The Annual Breast Fest

Had the yearly mammogram; now I can seek counseling for the resulting PTSD.No seriously, it wasn’t that bad, and I did learn something: I learned that the technician’s mother died of cancer and her father  of heart. I got this information by telling her that I wasn’t anticipating a bad result since in my family we all just drop dead, some at home, some at the mall. She wasn’t shocked. You can’t shock the mammogram ladies; they’re just too cool.She learned something too when I asked her why, on the lengthy questionnaire , they ask you your bra size.“Oh that. This doesn’t sound very scientific but it used to be we had two rooms, one for women size 36 B and under and one for those over that size, I don’t know why.” Then she paused a minute. “I know this sounds crazy but I think they’re changing the bra sizes on us . I mean have you ever heard of a 32E?“Have I! it’s because of the really fancy bra stores where you’re supposed to believe the bras are made of placental material from the mothers of Miss America contestants or something. They only HAVE crazy bra sizes. They told me I was a 32 F!”“32 F?!”“And I'm just a regular normal-looking girl, right? It’s  because they want to make them as tight as they can around your rib cage and I have this little narrow rib cage, upholstered as it may be. Their idea: anchor it low and tight in back  and that will raise everything in front sky-high. Think of a person with a pair of ice skate slung over his shoulder, it’s the same principle, the lower the higher, get it?”She got it. Anyway it was a nice human exchange. Even though I waited more than 90 minutes for my big moment under the lights, I left feeling  'seen' and understood and if a little squeezed, mostly just squeezed for time.

DanceMorphosis

No more Nautilus for me, or Aerobics either. For sure no more of the private hell of  Step Aerobics.Depending on what day of the week it is you’ll find me either clenching my abdominals or dancing . At the Y. With a roomful of other people, including a 90-year-old who can do  a better imitation of a soft pretzel than anyone else I know.Often I do  Zumba, which is  fast-paced Latin dancing mostly: Meringue, Mambo, Salsa, with Dances of Many Other Times and Places thrown in. I also take a Hip Hop class each week and another class with a lot of Bollywood, which is actually a lot more like Hip Hop than you might imagine. (In fact click the link below to see some adorable Bollywood dancers:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aumLcSU3-g]But what I really really really love these days is the dance technique called Nia which you could say is what you get when roomfuls of  otherwise normal adults take leave of their senses entirely . Go in past the naked-lady James Bond silhouettes  to the clip of me sitting in a dance studio and speaking German! The actual movements start about a minute into the video but don’t I look awesome ? Thanks to my new regimen at the Y I'm now multilingual - AND I have no tummy at all![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQNPZdXtc0k&feature=related]

Awesome Tips & Great Ideas

One, for a nice hot bath, run the cold water full blast, all by itself until you get about six inches of it on the bottom of the tub. This will give you a good start on your volume. Then and only then, turn off the Cold and bring on the Hot, also full blast, until the tub is full and the temperature perfect.(Not recommended: wandering off to fold your socks while the tub is filling, lest you get the mix wrong and end up lowering your naked little self into something that feels like a large gelatin salad.) Two, for a good night’s sleep, put the bedroom clock in a place where you can’t see it from a lying-down position. It turns out that even the small amount of light from those bright electronic numerals can drill right through your eyelids, which are only half closed most of the time anyway. And if they’re really open it means you’re dwelling in the anguished Kingdom of Insomnia where the last thing you need is to see the long slow hours ticking past.(Not recommended: doing this before you conquer the mystical Tantric feat of waking yourself up automatically, at any desired hour, though you might be surprised by  how easy it is to acquire this skill.) Three, for fully waking after your Sleeping Beauty act, install a coffee pot within 20 feet of your bed.  You need coffee and you shouldn’t have to stumble around trying to find some when you’re still half asleep. I keep mine ten feet from the bed along with my sweetener and some powdered milk.(Not recommended: bringing real milk into the bedroom for a sleepover. It curdles at room temperature and makes the room smell like a cow barn.) And finally, bringing us right back to the top again just like that old Ferris wheel of a calendar does with us each year, Four, for starting the day in the best possible way, devise a contraption that will slide you from your bed directly into that fresh hot bath.Too tall an order you say? Not at all. The Victorians invented such a gizmo in the early 1850s and brought it to London to display at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations - and that was  over 150 years ago.I say here's to  great sleeps and fresh awakenings too – and that blend of wit and optimism that let old Tom Edison keep on keepin' on until, for less than a penny’s worth of filament, he had perfected the long-burning, civilization-changing electric light bulb. And if he could do that why couldn't we come up with something at least as cool?

Try This

Poetry is what I turn to when trouble comes.If  you're anywhere near my age and you hear of such things as happened outside that Tucson supermarket yesterday you think at once of the 60s, how one after another the great men died: Jack and Malcolm, Megdar and Bobby and Dr. King....There were crazies then too but was there this level of hatred, these numbers of guns?Here is Wendell Berry's answer to the crooked, the venal, the cocksure.. When he says embrace the flag he means the flag of leaves I think. Or the simple grass perhaps, the  beautiful uncut hair of graves as Walt Whitman called it. Read the part about the mothers. Read the part about going in the field with your love. Feel hopeful, and sure and unafraid...

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,vacation with pay. Want moreof everything ready-made. Be afraidto know your neighbors and to die.And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mysteryany more. Your mind will be punched in a cardand shut away in a little drawer.When they want you to buy somethingthey will call you. When they want youto die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do somethingthat won't compute. Love the Lord.Love the world. Work for nothing.Take all that you have and be poor.Love someone who does not deserve it.Denounce the government and embracethe flag. Hope to live in that freerepublic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannotunderstand. Praise ignorance, for what manhas not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.Say that your main crop is the forestthat you did not plant,that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvestedwhen they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.Put your faith in the two inches of humusthat will build under the treesevery thousand years.

Listen to carrion - put your earclose, and hear the faint chatteringof the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyfulthough you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheapfor power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfya woman satisfied to bear a child?Will this disturb the sleepof a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.Lie down in the shade. Rest your headin her lap. Swear allegianceto what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicoscan predict the motions of your mind,lose it. Leave it as a signto mark the false trail, the wayyou didn't go. Be like the foxwho makes more tracks than necessary,some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

Workin' 9 to 5

It’s Saturday and I feel LAZY. Slept late  today - ‘til 7:30 as against 5:10 – and went to bed last night with no t’s crossed and no i’s dotted, very unlike me.One minute I was reading Jane Eyre on my bed, fully clothed my meager four ounces of wine at my elbow and the next I was sound asleep and dreaming all kinds of racy ancillary adventured for old Jane to get involved in.  Then it was I-don’t-know-what-time and I was under the covers, mostly clothed and drooling, the wine still untouched beside me.I get so tired as the week goes on. We all do. I look at the traffic report on TV mornings and there we all are in our cars hours before dawn, inching along toward work. I go out in my own car and there we are waiting at bus stops, in snow and rain and air so cold it makes your fillings hurt.The French have it knocked. They've got free this, free that, 6 weeks of vacation and nobody goes in to work ‘til 9 or 10 in the morning and then they’re out at the cafés nights laughing and smoking their brains out and drinking the good red wine.Say what you want about us Americans, I think we're  the hardest-working people anywhere. So me falling asleep sitting up? And the two EMTs seen sacked out below?  Well it's bound to happen sometimes, right? ;-)

Observations by the Timid

What's with the birds? When you invite them they’re suddenly nowhere to be found. I have this dandy bird feeder outside on the dogwood and NO one has come near it - except today when two poodles who tromped across the snow to have  BMs in my yard. (On MY Snow! With their master escorting them!)But seriously where ARE all the birds? Last summer I couldn’t get rid of them. They made babies on my windowsill who I had to watch for two solid months as they put their wee little heads inside their mother’s mouth and down into her stomach! Gross!I  guess I don’t understand Nature very well. OR people  who trot their dogs onto my land to do their business. It was just 6am and still pitch dark this morning though so I bet that guy thought he was totally getting away with it.Not that I’d do anything anyway. Not that I’d call out the window to her or wire  the bushes to administer  electric shocks to their delicate underparts or anything.One of my kids is fierce about dog droppings . She returns them to the family of the offending canine and says "Your dog left this in my yard"  with the sweetest smile you ever saw. If I weren’t related to her I’d be terrified of her. She really rattled this one big hefty guy who drops by the house  a lot. He came one time when she was there with our grandbaby. “Is  that  a boy or a girl?” he said pointing  a large paw at the child. “A boy,” I told him. “Kid needs a haircut!” he snorted .Now his momma was out in the deck at the time but she heard him all right-  and when she came in she walked right over with that same big old smile: “Thanks for weighing in about the baby's hair!” she said to him without a hint of sarcasm., as if what he had said were Kindness itself. And his expression: one of total confusion.Me I can’t do that. I can’t smile when I’m mad . I can’t even confront trespassers, not even the ones who stroll past, glance quick at our windows, then reach up and swipe a dozen blossoms from our hydrangea trees .I see them though. I see them because day or night, dark or light I am lurking behind the curtains. I am the  Boo Radley of the neighborhood. :-) 

Shut My Mouth

I've been trying all day to think  how people work their way back toward cheeriness when they’ve got the blues. Some drink I suppose, some gamble, some collect dolls - there's a serious chunk of the population addicted to doll-collecting not sure you knew that - and some just lie flat down and spend hours staring at whatever’s in front of them.I tried that last night in front of “Parenthood,” the NBC show with the lovably flawed Craig T. Nelson character and the star-crossed Lauren Graham character  getting kissed by the wrong guy all the time. (She’s pretty adorable herself; who wouldn’t want to kiss her? Except her kids, the short seething girl with too much eye makeup and the mute yet sensitive boy.)  But even this sprightly show could not  restore my joy. I was just lower than the underbelly of a snake. I lacked the energy to even click it off -  had to ask David to do it for me.  “You can’ pick up the remote now? " he said, momentarily  distracted from his own addiction to the Stieg Larsson novels.“I know! Put me out of my misery!”  I mewed and so he clicked it off and I turned on to my tummy and went to sleep. (And yes I know you’re not supposed to have TV in your bedroom. I know I just wrote all that about how even an alarm clock is too bright to be around when you’re even thinking about sleep. I will  only say that the day we went ahead and got one anyway  WAS ONE OF THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF MY LIFE, OK?)And then I went to the Post Office and got this letter written by someone in response to what might have  struck her as an exceedingly optimistic column of mine. It is just so sad; it makes me feel like the proverbial man who cried because he had no shoes until he met a man who had no feet.How to respond to a letter like this?  The poor soul just ends it here, without even a  signature. What can I possibly say to her?

I-Pad for Dummies

Half way through the day when you realize you’re probably NOT going to do all you'd hoped to do it’s good to drop back and make a list - because it helps. I  was ready to throw myself out the window for all I couldn’t seem to get started on – until my gaze fell on my mate’s bureau and this dumb jokey gift I got for him, just because I’m a typical American and easily beguiled.They call it a Boogie Board™ (lame name. Brookstone!) and it’s little more than an Etch-a-sketch only not as hardy. It has an LED that sort of illuminates the writing surface but not all that well. And it says right on it when the battery runs out you just throw the whole thing away, but still: it did help me raise my spirits.First I took pictures of myself holding it, then I wrote on it and took pictures of what I wrote.Here you will see my food intake for the day. (It’s a thing we Weight Watchers people are doomed to do 24/7. It’s WORSE than watching your liver get plucked out by birds every day and having it grow back every night.)  Then I made that comforting list and just look at all I was going to do, calling carpenters and eye doctors and massage therapists; putting a walnut stain one old piece of furniture and applying the finish to another; making the homemade soup and going to buy more firewood;  running on the goddam TREADMILL and blogging and all that before dinner because I know I'm no good after dinner.I did some of this I guess though nobody got any homemade soup, that's for sure. And for the first time in a long time I didn't get the old blog post thought up in timely fashion.But just making this list -  here seen at an artsy angle like the Prologue of Star Wars - made me feel better and there’s the real distinction between us and the animals: not the ability to accessorize as that Clairee says in Steel Magnolias but the ability to do very little actual work in a day, then sit down and draw up a list to that makes you feel that very, very soon you really WILL do it all.

Hibernating

Man I’m lovin’ these nice blank days you get after New Year’s. I got so relaxed yesterday I went to sip my coffee and poured it right onto my clean white shirt. Didn’t care either. Just wore it all day and told people it was the map of Chile. (Right there: that’s the beauty of not being a kid. You’re finally free of the What Will They Think of Me’s. Nowadays I even wear a fanny-pack when it suits me and what do I care if my favorite shirt is a hand-me-down from one of my daughters? And she got it in the early ‘90s? From a junk shop called Dollar a Pound? It’s comfortable - as soft as a sweater made of baby kittens.)I got some gorgeous loungewear for Christmas but I haven’t taken it out of the plastic yet. Sunday and most of yesterday  I wore my Abominable Bathrobe all day, a fuzzy oversized thing really made for a man. Because how many hours of the  day and night do I go around tightening my core and sucking in my gut? It’s all they talk about at the Y, which I go to six days a week or anyway two.What fun for once to bum around all day in PJs!  I hadn’t done that since the time I drew some measles on my chest to dodge the big math test my second year of high school. Normally I’m all dashing about, setting the world on fire, etc. while Tightening The Muscles of My Pelvic Floor. These last two days though? Nuh-uh. Maybe I just have a temperature in which case great. Mothers never get sick; I haven’t thrown up since the early 80s. What fun if it really IS the measles this time and I get to lounge some more with my dear dog Spot!

v

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(Or wait, maybe that's mu husband David. He knows how to have fun himself)

Someone's in the Kitchen With Dinah

To get in practice for the holidays just past I tried making a  pumpkin pie with a recipe that called  for canned skim milk and a ready-made fat-free, sugar-free graham-cracker crust – only as it happened I was out of the special milk and no grocery store anywhere in MY galaxy had that wondrous crust. AND the guests were due in an hour and suddenly I  somehow couldn't FIND the recipe and so had to improvise. The result? Something that looked like what you’d get if you moistened a little kitty litter and patted it onto a pie plate.So maybe I’m not the world's best cook, that’s not such a bad thing, is it?  Maybe it’s even a good thing. With some fancy reputation to uphold I might not feel as open as I do to food-prep ideas of every sort – like the ones I found in The Irish Microwave Cookbook that recently presented itself from its hiding place in the back of a kitchen drawer.It was 1993 when one Ann Ward wrote this book over in Ireland, where I guess microwave technology still seemed pretty miraculous. Anyway a tone of total delight underlies every word, appearing not just in the tips but in the recipes themselves, such as the ones for Captain’s Cabbage, Gammon Joint, and those other yucky-sounding-to-us-but-doubtless-perfectly-normal-British-Isles dishes like Fish Pie and Smoked Kippers.It’s when she gets down to the pages and pages of tips that you really feel her sense of  satisfaction . So ease gently into this new year. Stow the skillet and see how far YOU can go with Ann’s wise counsel.For example: When cooking meat in the microwave she says, to avoid cheap stewing beef "as it will turn tough." (And you thought boiled meat sounded bad!)  Also, she says to trim the fat before cooking - just picture the spattering if you don’t!  - and to keep your microwave clean at all times. "Otherwise the microwaves concentrate on the dirt which will throw off your cooking times.” (An odd idea but probably true: Taking meat from ‘raw’ to ‘done’ by using a microwave probably WOULD generate some pretty large blobs of ‘dirt’.)Also she says, “when it comes to boiled eggs it is best not to try these in your microwave,” and there's the understatement of the century. Once when he was in 5th grade my boy and I performed an experiment by taking an egg still in its shell and put it the microwave. The results? Stunning and unforgettable bothAlso, “Cocoa is lovely out of the microwave,” she says and of course cocoa IS lovely, in or out of the microwave, as are many hot beverages "- which fact leads our Ann to her final tip:“Never heat alcohol in the microwave as for making hot whiskey. “You may heat the water and sugar but add the whiskey afterwards. If you try to heat the whiskey on its own it could ignite.” And where would you be THEN, with a whiskey fire blazing away in your magic hot-box? No, the real place for whiskey is very early in the cooking process, which is how my mother and aunt used it the Christmas their dad brought home a fully feathered turkey with its head still on, said “Here you go girls!” and moseyed off to the living room to curl up with his pipe and his paper.That's when they turned to the whiskey, just as I turned to the whiskey just as my very guests turned to the whiskey too - and we all sat down to our lovely lo-cal, no-cal Kitty Litter Pie.So see? Life really can be easy if you let it!

Another Opening Another Show

There we were yesterday at the opening of the show called 2011 whose first day most of us pretty much wasted, at least I hope we did. I know I wasted it - after a brief misguided attempt at scrubbing the mildew off the shower curtain that is. I took the whole thing down, immersed it in the tub, sprayed it with bleach-laced Tilex - only to realize I was also bleaching my nice black jersey instead, turning it white in comical concentric circles right in the two key leaning-over the tub places. Aargh!I also continued my crotchety observance of Festivus, the Airing of Grievances part if not the Feats of Strength part,  by entering the names on my hard drive of everyone I sent a Christmas card TO with the idea that today I will go through the cards themselves and list all the people I got cards FROM and then I’ll see who my friends are. It may be that I’m getting a tad odd - because I also feel feel surges of resentment when I write someone an email and they don’t answer. I want to hunt them down where they sleep and  hold their nostrils shut til they snort like a snuffleupagus – and yet how many emails remain unanswered in my own Inbox? 111 at last count. It’s weird: When I get a super-nice email I almost can’t answer it right away and there's another sad truth too: I can’t type worth a damn and my Dragon 10 Speech Recognition Software quit on me more than a month ago. I did get Dragon 11 as a Christmas present but you have to train it to recognize your accent and seriously folks is there anyone who gets the Boston accent right off the bat? Every time I say the word ‘dark’ it writes ‘dock’!But more on that later. Right now it’s the first Sunday in a shiny new year. The sun isn’t even up yet and I’m already attempting to dye that poor double-bull's-eyed jersey black again and then who knows? Maybe church which is always fun and cool. I sit in the balcony these days and get tears in my eyes just looking down at the tops of all those little heads. (Like I say: odd.) But speaking of balconies and Muppets how about a rendition of that great old Cole Porter song by a few of the best?  WITH a quick cameo by the best Muppets ever, those lovable old codgers Statler and Waldorf? Gotta love 'em![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8HUgAK5i-M] 

You Say You Want a Resolution

(♫ Well you kno-o-o-o-ow we all want to change the world… ♫ ) Hello and welcome.Well, it was a record year for the Marottas and that old Christmas tree: it didn’t go up til December 24^th and it came down today. I bought it in early December and every day after that we wanted to drag it inside and decorate it really we did; only I guess we wanted to read our books more. Hence RESOLUTION ONE: invite the kids to come for fun and awesome takeout on the weekend after Thanksgiving next year and get them to put up the darn tree.Second, it was also the first year I finally saw how much I overdo it in the friendliness department, sending a card – no making a card-  each year to then send to people many of whom never ever send one to us. Today I dragged out my list of recipients and realized there are names on there of people I’m not sure I can even place. Hence RESOLUTION TWO: cull 50 people who probably just make fun of my poor little homemade card anyway.Third and last, it was the year I decided how much I love twinkling lights, whether on a wreath or a tree or inside those little gingerbread-type houses that look like they’re made of sugar but will kill you with instant cancer if you even so much as lick them. RESOLUTION THREE: do not put these lights away in the attic behind the ancestors' high school diplomas and the obsessive tinily-lettered  timeline you made to cram for the US History SATs but keep them out and festoon the houseplants with them instead. Classy look!And if my title and first line seem familiar here is why. Have a listen and then let’s go out there and make SURE it’s gonna be all right all right all right. :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrkwgTBrW78]

End of Year Lookback Part 3

And last of all there are the friends you  made in during those impressionable years between 18 and 21 when you may have  THOUGHT you were complete but really you were changing with every one of those gloriously time-wasting conversations in every dormitory room or hallway.Maybe the people you stay up all night with are the ones who really come to  know you, seeing you morning and night, on glad days and sad days, whether standing  with one leg in the sink to shave your legs or dressed to the nines for some big campus dance.I went to Italy this past year with seven such pals where we were hosted by an 8th pal lucky enough to live there. Over the course of our six days together we talked about politics and movies, about the economy and the planet, even about our parents who once seemed to us so crazily forbidding or judgmental but who we now simply saw as people doing the best the could both with the tools they had to work with.We laughed a lot cried a little and argued too, in the easy familiar way of the long-married. And on the very last night , with our hostess Victoria unable to join us because of a business commitment, the seven of us took ourselves out for one final meal where I captured this 22-second video.Here you can see Judy being pleasant and Adrienne reserving judgment; Elizabeth laughing and Cathy speaking her piece; and Susan just rolling with it as Susan always does. And that feisty one saying ‘What?!’ That's Lynne, my sophomore roommate, who was always so funny and so serious both, and who never for a second suffered fools gladly, me included.So on this closing day of 2010 I say God bless ALL our friends, wherever and whoever they are! May they ever be at our sides![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVrDH6KSZf0]

End of Year Lookback Part Two

After the launching years I spoke of yesterday came the developing years when you were just starting to become who you would be, maybe as part of a team or a troop. Me, I was part of a camp, a little kid in falling-down socks and an odd sort of woolly green bathing suit that bagged at the seat and stood away from my little-kid thighs.These were the years for teams and troops and summer programs at the  playground where you did what you did without parental interference. Moms and dads mostly didn’t go to their kids’ games back then and you did the Scouting thing alone too much of the time, sometimes even walking to your troop meetings. And as for camp, well, the whole point of summer camp was to get you away from your house and teach you how to win and lose with an equal grace.I went to camp for ten years and the kids I was there with became two things on account of the experience, (1) competent athletes and (2) people who could sing. We sang morning noon and night: funny songs, schmaltzy songs, rousing songs, songs written by Steven Foster, George M. Cohan, Carl Perkins -  everything from 'Swanee' to 'Over There' to  ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ in other words. In the camp dining hall other kids would call on you to sing and you got up and did it, simple as that. Talent didn't matter as much as heart.I guess that's what those late-childhood years on teams and in troops and at camp are all for: the growing of heart. Think now: what did YOU do back then to go about growing yours?

(pretty sure I'm the little dumpy kid with the dark hair at the end of the table)

End-of-Year Lookback Part One

If you could set aside the present long enough to look back for a while who would you recall? The ragtag army of kids swirling around in your street? That one you explored the receding North American forest with, looking for any kind of rock at all that looked even faintly like an arrowhead? What about the one who was bouncy and great to play with you just stopped noticing his runny nose and untied shoes?Maybe you see a small boy like the one I see from my first neighborhood where we were the only non-Jewish family on the block. He had dark brown eyes and black curly hair and I loved him in a mute third-grade way. Once I showed him the gorgeous white rosary beads I had scored for my First Communion and as some kind of perverse test asked him what he thought they were for. “For this,” he said and hung then around my neck and I thought my heart would melt.I see another boy shy and smart and forever indoors peeking at us from behind his bedroom curtains. Decades and decades later, after the fancy prep school and the boy-genius phase, he would come to imagine himself stalked and watched and get in fights with the cops and die way too young of nobody-really-knew-what.I think of the girl I met in line outside the lunchroom at our just-built elementary school who showed me a faint scar on her cheek which she said she got while being pulled from her mother’s body. I thought she was the most interesting person I had ever met and she became my friend for life then and there.We were all of us children together and united in powerlessness. We were fellow sufferers in music lessons and religious instruction, enduring regular visits from the family doctor who would sit on the edge of our beds tapping and prodding as we simmered with the fevers of a dozen childhood diseases....This is what I see of my earliest days when I closed my eyes and tried to look just now. What do you see when you do the same?

Thoughts from the Snowbound

My family likes to really be together on the holidays, meaning all of us under one roof. Hence on December 26th at 9am, with that half-eaten cookie right where Santa left it, we rushed to our cars and drove together to the country place we come to in summer. Here, the great Last Gasp Blizzard of 2010 found us and has kept us pinned down ever since, in the same sort of suspense I used to feel when the neighborhood big kids would sit astride me to lower long strings of spit over my small face, then suck them back up again at the last possible second.Things felt pretty dicey by last night all right as the milk and butter sank away and the Pampers ran out; as the lights flickered and one us began shaking with fever  like this little oak leaf you see in the photo, which I have watched these past few days shivering in the bitter 50 mile-an-hour gusts.But last night at 11 the plow finally showed and now here comes this blazing sun so it looks like Pampers for all , and milk, and eggs, and a fever now seemingly lifted so we  that with easy minds we might return to those board games and jigsaws - and maybe even watch Toy Story 3 again that last night had 8 grownups snuffling into their hankies even as the little ones, all heedless of Time and Death, gazed rapt and smiling at that small bright screen.

Hometown

Last month I watched 30 whole minutes of a movie before realizing it had been filmed in my own home town. Suddenly I realized I recognized those chesty buildings, I even recognized  the light itself for light over water has a special look, and my city is a city of waters.I wasn't born there really, but I think of it as my hometown anyway. We moved there when I was nine and the world just ...opened up for me. I got to go to the public schools and ride bikes with the kids in my classes when school got out. I fell in love with every tree in our neighborhood, with the bell Mrs. Talbot used to summon her kids home, with the snuffling sounds the dogs made on their jingling early-morning rounds.And seeing that movie brought it all back.'What an Eden!’ I thought as I watched and 'how lucky I was to live in a place with parades and winning teams and every high school formal like an old-time cotillion with an actual Grand March at the beginning!'All this was last month.This month, on the very first hour of the first day it was showing, I drove back to my hometown to see a second movie that was not only filmed in Lowell Massachusetts but is about that city during some of her hardest years, now thankfully behind us all.It tells the story of a boxer and his relationship with the family that both encouraged him and held him back. We see the peeling paint, the abandoned mill buildings, the local jail where a neighborhood dad took his little sons to put the fear of God in them as he told our mom. In other words, we see a much darker picture of the city I grew up in, whose problems are every city’s problems.Some people fear all cities, saying there is danger in them. Once, curfews were mandatory in all cities, partly because no street was safe before the dawn of artificial light.Homes weren’t safe either: The word ‘curfew’ is from the French. ‘Cover the fire’ it means, since always there was a great fear of conflagration and rightly so: In 1666 four-fifths of the great city of London was destroyed by an oven fire in the king’s own bakery.So you could say there is danger wherever there are people. Or wild animals. Or disease. Or even weather like the storm we are now having here in the east.And yet we sleep each night in faith that all will be well.I look back over the last month and marvel at the affection I've been feeling for that old city, I guess because we are all like the infant in the mother’s arms: what we look on when we first come awake in life is what we love and think of as home.The darkness finds us there, and so we light the lamps, and lie down and take our rest.

Christmas Morning from the Still Small Center

I guess this little video says it all:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7SVfdvNqN8]Sometimes silence really is the most eloquent thing.

Major Sigh of Relief

By 9 tonight we’ll all be sitting in front of  the TV again and it'll be  as if those crazy endless weeks between Halloween and now never happened. Hard to imagine..Two little people slept over here the night before last so we were wakened at 5:30 yesterday – after being wakened at 3:00 when the smaller one climbed out of his crib and wordlessly presented himself at our bedside. “Oh God!” was all I could think, but before I could do anything David reached over, scooped him up and with one motion landed him in the open spot between the two of us where he made a little nest of his blankie, sighed happily and fell dead asleep.It was his big brother who woke at 5:00 but he was good. He waited til 5:30 to wake the rest of us. We really appreciated this since getting them to bed the night before had involved an unusually lovely combination of sobbing, cajoling and negotiating (we were the ones sobbing ha ha.)   That's why at almost midnight when it seemed like they might be at least temporarily 'down,' I got out the whipped cream that I had made to go with our dessert of strawberries and ladled some on top of more strawberries– pretty good! - then spooned some into a mug of hot milk laced with whiskey – even better! – then finally dug out a dusty bottle of Kahlua, added a few heavenly dollops of the peaky stuff, zapped the whole thing in the microwave and sat down next to the Christmas tree (still not exactly decorated) to read my book for an hour. I was afraid to actually go to bed; afraid of being waked by the little ones which of course I was anyway.But hey I did sleep in the end and in the morning the little ones left and the sun climbed and the sun sank and cooking began and wrapping ended and we finally finally finally got all the ornaments on the tree and now the holiday is almost over and I HOPE EVERYBODY OUT THERE HAS A WONDERFUL DAY OF IT. I myself am more than fine with facing the plain days ahead; with  standing in line at the pharmacy and laundering my dainty washables and thinking my own quiet thoughts.

The Dread Holiday Card

Darn it! Ran out of Christmas cards at the last second here so will have to send a cooked-down version to the rest of the list. This year’s had 8 pictures but the emergency condensed version is only going to have 2, stuck in a conventional card.One is what you see here, which on my special extravaganza of a printed card has as its caption  “Pyromania grandkids play with fire.” (I'm forced to be ironic this way; they're still little but they HATE it when you fawn over them with tender phrases. Even this younger one said the other day, “I’m NOT cute TT!” Only he is cute as anyone can see, even when he’s frowning at the paparazzi like he is below here.(This is he and on the right is the girl who 'made' him (David and I 'made' her. :-) )So a few of those end-of-the-alphabet people will at least see the pyro picture on our card. They won’t see the shot of me smiling like a monkey and holding a wine bottle in my hand. Or the shot of our kids dressed up for a night at some fancy New York restaurant. Or that classic shot where David is trying to teach the older child how to wallop a baseball while in the background his little brother is seen trying to swing a second bat, which he is holding upside dowm while sucking on a pacifier.They won't see all the baseball we played.Or this guy in an unshaven closeup:But they WILL see the two of us on our wedding day when I was barely 21 and he just 20 months older.It is Christmas eve at 5am as I write this and our little guys slept over last night.It took us two whole hours to get them to bed.  Dizzy as  we are with fatigue, the two of us can still remember this day 40 years ago when we took that oath to forsake all others. The picture of that day everybody gets because that's the place a-a-a-a-ll the rest of the fun has sprung from.