyone can get right in any supermarket there in the Granite State. “Look! Sparklers! They’re illegal in Massachusetts!” I said to the birthday boy’s older brother and his eyes widened. “WHoooa!" he yelled. "Hey everybody, we have sparklers!" Then…. “What’s ‘illegal’?We got a lecture on that topic from a firefighter-guest and when we did finally light them it was under conditions you could only describe as extremely controlled. We watched a few fizz down to their wicks in honor of a matchless May day. The sun went all golden and a little boy blew out his candles as his big brother kissed him and who knows but what the two of them will still be embracing each other right on into the 22nd century?

Grandma Says: Stay a Baby as Long as You Can

Last night at midnight our family baby turned three and, some would say, became a baby no more. But when I look back! By the time his mom turned three I was treating her as if she were a combination Teaching Assistant and Counselor-in-Training, so much older did she seem than that new little package we held in our arms, swaddled tight against a case of colic so horrid I used to climb on top of the clothes dryer with her, its roaring tumble being about the only thing that could soothe her.Really, three-year-olds are still babies, even though they can talk. That oldest child of mine, mother to CurlyTop here? Here's how she made sense of her sense of disappointment at being nudged aside by a newcomer: “Sometimes when I miss my nap I don’t love the baby that much,” she said one day and that was months before she turned three. As for Baby Colic, at three she was still sucking her thumb with all the relish of a man smoking a fine cigar - and kept on sucking it right through kindergarten, sneaking over to her cubby for secret sessions among the hats and jackets. It’s true that their little brother appeared in the kitchen the morning of his third birthday and refused his customary bottle of cold chocolate milk.  “I’m three,” he said. “I don’t drink from a bottle anymore,” the implication being that he was past all that  - though not, as I recall, past stuffing a bright plastic bead up his nose  few weeks later  just because it seemed to fit so nicely. (Now there was one long night in the ER!)There will be a party later today and all we busy grownups will stop our mulching and our weeding, our ironing and our cooking  and head over to their little house in the woods and spend a few hours with him and his sweet  big brother and their parents, just watching them play in the warm spring sun.

Parade of Life

Street Fair, USA, starting with a parade which seems almost metaphorical: We line up in the high school parking, a place practically synonymous with the true starting point of life.  We are freezing and we are warm; our comfort levels change minute to minute depending on how we are dressed and from which corners the wind suddenly sneaks around to hit us full in the face.Thanks to the school Marching Bands, there is a sound track to the parade, just as there must surely be a sound track to our lives that we will one day hear, perhaps in that last moment when we start to rise and for the first time see our life whole, flying low over the lovely long stretch of it.We do not march for more than 40 minutes and yet there are incidents: A dozen dogs accompany an organization called "Canine Care" that brings animals  into nursing homes to cheer the residents  and one, an elderly bulldog, is pulled along  in a  child’s wagon – until 20 minutes in, that is, when it tumbles out and lies helpless before the man pulling it even realizes and hurries back to take it up in his arms. In eerie human parallel, a man standing on one of the floats falls from it, landing hard on the asphalt and cannot rise; cannot rise at all.  “Call 911!” “Call 911!” The sound ripples through the crowd. But a police officer on his motorcycle is nearby and we see him accelerate even as he summons help on his radio. Then, “Go around! Just go around!” someone is heard to say, and, a bit stunned, we do go around and keep on marching.Below are a few seconds of this march, featuring four of the seven young men I love very much and work with as this year’s Vice President of Winchester ABC, along with President Jennifer, seen stepping along life’s road with all the zest the enthusiasm she is known for. A slice then, just a tiny slice of that Parade we all march in every minute whether or not we know it:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98RZKMYIucM]

The Silken Tent

I said in this week’s column that I'd post the poem I've been trying to memorize for three years so here it is. It’s not only a sonnet – something of a departure for our pal Robert Frost – but it’s also (and more amazingly) all one sentence. For him it’s a tribute to much-loved woman but I like the image itself. Close your eyes and picture the slippery silk of a little tent swaying slightly, held by its delicate cords. Are we all held so lightly here? I think we are, though we like to believe otherwise. Babies know they could fly off at any second which is why they startle so when you unswaddle them; it’s why they love and need the parental hand on them as they lie all trusting and helpless in their cribs:

The Silken Tent

She is as in a field a silken tent

At midday, when a sunny summer breeze

Has dried the dew, and all its ropes relent

So that in guys it gently sways at ease

And its supporting central cedar pole

That is its pinnacle to heavenward

And signifies the sureness of the soul

Seems to owe naught to any single cord

But strictly held by none is loosely bound

By countless silken ties of love and thought

To everything on earth the compass 'round

And only by one going slightly taut

In the capriciousness of summer air

Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

Flatten Your Underwear For You?

Yesterday’s Times had funny signs from all over in a kind of English we find laughable (as if we could speak a single word of Mandarin, say. ) They remind me of my favorite sign from a hotel in Yugoslavia: “The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid."I know I still savor the memory of a Thai restaurant  menu I saw once, with entrées of a most exotic kind: 'Hearty Sweethearts' (for when your girlfriend starts to really get on your nerves?) or 'Spicy Friend' (for when a former pal does something unforgivable and you have to put him in the wood-chipper like in that movie Fargo?) They had a  dish called 'Excited Chicken' and one called 'Dancing Duck' along with the cheerleading favorite 'Pacific All the Way!' (exclamation point right there on the menu.)  We laugh but could we do better?Even I can’t get the English right, when it comes to texting. My thumbs get pretty excited themselves and land on the wrong keys. Add in predictive spelling and I’m  in real trouble.  I was texting a young person the other day who I was supposed to bring to the doctor; hoping he might be waiting outside for me, I thought I'd quick punched in “I’m coming” - only what I ended up sending thanks to the help of Blackberry’s Predictive Spelling feature  was “I’m vomiting.” (“Are you all right?” came his reply.)When my last child still lived at home, his two older sisters having left the nest, I guess you could say the IQ level  in the house kind of dropped in the sense that the two of us seemed to find everything  funny. He was in middle school when we saw The Fabulous Decomposing Ball which you could buy for a quarter from one of these little vending machines at the front of the supermarket. We bought one and unfolded the instructions that came with it: (1) Hold in Hand,  it said. (2) Drop to Floor. (3) Have Fun Decomposing.... And I don’t know about my age-immune young pup of a son but I’ve been doing just that ever since.

Solving All Our Problems

He’ll be getting dressed for the gala now, our Citizen of the Year Kevin Ryan. Our Chamber of Commerce named Fells True Value Hardware to this honor and Kevin as one of the  founder’s two sons will  be receiving the accolades in less than an hour.When I think of the silly problems I have brought them over the years! I need to cut the thick wire stems of the silk flowers I just bought; can they sell me a tool that will do the job? “You don't want to buy this big thing!  Bring them in here and show us where you want the cut.” I need to duplicate some keys and figure out how to label them.  They do the job in no time and even push the brightly-colored plastic caps onto them for me.  I buy a bathing suit with a metal ring holding the two cups of the bra part too far apart for my comfort; can they take that same awesome wire cutter and sever it so I can stitch the fabric together more modestly?  They do that too, and without even laughing.Jay and I talk about US History and what he likes to call The War of Northern Aggression. Kevin and I often talk about music. He not only bought my last audio book for his own use, he displays the thing right there on the counter and won’t even take a cut on the sale. And Bruce and I? We sometimes grab a minute to talk little about famous battles and the transforming power of love.I can’t attend tonight’s event tonight and so thought to drop off some  flowers at the store this morning. But “Wait for a quieter time” advised Bookends owner Judy Manzo who made this unseal nomination. It was a good suggestion, because, as I now realize, flowers die. But with our friend the Internet here this little post will still be orbiting when the next century turns. Now take a minute and look at the kindness in this face: then join me in saying "Here’s to you all who welcome the stranger . You are an inspiration to all who know you!"

Good Day Sunshine

I was in Macy’s Children’s Department last week trying to buy clothes for the family baby and  getting pretty steamed up about what they want for a pair of shorts no bigger than a dinner napkin. But then when I got to the register the man seemed so pleasant I cheered right up, even though there was a hang-up with his register. I busted into my just-purchased sack of chocolate-covered coffee pellets and the two of us were sharing them when he thanked me for being nice about the wait.  "So most people aren’t nice? “ I asked him.  “Are you kidding?”  he said, rolling his eyes. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff some people say; the stuff they try to pull!”Then just now I was at the new Dunkin’ Donuts near my house, formerly a Starbucks, and sad as I was to lose contact with barista Carol the bunny keeper, I have to say this new DD seems pretty great. “All my life I’ve wanted to work at a Dunkin’ Donuts!” the young woman behind the counter said to me. “I’m just two weeks in!”  “And what’s your take on things? Are people mostly nice?”  I thought I might as well ask. “People are awesome!” she said unequivocally.So which is it? Or does it depend on whether or not the one you’re asking has a tummy ache that day? Or whether the weather is fair or crappy? Today “fair: doesn’t come close to describing the weather we are having  and it’s got me loving MY job all right even though I can’t type to save my life and never could.  Plus the days are growing ever longer and now two actual doves have taken to perching on the window sill of my office here and peer benevolently in at me all morning long. And what’s the nuisance of having to type slowly and laboriously compared to a thing like that?