A Clean Well-Lighted Place

I’ve stayed in plenty of hellish hotel rooms  - the one with sludge burbling up through the bathtub drain, the one where the single dim light crackled and went out the second I flipped the switch, the one whose door I opened for the first time to find it already occupied by a naked guy just toweling.  This past weekend though I stayed in the best hotel room of all, in the on-campus hotel at Indiana U - which amazes me mostly because on-campus hotels are usually pretty sad. I know I've never been able to stay in the one at Brown without feeling that I slept in a minimum security prison facility.But this one! It had 1930s-era casement windows! That actually opened! And when they did open they let me look out a stand of old trees under whose canopy lay  a tiny churchyard, where, for those three nights, the dead slept no more deeply than I did 60 feet above them.I took this picture at dawn of my second day and what a calm state the view alone put me in - or maybe it was the perfect pillows, four per bed. Or the fact that the bathroom, done in 1940s-era tiles, looked as clean as a just-polished diamond. All I know is I felt safer and more ‘held’ in that room for those three nights than I have felt since my baby days when I lay watching a summer sun creep up the wall by my crib and knowing that soon the kindly Tall People would come to lift me high and set me down in a brand new-day.

Hello SUNSHINE!

Sure NOW wherever you look you see ads for creams and spackles to fill the cracks opening up all over your body. Bet they even sell sun-repellent sheets of Glad Wrap to keep your skin from looking even more like the speckled egg of the world’s ugliest bird. So where was all this stuff when I was  20 and lying out in the sun holding sheets of aluminum foil to focus the rays directly ON This Old Face?

Here’s that video homage to Beyoncé  which is funny and great all on its own. Come the day when I look like a laundry bag stuffed full with tennis balls let me throw on a leotard and step on the dance floor too. Because seriously what are you gonna do? And Sarah Renfroe's right: when it comes to wrinkles you sure are gonna grow some of your own, and before you know it too.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaruNs_7okY]

Sex Questions? Ask 'em

There's more to be said about sex and The Kinsey Institute, which I toured before their researcher Debby addressed us columnists Friday. It has a website called Kinsey Confidential for one thing where you can get information and ask her your own questions. When I roamed its galleries filled  with examples of erotic art I had to keep channeling Liam Neeson as he played Dr. Kinsey with his calm scientific manner. You sort of have to fix your mind on that manner so you don’t jump a mile when a passing staff worker greets you even as you are peering at an early 20^th century photograph of a very limber gentleman executing a feat you wouldn’t think human anatomy would allow for. (“Thanks so much for visiting our center!” smiled one plump staffer of middle years, looking at me with the same warm expression Gandhi  might wear if he saw you giving your last crust bred to the poor.)

But the torment and guilt people have suffered over sex! The sin of what advertisers have done with sex in our own time, essentially stealing it from us, then trying to sell it back to us as a pair of jeans or shoes or makeup!I’m getting too worked up though. Let me stop and watch again the trailer for that terrific film about Kinsey and his work. Let me look on the face of the luminous Laura Linney as his wife, the face of Liam himself who did not know when he made the film what suffering lay head for him, the faces of all those perplexed young people trying to come of age in this outwardly pious and violent culture.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppZwSABxeYE

On This Soft Anvil

I was saying yesterday how organizations change when there get to be more women than men in them and at first I thought that’s why my fellow columnists behaved so well when Dr. Debra Herbenick came to speak at our annual conference. I can tell you that back in '95 when this membership visited an outfit that extracts and freezes bull semen, the tour-guide chastised two of our guys for laughing uncontrollably. But yesterday when Dr. Herbenick came to speak with us on her work with the Kinsey Institute not a soul laughed, even when she she showed explicit slides and held up stuffed toys resembling female body parts.Maybe it's because she has a manner as open and sunny as a farmhouse window. A dead ringer for the Charlotte character from Sex and the City, she seems so sweet and guileless only a cad or a moron would have laughed, and we had no such men among us this time.She told us she speaks often to college students who take her class to get information on what practices (besides the most obvious one) can result in pregnancy.  She quoted former Indiana President Herman Wells, himself a firm supporter of the place where she works. "We have large faith in the value of knowledge and little faith in the value of ignorance,” he once said.She had also let it be known earlier in the day that she would answer any anonymous sex-related questions we cared to pose and when the time came she did this. The questions were dead serious with the exception of the one that said, “Where DO babies come from anyway?”She said she used to ask that question of little children at an earlier stage of her career and one child had an answer that she still remembers. The child’s little sibling began by saying that your babysitter the baby and she got it from the doctor who gave it to your mommy - only wait, maybe it was the other way around. It was then that the slightly older child spoke up and clued Debra in on what really happens, a process involving these things called 'cells' and your mother’s stomach where the baby grows.“But then how does it get out of there?"  Debra asked."Well,” said the little girl, “it seems there's this little door ….”Indeed there is.So let us close now with words by penned by an English earl in the 1600's who said of this little door's close neighbor the mons veneris, “On this soft anvil was mankind all made" - to which I now say Amen! and also Thank you, God, for the dandy design (!)

Writers Unite

In the first official moment of our conference here in Indiana, President  Samantha Bennett began by directing our attention to the Proclamation issued by the governor  congratulating the NSNC on its 43rd convention and touting the importance of us columnists to life as we know it.  “Take a look," Sam said,  "it’s very impressive, very whereas-heavy. There’s a laminated copy in the hospitality suite, a place where, come to think of it, I myself have been laminated on more than one occasion”Not here in Bloomington of course. Our conferences have been held in cities from one coast to another with plenty of stops in between. The first one I came to, motivated as much by the chance to get away from diaper-changing as to collect my small writing-contest prize was in the charming seaside village of Mystic CT. Back then, the membership was heavily and getting  laminated in the hospitality suite seemed almost normal. Now that we’re more than 50% women we’re all nurturing each other in the hospitality suite  and the friskiest thing that happens is that sometimes  Sam executes a few of her famous handsprings which you certainly couldn’t do drunk.Anyway we had a day crammed full of  presentations, were on everything from writing with snap and precision to considering how sadly little humans seem to learn from history and how Dorothy Parker was right. (It’s not that it's one damn thing after another in this life; it’s that it's the same damn thing over and over.) We had live piano music, a panel on Intolerance and Conflict, a killer lunch with the Roll Call of the States. (“Massachusetts,”  Sam belted out calling on my delegation, “Now with one-third fewer Kennedys!” alas alas.)Pulitzer-prize-winning editorial cartoonist Joel Pett gave an illustrated talk and a researcher from the famous Kinsey Institute answered our sex questions. Oh and political satirist  Rick Horowitz led us in a topical song of his own inventing with eight good-sport volunteers holding placards to cue us on the words. In fact give a listen:  That’s Rick on the right in the Hawaiian shirt . Over the left is our girl Sam. And in the middle on the screen? well that’s the topic of Rick’s song, the oil spill which is  keeping columnists and commentators everywhere  busy, plying that ‘pen warmed up in hell” that Mark Twain says we should  pull out anytime people in positions of trust go all venal and self-seeking on us.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iU3-vtZSKg]

Naked at the Airport

No it’s not a picture of aliens doing calisthenics; it’s a picture of you against a plate of glass at the airport. Well not really you but the iconic male and female, the female on the left, chiefly identifiable by what she lacks and the insult of that every time, the young couple peering at the ultrasound as the doc sweeps the wand across her mounding belly. (“Is there a STEM on this apple?” is how my doc put it as he searched to see if I carried a male-child.) You always heard travel was broadening but who ever thought back in the glory days of flying  that broadening would come to refer to your stance? Broadening as in “Spread ‘em, pal”?No one even reacts anymore. Every time I fly I have to just about take off my bra with its  pesky underwire. In early 2002 we were complaining like crazy about just having to slip  our shoes off. Now we’re practically pulling our pacemakers out of our chests and laying them down on the belt.  Not that we’re not grateful for the oversight. God forbid Grandma should climb aboard packing right?All of which is to say I’m here at last in Bloomington to bask in the company of my spiritual kinfolk. Yep. It’s the Annual Conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists which has prompted even the governor of this fine state to issue a proclamation.  Now where did I put my kazoo?

Ask Any Insect

Here’s a thought for the day: Trees win. The boy who owned this bike parked it and went to war in 1914 and maybe he was one of the 21 million who died during that horrid global conflict. In his book “The History of Everything” Bill Bryson says that that same number died in the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918, also known as the Spanish Flu and the Swine Flu. The difference: it took four years and the senseless slaughter brought about by trench warfare to kill all the combatants in that conflict. It took the Flu four months. And yet....And yet: the boy went off and the bike leaned waiting for him against the then-young tree. Did the tree come to feel sorry for the bike? Did it extend itself to embrace him, saying “Come I’ve got you now”?  Whatever happened, I take it for a message from the universe: Trees win. Life wins. Ask any insect. Ask any microbe.

Rx for Extreme Heat

Yes it’s roasting but at least the candles haven’t melted yet and taken that deep bow to lie right down on the dining room table. It’s like something out of Beauty and the Beast when that happens. Next the teapot will scream and throw its apron over its head, which come to think of it is what I was doing all day yesterday though until this year I hadn’t worn an apron since 7th grade when we made Prune Whip in Home Ec class. None of that June Cleaver stuff for me I always swore. We Woodstock girls, we wiped our hands on our pants is how I saw it – at least until the year my girl Annie went to culinary school and made aprons look good. She bought a real one to live here for when she comes over to do her magic. Then out went my novelty apron with the frazzled cartoon lady standing at a messy stove crying “The Cook Needs a Kiss!” In came this plain cotton one going clear down past the knees like the hemline of a nun.I had it on yesterday because I was making tender morsels for my former student Richard whom I hadn't laid eyes on since he sat in my Accelerated English class back in the 70s  when I was at the height of my wearing-green-fingernail-polish-as-an-effective teaching tool phase. (I was in that phase but my how I loved every kid I taught. I still have all their test grades; still remember where each one sat.)Richard is here from Paris where he has lived since he turned 21. He and his partner Sasha spent the day coolly sailing on the ocean. I spent it sweating like a tea-cake.  All day on the errands I ran, people were walking slowly, hollow-eyed as extras in a Tom Hanks war film. They looked like they were wading  through hip-deep water as they crossed the steaming seas of asphalt to get to their cars.Everyone looked that way yesterday – everyone  but these two, standing serenely by the side of the road. I zoomed past as they feebly waved. I saw them in my rear-view mirror; screeched to a stop; backed up; and bought me some lemonade. And aside from seeing warm and handsome Richard and his lovely Sasha and preparing for them the berries and the goat cheese and the young rosé we turned out to be too hot to drink it was hands-down the best thing I did all day.

Insomnia Alley

Can’t sleep. Leftover fireworks and headlights from street sweeping through bedroom. Mate out cold, lucky dog. Sheets ropey and damp. Toss. Turn. Get up 2am, pour  lemonade, drag pillow and fan to different room and turn on tube. Hotter than hell. Try hanging upside down off the couch.Notes from the night:

1. People’s teeth look really great when they’re up at the tops of their faces.
2. Look into these ads with smiling girls in low-cut dresses who want me to call them. Yet they don’t SEEM lonely. Easy work-from-home job with mother’s hours?
3. Consciousness can be lost in any position, even while hanging like a bat: significant gaps in “House” episode as a result.
4. “House” will never ever go off air. Day or night, flood or famine you can always catch an episode. That Hugh Laurie is good all right; you’d never know he was really a British comic. HEY, let's all watch this video!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJW_yTbYGoI&feature=channel]Ha ha, right? Well, it’s MORNING NOW. Woke 4am, drank 3 cups coffee to assist cogitation. Why did I wake holding me cell phone? Amnesia ? Small stroke? Make mental note check next month’s phone bill. (But oh isn't Hugh a cutie?)

The Power of Example

Husbands create an extra seven hours a week of housework for wives, according to a new study released April 3 by the University of Michigan.

It's 6 at night and after 5 hours driving I stop at the good old Double D Ranch for the jolt of java that will get me home. The girl behind the counter is jokey and warm, but with sore feet.  “Been here since 6 this mornin’ - Whoo-EE  my dogs is hurtin'!" she's telling me, when this guy approaches her with a notably wheedling manner.

They talk a bit and his expression of supplication lingers. 'Just another sharpie lookin’ to score a discount Latte by asking for extra gobs of cream' I'm thinkin' when, edging toward the door, he calls back to her: “See you later then? Love you! See you at home!”“Your husband?”  I ask when the door closes,“My boyfriend – IF I’m in the mood,” she says, rolling her eyes and standing on tiptoe to see him into his truck.“So not going straight home?”"Hells NO! 12 hours on the job! If I want to go have a pitcher of beer first I’m doin’ it!”“Good for you” say I, wave goodbye, climb in my own truck  and drive the last hour of my six-hour driving day. Get home at 7 to find my man knee-deep in the papers and watchin’ the ballgame and tell ya what I decide not to make no supper m'self.

For Kevin

Kevin Forrest, whose death I talked about yesterday, edited my column for the Vermont Standard and never seemed to mind if I didn’t get it in first thing Monday morning. Plus if he needed copy early before a long weekend like this one he'd call and say  “Just send anything!” which he knew I would never do. I’m serious like that about my writing.Kevin was serious like that about his music. He started playing in high school and was playing just a few months back, even as the cancer started growing again in his neck. I just found on YouTube and watched all the way through a crazy video in which 20 people run into a room and dance in endearingly clumsy fashion while the lead singer bellows out a tune with an intentional play on the F-word. Kevin is the band member with glasses and the blond hair which went white when he got cancer the first time, just a young guy in his 40s.He had surgery inside his mouth and had to learn talk all over again. He did though and he healed all up and fell in love and branched out with Local Access TV and the special stories for New Hampshire Public Radio. These picture show how he looked when I first called on the paper trying to sell them my column.The only song I can find that he wrote is this one and doesn’t its subject haunt me today, sending me again to NHPR’s website so I can once more hear that nice scratchy voice…. He was just my friend that I saw once a year; I can’t imagine the hole his passing has left for his children, and his real pals, and Linda, the love of his life.

On Light and the Good Clean Earth

This is one of the brand-new windows punched out of a room long buried in the earth. It sits under our deck on the ground floor facing the lake. Before now, sleeping in this room always felt like sleeping in your tomb, filed away in your crypt under C for Cold-and-Dead. Now suddenly the view-spoiling posts under the deck are gone, as are the outside stairs. Now, light streams in all around. Our friend and contractor Paul scooped away tons of earth back in May and last month made three pretty windows in this wall once buried. One fine day he'll paint, and lay a warm and breathing floor of wood.This bedroom sits just below our own room, which is so filled with sun- and moonlight I sometimes wake nights and think I'm sailing the heavens. And yet I'm so drawn to this new space I keep going downstairs to stand in it where I feel like part of a mole family tucked in under a tree-root and peeking up at starlight.Because roots are beautiful, are they not? And the tumble of growing grass? And the innocent pores of earth? Always we're too busy to look down, whether into a hole or a gully or a ditch; too forward-glancing ever to note what's right beneath our feet, holding and supporting us.For two weeks now since I heard of the death of my friend Kevin I have felt my heart as a dank and heavy space. Today for the first time it feels a little better, cheered perhaps by this inside peek. Maybe Walt Whitman was right and to die really is different from what anyone supposes and luckier. He called grass the beautiful uncut hair of graves. I think he definitely knew .... something that I myself am only just starting to sense.

This is what we see through the middle window now.

and this is how it looked back in May.

Oo-wee Ride Me High

Here we have 'You Ain't Goin' Nowhere,' a sweet and sexy song by Bobby Dylan but sung here many years later by his old friend Joan. "Oo-wee ride me high, Tomorrow’s the day my man’s gonna come, Oo-wee we gonna fly, Down in the easy chair"  A song for anyone waitin’ on love today.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geR19YWu2sk&feature=fvw]

Under the Stars

Remember sleepovers in the yard, the tent pitched using an old bedspread? Driving the two tall stakes in the ground and a length clothesline between for it to drape over? The thing sagged like crazy but you didn’t care. Remember the little can of Sterno used to warm the Spaghetti-Os because what kind of camp-out would it be without food cooked out in the open?Remember the ghost stories swapped? The one with the crazy guy's hook-hand on the car door of the couple parking? The one with the Golden Arm? The one where the lady’s head falls off when someone finally unties the velvet ribbon that's been around her neck for the last 80 years?You lay in your bedroll; no one had sleeping bags. If you did it was a flimsy thing lined in plaid flannel with a corner the mice got at and anyway it smelled like feet. You made a real bedroll and you lay in it and watched two bats flying high in the trees and were glad for them because you knew they ate the bugs.There weren't any real bugs then. No bugs and no bad dreams. No worries and no regrets. Just a splash of stars and that moon riding high over the garage and then nothing, nothing ,nothing  .... until 5am when the neighbor's dog came nosing under the tent smiling his doggy smile and  announcing a whole new day.

Clean Bones Please

Somebody put out a call for clean dry bones in an email blast and imagine my satisfaction in knowing I had those very things – and not even buried in my cellar either. I just so happen to have bought a bin o’ bones, an entire person’s worth, during the six years when I practiced massage therapy, and there was one of the stranger detours I have taken in my life;  I’m still not completely clear about what road it set me back down on.I do know I’m a more enthusiastic writer now, grateful to be doing work that doesn’t drive pain up my arms and into my already-messed-up neck; but it also gave me the ability to SEE things in people, through this kind of  invisible eye that slowly opened up in my chest area as more and more I looked upon the bent human frames that appeared on my table. It may sound cheesy, like someone ripping off early Steven Spielberg - ET’s ‘I’ll be right here' as he pointed a bulbous fingertip at his heart - but  is a real and true thing as anyone in the healing  professions will tell you.The best thing I learned studying structure in those years is that we are all burdened; that we all hurt. Look at the person at the Post Office window next time you step up to it; really look at the way he is holding himself, the way one shoulder droops, the way the head is inclined a certain way like Meredith Veiera’s (see?)  Broken kites all of us.But the bones, the shining bones in whose innermost parts the blood is made! God knew what he was doing when he gave us the bones!

Countertop

It was bad news for me when the Wall Street Journal called the Gores’ breakup after 40 years the ‘new normal.’ because I’ve been married 40 years this month. AND, and my veil looked just like Tipper’s!And the similarities don’t end there. Dave was in Al Gore's class at Harvard, though he’ll be quick to tell you he didn't invent the Internet. He says all he did was play Freshman Football and, since he couldn’t afford to buy the books, read his course assignments in the library, starting around 48 hours before Finals. He also played cards by the hour and just generally did a whole lotta Not Much Else until I came along his Senior year and we began hanging out with my big funny family. And it's been such a Big Top of fun-and-fightin’ ever since I can't imagine walking away after the early innings like the Gores did,In that Wall Street Journal piece Jeff Zaslow also cites a survey sponsored by the British dating site ForgetDinner which reports that people married one year spend 40 minutes of an hour-long dinner talking. By 20 years, they're down to 21 minutes, by 30 years, 16, and by 50 years all of three. To which I say: fiddle-faddle. We sure never spent 40 minutes over those first-year dinners. We didn't have enough food for that. We could’ve eaten the roaches to extend things maybe, crisped ‘em up in one of the zillion fondue pots we got as wedding presents.By our 20^th anniversary it is true that our dinner-talk only lasted about 21 minutes but that’s just because we could hardly make ourselves heard over the offspring resulting from that yeasty early years. And by our 30th, we were too busy executing our kids’ desire to have people join us for dinner: pals of theirs, pals of their pals, even a doorbell-ringing solicitor if they took pity on him. And Dave and I, we just keep bringin’ on the chow. Who could talk?Since the survey is silent about what happens at 40 years in I can tell you right now: At 40 years in you can break all the rules, because it's just the two of you again.David has recently taken a notion to eat standing up like a horse, maybe because he can’t wait to get back to the crossword he’s afraid to bring to the table since that time I took a match to his Sudoku. It used to drive me crazy to see him standing and eating at the island like a commuter at a pushcart - until I got the idea of sitting ON the island countertop, legs crossed under me, to eat my dinner like that.And it works, We’re at eye level. We chew. We talk. And if  people look in the window and see two diners, one a standing man and one a woman in apparent I-Dream-of-Jeannie-style levitation, sure they might be flummoxed. Hey, we’re flummoxed ourselves most of the time, and if not laughing 24/7, havin' some pretty good times.

For Bobbie

She was just Bobbie, one of the big kids with the long legs at camp; much sought after when we played those long games of Run Sheep Run and Capture the Flag..She paid no attention to me then in my dumb little baby shorts with elastic waistbands and curls foaming from the top of my head like water from the blow-hole of a whale  - but suddenly the summer I was 12 she was my counselor, still fleet of foot and glamorous but now she taught us swimming and slept in our cabin, a goddess among trolls, and tucked us in after Taps.She was my counselor again the next summer when Patty O’Donnell and I lit up cigarettes, big as day, right in the cabin, the summer Joey Cardamone lost her retainer a record ten times...And then suddenly I was 15 and in the C.I.T. cabin and here she was once again our counselor, this time riding us hard, giving us the requisite Counselor in Training tests and lectures and every other day it seemed pulling me aside to point out my many shortcomings.By the time I myself became a counselor she was off at a fancy camp in California and never did come back to Fernwood. I was in her wedding though as she would have been in mine if she weren’t half way across the world by then. But along about the time she was expecting her first child we connected again and talked through our way through every little kid question, raising-a-teen dilemma, kid-out-of-college conundrum, marriage mystification, spiritual query, hormone issue and medical mystery . She worked 20 years in corporate America, then started her own business and ran with that for a decade. Now she works out every day and reads to the dying and and impersonates sick people at a med school  - it’s not a scam it’s a job - and  helped elect Joe Sestak to Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional district in '07.She just got back from hiking in Iceland and today is her birthday. So this is the shout-out on my blog to my wise elder and spiritual counselor Bobbie who on my birthday sent a shout-out to me on hers.

Bobbie then-Bayley as a camper herself with Mary Creagh, counselor Percey Williams and Ellen Smith in a summer in the Camelot years

How You Know You're Nuts

You still have your 10^th grade term papers. You still have all the notes you and Ilona Wisniewski passed in 12^th grade English when you sat bored out of our skulls in that windowless classroom. You still have that fat candle with the three wicks that you can’t light anymore without having it drool  all over the place but how can you throw out a thing that came to you as a gift from such a dear of a human being whoever that was?  So maybe you're a hoarder and maybe that’s OK because they know what to do with hoarders these days. But you have compulsions too and they’re more of a nuisance.One Example: You just came across a pile of letters you received from readers in long-ago 2004 and your first thought was that you should sit right down and write to them all again. Even though you answered them back then. Another example: ten days ago you lost your diary and without the ability to write things down just so in that particular volume you haven’t been able to feel your feelings at all. Do you find it gratifying that the oil spill is in its 69th day? Hmmmm, a mystery. Are you happy your faraway friend died last Saturday and you never understood that he was dying so you never went to see him? You heard the sudden-stroke-after-surgery part but not the cancer-came-back-which is why they even had the surgery part.This news has knocked you clean  off your feet and you just can’t process it. Your psyche is a locked room whose only key is that little leather-bound diary left someplace dumb like in the Ladies Room at Target.Now here it is Sunday and you’re feeling a strong urge to visit the stationery store. Maybe you’re on the brink of buying a new diary and starting over, writing off as lost the last six months.  You HOPE you come home with some sort of journal, late as it in the year, because if you show up back here with notecards meant for once again writing all those readers from 2004, well we  might as well call in the Crazy Police right now.

Me and the Cows

It was a five-guy day field trip for me Thursday because I had charge of the little ones and looked to the big ones for help. We went to the Y first where the big ones joined revolving teams of players scooting up and down the court, their sneakers barking like seals and I thought I couldn’t feel any hotter -  until an hour later when we went to a pool in whose Ladies Room I bent to within an inch of the slimy floor to pull some very small shorts off a very small person and thought I was going to pass out and die.I was as miserable as the kids were happy with the heat. Then, as we sat at the table ordering food I suddenly knew rain was coming. It was as if the news had telegraphed itself to my every pore. Or maybe my ears sensed a sudden dip in the barometric pressure.“Did you feel THAT?” I said to my five companions. “It’s going to rain - hard! We’d better get home before it does.”“Rain?!” said Mr. Italian Ice here, pointing to the enamel-blue sky. “The weather guys were wrong if they said rain for THIS day!”But it did rain, 90 minutes later and trees went down all over the county.It’s not that I smelled it. It’s not that I saw it either unless it was that moment when the wind did a quick ten-second somersault and the leaves all went pale and threw their dresses over their heads. Mostly I just ….. sensed it. Games of basketball and Marco Polo may be behind me but I'm good at other things. Unlike these guys below, me and the cows, we feel that rain a-comin' and we just want to go lie down.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d24UopdMuKw]

The Innocents Laid to Rest

When the moon rose at dusk last night it looked burdened, like the head of poor mythical Atlas stooping under the weight of Earth. I had gone for a short walk, passing the church where our four murder victims will be remembered today. The street was already lined with signs to save space for the funeral cortege as I assume, or possibly the media. “EMERGENCY NO PARKING" the signs all said, though the emergency felt far behind us now. There was a quiet feeling at that hushed hour with the birds swooping low and a plane out of Logan ascending like a prayer.I could look in the windows of the church hall and see the Gifts and Memorials Committee at their meeting. At other hours in the week this hall plays host to other groups as well, among them the local chapter of Rotary International and those following the Steps and Traditions set down nearly 80 years ago by Bill W. and Dr. Bob. Additionally, according to the sign out front, the Cloister Concert Series will take place, tonight featuring contralto Marion Dry in an evening called “Saints and other Mortals” from 7:30 to 9:00, ice cream afterward.Just as I passed, the Reverend Thomas Brown himself emerged from his car carrying his robes for today, freshly ironed as they looked. He seemed as burdened as poor Atlas, perhaps from standing so long in these last days by the woman who was sister and daughter and aunt to the victims; yet he had such a beautiful light-filled countenance I wished I too could attend tomorrow and hear his words of comfort.I can't. This morning I rose at 4:30 and worked for two hours and sit now on my front porch awaiting the very early arrival of the little boys 3 and 6 who are my grandsons; and, several hours later - because teens need their sleep - the arrival of the big boys who will help me care for them while their mama keeps a vigil by a bedside.They say we'll see heavy rain before the sun goes down and a hard thing it is to leave any graveside in the rain. But who knows? Perhaps a cleansing rain will bring some relief for these mourners, or at least the end of the time of the first hot tears.In this life we are again and again delivered from sorrow without ever knowing by Whose hand. But if we could see God’s face even just once I think it would look the way Reverend Brown’s face looked last night: filled with somber care, but shining; shining.