Texting While Stupid

A good thing: The Massachusetts legislature is about to approve a ban on texting while driving. Also a ban on talking on the phone while driving for the under-18 set. Said one State Senator to the Boston Globe, “I commute 72 miles each way to the State House, and people are reading textbooks, putting eyeliner on, slapping their kids in the backseat, eating Big Macs, and a myriad of other things, while driving cars, usually with their knees.”With their knees? While doing their homework and putting on eyeliner?  And ouch, while turning to slap away at their poor kids in the back seat?High time, is all I can say, And Massachusetts is hardly out in front on this: if the bill passes, my state will be the 29^th in the nation to ban texting for all drivers; the 29th to ban all phone use for under-18s.  Oh and it also covers doing these things while idling at traffic lights and Stop signs.  Plus the lawmakers are smart: their ban also explicitly includes e-mailing,  web searching and all other non-calling activities you can accomplish on any kind of  electronic device.It’s a good law because the world  full of idiots. I'm an idiot myself. I think from now on I’ll keep my Blackberry in the ‘way back’ where I can’t possibly get to it and make or take a call or look at a text. After all, that’s where I keep all the snack food I’m transporting home from the store.  WeightWatchers girl that I am, I don’t trust myself to sit beside it -  and if Doritos are bad for your health how much worse is that semi bearing down on you as you wander across the median into oncoming traffic?I did that only once in my life and no phones where involved. I was just  gesturing toward the view  and the country  road was narrow and, well, I meandered all unwitting  across that center line – and came SO close to hitting the kid behind the wheel of the oncoming car that our mirrors whacked each other, hard. I have never forgotten that moment.So yeah: Phone in the “way- back” for me from now on. And not because I fear the ticket.

Again with the Sex and Babies

Not only has that new-mother dove come back to my windowsill, she even put the sign out -  even though it was just last week she got her babies launched – and all this just as I was getting ready to lift the sash and scour the whole length of wood, the babies having used it as a combination rec room and potty chair for two weeks, not moving a muscle 'til Mom gave 'em the big nudge and they took flight at last.It just seems weird to me. I was expecting her to be joining the Y or signing up for a course in Bug Finding but here she is again.Not that she's paying me any mind. All day yesterday she looked at me like I was wallpaper, fixed as she was on the Hoochie Dance she kept doing every time Mr. Pointytail came around. He'd stick out his chest and start bobbing his head like a hip dude at a jazz club, then - boom!  -  the deed was done. Several times in fact. Then he began showing up with all these twigs which she took from him twig by twig to form a nest much bigger  than the nest she had last time.Just now when I leaned in close Poppa, above here, took off in alarm. Not Momma though. She is here for the duration. She fixed me with a look I recognized as a special girl-to-girl telegram. "Here we go again,” is what it said.I could identify.

Eat a Fish, Rev Your Engines

Two things over the weekend, each with its charms: the peace of a lakeside stay and ….BIKER WEEK! The peaceful part involved 80-degree weather and a wind so strong you could hook an umbrella on it. A great blue heron swooped down right in front of us and grabbed a 12-inch fish right from the water, landed on the float 50 feet away, waggled his head this way and that until that fish went DOWN  – then sat there, the poor dying trout making a giant mound in his gullet.I tried to tape him taking off after he swallowed but only managed this crooked video in which nothing happens at all except a possibly nauseous feeling on the part of the people watching it.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FWQjEm0b8k]The other thing was the perenially crazy carryings-on of the  300,000 motorcycle enthusiasts who all but deafen the population each year when they visit for Biker Week. They zoom loudly up and down the roads surrounding the lake all night long, then start again bright and early in the morning.I was at the food store in Center Harbor at 4:01 Saturday and snapped the picture above - serenity itself, right? - then got in my car, drove 80 yards and at 4:02 caught the shot below. From the sublime to the tinniticulous. I may never hear right again.

Hop on Pop

The man we're celebrating this Fathers Day had just one suit the year this picture was taken. It was bought for his middle school graduation. That was fine with him. We've been married 40 years today and in all that time I have never heard him utter a single boast. I remember before his 25^th college reunion he didn't want to fill out the survey. "Look I'll read the questions and write down your responses," I said, and took out my pen."It's asking for your special achievements. “Leave it blank,” he said.  “Or else put ‘My family.’” "It asks if you’ve served on the Board of Directors of any companies. You have!" ” I said. “Leave it blank,”  he said.He doesn’t care if the world thinks him successful. It just doesn’t matter to him. I remember asking him that day how many suits he had now. “One,” he said. “One that I can wear.”The year our son was going into 8^th grade he spent all eight weeks at a summer camp in the Berkshires.  On that first Visiting Day, most of the other campers had parents with fancy cars. At one point we found ourselves next to the basketball court where a lone father in fancy shoes and a Versace shirt was shooting baskets. David had on shorts and his Dr. Seuss T-shirt with Hop on Pop stenciled on the front.  I knew he wanted to shoot with our son, but was holding back, not wishing to interrupt this well-dressed dad. “Go on out there!” I said under my breath. “This guy's just some cardiologist! ”He laughed. He knew what I meant. I meant, "Some rich guy in fancy clothes? Some rich guy is no match for a man with just one suit."Happy Fathers Day Old Dave! And Happy 40 Years With TT who loves you even more now than she did when she snapped this picture.

Spit It Right in My Hand Honey

A definition of love you can really hang your hat on is the one where you show a profound concern for the welfare of another without any desire to control that other,  be thanked by that other, or enjoy the process at all.Can you identify? Are you a parent?Say you're trying to get a little child dressed. Little kids prefer to stay UNdressed since they like all the possibilities being undressed offers. Trying to get a child dressed is an experiment in reverse psychology - and lacrosse sort of. You have to hide the clothes behind your back, sneak up on the tot  just when he's busy doing something else, throw him in the air, quick open the pair of pants and catch him in them. If he sees you coming, guaranteed he'll run in the other direction - laughing.  And if you think pants are hard try shoes and socks.And yet we dress them. Every day all over the world grownups are dressing little kids.Every day all over the world too they get to making hideous faces about whatever strange substance they find in their mouths. Chocolate covered cherries, that kind of thing. They get that look. Their eyeballs start to jiggle. When their faces go kind of plaid you know something bad is about to happen. You sidle over, hold out your cupped palm. They open their mouths to reveal a world of hideous goo and because you're a parent you accept the whole mouthful. The kid is happy. It's your problem now and he very well knows it.Does he thank you? No. Have you controlled events? Hardly. Did you enjoy catching the chewed up chocolate, the tuna casserole, the throwup? Of course not. But  did you get stretched enough to actually start thinking more of somebody besides your own boring self? Let's hope so. Because if you want to be happy in life you're going to be giving away give the shop again and again, putting the child first, letting her sleep in your bed, standing around at the mall ten years later, holding all the coats.It's what they call Agapic love, the highest kind of all, the one kind that’ll get you into Heaven  no questions asked. If you're practicing Agapic love even once a week you're the lucky one, you're aces, kid, your ship came in. It's just that nobody wants to shake your hand.

Begin Again

Today we move on. Yesterday the hometeam lost but the killer was found. News footage showed him ducking to get in the squad car. The D.A., who on Wednesday said the details at the scene were too gruesome to relate, yesterday related them all and the images bled like a stain into all my thoughts for the rest of my waking hours and on into the night.The town is full. The morbidly curious keep turning off Johnson Road onto Berkshire Drive looking for the quiet street where the quadruple murders took place. Today the self-confessed killer, husband and father and son-in-law to the slain will be arraigned in the Middlesex Superior Court, just down the road from the Y where I go every morning to keep my little teacup- tower of a skeleton upright and balanced.I think I will skip the Y this morning. This morning I will bring food to Uncle Ed and take him out if his pain will allow it. I’ve been super- busy all week so I know he must feel lonely. I will also gas up the car so nine people I love can use it as part of a small fleet headed tomorrow for Six Flags. And I’ll stop in at the House where these nine live to say goodbye to the two I will not see again until fall. They're off to summer programs, Davidson College and the University of Virginia.  One of these individuals  stands for justice and looks for the New Jerusalem; the other is a poet inside and out.  Speaking of that, I woke at 5:00 with a dozen apt snatches of verse for them circling in my head  and will now copy them down and drop them by: bread for the journey.One bit of verse I will copy here instead . It’s the last part of Marge Piercy’s  “The Art of Blessing the Day” and has in it the call to begin again that I know I need to hear today. Maybe some of you do too:

Attention is love, what we must give to children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others. What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can  with eyes and hands and tongues.  If you can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.

May They Rest in Peace

Today I am alive, as are my two grandchildren and my oldest daughter, but the terrible multiple murder here of a woman in her 60s and her oldest daughter and the daughter’s two babies has all of us on edge.

When the news broke but no identities had been revealed - when we did not yet know that a manhunt was under way to find the daughter’s husband - we all felt panic and I could only think, “If my life ended today - if someone shot me, or a truck driven by a joyriding kid  jumped the median as it did with our brother and his friend though their lives were spared thank God - if my heart stopped the way my mom’s heart stopped as she sat in my living room, what would be the last things I saw and noted? This little girl trailing home from school with her flowered backpack? I really saw her yesterday. This middle-school boy walking homeward too, clarinet case in hand? I saw him too, and felt I could see right down into his young life, the practicing  sessions, the jitters he felt as he walked into the room where his lesson took place each week.And when I arrived at the grocery store to which I was headed when the news alert came, I noted more things: the funny military spikiness of asparagus bunches, all standing at attention; the dark moonish beauty of the plums. I picked one plum up and cradled it all warm in my hand, and seemed to taste again the tart outside of all plums, the yielding sweetness within….They had released no names at that point but they did mention 2 Windsong Way, which, like everyone else  I immediately Googled so as to  pinpoint the eye of the tragedy. Then when I got home, I looked in my 2008 copy of the Town of Winchester's List of Residents Seventeen Years of Age and Over to see who had suffered this awful fate and there they were, only two  of the four dead, since children do not vote.In my church our ministers have us lift up by name the people we are praying for. Today we lift up by name the lady Ellen and her daughter Laura, and the little ones Charlotte and Thomas-called-Finn, all of whom entered into Eternity at some unknown time earlier this week on 2 Windsong Way as the birds darted and the sweet scent of freshly-cut grass drifted in the balmy air.

You Tampax!

What is it with little kids and the bathroom talk? Today at the kiddie pool little children four three and four years old were calling each other 'toilet-face'. It was toilet face this, toilet-face that, toilet-face chanted antiphonally from one shore to the other.  The sounds rang across the water, call and response,  like a naughty version Marco Polo.I blame “Shrek” and such movies with their dumb flatulence jokes, the movie-makers’ attempt to seem ‘edgy’ and ‘adult’ to the small people in the General Audience seats of the Cineplex. I got all on my high horse about it – ‘til one little kids said to another “You Tampax!” and I had trouble not laughing right out loud. Lucky for us all, one veteran mom cradling an infant suddenly turned from the friend she was conversing with and said “Hey! Enough with the with the bathroom talk!”and that wiped the smile off all our faces.I guess you can’t really blame the kids; it’s what they do, take some private, shameful-seeming  thing in their own world and direct the heat of it onto somebody else in order to mock and target them. It’s just an attempt to get the focus off themselves I know but Gad what an ugly human trait it is. I recall my little first-grader coming home from school to report that  her best friend  got the other children to make a circle around her, and with pointing fingers chant “Baby wets her P-a-a-a-nts, Baby wets Her Pa-a-a-nts” never mind that she had not done that ever not even once.How do we get them to stop? Not to say my own children were all blameless little Gandhis but here’s something my son did once at the middle school lunch table. He was the funny one with the twinkle in his eye, which is maybe why one of the boys suddenly said, “Mike, quick! Go squish your juice-box on that kid’s head!” Michael looked over at the would-be victim and back again at his pals and said in the mild voice he still uses  with his family when he things we’re acting like chumps, “How ‘bout this? How ‘bout I squish it on my own head and tell you what it feels like?”I remember slamming the steering wheel with the flat of my hand in my enthusiasm when he told me this story in the car after school. “Good for you Michael! Oh, GOOD for you!” Maybe we all just need more observers in our lives; some to call on us on it when we misbehave, like mom with the baby, and some to praise and notice when we do sometimes get it right.

Birth and Flight

Last month a lone dove settled on my windowsill and looked in on me one day like a schoolmarm checking on her pupil. She never seemed afraid even when I came really close. (See left). She began to sit there a lot. I mean for hours.Then one day when my son Michael was here from Brooklyn he saw her heaving her sleek little body, bringing up bits of digested food for the two bald and greasy-looking life forms who were feeding out of her mouth.Time passed. They little ones grew, as little ones will.Sometimes their dad visited, hoping for a little love maybe, in which case forget it, right girls, that soon post-delivery? Anyway he stayed far on the other side of the sill.More time passed. My, they grew quickly!And then this past Monday: Gone Baby Gone. So today I will lift the sash and sweep away a months’ worth of dirty-birdy-diapers and come next spring, hang out the Room to Rent sign. May they dip, and coo, feed and fly in all joy this summer ,and for as many more summers as are given them.

Fifth Grade Mentoring Night

I just found something I wrote about Sharing and Recognition Night for the 5th Grade Mentoring Program that was put on by people now entering their junior year in high school.They were just 11 then. Made me smile all over again:"By the time I walked into the school cafeteria with my pile of reporter-style hats for the three kids I had mentored, the young presenters were gathering by their exhibits, amidst knots of talking grownups, swarms of siblings and two unexplained dogs trotting around with their tongues out."'My' three each quickly chose a fedora and filled out the nice fake press credentials I had made for them to wedge into their hatbands. Then we caught up with the Master of Ceremonies who was going kid to kid with a cordless microphone and learned:"That a girl named Julia had worked with a retired MIT guy on Principles of Chemistry. Specifically she had studied the science involved in making tie-dye, which seems to involve quantities of paper towels and red cabbage, 'which you squish with rubbing alcohol until you get lots of burgundy juice.'"That a boy named Julian had worked with a cartoonist, though he seemed already to be one, having offered to draw pictures for any and all comers during the milling-about part of the program."That Melanie and Sarah watched a pediatrician work. They took turns with the mike to read the steps necessary in becoming one. (“First, graduate from middle school,” the list began.)"Then came Stephanie, who had shadowed her very own dad.  “Finance professor is not a job most kids want to do,” she stated, but then she went on to read aloud his daily tasks:  “(1) Explain the day’s lesson; (2) make sure the students understand it; (3) do a little fun activity at the end.”  That made a lot of us smile."I could go on: About Alex and Craig, who studied with an architect and designed an elaborate three-dimensional fantasy bedroom apiece.  About Andrea and Maggie, who apprenticed themselves to a photographer. About Erin and Stephen, who worked with a meteorologist.  About Seamus and Brendan. About Amy and Kendall and Ngawang.  About Kayla and Jaxie and Allie. About Yibo and Kirsten and Joey - and that’s not counting my 'own' three, Lucy, Lucy and Thomas, who looked completely adorable in their too-big hats as they told what they had learned about being a writer."But I can’t end though without describing the three kids who studied the veterinarian’s life, which turned out to explain the presence of the larger of those busily trotting canines."Cammy and Nicki and Noah they were, and Cammy started off:“'I’m going to do a checkup on my dog Bosco,' she began, and tried examining the big dog’s eyes."Nothin’ doin’ said Bosco in all but words."She tried his ears before remembering that actually he was quite sensitive about his ears."Then she tried palpating his ribs, which made him first look deeply sorrowful and then give an almighty shake."Luckily, Noah took over then, saying from deep inside his glovings and maskings that this is what you did if you were cutting a dog or cat.“'First, make an incision,' he began, and the place went wild, kids pressing in on all sides to see the drape, and the surgical field, and all those dandy implements he had set out beside him."There was no REAL cat or dog under his scalpel of course, but the enthusiasm was real."And even the old folks had to wonder that night if, given enough encouragement, there was anything at all that a shiny group of new people NOT dream up and do."

Get it While You Can

Normally my latest columns go up top each week but where I'm a little behind with them I think I'll use one here. This is called "Get it While You Can" and if you don't feel like reading just scroll down to the video and watch Janis sing one of her best and God wasn't she something, the greatest white blues singer there ever was they say and she just a girl in her 20s. She died of an overdose and the dazzling album "Pearl" was released posthumously.

I condensed this a bit to give everybody a break on a Sunday:

“LOOK at that girl sitting in her boyfriend’s lap and kissing him, in public! We never did that in MY day!” That was my first thought as I passed the two teens in the park yesterday. My second thought? “No, Terry. The summer you met that certain guy the two of you used to lie right down and kiss - in this very same park even.” I remember a man in a suit passing us as we sat up after one of these lengthy smooch sessions. He was crumpling up the brown paper bag that had held his sandwich, heading back to the office. “Hey, get it while you can,” he said to that long-ago boy, now my mate of many years - and this two full years before Janis recorded the famous song by the same name.On this day in the park everyone I saw seemed to be doing just that in this most civilized of urban spaces. Getting it all while they could I mean: the sunshine, the air so fresh it almost tingled as you inhaled it, just all of it.I saw a Bernese Mountain Dog the size of an elementary school furnace, docilely loping along on the leash that bound him to his tiny mistress.  "WHO’S a good puppy!“ enthused a man clanking with tools, who then bent down to the beast and let his faced be slathered in kisses.  "He looks like Beethoven!” a woman in African told me as she looked on and I assume she must have meant the star of the 90s dog movie and not the composer as you think of him in the famous bust with his genius frown and his wild toss of curls.The skinny teen with the girlfriend in his lap was under the shade of a giant tree but most people were seeking the sun - like the man with closed eyes who had propped himself up against his backpack. Whether he was sleeping there on the grass or listening to music delivered by the headphones clamped over his dreadlocks one thing was sure: He was in some ecstasy of inner calm....Two hundred feet away, a woman lay flat on her back like a human sacrifice, her pale exposed stomach mounded like rising dough, her thighs so tanned and shiny they looked like hot dogs on the grill. Nobody bothered her.There's that kind of trust in a park - and sometimes there's political action: At the top of the hill this day, an agitation of striking workers held signs and chanted slogans. “No justice, no peace!” they shouted, while like-minded drivers passing by hooted and tapped their horns and made thumbs-up gestures in solidarity.Then suddenly, the cream ice man tooled by in his truck, his sound apparatus blaring out what seemed like every tune ever written in the last hundred years: about 30 bars each of “Ebb Tide,” and “The Theme From The Godfather,” of “Happy Birthday” and “Give My Regards to Broadway” of “New York, New York” and “Come, All Ye Faithful.”The last one struck me as strange on a blooming June day but what do I knows? Maybe this is how we seem to God at any given moment: the sleeping and the wakeful, the lively and the calm, and emitting from us all as a kind of soundtrack, the distant tingling jingle of our lives.And now here's our girl, as alive-seeming today as she sounded and looked when she recorded this on the Dick Cavett Show so long and long ago.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju9yFA1S7K8]

Diabolical Technology! Excuse!

Yesterday I got an email in German from a Berliner who stayed in my house one night in March. Actually it was to everyone in her address book which is why the German, a language I know not a word of save for your basic survival terms like ‘Michelob’  and ‘Wiener Schnitzel’.  So I thought, Go to Google Translate, right? Only that site gave me a string of words that no offense Ruling God of the Internet, made no sense at all: it said my friend was saying this:"Last week I, of research, is registered on Facebook, and probably very quickly forget that I have agreed to all the people on my mailing list to invite to my photos Anzugucken on Facebook. This annoys me and maybe some of you. Diabolical technology! Excuse! Greetings!"Okaaaaay. But so what's this ‘anzugucken’ word and why wasn’t it translated? I looked it up all by itself on Google Translate. It told me with a perfectly straight face that it meant: anzugucken. So what’s the deal?  Is it like FUBAR? But you can find out what FUBAR means. I tried again just now and a video came up on YouTube. No disrespect to a great European country but is this even a video? Take a quick peek. Theories anyone?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EC_onMyoCI]

The Good are Always the Merry

Take a second  and watch the Dalai Lama in this Ten Questions Forum put on by TIME Magazine. At the age of two he was told he was the next Dalai Lama; I mean it’s not like he ran for the office. As a result, he is humble. As he puts it, “Important is, we are same: human being.” Like all of us, he too is just trying to play the hand Fate dealt him.The video has some clarifying text under every other utterance which you turn out to really need. I had trouble understanding  the sentences that don’t  get ‘translated’ in this way,  though some words you can puzzle out, like ‘ hypocrisy’ which he pronounces like Hippo-Chrissie (you know her, kind of wide in the beam? With red hair?)Eight years ago I saw that other much-revered Buddhist monk Thich Nat Hanh, widely credited with convincing Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to come out against the Vietnam War, which gave the peace movement its start.  He appeared at a giant convention center, a tiny doll-size figure sitting cross-legged on a stage 1,000 yards away. I couldn’t decipher his speech at all; plus, he spoke so slowly! I fell asleep two minutes in and was out cold for a good 30 minutes. But here’s the funny thing: when I woke up, I woke all the way up and understood every single thing he said and remember it still. Example: he was asked what his response would be to a September 11th-like incident like we had just suffered. He said, “If a person seeks to harm me I will go to him and ask in what way I have harmed him.”Back to his spiritual brother here. I note his warm smile and wonder if Jesus had that too, and Elijah, and Mohammed.  I’m thinkin’ yes. Because William Butler Yeats said it in his poem The Fiddler of Dooney: "For the good are always the merry, save by an evil chance,  And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance."

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efblggixy1A]

Facebook Rules

The people who took a peek at yesterday’s post with the pictures of  David Then and Now stuns me. The people who took a minute to send a greeting! One hadn't seen David since  6^th grade and there's the beauty of Facebook where I posted the link. Facebook can all but make the dead live again.150 years ago my people came here from Ireland to escape starvation. When there was a get-together to say goodbye to one of these émigrés, they called it an American wake; that's how sure the departing one was that he would see these people no more, no more alas in this world. They'd be as good as dead to him. Now, with Facebook, even people you haven't seen in 40 years can be found. Plus the fastest-growing demographic on FB is the 55-to-65-year-olds, of whom there are, shall we say, zillions. (Remember that mock headline from The Onion? "Internet Crashes! Photos of  Boomer Grandchildren Cited!"?) With Facebook you can resurrect unbelievably detailed memories of  that year-end outing with the middle school band, say, or sort through old misunderstandings with a person, or send someone pictures of his younger self at a time when he might really need to remember the child that still lives inside him,Facebook let me show you David who I've been talking about in my column since I launched the thing the year old Ronnie Reagan propelled his big  pompadoured head to the podium to take the Oath of Office. And today it lets me show you this glimpse of two family members having that birthday supper at a tapas joint called Toro the other night.Who cares? Anybody? Nobody? It doesn’t matter. We need to tell our stories. And anyway who knows? Maybe God really does have the hairs on our heads all counted in just the same way Site Meter counts the hits on this blog. Maybe we really ARE just one big village, eating in sidewalk cafés and watching the sun set and bending to greet one another’s dogs.A very nice thought, for me anyway, on this raw rainy day in early June.

Happy Birthday Old Dave

The day this boy turned 21 I was drinking my brains out in that charming underage way at the wedding of  our cousin Eleanor. I had stuffed my babyfat-padded self into my sister Nan’s bridesmaid's dress since Nan was in St. Elizabeth’s with a ruptured appendix and the bride needed a stand-in. At the after-party back at Eleanor folks’ house we all watched the tube as poor Ted Kennedy,  swallowing sobs, tried to eulogize his murdered brother Bobby.I was 19. My plans included a graduate degree in English, traveling in Europe and living for a time in France, where the populace would by wowed by my highly polished French, spoken with the accent of a person born on the Dorchester/ Roxbury line. They did not include marriage ,which I meant to postpone for many years.Two days later Eleanor was on her honeymoon, Nan was set to come home from the hospital and I was starting the summer job I acquired by hitch-hiking to Boston and asking for it . There I met Exhibit A here who, like me, was a research assistant assigned to the snoozy old library of the Massachusetts State House.I was an Irish girl and a Catholic girl sick to death of hearing how nobody else quite measured up to either of those two categories. He oops was not Irish and not  Catholic. (Let's just say HE wasn't getting into Heaven OR the Country Club.)  In spite of this fact it wasn't six weeks later that I  woke my mom up out of a sound sleep to tell her I meant to marry him the second I got out of  college and this I did.Now, three labor-and-delivery-style kids, six honorary kids and a world of dead pets later, we're both still here. And today, best I can tell , the boy with the dimples is merrier than ever. So here's to you with your now white hair, David Prescott M. I think it was the biceps that won me (the biceps and those tiny white-satin basketball shorts !:-) )

David and his wife (or part of her anyway) in modern times

I FRY MINE IN BUTTER

My writing hero Brenda Ueland says writing is not a performance,  but a generosity. And so is the making of music, which you realize anytime you go to hear just  about any bunch of musicians. To me they’re like saints the way they don't seem to mind that at any given time only a third of the crowd is listening to them.  The rest are doing the usual crazy human things, inspecting their nails, gossiping, daydreaming, etc, while up there behind their mikes the musicians are pouring out their souls. (In one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut true-life tales he describes himself seated at a performance of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra  when  a couple of  older ladies surprise everyone as the very loud music suddenly stops  and in the pin-drop silence one is heard  bellowing to the other, ““I FRY MINE IN BUTTER!)

I took some video Saturday night of the band called Six, motto 'Classic Rock That Never Gets Old (Even if We Do')  and I would estimate that three-quarters of the time the majority of the audience wasn't listening at all, good as they are. Here's some 100 seconds of them  singing “The Weight” by the Band, better known to many of us as  the Take a Load Off song . I'd have been charmed by their performance even if I hadn't been the cameramen  but you’ll see what happens even to me some 80 seconds in. People are so  infinitely distractible; how on DID those Medieval monks ever just sit there in one place and copy hundreds of years’ worth of classical manuscripts?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXNPz8ENox0]

Like It Was Yesterday

My screened-in porch. Hard rain at  dawn yesterday  and hard rain again today but what fun I had between! Saw two of our oldest friends who said they’re never moving because they don’t want to be the ones to clean out their basement. Saw our state’s answer to that band made up of famous guys Matt Groening, Steven King, and Amy Tan.  Our guys rocked the world of everyone within earshot.Then a friend sitting on the back steps at this house concert began animatedly discussing  the worst natural disaster this nation has even seen - completely oblivious to the fact that her glass of red wine had tilted dangerously and was dripping its life out onto the concrete steps. “Speaking of OIL SPILLS…” someone said. Finally, I got to hear our nephew Matt Marotta talk at the graduation exercises of  the Class of 2010, whose President he has been all the way through.  A good 1,000 family members sat in that hot gym fanning themselves with anything they could find while some dozen of us others, mostly with white hair and walkers, watched the whole thing on closed-circuit TV from the air-conditioned comfort of the school auditorium.I sat in the front row of this near-empty auditorium and took this imperfect picture below of Matt, who invoked all their years together - all the way back to the days when "[their] teeth were too big for [their] heads, and [their] heads were too big for [their] bodies. He spoke too of the time later today  "when the sun will go down and the cookouts will  burn out."The sun  has gone down now. But earlier today, one of the school's custodians had slipped into a seat near mine in the front row of that quiet auditorium. “Do you believe this?” he said to me, his eyes never leaving the screen, “I graduated high school 35 years ago, but I remember the whole thing like it just happened!" then interrupted himself to say, “Look. there’s Courtney!” - and then more than a little wistfully added, “I just about learn their names and they’re gone.”

Bear Alert

My plumber-friend  Don lives less than a mile from our place at the  lake and he reports that THIS guy came right up to their house to raid the bird feeders Thursday night,  He and his wife must be a lot braver than I am because when he told me they went outside and made loud noises to get the bird feeders away from him I couldn’t believe it. The bear got mad, which he says you can tell because they're known to make these weird clicking sounds. Plus he pawed the ground and growled. But they did actually grab the feeders and hustle back inside, which really ticked him off.  He walked to the shed, tore off its door with his five-inch claws and destroyed two bags of trash.At that point Don’s wife ran around slamming the windows shut. For his part, the bear finished eating everything he could find, loped to driveway's edge, pooped hugely and skulked away.Don did call the State and they’re sending someone. I hope he’ll also call the Meredith Police and have them come and park right alongside their property for a while but I couldn’t tell if he would want that from what he said.But if HE won’t take the stake-out I will,  starting tonight. Click on the following for some footage of an angry young bear caught in another guys tree. The sound he makes is absolutely terrifying. Give it a listen- and if you have some advice for us, for Heaven's sake weigh in! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2vPceh7X48]

Flyin'

Caught in the Kiddie Corral at the Mall: the young woman on the right here, singing  'The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round' to an audience of  little people. I had never before seen a song leader/storyteller at this mall's kiddie space  so “college kid” and “summer job,” is what I was immediately thinking.My first summer as a college kid I worked as the lone chambermaid in a seedy motel out in Aspen, a spooky  place, the owner a mean and pointy-faced crone, the manager stealing from her.... Anyway that’s what the extended-stay guy on the second floor told me, a hippie who  drank a lot of tea and kept a fairly neat room, which I knew since I was the one who had to clean it every other day.But boy was I out of my element there, a pudgy and clueless innocent just  trying to get into Heaven.  I know I would have been devastatingly homesick – IF at 11 every morning I hadn’t popped a diet pill, prescribed for me by an actual Aspen MD, who furnished them without so much as batting an eye, without so much as checking my vital signs practically. That's why I had all this energy. Because, I forgot to say, in addition to being a chambermaid, I also cleaned houses for three other families and walked to and from all these gigs, all of them a full five miles from where I was staying. I mean, you put a girl of 18 on speed, she can walk most anywhere.I took those pills that whole summer and hardly ate a bite.  I lost 15 pounds - which of course larded on again the second I returned to school college came back down.

So what? So I'm just saying: I always stop and pay silent tribute when I see young people in their summer jobs. I know they’re lucky to have jobs at all but sometimes – sometimes - there’s a little more to the story. you notice she's in the bathroom. Colon cleanser another mirage

Prom Night in Grovers Corners

Prom night in our little town, when all kinds of people come to watch the kids get on the buses that will bring them to the big dance. They first started to have this night of public inspection almost 18 years ago when kids used to get really wasted before their proms. This way, where they have to walk 18 inches away from a double line of eagle-eyed grown-ups, they’re not so likely to be ‘impaired’. There’s less drunkenness these days anyway, among people of every age. I mean a kid six knows what substance abuse is, and he knows it isn't cool A kid eight understand the concept of denial. It's a new world and I'm not the one prepared to say it's a worse world.These days the prom-bound young first go in to the gym where for all I know they get look over, wanded - breathalyzed too maybe. Then they emerge at last, looking new-made in the golden light of evening.It does take a good hour to get them all on the buses but no one seems to mind. Certainly not the kids, who seem the opposite of bored.  They have it all before them after all, the dancing, the not-dancing, the loosening of the necktie as the ballroom gets hotter, the eternal tugging-up of those lovely strapless gowns....And later the After Party and the Party After That and then The Next Morning at Somebody's Vacation House...I pulled out my video camera hoping to catch some of the remarks the waiting crowd was making. For example one woman kept saying “This is retarded, all this waiting!” And at one point a guy said, “I’m waitin’  for the short bus myself.” People are pretty careless in their utterances but what are you gonna do? They're human. Anyway I didn't catch any of that on camera. What I did catch seem to be the backs of  heads, dye jobs, bra straps, and somebody's short gray hair like iron filings -- in other words a quick candid pan of all of us onlookers whose night it wasn't. That was fine by us who  had but one clear goal: to get those shiny kids uploaded and sent on their way. Here's to them all I say; may they enjoy to the hilt these last moments of unadulterated youth.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKY0ERgsrig]