Vintage Friends

What a break after a period of hustle and bump to have a whole day-and-a-half of quiet fun at the house of these two, who know even better now how to have fun even than they did when they looked like this.Bobbie I know from summer camp when she was my counselor. The same year this picture was taken I made her to come to Mass with me one winter Sunday in an effort to  get her to re-subscribe to the whole long list of Hellfire Do's and Don’ts the Church was so obsessed with then. She was a junior in college coming to see her 12^th grade friend, and sat so sweetly through my sermons, then went back to this fine boy seemingly unharmed. I'm just realizing that at the same point in my own college years I too found a fine boy, who almost shortened the life of the people who raised me by being a Protestant.Though the four of us still fly and drive and trudge through epic snowfalls to see each other this past Wednesday I came on my own to our friends' nice stone house. They erved a pork roast that cooked for six hours in a slow low oven; a wine reduction sauce, pears in maple syrup, and a salad of greens, toasted almonds and root vegetables, all preceded and accompanied by two red wines so smoothly great my astonished taste buds almost made  my whole head lift clear off my shoulder in delight.I slept like the dead in a cool high room, scribbled my little scribbles, did a Body Pump Class and watched 3 glorious episodes of a favored HBO series with my old pal before 5pm rolled around and she brought me back to the airport.Home now, I look at these pictures and think that they are just the same, these two, still ready to stride out in the chilly sunshine and perch on a log; still willing to open their house to this same old weary traveler.

Bobbie at 20

The Old Neighborhood

The night before last I went to the wake of the lady I lived next door to growing up, who I still picture barefoot in bermudas, smiling as we tore in and out of her house all day, a pack of drool-flinging dogs hot on our heels.When I first got there I felt both weary and strangely shy. “I’ll stay just 30 minutes, then get back and start dinner,” I told myself. I signed the guest book and prayed at the kneeler where her urn was displayed next to a half-completed crossword, her eyeglasses set down beside it as if she had just jumped up for a minute to see to some small task.I spoke first with Mr. Wilson and then their three great kids, companions of my happy childhood. Then my middle school boyfriend appeared and I talked to him a while before confessing that I was making my way doorward. “I’m just so tired, I don’t even think I can make the rounds again to say goodbye. With all these people here and the family so busy I could just sneak out, couldn’t I?“You could, sure you could,” he said mildly. “But think for a minute how you'll feel when you make that first left hand turn out of the parking lot?”He was right. This wake was not arranged as an Rx for me. I took off my coat and stayed another hour.I spoke again with Mr. Wilson, then with the O'Heirs from the old farmhouse down the road; then the two brothers on the other side of our house who my sister Nan and I were off-and-on in love with only for about ten yeas between us. Then in came Mrs. Blazon from two doors down, at 82 still the blue-eyed beauty whose little sons I babysat in high school.The older one stood beside her now and I went right over.“Hey, Mrs. Blazon! And you’re Billy, right?“Well, Bill, yes.”“Your mom let my friend Tina and me take you for a little walk in your stroller when you were like ten months old. We made straight for the woods by the Pow-Wow Oak and immediately got your booties soaking wet, which forced us to sneak back home, steal matches from my kitchens, go back to the woods and make a fire to dry you out."“Yes and I haven’t walked right since,” said Bill, though of course he doesn’t remember. I'm amazed I remembered, since Tina and I were only nine, maybe ten at the time. If Mrs. Blazon wondered about the dark smudges on her woodsmoke-reeking child she never said so, though I do now recall that I wasn’t asked to babysit again until I was an all-too-serious senior in high school translating Latin orations after Billy and his little brother had tumbled about like pups in their PJs, then tucked into bed like a couple of angels.All this came back to me at this wake that I am so glad I went to and stayed long at. Because now they are fully alive in my mind, Barbara and Charlie Wilson, the departed one so calm and quick to laugh always, and also the one remaining, funny salty-tongued Mr. Wilson who so many times all but physically tossed eight or ten of us in the back of his convertible and brought us for ice cream, he leaning out the window to loudly moo at the cows we passed in that one field along the way.

Ponder This Picture

Any day now I’ll hang up my hammock and relax. Oh I guess I relaxed a little in Salt Lake City in my sensory deprivation hotel room but you know how that is: if you’re too far removed from the Triathlon of your actual daily grind you don’t seem to get the benefit of sleeping away. You wake up in those hotels and motels as if in somebody else’s life.Anyway now I’m back in my OWN Triathlon. Yesterday, jet lagged from a 1am arrival in the east I slept not at all, missed my alarm, threw on my clothes and dashed into the city for my annual physical where I learned that my spine is now torquing so much I’m turning into a sort of Mobius strip; any day now my foot is going to rise up, flip over my beltline and settle onto my shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. Aaargh matey!The only thing to do is build up core strength, says my doc, so it’s back to Pilates for me, doing leg lifts, balancing on the delicate driftwood of my sacrum while holding my torso high in the air. I sure couldn’t start that yesterday what with work a doctor's appointment and then a wake; also  some some visit-the-sick action, then the dropping off my messed up car at the mechanic’s,then the walking home in the dark to do the ironing because the ironing you shall always have with you as Jesus said and now flying out to Philly here at 6am.But I do THINK of relaxation and feel so excited! Also happy!  Even knowing I might have to wait for the tree to sprout, then grow arms to tie a hammock to. I'll take that hammock with my one arm and use my teeth to stretch it to that other tree if I have to and THEN I’ll be set all right and rest the old bones in the rigging of my little swinging ship. Aargh!

How it Was

Flying this past week has made me think about a letter I recently came upon written almost 100 years ago to one Mary Ann Maloney by her second cousin Mary Ellen back in Ireland.Mary Ann’s folks came here in the 1850s while Mary Ellen’s stayed behind . It is clear from what she says that no word had passed between them for years and  I find such pathos in that. Pathos because so much happened in Mary Ellen’s life since last the two were in contact. Pathos because so much has happened in Mary Ann’s life too that her cousin does not know.I only know because I lived with Mary Ann for the last ten years of her life, when she was a tiny ancient thing who sat all day in her rocking chair, reading the paper and making tart remarks. She was born here in the States just 14 months after the assassination of President Lincoln, to set things in history, and her cousin was her contemporary. And now to the latter’s note, which begins with an all too-human glimpse:“Dearest Mary Ann: I hope you are keeping strong and also your sister and brother.”How could she know that Mary Ann’s sister died in her sleep at only 42, leaving behind five children who never got over the loss? That her brother fell in love with a woman not his wife, had a secret child by her and soon after saw his whole life explode like a landmine beneath him?Then she gives her own news:“Thomas and myself are keeping fine, however my other three brothers died, Patrick at 19, Lawrence at 27 and Richard at 22, and also my only sister Kathleen at 16 years.”“Adn now, dear cousin I think I have told you all,“ she calmly ends. “I would certainly love to see you all but I suppose that will never happen so Thomas and myself join in wishing you and all our cousins a very happy Christmas and prosperous New Year.”  And she signs it “With love, your effectionate cousin Mary Ellen.”How hard to hear such news so late and all together like this!  I read these lines and feel once more how lucky we are compared to people only a scant ten decades ago. We cross the ocean and call when we land - or we Skype or go on Facebook to chat and send as many pictures as we like. They turned away from the port in a long echoing silence.I thought of this last week as I sat  stalled in holiday traffic, in the car and at the airport, warm and comfy and sipping a fresh hot drink. I'm going to try to continue thinking of it too, right on through the holidays to come.

Bound for county Cork: my grandfather in 1899, one of the few lucky enough to visit the old country 

Travel Tips

Even a slow learner learns at last. Here, after 25 years of jetting about a few packing tips picked up the hard way. Now I bring these and only these things on an airplane:

• A small suitcase weighing no more than a lady’s purse
• One spare skirt or pair of pants
• Any number of Steve-Nicks-style tops or dresses, weighing less than the down on a baby duck
• The requisite undies and creams

I lived for nearly a week in Europe with just this in September and for nearly a week in Utah just now and it all worked great. I bought one of those super-lightweight-but-indestructible little suitcases that heaves right up into the overhead bin and I was SET.  Everything else I carry in a backpack, everything being:

• the laptop, i-pod, phone
• the GPS for when I exit the ol’ rental car garage
• the wires for all the above, none of which are ever ever even faintly interchangeable
• Well-jacketed fruits like your orange or your apple (never the highly squooshable banana)
• Powdered milk, powdered coffee, powdered sugar substitute
• A toothbrush toothpaste and some floss
• A needle and thread but never any scissors natch. 
• A bit of makeup but not too much out of respect for my healthy fear of Kabuki-style paint jobs
• Reading materials.On this latest trip I had Jonathan’s Franzen’s Freedom, Susan Cheever's Louisa May Alcott, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls, four old New Yorkers, two Times and a Newsweek.

Oh and my diary and my planner too so that even though the suitcase was easy to tote, the minute I swung theat backpack up onto my shoulders I almost fell right over backwards. Next task: conquer addiction to books made of paper and ink.

(Still, a BIG improvement. Yay for this old dog learning a new trick, with more new tricks ahead!)

Snowbound?

Here in Salt Lake City a fat wallop of snow has arrived to smack everyone on the chin, and this on the year’s second heaviest travel day.It was just ten degrees here when our plane landed Thursday night and it’s still mighty chilly now. My girl Annie has been staying in the new-baby house all this time while I have been billeted in a motel so spartan its wee kitchen offers just two cups, two bowls, three each in the spoon-fork-knife department  and maybe ¼ of an ounce of dishwashing liquid in a small foil packet.But hey the fridge works, sort of, and the toaster at least warms up your bread if it doesn’t exactly brown it and they say  an actual Whole Foods lies just over yonder. So if it turns out I’m marooned here I guess I can always trudge over there  in the my ridiculous old fur coat, brought along just in case. I look like the Abominable Snowman in it I know but I bought it 20 years ago  both because it was seriously on sale and so I could have something warm to wrap my children in that Christmas when at my INSANE suggestion, we took the train from Boston Massachewsetts clear to Tampa F-L-A, chased the whole way down by a cold snap so severe it made black wilted spinach of all their lush vegetation.Glad I was for this coat on that train I can tell you, especially when in classic Amtrak style the cars went cold, the water in the johns all froze, and our kids began throwing up one after another on entering them, first at the smell of the unflushed waste and then at the sight of each other throwing up but let me not go there now. Instead let the God of All Travel shine his light on all those trying to get home safe today. Annie and I don’t fly ‘til tomorrow and I know I’ll be fine here  even if the kids can’t come get me today in all these veils of white. That Whole Foods is just past a few dumpsters, across a right-of-way and through several hundred yards of parking lot where I can find  a wealth of soy flour, and wheat bran, and kelp sprouts if there even is such a thing as kelp sprouts.

me in my old fur coat

Long Time Passing

This is part of a letter my great aunt Mary Ann Maloney received from her never-seen-again cousin in Ireland. How did they all do it? Go years and years without seeing one another and finally die, one or the other of them, the news of their deaths not reaching across the ocean for years, sometimes even for decades?This lady you see below on the right - the one with the strong chin - she was Mary Ann, the recipient of this sad letter. She lived all her life a spinster as Mary Ellen did back in Ireland. Perhaps it seemed to them the safer way. Perhaps it was safer, because of  those losses that came when there were children. I study the picture below in which Mary Ann's mother Katherine is seen holding her first grandchild in 1904. Look at her face; look at the way she holds or rather doesn't hold the infant. Maybe you'd have to know that seven of her children died young, five of them as children to understand that look.Life was hard enough for people 100 and more years ago without their being cut off entirely from the world they used used to know. Every time I see happy people recrossing  the waters in today's swift carriers I think 'Good for you for going and returning! Good for you for spending the money to go back and keep alive the family bonds!'

A Very Very Very Fine House

The words to this old Crosby Stills &  Nash song keep singing themselves in my head every minute here at this new-baby house where Annie and I have come to help.  This is Annie and not mother Sooz here holding baby Peter but we had both forgotten what it’s like in such a house, where it's all so hushed and still. One minute we're talking and leafing through magazines and the next we're all out cold. Even when we first arrived late Thursday night there was that feeling, the child reposing in his reclining baby rickshaw atop a coffee table Kevin made back in his college days and would certainly throw away now if Susie hadn’t pronounced it good. (Look what it says though Mum!” (Susie has always called me Mum.) “It says all this over here is the living room, while all that” - and she gestures to a table six feet away - “is the dining room!”It’s a sizeable room if a tad small for 5 people and 3 pets to be spending days at a stretch but who would want to be anywhere else with that new-baby fairy dust still dancing in the air? In this moment here captured the people are just hanging out, the cats have just stepped down from their padded high-rise, the famous coffee table is acting in its key room-dividing role and the mystified but noble Bosco is keeping watch over all.Now click on this performance of a great old song of praise to domestic joy and imagine that a BABY is speaking the lyrics: (Come to me now/And rest your head for just five minutes/ Everything is good./Staring at the fire/For hours and hours/While I listen to you/Play your love songs/All night long for me/Only for me. Ah![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZtJWJe_K_w]

Here to Help

You can’t beat a Thanksgiving afternoon for relaxation, with nothing to do but rest from one’s labors – not that I had any labors. No turkey, no stuffing, no grace, nary a toast to drink or a glass to wash, all because Annie and I spent eight hours winging westward to help two sleepy parents, Susie and Kevin, with their brand-new baby.We were like Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers coming out of the night bearing gifts, Annie with a beautiful delicate wooden mobile and I with a small rocking chair that my pal at Mailboxes packed with such care you’d think it once belonged to the Baby Jesus.It was better than that in fact. It belonged to new mother Susie when she was a child. I saw it broken in their garage just days before their house was sold and kept it these 18 months though it had no paint, no seat and no rockers at all.I brought it one place where they took it apart entirely, sanding it,  gluing it and turning two fine new arcs of wood for its rockers. Then I stained it and finished it and brought it to a second place in mid-October for a nice new seat. “It will take  six, maybe seven weeks,” they said but by gosh if they didn’t have it on Wednesday. And didn’t I bring it straight to Mailboxes where my friend  Billy double-wrapped each single dowel and span of wood with foam and tape and more tape and crafted a box of airline-approved size too  and greeted me at 5:00 the night before Thanksgiving with a big big smile, happy to help and proud of a job well done.So off we sailed over  mountain and plain to meet this child who it may be will be one of ours because his parents are ours through the bonds of love and what could be a nicer way to spend this the nicest family holidays?

I Got Life

Today it’s cold but it’s gorgeous here by my ocean, all penny-tasting and heavy in the hand like that fat drop of mercury you once broke your mom’s thermometer to get. I’ve got this ocean anytime I want it, just 8 short miles to the east. And this little pond too, captured just as the sun came up this morning: I've got this pond.Outside my bedroom window I’ve got a tree that a boy named Roberto said he'd  help me plant in the spring of 1990 only he took off instead and I had to plant it myself, dig the hole, hoist that hefty root-ball and all 6 feet of trunk in the air, then feel it bonk me on the head when it slipped from my hands. I was sore at him that day. Said to myself "This is your tree, for good or ill, and it is ON ITS OWN now, to prosper or not."  Today it reaches past the second-story windows so yes I’ve got this tree.This is Roberto on the left and behind him Stan who I have been looking for without success for 15 years at least. They feel lost to me now, though I think of them often. The boy on the right is not lost to me however. That’s Chris, former State Champ in wrestling who  lives in Park Slope with his new bride Claire. Today is his 40^th birthday and as a present he asked me to get him two more Winchester High School Wrestling Team T's because after 23 years his two are finally wearing out. So I've got  Chris and I hope now Claire, and a double-armful of all the great kids David and I have raised and helped to raise, and a growing edge of grandkids too. I've got food and a bed and enough wrinkles around  my eyes that they almost disappear completely when I smile. And memories and a glad heart,like the saucy young star of the musical “Hair” here who is also clearly thankful for some dandy things himself. Happy Thanksgiving to all - and may you too dance on the dining room table before the day is past![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1LRD3DtFAo]

Creepy But Cool

Below a video of my man Ralph Waldo Emerson, here reanimated in as hideously compelling  way as the famous stuffed corpse of old Jeremy Bentham. He was gentle and good, was Emerson, even though he did make that poor second wife change her first name. Even though he did shut himself so thoroughly up in his rooms after their little boy died she must have felt doubly bereaved.His first wife had died in her early 20s. This was before he walked away from the ministry to start mixing up the tasty pie-filling known as Transcendentalism. He had her dug back up, you know, just so he could gaze once more upon her face. Abe Lincoln did this too, after his little boy’s death in the White House years. It must make sense on some level to us the left-behind. We just can’t believe they are gone.Anyway, I love to visit old Waldo's house. I love to study his mild kind face with its deep-set eyes. It’s true I was a tad unsettled when I first saw this clip but strangely comforted too,  maybe at the thought of them all still alive just on the other side of that mirror, talking away; trying so hard to give tips to us the living ,so heedless and so deaf …..[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5J2M2CEQsE&feature=related]

Come in Stranger

The same day I went to  Snootytown I also went with my pal Ronda to a place that was once the largest building in New England. Our aim: to see a special performance by the Brio Integrated Theatre in which two people very dear to us are involved: I mean Brio's founder and Creative Director Sahar Ahmed and high school sophomore Rayvoughn Millings, her able assistant. As Sahar says here in this video, Brio teaches awareness about disabilities through integrative workshops, productions, educational programs and community outreach.Darkness had fallen by the time we arrived - rain too - and to warm ourselves en route, Ronda and I had stopped to get coffee, which we now clutched in our chilly fingers.“Well we DO have a rule about No Beverages,” the young woman in the ticket office told us when we first walked in. “But the tours are over for the day and the museum is closed so I guess we can call this a special occasion. Just if you spill any, come tell us right away okay? ”So in we went and it was all lovely. Lovely to watch the graceful movements. Lovely to sit in those high-backed pews all warm and safe. Lovely most of all to feel so welcomed in a place built before George Washington was even born.Rayvoughn only occasionally takes part in a Brio performance; usually he stage manages. But on this night he took to that famous pulpit and read the play’s final words, with the dancers beneath him in this old old building, once the church where Sam Adams and Ben Franklin and former slave and poet Phyllis Wheatley would come to worship.Here's Ray now in a tiny 3o-second clip.Oh and as for Ronda and me? We didn’t spill a drop.:-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiGfCzHb_W0]

On Fitting In

It was a big week for me culture-wise. I not only read a book about Louisa May Alcott I also went to a lecture about her pops Bronson, one of the most ineffectual men ever to draw breath. This lecture was held in a place I have gone to before, not just to hear talks but to sit in that one leather chair by the window and think long thoughts. (The graveyard on the other side of the glass helps with that.)Anyway, throngs of people came to hear about old Bronson who never did an honest day's work after about age 37. And yet he loved himself always. (His Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that he was always feeling about his shoulders to see if wings had sprouted.)  And he didn’t just keep his wife and four girls in poverty; he made them subsist entirely on a diet of raw fruits and vegetables. He also thought sex put a crimp in the life of the spirit so he denied his wife that as well. He wouldn’t eat any dairy or wear any wool  - didn’t believe in the servitude of animals  - and the one year Fruitlands was up and running he wandered off with his crackpot pals to New York for all of August instead of bringing in such harvest as they would have had. (He didn't believe in the use of manure - again too exploitative of Bessy and Elmer.)But folks are fascinated by a nutcase so the place was SRO - and I guess that's why the  man at the front desk sort of lost it. His job: to be sure no one ever brings in any kind of bag in which s/he can stash and make off with any rare and precious objects.I have never minded taking out my laptop, hanging my power cord around my neck, and stuffing all my books and notebook into the little see-through bag they give you but I didn’t expect to be yelled at three times in 20 minutes. Yup, yelled at. First for trying to bring the laptop into the Reading Room  (Ma'am! Excuse me, Ma’am!”), then for trying to pull its rolling laptop bag around the man's desk rather than hoisting it over the top. (He thought I was attempting to take it inside) and finally for using my phone to take this picture which act almost got me wrestled to the ground by a short young lady in sensible shoes.It was this picture, of the Marquis De Lafayette looking pretty above-it-all himself which is certainly how the guy at the desk came across. I know he was just doing his job and probably hates having to speak to people but still. It was a good reminder to me of how it feels to be a newcomer in a culture you don’t know you way around in. “There are many rules here but they are all unspoken.”  We say that in all but words to people new to our shores and, I mean really, how fair is that? It's like when Steve Martin used to suggest in his early stand-up routines that we should teach babies to talk wrong so as to have the fun of mocking them later.

Which Is Better, Dogs or Cats?

This is my late dog Penny asking for a second coat of polish on her nails (that's a can of acrylic.)OK so here’s a good way to start a lively conversation: go down the path of which is better, dogs or cats. Crosby does this in an episode of “Parenthood” when he’s talking to his girl Jasmine about what she should do to make her new place homey. His recommendation? Get a dog. “Uh, I’m actually more of cat person,” says Jasmine with a look. “Grody, you’re a cat person?!" answers  Crosby. Cats suck! They’re narcissistic, they’re always licking themselves, they’re kinda OCD… ”“Hmmmm” you think hearing this. Cats are grody? because they lick themselves? Maybe we're the grody ones, putting spit on our fingers to wash the faces of People Who Are Not Us. As for narcissistic, until Jasmine and little Jabbar came into his life, Crosby's the most narcissistic person on the show. And cats are OCD? Has he never seen a dog settle down for a nap, the way it goes round and round in a million circles before finally flumping down? I say forget the generalizations, let’s look at real life:When I was five we had a kitten who kept trying to climb up on our heads like a panicky swimmer.  Now in adulthood I’ve had several cats, none of them fitting the nasty cat stereotype. The black one with the little white flame of fur at her throat used to leap INTO the Christmas tree every year. Perched there darkly, she acted more like Poe’s raven than any feline you ever heard about. And the grey one struck lots of people as mighty doglike with his blithe outgoing ways. Once he brought a live chipmunk into the house, not in his mouth but running alongside him, like a little kid arriving for a playdate. In they both burst the second I opened the door. “Hey, wanna see my ROOM?” he seemed to be saying to the wee thing.Come to think of it, my old dog Penny didn't fill the standard expectations either. She was more like a goat; she ate everything. Salad. Wood. The whole bottom of her food dish and that was made of metal. Then, when company came, she sank her long retriever’s nose into everyone’s drink. And speaking of obsessions, she was obsessed with ladies’ underwear, which she presented to all visitors every time the doorbell rang. The minute the parish priest showed up out - boom!  - out came bras, stockings, panties - all our dainty washables. Stunning to behold.So don’t talk to me about “Dogs are like this” and “Cats are like that.” For my money all such talk is dumb. Dumb leaning toward hurtful, because every animal - every person too - is unique. And dogs are great just as cats are great. Hamsters and birds too, and even that four-foot-long iguana my friend Mary has under those eerie purple lights in her upstairs hall.Remember the old Little Caesar’s Pizza ad, “I taught my dog to say I love you”? “As if dogs could talk!” is the joke. Well all I’m saying is Never underestimate what an animal can do. Because it sure does sometimes seem they’re a whole lot smarter than the two-legged fools wielding the can openers.

good old Abe in hound-dog mode

Mean Signs

Back when I was first learning to read I always thought that ‘Go Children Slow’ street sign sent an odd message. Even now in my life I pass this sign every day that says ‘Slow Deaf Child.’ It’s one thing to say a kid is deaf or whatever but do we have to throw in the fact that he's slow too? Talk about mean!

Here below you see a sign from the lobby of the fancy new Liberty Hotel, so named in ironic commentary on the fact that the place functioned for some 150 years as a jail. (One of its eateries is dubbed Clink, another Alibi. It’s all very droll - unless you remember that Sacco and Vanzetti were among those held here at a time when their case almost tore this country apart.)

It was hard to get a good picture of it what with the glass frame and the gold lettering but it says “Unattended Children Will Be Given a Double Espresso with Three Sugars … and a Dog.” Ha ha. A funny joke, with only a slightly prickly we-hate-kids subtext..... So I'm just wondering: when did this happen? Remember when children were thought of as these clear pure vessels, who were capable of teaching US so much? The Boomers' whole youth revolution was predicated on that belief come to think of it. So what’s going on here? Are kids routinely given the curled lip these days or are we just get meaner across the board?at least this one is funny:

Facebook's for the OLD?

“Facebook’s for gerries,” he scoffed in an email last week. This was my old student Kevin and wasn’t he just always that kind of kid mouthy and walking around with holes in his clothes and refusing to put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance even though he was on a stage  being inducted into the National Honor Society at the time.He and I stayed in pretty good touch for a while after he left Somerville High and college and was living in Manhattan. Whenever he was in town he'd come for dinner, bringing our small children some odd sort of a prickly toy they couldn’t really play with but seemed to love anyway. Years later, he gave Carrie the scarred leather jacket from his Bukowski days. I think he got slapped in the head with a tire iron in it once and I’m still pretty sure that was a human bite mark on one sleeve.Anyway I found him on the internet a year or so ago which annoyed him hugely - that he could be found I mean - but soon enough he fell to asking did I ever see this one or that one and while I don’t SEE these long-ago students  I do try to keep track of them from a distance.So I very reasonably suggested he join Facebook which is where three-quarters of the population seems to be these days and that's when he wrote it in a one-sentence email, this mouthy kid with the long crazy hair: "Hah! Facebook's for gerries!" he said. Meaning geriatrics, relics, the old. Meaning ME, even though I’m young enough at heart to not mind being photographed in a rumpled garment like this one here,I can't argue that I am old because listen to this fact which stuns even me: my grandfather’s sister whom I knew and lived with was born during the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant! My grandmother’s sister who lived with us too was born when Andrew Johnson was President.  Johnson, who took over after Lincoln was shot!That darn Kevin: still pretty much of a bigmouth but he tells it like it is.

One Tough Old Soldier

There’s so much to make fun of always, like the Royal Family for example, and now Liza Minnelli with the whole front of her head all re-sculptured, but these are thing I’ll have to get back to because I just spent the day with someone beginning on his tenth decade.I see Uncle Ed two, sometimes three days a week, having inherited him from David and his brothers who are his nephews.Well no. ‘Inherited’ makes it sound like they gave him away.  Far from it. One of my brothers-in-law comes Tuesday nights to have a belt with him, one swings by all the time with groceries and fresh meds, one is always sending lively notes from Tucson and San Diego.Me he uses me for our Journeys to Nowhere in my sweet red van. That and the acquisition of hot delectables either from my kitchen or the kitchens of the pros at Whole Foods and Boston Market.Anyway, I'm his special one. He just likes girls better, as he readily admits and I was the first girl to join the Marotta family back at age 19. Thus am I the one who takes him the doctor too and sits with him by the pond, and comes for our special toast on Charismas Eve just at that blue twilight hour of early winter.He had a bad spell in June of ’06 when his doc told him  he couldn’t live alone anymore."Pffffft!" said Ed to that and carried right on in his little flat, scrubbing the bathroom floor on his hands and knees.It’s true his arthritis gave him an almighty spasm one day and he slipped and couldn’t get up and it took him more than an hour to inch on his back toward the phone. He does have a Lifeline that he wears like the dog tags of his Army days but he somehow didn’t have it on just then. For this he made no apologies.“But what if you fall and you can’t get to us and you.. you… you  die here in your apartment?” I said chokingly when I first  heard this story. We were standing in his kitchen at the time.He fixed me with a long doleful Armenian look, then stumped closer with his cane. “Don’t you see? That’s what I’m trying to do,” he said, meaning 'go', just like that , snap!,  go quick and neat and not like his poor wife Fran went, over the course of a decade, marooned with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home.It's nearly  five years since that bad spell, and as I say, at the time it seemed crazy to me for him to carry on alone.I see now that it was just the thing for him because here he still is, with us. And really who but a 36-month veteran of the fighting in the Pacific could tough it out this well?So here’s to you Ed at the start of your 91^st year.  My red van and I would both be lost without you.

Susie Again

I’ve heard the parents of twins describe how their babies, sharing a crib, will sometimes identify each other’s thumbs instead of their own and set to work sucking anyway. That’s how close they feel one to another and that’s how it’s been for my girl Annie and the friend she met at that 6th grade party: I speak of Susan, whose arduous initiation into motherhood I wrote about Monday.They were inseparable back then. Weekdays when she slept here, they would tackle that homework right away, eat an early supper, bathe or shower and  be tucked into Annie’s big bed up under the eaves by 9pm. I remember the morning Annie got down first to breakfast and reported that at one point during the night Susie, still sound asleep, had tried tucking a strand of Annie’s hair behind her own ear. (Easy mistake to make: you could let yourself down from a second-story window on Annie's hair back then.)Maybe I talked enough about their friendship the other day but what can I say? It isn’t often that such a large event takes place in the life of a person whose stuffed platypus has so often been through your washer and drier.Susie’s a natural athlete; every coach she has ever had has said as much. Annie, meanwhile, could care less about making the team. When, in sixth grade, she was pressed by her orthodontist to say what sport she most enjoyed playing she stunned him by quipping “I don’t do sports; I think sweating is  bad for you.” So too,  on her very first day of Archery as a freshman in high school she came home to say she’d gotten stuck inside the bow.They’re as different as day and night are Susan and Annie, and yet so close they consider themselves real sisters.I talked with Sooz yesterday in the hospital where she has been since Friday, rather a long stretch by today’s standards. She sounded a million miles away and calmer than the Buddha. I loved hearing her like this though it’s hard for me to picture her so still and quiet, knowing what she’s been like most times in our company, playing games and making everyone laugh, as see here below with our boy Michael  back in '98. That new baby she and Kevin just had, God bless him, is in for some very lively times.It isn’t  every day a baby is born to a person whose stuffed animals you’re on intimate terms with.)

Pinocchio's Nose

The sign on a nursing home reads “Sad Place for Lonely Old People.” (2)  The cocktail waitress in a casino greets her customers by saying “I actually wanted to be one of the dancers, but I’m not attractive enough.” (3) The serving-person in a restaurant sets a margarita down in front of someone and says “I took a little sip of that, right there, see?”I've seen parts of “The Invention of Lying,” six or seven times. Saw the beginning four times, the end twice. The middle part I mostly missed, or anyway I didn't see enough of to understand its strange take on religion. I did get its take on fibbing though which is basically that without falsehood’s ability to “airbrush” hard facts, life can be pretty bleak.The above examples make you realize how rarely people do tell the truth, at least in social situations.Me, I started fibbing early, tutored by my big sister Nan whose yeasty little mind was ever active. Sometimes she had us telling people our dad was an airline pilot, sometimes a member of the CIA. I guess she figured since no one was ever going to meet the man we were free to invent him.Even in my high school years I was still fibbing occasionally. Sometimes I said I was biracial and dad was African, whereas in truth he was just this white guy living in Delaware last anyone knew. I must have felt there was freedom in lying, which is nuts, since the only real freedom comes in telling the truth.Which I do nowadays.Mostly.Oh sometimes I’ll compliment a person on a task even if he fell short, stammered while giving a talk, say, or got so jittery he went off on some wild tangent, but who needs a frank assessment under circumstances like those? Kindness should pretty much trump honesty every time and that’s the sure-enough truth.And while we’re talkin' truth I might as well admit it here: I really wanted to be one of those dancers too. ;-)And now the film's trailer, for fun and reflection:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-H2dNfx-Uw]

New Mother

Pretty nice weekend with the warm weather and  the birds all yelling with joy like they’d just gotten a governor’s pardon. Then yesterday morning as I made the coffee the news flashed over my phone: Susan had had her baby, little Susie who came into our life when she met our girl Annie in 6th grade and they both just knew they would be friends forever. She is resting now in Salt Lake City – the birth was hard and she couldn’t yet talk on the phone - but oh if she were next to me now what I wouldn’t say to her! Maybe something like this:“Remember when Annie brought you here the day after you two met? It was Good Friday and we dyed Easter eggs. And then the next day we shopped for pale-yellow and purple paper goods and a stuffed bunny the exact color of that warm spring soil. And then Easter and then that Monday was April vacation and they were running the Boston Marathon and I brought all you kids into the Museum of Science, remember that? Do you remember how later that day when you got out of the car at your own house you said in this cute shy way “I have a brother.”And then he came too, after school and on outings, and your oldest brother as well and it was a whole new stage in the life of this family, already enriched with one honorary son but now with you three too. With YOU, Susie, and your flashing dark eyes and your love of all dogs everywhere. You leaping away in the name of Track and Soccer and Basketball in high school and then off to Smith College right alongside your Annie. Remember sitting in Sage Hall the first time everyone accepted to the Class of '01 was assembled, you turning to us with an impish smile and whispering . “Where are the guys?!” Ah but you flourished at this fine women’s college, you and Annie both. She made notes on her notes and threw elegant beer parties in her room and aced every course they threw at her while you cracked Geology wide open, swam competitively, sang in an à cappella  group and used that cute scratchy voice to get your own little radio show. Then it was field study all over the planet, and grad school, and then suddenly Kevin as if he'd been waiting for you all that time, the perfect match, blonde to your dark, tall to your tiny…And now this unimaginable gift of a child.I remember when your mom died at last of her terrible illness in your 10^th grade year. At her memorial service you stood to sing an à cappella version of  “In My Life”  together with your closest singing pals - only your face began to crumple part-way through and Annie rose and encircled you with an arm and brought you back to the pew.You couldn’t feel your mum that day maybe - or maybe you could feel her all too well, I don’t know. But I bet you can feel her this morning, the beautiful Peggy, gone too soon of ALS. And thank God, thank God for this: that when her sister Ginny heard the news on the farm yesterday she got on the very next plane, and isn’t she there right now this morning as you wake, there holding you all in her incomparable Aunt Ginny way.To you both! To you all, until Annie and I and your dad can get there too!