The World's Bright Shapes

It wasn’t quite 6:00 as I woke today and the world felt washed so clean it made me remember my childhood, when all things shone simple and clear to the senses: the red of a favorite sweater; that tingly first bite of plum; the face of an old alarm clock, whose second-hand trembled and jumped minutely, tense with coiled energy.I remember waking in my bed when I was three and looking at my arm against the sheet.  “Well you’re awfully little!” I recall thinking, for the first time feeling my mind as a thing apart from my body.Animals lack this self-consciousness which we humans we have in abundance; we live, and we watch ourselves living.  Add to that the fact that we are acutely observant. We note things without even knowing we note them. One day we are sad past all explaining and it isn’t until night-time that we realize it is the anniversary of the death of one we long ago loved.Memories trail us like vapors, some too tender to speak of:  The caring hand of a parent stroking our worried brow. The slight pressure on our shoulder as a favorite teacher passes us earnest and working at our desk.And, if we dwell closely with others, we sense their feelings as well as our own.  David hasn’t even walked all the way inside the house before I can tell what kind of day he has had. One of our  girls calls on the phone and I answer with what seems to me a neutral hello. “What’s wrong?” she instantly asks, somehow detecting under my voice a sadness I scarce know is there.Stalked by memory, driven by dreams, we feel our feelings so acutely they all but wound us.David once described to me a memory so tender he has spoken of it only once in all the years of our marriage.  Imagine it as your  own: You are not yet ten with a father young and full of life who drives a car of a certain peachy hue, unusual even in that bland pastel era of the 1950s.Then suddenly, inexplicably, this young father sickens and dies, and the car is sold, and never again do you see a car that color. And then one day you do see one, and though you are older by 20 years than your father ever got to be all you can think is: “Here he is! Here he comes! He’s finally back!”Hearing such a memory, we feel our hearts constrict with an answering sadness and this welling compassion both comforts and pains us.It comforts, because it connects us one to another; but  it pains too, because we see then how far we have come from our baby days, when we woke, and only saw the world’s bright shapes, and heard its lively music.

Fall Fashions

About.com, which is doubtless produced by some lazy bunch of bloggers in their PJs, has issued a list of Clothing Must Haves for fall and on that list are:

• The Fitted Jacket, seen here: Just add a hat the size of your average house cat and you have the dear old Queen of England.
• The White Shirt: OK who doesn’t have that, right? Even if it is pilfered from some man's closet. in which case you call it a “Boyfriend Shirt.”
• Plaid, of any kind presumably: Will my old Catholic-school uniform do?
• The Turtleneck Sweater: Do I mind looking like Velma from Scooby Doo?
• The Neutral Coat:  No prob. My coats haven’t taken sides since Ross Perot ran for President.
• The Black Pantsuit, Which Can Be Rendered Dressier with Heels and a Sexy Cami: Score! Got one 20 years ago spending more money for it than for anything except that used Dodge Dart I started adult life with,  and don’t I still wear it today albeit with some blood sweat and tears at zippertime.
• Pearls: Got ‘em, in Plain and Peanut variety (which is to say fake and faker.)
• Tall Boots: Check. Got the very ones I once wore with that super-cute black-crepe hot-pants get-up.
• Large Leather Bag: Check and double-check and it’s fine if it’s really plastic and holds a Spidey toy and some spare pacifiers, right?
• The Sheath Dress: OK so the sheath dresses are kind of in the back of the closet right now since I’ve been going for a somewhat roomier cut lately kind of like this chick's nightgown and wait how did she find her way onto a cool blog like this? There’s the trouble with the Interne right there: no boundaries. No boundaries at all.

Tricky Weekend

It was a tricky weekend for me to be honest: a little one peed on my new sweater and during the night my slowly-twisting spinal column began pulling my poor back muscles so hard I was wandering the house at 2am looking for something to knock me out: Whiskey? Too many calories. Hot milk? The sound of the microwave might wake the little pee-er. The Percocet in the very back of the medicine cabinet left over from some long ago trauma? Ahhhh the Percocet. It was only 2am so I figured I’d be fine by 6. I’d get up real early and write for two hours before the little ones came looking for more of my wardrobe to decorate. I had it all figured out.Well I did get up early but somehow the next thing I knew I’d spent the whole morning lying face down on the bedroom rug, thinking vague but happy thoughts. I did rally long enough to help the little ones with a project and I may have even cooked in a feeble way but there was certainly no merry blogging. Or reading. Or making sparkly conversation with the houseguests for at least another 10 hours.Maybe we were all under a curse this weekend. Because I also got stuck in a five-hour traffic jam come to think of it. And take a look at this very interesting wound incurred by a houseguest at an area water slide. Can you see the Big Dipper in it? The face of Jesus? It does have that Weekly World News look to it doesn’t it?  Let me just get Nostradamus on the line and see what HE makes of all this.

Fall Fashions Preview

Get ready for tomorrow's fall fashion headliners right here at Exit Only! For now though a little hairstyle talk:My old look, very classic, very Coco Chanel:As against my new look, just a little edgier for the new season

Be jealous. be very jealous.

Step a Little Closer Miz SHOPKEEPER!

So this nasty shop owner starts browbeating a timid customer who bought an item from her that broke immediately. Says she can’t return it, that’s their policy, then says if the timid lady doesn’t like it she can just shop somewhere else.Sooooo, being a brave crusader for justice, I wrote a column about it, ratting the shopkeeper out and a whole army of outraged consumers rallied to my banner too -  the whole world as it seemed – except for a thoughtful 80-year-old who emailed me  to say she never writes in this way but it does seem to her that it’s not quite fair of me to criticize the lady shopkeeper behind her back; what I should have done and still should do is raise the issue to her directly.Come to think of it I also have a piece of jewelry I bought there that broke immediately. So now I'm trying to get up the courage to go in and ask for some “help” myself. Will the shopkeeper yell at me too? Will I shrink and flee or stand and fight? We women over 40, you know: we were conditioned to keep the peace and go along. The aunt who raised me used to say it all the time like reciting a Commandment and her father used to say it to her: “Even if you're caught in a bear trap, smile!”In other words, shut up and take it. In other words, show no teeth.I guess I'll just have to see what happens. Time was, I let people walk all over me but lately something is changing. It's like I can feel these little fangs emerging; must be all those "True Blood" promos on HBO.

Lucky He Doesn't WHAT?!

David has been away  for 2 days but I still feel like killing him I don’t know why, maybe it's the heat. Or maybe it's because he never listens when I talk  - but just goes “Uh huh, Uh huh” while continuing to read his newspaper the way a man will do. Or sometimes he isn’t even reading but just keeps silent anyway when I'm telling him something, which  makes me do what a wife should probably never ever do: take shots at his mother. Who is dead. Who he worshipped.“What, your mother didn’t teach you to speak when spoken to?" I bray at him in such cases.  "Oh I know how it was in your house, I was there! Four male galoots lazing about on couches while their poor widowed mother waited on them hand and foot! What, she never mentioned that in civilized society people acknowledge others when they  speak?”Turns out it’s a mistake to go after a man’s mother  -  and it's a worse mistake to complained TO a man's  mother ABOUT her son. "He doesn’t even  talk to me when he comes home from work!"  I said once to my mother-in-law, hoping for a little female solidarity and what  did she say back?  (a)  "Most  men don’t speak until you’ve fed them  dinner, and  (b) "You’re lucky he doesn’t beat you.” Hello!I remember this one time when I was just sort of mildly criticizing her behind her back: David fixed me with this piercing look he sometimes gets and said, “Don’t think YOUR mother doesn’t make a mighty wide target,” - which, I’ll admit, she did.  But  when she got in the kind of nasty mood I've been in lately she'd get herself out if it by suddenly stopping mid-kvetch to shout, “Gad! Somebody take me out in the yard and shoot me!” - which actually  gives me an idea: I think I'll go out in the yard myself now and pick a fight with the neighbor's cat but first I have to say it: We sure do miss our mothers though, don't we?

Stop Growing!

This is what my house looks like by the time August rolls around, ha ha, but I do have to say: the ivy wrapping my office window feels like it’s starting to smother me, like the moss in that Emily Dickinson poem. Also, there’s a cricket hiding someplace downstairs. Also,  the garbage disposal just choked on its own vomit and died altogether: too many zucchini peels. Plus there’s this ungodly smell outside the back door, as if you threw a bunch of rotting cabbage and crab shells.

This slightly gross picture is of the nest of the birds who perched on my office windowsill all summer. Mrs. Dove raised two babies in late June, sent them on their way, then forgot all about where babies come from, returned to her perch and began once again entertaining the advances of Mr. Dove, leading to a whole NEW set of babies who sat there in the same original nest along with so much bird poo it lapped against the glass like kudzu. When they finally left a week or two ago I lifted the sash and hosed it all away, bedroom, nursery, kitchen and bath, which were, of course, all one room. It was mean of me maybe but this life, this teeming life! It’s wearing me out!

This is me out back looking for the source of that wicked smell. What can I say? Eve in Eden I ain't.

Here Ya Go Granny

Catalog called As We Change comes in the mail that turns out to have such an array of fascinating  items it feels like Anthropology to study it. I'm taking about things like  (1) this whisker remover, to keep  you from turning completely into the witch from Sleeping Beauty, (2) "The Bra Extender" for gals that haven’t in truth been a 34-B for one very long time but like preserving that fiction, and (3)  "Comfy Straps" to ease the pain of having inch-deep dents worked into the tops of your shoulders from the weight of those darn breasts you’ve had carry around all these years. It" also has: (4) these nifty little bootleg shoulder-pads that attach to your bra straps to help you get past the sad fact that you can't BUY clothes with shoulder-pads in them  anymore and here you are looking like a total pear these days with hips hour-glassing out so much farther than they used to do; (5) silky little doodads called "Winkies," small spans of cloth that modest you can stick inside the plunging necklines clothes all have these days so, and finally  (6) the Super Primal Pheromone Concentrate," (an 'unscented elixir containing highly concentrated human sex pheromones, the natural hormonal secretions of the body that attract the opposite sex. Spike your favorite perfume or lotion with Super Primal or apply it directly to pulse points and get ready for a romantic response.')Ha ha, putting on sex hormones like perfume! I laughed in such superior fashion reading this whole catalog as I did from over to cover. Laughed ‘til I cried in fact; then abruptly stopped, called the 8oo number and ordered about ten things - because as the poet said once Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls, Old Girl; It Tolls For Thee! :-)

You Need It

What you need when you’re off on vacation is what you need when you come home – what you need every day of your life in fact: Good company and the chance to think your own thoughts. The people of course are very key (and the more innovative their exercise styles the better)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWThfOUOIQQ]And so is the peace.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HamgTXJIUeg]

Hair Today

As I was watching the old Karate Kid movie yesterday with 7 other people in one crowded room - call it vacation with children - I realized how much I miss the days when girls and young women had a little volume in in their hair, not like today when they all wear it slicked back like Louisa May Alcott.  And to think the kids look at our high school pictures and laugh. Wait another 20 years and see how they feel about their old hairstyles!)I mean seriously, here’s how the author of Little Women looked.It's just a tad severe, right? Even Jennifer Lopez looks bad, like a bunny with its ears cut off, without more hair around the face.I like hair like Elizabeth Shue had as Ali when she was offering Daniel-San the inspiration he needed (above.)Look at Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza:And OK maybe Demi Moore went a little too far when she was just starting outBut seriously: who doesn’t think Nicole Ritchie here doesn’t look a whole lot better than Jaime King?

Just sayin'!

OK it's another beautiful day on this my very last of vacation and little feet are thundering around on the other side of the wall. Time to dress in my Camp Director suit, fry up some bacon and kick everyone outdoors!

The Remains

“March 1, 2010 - The State Fire Marshal's Office issued a statement on Tuesday that a New Hampshire woman was found dead in her home Sunday night. Neighbors across the lake from the one-story ranch spotted flames shooting from the roof and called for help. By late Monday the body remained unidentified pending autopsy. The driveway on the dirt-covered road leading to the house was sectioned off with yellow emergency tape and the scene was clear of investigators. A small bouquet of flowers lay in the snow beside the mailbox….”++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Six months after this terrible fire I took a walk with a friend visiting us on our  lakeside vacation and on impulse we turned down this very driveway to come to the place where the doomed house so lately stood. An orange backhoe told the tale of what had been done this past week: the place was a moonscape, with not one stone left standing on another.“To think that this person had a whole rich life here and now there’s just nothing!” I said to my friend, looking mournfully down at the ash.But she was busy pushing some cinders with her shoe. Then she stooped and pulled out the burned edge of a page with the word “Smiley” on it. “Part of a John LeCarré novel!” she said, then walked more, stooped again, and stood holding a small clutch of dollar bills. I moved a few yards closer to the lake and began looking too. Before long I had found the coiled metal spring and the matted corner of a magazine. Then she found a shard of dinnerware. After a long silent time we gathered up all these items, which I carried back to this house to set out on this drought-parched patch of grass.This was two days ago and I find I can’t stop looking at them. If you click on the pictures you can enlarge them and read the words “free of guilt,” “free of responsibility,” “send no money,” “just mail this card, and ponder the way the lady who owned them is now past all this human clamor.She was my age exactly and the end of yesterday’s poem has kept  running through my mind so much it is as if she is addressing me:  “Think that life and glory flickered on the rushing bloodstream for me once, and for all who have gone before me, vessels of the billion-year-long river that flows now in your veins.”

Spitballs

When an acorn drops on your head you say, "Ow! Jeese!" and look up almost in outrage, as if you actually thought you could keep on walking through life and not get beaned, even by that final cartoon Anvil of Death dropping out of the sky to squash you flat.You say “Jeese!” when the acorn hits - but when you go out on a clear night one-third of the way into August and actually see the Perseid Meteor Shower, you just say “Ohh!” Because for all the reading you may have done about it you're still not prepared for this quick stream of light across the sky, and then another and another. - the gods are throwing spitballs - and just for a moment you see that really you're not running a single thing around here. Rather you are a small child lifted from sleep, a child like the child in this poem about Halley’s Comet which whizzes past like some famous old-time gangster in a speeding roadster just once in most people’s lifetimes. But you were up, as I was up last night when the Perseid Meteor Shower put on its show. Large hands lifted you from your crib and you were one of the lucky ones who saw.Here now is Kenneth Rexroth on the subject of celestial showtimes, and underneath, the wonderful Mary Chapin Carpenter on the same theme:

When in your middle yearsThe great comet comes againRemember me, a child,Awake in the summer night,Standing in my crib andWatching that long-haired starSo many years ago.Go out in the dark and seeIts plume over waterDribbling on the liquid night,And think that life and gloryFlickered on the rushingBloodstream for me once, and forAll who have gone before me,Vessels of the billion-year-longRiver that flows now in your veins.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRxCDOQfkw4]

Tell Someone

People are mostly mystified. I know I am. Last night at 9 when I walked into my house I know had my I-Pod because I had been listening to it for the past two hours as I drove the two hours home. But 20 minutes later it had ceased to exist, was gone, lost, vanished. Today I have looked under every piece of furniture and in all the wastebaskets to no avail.I was also mystified to find that I had exited my own vacation: I drove those 200 miles in 24 hours to see a doctor whose appointment I could have easily postponed and bring food to Uncle Ed who, I seem to have convinced myself, will die entirely without my ceaseless attentions. I think I also drove all the way home  because Dave was driving home for a can't-miss business thing and I feared I might take on some insane project like refinishing my car in his absence.So I exited my vacation at 6pm one day and got back at 9pm the next day. Dave meanwhile, left the lake here 12 hours after me, got back four hours before me and was contentedly watching the Red Sox-Blue Jays game when I walked in with a world of groceries, four kinds of cleaning supplies and two fancy bras I apparently  didn’t think I could get through the week without. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about the missing I-Pod and how I had to listen to the radio the whole way up, bouncing among six or eight stations wobbling in and out of range.I did catch enough on one station to learn that the good people at Kent State  who have just buried a time capsule to be opened 50 years from now are all pretty sure they also buried one 50 years ago now, though nobody can quite remember where.See? They're mystified too - which supports my theory that we should tell everybody everything lest all knowledge be lost. Every one of my kids knows the whole story of our family. They know where all the coolest old letters are filed. They know what spinster Aunt Mame said every time she read about yet another engagement in the paper even though she was born just 14 months after the death of Lincoln. They know where sits the little wooden trunk packed by their four-greats-grandfather as he fled starvation in Ireland in the 1840s.They know all these things and are holding them for me even as I held them for my sorrowing single-parent mom and she held them for her sorrowing widowed dad. I can't tell you how cheerful this makes me feel. In fact maybe I'll call them all now. I'll bet one of them can  just picture what I did with that I-Pod.

He Licks the Kids

THIS is why you can never let your guard down: because the world will see you for the numbskull you are. This is also why I spend at least the first 48 hours of any vacation working. I just feel like How can I  just....‘let go’ when so much of what I put out in the world goes before me carrying a sign reading “An Idiot Did This”?I let my guard down so much the other night I never gave a final edit to what I had written to post here yesterday which turned out to be sheer gobbledygook, with dropped words, extra words, wordy words. And to make matters worse by the time I woke at 6am and saw it on my Blackberry – I'd scheduled it to go up onto the Web at 4am – our Internet had gone down, thanks to a string of wild country rainstorms that tossed buckets of rain right through the screens and onto all our floors. It's OK now but I couldn’t fix any of the mistakes until 1pm, so there they all stood showing the world my true colors and reminding me of all those other times: the time I walked into my Fifth Grade classroom with the back of my skirt tucked into my underpants; the time I wrote an email seriously slamming someone and then sent it to that someone by mistake; the time in the airport bathroom I saw myself trying to fold a few squares of toilet paper into my wallet and realized too late that I’d just flushed a fistful of dollars.I know I should just let go more and learn to laugh at myself - but then I remember that letter of reference I once wrote for someone under my supervision now in search of a teaching job. I've always been a terrible typist and this was back in the days before computers so there it stood: “He licks the kids and the kids lick him.” What can we say about a dope like this except 'Send her away even longer and hope she grows a brain'?

How to Have Fun on Vacation

A couple of weeks back I came upon 30 fan letters I got five years ago, every one of which I answered at the time but because they were  so nice I decided on the spot to answer them all again, buying special stationery so I could do that in this my one week of vacation at the lake.I also brought with me a waist-high stack of boxes filled with negatives reaching back to the 70s which I have to identify, label, and place in specially bought negative cases - just in case 50 years from now someone wants to make prints from them even though I spent ten solid months in 2008 putting the original pictures that go with these negatives into shiny new albums each duly marked on its spine with the year in gold leaf.Yesterday I wrote here, and filed a column and entered 100 tiny little zip codes and email addresses onto a spread sheet - all in my bathing suit which I donned at 7:00 am thinking to swim right then. Instead I dove off the dock for the first time at 4:00. The swim only lasted about ten minutes because I wanted to begin tackling the books I've been waiting all year to read. They are: “White Like Me” about fighting racism, “Difficult Conversations” about difficult conversations, “Dealing With People You Can’t Stand” about how you really can’t think that way and expect to be a happy person, and “In the Country of Illness” about living with people who are fixin’ to die, and I must say I’m enjoying them all immensely.David meanwhile read his book, fell asleep listening to the ball game, and completed not one but two fiendishly hard crossword puzzles. I feel for the guy to be honest: he doesn’t know how to have fun. Plus, ha ha, he just won’t stay dressed!

Week Off

What's a seagull doing 100 miles inland on the edge of the White Mountains? Answer: Looking for bites of your Monkey Bread. Maybe bites of you. The Monkey Bread was what our girl Annie made over the weekend, along with the ribs, the mashed potatoes, the poached salmon, the crème anglaise, the special berries, the chocolate cake and on and on. You wouldn’t call it camp cooking exactly; you wouldn’t call it Vacation Fun For Annie either but what’re you gonna do with a chef in the family, lock her out of the kitchen? Tell her she can’t use her creative gifts? What cads would do that to a daughter?She brought that sugary bread out on the dock yesterday where Old Dave and I were hanging out, resting our bones and watching Those Born Well After Us jump in the water and swim out to the raft. Some nosed around in kayaks, though I wasn’t one of them. Some kept an eye on the noisy renters drinking their brains out two docks over. I was one of them; I love the way people don't realize how far their voices carry over water.This was our family who at day’s end packed up and were gone, leaving Pops and me to patrol for tiny life-jackets and brood upon the fate of the red-ant nest under the big pine. “But won’t you be bored up here all by yourselves?” asked one right as he was leaving.Bored? When we have each other, and Scuttle, and the rest of Annie’s cooking? It’s our one little five-day vacation. I think we'll find a way to fill the time!

Sunday Funnies

Sunday again! I say let’s mark this Day of Rest by making fun of famous people.First, check out the mullet on the husband of the year here. Mellie we hardly knew ye!Now, here’s the President of Russia with an obscure sidekick as the two get ready to stand in for TweedleDum and TweedleDee in a remake of that famous final croquet game at Alice’s place over there in Wonderland.And finally a big “hello” to Jerry Brown now putting his signature crotchety spin on his race for the California Governor’s mansion. He was once good-enough looking to date Linda Ronstadt as I recall but now he looks a lot like Peter Boyle God rest his soul…And speaking of Peter here HE his is along with Michael Keaton and Christopher Lloyd in the trailer for that that awesome 1989 film “The Dream Team.” Give yourself a little gift: watch all two minutes of it and ask yourself if you wouldn’t have loved to him as governor of just about any state you care to name.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFeyf3NwHPc]

Sometimes You Eat the Bear and..

Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. We're out in nature this weekend and the nights are mighty rackety. The sound a fox makes when it’s mating would take the skin clean off your face it’s so scary. You can hear it here. There'll be some birds first and then about ¾ of the way in you’ll hear a sound that makes you wish you were in a steel house with bars on the windows, and not out under the stars with sly little creatures slinking past all night.We keep looking for the martin reported to be living under the cabin, though we hope never to see it. They say a martin can tear your cat apart quick as thinking and leave nothing you'd even recognize as your dear little freeloader of a housepet.Sigh.This is our first year here without our two cats, both safely in Heaven now. It feels weird  having only humans in the house. Humans have such poor antennae. I know animals can’t see into the future but they sure can see in the dark. We by contrast: we’re just kids in the backward-facing sat of the old station wagon with no clue at all as to who - or what - has its eye on us for lunch.

A "What If" on Same-Sex Marriage

What if Equality in Marriage did become the law of the land? Well let me ask you this: What if your college-age daughter fell in love with another young woman, and six years later loved her still?  And what if you belonged to a place of worship that around this time chose to examine the possibility of becoming a place welcoming to all? What if one day during this 18-month-long period of prayer and reflection designed to let people really examine this possibility, someone stood and expressed concern about how “these gay people” might fit in. I wonder how you would feel hearing the man in front of you turn to his wife and with such a pained expression say, "He’s talking about our child!"  Would it surprise you to learn that other parents present that morning were thinking the same? 'These people’? They speak of our children, whom they have known since their infancy!How would you feel if your place of worship then voted Yes, saying “Let the word go forth that we in this 170-year old community of faith choose to be known as an Open and Affirming congregation?” If, one full year before same-sex marriage became legal in your state, the leaders expressed their delight in holding a Ceremony of Commitment for your daughter and the one she loved?I only know how I felt when my husband stood at that service and prefaced the tender fatherly poem he was about to read by saying he knew he spoke too for the much-missed dad of our daughter’s beloved, gone now into death’s quiet corridor. I know how I felt when he then paused and looked over at Chris and said aloud before the hundreds there gathered that he could not be happier about our girl Carrie's choice in a partner.

I think it might also lift your own  heart to hear the verses he then read from Gail Mazur’s “Young Apple Tree, December”: “What you want for it you'd want for a child," it goes,  "That she take hold; that her roots find home in stony winter soil; that she take seasons in stride… "That she know in her branchings to seek balance. That change not frighten her, rather that change meet her embrace... that she find her place in an orchard.”

And if, in the years soon following, babies should come to the house of your children, would you not rejoice and be glad seeing them cradled so tenderly in their strong  young arms?

I think you might, if it became personal for you this way. I think the realization might dawn within you that this is all God has ever asked of us: that, committing to one another over many years’ time, we spend ourselves in deeds of care and kindness; that we strive to make a place where any who shelter under our care can take root, and grow, and one day find their own place in the orchard. our Carrie....

and two in her growing family

Goodbye Again to Marilyn

Today is the anniversary of Marilyn's death who was so pretty with that wavy dark hair before the studios made it into yellow cotton candy. She was darling as a child, darling as a young wife, inexpressibly lovely in her years as a star, especially in those unguarded moments like this one when some  photographer captured her in repose, maybe just relieved about being up and functioning, the uppers having finally kicked in to bring her out of the deep sleep brought on by the downers that might as well have been roofies for how thoroughly they smothered her.I looked on YouTube just now on the off-chance I could see more of her, doubting I'd find anything, but what miraculous times we live in for here she is again. Not dead Marilyn with the blood pooling in her face when, for hours she lay where she died, but this luminous girl about the same age as Angelina Jolie, our current icon of female beauty.Here's to you Marilyn; and here's to you too Sarah McLachlan, for writing that haunting 'pulled from the wreckage' line in the song that accompanies it.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1qIQpwFNA8&feature=related]