First We Tie You Up...

Here's what my friend Ann Aikens had to say in reference to yesterday's Mad Men Bad Men post: "OML even in the 80s, the weirdos that would take me out to lunch to give me 'advice', saying maybe they could 'do something' for me! One asked leading questions like: 'You have to be willing to take chances. Are you willing to take chances?' If I were less naive, I’d have replied, “Why, in fact, I’m willing to take a chance and HAVE SEX WITH YOU RIGHT NOW–but first can we call your wife? She has 20 years on me, maybe she has some insights, too, Mr. Businessman!”Ah good old Ann who always calls 'em as she sees 'em. Now, just for added fun, this short trailer to the great 1980 film "9 to 5." Women aren't 'just' secretaries anymore but the themes touched on here sure still have their appeal :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVKTZ4CEM90&feature=related]

Mad Men Bad Men

A woman who worked in New York in the Mad Men era saw my column last week and wrote to say how accurate the series really is. “I was there! Most of the men I worked with were married and commuted; most of the women were single, living in apartments in the city. Some of the men certainly were sleeping with their secretaries which was  especially noticeable when they went on business trips and took their secretaries along to ‘take notes’  or just took them off for long lunches. Many times the men had to stay overnight in the City because they had to ‘work late’ or ‘entertain a client.’  They all took long two-hour lunches where martinis were definitely consumed...”She went on to say how she herself steered clear of the carefully-baited traps but boy did this email bring back memories! I was 19 with a summer job in the city at the very final second of the Mad Men era.I remember a much older male relative taking me to lunch and ordering up those double-whiskey drinks for the both of us, even though I wasn't old enough to drink alcohol. But nobody asked for They never did in such circumstances. If you were with an older man you were his problem – his 'property'? - and what waiter (much less waitress) would dare question an "executive?"The next summer when I was 20, a creepy old guy asked me to attend some conference for pay as his ‘Girl Friday’. He had already taken me along on a business lunch with several other old guys and also to the office of a local college president though I did wonder what on earth I was doing at either place since the guy didn’t know Thing One about me except that I had shiny hair and a big smile. I guess he thought he’d look pretty good walking in to a place with a spring lamb like me at his side.Luckily I had met David the summer before who I would marry within the year. Though Dave was just 22 himself and hardly a man of the world, he saw right away what the guy’s real agenda was and clued me in so in the end I was spared.... But make no mistake you young ones: Those weren't the glamorous times with clinking glasses and tinkling female laughter. They were the bad times when women had no voice at all or voices they didn’t dare raise.You doubt me? Consider what Peggy endured in Season One and obviously suffers over still; just look at her face as she's lying next to the  fool she slept with last week. "I want to be your first," he had said by way of courting her.  Sorry but that sounds to me a lot like what the Conquistadors said to the indigenous people.

Girls Gone (Not That) Wild

I drove for 12 hours over the weekend and saw a full-size deer dead on the highway, not ten miles from Manhattan. I also saw two young guys in yarmulkes having a picnic at the rest stop. I had just bought a bacon-and-chicken wrap inside and was perched on my tailgate pulling off all the bacon. “You bought your own food too!” one called over and how could I correct him when he seemed so eager and cheerful?When I was inside buying this wrap I had also seen an 80-year-old in short-shorts and a girl six feet tall wrapping her 5-foot-2-inch boyfriend in a bear-hug from behind. Now in the parking lot I also saw a baby boy in his car seat waving at his stuffed dog.And really all that was just prelude – because out on the highway again I kept passing a green Ford Explorer with the phrase “Girls Gone Wild” hand-painted in bright-pink letters on the driver’s side. On the back it said “New York or Bust!” and had two tiny flags affixed to the mud flaps reading “Hot to Trot.”When, ten miles down the road, it passed me I saw the lettering on the passenger side that explained it all: “Caitlin’s Bachelorette Party,” it read and as it whizzed by I could just glimpse within an earnest-looking female driver, five or six lounging female forms, and, propped on the sill of the shotgun seat window, one slender foot topped by five painted toenails as round and even as kernels of August corn and didn't this last sight redeem all the rest for me. Because whatever crazy thing we women might seem to be saying about ourselves, really we are never wild in the way that might get a guy's hopes up. Really all women are what they have been since the dawn of history: creatures of the utmost cautiousness who look to the future and take excellent care of their feet.

Way Back

Well how could I not drive the 5½-hours through a hell of beach traffic for your big surprise birthday Horace, even though you found out about it in the end and did all the cooking yourself? How could I not come when I was the one who brought you to Brown every September and back again every May? We packed my van to the roof  20 times if we packed it once. It went with you to grad school at Tufts and it made the long sad trip home when your grandma died and we missed the wake because you had been asked to address 700 school-kids for the big Martin Luther King Day Assembly and you didn’t want to let anyone down. It was OK though because by then you had moved back home to be with her and your mom by then and weren't we there for the funeral where you spoke and didn't you toss that first shovelful of dirt into her grave?Grandma died just after you guys bought this place that your sister Crystal stood in front of last night and I have to say, Horace  I think of  Eula every time I hear this Tanya Stephens song Way Back because I gave her the CD that it’s from and when I next saw her she put it and made me dance with her.She sure would have loved the fun last night.When I got to your house  at 6:00, the kitchen was still a sauna of cooking and you guys were all still in your work clothes. But not 50 minutes later your mum was crisp in white linen, your little brother Travis was calmly texting a Haverford classmate and Crystal here was resplendent in forest green.You too had on a just-ironed shirt as you set out the food, all of which you cooked yourself - all but your mom's rice and peas and the two desserts brought by your godmother and  Crystal’s potato salad and killer mac-and-cheese.Anyway I hope it was a nice day. You and I have walked many a mile together since you came so thoroughly into our family that my kids took to calling you The New Baby. I guess you could say that we go 'way back' too. You came to MY big 60th last year and to my big 50th ten years before and you danced at my daughter’s wedding. So how could I not return the favor and come to yours? Especially when you were serving  (deep breath) curried chicken, jerk chicken, curried goat, oxtail-and-beans, rice-and-beans, rice-and-peas, cabbage-and-carrots AND all that homemade dessert, plus Crystal’s potato salad, and mac-and-cheese AND Myra's homemade cakes, carrot and pineapple upside-down! :-)

The Week in Review

I found the bird who was flying all around my house over the weekend. She was lying against the window-glass, a soft glove of feathers on the  bookcase. Also point of information: she was never the same bird as the one on my windowsill having sex in public for the last two months and just about runnin' the place. That one never came inside. This one was all over the house: went to the bathroom in the kitchen, the powder room, on my favorite bright red raw-silk sofa cushion etc...Also, that isn’t really Gandhi in yesterday’s post. Gandhi is dead now. That is actually a statue of him next to me at Madame Tussaud's House of Wax in London. I myself am not yet dead but when that picture was taken I had not yet heard about beauty products. I look like the scene in the first Batman movie where the news team is afraid to wear makeup on account of how the Joker poisoned the Gotham’s City ‘s whole supply.Also, I posted the wrong picture of me looking down at my own chest at age 12 in The King And I . The right picture is up now if you scroll down. This picture, that picture: they both make me cringe.And speaking of pictures,  another awesome picture of busty Christina Hendricks up now too.Ok that’s it. Driving 300 miles now, meetcha at the second the rest stop....!

Cuss-Free Zone, or, It's Tough Living with Gandhi

No more swearing in the workplace says Goldman Sachs but when I was growing up no one in my house swore - unless you counted Mom yelling  “God!” now and then, followed by the immediate disclaimer that she was praying for patience.Later on, my sister Nan took up swearing bigtime, though never while angry . Only while telling a funny story and the swears were strung together in such original fashion you felt like Mark Twain was in the room, emptying the dictionary on some fool he had in his cross-hairs.Me, I never swore – until that time I was carefully bundling an armful of wire coat-hangers and dropped them all again. OUT came that ugly one-syllable expletive. IN came Mom who scared even grown men when she rose up and fluffed out her fins.“IS THIS THE KIND OF LANGUAGE YOU’RE LEARNING FROM THAT DAVID?” she roared.I was 19 and David was the boy I had just said I was going to marry.But Dave never swears as I well know after all these years. In fact just a few months ago in a conversation about cursing I asked him if people ever swore at his place of business.“Not really,” he said. “Why, in this foul-mouthed day and age?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Because I don’t?” (He’s the company president.)So hmmmm.  Maybe that whole Be-the-Change-You-Wish-to-See-in-the-World thing Gandhi said really DOES work....Anyway, I just Googled my name together with the ‘sh-’ word and 2 hits came up, in each of which I’m quoting somebody else. Maybe I'll have to stop doing even that.

Because after all I'm not just livin’ with Gandhi here on earth, I've also got Mom up in Heaven now, hearing everything I say. a hot summer day long ago, with Gandhi and the women who raised me

Careful What You Wish For

My column talks this week about how much Mad Men’s Sally Draper seems NOT to want to be like her mother hen she grows up, trying to make a whole day out of defrosting the fridge and putting down new shelf paper and all.She might not want to be like curvy Joan Holloway either, though it’s too early to tell. It  goes on to speculate whether Joan wore a fatsuit  under her clothes in the first few seasons because she does seem to look just a tad different now, a little less like two scoops of vanilla spilling out of an ice cream sundae.

I said I'd post proof of my own brush with fatsuits on the blog here. It came when the owner of our local kids' theater company once lent one to my little boy for Historical Impersonators Day. So here is the child below as William Howard Taft, the president so hefty he couldn’t fit in the White House bathtubs.

Because it's fun pretending to be what you're not, superfun to wonder what you'll end up looking like.

I guess I'll add a picture of  me as a harem girl in the big camp production of "The King and I." Notice how everyone on the stage looks properly clued in; everyone but the one with the ripply hair; check out what she's looking at,the dope.

I wanted so much to look like Joan Holloway, and then it happened and now what I wouldn’t give to have looked less like a Hot Fudge Sundae and more like a tall slender Lime Rickey.

So today I wear high necks. Or else I put my tops on wrong way to. "Excuse me!" people are always saying to me at the Post Office. "Excuse me but I think you have your .... shirt on backwards?"

I don't care.  My friend Michael Dwyer and I are Irish and he says our people have been wearing their clothes backward for centuries. To ward off the Little People he says, and that's fine too, because you know GOD FORBID I get snatched up by Fairies, swapped for some baby and forced to start the whole thing again.

Little Michael (R) as William Howard Taft with other historical impersonators

followed by......

me at 12 (second from Left) worrying if I look allright in that two-piece Jantzen

Death By Pecking

All day I dreaded going up to that closed-off room on the third floor. I just knew that bird was still in there right where I saw him on the weekend, batting against the window-glass, crashing and splashing like the heart in your very chest during the worst nightmare but No. It was quiet. Maybe it went out as it had come in, through the one place in the eave not crammed with insulation.So need for the nets and tennis racquet this time thank God, thank God.Flying creatures put a fear in me like Tippi Hedren showed in “The Birds", the way they can just come at you like that. The way they just won’t stop. I think of the poor guy who smelled so bad he fled to an island paradise - where, walking the beach on his very first day, he got pecked to death by seagulls. This picture above was caught by the motion-activated wildlife camera David got for Father's Day and what on earth kind of a bird is THAT?Now check out this collage of clips from this great Hitchcock film and you tell me: Do the birds attack because of Tippi’s smug schoolmarm way? Or is it that they’re just itching to dismantle that prim hairdo? Tell you what I think: the chick is wearing a fur coat for like 90% of the film and those birds? Those birds all belong to PETA.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF-c4JkFZRo&feature=related]

Dazzled

I just learned that a houseguest is coming here tonight and last Friday a bird was swooping around on the third floor where I would put him. It finally wormed its way under the door and ended up in the attic crawl-space and I walked away fast, hoping he’d find his way out under the eaves. Point is I'm still scared to go up there so today at 6am I entered this little 2nd-floor room not slept in since last Christmas when all 8 of our young'uns were home for the holidays.I walked in there this morning and was dazzled by light that in summer only comes in for maybe 30 minutes right after sun-up.The sight just dazed me and seemed to nudge me off my moorings. Were all these things here before?The old bureau?My grandfather’s specs resting upon it?And here again is my sweet first girl smiling up at me and my how I loved her in that dress!And above the bureau and to the right a picture of my own little family of origin in the frame that will never hang straight.

What is this place with tokens of both the 1880s and the 1980s, the dear dead past and the dazzling present? I have many tasks to accomplish today, checking on that poor bird being only the first - but how could I not first come here to you and show you what I saw just after dawn on this midsummer morning?Maybe the tile on this novel which was sitting right here explains it. The Notebook of Lost Things it says.

But are they lost really? I think they are just out of sight.

me with our mom and my big sister Nan

Keep an Eye on Sally

We can resume therapy with the gang from “Mad Men” back among us; they're our shared past I think, a show in which that period stirs and comes once again to vivid life with the shimmery TV signal, the bright ugly knitting project thrown across the sofaback, the women in their girdles and white gloves and  heavy clip-on earrings that hurt even more when you take them off and the blood rushes back into the poor pinched flesh.Keep an eye on ten-year-old Sally, the child of divorce now, who seems to be wearing actual makeup this season, to me a sign she’ll soon be replaced with a fresh actress of the budding breasts sort since the little girl who plays Sally is only ten herself and you just know the writers are dying to grow her up some and grant her the rebellion she so richly deserves.I’ve had my eye on Sally from the start in her short-sets, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV ... and taking that Peace Offering Barbie Betty gave and throwing it out the window. My sister Nan and I did that ourselves with the dolls people gave us, the  Ginny Dolls, the Tiny Tears babies made to wet from chaste openings at the base of their spines and those big-girl dolls especially with their more-than-budding breasts and their tiny waists. I didn’t see it then but watching "Mad Men" makes it clear: we didn’t want to be ladies smiling blandly and teetering in ridiculous footwear. We told people we were tomboys. We wanted something else, something we weren't being offered. We loved only our poor kept court jester of a dog Penny and our stuffed animals, all of whom had a certain sad mute dignity; none of whom looked a thing like us.

Dumb Kid

So I'm at my gym when I hear the following exchange between four First Graders and the bored 14-year-old  placed in charge of them. They are here for Summer Day Camp. I am here for the Special Double Combo Kickbox and Bosu Class, “Bosu” being that exercise device whose heavy circular base supports a rubbery hemisphere. (The word stands for “Both Sides Up.”)I can see that the little boy with the round face is trying to tell this junior staff member something. “Guess what, guess what, our lights went out last night!” But “Line up against the wall and sit,“ is all the youth says, and that in the voice of the world’s most bored person.“It was completely dark!“ the child says again. “No poking,” is all the dumb kid answers, eyes glazed over and mouth open.So... "How dark WAS it?” I ask. I have stopped and joined in it seems."It was SO dark!“ the boy enthuses. “And my mother had to get flashlights!”And you all told ghost stories?”  “Yup! Well.... actually, no. But nothing in the house worked! And it was AWESOME!”“Guess what, guess what?” says another child suddenly. “One time my mom burned the dinner! And the flames were HUGE!” Then “Oh! Oh!” says a third. “MY mom set off the smoke detective!” (Sweet! The smoke detective!) Then even the fourth child weighs in, actually raising his hand to tell of the time his baby brother flushed his grandmother’s glasses down the toilet.I realize it's for ME to be all twinkly and engaging with the four; after all I'm not the one who’s been out on a sweltering playground for the last two hours, but still. Little kids are little kids, exercise devices in their own right whose both sides are pretty much always up. I just think when they speak with such animation the least we big people can do is muster up a little joy in responding.

Who's Old? (With a Tip o' the Hat to Michael)

I got the message I was old 3 times in 30 seconds when I picked up my young friend Angie the other day. She hopped in the car, shot me a quick a look and asked if my hair was really long enough to be gathered at the back of my neck. “Nah, it’s fake, They call it the Fun Bun,” I said, yanking it off to show her.“O-KAY,” she said in that certain young way that always makes me feel a tad defensive.“Hey what’s the point of being old if you can’t have fun? If you can’t wear a thing like this?” I said, pointing now to the pouch at my waist.“A fannypack?” she said, actively working to suppress a smile.“But I need it!” I cried, pulling from it that tiny device with the white ear buds that has made so much money for the good people at Apple. “How else would I carry my.... my ... my Walkman here?”Which prompted an even MORE indulgent smile -  and this from someone who still wasn’t alive five years after “Bad” came out.But you know studying the pictures from that famous video I see now that my hairstyle then was exactly like Michael’s hair back then. In fact I really LOOKED like him - only I never learned to snarl and look all mad like he did in these clips. I was taught to just smile and act all sweet and that was probably just as well, because I have a hunch the young are gonna let us live only if we DO smile, and stay twinkly, and keep on furnishing them so much amusement.And now  .....Michael, an angel even then:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsUXAEzaC3Q&feature=avmsc2]

Rare When It Happens

Rare when it happens that the room you rent looks even nicer than it did in the brochure. I drove yesterday to Portland Maine to see two college pals and am staying at a B & B called The Pomegranate Inn. A month ago when I first saw the picture that opens up on their website I said to myself “That’s my room!  And it’s on the third floor, up under the eaves, high among the treetops!”) The three of us walked and talked tirelessly for seven straight hours and all I could think when I turned the key and walked into room 3 was “where's the bed?” I turned on the tiny television for a few minutes for the inanity of the 10 o‘clock dramas (yet more body parts found in urban settings! yet more lady coroners in low-cut lab coats joshing with yet more engagingly boyish members of the law enforcement community! ) then slept and dreamed of peonies and cotton balls and Oscar Wilde. And when I woke this morning I understood why:I am in a room with intricate hand-painted walls where the bright ocean light is positively ladling in through the windows, onto the bed, onto the walls, onto the fat and cheerful pillows. The place looks exactly as it had in the promotional literature and maybe better and how often does that happen in life?Speaking of Oscar they say that even as he lay dying he was funny. The story has it that right near the end he turned his face to the wall, opened his eyes and said “Either this wallpaper goes or I do.”I have always imagined that wallpaper looked quite a lot like this. But me, I could look at this wallpaper forever - and I’m just betting this room is every bit as nice at dusk on a clammy November day as it is right now at seven on this high-summer morning.

Go to the Funerals

Many of the houses along Summer Street are old in the nicest way - you still can see the 1920s and '30s written all over them – but for all  the years I have loved this small city and remembered my time teaching here, I has never before been in this Summer Street church. It looks like the inside of one of those sugared Easter eggs, like Paradise the way people once pictured Paradise, with arches and frescoes and an altar like something sculpted out of ice. When you sit in its hushed high space it could almost BE 1920 again, the birth year of the lady we were there to memorialize.

And what a lady she was. I knew her as the mother of my student Lisa, who in English class answered every one of my questions almost before I got done asking them. Mrs. C. used to come to the Parents' Nights and fix me with a few looks that made me wonder if the whole front of my dress wasn’t unbuttoned. And really how could I blame her? She was a woman in her 50s who had given birth to six children and buried two. I was a kid of 23 presuming to tell her things about her daughter. She did smile when I said Lisa could go to any college she wanted  - wasn’t Lisa's next oldest brother a senior at Dartmouth? – but she knew Lisa and Lisa  had her own plans. In the end the years passed and we had our babies together, or almost together. I still remember going to her house with the maternity clothes I knew I wouldn’t need again.From the pulpit yesterday Lisa told great and funny stories about a woman many called feisty though as Lisa said  “feisty” didn’t come close to expressing it. From the pulpit  that same Dartmouth brother told great stories too and it wasn’t because he represents the  8^th Congressional District of Massachusetts that you could hear a pin drop as he spoke. Like Lisa, he had to stop once or twice to collect himself.After Lisa’s daughter Carly finished singing four or five other songs with a voice like silver filigree, she launched into “We’ll Meet Again,” just as the priest was blessing the coffin. It’s a song from the era when Rita was a young bride waiting for her war-hero groom to come home to her and it cheered me so to look across the aisle and see that small knot of her special pals swaying and singing along.I went to Mr. Capuano’s wake some 16 years ago now, for Lisa. And for Mike.  And for Mrs. C.  I went too because I could never forget how tender that man always was with me because on  some level, he told me once, I reminded him of their child  Karen, lost to polio and born the same year I was born.I couldn’t get to Mrs. C's wake the other night because I was on the road but I am so. so glad I got to the funeral. Because where else can you go to see – really SEE a person’s family send him off wrapped in so much love?

Lisa now, with one of her two famous-actor sons, Scott Evans

and Lisa then, when our babies were small & we had no furniture  at all :-)

Slow News Day

Lindsay spent her first night in jail, a runaway dump truck took off on its own flattening 5 parked cars, and passengers on United Flight 967 got bounced like so many toy people in a toy bus dropped onto the floor. Also, a cop went to get his picture take with the 3'-9" porn star Bridget Powers - oops! - right in the middle of his shift. “Where was the news when I pulled someone out of a burning car last year?" he said upon tendering his resignation.  “All the good things you do, and I’m going to be remembered for one stupid decision. It just sucks.”

That must be how poor Lindsay feels this morning.But let's not focus on her current troubles. Let's remember instead the time a few summers ago when she appeared with Meryl Streep, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin and the odd and tender Garrison Keillor in A Prairie Home  Companion. Here she is now  along with Naughty Woody and the rest in the trailer for that film and, under that, doing a song all on her own. Who wouldn't wish a good outcome for this poor girl, a child still in so many ways?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05AfA24Q-eo][youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsQs0oZLvYg&feature=related]

Uh oh

Sometimes you just get a bad feeling. I had such a feeling at this gas station where one tank seemed to be fine and the other said “Condemned.” Would it blow up on us all? Who knew?I got another bad feeling yesterday at the Dunkin’ Donuts where four very small children were sitting all alone. The eldest looked almost six. Then there was one four, one three and one about 15 months. The six-year-old put the little one in a high chair and pulled her to the table. Then they all sat looking out the window.“I’m not running a day care center!” the lady behind the counter suddenly yelled over to them. “You just tell your father that!”“Where is he?” I asked when I approached to order my latte. I too had noticed the absence of a grownup.“Search me!” she said.” He said he had to go to the ATM.”“Oh. Well let's not make the children feel bad!”“I know, but for God’s sake!”I walked over to them. “Hey guys.”They smiled up at me. “Shall we watch for him together?”“Yup” they said and we turned and all looked out. “Is he in your car?”“Nope. That’s our car there. It’s red,” one said.“Hey my car is red!” said I. “Two red cars!” they said and laughed.“I’m sure he’ll be back in a sec.”I went to collect my coffee then and when I turned around again the dad was back. I ducked into the bathroom at that point and so didn’t hear what the woman behind the counter might have said to him. I did note that his back was very straight as he left the shop with his four children a few minutes later.They were a black family. This was the hard part, since every other patron in the place was white and, well, you could sense a lot of judgments and silent assumptions being directed at him. All I felt myself was that same bad “uh oh” feeling I had felt at the gas station. And I was grateful this time too that nothing exploded.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

The crickets have started in, two full weeks ahead of schedule. It’s a sign we’d best  hurry up and squeeze in the summer fun. And how am I doing with THAT so far? Hmmmm.  Well we got the air conditioner into the bedroom finally and that’s certainly been fun. As of this morning it’s leaning so far back into thin air I think it’s going to go any minute and take the whole window-frame with it.I also stole away from my desk in the middle of the day to see Sex and the City 2 the very day it came out. Had the wide-brim hat and silk sheath dress all lined up to put on and shoot a video making fun of it, but the energy seeped out of that idea as soon as I got to the theatre. Conked out 30 minutes in, walked out 30 minutes later. Dumb, dumb movie. I mean could Samantha’s nymphomania BE any more offensive when the action takes place in an Islamic country? Plus, is that what dermabrasion does? She’s all .... waxy, like those little tubes you used to get in elementary school and sucked the red goo out of and stomped on the pavement after. And I don’t care how nice a person Sarah Jessica Parker might be she still looks like a horse.I haven’t slept outside yet and hope to God I don’t have to. Haven’t swum in the aqua gel of a pool, haven’t gotten a sunburn or been to the beach or walked up to a single jingling ice cream truck.Over the weekend I did go to a lake and for the first time this year dove off a dock. You have to go shallow off this particular dock or you’ll hit the rocks but I remembered my racing dive because I learned to swim at the same summer camp as this pretty diver here. Only for the racing dive you get into the proper squat, shoot your arms back, shoot them forward and slam! you go, flat against the water and come up doing that mile-a-minute crawl stroke, in my case all the way out to the raft without once coming up for air….And when I did come up I wasn’t any longer the grownup who hasn’t been to the beach or swum in a pool; wasn't the one who goes to the movies and sees them through a glass all darkly. Instead I was the child who can keep her eyes open wide the whole time in the moss-green water and cherishes as her friends the minnows and the tadpoles. I was this little person below, second from the right getting ready to play The Beet in that timeless Parents Weekend play King Hale of Healthland.

Camp Do-Too-Much

Up at 5, write 'til 9; then food-shopping for twelve people. Home for 3 hours making and serving food to gracious lady never before met. Then three more hours preparing pork roast, meat loaf, two salads, French bread and rice, not just for the 11 people set to arrive for supper but also for 89-year-old uncle, all of whose meals I provide. At 6pm an hour-and-a-half spent going to get him and bring him out for a spell, stopping real quick for the night’s beer and wine. Drop him off and quick home to greet not just the hungry 11 but the two little grandsons invited to sleep over earlier in the week, pant, pant.They do sleep over as party roars on only whoops, the little one sounds off like a cuckoo clock every two hours all night. Hurry to his crib, take him up, walk him, whisper into his little head etc. until 5am when he gets up for good. His brother up at 6. Three blurry hours involving bacon, cocoa, eggs, French toast, banana smoothies, etc.  Dave leaves for work. Still no coffee even for me but that’s OK tt quick let’s go out to the yard! Inspect the dirt, inspect the bugs, inspect the garageful of musty things from the 1940s. Little boys drag out garden hose, water grass, water shrubs, water each other by mistake. Back inside, sneakers squishing. Pop everything in dryer, pick up house which looks like a Connect Four/Mouse Trap/ Lego bomb has gone off in it, sit them down to read two nice musty garage books. Then Dave reappears, we pack the clothes-the-kids-the-food, drive a hundred miles to the place where their parents will meet us and I will no longer be in charge, whew!All this took place Thursday-Friday this past week which is why I didn’t write on Friday. I really am starting to see now that whenever I fail to sit and write I feel like a vacuum cleaner with something caught in its throat: Just that jammed up. Just that weak and wheezy.  I don't know but after 40 years of over-functioning I think I really have to stop with the crazy overbooking, before the crazy overbooking stops me.

Stayin' Right Here

Sticking around in summer feels normal to me because when I was a kid nobody went anywhere. The country wasn’t set up for all this zooming about we do now. There weren’t any restaurants, for one thing. Sure, a person could grab a bite at places like Woolworth’s and Kresge’s but those places all closed at 5:00.No, if your parents really wanted to feed you kids away from home they had to hunt down one of the 'real' restaurants, usually in the downtown section with the heavy drapes and the wide leatherette seats.  You never saw restaurants along the highways because, to be honest, there weren’t any highways.And families rarely took the train.And only movie stars and moguls flew.So if your parents ever did throw caution to the winds and decide to go on the road with you they took the car and there you’d be, a family of five or seven or eight, poking along with no air conditioning, no seat belts and no for sure DVD players,  just you and your sibs all crammed in the back, while the grownups sat up front squabbling and sucking on cigarettes.No wonder people stayed home. At home it was cold sliced ham and Grape Nehi and on really hot days you could run under the sprinkler. Mornings, you’d hear the wet slicing sound of a push lawnmower; noontimes, the electric buzz of the mid-day bugs; evenings the sound of soaped-up supper dishes clinking in the sink.Yep, staying home at vacation-time had its charms all right and it still does. Think: you can get up only when you feel like getting up, throw on any old thing, then step out onto the porch, or the stoop, of the soft wet grass and look around some. The rest of the world is at work but you, you lucky dog, are idle this week. You're blooming where you were planted, just like God always hoped you would do.

Enough with the Reproducing

It was all very well a few weeks back when this mother dove made her nest on my office windowsill and soon produced two hairy looking THINGS who dangled from her mouth to eat her regurgitated meals. I’ll admit that when they  grew and left the nest I thought “Whew!” Not that they weren’t charming  but the more time passed the higher the pile of droppings underneath them. Things were getting a little ripe just six feet from my desk.Then not a week after they all left,  doesn't Mom come back? And didn’t Poppa show up too and begin doing this little dance, prelude to The Act. Then sure enough in another 10 days there were more eggs.Now Mom has starting making little forays away from the nest, and, seems to be scanning the horizon for cleaner pastures. My plan for the minute she goes? Hoist the hose up, train it on this windowsill to wash away the smelly muck, then hang a couple of shiny CDs out there, which birds find scary and  repellent. It's not that I dont' like birds' I'd really like to be able to open the window a few times before the snow flies again. And also Sister-Mom, I think you could use some help with family planning. And finally, take it from me, babe: there are way easier ways to feed the kids than what you've got goin'.