Rich Footage

Yesterday I couldn't find half of the presents I bought. You can see that sad story one post back. Today on the other hand what I seem to have I lost is my little pocket video camera. This is really too bad because I had just caught some footage of the 1985 Lawrence Welk Christmas Reunion Show in which retired cast member Jo Ann Castle did a Ragtime version of Jingle Bells with a high airy confection of blonde hair that shook as she played like Santa’s famous bowlful of jelly-belly. I videotaped it right off the TV, the waltzers, the harmonizers, the smilers with their big teeth, all performing  like wind-up figures on top of a music box in their time capsule from 1985.Anyway this is how this ragtime/boogie-woogie pianist normally looked when she sat down at the piano. Go in past the gentler pace of the intro for the full workout:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfpVCpZBHbw&feature=related]Now imagine her  head movements with that high-rise hairdo taking on a life of its own - this is what I caught on the camera I can't now find -  and she becomes Rowlf the piano-playing Muppet.  (Love those Muppet musicians!  Remember Animal the wildman on drums? Click here to see   him accompanying the Great Rita Moreno on a comical version of "Fever.")After getting such a boot out of  Miz Castle tickling the ivories 25 years ago I then went WAY back in my search and found this a clip from a show 20 years earlier in which cast numbers and their families are introduced by one of the hardest-working Santas ever.Forty seconds in one of the babies starts to howl. Catch that, then watch what the child’s father does just before the one-minute mark. THAT’s what we need more of in our holiday specials: real and unscripted human drama![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gny3BNpBKTs]

Where Have All the Presents Gone?

Countdown to Christmas, now what did I do with those gift cards? They’re small so they slip under things, they could be anywhere... OK not in my purse, not in my pockets, not in my bra. (I keep my headset inside my bra; what do I care if I look like my old piano teacher Mrs. Toye who would reach a hankie out from the deep cover of her gigantic bosom to wipe the stalactite perpetually forming on the tip of her nose.)Hmmm uh oh not in any one of those places and not inside the Marshall’s bag either.. Wait, what if I didn’t get them at Marshall’s at all but at the grocery store instead? I did! I OH GOD I DID GET THEM AT THE GROCERY STORE AND MUST HAVE THROWN THEM AWAY WITH THOSE DOZEN PLASTIC BAGS LAST NIGHT! - which means they’re under this morning’s coffee grounds and egg shells and the kidney beans that sat in their Tupperware 4 days too long and are now imparting that certain rotten-egg-and-swamp-gas smell to the whole Tall Kitchen Trash Bag.This could get even uglier: there are shrimp tails in there too.And now Christmas is just two days away and Friday's the federal holiday so I just better find them and wrap them and mail them tomorrow and by the way where on EARTH are all those really awesome presents I so craftily bought back in October?It’s all so horrifying. The only thing that comforts me is that it happens every blankety-blank year.

Shortest Day

Today is that shortest day you felt coming way back in  summer. Now there'll be brighter mornings, and longer afternoons, with the snow all  coral-colored in the sun, pale indigo in the shadows, like this picture, snapped one morning after a snowstorm.Maybe you love the early dawns of summer, but it's funny: sometimes you love these dark mornings more. You wake early and lie a long time thinking. Maybe you remember your babyhood; remember lying in your crib, having your pants changed, sitting in your high chair. Not many can do this but you can and sometimes, sometimes, on these dark dark mornings you think you are little still and it’s all getting ready to start again, like movies do at the Cineplex.Instead you are what? Three-quarters, four-fifths of the way  through your  life? In the mirror you still look like yourself but not in photos. Not in shop windows. It shocks you to see what time has done and you understand finally what your mother meant about all young people being beautiful with their full cheeks and their strong white teeth.On summer noontimes this change might bother you but not in this early morning darkness. You lie in the bed and the room is cool and the street it utterly quiet. Tomorrow  Nature wall begin her great slow cartwheel and you will ride on her back into your future. Not today though. Today you're the child  not yet born, all calm and still and patiently waiting.

Big Sister

When my big sister was 18 months old, she broke out of her crib, found the diaper-changing supplies and got right to work scattering the cotton balls like rose petals and overturning the Baby Oil. She must have stood a while as the thick liquid burbled out onto the floor because three little footprints remained on the dry and porous floorboards forever after.Through the years of Mumps and German Measles, our  babyhood still in sight, the two of us would go in search of  these marks, hidden by then under a small rug.  "How could I have been this little?!” she would marvel every time.Nan was always drawn to a mystery. The Golden Arm, the ghostly voice, the getting yourself coffined and planted even though you were still alive: these were the things Nan loved and so I loved them too. But I became serious in time and bored dozens of nice boys near to death on dates with my endless talk on Life’s Real Meaning.Nan never did that. Nan was a butterfly you could never catch and pin down, a blithe spirit who even at age four would be three floors away within 40 seconds of entering  a department store.She got to live with our mom and our dad - until our dad left us for good the summer of the Baby Oil. Maybe that’s why she never wanted to find him later the way I did:  I’m pretty sure she remembers him on some level. And she is a merry soul and prefers to stay merry.We couldn’t be more different in short and yet she accepts me.  She thinks I’m crazy but she loves me anyway.  Yesterday was her birthday so I got to call her up and tell her I love her that way too.

"Hap" Sheehy and little Anne as she was then called

Seasonal Amnesia

Remembering Christmas Past is like remembering childbirth: a certain amnesia sets in. If you asked me yesterday what happens most  Christmases, I would have said they were uneventful. Then I looked  one up in an old diary.How quickly we forget.That year, I came up with the idea that I should send a card to 192 people, and thus spent every spare moment over a five-day period entering their names and addresses on my laptop so as to generate labels. Finally one morning I pressed “Print” and hurried away to shower. When I came back, the pear-bottomed black cat was delicately shredding the sheets of labels one by one as they emerged from the printer, while sitting directly ON the laptop, causing it to beep frantically, then lose its mind altogether, writing  “#!” when you tried to write "the" and %#~" when you tried to type "and."And it kept ON doing this, hiccupping and speaking in gibberish for the next 13 hours.Then I spent five more days of non-existent spare moments working up a newsy collage of holiday greeting and when it turned out to be too big for a conventional envelope, I went and bought bigger ones, on which the printed labels now looked puny and impersonal. So I took ANOTHER five days and made everyone who came into the house help me decorate each one with a bright holiday drawing.And then there were the Disappointing Presents.  Our then-sixth grader wanted Army Guys, but when the bucket of them was opened on Christmas morning, I turned out to have bought the wrong kind: guys that couldn’t even lie down in the mud and inch along on their tummies. Our 10^th-grader-at-the-time turned out to be hoping for a  leather jacket and instead I bought her a big silky Cheese Puff of a thing. Also: the much-wished-for video game was sold out until March, it turned out you couldn’t BUILD Erector Set Number 6 unless you already OWNED Erector Sets Number 1 through 5 and the two presents I thought were sure-fire which I had bought and wrapped super-early I couldn’t even find until three days after the 25th.On climbing into bed that night, our boy’s eyes shone with sorrow.  “It’s my fault,” he said, so as not to sadden his mom. “I didn’t get in the Christmas spirit....I should’ve thought more about what I was giving, instead of what I was getting.”So this year we’re all TRYING to do that. Still, you sure can get turned around. It turns out I was the one who wanted a big downy Cheese Puff of a jacket! But while we're at it I’d like a new wallet too, since mine looks like it was mauled by a pit bull and is also covered with ink stains, as literally everything I own, even my very underwear. Also a nice book and  maybe some undies not yet written on- Oh wait but see?  I’m doing it again.  You forget it from year to year, but this season does just makes a person crazy!

Thank You JESUS!

Everyone should have a daughter like this. Our girl Annie, seen here at age 11, went to culinary school between college and grad school and for a while worked nights and weekends for a famous Boston chef and restaurateur.  (Her 'real job is in project management.) Then, after a few years something wonderful happened: She decided that really she'd rather just cook for US her family and ever since our holidays have been pure bliss. An email  from her just now says it all:"Hi guys," it begins.  "Here’s what I’m cooking for us all on  Christmas Eve:

• Bay Scallops with Celery Root Puree & Bacon Vinaigrette
• Mussels with Pernod Breadcrumbs
• Salmon Parcels with Caviar
• Mini Salt Cod Cakes With Niçoise Slivers
• Oysters & Pearls
• Halibut with Parsnip Puree & Spinach
• Salmon with Orange Beurre Blanc & Wild Rice

"And then on Christmas Day:

• Tomato Tart Tatins
• Roasted Pumpkin & Brioche with Comte Fondue
• White Anchovies with White Bean Puree & Bacon Vinaigrette
• Roasted Turkey Breast
• Slow-Roasted Beef Tenderloin"

She has the rest of us jokers filling in the gaps if there even are any gaps. My asssignment : the salad.

I'm thrilled in short.. But uh, does anyone know what ‘confit’ means? And what ARE tart tatins anyway? Celery root, its own vegetable completely separate from celery. is like heaven when prepared by Annie with a bit of butter, French Chef- style.  I'll be happy to just eat a bit of that and feed my share of the flaky buttery warm home-made croissants to this little guy and his brother. Hurry Christmas!(AND she's everyone's favorite auntie.)

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

I’ve been making my own holiday card for like the last 200 years or so, sending along the pet news and mentioning various  milestones. I also build in any pictures I think are funny, like this one of our nice old cat Abe which appeared with a caption mentioning how hard it is for him to live in a family where even the animals get made fun of.Then one year I had this picture, captioned "Alien Landing" in which I moved up to making fun of babies:This one below from last year served as a metaphor for how we all felt barreling down the slide toward 2010 - and I have to say I think a lot of us still feel  the way my little grandson obviously felt, second from the back there. Jittery times!Then finally there's this one, of  me on the new Weight Watchers Points Plus plan, rejoicing at great results.

You might as well laugh right?

A brand-NEW holiday card for 2010 getting worked on today because now is no time to stop smiling!

Hang 'em High

Here's one way to get a tree to behave: PAINT it onto the wall. What we do we hang our tree, sort of like the nurseries are starting to do but with one difference: they tie a rope to the top of their heads and make them sort of dangle, standing on tippy-toes to keep their scalps from tearing off. We're at least a little kinder: we tie the rope around the tree’s tummy, then lash it to the locks of the indows it stands between.It takes the suspense out of walking into the living room mornings, which everyone appreciates; we have enough ghosts around here as it is. At least once a week the ironing board busts out of its closet at midnight to land wham! on the floor. And then there's that old Navy footlocker once belonging to the first airman lost over the Bermuda Triangle. His parents moved into this house after his death and when the house was sold to us 30 years later it was sold footlocker and all. The wooden trunk sits behind a tiny  Alice-in-Wonderland-style door in an attic bedroom and tell ya what that little door yawns open all the time. Just yawns right open. It scares some overnight guests near to death.It never scared us. What scared us , until we got the rope idea, was hearing that soft whoosh when the tree fell over yet again because we knew what we'd see: every last ornament knocked silly, the tinsel hanging sideways, the treetop angel on the floor some 12 to 15 feet away....When she fell out of last year’s tree I drew a tear in one eye, dropped a little red ink around her mouth and put her in a tiny hospital bed, just for fun. It’s all you can do at this season: keep ahead of Crazy one laugh at a time.      

Born on this Date

“Born on This Date”: Normally I brush past that little item in the daily horoscope.  “Romance blooms! You are strong and supple! Watch for a windfall early next week!” Baloney, right? But there's one site I know of with such amazingly detailed accounts of the behaviors associated with each sign you really have to go there to check it out. I know they nailed the Gemini I gave birth to; he says so himself.The newspaper has quotes by famous people born on a particular day too of course. Irish Novelist Edna Farber is a December 15 baby and she once said, “in a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen.” I like that.Her birthday ‘twin’ and fellow writer Muriel Rukeyser said something nice too: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” I like that even more.Even famous 12/15 rich guy J. Paul Getty thought up a pearl of wisdom: “Getting results through people is a skill that cannot be learned in the classroom. “ (Hmmm. You can kind of see why HE didn’t become a poet. )All three of 'my' born-on-December-15th people are on my mind today. One has been my 'sister' since 1983 when she married David's brother Jeffrey. One is a lad dear to me both for his candor and his poet’s soul.  (He is, in fact, a poet-in-training.) And the third was my mother-in-law Ruth Payne Marotta who over the years gave me some of the best advice I have ever received. (Example: "It’s bad enough you're succeeding at your own marriage; don’t succeed at hers.")To any and all with December birthdays then! We’re a week away from the year’s shortest day; let’s quote Edna again and say Winter's the time when the inner things happen.. Let's light ALL the candles tonight and get 'inner' ourselves.

(and Happy Birthday, Ruthie in heaven We miss you more than we can say.)

Bah Bah Bleak Sheep

Just to cleanse our palates a little let's list some things we DON’T LIKE about the holidays. Thoughts?

• You in the back.... Did you say carolers, really? You don’t enjoy answering the door in the midst of a marital spat to find 20 Up With People-types smiling and nodding at one another as they sing in four-part harmony? Dude what is wrong with you?
• OK down front here: You’re saying you don't like ribbon candy. What were you, born in the 1880s? Ribbon candy hasn't really been around since they began fluoridating the water. It takes kids’ teeth clean out of their sockets.
• Keith Richards in a Hallmark special about a lonely man redeemed by the love of a beagle? KIDDING! You’ll wait a while before you see that one Luv!
• Over here: Pop artists coming out with Christmas albums they expect you to buy just because they're pop artists? You say Josh Groban who you find hard enough to take without having to listen to him warble his way through ‘Chestnuts’? Now Susan Boyle on Silent Night you can stomach, am I right? She sailed into the hearts of us Americans anyway the minute she pitched a fit about not winning Peat Bog Artist of the Year or whatever it was. We love to forgive, we Yanks!
• Regis in a Santa hat? Well now that's just MEAN. Regis is our Ramses the Great; with a little blush on the old cheekbones he’s plain adorable, like something your aunt made in ceramics class. And you gotta love Kelly. You can just tell  she's fun to live with.

Anyone else? Anyone? Before we close the nominations? Think about it and write us here at the Grinch Department if something comes to mind. And as for me, well I just love everything about Christmas ,especially those carolers. ;-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_stLIofpIg&feature=player_embedded#!]

Knot a Pretty Picture

It's not a pretty picture around here lately. The house is an absolute mess, with a package of From and To tags mixed in with the clean laundry and a strew of half-addressed Christmas cards sharing the kitchen counter with a couple of houseplants I had to practically put IV's into they got so thirsty this last week.Time was at this season, we put a candle in every window and that was fine for all the years the kids were here because kids you can order around: “Go light the candles! Go turn the candles off!” But these last few years I find I will do almost anything to avoid dealing with window candles and so, to compensate, I have been slowly collecting a number of wreaths and small-scale Christmas trees all, need I say, fake, which when set in place twinkle away, and hopefully give the neighbors the sense that the Marottas really do care about such things even though they’re almost always AWAY on Halloween and they never EVER adorn their front door with a nice wide garden hat sprouting pastel blossoms come spring.Make a long story short it was the wreaths that were getting to me yesterday; I knew if I didn’t get them hung in a handful of key windows they wouldn’t get up until December 24^th. I have that much to do over the next ten nights …I had a young guy here yesterday, kicking the holy hell out of my stupid laptop which turns out to be the real culprit in last week’s Case of the Mysterious Despairing Address-book on my phone.  (Click here for that tale of woe.) Nick knows just what to do and was quietly doing it for three long hours, and somewhere in there I remembered that he is both an Eagle Scout and a certified wilderness survivor.I asked him about my knots.I was trying to use fishing wire to hang my wreaths but the knots just kept slipping such that they looked like slow motion yo-yos moving down and down the windows 'til I could come and yank them up again and then boom the same thing over and over. So he taught me how to tie the kind of knot cowboys use and just like that the wreaths stayed up. He even stabbed the various elements of my two fake trees together and they're both twinkling away now, one on the porch and one here in my office, the only still-tidy room in the house… And you know I've been thinking as I write this: Maybe I can just stay in here for the next two weeks and have the Domino’s guy come by now and then and sail a pizza up to me Frisbee-style.

the one clean room

Day of Rest? At This Season?

Cleaning out my desk yesterday I came upon a year-old memo labeled Note to Self Regarding Holidays the first item of which reads "When it comes to seasonal decorations don’t bother hanging the mistletoe. Nobody ever got a kiss worth having based on a sprig of vegetation that two days in looks like a little dead bat." There's more too:

• When out shopping, focus on others, not yourself.
• This means no stopping to buy at that kiosk with the fake hair. Do you seriously want to come home after all that jostling with just a single gift because you spent all your time and money over a fistful of artificial ringlets? What are you, 12 and pretending to be the bride in your crystal-studded curls. Fake hair you do not need.
• Neither do you need frilly wares constructed from wee spans of satin and lace the size of cheese wedges.
• You may well need that famous new tea cozy of a garment, the sternum-to-kneecap Kevlar corset, but again try to remember this shopping effort is not for you.
• Sending a holiday card isn’t a thing you do for yourself either. Sure, you’ve heard people shouldn’t bother sending out cards unless it’s “fun” for them but that’s crazy talk. Most of the things we do are fun not fun and yet we do them. It’s practically the definition of adulthood.
• So write the darn cards and send them out, to every single person who sends one to you. Use the store-bought kind or make your own, either way.
• If you do make your own, throw in lots of pictures - everyone loves pictures – but for God's sake go easy on the long grey paragraphs of text. People are such wrecks these days they can hardly get their eyes to focus never mind wading through a 12-month blow-by-blow on you and your household pets.
• I write this last because I admit it: I’ve been guilty of producing way too much text in the holiday card, as well as carrying on about my own pets. And yet do I know very well how seldom I sit down and real every word of those newsy cards - until January rolls around, that is, at which point they seems so dear and fascinating I read every word and save them for the next six months. It isn’t rational, it’s the holidays. And who doesn’t feel the need to celebrate light and warmth in this months of the shortest days?

So I’ll say it again about contacting people whose life paths have crossed your own: do it. Just do it, whether you call, or write, or send an owl like Harry Potter’s friends at Hogwarts. Never make the mistake of thinking “oh, no one cares about me, no one will even notice if I don’t get in touch.” It is a lie spread by the old deceiver himself. We ALL care about you and require your presence in the circle, for you are the yarn and we are the sweater and we need every bright bit of fuzz we can find at this the lame pale tail-of-the-tail-end time of year.

The Fighter

When I turned into the Showcase Cinema parking lot at 10:30 yesterday morning the cars were already streaming in for the first  showing on the very first day of  The Fighter's limited opening. On the way I passed through the city center and the neighborhoods, past peeled paint and fresh paint, mills and row-houses, the churches the shops housed in what I know to be inns and taverns still standing since the 1850s.'Still Standing' would also have been a good name for this film about two brothers born in my hometown, the older one when I was in 5th grade at the Moody School, the younger when I was trudging home from the bus stop, an armful of books hugged tight to my chest. Both began boxing in the years I was coming home from college to find out, in that thrilling underage way, just what a boilermaker was and who you had to walk in with to get served one.This is a story about blood, both the kind you share with your family and the kind you leave on the floor as life hits you the way it hits us all sooner or later, "head-body-head-body” as Micky explains his chief tactic to his girl Charlene.  And the violence of the sport seems so much worse the way this film reveals it, principally on the faces of the ones who love Micky as they witness the carnage, just inches from the ropes.Somehow you end up rooting for them all, not just for the two boxers and Charlene and the Greek chorus of mouthy sisters, not just for the by-turns tough-and-tearful mom and the heart-of-gold dad but even for the asphalt. Even for the poor forlorn and childlike crack addicts.Almost 900 students graduated my year from Lowell High School and sure many have left; but many have stayed too and still work and/or live there. They are loyal in the same way any Bruce Springsteen fan would understand. In a way that those of us who left understand too, all of us children of a place that sits at the confluence of two great rivers, its  ropey waters braiding and twisting like the sinews on a young athlete’s back.

Murphy: "Love Me Love My Law"

Lessons from the universe: This morning at 6am, before I was really even awake , I went online and bought four pricey show tickets FOR THE WRONG DATE and - of course! - they are non-refundable. Also at 5am my phone opened its bright little eyes and asked me if I wouldn’t like to install a new version of itself, to which I foolishly foolishly FOOLISHLY replied Yes, forgetting entirely that my Outlook has been not been able to synch with any of the contacts on this idiot phone even once in the last ten months. Not once. No matter that I have spent more hours on that effort with technical support people than most women labor for. No matter that I brought the phone AND my laptop TO the Verizon store, as instructed, to see if those guys could sort it out. Their response after keeping both devices for nearly three hours? “Sorry!” Also, “Care to buy a Droid? How about an I-Pad? You know we have the 4-G network now. Take a look at this nifty Mi-Fi!”What happened is, with that one sleepy early-morning touch of  a 'yes' key, I lost all 1,100+ of my contacts. This meant I could not text, or send an email, or even call anyone whose number I didn't already know since the Carter years.I have to admit thought it is quite entertaining to get text messages from people whose identities you no can’t discern. I had two such messages shortly after breakfast. One said “When is Uncle Ed’s birthday?” and for a minute I thought it was God Himself trying to figure out if he’d missed the big 90^th. The second said “Can you take me to the mall after school?”“Who IS this?” I texted back. It could have been any one of a half dozen young people in my life and I must say I did find it sort of liberating not to know just who , since I was then able to draw on years of conditioning as a pain-in-the-ass mother to add “And howsabout a ‘Please?’"Confused I was in sum and confused I remained, all day long.Moral of the story and memo to me from the Universe: "Drink a little coffee for pity's sake, even  before you climb out of that bed - and for darn sure before you sit down in front of any technology!"

Stand By Us. He Did

“When the night has come and the land is dark and the moon is the only light we’ll see/ Still I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid/ just as long as you stand, stand by me…”Elizabeth Edwards is gone and it feels like she’s gone; but the man singing this old classic doesn't FEEL gone. I just spent an hour watching clips and listening to his music. And I looked up December 8 1980 in my diary and there was the killing, raw as a fresh wound.His spiritual brother Paul is gifted too of course but John had that bass-note of darkness and he didn’t care at all what they thought of his wife. I still smile when I think of how they found a way to embody that truism that love beats war with their two "bed-ins.” He had a great talent and he grew it and he shared it all around; what more does God want of us than this?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4_ghOG9JQM&feature=related]

Goodbye Elizabeth

She was one of us was Elizabeth Anania Edwards, a Girl Scout as she told the 1500 people gathered to hear her that morning in '07. We were at an annual event established to honors six or eight “leading women” in the community with a well-known figure brought in to address us.I say “us”: I was a Leading Woman in ’93 and for three months that summer a giant version of my face and the faces of five others hung in various public places around Boston.I didn’t deserve it.  What was I but a newspaper columnist who skulked around eavesdropping on people? But when I heard her talk that day about what mattered to her I was simply inspired; thought, “I can do WAY more for this organization” and began doing it. I volunteered as a counselor on one special day and then began going into our two correctional facilities for women as part of the Beyond Bars program that brings the girls for troop meetings with their incarcerated mums. Once I demonstrated a neck-and-shoulder routine and we talked about the mind-body connection - I was moonlighting as a massage therapist at the time - and once, wearing my writer's hat, I led everyone in a session where we told funny ‘What Was I Thinking’ stories on ourselves.Elizabeth did way more than this of course, even before he re-dedication to good works after the death of her boy. I had always admired her; but that morning I LIKED her so much too. She was already sick, her hair telltale thin from treatment and she did have to rest a while before she could come back out and sign copies of her book for us.I look at this photo now and think “You never looked like that Terry,” though we are twins, born the same year and photographed in the same poses and hairstyles for our various yearbooks.I hope we go to some brightly lit place after the dim mystification of this human living. And I hope she is there, Elizabeth, all well again and smiling that beautiful smile.

Sad

I was so sad yesterday. In the supermarket, on the road, my eyes kept filling with tears and why? Because I hurt my ankle at dawn in the darkened driveway trying to get Uncle Ed’s wheelchair into my car? Because when I went to get him for his bloodwork he said he felt ‘bereft’ during the whole six days I was gone, causing me to feel I let him down? Because that's what we all do, let down the people we love who love us back even with our annoying habit of leaving the cabinet doors open as we cook?Maybe I’m sad because HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” ended last night and I just loved it, the way they got so much right about the year 1920. I once taught a course on the Twenties in America, so I know something about the era. The main thing I know is what that First World War did to people, which you see so clearly in the character of Jimmy Darmody: he has quite simply lost his humanity. (His hideously disfigured friend and fellow-vet Richard Harrow has the same problem only his wounds show.)How can people recover from such an experience? I heard a segment on This American Life about a child who had been in a Romanian orphanage until he was seven, literally tied in a crib with no stimulation, no human engagement... The couple who adopted him were at wit’s end by the time he was in adolescence; he was that violent. Then this adoptive mother underwent a special kind of therapy to bond her with her son the same way an infant bonds with its mother: by having the two gaze fixedly into one another’s eyes for hours at a time. It is an amazing and hopeful story.Maybe I was just sad because of my own mother's death and I shouldn’t really look on that loss as I did here yesterday. Maybe if I lie on my back now she and all my dear ones will come, the way Billy Collins says they do in this 30-second clip, pausing above us to watch til we sleep:[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3474890035450021520#]

THE DEAD by Billy Collins

The dead are always looking down on us, they say.while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heavenas they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,they think we are looking back at them,which makes them lift their oars and fall silentand wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

Stopping by Woods

I shot a long video of my mother some 20 minutes before she died though no one imagined she was anything but healthy that fateful afternoon. It’s a mercy my battery died before she did or the video would be utterly unbearable to watch instead of merely painful. But where do the dead GO? And why don’t any one of them ever write? My Great Aunt Mame used to get so exasperated as she started naming all her dead: mother,  father, all nine siblings, her friend the town’s postmistress, the parish priest Father O’Brien .... “Not even a postcard!” she'd bluster disgustedly before laughing at the folly of her anger.I once bought an audio tape of Robert Frost reading his own poems that I treasure because there it is, his very voice. And now thanks to the artistry of British videographer Jim Clark, here he is again, reciting for me every time I press the 'Play' icon below.I realize there must be plenty of film of him reading when he was on the circuit  but by that point in his life he had suffered and darkened; anyway even at the best of times he was no showman. But you touch 'Play' now too and see that even in this photo taken when his eyes were closed,  he appears lost in thought merely, as if composing the words on the spot. Here then: "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" for us all at week's beginning with miles to go before we sleep too.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG24ohpacDk&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=MLGxdCwVVULXdKFxVoDP3Ieo689GKmlQYV]

Slaves are Cute!

And speaking of the commercialization of desire (see yesterday's post) I once went to an exhibit that by excerpting words and images from 100 years’ worth of ads sought to teach us ladies about both 'the women we have been and the women we have wished to be' – all according to those who claim to sense our deepest yearnings.What they 'sensed' 100 years ago? That, still denied the right to vote, women  yearned to be heard: A Kellogg’s ad of the period shows a young matron saying to her grocer, “Excuse ME! I know what I want and I want what I asked for: Toasted Corn Flakes! Good day!”  (The poor guy probably offered her oatmeal.)By the ‘20s though, advertisers had begun portraying  women as much more alive to the various energies crackling around them. As art critic John Berger said,  'Men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at.' In other words women can be  urged to see themselves as others see them -  and from this one notion sprang a million ads.Witness the one for hairdryers, showing a woman in curlers. “You could have been so nice to come home to." Or the one reading, “Often a bridesmaid but never a bride” ad, which caused sales of Listerine to jump 4000%. Or the cruel little Coty ad that said, “Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman.”In the ‘40s, ads urged the ladies to keep the wartime economy pumped by what they called “patriotic shopping.” Then, when Johnny came marching home and they were fired from their wartime jobs “the feminine mystique” sent them all back to the kitchen where nothin’ said lovin’ like something from the oven.Later came the 60s with its many freedoms, including reproductive freedom. At this point in an effort to seem swingy and  'mod', copywriters went in for sass replete with double meanings as in Clairol’s “Does she or doesn’t she?  Then with the women’s movement well established, advertisers tried appealing to women’s sense of themselves as strong and smart, ushering in today’s cruel framing of males as clueless dopes which is still where we are today.It's terrible to be patronized the way the ladies in these two ads are. what is it with humans that they have to have people to look down on? It makes me almost yearn to be part of teh great democracy of dogs.

Seeing is Believing

You see it all at the Mall around now, the marketing of desire, the headless child mannequins in the store windows, all those grownups pushing and crowding to get the holiday picture…  (Note the body language on this little one in the plaid: a critical shopper even at age four.)It’s enough to make you a Scrooge - that is, until you brush past a man on his way to the rest room and you quick lift your camera and - flash! snap a picture and who does it turn out to be? And instead of flinching/ startling/ frowning, he smiles at you and says “Hey, How’s it goin’?” It’s enough to make you believe in Rudolph. :-)

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