Weekend Report

First I see True Grit Friday night. Love it. Eat out after, also lovin' that little-girl lobster swimmin’ in the tank five minutes before. Saturday go to play Laser Tag, then don’t actually play because remember am probably not that great in large dark room teeming with teens, stoked dads and galloping ten-year-olds. Also, wearing suede boots with pointy toes. Also, three weeks away from getting into the movies for half price. Instead, watch the guys I've brought go in, come out, brag, tease, sneer, gloat, hoot and go back in. Testosterone rules! Burger King after.Then right to the Coco Key Indoor Water Resort in Crowne Plaza Hotel, due for an update bigtime, cinder block walls, no curtain on windows but wait! Is this that federal prison at Danbury? Did I committee some white-collar crime I've forgotten about?  Or is this Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and I’m boarding school headmistress Jean Harris who killed that diet doc and if so where are my pearls?  No no. I'm just my same old self in a swimsuit now and getting ready to see what 600 winter-weary people DO in a place heated to 90 degrees with tubs, falls, lagoons and whirlpools. Put yoga togs over swimsuit and head on down.Keep yoga gear on. See more bare flesh than you’ll see even in Vegas, possibly even on Riviera. Seas of flesh and on some pretty hefty people. Tubing aplenty, shrieks, water dumping on unsuspecting heads. Pizza Hut right in here with us, full bar too. Six hundred wet heads, six thousand wiggling piggy-toes, waterproof chairs as far as the eye can see.  I offer to hold boys’ towels and mind their flip-flops. Do that. Read my book. Ah!Then here comes old Dave to take one for the team by sleeping over with us. The hours pass. The lads grow sleepy. Three have varsity basketball practice 10 sharp Sunday morning. Another three wrestled for six hours this day, thus missing all of laser tag and most of water park. 10pm finds us all in our rooms, they curled up in theirs with snack foods and television. Dave and I curled up in ours, out cold before our heads even hit the pillow. Breakfast of fresh fruits and bagels in the morning and back to the old hometown for Sunday homework. I write a column, post to my blog, drive to daughter Annie’s house for yummy indoor barbecue, home-made fries, strawberry shortcake. Old Dave opts out, citing need to recover from all that youthful fun. I home again at 8, lights out at 10, tubing and arcade footage still swimming in head. G-O-O-O-D,  G-O-O-O-D WEEKEND, good weekend! :-)

our man Hazees, king among high scoring laser-taggers

How to Get Happy

The Good News: People are sitting down and composing long chatty notes again. Letter writing is BACK! (The Bad News: They’re doing it all online, thus leaving no trace. How will our children ever come to know us with nothing left on paper? I mean, who ties a hard-drive up in satin ribbon and tucks it in the back of a drawer?)The Good News:  Everyone but the family gerbil has a cell phone. Handy for emergencies! Also for finding out what time the movie is! (The Bad News:  Because of this, people are less present in the places they actually are. ) I think to myself, “Behold this lady on the bus looking out the window with an expression of such eager good will. How bad can the world BE if it can summon such ready cheer from someone?” Then I see the device in her ear and realize she’s on the phone with someone. It can really bring you down to see how many people are engaged with this ghost class of invisible others. When they look right through you it makes you feel you’re not here yourself.The Good News: You’re here all right. There are countless ways to know how ‘here’ you are, so let us now leave aside all reference to Bad News and focus only on them. In fact try any one of these tactics to sense again your place in the world:

• Find a bird and watch the way it lowers its landing-gear on approaching the patch of earth or shimmer of water. A miracle of engineering!
• Connect with the people you find standing in line. I stood behind a 90-year-old at the coffee shop yesterday who seemed so angry as her 60-something daughter tried to order that I didn’t dare catch her eye but instead settled for smiling vaguely in her general direction. She clucked and harrumphed for three whole minutes - right up until the moment when the daughter finally got the two coffees, at which point she turned to me with a wide and genuine smile and apologized if they’d held me up at all.
• Get caught up in the enthusiasms of a dog. My sister used to say that your dog greets you at the door and it’s as if he’s saying “Omigosh Hi, you’re here, come in, your hair looks great!” Then when you duck into the bathroom and come back out he starts in all over again: “Omigosh Hi, you’re here, come in, your hair looks great!”
• We should all take a lesson from the dogs.
• Sit with a cat, realizing that with a cat you need to shut your mouth and get calm before you can truly enter into its presence. Cats are the Yodas of the animal world; they can give you ‘the look’ for a solid hour through half-closed eyes until gradually you set aside the ceaseless chatter in your brain.
• A cat will take you straight to the quiet place if you matching your own breathing to its own.
• You can do this with that family gerbil too.
• You can even do it with your houseplants.
• To center yourself amidst the general hubbub anytime in fact, just find any living creature and try matching your breath to its. Imagine your way into the experience of any living creature and you will find peace. You’ll forget that the Internet and cell phones were ever invented. (And at least for a while you won’t even miss them.)

look deep into my eyes....

My Road Not Taken

This appeared in the Huffington Post  on Friday , the 25th anniversary of the loss of the Shuttle I almost got to ride on: When in the Spring of ’86 I became one of the final 40 contestants in the initiative to send a journalist up in space, the loss of the Challenger was still so recent the bodies had not yet been found on the ocean floor. Maybe that’s why the TV crew who came to my door the day my name was announced seemed so eager. “She even looks like Christa!” said one of them. “Have her children cling to her skirts!” said another. We were all still in a kind of shock I think and maybe that’s why that news crew was trying to frame things in such a dramatic way. We hadn’t yet adjusted to the new reality. Masters of technology that we imagined ourselves to be, we thought we were in control of everything.It’s a notion we humans cling to fixedly and relinquish with great reluctance.Picture being on a plane as it taxis toward takeoff, a rolling rec room in most of our minds, in which folks read and doze and look out the window -  until it picks up speed and the trees blur and the tarmac goes fuzzy to your sight and somewhere inside, all your instincts as a land animal cry out in disbelief that this big-bellied metal hull will ever lift and soar in flight. The tiny bubble in the carpenter’s level of your brain leans way over to one side, and a small frightened voice deep inside you asks of your death, 'Now? Today? This very minute?’ Then the plane straightens and climbs higher and with relief you turn back to your magazine, thinking, ‘Not yet then. Not this sight the last these eyes will behold.’In the months before Challenger flew, teacher and Mission Specialist Christa McAuliffe said in her motherly and reassuring way, “It will be like taking a bus.” But it isn’t like taking a bus and it never was, as every career astronaut knows. It’s like riding a Roman candle.Back when this first crew died what shocked us most was that we all watched it happen: one minute, seven hale and joshing Americans; the next, a blank sky. And then between that lost mission and the loss of Columbia in ’03 came that other event when, in an eyeblink, two mighty steel towers gave way to blank sky too.I was just 36 when I applied to be the first journalist to fly in Low Earth Orbit. In the days just after January 28th I wrote in the Boston Globe that we owe God a death, as Shakespeare says, and that the Challenger Seven had paid their death-debt. They now flew free, I felt, beyond caring about control, or planning, or how many days might pass until a tiny planet tips enough to bring what its creatures call Spring.I think of them today. Oh I think of them. “Give me your hand,” the black box caught one of them saying as their capsule hurtled quickly downward and the phrase is lovely, holding as it does all we can offer one another in love, or friendship, or at the Hour of Our Death. All, and perhaps enough.Watch this is you can bear to. It's very hard. And under it, for comfort, President Ronald  Reagan's finest hour:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQL0NWS1Rc][youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JKIZ7j20EA&feature=related]

Here's a Fun Idea

It’s the weekend; time to be playful!  I take my inspiration from Nick here,  who was building computers from the time he was 11, using about the same components as E.T. used to make that famous phone call home.That’s what he does for me- connect me to the world I mean. Yesterday he put a new keyboard in my laptop and installed my new  Ultra HD Flip video camera. Last week  he spent a mere three hours accomplishing what not one human being at Verizon OR  Blackberry could do over a period of nine whole months even when I brought both laptop and Blackberry TO them and that was: to sync the darn phone to Outlook. Nick did it while watching Sherlock Holmes and texting with his fiancée in St. Louis.It's fun for him, all that trouble-shooting. People born after 1990 don’t think like the rest of us; to them the world is play. I have learned this from knowing Nick, who also is an EMT and an Eagle Scout. has a black belt in Karate, makes his own mead and sometimes wears a  kilt.Here's a minute or so of  him describing his idea of fun around the spattering, smearing and spurting of  fake blood.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YyBJkSu8_Q]Maybe you can consider such entertainments for yourself today. Me I’m playing laser tag. :-)

Because He's a Pro

My tactic in the face of trouble: whine for a while, then curl up with a book and forget about it. In a kitchen that is for the third night in a row  far too cold to cook in I say the heck with everything, make a fire in the living room fireplace and do just that.

Old Dave has been doing this for hours already and is now cozily reading one of his bizarre futuristic semi-sci-fi tomes. His solution for any frozen pipe: let God thaw it. Sooooo on this third cold night, I suggest a plumber.

“He’s not going to tell you anything different,” sez Dave.  “How do you know?” say I. "Because I know” sez he. "So now you’re the Energy Czar? I mean, you’re no professional” say I. “Yeah but I’m right,”says he.

Then about ten minutes later up he gets and disappears down into our 1890s cellar. When he comes back up he asks if we have a space heater but - ack! - I have just hours earlier donated our one space heater to a family in much worse shape than we are with our books and our fireplace and the wise-cracking wife giving continuous grief to a nice quiet man.

“Come down and see,” he says and so I go down and  see what he has done which is to stand first on a rickety old chair and then on a very tall radiator and then  pry off a two-by five-foot length of paneling fat with pink insulation to reveal the bare earth floor under the kitchen addition , where running its entire length is the skinny ice-filled pipe that is causing all the trouble.

“Let’s see if this helps,” says Dave, turning the antique black knob on this radiator we have never used, and back upstairs to the fireside we go and whaddya know, what do you know, what DO you know, within 30 minutes we suddenly hear hot water coursing  through a well-thawed pipe and into kitchen baseboards. Hurrah!

So maybe he IS the professional after all, what do I know? But hey: I’m the Queen. Oh and I meant to say: this is Dave at the top  with that 'I told you so'  look he so often gets  ... And down at the bottom here, well that's  me in the rocking throne from which I rule this roost, allowing my subjects to sometimes approach (as  long as they stay on their hands and knees. :-))

Angela's Ashes Comes to Old No. 9

Frank McCourt grew up the most wretched of  Limerick's wretched and for sure he and I have something in common - or we would if he hadn't gone and died on us  a few years back.This passage from Angela's Ashes says it all, now that  frozen pipes have  made us retreat to the second floor entirely: we're living in 'Italy here.'This is how it was for the McCourts back then (and with a fresh foot of snow coming in and no thaw in sight this is how it's going to be for us too (all but the part about the Pope):

"Two weeks after Christmas Malachy and I come home from school in a heavy rain and when we push in the door we find the kitchen empty. The table and chairs and trunk are gone and the fire is dead in the grate. The Pope is still there and that means we haven’t moved again. Dad would never move without the Pope. The kitchen floor is wet, little pools of water all around and the walls are twinkling with the damp."There’s a noise upstairs and when we go up we find Dad and Mam and the missing furniture. It’s nice and warm there with a fire blazing in the grate, Mam sitting in the bed and Dad reading The Irish Press and smoking cigarette by the fire. Mam tells us there was a terrible flood  that the rain came down the lane and poured in under our door. They tried to stop it with rags but they only turned sopping wet and let the rain in. People emptying their buckets made it worse and there was a sickening stink in the kitchen.  She thinks we should stay upstairs as long as there is rain. We’ll be warm through the winter months and then we can go downstairs in the springtime if there is any sign of dryness in the walls or on the floor. Dad says it’s like going away on our holiday to warm foreign place like Italy. That’s what we call the upstairs from now on. Malachy says the Pope is still on the wall downstairs and he’s going to be all cold and and couldn’t we bring him up? But Mam says No, he’s going to stay where e is because I don’t want him on the wall glaring at me in the bed, isn’t it enough that we dragged him from Brooklyn to Belfast to Dublin to Limerick?"

As I say we  don't have the long nose of the Pope in here with us - and our bed isn't quite as sad-looking as The McCourt bed below but still: things feel pretty droopy around here. Maybe we'll take up smoking too or anyway go buy a bunch of ice cream and get in our own little nest of a bed and eat it all straight from the carton like that pair in Grey Gardens.

ha ha

Tricks on the Treadmill

Maybe it's a good thing I had so much practice trying to go Up the Down escalator as a young thing. (See this posting.)  I only say this because I just now went to step on, and then across, my treadmill to adjust the window fan before resuming my workout only it was still  running a four minute mile. I went to set my foot onto that belt in the same placid way a character in a Norman Rockwell painting might step out onto his porch after supper, realizing too late that it was racing along  WHILE CRANKED UP TO YOUR BASIC MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING INCLINE – oops!Somehow I didn’t fall. My legs spun like the Roadrunner’s but I did not fall, even though I was running sideways and uphill, like this band does in the video below.Enjoy these four band-members dancing away to “Here It Goes Again,”  then check out this poor skinny waif of a girl 'lifting' in her shorts and sports bra with what appears to be a set of water wings inside the latter. “This is Part Two of My Forty Minutes workout” she says with a fetching accent and, well, the rest appears to just be eye candy for the boys.You have to just endure a 12-second commercial first - but then you can scroll further down  and have your dessert. :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAAsCNK7RA][youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo2hF5S0a8o]

I Miss Him

I miss my boy. Not just his little-guy self that I was talking about here yesterday;  ever since he went off to New York to live, I miss him at every age. He was just home for the weekend and maybe that’s why I’m feeling it all again.He was always such fun to live with. I remember a morning in Fourth Grade when he was getting ready for school and suddenly there was this gigantic crash in the bathroom and when he came out he had a big smile on his face and a long beard of minty foam all down his front. “There was a small explosion in the tooth-brushing area,” was all he said.I could never get mad at him, even when he procrastinated on those high school term papers. They were always perfect by the time he handed them in even if it did mean he and his dad were rocketing down streets  and around corners to get him to school with them.He has that quality: the perfectionism I mean. He sits in front of sports when folding his laundry. It  takes him a good 40 minutes to get through the whole basket but by the time he’s done each T-shirt has been smoothed  with such precision you’d think it was a flag folded by a couple of West Pointers at  a state funeral. He shoveled our stone steps after Friday's storm and it looks like someone used actual tools to remove the snow in exact rectangular blocks such as you'd see in an igloo.~ Sigh ~His big sisters miss him too and his dad but what are you gonna do? All his college pals moved straight to Brooklyn once they graduated and there they remain, for now anyway.Although.... as we sat in front of the fire last night eating a last meal before he made the five-hour journey back  he did happen to say that the snow piles and uncollected garbage in Brooklyn  after that big December 26th storm were disgusting.  "Just the sight of them day after day!" he said, as he stood up to bring his empty plate to the kitchen. "It was horrible . Almost Post-Apocalyptic!”His sister Annie and I exchanged a look and when he left the room I whispered , "Did you hear that? This is good for us!"  “For real!” she whispered back.We just miss him with s expressive ways, especially in football season because there’s never been a bigger Pats  fan. This  below is our living room, Superbowl XLII,  when the Pats went down in flames. I bet you can guess which one he is.

From Off Your Mother's Body

four breasted woman

We have a brief Socratic interlude at my church called ‘Time for the Young’ during which the small children come forward and sit on the steps where a member of the ministerial team, also seated, offers a little Q & A. Only sometimes things don’t go in the direction that that person might have hoped.“Let’s all thank God today for the gift of hearing!” said this minister on a recent Sunday morningThe tykes just looked at her blankly.“Because we all just heard you playing so nicely on your drums and maracas!” she said as one tyke sent a small finger up inside his nose.“Some would say that your hearing is a gift. Now where do you  get this gift do you think?”“From off of your mother’s body!” cried one child in a clear loud voice.“From your mother’s body, OK. But where else does this gift of hearing come from?”But the under-six set had caught fire.“Also your foots come from off your mother’s body!’ cheered a second boy.“Mmmmm. OK your feet… ““And your eyeballs!” cried a third little boy."And-"  began a fourth but “O- KAY! that's enough of that line of inquiry!” the minister interrupted as the congregation chuckled. Because really as everyone knows the right answer to 99 % of these questions is never about human sexuality; the answer is always just ‘Jesus.’The day I first brought my three-year-old to pre-school I was invited to sit down for a few minutes while my child zeroed in on some paper & pencils and began making a giant-headed creature with five large torpedoes protruding from its body.“What a nice picture!” cooed the elegant boss lady.“Uh huh,” said my boy, not looking up until he had finished the last little stroke.“And what is it a picture OF I wonder?”He fixed her with a somber look. “It’s my muzzer,” he said.“Ah your mother! And what are these?”  she said, pointing to the five warheads.Poker faced, he looked down at his picture and back up at her.“Dose are her bweasts,” he said and there is the bald truth about little kids: what they say is just always a whole lot more ‘vivid’ than anything you might have imagined. (And just so you know when it you’re looking at the timeless Where Babies Come From topic; These days nobody ever, ever mentions a stork.

A World Gone White

When I was little, we had a 30-inch birdbath that stood sentry in our yard through fair weather and foul.  “Check the birdbath!” the grownups would call out once a snowstorm had passed, because it was our marker: its top-hat of snow measured exactly how much we'd have to shovel.Almost 20 years ago when we closed my childhood home, I brought that birdbath to my current yard and, well, I will just say this: I suppose it’s still out there but it’s buried completely.Our sweet old lilac lost its whole middle section in that first big storm. Ditto the tall hydrangea that's been tapping people on the shoulder every time they walk along the sidewalk next to our house.And now two storms and a deep freeze  later the world remains dipped in a thick white batter. Snow crunches underfoot. But it is also true that  for most of this month the days have been dazzling, with sunsets that flash like crystal. And when night comes on, it comes with such a dark beauty it thrills the soul to see moonlight spilling on all that white.“Do you believe this? It’s like Antarctica!” I called to a stranger whose path crossed mine outside the hardware store. “No, silly; it’s like Vermont!” she laughed back, I guess because my reaction was so typical: all too often after a big storm we panic, convincing ourselves that no snows like these have ever fallen and that we will never again feel the soft moist earth.That’s when it’s time to turn to those who are best at observing Nature. I turn to Robert Frost whose poem “The Onset” closes on this hopeful note.

I know that winter death has never tried

The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap

In long storms an undrifted four feet deep

As measured again maple, birch, and oak,

It cannot check the peeper's silver croak;

And I shall see the snow all go down hill

In water of a slender April rill.”

I like to read the lines once and then  go back and read them again out loud. Their rocking iambic beat comforts me as much as the words and reminds me of what I already know: that nothing stands still in Nature really, and even the bitterest winters give way at last to spring.

(Not our yard.  This is nothing compared to ours.)

WHO'S Dumb?

I once had this quiet but sneaky boyfriend who was always doing the weirdest things: “Let’s roll down this hill right now!” he’d suddenly enthuse as we’d be standing on some grassy cliff. “OK!” I’d gamely say back and down I would go, rolling clear to the bottom, and look around for him – and there he’d be, still standing at the top and laughing his head off.Once we were approaching a set of escalators to go upstairs in this fancy mall, me chattering away – I was quite the little one-man-band in those days – and before I realized what was happening he was making the “after you” gesture and I was trying to stumble UP the DOWN escalator because that’s the one he was trying to put me on  - I guess to find out just exactly HOW absorbed I was in my own narrative.Pretty absorbed was the answer. I tried going ‘up’ those fast-moving ‘down’ stairs and ended up performing a series of lightning-fast stumble-jumps to keep from breaking my neck.He actually caught me at the last possible second and handed me on to the right escalator but still - what kind of boyfriend takes pleasure in  another’s confusion?The kind you marry of course so you can keep on with the teasing and sabotaging until you’re both pushing 100 but hey I DON’T MIND because tell ya the truth his ways rubbed off on me. Tonight I lift the lid and seal the toilet over with Saran Wrap. :-)And now this funny video ad just because it ties in so nicely with our title:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRBchZLkQR0]

Sex and Men

I’m shootin’ the breeze with a coupla older guys I see in the course of my weekly rounds and don’t they start talkin’ about women:“So here’s the deal,” says one. “Women in their 20s and 30s will sleep with you on the fourth or fifth date.”“That’s true!” says the other, “but with women in their 40s and 50s it's a WHOLE  different thing.”“Right. Women in their 40s and 50s if they'll see you at all - bang! - it's right to bed on the very first date!”“Plus! They're very aggressive!" says the one. "They're always slidin' phone numbers across the bar to guys.”“I had a woman do that with me just last night!” says the other.Meanwhile here's me in my highly married state and what do I know? My last date took place when Three Dog Night was the hot new band.So I ask a question:“Why do you suppose that is?”“Why? Because the younger ones are still playin’ the game. And the older gals are DONE  with all that crap,” says the one.“They’re grownups” says the other. “If they see something they want, they go after it.”“Exactly,” says the first. And suddenly I feel like Margaret Mead, only not short with the weird hair of course - that's old Maggie at the top there -  but in the sense that she was an anthropologist. Were these guys reporting an actual phenomenon or was this just a kind of performance on their part, some sort of joke like God made in designing baboon bottoms? I do seem to remember hearing that the Samoans who Mead wrote about later said they made up half the stuff they told her just for laughs and maybe these guys were doing that too.Who knows?  I’m sure no expert - except I do know that however ‘willing’ these older gals may be, on that deep, deep level that not even speech can’t touch men are hard-wired to want to do one thing and that is  to pass on their DNA  - which leaves our 40- and 50- year-olds either singin' the blues or sighin' with relief you tell me.And speaking of singing can we ever tire of this? Ann Renfroe's take-off on Beyoncé's All the Single Ladies?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaruNs_7okY]

Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye

Hard to believe JFK’s inauguration was 50  years ago. I remember reaching out in the crowd to touch his shirtfront the night before that squeaker of a victory. We all have such vivid memories of him if we were awake back then. I mean his picture was everywhere, the picture you see here, his official portrait, done by Bachrach of Boston who 30 years later did a portrait of me too. (I never looked like this really. I look like some kind of a  younger Mother Superior in the era after nuns got out of the habit of habits.)But I study this portrait of “Jack” and it seems so familiar: that tan which we now know was the dark pigmenting that comes with Addison’s Disease; those squirrel cheeks he got from the steroids he was given to control his pain. (Go here to read the stunning array of drugs he took in the White House years as finally revealed after the death of Jackie.)I think of her today too and of how way too much has come to light about her man's many affairs for even the most loyal of us to believe he was ever a faithful husband. It was shameless, the way he had sex with young  women he didn't even know, all ushered in to “meet” this  charming  leader of the free world. When I think how readily  they submitted to him my blood boils and I silently hail Paula Jones who said no to Bill Clinton, then went out and told on him.At the time when news first started to leak out about his  ways no one knew much about addictions . We know about them now all right and a very good thing that is. What kind of pain was he running from that he had to medicate himself with encounter after encounter? What could his view of women have been that he could use them in this way? He can never enlighten us. His lips are sewn shut  inside the box within the vault under the earth on the slope of land near the onetime mansion of General Lee. Two of his three brothers now lie near him, all sons of a problematic father. Who knows what demons chase a person in life? There is peace at the end let us hope. Let us hope there is peace for us all.

Bad Thing Good Thing

• Bad Thing: Stay out too long doing errands on world’s messiest day. Fishtail on returning to driveway, getting totally mired in slush-on-top-of-ice.
• Good Thing: Careful not to over-steer in panic like before and bump clear over stone wall to land in garden.
• Bad Thing: Stuck on house arrest from that point on. No Cheesecake Factory and “The King’s Speech” for Terry!
• Good Thing: Still have that dinner-and-a-movie to look forward to.
• Bad Thing: Try again two hours later to rock darn car out of ruts. Now it’s facing sideways.
• Good Thing: Come inside and whip up homemade Cream of Tomato soup. Taste buds applaud!
• Bad Thing: Blender used to turn cream, bouillon, tomatoes and onions into liquid velvet keeps wetting its pants. Counter tops a-slather in coral-colored drool.
• Good Thing: Do so much mopping decide what the hell and wash whole kitchen floor.
• Bad Thing: Fail to do a lick of real work all day. (What will NEXT week’s column be about? Brain empty. Spirits flag.)
• Good Thing One: Don’t have to think about that now.
• Good Thing Two: Call big sister in Florida, Hatch plan. Going there in five short weeks!
• Good Thing  Three: Big sister still funny. Says she’s gained so much weight her fanny has a fanny. Snort with laughter on hearing this. Snort, chuckle, sigh, calm down.
• Last Best Good Thing : Monitor Weather Channel app on phone all day, noting that temps have climbed from 18° to 38° and will remain there for only two hours more before once again plummeting. Boots back on and out to driveway. Rock car, urge car, beg car, curse  car with the result that finally finally FINALLY it rises, breaks its icy chains and rockets into dry warm garage! Excelsior!

so near and yet so far

Gleaning from Glee

I’m coming in late on the whole Glee phenomenon but now that the show has picked up five Golden Globe nominations I thought I’d better finally look at it systematically. I've just watched four episodes One-Two-Three-Four while pounding the treadmill in the attic. (Well, not pounding the treadmill the WHOLE time. I touched up the finish on a sweet old chair while watching and also sorted 100 photos from the 1990s, but in the end someone looking in the window at that messy third-floor room for 75% of the time would have seen a person watching a TV screen. Just fixedly watching the screen, which is maybe how most people watch TV I don’t know.)There’s a lot I still don’t get though - like why the cool director Mr. Shuester would marry that moron of a woman in the first place? And what’s with bald-guy pederast in the pink sweaters? Wouldn’t it be better to have just one nice normal gay male in the person of the sweet rosy-cheeked Kurt Hummel character?I need to catch up I realize; these are just the first four episodes of the very first season I'm talking about.I do get the satire though. It’s funny that little Kurt Hummel looks like a Hummel, the little figurines your elderly aunt collected and displayed in her Colonial-style curio cabinet.I also 'get it' that creating a character like the wide-eyed hygiene obsessed Emma Pillsbury is an homage to 1978’s Animal House and the white-glove-wearing character Amanda Pepperidge. (Anyone remember her? And they say drenching sexual content is new!)Anyhow... She’s the one in the headbands in this witty clip-plus-music but oh John Belushi where are you when we really need you? A shame and a waste, your death from speed-balling. Who would ever have guessed back in ‘78 at the huge, huge part drugs would play in wrecking so many lives? Click through to YouTube to watch it and remember to KEEP ON SMILING or else we're all lost![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fAqFAx_zzk&feature=fvw]

My Lord What a Morning

This picture is sure not what’s happening in MY church. We’re trying something new right now that involves a worship service so non-traditional you wouldn’t be surprised to see an elephant loping through the sanctuary. They’ve unbolted the first few rows of pews and made them face each other instead of facing front, thus creating a space where the little kids, no longer ushered off to little-kid classes, come and sit on the floor cooing like pigeons and spontaneously shaking all manner of rhythm band instruments. Unbidden yes, but also un-shushed.Also: Instead of the heavenly organ there are now  guitars and a simple piano to add to the kiddies' jingling and thudding;  and instead of prepared hymns, just these super-simple tunes we have the words for but not the music. We're taught the music on the spot the way they did in the old days. The two ministers running things do so without clerical garb, and the 30-voice choir has dissolved away entirely,  its members also in plainclothes as they sit with their friends or their families or alone as the spirit moves them.Finally, a phalanx of five- and six-year olds took up the collection today - and two of THEM decided the time to begin was several minute before church started. Suddenly a wee lad appeared at my elbow with the famous collection plate and what could I do but empty my pockets? And when he came around again at the right time what could I do but fork over  more? (He was later seen sprinting down the side aisle, dollar bills flying all around him.)At the start of the service we sang an odd little tune that really got my attention.  It went “Come, come, whoever you are. wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving…”   “Hold on, are they talking to ME?" was all I could think. Because how many times have I left? Stayed only for three-quarters of the service, then hurried off to do some darn errand I thought was so important? How many times have I done that in every part of my life?I felt great by the end all the same, maybe in part because we got to also sing the beautiful old spiritual whose name alone seemed to say it all. You know it as "My Lord What a Morning," and here it is now:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFZtWXfSa3c&feature=related]

Harness Undone

Last Friday I got to step out of my harness a while when, out in my car and hell-bent on errands, I made a left-hand turn and felt something give.  One minute I could brake and steer  fine; the next I could do neither, and my tame little house cat of a car was screeching like a Tasmanian devil.“Excuse me! Am I … dragging something?” I called to the pedestrian striding along beside me. “No,” he called back, “but it sounds like your belt is loose! I’d get to the closest service station if I were you!”Lucky for me I spotted one not 1,000 yards away. By the time I reached it I was practically braking like Fred Flintstone, two feet on the asphalt. The kid pumping gas went and white at the sight of me and disappeared inside. Seconds later out popped the mechanic on duty.“Some noise!” he said, with cheerful demeanor. “I could hear you behind two closed doors.”   We opened the hood and I looked on, as with the soft inquisitive touch of an old-time family doctor, he began checking this and that.“Tell you what, I have a little time this morning,” he said finally. “If you want to sit over in McDonald’s for 30 minutes I can get up under her and see what’s what.”So I went there, first pausing to text the news to David, possibly the most easy-going person in the galaxy. Then I ordered coffee and the Snack Size Fruit and Walnut Salad and settled myself in a booth. I pulled out the Time Magazine that’s been riding around in my gym bag since last year and fell to reading This is fascinating!" I kept thinking as I read article after article – about Burma and the economy and robotic surgery.After a pleasantly indeterminate drift of time, I looked up and saw the mechanic shouldering past a line of parked cars to find me."It's just the idler pulley," he said. "I can walk over to the dealership across the street there and get one and have you on your way in no time at all."And so it happened. I more coffee, read a few more essays in Time, including one by Joe Klein, author of the novel-made-into-a-film Primary Colors that so accurately captured the nature of a certain 1992 presidential candidate from Little Rock.Then suddenly here came David, who works just close enough so he could sneak away, and together we ate a big old bunch of burgers, mine bunless with the cheese scraped off.Then we crossed the parking lot to get to the service station. There I paid the man  and thanked him and was indeed on my way, just as he'd promised, back in harness and grateful for the small vacation.

The JOY of Cooking?

Is anyone out there as sick of cooking as I am? I’m trying to eat carefully here in the new year but my God it’s a lot of work. Chopping up a butternut squash is harder than anything Tony's nephew Christopher ever did in the back rooms of Satriale’s if you get the reference. And peeling a mango and cutting it into edible pieces? It’s like peeling an elephant’s eyeball and then trying to dice it. I mean shouldn’t there be some sort of tool?This week I made enough mouth-watering entrées, soups and salads to feed an army, and all for a husband who won’t even sit down to eat anymore. The man is getting odd no doubt. His approach to a meal: get it down and move on to the next thing which for him is some left-brain project like Sudoku or the world’s most difficult crossword puzzle. Even when I’ve expended the last scraps of energy making Crab Cakes with Mango Relish or Slow Cooked Lamb and Fresh Thyme Stew I can’t get him to actually sit at the table with me …. Ok sure they’re from Weight Watcher’s kitchens instead of The Silver Gourmet’s but they’re great.Last night I served this whole fisherman’s delight of a spread with Garlic Steamed Spinach and Toast Points and I don’t know Fetal Tomatoes or some such and the only way I could get Old Dave to do something other than stand like a horse at a trough was to use On Demand to call up The Sopranos on the tube. All it took was offering him the episode where Ralphie gets his head cut off and he was rooted to his seat while he chewed. (Wait so where are those old TV tables? I think maybe the good old 1950s are coming back to haunt me...!)

Aftermath

The whole day after this giant  two-foot snowfall I felt  like a kid. When I backed my car out of my driveway with that big marshmallow of a top-hat still on the roof  I did what I’ve always loved doing: went fast down the hill then braked hard to see if it would all fall down fwump! on the windshield.It did and I loved it all over again. I love seeing the wipers jump into action the way they do, rushing in to clean things away, like lowly ball-boys at a tennis match.All day I worked at my job and did my errands. Came home and broiled some lamb chops and made a pot of wild rice with pine nuts and almonds mixed in; made an Autumn-Vegetable soup  from scratch and then sat down in an actual chair and watched a whole 2002 episode of Six Feet Under, still to me the greatest work Alan Ball and HBO ever did.Finally, dazed with the beauty outside the window and the unaccustomed sense of peace inside my head, I got out the camera and took these pictures - just as  the sun begun to sink and the moon got ready to rise. That's one neighbor's house on top, taken from inside our kitchen; then going down another neighbor's house looking across our yard; then the poor magnolia; and  finally the long beard of ice growing from the gutter outside the window of  the upstairs study...

Snowed In

It was like a snowstorm from the distant past, starting as thick white flakes, then, as the temperatures dropped, becoming like grains of icy sand in a blinding sandstorm.Either way it sealed us in. It sat on our chests and stopped up our mouths.Anyway it stopped up mine.Every day of my life I get up at 5 and write 'til my back hurts. Not yesterday. Yesterday I woke at 7, took this picture, and got back into bed where I basically spent the whole day reading and dreaming. No TV.  No phone. No internet.David stayed home too but he shoveled four times, then cleaned out all the kitchen drawers and by  noon was seated at the dining room table getting a head start on the taxes.“TT!” he would yell cheerily every time he came into the bedroom. “Lazy old TT!” he would say. But I just looked up from my pillow and smiled a guilt-free smile.  Finally at 5, I lit this candle and watched the night come on. I knew we could lose power any minute with the high winds but I figured by then he'd be in the bed too and it would be like my favorite fantasy. “Pretend we’re in a boat on a tossing ocean,” I say when we curl up together. “Old Mr. and Mrs. Astor going down with the Titanic,” he often says back.We were sealed in all day and night and it was loveliness itself.