The Kids are Reading My Diary Part Two

So far only my oldest kid has begun reading the 30-volume diary I offered them all last week. She's really enjoying 1980, she says. She loves meeting our whole same cast of characters younger. It's how we all felt 20 years after the first Star Wars when all of a sudden here came a prequel with this hot Obi Wan Kenobi all  young and wrinkle-free. Or like when Godfather Two came out and instead of Mumbles Marlon as the Don  we had Bobby DeNiro, fresh from his bad-boy role in “Taxi Driver.”I know they're a tad worried about what they might learn there but they shouldn’t be. Everything I was ever writing I was writing for them, before I even met them or saw them in my dreams.Plus there's no whining in these volumes - except maybe about the time their dad just went to CVS for my birthday and got me jumper cables and a can of 3-in-1 Oil. I still remember sitting on the back stairs at midnight that night, sobbing and pulling my own hair and ah the drama of the young!  Still, how would any young mother react when her husband said in the course of the fight that really it was silly to make a big deal of birthdays?Today I'd be able to see that he was just feeling defensive and on the ropes.  Also today if he said something like that I’d laugh right out loud and quick as a wink reach into my handy memory-pack for some nice vintage example of his own emotional vulnerability. Then he'd laugh too.  We’re such pals now we've grown almost fond of one another's foibles and blind spots.So “Relax,” I would say to my kids.  “The diaries are just a series of funny tales with you guys at the center” And also, “Remember when you were small and it was just us five,  in that little 'house' we called our family? Remember a few years down the road when we began adding 'rooms' to that metaphorical house and the family started really growing?”Yeah. I'd say that. And I'll say to you guys now that when I look at these lively young faces above and below all I can think is I wish I had written down more.

Noah Called: "Febreze Please!"

You always wonder about what you DON’T see when you're on a cruise ship: like what do the kitchens really look like, and how about those wee windowless cabins where the crammed-together staff-people have to duck their heads whenever they stand up to zip their pants?Mostly if you look around at all us fat first-worlders waddling to the midnight buffet you think “Gad, we’re generating a hell of a lot of waste here, people!” I picture the hold of Noah's little cruise-ship the morning the waters finally receded enough to let down the ramp. But then you step into one of  the rest rooms and it’s like something out of a Renaissance palace, all rosy-hued marble and honey-colored tile - or you go back to your cabin and see this bathroom that is a pure jewel of efficiency, mirrored shelves with tiny guardrails for your cosmetics and then the toilets! Those vacuum-powered toilets strong enough to suck down even your dainty washables!Ah but what we learned this week is that even a vacuum doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It needs power and that’s what they lost on the Carnival Cruise Ship Splendor...There’ll be more to learn in the days to come, though delicacy will probably forbid most people from unpacking their full store of figurative language on the experience. It’s a good reminder that really we’re all still  animals just like the scaled, the feathered and the four-legged underneath our Speedos and our thong bikinis,. And as for us first-worlders sucking up all the resources, then going off to the Captains’ Ball? Well, our day of reckoning is bound to come too - and that time there won’t BE any complimentary second cruises to compensate us for our trouble.Now, just so you'll know I don't see myself as above it all, here I am with my gang, dressed up for - what else? - Toga Night on our own ship of fools in '99. (You know that clicking on an image will enlarge it, right? ) Now somebody call Nero!  And tell him to bring along that fiddle!)  

Seein' the Light

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last 24 hours:(a) that you change the bulb for a streetlight just the way you change the bulb in your bathroom. One of my bathroom bulbs popped yesterday so I walked to the hardware store to get a replacement and on the way saw this guy ascending into the trees to do the same thing with one of the streetlights.(b) that you can’t be sure a candle isn’t burning unless the room is really dark. I left one burning all last and didn't know it till I rose today at 5 and saw it glowing. (Oops! Not quite as dumb as leaving one of the stove burners flaming away while you're off on errands but dumb enough!) And(c) That you can GO to Weight Watcher for a full year-and-a-half and not lose a single pound.I know because I have done this. I brought my friend Mary who promptly lost 40 pounds, ascended into maintenance heaven and was never seen again, while I'm still there in my little beige chair, smokin' and jokin' as we used to say, losing and gaining the same 2 pounds over and over again.In the short period I tried therapy I remember a phrase the shrink used on me once. Actually she used it on David who she tried to rope in too the way they do when you're part of a couple. Now you could say that Old Dave isn't exactly the therapy type -  he's just not that wild about long Kleenexy talks - and one day after the last of our three joint sessions she told me straight out: "I think it's safe to say that a phrase we sometimes use applies here: your husband has not entered into therapy" - which meant “gives not the least indication that he's going to really try it.”Well imagine my surprise to realize that all this time I've been dragging myself to Weight Watcher meetings I never entered into therapy either!  Meaning  I never wrote down what I ate. “You bite it you write it,” they all tell each other every week while for a full 18 months I seemed to believe I was above all that but LADIES AND GENTLEMEN I began at last!  I went to the site and signed up for "etools" and now I will write it all. I just finally saw the light I guess.Because I want to go to Heaven too, shed my own shell of subjective self-absorption and sail on silver girl like it says in S & G's “Bridge over Troubled Waters,” here performed by the great old King of Rock and Roll himself.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTa7fBskDD4&feature=related

Gay in a Mighty Straight Time

Back in my teaching days, Dottie was a girl in my English class, different in ways I could see made her proud, an athlete in a time when girls mostly primped, an honest person who admitted when she hadn’t done the reading. She hadn't done the reading quite a lot in fact, ditched school a lot too, still in mourning  over the sudden death of the dad she so adored. In the years after high school when she realized she was gay, her life began to blossom: she played on a softball team, worked as a nurse’s aide, and fell for a woman who worked on a suicide hotline. At one point in the 80s she moved in with us and taught our little girls how to safely climb of stairs in their floor-length Strawberry Shortcake nighties. She was wiser than I will ever be and when she died young, like her dad of an inherited illness, we all missed her so, godmother as she was to our youngest child.

Back in my teaching days, Barbra was a girl NOT in my English class who came anyway, though not even enrolled at the school; just came and sat in the back of the room, listening and sometimes asking questions. Barbra knew she was gay from the get-go, I'm pretty sure, though she didn’t date as far as I know. She went stag to the prom in a tux though and a brave thing that was in the spring of '74. The summer following she got her GED, joined the Army and came home from Basic Training alive with excitement to tell David and me all about it.  We lost track of her for a while but in the late 90s there she was in San Diego, with a degree in Molecular Biology of all things and a Master’s on the way. For some years she ran the big  AIDS Walk there and is today a part of the administration at UCSD.

I think of them both oh I think of them all the time and how lucky I was to have known them when I was just embarking on adulthood myself. If you can now, watch this very-short performance by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. Watch it even if you've watched it before. Note the most touching part of all when the families join in during the final 60 seconds and think a while about what it means to have a family; and allies; and companions on the journey.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnYa9R4N-8c&feature=player_embedded]

Back in the Pink

Today I feel great and maybe it was the advice I got here from others who understood just how bummed out you can get over the early darkness. Or the fact that I turned out to be totally wrong in thinking my cardiologist said I should lose weight when I last saw him two years ago. I saw him again yesterday and he insists he said no such thing. “Anyway it’s clear you didn’t listen!” he smiled and I smiled too since I’m now a whopping ten pounds heavier than I was then.So maybe I should feel all downcast but…. I don’t somehow. Anyway I did listen to him about exercise. It took two full years to build the habit but I now go to the gym three times a week – AND I’ve just begun pounding that old treadmill up in the attic.So I’ll make it back, right? Maybe I just had to hit bottom weightwise. (What does it mean if you can look around and actually SEE your fanny rounding a corner?) My heart is healthy and I aced the echo test and if it weren’t for some upward-creeping cholesterol I’d be in the pink. (But I don’t EAT cheese or chips or ice cream! It isn’t my fault, God!)The doctor is thinking statins – or, he says I can take something called Red Yeast Rice and see what happens  if I crank up the exercise too.I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever he says to keep on keepin’ on.In the meantime I have this early dark thing down. I’m totally dead by 8pm so I’ve just been going up to our room and getting in the bed and who turns out to be there but Old Dave, the original Lying Down Man himself! With the lights out by 10 it’s no problem at all for a person to be up again at 5 and posting super-dull stuff about her health. :-)I do wonder though: must we put in one feelin'-really-down day for every feelin'-great one? And who decides what kind of day we have really? Is it  our hormones? Our limbic system? Or is that big Screenwriter in the Sky who likes to keep the suspense up reel to reel?I distorted this picture to make me look really wide. It’s supposed to be an incentive.Here’s a picture of the kind of food I haven’t touched since my 15^th birthday and which now I’ll never get to touch again.Sayonara, greasy comfort food. Vegetarian Ninja Monkworld here I come!

How It Happens

You'd think we'd feel more energized with the clocks all set back but I sure didn't. Not yesterday anyway, even BEFORE the sun started setting at 4  - or was it 3:00? Was that twilight I saw at 2pm?  All I know is I panicked and fled, packed my bags and drove two hours in hopes of what? Outrunning darkness?I serve on the board of my town’s Multicultural Network and our big Annual Retreat/Workshop took place this past weekend. This meant I sat in a circle in a folding chair on Friday night from 6 to 9 and again all day Saturday. David, meanwhile, was up at our summer place raking leaves and dragging in kayaks. “Don’t bother coming, T," he told me. “I’ll be home by noon Sunday and it’s a long drive for you to begin upon at 5pm.”It turned out to be much later than that when I began upon it and the road all dark before me. It still seemed  like a good though because I pictured that we'd have this bright clear day and even sleep over Sunday night and what an adventure that would be! And with the clocks turned back we’d wake easily at 5 and be home by 8, even allowing for the slow  flow of traffic back toward the city on a Monday.But Sunday's skies were cloudy and when I tuned into the Weather Channel and saw high winds, rain, and snow predicted for today I lost all hope. I climbed back into the same car I had climbed out of just 18 hours before and drove the hundred miles home.So here I awoke in the land of my many obligations with rain hammering at the window panes and the remaining leaves swirling like crazy dancers. All weekend I felt a sadness, coming as I now see, from both the sudden loss of light and the more gradual loss of the bright green life that has been ours since April.There's a poem called "How It Happens" by W. S. Merwyn, former Poet Laureate and author of “The Shadow of Sirius,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2009. I offer it here to match the day:

The sky said I am watchingto see what youcan make out of nothingI was looking up and I saidI thought youwere supposed to be doing thatthe sky said Manyare clinging to thatI am giving you a chanceI was looking up and I saidI am the only chance I havethen the sky did not answerand here we arewith our names for the daysthe vast days that do not listen to us

my office 7am

Sell Sell Sell

You can’t listen to the radio for 10 minutes without hearing claims for miracle products dreamed up by the enterprising. I'm talking about  everything from products designed to enhance your love life to products to inflate your skin so your wrinkles simply disappear. Come to think of it my sister got her face inflated once when a scorpion stung her on the inside of her lip. For a solid week her face look a dome of Jiffy Pop but hey, nary a wrinkle!We Americans have a long tradition in the old hustle game. Look at all the people selling stuff on E-Bay and Craig's List. Was it P.T. Barnum who said there's a sucker born every minute?But listen to me, trying to sound like I’m above it all. If fact I joined the selling game when I began publishing my own books back in the flannelly 90s. I thought it would be fun.And it was fun, some of it. Selecting the blurbs was totally fun, though hard to take seriously. My all-time favorite came along when an angry woman wrote in to her paper after seeing a long-ago column I did on Liz Taylor’s latest nip-and-tuck job:  “Who are YOU to talk about looks?” her letter said. “Your eyes are beady, your hair is out of style and your teeth look false!” I put that one right on the cover of Book One.But making a book is always easy. It’s selling a book at a book signing that's hard. Over the years I've done signings both at the big chains and in the smaller independents, where actual refreshments sometimes served and you get to give a real talk and the audience talks back.At the big stores they just set you up at a table out front and make you ambush the people coming in. In fact they call them “ambush signings” and they're awful. The people coming in don’t know you. They’re just there to get the book they need and leave - and are you really going to leap out at them and shout, “Here’s a cute little read!”?My little author site shows how many signings I did when Vacationing in My Driveway came out - a zillion in short - but I'm pretty much done with such events now. Maybe I’m more Irish than American really: we Irish tell our stories non-stop anyway and for free too.My pal Jerry Zezima just came out with a funny book called “Leave it to Boomer,” a signing for which he announced in an email blast last week. His "contribution to the decline of literature" he calls the book.  “Good news for masochists and insomniacs!” he went on in the email, adding that the books were $15.95 each with signed copies being “practically worthless.”Maybe Jerry's part Irish himself. With a last name like Zezima you wouldn't think so, but you never can tell. Who could guess that a dark-haired girl named Marotta could trace every ancestor for 200 years back to the Emerald Isle?

Pantsed!

OK let me get this straight: Here's how the tree in my front yard looked three days ago. It’s true that its leaves are gone NOW but can anyone tell me why, on the fifth day of November, Santa Claus was already suited up and scratching his nose at the mall?Here he is as I caught him on my cell phone. I could have gotten a better picture if I'd crept closer and taken more time to take his picture but I was pretty sure if I did, the pointy-eared elves controlling the old Change Purse would have wrestled me to the ground and pulled 50 bucks out of my jeans, just for the privilege of capturing his image even without a baby in his arms. It's like with God back in the time of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob - clear down to Moses: you couldn’t take His picture either or wear shoes around him or say his name out loud even.  ("Hey SANTA!!" I could have yelled defying that rule too but I was afraid he might see me.Her saw me anyway and raised his hand in a wan wave.I waved wanly back and there we were, two weary grownups, just doin’ the Nine-to-Five just trying to get through the day.So if  Santa’s a victim too then who’s responsible for the near-violent way the holidays get shoved under our noses so early? I thought about this as I wandered into one of the department stores  where a cosmetics person hawking perfume tried spraying me, all sneakily skunk-like. A hundred yards in I came upon a Sales Associate pantsing a mannequin behind a carousel of Activewear.I really tried to get that picture but she caught me watching. It was some sight is all I can say. And here’s me thinking all these years that nothing's harder than working tights on to the fat flailing limbs of a squirming toddler. Trust me as one who watched unnoticed for a good 30 seconds: pulling skin-tight leggings on a giant vinyl doll is a whole lot harder.And come to think of it the doll was being dressed by the sales associate and so technically wasn't getting pantsed at all. I guess the pantsing is reserved for the rest of us suckers  - and the reaching in our pockets too.

Stand Together

Damp as a wet dog’s nose when my alarm went off at 5 yesterday and I thought I’d never be able to get out of that bed. But  I had to be in the city by 7 so off I went in the rain and even my old fedora couldn’t stop my hair from looking like this. (It’s funny: you think you look OK  right up until someone two decades younger grabs your arm and says  “Oh look at you in your hat! how CUTE is that!" and boom you’re back to feeling like a circus monkey all over again just like you did when you were 12.)Still, I had a swell time: I learned about an institution so great it will need more than a newspaper column and a few blog posts to tell about. I also looked up at  the ridiculously high ceilings of the Harvard Club that kind of make you want to rally the peasants and lead a torchlight mob to the palace – until  you remember how many young people with nothing have found a place there over the years.I didn’t find a place there. I didn't find a place at any of the Ivy League schools because when I was coming up they didn’t take my kind at the Ivies. I was a girl, and back then  girls were raised to act as ornaments to their husband’s careers and tenders of the next generation of little male rulers. I went instead to  a women’s college called Smith which has been turning out sharp and competent leaders since the 1870s and I thank God every day that they found me and gave me that scholarship that got me through,along with the my part-time job and the $25 a month my mom scraped up to send me.One of the people given an award at yesterday’s breakfast was Ayanna Pressley, the first woman of color to serve as one of the Boston’s City Council's Councilors-at-Large. She told us how some older guru-pol told her she'd sure-enough  never win an election on a platform of saving the girls but that was her platform and win she did because, as she says, "girls become women and women are the backbone of our families our neighborhoods and our communities."Rain or no rain it was a good day to take my little monkey-self to hear a message like that.When I got back to my house I sat outside in the car for a whole hour, looking at that front-yard tree so bare now just 24 hours after its big moment. And I remembered what Eleanor Roosevelt said about how no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. And I thought "Wear the hat you like when you want to wear it, T!" And who cares what kind of creature you are as long as you're strong and kind and you stand with your fellow creatures in good times and bad.

Birdpeckers

I started reading my old diaries last weekend and got such a kick out of them that when my girl Carrie here stopped by before work I asked her if she’d like to borrow 1980. “Sure!” she said and yesterday she wrote a quick email reporting that she loved reading it and would soon pass it on to her younger sister.I feel good about this: I figure this way if they have any  questions, I’m here to answer them instead of being six feet under with my mouth sewed shut.Anyway it’s all harmless what I wrote, bald fibs in 5^th, 6^th and 7^th Grade, codes and obfuscations in 8^th and 9^th, screeching lunacy in high school and pomposity in  college .It took having kids to bring me back down to earth - that and teaching high school. Because suddenly here were these three blithe spirits – two in the year you see captured  below - who thought I was swell and followed me everywhere. And even when that third one came along ,we still spent hours nesting in the beds, talking, reading, pretending to write things on the ceiling with our toes.The 1980 diary tells the story of little Carrie coming home from  nursery school to say that she had drawn a picture of a goat with just one “poke" on its head.  She smiled a fond mothers smile when I told her this on Monday , for she and her Chris are parents now too.  She told me that their little ones get the words wrong too. In fact each time the younger  one sees that redand black bird who drills away at the trees he says “Look! A birdpecker!”Ah, the  little ones: what did we all do before they came along? No wonder Adam and Eve got bored and made mischief in the Garden!

in the years Before Michael

Goodbye for Now

At 7:00 this morning the leaves on our ginkgo tree started to fall. This tree came with this house we bought in my 30th year and that first spring we lived here a strolling elder passed our yard and stopped. “You know you have one of the only two ginkgoes in this town," he said in grave tones. “"Really?” we said, knowing little then of the power of trees. “Yes,” he said sternly. “The ginkgo is one of the Nature's first trees, a real primitive. Look how its leave grows right from its large branches; there are no little branches!”We started noticing then, all right. That was  in April and six months late we saw what you will see below.This morning I was slow to wake and was just passing the upstairs room I call my office when a flickering caught my eye. The tree was releasing its leaves - so fast that in an hour the tree would be bare. I threw on my robe and hurried outside so you could see it too. You'll hear the work of the world in the background - a truck backing up? – but mostly you will hear the tree. Press ‘Play’ now and think for a minute how quickly change comes to all us mortal things.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVv1vsHXHmQ]

Little Sir Echo

So this is me having an echo-cardiogram. The lady tech and I cut our hair and grew beards for it,  just for laughs. OK not really but she sure was funny as she sat beside me the whole time. “I don’t go on Facebook,” she said out of nowhere.  “I don’t go online at all when I’m home. I sound like Ted Kaczynski, I know, right, but seriously I have ENOUGH COMPUTER TIME here at work!”She was certainly having enough then as I lay beside her, bare from the waist up, the hospital johnnie pushed pretty much completely aside and 6 or 8 electrodes planted like so many leeches on the skin of my torso.“Sooooo, any holes?” she cheerily said, peering at what looked like a pregnant woman’s ultrasound. It was all I could do not to ask if she could see a little stem on the apple as they say, but then I realized I was looking at a site that sure does get your attention: a rhythmically repeating shimmy and jerk, a shimmy and jerk, and at the core of it this weird little valve flinging itself open and shut again with a wet sucking sound.It was, in short, my heart.But from then on it was all fun. We had me standing with all these electrodes comically affixed to my chest and a swaying pack of God -knows-what kind of circuitry affixed to my hip. I felt like a cow hooked up to a milking machine. We had me breathing hard in and out and  fast as I could, which brought me clear back to my blue ribbon fainting days as a little girl.  We had me trotting along on an up-tilted continuously-accelerating treadmill to the point of failure as they say in the gym, then hopping quick back onto the gurney to measure how long it would take for my heart to stop screaming in panic.A young exercise physiologist was also present who told me she had been a gymnast and a dancer as a girl. “Hey I didn't know you were a gymnast!” said my pal the echo-tech who owned as how she had once been a figure skater. So then we talked butt muscles and thigh strength and how the younger girl always loved old Tonya Harding bless her crooked little heart, and in general I have to say the time just flew by. I was outa there in under an 70 minutes, smiling my face off -  that is until I remembered the world-famous heart doc. "I hate how he's always after me to lose ten pounds and exercise 60 minutes a day and all that," I whined to my new best friend the echo-tech.“Pffft!” she said  “First of all you're NOT overweight and anyway what does he know, a skinny guy like that? Take it from me you NEVER wanna listen to some skinny guy!”And with that  we shook hands and I danced out the door, free as a bird until the next echo- test in late 2012. Oh yeah, that is after next Tuesday, when Skinnyman and I sit down to talk about what it showed.  :-(

resting comfortably afterward

Aaaargh!

It always stinks for me when Halloween comes right before deadline day because what I want is to just sit around waiting for the little Trick-or-Treaters, maybe hide behind the living room curtains Boo-Radley-style but no. Instead here I was trying to get my column done.  (This is me in the living room - I never stop to sit down right; I just kind of slide in to home plate and start clacking away. ) Then the doorbell rang and rang again and rang again and again and sure Old Dave is finally home from Germany but I made him go upstairs to the watch the Rangers vs. the Giants so as not to wreck the spooky feeling down here in the living room which meant I was all alone on door duty. And they kept coming and coming, little bumble bees and ogres, fairy princesses and  and even one wee little MD complete with hospital ID and a stethoscope and didn’t it turn out that I BOUGHT THE WRONG CANDY.Silly me, I thought kids got sick of chocolate on Halloween, the same old M & M packs so I only had two dozen of them. The rest were Mike & Ikes, Skittles and Twizzlers, and those little hands dug into the bowl again and again past the latter three to get to chocolate pay dirt and there wasn’t enough. Never mind the kids with their Unicef boxes which we forget about every year. We had only pennies and dimes so ended up giving out dollars and the tide kept coming until all hours and finally when it stopped I sat down and, well, here ‘s what happened:

And remember, Halloween is just the start, am I right? Because look what's waiting in the wings:

And after that it’s holiday parties and Yankee Swaps and strings of  twinkling lights all tangled  together as if in some Dental Floss graveyard...Just pray you can be ready, people; it’s all I can think of to do. That and maybe put on some weight to build up my strength.:-)

What I Learned at the Zoo

If you want to really scare yourself for Halloween, consider spending time around creatures who get blood popsicles for treats. I’m talking about the big cats at the New England Stone Zoo whose care I learned something about during a special backstage tour I got to go on last week. I was  guided by amiable Assistant Curator Pete Costello who for 23 years has worked at this small jewel of a zoo, sister to the venerable Franklin Park Zoo some ten miles to the south.“Keep in mind,” he warned us as we ducked inside to watch a bit of the jaguars’ training: “These animals are not your friends,” a point reiterated by Animal Trainer Dayle Sullivan-Taylor. “Don’t stand anywhere NEAR the bars,” was her stern warning. “We train these animals so they can bear to be touched in case we have to examine them for medical issues but make no mistake: they’re dangerous.”The young jag Chessie has been training with Dayle since she was eight weeks old and does in fact follow commands beautifully. “Open,” Dayle says and she opens her mouth. “Paw” and she extends her paw. “Over right” and she lies on her right side. Each time she obeys in this fashion, Dayle clicks her clicker, then throws meat into the cage.“All this just desensitizes them to human touch,” she explained. “Once, Chessie here got something caught between her teeth and because of this training I was able to extract it - right through the bars” – without, she did not need to add, losing her arm in the process.But the animals don’t undergo these lessons only for when they’re sick or have thorns stuck in their paws. The training entertains and stimulates them and is part of their overall enrichment program. Props of all kinds as well as sounds and smells are used to keep them interested and alert and happily curious.It's been discovered, for example, that the big cats are wild about Calvin Kline’s Obsession for Men when it is sprayed around on their environment – something about its complex pheromone-rich bouquet. Giraffes, otters, gorillas, parrots and even goats have toys and “train” as well. And last weekend on a just-for-fun return visit to the zoo I saw one of the gibbons swinging through the air holding the handle of a plastic jack o’ lantern – with her tail.Environmental enrichment of this kind gives the animals the chance to make choices and experience new things, just as they would in the wild. They like different textures, from straw to soft blankets to wood shavings. And they’re hugely compelled by certain scents, with kinds of animal urine topping the list.And then there are snacks: besides blood popsicles, the cats also like to see the occasional frozen mouse tossed onto their rocks now and then. I have a friend who had herself donated two bottles of Obsession.Accordingly, at the end of our tour I asked Pete what else they could use.He cited the big capsule-shaped toy that we had seen Chessie mounting and biting, much as she might bite the necks of her prey in the wild. “That’s called a Boomer Ball,” he said. “They come in all shapes and sizes and people can to contribute to the purchase of one by going to the website that virtually all zoos have these days.” (Theirs is http://www.zoonewengland.org )“Is there anything else I should say to people?” I asked as we shook hands at the gate.“Just tell them to visit their zoos!” he called back to me over a little distance as he began trotting back to his charges.  “Just have them come and see how much they learn!”

Frozen mice bodies also get tossed into the cage for another kind of 'popsicle'; this male jag was briefly stymied: it landed in his pool and really he's not much on swimming.

Last Seen Wearing....

Last weekend I took these guys to the zoo and today we’re going to attack a corn maze. It makes a nice break from working on the intricate moving parts of Honors Algebra or reading your 40 pages per night of Jane Austen.These are 6 of 8 top students who, through the National Program for a Better Chance , left their warm homes and familiar neighborhoods to attend high school in our town. ABC places kids in over 300 public and private schools throughout the country and we have such a program, supported by 80 volunteers, by countless donations  from the community and, this year, by my own small contribution as Mistress of  Enrichment, Community Service and Last Minute Rides to the Y.

Most weekends the scholars are busy studying for SATs and playing sports and writing papers but this weekend we decided to drive to my family’s summer place, together with Winchester ABC’s President Jennifer Regentz and her hubby Mike who between them seem to be doing all of the the cooking  (yay!)

And today we're doing something much more arduous than interacting with jaguars. They're  still sleeping at the moment – something about that midnight screening of  "Fight Club" I found them enthralled in when I wandered out to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water – but soon we will all get marched into a maze so puzzling it makes old Honors Algie III look easy: the famous Corn Maze at Moulton Farms.   My kids and I did it last fall and if it weren't for our son Mike with his memory like God’s own memory we'd still in there now. I'll report  back in a few days if we manage to get out that quickly. And oh yeah: Ray in his hoodie might be trying to look like some tough guy in the picture above but he's a big softie really, as you can see here with his arm around Class of  '14-er Hazees.

good luck to us; they don't even give you  a map! corn maze from the air Mouton Farms NH

Peace and Sleep

On Tuesday  we hosted a party for our great State Rep Jason Lewis. Then  on Wednesday David  packed to go to Germany, stopping en route to the airport for a wake. It was a big week for wakes:  Two people in our circle died and though I could not got to the interment of one I did  get to the interment of the other; in fact I was still at the graveside at 5.I say "still" but really I went back, in that last glorious hour of light, with the air as warm as summer and a wind like a matron of honor fluffing out the skirts of trees and the bushes. I was alone but for a woman around 40 who had been sitting by a grave that morning too, her sorrow her secret; she simply sat on the grass and looked at her headstone.Me, I wandered, for more than an hour. looking for shots that might comfort the family and found a few I think, though this one may sear more than it comforts. What does comfort I found is not so much to sit by a grave as to lie by one. I took these shots crouched down behind the headstone of Gene and his Betty, who waited seven years for Gene to join her.Anyway they are together now in the Great Mystery, watching the high tall sky, the bloom of light by day, and the night coming on, bringing peace and sleep to their children and to all of us the living, who yearn so much and understand so little.

The Holy

I remember it myself, riding in the big black car that would take us to our grandfather’s casket one last time. I remember looking out the window and wondering how all those people could be having their ordinary days when such a blow had been dealt to us: the man in whose house we lived gone, his protection gone, the shelter of his income gone and nothing for us to do but find a new place to live, our mom and us two kids in our falling-down socks and our funny haircuts.As I drove from one funeral to the other and in between got myself to the hospital for that  X-ray I have long been postponing, I noticed all the little ways that life goes forward. And yes at the funeral of John the firefighter the knees of my old friend buckled when saw me and she collapsed sobbing in her chair. And yes at the wake of Gene whose baseball team were state champs back in ‘45 and who got to try out for the Red Sox, the eyes of his children and grandchildren filled and refilled with tears as they stood all those  greeting the many who called.But all day the rain was gentle and the air was warm and the yellow leaves shone bright on the wet black asphalt. And when an old man next to me in the X-Ray waiting room asked for help because the leg supports on his wheelchair were hurting his calves three strangers leaped from their seats to help him. And always there is the Sacred in the Everyday and the Everyday in the Sacred and the braiding of the two brings a kind of  comfort... Even a strong sort of joy as when you turn a corner on a busy street and there before you is this young and mortal woman with the gorgeous deathless music spilling like a fountain from her throat.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjaN9hI9ZRc]

They Are All Around Us

Warm and rainy today. A wake and a funeral for me, honoring not one but two fathers dear to many. I know I always loved to sit beside them at a party.Yesterday my thoughts were with my own single parent of a mom, born October 26th in her parents’ bed. She and this weather and the week’s two deaths have sent me to my camera here with the ivy going slowly magenta-colored outside my office window.This is my mom as a small child. She's the sad-looking one with her two brothers and her jaunty baby sister.

She is sad-looking because their mother died when she was only two and in a way she never got over it.Then, under her, is the dead young mother herself for whom my mother was named and I am named and my firstborn daughter was named in her turn. People didn't smile showing their teeth in those days but she was blithe as I know from her letters.

Then underneath this is that lady's high school diploma from the 1890s, rescued from a hundred-years' moldering in an attic carton. Diplomas really were made of sheepskin once, so restoring it wasn't all that hard. I see now that the red book beside it is “A Mass for the Dead,” and how strange is that on this day that I see a book with that name, a memoir so powerful I had to stop reading it one-third of the way through! Maybe today is the day to pick it up again after one man's funeral and another man's wake and before that man's funeral tomorrow.The dead are all around us of course, the "strengthless dead" as the poet called them only I'm not so sure they're all that faint and devoid of strength. Anyway the spirits of Gene King and John Lumsden are not faint; they have only just passed and today and in these first days following I know their families will feel them again and again and see them in their dreams.

No Problem Too Big

I take just one drug in a teeny-tiny dose every morning which is said to save me from indolence, obesity and a persistent sadness whose most visible sign is something called “shark mouth.” Its  side effects meanwhile? Only the usual array: sleep problems, nervousness, sweating, and increase in both appetite and weight. Small potatoes if only there weren't now several new challenges in my life, among them:

One: I spill on myself. It’s like when I was pregnant and my arms weren’t long enough to get the food to my mouth, only now I spill because I eat while sitting at my keyboard which I have to do because of my commitment to keep bringing twinkly prose to a weary world. My solution: I wear a bibbed chef’s apron whenever I sit down to write. Instant fix! And it looks pretty comical too, especially when it’s only over my bra. (“What’s THIS?” said Dave the first time he saw it last week.) This picture here gives you the idea though I guess the baby isn’t mine. Or the apron. Or the body.

Two:  The bathroom is now entirely too far away for me to get the aspirin I so badly need nights as my little broken kite of body torques around a progressively twisted spine. Also, it’s too far way to get the coffee I need immediately on waking. I long ago set up a coffee pot in the bathroom because the kitchen was WAY too far away but now the bathroom seems too far too. What I want is to get that coffee pot right next to my bed so it’ll be like that scene at the beginning of "Pee Wee’s Big Adventure" where he wakes up and here is his breakfast cooked and delivered by a series of clever little gadgets. You can see that below if you can bear to watch Pee Wee, the sly fox, building a career by mocking childhood. (Anyway that’s what Mr. Rogers said about him and I believe everything Mr. Rogers ever said.)

To see what shark mouth looks like click here.  Meanwhile, enjoy the idiot Pee Wee. Oh and my Levoxyl-requiring disease? Mild hypothyroidism AKA Hashimoto's. No big deal. In fact as common as ants at a picnic so..... once again today I'm feeling grateful!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYyD55elKJA]

My First Hero

I still dream about the summer camp I went to - the wind in the trees, the sudden storms coming over the mountain - and at a recent reunion, I found out I wasn’t the only one. All of us former campers remembered these things, and remembered too how safe and cared for we all felt at that place; how tall and kind our counselors were when we were little, shampooing our hair in the sinks and tucking us into our beds.I remember especially my counselor Barbara, who taught us Arts & Crafts - that's me on the left - and could paint and sing and ski and play every instrument in the book, even that old Army bugle she pulled out of the air a couple of dozen times a day to tell us where we belonged.Once she found me crying in my bed on account of a mean thing the new girl said about my mother, who was the camp’s owner and director. “Your mother is OLD!” she sneered and when I tried to say that no, she was only 30, she laughed in my face. “SHE’S not 30! MY mother is 43 and your mother looks WAY older!”That’s when Barbara stepped into the cabin.“Listen,” she said, sitting on the edge of my bed. “Maybe your mom is 30 and maybe she isn’t. It doesn’t matter. She could be 35, or 40, even 50 but that’s not old. My parents are in their 60s and they still do everything they ever did. Anyway, it’s never how old you are. It’s how you live.”I have never forgotten this kindness of Barbara’s and reminded her of it at our last camp reunion which took place a full 20 years ago. She had driven from Long Island for it, together with her two older sisters, counselors themselves in their time. She was marking her fifth year cancer-free and was as busy as ever with her music and her art, maintaining her portrait studio and teaching would-be pilots how to fly.A month ago now at this latest reunion, we screened the video someone had made at that first one in 1990. Barbara’s sisters were beside me as we watched and heard again the singing we had done at the end of it. We could clearly hear Barbara’s voice, and then, as the camera panned, “There she IS!” one sister whispered excitedly to the other ... and sure enough, there Barbara was, first singing and then stepping away from the banquet table to pick up an old bugle and play Taps once more in her own slow, pitch-perfect version.She is gone now from all our tables. Shortly after that first reunion her cancer returned with metastases to the bone.“I was so angry with God for taking her,” one of her sisters wrote me recently, “But then I heard her saying something to me from wherever she is. The Irish call such an experience a ‘thin place,’ meaning a place where you can just glimpse the world beyond this world.“’Anyway, she was very definite: ‘Stop crying about me!’ she said.  ‘I'm out here flying!’”Then I could almost hear her voice as well, and hear again what she had told me as a little child in my little-child’s bed.  Because it really isn’t how old we are or get to be in life. It’s only how we live, day to day, that matters.