Mama Bear on the Move

Nature, that big old mama-bear, is starting to wake up. Who can doubt it hearing those winds? It was almost 60 for two whole days around here last this week. Not much melted. The picture here on the left shows the view from our kitchen window after this latest dusting last night.And this is the view from inside the Pilates room at the gym I go to four times a week. We're still cave dwellers there as you can as you can see. It's often hard to see progress but I guess that doesn't mean  there isn't any; the parents are the lasts one to know when their child has grown an inch, right?  It's because they're too close.Anyway by the weekend temperatures had dropped 30 degrees so we felt less teased.Also the wind was so fierce it pulled the top one of our trees off hurled it like a javelin and planted it right-side up in the snow. See? It's the spindly one.But ah what the wind did with the last light dusting! 45 miles an hour and it waved those veils of snow around like an exotic dancer might do. Click on this and see if you don’t agree: that mama bear Nature may still be snoozing but she’s GOT to stirring now! 

Happens to the Best of Us

Lately I’ve turned into some kind of softie; I don’t know why. Certainly in my days as a high school teacher I was no pushover. There was no mouthing off in any of my classes, no smirking, no muttered comments. And didn’t my husband and I make a solid no-nonsense parenting team when our own kids came along? But something has sure happened in the last few years and it seems to me it began around the time our oldest child began having children.The two little guys were recently here for a sleepover. They arrived at suppertime.First, at my suggestion we whipped a pint of heavy cream, ladled it onto some sugar-dusted berries and went to work with our spoons, only later moving on to the chicken, the veggies and the rice.  Then, after eating, they experimented with climbing the stairs toward bed by handing themselves along the narrow margin OUTSIDE the railing.We did the bath and brushed our teeth, one of them standing on the lid of the toilet to do so. (That was the little one.) I then put him in his pjs, read him three books and tucked him into his crib.There, I sang to him, kissed him and started heading back to the living room  – only to turn around and find him calmly following three feet behind me, his little blue blankie clutched in his hand. He had simply climbed back out; gone over the wall so to speak.“Daaavid!” I called to my mate who was by then reading Harry Potter bedtime stories to the six-year-old.“Let’s try switching kids,” he said and scooped up the escapee to bring him back to his crib, leaving me with the older boy who, sated for now with the hijinks at Hogwarts, fell to asking me a great many questions.At one point he looked at me in a searching way and asked, quite out of the blue, “Where is YOUR mother, TT?" (He named calls me TT.)“Ah! Well, my mom is gone now, but oh, she was a great one!”“Why?”“I guess because she seemed to get such a kick out of us kids. She was 20 years older than most of our friends’ moms and maybe that was why. She had ….perspective.”“What’s perspective?”“The ability to see things for what they are, sort of. Also she seemed to know when to let a thing go. Plus she never got mad at us, not really. Like this one time she tried chasing us with a hairbrush to spank us, though she’d never spanked anybody in her life.“Around and around the dining room table we went - it was like a Tom and Jerry cartoon - until finally she stopped short.”“Why?”“Because she was laughing so hard. I think she suddenly realized how she looked, a woman 50 chasing a couple of little kids. ‘You young hooligans!’ she yelled and then laughed even harder, which made us laugh too.“Also, when I grew up and had my own babies and brought them to her house? she sort of let them do whatever they wanted.”He paused briefly, then said “That’s how YOU are,” in just that frank first- way and there it was, talk about from the mouths of babes: the change I could not until then identify with my dessert-first, use-the-stairs-like-a-jungle-gym, why-not-lie-around-talking-all-night ways.It’s so simple, I now see. All that happened was…. I became a grandma.

Monkey on Ya Back

This faded old photo to the left is me trying to smoke on the last day of camp the summer I was 14. People were packing, and later, after the weepy rituals of Candlelight Ceremony and Good Night Circle, the friskier kids would climb onto the cabin roof and gorge themselves on contraband sweets obtained by “sneaking out,” darting down the road ducking behind trees and bushes to get to the corner store.

This was the only time I ever tried tobacco.

(I've cropped the picture to spare people the sight of a child coughing her lungs out.)

Since I seemed to be focusing on health topics here lately let’s round out the week with some observations on smoking from a site called Medicine.net. here I learned all over again that smoking:

• Stains your fingers
• Puckers your mouth
• Squints up your eyes
• Puts vertical Clint Eastwood-style line in your cheek (ha ha same cheeks!)
• And makes your skin inelastic

The funny thing is, in time all this happens to non-smokers too. I work so much with dyes and woodstains my fingers are always pigmented strangely and I have to tell you all of these other conditions are fast becoming mine as well.

To see pictures of all  of them just click on the colored hyperlinks above. Have a look, then ask yourself if  you wouldn’t just as soon stick with your more harmless obsessions like tweezing your moles and watching dumb TV.

(because it's tough to have just one :-))

and because it's not this easy to quit

Live and Learn

What’s Ok to say and what isn’t: only you can o decide. I love the informality and immediacy of the internet, all those people out there saying just how they feel. It’s like the opening scene from “City of Angels” where Nicholas Cage and Andre Braugher stand on a tall building listening to the thoughts of the little humans below. (They’re angels, see. Then one of them falls in love with Meg Ryan before she had her upper lip plumped up this scary way.)Take a crack like that: it’s everyday parlance here on the net where people are always exclaiming over Before and After shots of the poor celebrities. I'd totally take a shot like that here, but I wouldn't dream of doing it in the weekly column I write - partly because I consider it a privilege to appear in the paper every week and partly because such remarks seem too... well, hurtful. I also don’t use the word 'fat’ in my column or  refer to the 'Christmas cards' we 'all' write or speak about when you go 'upstairs' in your house.  I’m done leaving people out by acting like everyone is thin, and Christian, and has a whole house instead of an apartment or a rented room. I’m just very careful – in the paper.But here? I act like it’s all harmless jauntiness. Or I did until yesterday when I got an email reacting to the photo I had just posted of a person with psoriasis. Look back and see. I was saying basically “Awesome medical anomalies!” “Awesome video of a surgeon’s implements probing around like the delicate feelers of an insect!”  But the man who emailed me opened my eyes:“Dear Terry,”  he began…

Thanks for sharing with your readers a 'great'  picture of psoriasis.  Unfortunately, a real person was in that photo, and for that person, psoriasis is anything but great.  More than a quarter of a million people in Illinois, including many children, have psoriasis or its counterpart, psoriatic arthritis.  All of us with psoriasis need more medical research, affordable treatments, and greater understanding in the meantime.  If interested, you can learn more at our website below.Thanks again for your coverage of this incurable immune system disease.Michael Paranzino, Psoriasis Cure Now, P.O. Box 2544Kensington, MD 20891 Kensington Maryland  http://www.psoriasis-cure-now.org

My cheeks burn to read such a mild response to my unfeeling remarks. Guess now is as good a time as any for me to mosey over to this psoriasis site and start getting schooled. It's so true: we live and then (one hopes) we learn.

Frame o' Reference

We see the world only from our own point of view, no doubt about it. Yesterday when I was writing about AAA, I figured the whole world would know I was talking about the automotive and travel outfit. But when I Googled it to get the logo what came up right in the top row but the picture on the left of somebody’s  operation! Those two thingies that look like shoehorns hold back the tissues so the surgical team can really dig in. And the shiny red bulge? That’s the inside of the person's glistening pink insides.I looked around the website this picture was from and learned what these three little A’s stand for. The answer:  Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm which happens when the big vessel that supplies blood to the abdomen, pelvis, and legs becomes abnormally large and/or balloons outward. Your aorta leaves your heart, see, then ascends, arches, and descends through the chest until it reaches the diaphragm where it passes the diaphragm and continues down the abdomen. Then it splits to form the two iliac arteries that go to the legs. Basically it looks like a little dancing man. Well, a dancing man with no head and no arms. This information was followed by some riveting Q and A, including the tantalizing question “What's inside an aortic aneurysm?” (Answer: a laminated blood clot layered like plywood if you can picture it.)But I also found on the same page all these great pictures of medical conditions. I saved this eyeball for you to see....as well as the this one showing the heart break of psoriasis as the old ad used to call it..But best of all I found this video of the actual  procedure and all I can say is the phrase “Tripe A” will never again bring to mind tow trucks and flat tires. Amazing![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSPo6SwZbAg&feature=related]

Kick in the Pants P.S.

Triple A, man. You’re glad you have it but boy do you have to jump through some hoops to use it. My girl’s broke-down car was stranded 100 miles to the west for 8 long days while the ‘experts’ dickered. The service station couldn't fix it, the dealership couldn’t fix it... They all threw up their hands, cried  “We don’t know WHAT”S wrong with this car !” and, as a nice kick-in-the-pants P.S. said,  “Get it outa here."So Annie and I each called in sick and spent five harrowing hours trying to do that.The advice from the clowns who handed over the keys? “Drive it ‘til it starts screaming; then call Triple A.” So drive it Annie did, with me following close behind in my car, eyes peeled for the white smoke which in this case would NOT mean “We have a Pope!” but rather “Your vehicle’s in its death throes, get the hell out!”Well, the car did break down again, of course it broke down. As Annie drove it, the engine light came on and it was sure-enough screaming and groaning and finally she  motioned that she was pulling over. Lucky for us we were near a service plazas. We pulled in there and made our call.“Oh!” sang the Triple A guy merrily. “Well Triple A doesn't service cars on the Turnpike What we can do is call the state police who after more than an hour will come tow you off the Pike and leave you on a nice twisty secondary road from which  you can then call again and wait another hour while we decide whether or not to come save you.”We spent that first hour we spent waiting for the Staties who never came. When we finally called the AAA  again we got a new  guy who did put us right through to State Trooper Sullivan. “Wh-a-a-a-at? That's not right,"  he said when we explained what we had been told earlier. “We'll have a tow truck there in five minutes.”It came in four minutes and its driver didn’t tow us to some secondary road and leave us there. He took and towed Annie’s car clear back to Annie’s own mechanic 60 miles to the east. He was a sweet young guy with a nice smile and we gave him 20 bucks which I hope he spent on beers with his chums.

Here it Comes

Today everything's great: I just saw six Canada geese unpacking their bags by the lake across from here. Two weeks more and they’ll be standing on our grass huddling together like middle-schoolers at the mall. They like to stand on our grass and I like to see them do it. I figure what they’re saying is “This place is more ours than yours, just so you know. We’ve been coming here at the end of every winter since before you took down that ugly swing-set after your kids grew up; since before you put it up ten years before that. In fact we were standing on this piece of land before there were even any houses here at all.”Anyway that’s what I like to think they're saying. Call me a masochist but I like being put in my place.The geese do that to me every year when they come back: shrink me down to size I mean. The way the light looks just now does that to me too. And also the crocuses that just won’t die no matter what kind of winter gets thrown at them. And just when I’m thinking things can’t get any greater, gardenia plants go on sale at the supermarket and the luscious scent of those velvety blossoms practically takes the top of my head off.

you can practically smell  them even in a picture!

Sugar-Free WHAT?

Let’s return to the ridiculous after yesterday’s little detour into the sublime. Today I’m still thinking about printed goof-ups, for indeed they are everywhere. Take the ad in the paper offering for sale “a 2000 pound wench.” (It’s just that she eats so much!) Or take this sober note in a church bulletin saying “This being Easter Sunday we will ask Mrs. Brown to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.” (Good old Brownie! She’s a sport all right!)For some reason church bulletins are rife with these ambiguous phrasings. Like the one announcing an event to be held in both the south and north corners of the church simultaneously where children will “be baptized at both ends." (With diaper cream at one of those ends presumably.)Then there are the recipes shared in the paper like the one that says to “cut up chicken and place it in a deep bowl, mash in a mortar the garlic, oregano, salt and peppercorns, add to rum, mixed with soy sauce and pour over children.” (And if they run, chase them.) Or this one for corn that says “Wrap each ear with bacon slice, fasten with toothpick and place on grill, turning until done - about 10 minutes. Or, let everyone grill his own ears, using long skewers to do so.” (OK Maybe this is just funny to 11-year-olds who really picture people cutting off their ears to throw them on the barbecue but who isn’t 11 deep down inside?)And as long as we’re getting grisly how’s this one from a paper in New Jersey?"Mike McGrew, deputy U.S. marshal in Oklahoma City has carried his son's first baby as a good luck charm for thirteen years. He has had it hanging on the rear-view mirror of four automobiles and, during the war, kept it in the socks of his Army uniform. (Ah, the joys of being a grandpa!)Also, who doesn’t like “Enraged cow injures farmer with ax”? (That whole milking thing finally got on her very last nerve.)The headline “Prostitutes appeal to Pope” seems a mite racy yes but it shows in four short words the root of all humor, which almost always lies in thwarting expectations.You do have to wonder what someone was thinking when he wrote “Jello-brand toilet tissue, regular, sugar free, fat free” (Here I am speechless.)But I have to say my favorite is this last: “Free: farm kittens, ready to eat."It just makes a kitty want to go all Witness Protection eh?

Happy Birthday Mr. President

I missed saying Happy Birthday to Lincoln yesterday so I’ll do it now since he's my favorite president. I like him not for all those myths about reading by firelight but for the things we know are true: The way he remained loyal to his poor crazy wife, difficult as she was, a shopaholic blithely sending the bills for her lavish wardrobe along to the government. The way he comforted her after their boy Will died in the White House even though he himself was devastated by this  loss and even had the child disinterred and his coffin pried open so he could look once more upon his face.

But he was funny too and speaking of funny I guess we might as well get that Geico ad out of the way right now. It’s disrespectful but there’s something so universal about the way his wife fumes and stalks out of the room. Marriage!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdy3orO6tQA]

According to his friend Judge David Davis, Lincoln's rib-tickling tales were really just   “devices to whistle down sadness," a tactic that I for one understand completely.

Finally, I love what he told the crowd in February of 1861 when he left Springfield to take the oath of office. “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything,” he said that day at the train station.  “Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return…Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.”

This speech is in my head all the time for some reason, the passing-from-a-young-man-to-an-old-man part especially.Also in my head often is the memory of these chairs set up by his closest associates who stayed with him as he lay dying from that bullet fired into his head at point-blank range.

I took this picture three summers ago.

the same room, filled

reportedly the last photo ever taken of the man

Booty Betooty

Here’s my advice to all you careless fellow Americans: be careful what you set down in black and white. An editor I know from the Shakespeare group we both belong to gathered up this collection of misprints from over the years.I loved this man Max Hall. Yet for all the care he took to watch what he was leaving behind, really what he most believed in was living life forward: Once, when we took a break in our reading he rose to stretch his legs and, returning to his seat, lost his footing and sat down hard; blinked once, got up and resumed his spirited reading of the part of Falstaff. When I complimented him later on his quick ‘recover’ he smiled delightedly and said “I’m 97 years old!” as if being 97 was somehow the very reason he bounced back so fast.An extended version of that smile appears in this collection of boo-boos, typos and misprints, all made because a series of ‘somebodys’ didn’t go back over the copy one last time.One of his favorites came from a review of the play Harvey which tells the story of a drunk and the imaginary hare only he can see. The misprint said the guy was as followed around by a six-foot-tall white rabbi.He also cites the time an edition of the Washington Post went out with the headline “FDR IN BED WITH CO-ED” (He was actually in bed with a cold.) Also, the time the Naval Academy took delivery of 900 diplomas to be handed out to the graduates at the next day’s  commencement exercises - only to find that “naval” had been spelled with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’ - like the bellybutton.This last story says it all about Max, who, I have just learned, died only days ago at the ripe old age of 100: “When my friend Robert Fort was appointed Beauty Editor of the Emory University Yearbook in the early 1930s a misprinted headline in the Emory Wheel made him the ‘Betuty’ Editor.’ For the rest of his life his friends called him ‘Betuty.’”Betooty: a great name. (Ah  human error. What a dull place the world would be without it!)

Somebody get that copy editor a drink of water!

Squint as You Approach

A sign hangs just outside the Women’s Locker Room at the gym I go to that forbids all but women over 18 from entering, with a second sign saying again no girls under 18 and no children over four. For more than a year I have wondered why this strongly worded rule but have finally decided it’s because the sight of an undraped woman is so stunning a thing as to sear a person’s very eyeballs.It’s like when that voice from the clouds spoke to old Moses from the burning bush. “Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” it said.In the women’s locker room we've got naked ladies of every age and body type slowly toweling their hair and stepping into or strapping on the complicated silky hammocks of their underthings.I myself am never naked in there I wouldn’t dream of being naked, I think because even in spite of all those flower-child years I spent in my early 20s I was more truly marked by my childhood years when every girl knew how to take off her bra without taking off her blouse  and could undress entirely ‘underneath’ while still remaining modestly draped. It’s just the way we were then. Most of us had never seen a naked woman in our lives which is pretty funny because we WERE naked women under all our clothes!Well THOSE days are sure over. Today’s girls are happy to appear at their very graduation ceremonies with every inch of fat on display, peeking out of their camisoles and brimming up over tiny Barbie doll-size skirts.The change took years to come but one day it was just…. complete. Example: When I was in 15, I spent most of my waking hours pantomiming a kind of extended apology to the whole male world for the fact that I wasn’t very pretty. When my daughter was 15, on the other hand, she proudly wore a T-shirt that said “Squint as You Approach Lest My Beauty Blind You.”I like to think that’s the spirit behind these signs. “Stop right there,” they’re saying “for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” And can I get an Amen to that! 

L'chaim, L'chaim to Life!

I ran into my new friend Morgan today who said she saw that picture of the dead bird on my blog yesterday and wondered if I knew what kind of bird it was. I had to say that I didn’t because the snow is too deep for me to get close enough to the poor thing.  She then told me that in her yard they have a squirrel who eats a little and then lies right down in the snow – just lies on one side, chewing before eventually getting up and trotting off . She doesn’t know what the problem with him might be.I suggested so look it up on the Internet and then did so myself the second I got back home again. It’s of course hard to know just how to ask the question that will give you information about a reclining rodent but I finally Googled “signs of sickness in squirrels” and got taken to a site where I read the following. Right church wrong pew maybe but good to know nonetheless. It says:“We have encountered a few cases of blind squirrels. These have been easy to spot, as they tend to hop around in circles trying to get their bearings, and will often bump into things. A blind squirrel may even have a sore nose for this reason. In our experience blind squirrels tend not to be aggressive (in fact can be quite docile) if handled gently. Be careful obviously just in case. The cause of blindness may need some investigation by a vet  especially if the eyes (or ears) look unhealthy, but a blind squirrel can lead a long and happy life in the right hands…” - hands like the ones above presumably since it says this is the right way to hold a squirrel.So see? You really can find anything on the internet. And when I Googled “blind animals” I got this beauty of a cartoon. I know blindness isn’t funny and certainly death by one’s own hand isn’t but still: how great is this? The guy is TRYING to leave a suicide note next to the tracks while he lies down on the tracks, selfishly taking his dog with him it seems, but the dog sure had other plans. Look at that little smile!There's that life force again, God bless it. Now everybody sing, "L'chaim, L'chaim to Life!" from Fiddler on the Roof.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjEDgvNP0NU]

Revenge of the Birds

Have you noticed how it’s suddenly WAY lighter in the morning and the birds are getting about more? Though not this one who died last night of who knows what. We found him this morning by the ginkgo tree. Is there a bird mortuary I could call?A year ago I got a bird feeder for my birthday which I carefully filled, carried outside and hung from a tree before sort of falling down on the job. Meaning I didn’t keep up so well in the re-filling department so that now, well, they just won’t come to it.  I filled it up with fresh new birdseed after Christmas and still, even with all this ice and snow, it hangs there untouched.I think maybe they’re mad at me. Or their parents told them, “Don’t even start with that one because she’ll leave you high and dry.”But it was a regular love-fest with the avian population around here last summer. That’s when a mourning dove laid her eggs and raised not one but two sets of babies on the windowsill not six feet from where I write each day. And she liked me, she really did and felt safe with me at all times, whether entertaining her man friend or sitting her eggs or letting these unbelievably homely babies put their whole heads down her throat to eat what she had eaten ten minutes earlier.Maybe these winter birds know all the bad things I use around the house: all that Comet, all that Clorox, never mind the deadly ice-melting potions we've been scattering around over the last few weeks.I try to be like my kids who wouldn’t use these products if their lives depended on it, whose napkins are made of cloth instead of paper and who – get this – use birdseed to give traction on icy sidewalks.  I bet they’ve got cardinals by the dozens at their house, practically eating out of their hands.But I was such a good landlord to those doves and what I'm wondering is, why can’t you keep getting credit the whole way for the good things you have done in the past?That’s what’s so hard in life: the way you have to keep ON being good every single day.~ Sigh ~ Just look at this sweet mama-dove from last summer. What a contrast to the image of that little toes-up corpse at the top here! What a contrast between who we are and who we would like to be!

Come back summer! Come back soon!

The Book of Roof

This is the roof over the front porch of our house.We’re not shoveling it.David doesn’t believe in the practice for places other than the walkways. For years he practiced only solar shoveling on the driveway; that’s what he called it: ‘solar shoveling.’ I’m not sure just when that changed and we began hiring a guy with a plow on the front of his truck. It may have been around the time the sweet softness of the mothering hormones ebbed in my body, causing me to turn a mite more male in my manner, which is to say more BLUNT in a merry sort of swashbuckling way.All he has to do now when it snows is take his mighty upper body strength out and do the steps and sidewalks, which I’ll be the first to admit he does very faithfully. But this new thing with shoveling your roof? This shoveling–the-roof thing he’s never gonna do.I have two rooms where I spend most of my non-cooking hours. One is the guest bedroom which I use for answering letters from the people who write me and the other is my so-called office if you can say that about a room that’s full of candles and pictures of the dead and props for all the funny videos I’m going to make any day now. Both look out in this porch roof, the same roof my oldest child used for sneaking out as a high school freshman. The same roof our cats loved to pad around on, surveying the neighborhood.I look out at it all day long lately thinking, “Today? Will this be the day it collapses and kills the mailman?”  I guess I could drag my own little Irish fanny out there and shovel it off but it’s so much more fun to stay inside and play the aggrieved princess.I looked out at the above picture for a really long time just now before I finally noticed the photo  of my two men, propped in the corner of the window frame. Don’t they look nice? Maybe it’s OK that I'm so idle and whiny as long as I love everybody to death who gets within 50 yards of me. Kinda countin’ on that to tell you the truth.

Haunted Honeymoon

It’s impossible to be serious all the time – who’d want to even try? So after my sobbingly nostalgic blurt about old things here yesterday I thought I’d say more about the old thing we sleep in, meaning that bed I spoke about that we found in the cellar of our last house where we use the headboard but not the footboard.I think it’s haunted. I know it doesn’t LOOK haunted covered with kids as it is in that picture but what about in this picture?  See that lady sitting up beside David as he quietly reads his paper? I mean who is she but a spectral presence? And where are her clothes?And look! I caught her on camera a second time, here six feet away from the bed.She's starting to take over the house! And isn't she the show-off trying to get us to look at her by standing right in front of the TV. What do I do, burn sage? Work on my own abs? Call the Ghostbusters?

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

Old Things

I’ve been thinking about the stuff people find  inside their walls, under their floorboards or wallpaper -  like the pencil-sketched dirty picture I found under three layers of wallpaper, the date “1929” scrawled primly underneath.My friend found something much more interesting in the rafters of her house when she went to repoint the chimney: two bottles of whiskey dated 1853 and 1874, both with labels perfectly legible, and an 1844 pamphlet called “General Rules for the Preservation of the Teeth,” stating that ill health in the mouth makes for ill health throughout the body, an idea many of us consider new.I've lived in four houses over the course of my life, all of which have provided me with unexpected ‘gifts’: the place we live in now, a stove from the 1920s, a fridge from the ‘30s and a cast iron form into which you pour hot tallow for the making of candles. From the place before that, left by someone generations before in the dank old cellar, the headboard to a bed, gummy with a century’s worth of grit, for whose sake I taught myself the art of refinishing.As it happens we've used that headboard ever since – and though we've never used the matching footboard, we’ve kept it as well, for the all-too-human toenail marks scratched into its finish, and for the way the whole thing is bowed outward, having been pushed at night after night by the force of some long-gone boy's ever-lengthening legs.These gifts are to me treasures and I’m so glad I learned how to restore them. Because by what other alchemy could you pull honey-hued maple out from under a blackened finish smeared with the rings of 100 paint cans? Now, what was once an ugly hulk is a graceful buffet standing tall on handsome turned legs.As it happens I taught myself to reupholster too which allowed me to turn a horsehair sofa from my mother’s basement  into something that simply lights up my whole living room.

(Click to enlarge.)

There is so much lost on the human journey, so much we must all too soon relinquish, our strength, our fleetness of foot, you name it.... How sad yet oddly comforting the way our things outlive us, and  by so many years.

The old headboard is obscured by the children but here it still is, as you see. (Again click to enlarge.)

What You Can Learn at the Movies

Face it: most of what we know about famous figures we know from movies about them. In fact what notable figures haven’t had a movie made about them? Dian Fossey you say? Wrong: Gorillas in the Mist. Howard Hughes? Nope: The Aviator.  Moses? The Ten Commandments. Certainly not Jesus who’s had TWO movies made about him just in the last 20 years, one starring Willem Dafoe and one starring Caviezel who at least looked a little mid-eastern (AND spoke Aramaic. The whole movie had subtitles, remember?)

But let's look at the life of Mozart just because we’ve been thinking about him these last few days. Most of what I know about Mozart I know from seeing Amadeus. Here’s the trailer for it now with Mozart being played by Tom Hulce fresh from his star turn in Animal House:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du-rD2QL1Pc]So too , most of what I know about Beethoven I know from seeing Immortal Beloved and here’s that trailer :[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS9MTQqVUFY.]It leaves you really hoping that the writers of all these screenplays stuck to the facts. I mean you try to learn about all the great figures but it’s a daunting task. Our lives are so short and here’s this ever-growing tail of human history. In a way it’s a wonder we remember anything at all of what went before.Anyway here’s  the movie that taught ME the most about a  historical figure and  then sent me right to the bookstore for the 400-page book about him (which, come to think of it, I should probably take down from the shelf and read again.)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVwCeGxTN-A]

Twinkle Twinkle it Takes Guts

I knew that I knew the music to  yesterday’s video of the falling-apart-treadmill - I had sung it all my life in various choirs and choruses -  but I looked it up to get the details and found this snazzy picture of the composer along with some reaction to the music that made me smile from ear to ear:“Mozart he was the best!” begins  Person Number One. “He wrote Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when he was four or some composition I don’t know what but can U imagine being totally deaf? what he  wrote is mind-blowing!” – this prompting Person Number Two to say, “Uhhh Mozart wasn’t deaf, your thinking of Beethoven,” and Person Number Three to weigh in with, “He did write his first composition at four. As for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star it’s a myth that he wrote that – the melody is French - but he did write variations on it, in his early twenties”OK, true enough but hey, we can all have our own take on a thing? Like Person Number Four who writes  “I like rap music and hip hop but I defy anyone on the planet to not like this!” – leading Person Number Five to say this in one long run-on sentence without benefit of  period, apostrophe OR the ‘ly’ suffix that makes a word an adverb: “Mozart-was-just-incredible-talented-beyond-anyone-wildest-dreams-he-played-for-the-empress-when-he-was-only five-sorry-for-the-bluntness-but-that-is-just-a-stupid-mixup-to-make-" Wh-i-i-i-ch causes Person Number Seven to sigh “God, take Justin Bieber and give us back Amadeus Mozart!” and on and on. You can see it all here along with the tune itself.And then there’s our friend Bach and his Minuet in G Major that most of us know as the pop song   “Lovers' Concerto” or, for us average joes who often don't quite catch the real name of a thing, “How Gentle is the Rain.”You know it, right? It appears that it’s known the world over: “Ah!” writes one member of the public under the YouTube version you 're about to click on. “Beautiful!" writes another. “こんな　やさしい　歌い方ってありますか～～♪♪  天使に　囁かれて　いるみたいで たまりませせんなぁ　☆彡writes a third.Let’s all listen to it now – it really is a quite lovely version - and then stop a minute and be in awe too, just like these good people God bless ‘em, and appreciate the fact that they took a minute and to go on record  with their opinions which in my book takes courage every time.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_wmS9DleJ4&feature=player_embedded]

Cabin Fever Day Number 98? 99?

Still stuck in the house under mounds and mounds of frozen yogurt  or whatever that white stuff is outside, I can’t even remember the last time I was out. Lolled in the bed for three hours reading old New Yorkers but when I got up I got way up: wrote a week’s worth of diary entries, paid bills, got done refinishing this little  high chair,  repaired some nice dangly earrings with Superglue. (God I love superglue! And this time I only got my fingers stuck together for a very short time before I found the solvent...)Also trained my new speech recognition software so that it will stop writing 'dock' when I say dark,' and 'pock' as when I say 'park'. I mean why would anyone even be writing about pockmarks even though I have a few doozies myself from contracting  chicken-pox at the ripe old age of 25 from my sister Nan who got them at 27 by sharing a ski chalet with a field trip of middle schoolers. (My how we itched, childhood diseases being much more serious when you’re big! )I also went on the treadmill and didn’t almost break my neck this time the way I did the other day . And I watched half an episode of Glee and the last ten minutes of Cast Away, made a creamy tomato sauce with real tomatoes, drank two ounces of red wine (Weight Watchers R Me) and built a big fat fire in the fireplace, only burning the front of my sneaker a little.Also today it finally stopped snowing and instead rained, laying a coat of clear nail polish on top of all that frozen yogurt. So if we’re lucky we will have maybe all gone back out and rejoined the world today.Less moronic content from me let’s hope. But why not end with some nice moronic fun just this once and enjoy this delightful video showing what happens when things really go amiss with a treadmill routine:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCj2oTsY3_M](I chose this slowed-down version made by a German-speaking person (a) because you can’t hear all the swearing as clearly as in the American one and (b) because the soundtrack is Mozart’s Lacrimosa (meaning tearful) from the Requiem in D…… Witty German-speaking person ha ha !)

Change o' Pace Snowday

When the last giant snowstorm hit a few weeks ago I curled up in my bed and read all day which is totally unlike me.  Maybe it had something to do with the fact that David stayed home that whole day, briskly shoveling and paying the bills and starting on the taxes.  It just felt like the more he did, the less I had to do. (It's a marriage thing I think.)  But yesterday’s storm was a whole different thing. I woke up at 6:30 and seeing that the snow hadn’t started, jumped into my clothes and made that  7 o’clock yoga class at the Y. ‘Course then someplace between Downward Facing Dog and Corpse Pose the snow hit like a fist and a drive that had taken me 7 minutes on the way over took me 50 minutes on the way back. Hence by the time I stomped back into the kitchen with my snowy boots David was gone baby gone, off to the fun and camaraderie of office life, leaving me to have  about the most unusual day  I have ever had in that I did not read a single word during it nor even come into the same room as my conjoined twin the laptop.Instead, I stood all day cooking. And while I cooked I watched movies on HBO. And here is what I noted:

• Whoopi Goldberg does ‘dignified’ fine as in Mississippi Burning but is much more fun to watch swearing her head off  in Jumpin' Jack Flash.
• 11 years after Back to the Future Michael J Fox did a silly film called The Frighteners made tolerable only by the presence of those same scary black flying guys that go after Patrick Swayze’s killer in Ghost.
• Zooey Deschanel’s character really disappoints the kid from 3d Rock in 500 Days of Summer but she sure has cute teeth. They're actually real!
• And though it’s true that I’m getting just a teensy bit tired of  It’s Complicated I still love the scene where she’s smoking a joint in the bathroom with her caddish but lovable ex and laughing like a hyena –  right up until the moment she catches sight of herself in the mirror, stops short and says suddenly, tragically. “GOD, is that what I LOOK like?!”

She is having a moment everyone over 50 has had, lemme tell ya - which is why we older folks can no longer get by on looks alone but instead have to produce now and then. Which is also why on this particular snow day I…

• Broiled a pound of salmon,
• Made a shrimp and avocado salad,
• Mixed up a zingy meatloaf with oatmeal instead of breadcrumbs,
• Tossed up an Italian tuna and arugula salad,
• Roasted  sweet potatoes, dusting them first with sea salt and garam masala,
• Grilled a bunch of mushrooms,
• Culled, rinsed and steamed a world of pinto beans,
• And fried up mashed potatoes in butter 'til I had a wonderful golden pancake all bubbling and crisp at the edges.

All of which brings oddly to mind the lyrics to this old song, often sung to me by my mate:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9ZZgDqzAg]