Trout to Angelfish: Mammo-time!

A pause in the fun to note that it’s Breast Cancer Awareness month. I don’t have breast cancer in my family - we favor the sudden heart attack and the quick Fade to Black - but where we’re all living longer the chances are great that we’ll all get some kind of cancer, especially after all those years of cooking on Teflon and dancing in the mists of DDT whenever the Bug Man came to spray the neighborhood. (You’d have to be over 45 to remember that guy!)My column this week is about the despised mammogram. Just picture taking a nice fat trout and turning into an angelfish even for a quick 30 seconds– yeowch!) I'll put it in its usual This Week's Column spot above but will copy it below here too just because  it’s  important.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Last year when I had a mammogram I wrote about it in post called “It’s Cryin’ Time Again, You’re Gonna Squeeze Me,”  echoing the old Ray Charles song. “I have to warn you, I’m a fainter,” I told the imaging professional administering the exam as she screwed together the two icy plates of her high-tech vise.The truth is I mostly fainted in my early years, like in church when I could often be found gurgling in the pew, half caught under the kneeler. Or like that time a creaky old doctor offered to remove two tiny warts for me, causing me to still have twin scars of the exact kind you’d get if someone stabbed two glowing cigarettes into your flesh.The mammographer just smiled. “People only faint if they haven’t had breakfast. And nobody faints after 11 in the morning.” “OK” I said as we stood there, she fully clothed, I as naked from the waist up as the Venus De Milo. It was well past 11. It was, in fact, 5:30 at night.Then she asked if I did regular self-exams, causing me to blurt out the terrible truth. “Oh sure.  That is, sometimes. Well, no, not really.”“Nobody does them,” she said, all the geniality in her voice suddenly gone.She didn’t chastise me the way they do at the dentist’s when they ask about flossing and you lie and say you do it all the time. She didn’t give me a lecture. She didn’t so much as sigh. If I wanted to get sick it was fine with her, is what she was saying in all but words.“I’ve been doing this since 7:30 this morning.” And now here it was almost 6. “I’m dead on my feet:”“It’s been a long day for you,” I said sympathetically, hoping for the return of her former warmth.But “Yep,” was all she said back. Just one little tight-lipped “yep,” and in the ensuing silence I felt the full weight of her frustration with a group of people who leave themselves open to all kinds of bad possibilities just because they‘re too “busy,” or too distracted, or too limited in their vision to slide their hands around on their own bare skin now and then.The memory of this visit lives vividly in my mind and now here we are again in the month dedicated to breast cancer awareness.We women over 40 should get mammograms if our doctors recommend that we do. But even if it’s true that a lump is hard to detect with self-examination we should also show some sense and check ourselves out, in the shower, say, when the skin is soapy and we can really feel the tissue underneath.

Jealous of Julia

I couldn’t finish Eat Pray Love. I was too jealous of the author who got to self-indulge for one whole year and still end up looking like Julia Roberts. I also resented her literary success: she got an advance for going and having all that fun and all I got was this lousy T-shirt as they say.I’m in the land of gelato myself right now as  a matter of fact. Last night I slept like the dead in this Piedmontese hotel which was super-comfy if a tad short on the towels. (You get one bath towel and no washcloths at all.) Still, when it comes to hygiene - and to a nice unsleazy take on sex - the Europeans are light-years ahead of us. When my boy was little he misheard the name of the Chevy Chase movie My European Vacation: "Can we watch My-a-peein' Vacation again?” he used to say.) And speaking of both below-the-belt functions, what these hotel bathrooms do all have are bidets, just in case you’d like to rinse out your doll clothes like my little cousin used to do in the toilets that were all just her height.Well then! Think I'll walk to the shops, maybe trade a few of my own lousy T-shirts for a gorgeous bra and perhaps a pair of killer panties. This is my third time in Italy and it’s true about the food; the lamb dishes alone are so fancy they come wearing little paper panties of their own  Buon appetito to me and to  my seven college pals on this five-day flight from reality.

Rose and Jack

Speaking of death on the North Sea and videos like the ones where people are seen sticking their faces under those industrial strength hand driers how about this for another example of what people will do to avoid getting starting on their homework? Seriously, how to be mean: someone making fun of that final scene in Titanic where Jack dies. The living just have no respect, that’s all I can say.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krYnsqKlkOc&feature=related]

Kill Me Now

I can never sleep on a plane and it makes me want to bite everyone who can, which is most people. Thirty minutes into any flight nine-tenths of the passengers are out cold, their heads back or tucked over to one side or chins resting on those little foam doughnuts. Even 7  hours into a night flight I’m still staring at the label on my pretzel sticks and going over the safety literature and who are they kidding with that stuff anyway? That In-case-of-an-emergency-landing-your-seat-cushion-becomes-a flotation-device baloney? They straight-out admit that your life jacket might not inflate in which case how are you going to bob along in balmy waters before being welcomed ashore by handsome natives in skimpy loin cloths? They should just tell the truth: if the plane goes down, chances are it will be over the hard-packed earth which will act on your body as a Cuisinart acts on a tomato. And if you go down over water it'll be in a place like the North Sea and Kate Winslett will be faintly calling your name as, shivering, with icicles in your hair, you sink away into the depths.

All I can say is next time I come to Europe I’m taking an Ambien, a Tylenol PM AND a shot of the velvet hammer that is Nyquil.

I'll Show You Dry

I knew I wasn’t going to be the only person to think of recording the way your hands look under the all powerful Xlerator hand drier. It’s so strong (and loud) I’ve seen it make small children jump three feet in the air. It blows your skin around and flattens your veins; that’s what you see. But it feels like you’re getting... I don’t know,  ironed - like maybe even your bones are getting ironed and will dissolve any second and leak out of the bottoms of your feet in a thin but calcium-rich broth.What I wonder is why does it make your veins change color? My hands and arms were perfectly normal-looking when I stuck them under the XLerator at my local Dunkin Donuts. Then, 30 seconds later, they looked like the arms of a heroin addict, and my veins were the color of an eggplant.For those of you who have yet to encounter this powerful saver of paper towels, the first video, made by a normal person, shows what it does to your hands. Keep scrolling down though to see the one that shows how your face looks under the thing. No doubt we humans are a frisky bunch! I bet God loves that about us.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV67pdRrHRE&feature=related][youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXuityWpAAg&feature=related]

You'll Say What We Tell You to Say

I felt so sorry for Sarah Murdoch last night getting fed the wrong information  about who really won Australia’s top model. I’ve been studying pictures of her face as she’s being told by live feed that she just announced the wrong name to millions of people. It reminded me of George Bush’s face on 9/11 when he lingered in that classroom glancing through a book about a goat after his Chief of Staff came in and whispered news of the attacks to him. Conspiracy theorists like my friend from yesterday’s post point to that as evidence that he knew; that it was no surprise to him that the attacks had begun which is why he was able to stay through the presentation anyway with the kids sounding out their words and reading right along like pros, all shiny and sweet and sitting up straight, but to me it’s just human that he sat there. I mean, it was a classroom, and a teacher was talking. You don’t stand up and rush out when a teacher is talking, especially when his aides didn't come in and hurry him away. It must feel pretty powerful at times to be the President but I think we all know the guy has to defer to the many experts keeping him up to date on what's really going down.I feel for anyone whose utterances get managed from some out-of-sight ‘Control Room.’ It’s true I never worked for a paper, never sat in an office or served on a staff. I was always just out there riding on a smile and a shoeshine as Willy Loman says, trying to sell my column to anyone who'd buy it. And now I write this blog too just like millions of other people, all of us doing our part to fill the atmosphere with A WHOLE LOT OF CONVERSATION, which, besides the ability to accessorize, as somebody says in “Steel Magnolias,” is the main thing that differentiates us from the animals. :-)I can't find Olympia Dukakis as Clairee saying that particular thing but here she is saying something  equally wry:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uc9Kn_3XJg]

Angry Man

Last month the man I  quote below sent me an angry letter denouncing me for writing a column about the TV show “Mad Men” when the real mad men were threatening our very existence. If the paper paid more attention to them and less to silly people like me the world would be a far safer place, he said -  then went on to  lay out his theory about how the attacks of September 11^th were an inside job.My family always tells me to ignore all letters like this but I could no more do that than I could pass someone on the street who has spoken to me; just pass him by as if he were some piece of street furniture like a fire hydrant or a mailbox.... So I waited ‘til I had caught up on most of the other letters awaiting replies and then answered him Friday. apologizing for the delay and thanking him for taking the trouble to write.And now today, here came his response, posted on my “This Week's Column” page. You can read the whole thing by clicking here and scrolling down or you can just believe me when I tell you that it restores my faith in humanity. “Thank you for that wonderful note” it begins. “I apologize for my tirade and want you to know that though you weren't the first to receive it, no one has ever responded before…”He goes on with the 9/11 talk but without the same rancor this time. And this time I could detect underneath his words a strong sense of justice."If you know of anyone interested in looking at his extensive and scattered) files, or listening to a 15-minute lecture, I would be glad to meet with them. And thank you again for responding to a desperate old man who has not been committed yet." To which I for one say Thank God for that and for the First Amendment that makes it so.

Beach Wedding

At most weddings the onlookers are in kind of a daze, looking around, worrying are they dressed right, but not at the one I just went to, held on the sand within 60 feet of the ocean. Here the guests were riveted by spectacle - mostly the spectacle of wind sending veils of mist past the happy couples’ faces; of bridesmaids shivering like frail papery jonquils in a late-March chill. It seemed a shame not to have sun; even the man officiating said so. He also said he was going to be frank with us all: “Marriage is an ordeal,” he said bluntly, quoting cultural anthropologist Joseph Campbell.I don't know about you but I think it’s good to say this straight out rather than passing on the fib that people are going to find in their mates all they had ever wanted in life. As one who's been married for four long decades I can tell you the man is right: “This person is so flawed!” you think at first - right before realizing  how flawed you are yourself . Sometimes you don't see how the other guy can put up with you at all.Just after the ceremony, people were hurrying to the bath house to get warm, ducking various body parts under the electric dryers just like Michael Keaton did with his baby in  that movie Mr. Mom. But then there was champagne, and freshly steamed lobster and all the great music a person could want. And by the time darkness fell that wind had scraped the whole sky clean of clouds to reveal a moon as big as Christmas.I stood near the giant bonfire not caring a bit that its flying sparks might drill holes in my nice new dress. I was so happy to be at this wedding of someone who has been like a son to us since he was a child of 14 with a mouthful of braces; at the wedding of Chris and his luminous bride Claire, all of us there together to help blend their two great families and be warmed by the fire of their love.

Heroes

On Sundays when I put my weekly column up here I like to look at its topic from a fresh angle. This week’s is about how friendly the world is when instead of smiling and looking away at people you smile and keep on smiling.My Aunt Grace used to do this. I’d be walking a little behind her on the street - you know how kids are, so mortally embarrassed by their grownups  - and I’d watch the faces of the people approaching her. They’d be hustling along looking sort of sour and preoccupied and then they’d see this wonderful smile coming at them. It almost made them stumble, fall off the curb, walk smack into a mailbox thinking "Do I know this person?”  But then they’d look again and realize she was smiling at them, and for no reason at all but only because they were there, walking down the same street in that same slender slice of mortal time.She was my first model, the first person who ever made me think, “I want to be like her."And now I am like her, in just that way: I see people in their cars or walking along and they look so sort of worried. I know I can’t fix all the pain in the world but I can smile at someone, or wave. And I don’t use that quick  wave you see people use in their cars; I wave like a kindergartner  because someone else I love does that too,  even though he’s 6 foot 4 with an extravagance of manly muscles. He opens his hand and gives that rapid left-right-left-right wave.He was 19 when I first got to know him but “I want to be like him,” is what I thought right away. Proving that you take your heroes where you find them whether, like Aunt Grace, they were born with Woodrow Wilson in the White House or, like this other, they came along the year Queen released “Bohemian Rhapsody.” :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ&feature=related]

Wheels up!

You’ve gotta love car ferries, the way they let you bring everything you own on board with you. It’s the opposite of air travel where you’re trying to stuff everything under your seat or in the overhead compartment. Plus, they're always  telling you 'No scissors, no knives, no quart bottle of Nivea' and seriously, who goes anywhere without these things? On this ferry though, I got to have it all right there in my ride: my snacks cooler on the passenger seat, my dressy hang-ups swaying in the back, plus the the standard extras I travel with all the time, my 8-pound packing-tape gun, my two thermoses one for hot and one for cold, my thousand-page book about how we should all be way nicer to animals....  David and I boarded this ferry like it was Noah’s ark, with two of everything practically; drove on like the Clampetts, then ditched the car in the hold, went up on deck and ah! looked out at the bounding main!

Why That Bar?

I woke again today thinking of Bryan, a student in my Honors English class during my sixth year teaching high school. Here’s what he wrote me in an email exactly one year ago this week:

I went on my bike yesterday to Maine and stopped to visit two guys who used to be my closest friends from 7^th grade on. Now here’s a story: When I first started going to meetings, my sponsor was this guy named Paul. I only stayed sober for 18 months that time but we remained friends. He was a good guy and he always helped me out. When I totaled my car he bought me one, registered it and insured it. I was supposed to give him the payments but since I was using at the time, I was always behind. That’s the car I did those armed robberies in and when I got caught and went to jail I never heard from him again. He’s been on my amends list for a long time but I heard he had moved away.Fast forward to yesterday when I stopped for gas and this couple started talking to me. They asked if I'd been to this biker joint down the road. I was wary but I followed them to this huge place with hundreds of people. I was walking around alone, totally overwhelmed. I went to get a Coke and when the guy in front of me called over to the bartender I recognized his voice: It was Paul. My first impulse was to walk away, but I knew I’d been led here for a reason. I tapped him on the shoulder. ’Hi, Paul’ I said. “He just looked at me and finally said “Do I know you, friend?”I said, “Ya, you do Paul. It's Bryan.” He looked at me for a few more seconds then went "Bryan? Is that you? How are you? What happened to you?"  We talked and I noticed he was drinking. I got his number and told him I needed to call him when he wasn't drinking to make amends to him, including financial amends. Then just before he turned away I said, “Paul, you were good to me and I took advantage of that. I just want you to know you were a good guy to me.”Right there, in the midst of all these bikers his face cracked and he started to cry. I don't think anyone had told him he was a good guy in a while.There were three gas stations at that intersection. Why did I choose that one? Why did those strangers talk to me?  No one ever talks to me.  Why did I end up at that bar in that line, behind that one guy?  Today I drove back to Maine and made amends with my school friends for leaving  them and blaming them, All this time I had told myself they had abandoned me but really I abandoned them - for drugs, and being a criminal, and going to jail.  My whole adult life I have felt the loss of those guys who knew me in a way that no one has ever known me - until I became someone they didn't know anymore.  I blamed them for not caring enough to save me. But, how can anyone save you from yourself? Yesterday after a very long time I started finding myself again.

Recently while riding his motorcycle with his wonderful new girlfriend Katie they were hit by a car. Neither one was seriously hurt but Katie made Bryan have a CAT scan anyway since he had landed on his head. The CAT scan revealed a brain aneurysm that looked to have been there for years. He was sent in to Mass General and was operated on last Monday.Katie texted me the all-clear the minute he got to Recovery.You never forget the young people who sat in front of you as pupils, and Bryan has meant to much to me in the years since our days at Somerville High School, not just because of the strength it took to conquer addiction but because of the way he studies his life, eyes peeled for signs of God’s hand on it.

Nice Try

I had to run to the lake yesterday to get my diary and the crucial planner I had somehow left there and yes I’ll admit it: I had my bathing suit on under my clothes JUST IN CASE the sun on the deck was  warm and I could sit there for a pleasant time and catch up with myself. The day was sunny throughout the six-state region, sunny when I left home, sunny when I got back 7 hours later. The only place it wasn't sunny  was that small bit of geography where our summer cottage is. “Are those clouds up ahead?” I kept thinking as I drove farther and farther north. They were clouds all right and by the time I reached our place it was raining.Soooo I looked at my watch, grabbed the diary and the planner, turned right around and started home again and sure enough just before I crossed into my own state the sun came out.There's a rest stop right there which is really nothing but a State Liquor Store and a shed with some vending machines. It was all I needed. I pulled up in front of this picnic bench, took out my diary and my planner and the book I read in the 15 seconds between the time I lie down and sleep overtakes me and spent a lovely 90 minutes, happy among the gratefully peeing dogs and the squashed-underfoot cigarette butts. 'Bloom Where You're Planted' isn't that what they used to say in the 70s? I took that advice yesterday and it worked out great.

First Day of Autumn

It's supposed to be 82° on this first day of fall and I’m driving 180 miles to get two things I left at our summer cottage: my planner and my diary. Without the planner I don't know when to cut my nails  never mind meet my deadlines. I do have a Blackberry, but it stopped synching with Outlook a good 8 weeks ago and the support people can't sort it out no matter HOW long they stay on the phone reading from their Help menus. Plus lately it's decided to randomly match the pictures of my 500 Facebook friends with people in my 1200-person address book so when I go to call up say the info on a fan in her late 70s I get a picture of some young guy with his shirt off drunk in a bar.I’m about done with the Blackberry to be honest. Schedules and contacts are too important to me; diaries too. What’s coming up, what’s just past: these things I really need to be able to ponder, the way other people need to breathe into a brown paper bag when they're anxious. I haven't written in my diary for three weeks now and so much has happened on my inner landscape plus let's face it: summer's over. The mice are moving back in and my little mosquito pal finds he much prefers the climate in our steamy soap-scented bathroom to the outdoors where even a warm day like this one the nights are downright COLD. Last week this maple just panicked at the thought of what's ahead, trembled once and blushed clear down to the roots of its hair.

Starin' at the Ceiling

I'm coming to the end of my rope with the sleepless nights. I tried what the pharmacist told me was a harmless little ‘sleep-aid’ the night before last and was a stone in the bed still at quarter of 8– and I usually get up 6:00.  So last night when insomnia once again came to stay and the sheets felt like sand and my sad little feet kept cramping, I finally tried the scalding bath method. This involves filling the tub to sternum height with water just short of the boiling point and sliding into it. I always expect to melt like Jell-O and that's what happens sort of. After about  ten minutes I can feel even my bones softening. Then, moments short of a swoon, I get out, open the bathroom window, and sit on the edge of the tub in just a towel reading my Newsweek as my body slowly chills. Some 30 minutes later, whip-sawed by thermal contrast, I begin to feel sleepy.Only last night this didn't work. I lay in the bed. I turned on my phone and took pictures of the moon which never works because even with your cell phone a flash goes off and all you get is your window treatments. I thought about Steve Buscemi, and about the movie I’d sneaked away to see at noontime. I thought about that lame sleep-aid and then remembered my Irish mom who always did what her Irish dad did too for the fever and the cold and the pain in the belly: I laced a glass of hot milk with two fingers of whiskey and drank it down, talking to the moon until sleep overtook me. It doesn't make intoxicate me; it doesn't even make me mellow. It just sort of pushes my reset button which is sometimes all a person really needs.

Childbirth

Carol Burnett said it: giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head. Here are some statistics from an online poll done by Self.com  in answer to the question, “If you could choose, what would be your ideal way to give birth?”

• 52% said they’d like to give birth in a hospital with an obstetrician,
• 25% said in a hospital with an obstetrician assisted by a midwife or doula, a doula being a person like a midwife who  helps you cut back on the cussing and teaches you deceptive terms  like the one that calls a contraction a ‘surge,’
• 13%  would like to give birth at home with a midwife, and..
• 10% would opt for a cesarean  and all the knockout meds you got back there doc.

Self also looks back to what it calls ‘the Betty Draper generation’ when American women were heavily sedated during labor and delivery. Doctors used a drug called Scopolamine that erased the memory of pain even though you sure enough went through the pain. It was what they call an amnesiac and they still have amnesiacs which they use for colonoscopies.My sister Nan had a colonoscopy that turned out to perforate the wall of her colon. They had to repeat the procedure after the two months it took her body to heal, and taht second time used pediatric instruments for her very-short torso (that's how Nan is built: very long legs; a very short torso.) Anyway when she went to sit down with the doctor after the first procedure and before the second, the guy stepped out of the room for a second. At that point Nan, in typical Nan fashion, reached across the desk, spun the chart around quick and read the note the guy made after that first painful attempt. “Stronger than appears,” it said.Now, for a really great five minutes, here’s Bill Cosby on what it’s like to be the daddy in the birthing room:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOP52g_rO24&feature=related]

The Road

Today is Sunday and I've just posted this week's column which you can see here. It’s about the time my sister Nan here and our old dog Penny met a momma-bear on their way to the lake. Penny was such a silly dog: Once when the priest came to call, she came down the stairs with a mouthful of our mom's underwear in her mouth and dropped it in the startled man’s lap. Whenever guests left the room she would tilt her head sideways and v-e-e-e-r-y carefully extend an anteater’s tongue to score bonbon after bonbon from the little dish on the coffee table, giving the neighboring bonbons a good once-over in the process.Ah, she was a good dog and no dog do I have now, nor have had since Penny took that last trip to the vet at the end of her bouncy grateful life.I did have three cats, all gone now, one to traffic, one to a coyote, and one to a fast-growing tumor last April. For more than ten years we brought them with us on weekends away, I with one in my lap and another at my feet but today? Today my lap is as empty as a priest’s lap.David and I have a drive to make in a little while, two hours in the car. But instead of cradling Abraham and reassuring Charlotte I will sit in the passenger seat and snap the beans for supper, and write in my diary, and keep David company as we go, the road ribboning on before us, taking us who knows where.

when they were new, a gift from our children

God Save the Queen, er, Pope

British Baby with Papal Flag

The media called it "a rousing encounter" that the Pope had yesterday with schoolchildren in the UK. He said among other things that maybe they would be saints one day if they played their cards right. Afterward, the BBC News Hour polled them to see what they thought. One child said it was the first time she’d ever seen the man. “He doesn't come here every day - it's not even like once a year!" (Just sayin, Your Holiness.) Another said it was a great honor indeed for him to be there and he wanted to thank his teacher Mrs. Williams for drawing his name out of the hat. (Only he said  'Mrs. Willy-ums'  in that cute English way.) The best was the third child who stepped gamely up to the microphone, then did a sort of verbal hiccup and went “What are we talking about again?” That happens to me all the time.You can't blame him if he had trouble following it all. I know the Pope is German and certainly he does better in English than most of us would do in language but when you listen to him you do kind of think Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes, no?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF7cJh302n0]

Heavy Lifting

I've just lost $50 worth of stamps and it isn't even 7 in the morning. Really I guess I lost them yesterday in my excitement at seeing Jon Hamm on TV. (It's not that he's so handsome; it's that as Don Draper he’s so dark this season. With the drinking and passing out and walking around with bits of throw-up on his Brooks brothers shirts you just can't believe how sunny and humble the guy is in real life!)Today I'm driving five hours to give a talk called ‘Surprised by Joy.’ For inspiration, I reread the C.S. Lewis book with the same name but the thing turns out to be mostly about theology and the string of horrid early 20th century English boarding schools where Lewis spent his childhood. To me being surprised by joy happens when you go looking ONE MORE TIME for all the stamps you lost and come instead across a funny old photo like this one. Talk about an unforgiving style for the lady on the left, eh?My mom was so funny always: once when she was talking to my cousin Sheil, she suddenly interrupted herself to shout, “Your teeth look GREAT!” We laughed at her then but now that I've become so much like her I totally get what she was doing. Just the other day I was in conversation with my friend Trish and suddenly I just had to say it: "That bra is really workin’ for you.”Was she offended? Not a bit.  “The Intimacy store!” she cried at once. “Have the fitting! Pay the money!”Well, maybe I will. Maybe tomorrow once I've recovered from dispensing all that joy. :-)

Long Time Gone

I always figured I was cool  because my grandfather was born in the early 1870s and how many people get to say that?  His father died when he was 12, his mother soon after. Just before then he wrote in his diary about how hard it was to bring his pal the cow to be butchered and how, when the Great Blizzard of '88 came, the snow piled up past the second-story windows. Later he was lucky enough to get to college and law school, he the child of a woman who couldn't read or write English - Gaelic was her tongue. This picture shows how he looked when he fell in love with my grandmother Carrie, poor dead girl, in the cemetery these 100 years. He's the one on the right,with his hands on her doomed and mortal head.I'm haunted by his story I think because I knew him. I lived in his house. He called me Blackberry Top for the shiny dark riot of my curls. He was a great believer in reaching across racial and ethnic barriers. The Boston Irish called him a turncoat because he opposed the Curley machine and sided with the Protestants when it came to good government. He was a judge and the Chairman of the Boston School Committee and a lot of other things too, but in his mind the best thing he ever did was get the teachers the pay raise they so deserved.A handsomer man there never was when young but even as when he was old with white hair he was lovely.I didn't have a father for five minutes of my young life but still I was happy, because I had him.His birthday was yesterday and I thought of him all day.

Statistics!

(me last Saturday)I took a survey, together with some 150 members of my college class and discovered some dandy facts:ONE, 10% of the class recently stopped having sex and 4% resumed having it.TWO, 5.4% of us never married, 18.1% are divorced and 72% have a spouse, partner (or taxidermied surrogate to prop up at the breakfast table.)THREE, 92% of us have children but most report that they're more likely to have pets in the home than kids. (No laundry is why. Next to kids pets are a breeze, especially if you teach 'em to flush.)FOUR, more of us exercise at health clubs AND more of us take antidepressant medicine than did then. (It’s those darn Step Classes; they'll  bring anybody down.)FIVE, There's been a big increase in ballroom dance lessons and a big dip in travel. (Why travel the world if you could just cross the dance floor?)SIX, 11% of us wish to work indefinitely.Well I know  I certainly wish to work indefinitely, if you can call this work. Now if you'll excuse me I have to go find my long black wig and my dancing partners the cats.

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