Nice

What's nicer than a moment in the day when the sky is blue AND it's thundering? That's what it was like last night at six o'clock, an hour I love because everything goes so quiet. People turn from their computers and join their  families, or else lie down for a bit before the evening or drink swigs of milk straight from the carton. In other words they stop for an hour and breathe. You can tell because emails stop coming and the chatter on Facebook falls way off.

At six last night I posted last weekend's column, changed my profile picture on Facebook and wrote to eight young people about going on November 9th to hear a talk by one Jill McDonough who helps people in prison write poetry. I may not be able to wait til then to meet her though; I may have to send her a letter now she seems so great. Her previous books have been about shipwrecks and pirates, hanging, tarring, gibbeting and the history of medicine. If my sister Nan had been a writer this is totally the stuff she would have written about. She did her first term paper on Premature Burial; all her childhood drawings are of corpses, mausoleums, people with blood dripping from the corners of their mouths…. She has said many times in her adult years “If I were a little kid today they'd have me on the couch SO fast!”

I don't agree. I look at shows like True Blood and Twilight and I can sure see it: Nan was just ahead of her time. :-)

Little Scowly-Face Goes to Camp, or, Which Child  Here is Mad about Vampires?

Floating

In Mad Men Episode 408, we see Don Draper alone, sleeping on his stomach in his bachelor bed, arms flung out to the side. In voiceover he's saying that he likes to sleep; that he feels like he's free-falling in a parachute. I feel that way too when I sleep and boy am I sleeping deep these days, just as I did in my crib when I would wake so disoriented. I’m doing that now too: I swim up out of sleep and I don't know what year it is or how old I am. (I kind of love it, to be honest.)This morning in the moments before waking I dreamed about Tommy Wilson, a student from my teaching days. In my dream he was still a football star, still the Class President and Prom King, only it was now and they had some new kid playing him in a sort of movie. I watched a while as the kid, not even faintly like the real Tommy Wilson, stole his life.“You can't do this!” I finally said to the  director. “You can't just steal a person! I bet the real Tommy Wilson is still out there! You can't just scoop him out and put somebody else inside his name and pretend it's OK!”He looked at me like I was crazy. “Of course we can. Recycling: that’s what life is.”I woke up then, no longer in safe Don Draper's floating  free-fall. Outside, a dog barked briefly, then made a strangling sound; he was leashed. Then a woman passed, talking loudly on a cell phone. So it wasn't ‘back then’ when the real Tommy Wilson was a youth, and it wasn't this Orwellian future from my dream either. It was now, this strange new time when dogs can no longer run free and we’re all forced to overhear each other's phone conversations, even at day's beginning, even in the hushed and holy hour of dawn.

Saucy!

Give me the saucy people in life. The other day at a cocktail party my Fun Bun fell off - it happens - and the two guys beside me looked down at it in alarm. “Whoops! Just my fake hair!” said I. “Good to know,” said one. “We wuz gittin’ ready to stomp it,” said his friend.Then the other night I met a waiter with a similarly breeziness. I had just surreptitiously sprinkled some no-cal powdered drink mix into my water, then tried hiding the packet under my dinner plate on account of the general tackiness involved in bringing outside food products into a restaurant. “I saw that,” the waiter whispered as he brushed past me. Then, a little while later he caught me diluting  my mojito with big splashes from that gallon bottle of sparkling water they make you buy if you want even a little sparkling water.“What's this?!” he shouted in fake outrage.“Hey! I paid for this water!” I said back in my own fake-mad way. "That's  Paulie from the The Sopranos when he comes to pick up his mom after her lunch out with her old-lady pals, remember? And one of them starts stuffing all the leftovers into her purse?  ‘Hey, those are my Ma’s rolls!’ Paulie shouts and snatches them our of her hands. Remember that?”He remembered it. Everybody watched The Sopranos, even just on A& E where they dub over the bad words. I loved all those characters and speaking of staying jaunty, here's old Paulie Walnuts now visiting Christopher in the hospital and explaining  how Purgatory works. Good message for the Sabbath maybe eh?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObglF8WUsWM]

Nine Years Later

I was already working at my desk when our son called to say something terrible had happened in Lower Manhattan. I ran to the TV, then quick called David, also at work by then. He knew only about the towers and not the other catastrophes. “Really?” he kept saying in disbelief. “Really?”But disbelief had vanished when I called back an hour later to ask how his people were doing.“Well, we’re chasing our guys still,” he said. “Three flew out of Logan this morning.” Then he hesitated. “So far we’ve heard from everyone but Bobby,” and in his use of this fond nickname I recognized in my spouse of many years that certain lightness of manner he uses to mask extreme worry. “We’re not sure yet about Bob.”Within the hour we were all sure:  Bob had been on Flight 175 when it suddenly veered and hit its mark.His wife was shattered, as were their two daughters and their son, who, the press noted in one account, wept unashamedly throughout his interview with them. He wept again when he called and asked David to deliver the eulogy at that funeral-with-no-body, where weeping was general.David simply stood and told a few stories: about a man everyone loved, who could get up antic games of Frisbee in any old parking lot, pinch-hit at golf, though he didn’t really play golf, and convince five grown guys what a good time it would be to drive 300 miles in February and stay in the world’s tiniest motel to watch his daughter play basketball. “And we all agreed afterward,” said David. “It was a really good time.”He told about the dozens of people who had called the company to offer condolences, many sobbing as they spoke. He told about the one who said what everyone knew to be true: that he was the nicest person he had ever known.Most of us say that when our time comes we want to go quick. Bob did that, as we pray most did who died on this date nine years ago. I myself like to think of them of them not as they died but as their families last saw them, when, on that blue cloudless day, they rose from their beds and stepped lightly into the morning.

Friends

At our reunion this past week this formerly tiny girl Trish told a story about being a little kid in school when the teacher made everyone go home and draw a picture of what their daddies did for work. “I figured I had it knocked," she said. "My daddy ran a funeral home AND he was dead! So I made a picture of this little guy standing next to a coffin and I was so proud. But then I got to school and the teacher wouldn't hang it.”When she told her mother, her mom got mad in exactly the right way. “She said  the teacher never should have asked about people's daddies. The teacher should have said, "Draw a picture about the work that someone in your family does.”This must have come up as we talked about the camp's  big Visiting Day Father-Daughter Softball Game, which made me cringe every time because I didn't have a father anymore than Trish did. But Trish was younger, this tiny darling child made much of by the visiting dads even though her tiger of a mom was right there acting as the camp nurse. My mom was there too, for all that; she and my aunt ran the camp.  But I was older than Trish and so felt mostly shame the way older kids will. In fact when we went to see the old place Wednesday my cousin Sheila recalled the time when we were around 12 and the two of us stole away to the lake, where I cried about my fatherless state.I had forgotten all about this until it was recalled it to me by Sheil, who even today is like my second sister and that is why people should stay close and make a family of their friends: Because in this life daddies are by no means guaranteed, no, nor husbands either. So just  keep making friends, for your friends you will always have with you.

Sheila and I, friends even then

Reunion

The young tend to shudder at images of their own earlier selves and attempt to disown them. With time you stop doing that of course. I look at a picture like this of a girl from my camp days and all I can think is how lovely she is. If we could have found her for this camp reunion I'm on maybe she would think so too.Yesterday we visited the place that lives in our memory, Camp Fernwood in the Berkshires it was called then. Now it's Camp Emerson and has been for 40 years and more.But enough remains of the place we remember to have held us there for two whole hours; in fact a few of us would have stayed longer; would have loved to play a quick game of softball on that field.Other kids have loved it there since, as all the graffiti shows. This scribbling from the early 1990s was made by a boy who could well be an investment banker by now. Was he threatening not to ‘come back’ next year, or  mourning the fact? From what I know of Emerson, my money’s on the second one.  My own child came here for the three  happiest summers of his young life. He was happy there as we had been - because at camp you're free from your school, your neighborhood, your family even. You make a new family, strictly of your peers, and it is wonderful.Many of us were only five years old when we started camp and the little-kid section was fun enough. We had swings and a sandpile only occasionally blessed by a visiting skunk. But it seems to me the fun really started when we got to be around 12. That's how old I was when we made this pyramid. I'm the funny-looking one in the second row on the right. Beside me is Meredith Chapman, my best friend and cabin-mate that year and for all of five of the years she attended.She was there with us yesterday. We stood in front of the 1920s-era cabin that we first lived in together, now slated for demolition. Meredith lives on Lake Champlain now and reads to the blind and does hospice work. I live here and do this work, whatever you might call it.In an hour we will all pack and go home, we women in our 50s 60s and 70s. But yesterday and the day before we were all campers and young, reaching high adn higher still again and playing  under a sun that never sets.

Sleep-Driving

I didn't blog yesterday because I was busy almost dying on the highway. It’s what seems happens to me on long road trips now: I start falling asleep, I don't know why. I have coffee. I have "The Girl Who Played with Fire" on my i-Pod, I have rock music but still I enter that weird state where I know I'm awake but my mind starts  knitting little dreams anyway. It's awful.So... I stop at all the rest stops. I pull in at the grassy dog section, pop back my seat and sleep for 20 minutes. That's all it takes. I sleep deep and then I’m great, sharp as a tack, wide awake - for at least another 50 minutes before it happens again.I drove four hours to get to my camp reunion and when I got  to where I was about 20 minutes away I stopped to fire back one last shot of coffee -   and accidentally threw my car keys into the giant trash can in the Ladies Room. They went right to the bottom natch. Then I arrived and learned that there’s no cell phone service at all here, not anywhere in this whole town.It must be some sort of message from the universe for me to stand still and stop trying to talk to the whole known world. I can do the first thing but not the second. People I haven’t seen for 30 or 40 years, here from Virginia and North Carolina and Florida and I’m taking some vow of silence? I don't think so! I’m jumping into my shorts and camp shirt and rushing from my 'cabin' to meet them down at breakfast now. Now that we're together I feel like we're all safe at home just like little Mary Lou was so long ago.

Diane's doing her best but Mary Lou is gonna be safe after all.

Bad Meat

I tried to bring two tenderloin over to our friends’ house yesterday, because they were feeding not only us but 15 other people besides. Luckily, I had  Annie here who went to culinary school and trusts the witness of her own eyes. When she uncovered one of the tenderloins,she studied it a while, then called to me to come closer.  "Am I hallucinating or is this meat green?” she said, so we turned the lights up brighter. It looked okay; I mean sort of grayish the way beef will look before you cook it but heck I'd bought it at Whole Foods."I'm sure it's fine," I said cheerily until Annie began searing it for me. That’s when it began to smell. I mean really smell, with a rank, sour and rancid smell. It sent something up your nostrils that made you recoil, a smell that would make most household pets slink off and hide under the furniture - well all but the dogs of course who devour stuff like this and somehow don't die..I'm afraid last night's diners would have died if they had eaten this meat.There was nothing to be done at that late hour but  I called Whole Foods anyway and explained my problem. I mentioned that the ‘Sell By’ date was still well in the future so it should have been fine. I said, "Why don't I bring it in and you can see it for yourselves?"“That’s Okay!” they quickly said back. "You don't even need your receipt. Just bring in that ‘Sell By’ sticker from the wrapper so we can trace down the source. We're happy to give you your money back.”I don't know what you're eating at your Labor Day cookout but if it's beef tenderloin and it's from Whole Foods, well, you just might want to stick with the macaroni salad!

They All Came Home

The weekend came and brought with it our kids, some sleepy from the car ride (left) some full of energy: This below is Annie set to unload a thousand grocery bags and make her famous from-total-scratch homemade gnocchi for us.Annie brought with her the much-missed Michael who bused to Boston through Friday night’s tempest to get to us from Brooklyn.“She’s taking pictures again," Annie said to him half under her breath but I think maybe Mike could see that.

(Maintenance man in background ha ha)

Anyhow we got right to work. Mike handed out bats….....we got a bucket o’ balls, and  just generally spent the rest of the day swingin' for the fences, big and little guys alike.

Pearl of an Earl

We’re back just enough from the ocean so Earl didn't touch us but still, it had its effect: Amtrak service from New York to Boston was suspended and the Sox got postponed – and just about every window on the Cape and the Islands had a sheet of plywood nailed over its eyes. My wind chimes started banging around in early afternoon and were still at it when I went to bed at midnight. Also the cooler that I left upended on the screened-in porch 'til I could give it a good scrubbing began talking to itself, meaning its lid kept opening and shutting, banging in ghostly fashion. The birds really shut up too I noticed and where do birds go when a hurricane is due? Have they got school gyms and cafeterias and relatives in other counties?What I really noticed though is that I was as restless as a caged tiger. I couldn't sit still. I sorted nails, pencils, packets of lemonade tossed in the drawer. I tried on clothes that haven't been out of the closet since the year 2000 because I was afraid of how I’d look like in them. (Not so bad as it turned out - kind of like Roseanne Barr would look if she’d done an episode where she couldn’t get any of her zippers to zip.)The big question is why we don't feel an antsy apprehension all the time living as we do on this wobbly planet with its wild winds and rains and Nature sending comets and asteroids whizzing past day and night, just biding Her time ‘til she can give us a good smack.

Claire Danes Deserved It

Last night on a long dark drive I listened on my iPod to a novel, one of whose characters states that actors are all children inside and you have to treat them as such. She herself is a young woman abandoned by her parents at an early age who learns right then to "manage" people, in her case the six young boys she is sent to live with. When she grows up, she becomes a very competent and actual stage manager. As I drove I also listened to NPR and caught an interview with the autistic Temple Grandin, someone the medical community wrote off as a child in the early 1950s, saying she would likely have to spend her life in institution.  Wrong. Today she has a PhD and is the leading expert in the humane treatment of animals destined for slaughter.But what really struck me as I listened is the fact that I knew right away I was hearing Temple Grandin. Though I had never before heard her speak, I simply recognized her voice. And the reason I recognized is it that Claire Danes played her in Temple Grandin, the HBO special, which, not incidentally, just won five Emmies.Claire is a great actor and was even back in the '90s as girl, playing Beth in Little Women with Susan Sarandon  and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio. But in this role she more than plays Temple Grandin, she almost becomes her. Watch these two very short clips and see if you don't think so too. This first one is Temple herself – just watch 30 seconds if that’s all you have time for. Then under it is Temple as played by Claire. Click on it and just try to remain unimpressed.Maybe actors are like children on some level, but aren't children often wisest ones among us? In my book the fine actors are so gifted they're practically touched by the gods - just like Temple, who thinks in pictures and can move the world with her mind.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAu6_Llfh2A&feature=related][youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG6UI5BmhuA&feature=related]

But If You Try Sometime

I finally gave in to the heat, meaning  I passed out, after running in little hamster circles all week. It happened at 7 last night, when I suddenly had that feeling you get when you’re about to faint. “Just let me lie down,” is all you can think, which I well know as one who's been fainting since 2nd grade, especially in church. I used to think I was the next child saint, blessed with religious ecstasies.The heat's what did it this time -  that and the fact that ten days  ago my One-and-Only declared summer over and took our one air conditioner out of the bedroom window. Since it's so big - our window are super-wide - it weighs as much as a small car and so he's reluctant to put it back in.Thus have I been enduring long sleepless nights with the bottom sheet a pad of clay and the top sheet a moist damp snake. (The temps don't seem to affect him; champion snorers can't be kept from sleep since snoring is their chief hobby.)For four nights I lay there, my eyes drilled into the ceiling, until last night when for some reason the Sleep Angel descended and took me in her arms. I fell into the bed with its freshly laundered sheets, and with the two window fans blasting and a tiny personal fan inches from my nose, slept like the dead for 11 straight hours.

So I guess it’s like Mick Jagger said in the great old Stones song: You really can’t always get what you want.... but if you try  sometimes (pum) you just might find (pum, pum) you get what you need.

And now Mick himself as a  boy 19 tellin' it to us himself via YouTube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxkdmL3iMCY]

AC is God

(I cut this out of a magazine beautiful sight that it is)

It just seemed like a good idea to the guy, to take the AC unit out of our bedroom window ten days ago. “What’s this?” I said coming home to find the three-foot wide 200-pound behemoth on the floor. “Summer’s over,” he said. “Yeah, but actually NOT,” I said back. “I didn’t like the look of it,” he then said - which made us both laugh since I'd been whining about 'the look of it' since it first went in on Memorial Day weekend. Why? Because (a) it was hanging out the window practically at a 45-degree angle – luckily there’s only a shed under it and no passing people – and (b) we never actually found anything but a couple of pieces of shirt cardboard to put on either side of the thing, so a good two-square feet of simmering air worked its way inside all the time. “Hmmm,” I said once. “Too bad we don’t know anyone in the foam business!” (This man has worked in the foam business SINCE THE BICENTENNIAL.)Anyway he took it out and I sort of liked having the real air come in. Even last weekend when it was started to steam up I tried to embrace the change. (Just read the ridiculously romantic post I put up Monday morning.)  We slept with three fans these last three nights; peeled back the bedclothes and lay on our backs to cool our viscera.But yesterday it was 95 and today it’s going to be hotter still. And our house was built in the 1890s and the crawl-space on the third floor, which is right above our room, has a temperature like the Planet Venus.So I say Bring it back for God’s sake, husband of mine, bring back the AC! I can’t budge the thing or I’d do it myself. This is me in happier times with my hair looking better than usual. (I really am a lot younger than I seem. :-))

Crabgrass

I let my lawn almost die this summer. Or David did, I’ll blame him. His position: lawns are meant to be brown in summer. “But this brown?” I say to him. We have an 1860s loveseat that, when I went to reupholster it, turned out to be stuffed with barn straw. That’s how our grass looks: like straw from the 1860s - heck, like straw from the cradle of the Baby Jesus. Even our new Japanese Dogwood which the nursery said was as tough as shoe leather started to wilt this summer.“Water it, fool!” they told me when I called for advice, and so I did and began watering the grass too, a project that shot riot-hose blasts of water right INTO my nasal passages every time I went to move the sprinklers. It’s those snaky hoses the sprinklers are attached to, which are not inanimate at all but twist and squirm and fight you like a wildcat – all before spraying you square in the face, like that lion did to Aunt Eleanor at the zoo that time.The result of all this irrigating? Crabgrass, which I am simply thrilled about but which David hates. “It’s the one thing I can’t stand,” he said the other day, though we wouldn’t HAVE crabgrass if he wasn’t in the complete thrall of our eco-Nazi daughter Carrie who is Against All Chemicals and keeps us from laying down any of that nice Agent Orange that they sell. Because I say What’s wrong with crabgrass? It’s tough, it’s nice and  green, and I happen to KNOW that Texans pay serious money to have their lawns seeded with something exactly like it.It’s a puzzler. And another way of saying that a column on this same subject (only without the jokes and the lion pee) is up on my “This Week’s Column” page -  until Labor Day weekend, anyway. After that it can be found orbiting the deep space of the Internet at one of any of 50 or 60 places like this one, now and forever Per Omnia Saecula Saeculorum.

Mossy Thoughts

They’re calling it an end-of-summer heat wave but it doesn't feel like that to me. Whether temps shoot over 90° in the days or not, the nights are cool. It was over 90° here yesterday but just 65° at night and a simple window fan made me feel as cool as moss by a forest pond.I love moss and admire its short not-askin’-for-much root system that lets it take hold wherever it finds itself. I love too the way it sports that jaunty green-velvet jacket. At dawn today I looked out the window and saw an earth that looked springy and fresh and a far cry indeed from the parched and yearning thing it was so lately.I live near the ocean, if 8 miles can be called near, and when the wind comes out of the east and the clouds roll in, the blood-heavy smell of it fills every corner. You feel manacled almost, tangled about the ankles in seaweed, with small sucky things fixing on your limbs.It’s fine to feel that way on those east-wind days; it’s just another way to feel. But it’s not how I feel today. Today the sun shines and I mean to set short roots in my own forest floor and be happy for what is.... And, in that cheery spirit, this short hopeful verse by Colorado poet Reg Saner about moss:

Green Feathers

Five minutes till dawn and a moist breath of pine resin comes to me as from across a lake.

It smells of wet lumber, naked and fragrant.

In the early air we keep trying to catch sight of something lost up ahead,

A moment when the light seems to have seen us Exactly as we wish we were.

Like a heap of green feathers poised on the rim of a cliff?

Like a sure thing that hasn’t quite happened?

Like a marvelous idea that won’t work?

Routinely amazing

How moist tufts, half mud, keep supposing  almost nothing is hopeless.

How the bluest potato grew eyes on faith the light would be there.

And it was.

Closet Hell

My family is after my closet, can you imagine? Could there BE anything more intrusive? It's like having somebody take out everything in your wallet and question you about it. They're telling me they need the space to install something on the other side of the wall.This is at our summer place I should say, where my closet is roomier than any I have had in my life. Back home, in our rattling old pirate ship of a ‘real’ house, the closets are all the size of a coffin standing on end. They're so shallow David’s suits have to hang at an angle, so narrow the little squeezed-together chests of my blouses need CPR before I can wear them.At the summer place though my closet is new, and roomy enough that I have clothes in there that I haven’t worn since the last century – which is why The Fam is now after me. “We'll help you throw them out, Mum! You know you never wear most of them!” Well, maybe if they come and hold my hand we can pull some of the things out and give them to Goodwill, but then Good Lord what about these shelves? What have I GOT here? A toy hula skirt in case I ever do have a female grandchild! Four bottles of Rit Dye in case I get the urge again to plunge all the lampshades into the tub and make them a different color! Shipping supplies! Earphones from the 80s!Maybe they're  right and what  I really need is a visit from Hoard Busters but still… what would YOU do if they came after your stuff?

Earthbound

Is this what it feels like to be a dancer? To have these long strong legs and then ... flowers growing up out of your torso?  I just spent two riveting hours watching  Hubbard Street Dance Chicago do their magic and as you can see in this super-short clip they’re not really naked the way they seem to be in that photo I used in yesterday’s post. (I mean seriously: who could dance with no clothes on?) On the other hand they’re not overly clothed either - not in the way dancers used to be in their tights and super-snug bodices, the men in those bulging codpieces that made the girls all blush and look away. This troupe dances with bare feet and bare legs, and the sound as they land is soft, delicious, like the footfall of a fawn. When I watched them swaying together I thought "Here is what we're meant to be: sea anemones caught up and moving to the rhythms of  some invisible tide! But how can  regular schlubs like us possibly learn to move this way?Then I found this clip of the dancers on YouTube and saw that we ARE like them: David and I look just like this when he tries to make me go back in the kitchen and clean that messy drawer filled with the duct tape and pizza coupons, the dried-up gluesticks and the cat suppositories. It’s the same thing exactly! I too dance away, go limp, pretend to pass out! He too picks me up and drags me back! So art really does imitate life, right down to the drier lint swirling around at their feet. It's a wonderful thing.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_h-M-IaMBE]

Lewd? Really?

Back in the old days a man could get arrested for receiving a picture like this in the mail. It happened to respected literary critic  Newton Arvin. Police raided his home, his career was ruined, and he was hospitalized for suicidal thoughts. He was charged with being a lewd person,and for receiving through the mails magazines containing pictures of semi-nude men. He also admitted to displaying the photographs at his apartment - and swapping them with others.  A book about the whole affair came out in  2001. I read it so I know that the pictures in those magazines were not significantly different from this shot of male dancers, taken in the early 1930s at Jacob’s Pillow. Who could be offended, right?Now  scroll down to this next photo taken of the dance troupe I saw perform at Jacob's Pillow yesterday. The semi-nude human form just doesn’t cause the kind of reaction it once did and thank heaven for that!

Kid Writers

Tomorrow I have to drive over to Roxbury and get my box of bones back. They’re not my family’s bones or anything, though we are from there. They’re more my “I’m-in-love-with-human-anatomy” bones that I bought to puzzle over when I was working as a massage therapist. I loaned them to 826 Boston,  the awesome after-school writing center to which I brought seven of my favorite people every week this spring in order to tutor.  826 did a kind of Fantasy Forensics camp this summer and asked who had clean bones and. well, I raised my hand.The kids who come here write some amazing stuff, which gets published in real books. How’s this by Ellie Nguyen as she looks back at First Grade?  “I ran my mouth as if I had shoes for teeth. People just always seemed to be interested by what I had to say. But when the teacher told me to stand in front and introduce myself, I froze. Was I afraid to show them who I was? Did I look stupid just standing there? ‘Elizabeth,’ I finally said. ‘I was named after the queen!” Mrs. Bae chuckled a bit and bowed. ‘Well, it’s an honor to meet you, your highness.’ I knew I was going to like here.’Or this, by Cole Cartwright? “The robot’s name is Rex. He smashes cities and people. He eats cars. Police are scared of him so they go home. Rex is so giant and handsome. He even has a girlfriend. Her name is Mary. She is a robot too. The robots play together and they are happy.” Cole is a bit years younger than Ellie.All I know is when I bring my seven favorite people here the children look at them with shiny eyes as they tackle homework sheets or read stories or do a bit of writing together. Sometimes they touch their hands, or their long muscular arms. “You are my future!” I believe each one is thinking. As for me, I just watch, And smile. And take the occasional picture. :-)

though I can't claim credit for this one!

This one I snapped: Josh Winchester High 2011, with the kids:

A Day in the Life

Tiresome to work so hard the way I did yesterday, up at 5, yoga at 7, food-shopping 'til 9 then fanny to the chair like any good grownup trying to earn a dollar. No breakfast ‘til 10, no lunch ‘til 4, no supper ‘til ‘8 – but one good thing came of all this work: for the anniversary of Ted Kennedy's death I wrote a few words about Rosemary Kennedy and sent it off to the Huffington Post, along with both a picture of that poor girl as my family knew her and the scanned-in letter she wrote to us just six months before her lobotomy.I did this in honor of Teddy and of Eunice, who did so much for people like Rosemary. All these years later no one seems to really know what was wrong with her. Was she merely slow, or emotionally disturbed too? Or did she have some totally treatable affliction like Tourette’s?Never mind. She is safe now and out of the rain, as are all but one of her siblings.Tomorrow I'll probably go back to cracking jokes and posting pictures of cats writing emails but for now this, Teddy eulogizing the second of his slain brothers, just because it is so very moving.  Then click here , and see his poor sister's letter.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwmmdKMuUqY&feature=related]