The Jaw

A week ago I ran this silly Who ARE These People contest, mentioning that line of kings the Hapsburgs with their mighty chins. I always think of those guys because I have a bit of a chin myself: they called me Dish Face in high school.(Prominent forehead, prominent chin, no nose to speak of, you get the picture.The chin I got from my mother who stuck hers way out to make the world’s most disapproving face. I in turn gave it to my daughter who  I understand uses it in workplace situations to signify an immovable stance. ("Oh our poor boss!” a colleague was heard to say on seeing him in her office. “She’s chinning him!”I just spent a little time looking up mandibular prognathism which is what this is called and found some dandy images, like this one of Jay Leno who has it. And these are two pictures taken 90 years apart of my grandmother who died at 31 and that same daughter who, God willing, will get to live three times that long at least. Same profile, isn't it amazing?But  that’s not why I bring up the Hapsburgs today. I bring them up because in my book  we are now officially in SPRING what with last night’s time change . And anticipating that return to warm and remembering those old Spanish kings brought to mind this wonderful poem I have long adored. It's by Maxine Kumin, and it's about love and our brief,  brief lives. Give it a read. The image of the little frogs right down to the tender brave ending, ahhh!

Love, we are a small pond.In us yellow frogs take the sun.Their legs hang down. Their thighs openlike the legs of the littlest children.On our skin waterbugs suggest incisionbut leave no marks of their strokes.Touching is like that. And what touch evokes.Just here the blackest berries fattenover the pond of our being.It is a rich month for putting up weeds.They jut like the jaws of Hapsburg kings.Tomorrow they will drop their bloodas the milkweed bursts its cottonleaving dry thorns and tight seeds.Meanwhile even knowingthat time comes down to shut the door -headstrong, righteous, time hard at the bonewith ice and one thing more -we teem, we overgrow. The shelfis tropic-still. Even knowingthat none of us can catch up with himselfwe are making a runfor it.  Love, we are making a run.

Innocence

You speak of innocence. I did anyway, right here yesterday. It was in relation to the young girl who thought she had lost her innocence because she had ‘gone all the way’ with a boy, and now figured it didn’t matter how many partners she had.It seemed so sad to me that she thought innocence could be lost that easily. Didn’t that itinerant teacher from Nazareth say that nothing we put into our body, no ritual we could perform or fail to perform has any real bearing on our true goodness? It’s what’s happening up in that busy little mind of ours that counts, whether it’s given over to kind thoughts or unkind thoughts, leading to unkind words and actions, words that harm others, actions that harm others.Remember this about the purity of our souls: it remains. Even the death-row inmate, no matter how blindly he stumbled, no matter what chaos and pain he caused; even he gets up mornings and goes forward with the same chance we all have to start again every day.I think of the film Dead Man Walking and the way the character played by Sean Penn boasts and swaggers and denies his part in the savage killing of two kids unlucky enough to have crossed his path. I think of the miracle the nun works who walks beside him in the week leading up to his execution. The love of this nun, played by Susan Sarandon, allows him to admit his guilt – and that admission uncovers the goodness in him long-buried.I don’t need to write another thing and you don’t need to go find the movie. Instead take a minutes and watch this well-crafted trailer in whose 120 seconds the whole story is told. It is our story too. My friend Bill Tammeus, author of the blog Faith Matters and former award-winning faith columnist for the Kansas City Star reports that in his church this past Wednesday folks were asked to write on a small piece of paper a confession, a hope or a concern, which they wadded up and threw in a common container, the contents of which were then lit aflame to make the ashes. As he put it at the end of that day, “We are wearing our own thoughts.” Another reason to try to make all our thoughts kindly thoughts.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg-GMqPHIPQ]

Used

Deliver me,  not only from this fool but from all the writers and producers of Two and a Half Men, that insinuating show where a child is put in the middle while a world of salacious talk sails over his head. I can't tell you how mad I get seeing the purported grownups on this show making their sly references to various expressions of sexuality. The kids watching don’t need to hear all that and you know some of them are just First and Second Graders. It damages children when adults don't act like adults, and then go on to engage in all this wink-wink behind-the-hand innuendo.For signs of the damage think of Katie Couric's 2005 special on teen sex. I give her credit for doing that show, Oprah too when she shone a light on 'rainbow parties.'  And don’t try telling tell me 'Oh the reporting was off on all that stuff and young girls really don’t know about such things.'In this tainted culture? They know all right. A girl n my Sunday school class once confided to me that she thought she might actually be done getting drunk and hooking up on weekends. She was 13 years old. Then two years later, a girl 15 told me she figured it didn’t matter who she slept with anymore because she had lost her ‘purity.' I wanted to weep hearing that.I tell you who I pity: I pity that poor skinny girl on Charlie Sheen’s knee, one of his many 'goddesses' as he calls these young women. Would he help any one of them if her car broke down and she needed a ride? Would he listen if she wept or hold her hair back if she got sick? I don't think so.I watch these interviews the media are doing with him. The people conducting them have these looks of faint distaste on their faces, looks of contempt almost, unless.... What’s that you say? They love doing these interviews which push ratings up through the roof and bring the big bucks to all the key players? But if that's the case then who might be  the REAL targets of their contempt?Who but you and me, babe. Who but you and me.Now here's Katie getting the scoop from a roomful of teens in that 2005 special. Click here and see what you think. Sex is no big deal? Now in what universe is that?

Lucky Cat

I spent a large part of my recent trip to the land of the palms with my sister Nan, her 'much older husband Chuck' as she likes to call him and this little creature named Duke for the John Wayne-lead-from-the-hips style of walking he has had from his baby days, when Chuck first found him hungry and mewing outside their house:Now Nan has been a softie for stray cats all her life; this I know.  For every poisonous snake she’s beheaded on the patio there’s been a new kitten in her arms getting saved and adopted. Her big black cat only added to the fun by producing a string of kittens, one after another appearing in the standard dissolving baggies Nature favors as packaging.  (“Mom!” the child screamed on discovering this. “Shadow is falling apart!”)Nowadays at their house, a whole section of the sofa is given over to Duke’s use, the good upholstery covered in lengths of terrycloth. (“Welcome to Towel-Town, have a seat!” Nan told me when I first entered the room. ) So all this time I thought SHE was the fool for cats.Turns out the real softie is Chuck who is so beloved by Duke that the little cat actually comes when he hears him in the shower, hops up onto the wall of glass tiles and “asks” Chuck to wash his face. Which Chuck does, reaching up as you see in the picture above.The cat loves it and that’s no surprise. Who doesn’t love to be groomed? It’s the great loss we the ‘civilized’ suffer: no more getting held tight between momma monkey's legs for a thorough scrub and a good looking over. I  miss it myself.And now for you groundlings out there who like to see a girl clad in little but her eye makeup and her undies, here’s the whole-body version of cat bathing, sweetly done on a little creature who never even mews:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFY0gb6wXrw&feature=fvst]

Hungry

Well the birds showed up finally. Maybe they’re done laughing at the bird feeder I hung too low - anyway it was lying sideways on top of the thigh-deep snow by the first week in January. They wouldn’t go near it all winter, brimming with seeds as it was, but now here they are suddenly.And they’re not spring birds just unpacking their bags either but the same old chickadees who are supposed to  stick around and suffer with us all winter.I guess they must be really hungry by now. I get that. I’m hungry myself at this season but then I’m always hungry and never more than when that basket of bread gets plunked down in front of me in a restaurant. Back in the day, David and I would stand for 40 minutes to get into the Hilltop Steak House on the rare occasion we could scare up the twenty bucks and he’d just be shaking his head the whole time at the way I ate all the rolls the second they arrived and then just picked at the entree.Maybe it’s the fear of scarcity that makes people gobble; that's surely what it is for the animals. Most of the time I feel like I could even eat paper, like the Tom Hanks character does in his movie Cast Away. (It was a good look for him, though, you have to admit, once he skinnied down and got that sun-bleached hair. You’d have NO trouble getting young women in this culture to hand over cash money to  look just like he did after four years living Lord-of-the-Flies style.)But hungry isn’t funny, I know. Hungry is what too many people in the world are every morning and every night.Today is Ash Wednesday for Christians, a time for fasting and repentance. I wonder if people still give up things during Lent and if so what do they give up. The deer I see on the weekends are eating tree bark they've grown so hungry. Won't we be glad when sprouts of green and seeds from living plants come back and  for a while at least all scarcity is banished.

I'll take pictures of our tree bark. It sobers you to see.

Liftoff

Travelled last week; it was mind-opening as usual. Watched a zillion sitcoms on my personal TV screen aboard Jet Blue, reveled in the big wide seats, gobbled not one but two boxes of Animal Crackers.I love Animal Crackers. I love all little things: dogs made by the Beanie Baby crowd, mini-marshmallows, Paul Simon...I bought the $8 headphone-and-nap-set just to get my hands on that little pillow. If I kept dolls I could totally use it in my doll house.I was visiting my big sister Nan on this trip. (She's the cute one pulling at her shorts in this picture.) Nan didn't approve of dolls. We never played with them as kids. Oh the odd grownup would sometimes give us one but we just kind of dismantled it for parts after we’d used it as the Baby Jesus in our annual Nativity tableau. (Ah those were great events! Nan took the two rocking chairs from our great aunts’rooms and tipped them over so the tops of their backs met in a perfect roof shape. Then she played the Virgin Mary in gossamer veils of blue, while I was Joseph in our grandfather’s old brown shirt. (Well I was Joseph if you can possibly recognize Joseph in a person less than three feet tall with hair like Don King's. (Does it even need saying that I’m the one on the bottom at the right?)Instead of liking dolls we liked stuffed animals, far more noble creatures in our minds. I had a stuffed dog named Pinky who got less and less pink over the years and Nan had a bear named Jinglefoot with a bell sewn into his lower paw.When I was visiting her in Florida this past week, we wandered into her closet so she could lend me a purse more decent then the old black feedbag of a thing I normally carry. I stood there marveling at all the closet space people get in new houses and that’s when she spoke up:“See that thing on the top shelf? Do you recognize it?”She reached up then – Nan is tall – and pulled down Jinglefoot himself, carefully saved all this time. So yes travel takes you to other places, yes. But if you're really lucky and you keep your eyes peeled, it will take you to other times as well.

The Dead Are Not Dead

Once you’re grown up, you stop making a big deal about your birthday. If you’ve learned anything over the years it’s not to wreck a nice thing by wishing it were nicer.On my birthday last month I had mail from my sister in Florida and my husband David’s 90-year-old uncle. That was it for cards.But I also got many shout-outs from my friends on Facebook and what did I care that a spot at the top of their ‘page’ told them it was my birthday? I still felt touched.I saw my kids and there were presents.  It was all very nice and after they'd all left and David and I were settling in for a quiet night we had an exchange that I think surprised us both. “So did you have a nice birthday?” David asked me.“Oh I really did! Only… well, my mom hasn’t called yet.”“I know,” he said with a kindly expression, “but she will!”“How?” I said, and we smiled sadly because both our mothers lie now under that rafter of satin and roof of stone that Emily Dickinson once spoke of.Still, what he had said changed my whole orientation.For some reason I couldn’t fall asleep that night. I lay in our bed for two long hours before doing something I had never before done in our marriage: I left our room and went to the guest room, whose bed felt strange and unaccustomed.I lay in it for yet another hour. Finally, giving up on sleep, I went and got my laptop and brought it t back to the bed.I opened up the social network called ‘Goodreads’ and there saw this passage from Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful novel Housekeeping in which she is writing about the ones we miss:“There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home.”I had to stop a minute at the tenderness of that phrase: “the hope that the memory will become flesh.”I read on, to where she speaks of the accompanying hope that “the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”“To stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness”: ah what a touching image! I closed the laptop then and was again stretching out in that unfamiliar bed when I suddenly I realized it wasn’t unfamiliar at all. The bed I was lying in had been my mother’s own bed, the same one in which I had lain during every childhood illness, while she slept across the narrow hallway with both doors open so she could watch me as I slept.So I had had heard from her after all, just as kindly David had said I would, a realization that caused me to smile, yawn once, turn on my side and sleep like a baby ‘til morning.

This Wind!

Charles V was famous for the family chin. They all were, those Hapsburg Kings. This last week - all during Name-That-Famous-Person week - I’ve been in Florida, where the birds have chins like Hapsburgs too, the pelicans like this guy on the left anyway with those big leathery satchels pinned to their lower jaws.Everything is different in Florida: The grass is like Astroturf, the water smells swampy and the air – well, the air is so soft and wonderful it makes you practically pass out at the wheel at the wheel as you’re driving in from the airport.The day before we came here it looked and sounded like this outside the window:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INXqHbXyDyM]Yesterday it looked and sounded like this.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyz-Uz6-BVc]That wind, cold as it blows up north, is a vernal wind just the same and it’s bringing us spring. And if spring comes, can summer and a beach of our own be far behind?

Chins & More Chins

I suppose everybody knows this is King Henry VIII who married six times and ended life fizzing with syphilis. And maybe most folks recognize his daughter Elizabeth, that shrewd queen. They say she had trouble relinquishing the  nubile (read ‘impregnable’) look since she used her marriageable status as a carrot to dangle before possible suitors/heads of state who took one look at her and saw a realm. I learned from the PBS series Elizabeth R that she wore a centimeter-think paste of makeup later in life and laid on the perfume pretty heavy too. (This is Glenda Jackson in the title role.)I felt for her so, hearing this, and prayed I would never do the same. Sure I wore a little eye shadow for a while there but all it took was seeing myself in a single photo to send me back to my roots as a Woodstock girl. (“She’s awfully PLAIN," I once heard a new acquaintance say about me. “I mean how about a little makeup?!”)So maybe you know those two heads of state but how about this king, with as notable a jaw as Jay Leno himself? 50 points if you ID this one right.And finally who is this little maid? This picture was just discovered in the year 2000 though it goes back to 1865. Looks like it’s the real person too according to scientists who have scientifically compared it to the one known portrait of the lady. ID her for another 50 points and give yourself an additional 10 for saying something about how seeing this helped you understand her writings better.Me I think it’s worth remembering all these long-gone ones. We want to be able to say Hey to them in heaven, right? And it really IS as William Faulkner said: The past isn’t dead. It really isn’t even past.

You Think You're So Smart

Okay so a lot of  people guessed right yesterday: Those WERE pictures of Hillary Clinton and Robin Williams when young but what about these two pix. hmmm? What I want to know now are the identities of (a) the child in the middle here.........and (b) this babe with the slightly inturned teeth:They each reproduced, like many humans (and also rabbits) and certainly the tie between parent and child is very strong. To show you how strong, take a look at this video from 1984, which is the year my son was born. (The strange thing: I remember seeing this show air on Mothers Day of that year. The stranger thing: it seems like it was just five years ago.)I love how fun-loving Robin Williams’ mom is and also how young he looks and how happy. This was just after his first film Popeye, which totally tanked,  and before he began making movies in which he let the audience see the empathy of which he is capable. (That scene from Good Morning Vietnam alone when as Adrian Cronauer he watches the convoy of fresh soldiers passing…!)What really kills me about this clip is not the then-newly-altered shape of Carol Burnett’s jaw the peculiar getup on her sidekick as those two women introduce the segment but how very clear it is that Robin really likes his mom. It’s worth watching all the way through - but for sure stick around long enough for the sightgag with the rubber band.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oziLWy5IVo8]

Not So Famous THEN

,I was once asked to play this parlor game where you have to identify celebrities by their baby pictures. I was terrible at it. I’m convinced I wouldn’t even recognize ET as a baby, so now here’s an easier challenge: What two famous people are seen here, in pictures lifted from their yearbooks? Just do the quick ID and we’ll let class out early.Also, just if you feel like it, post a link to a puzzling name-this-celebrity picture YOU have come across.Oh and the person to the left here someone I met a wig convention once, ha ha. (Don’t be scared; I shave my sideburns now. :-))and....

The Songs Go On

And speaking of Carly and James, here’s another tune they did. this from the fat book of American folk songs that goes from the aching ballads Steven Foster wrote to the rousing get-up-and-clap tunes done by George M. Cohan just as our young men were offering their meek necks to the meat grinder that was the first World War.  58,000 British troops went down, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme yet that war got remembered in merry tunes that made it sound as if we were sending our boys off to an ox-pull competition at the county fair:  “Over there, over there, Send the word send the word over there That we’ll be over, We’re comin’ over And we won’t be back till it’s over over there!”That’s George M. Cohan for you. Then there’s his super-nostalgic “Give My Regards to Broadway, Remember me to Herald Square, Tell all the gang at 42^nd street that I will soon be there. Whisper of how I’m yearning to Mingle with the Old-time Throng. Give my Regards to Old Broadway and Tell them I’ll be there ere long!”Well, some got back ere long. Some never got back at all. This handsome guy above was my grandmother's first cousin.  He was killed ‘over there’ just two months after his wedding day and two weeks before the Armistice. It took more than a year to bring home his body and now all that’s left of him is his name on a placard in a playground in Dorchester Massachusetts. His folks were right off the boat and yet he graduated from Williams College in 1898.  All that loss in a war!But enough of this sad talk. This song, also sung by James Taylor and Carly Simon, is part of the American songbook too. It was written probably 200 years ago as a lullaby but it’s sure been enlivened in our time by several recording artists. Nino Tempo and April Stevens did it when I was kid and here it is in the 70s, a jump-up-and-dance tune if there ever was one.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeOqD3uMIRs]

Close Your Eyes

I just came upon the clip below. It's from the 70s when everyone had all that HAIR, hair, long beautiful hair, shinin’, gleamin’, streamin’, flaxen, waxen, give me down to there (hair!) shoulder length or longer, here baby, there, momma, everywhere, daddy, daddy, haiaiaiair! That’s the song 'Hair' from the musical by the same name in case you didn’t recognize it. And this picture is me when I had such hair. And the clip shows Sweet Baby James and his bride Carly Simon before they differed, then feuded and ultimately split with one saying she'd basically just as soon never talk to the guy again and how sad is that?  What makes people think you have to LIKE the other guy every minute to stay married when you know yourself how stubbornly impossible YOU can be?Anyway sit back and let it wash over you. Pretend we can all stay young forever with fine skin and clear voices – then settle for knowing that what we can all do no matter our hands speckle up like robins’ eggs and our eyes get lost in webs of wrinkles is comfort each another with words like these.I really like that “You can stay as long as you like” part. They never tell you that in a tanning bed or after a massage when all you want to DO is stay there basking in the warmth. At least stay with this video for long enough - or else go to the one-minute-and-40 second mark if you’re in a rush. Do it just to see the bloom in young Carly's cheek![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_D0i7UC9UY&feature=related]

So close your eyes;you can close your eyes, it's all right.I don't know no love songs,and I can't sing the blues any more.But I can sing this song,and you can sing this songwhen I'm gone.It won't be long before another day.We're gonna have a good time.And no one's gonna take that time away.You can stay as long as you like.

Only Connect

Very soon, according to futurists, technology will have advanced to the point that life will be all but unrecognizable to us. Soon, whole phones will exist in their earpieces. Then we’ll be getting them implanted just under the rug of our scalps and be beaming our thoughts to everyone of our friends and voila! An end to individual consciousness.And with that an end to all Envy, Covetousness, Anger and maybe the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins too, based as they all are in obsessions over who has what and how much we see as rightfully ‘ours’. Just think: mutual ongoing awareness of how it is for the other guy! All joy: shared! All sorrow: instantly felt! Birthday cards valentines, holiday cards: no longer required! Sounds like the afterlife eh?In the meantime though what can we do to feel less marooned, each in a slowly failing vessel, each trapped in the present moment, this one, then this one and this one?Well.... we can talk to one another.Here are three super-short exchanges I had in just in the last 24 hours:

• At the fast food joint, the young woman waiting on me breathed deeply, then kind of lifted her ribcage up out of her lower torso. “Does your back hurt?” I asked her. “Ugh, all of me hurts! I play sports. But yes, my back does hurt. They say I have scoliosis” she said, making a sad face. “A surprising number of people have some degree of scoliosis but they can do much these days.” I said back. “Plus you’re finding out about it good and early.” “I know! I just have to finish growing and then they’ll see” she said with her dazzling young smile.
• An hour later at the electronics store the man processing the paperwork for my new TV looked up when a small child trotted past in a pair of twinkling light-up sneakers. “I want shoes like that!” he said. “They’re all I’ve ever wanted!” “Me too! For those special nights out!” “For tripping the light fantastic!” he said. “But they STILL don’t come in my size!”
• And an hour after that I was in line at the Post Office and called out to Wendy (at the window on the left) to ask how her beloved birds were. She called “Hi Honey!” and gave an upbeat answer. Then, when I brought my package to Sam (at the window in the middle) he shouted, “TT! How you doing TT?!” because he knows that’s what my family calls me. He knows because I must have told him once.

It’s good to tell things, I think. I say let yourself be known, by as many people as you run into in the course of your day and you’ll feel just fine and dandy - until that great new era comes when we experience the Spock-like ‘mind-meld’ said to be just up ahead and waiting. And then: Heaven itself! (maybe!)

Vulcan mindmeld time

Healthy as a Horse

Sometimes you just don’t want to get on that treadmill. Most times actually. I can think of a thousand other things I’d rather do than get on that thing. Yesterday for example I sewed up a hole in the fingertip of some gloves I never even wear - they smell like onions no matter how much I wash them - and THAT kept me away from the treadmill for a whole hour.

They’re great gloves and I have like eight pairs of them, bought on the Internet and hoarded away because I’m pretty sure they’re no longer making them.  I also love the way you’re supposed to clean them: you just put 'em on and then wash your hands in your favorite liquid detergent. It’s as easy at that and every time I do it I think “THIS is the way to bathe a baby: just figure out a way to put the baby on like a hand puppet!"  Or even if they just came with a terrycloth handle on the back.These are the things that are too weird for me to say in the paper but there’s evidently nothing you can’t say in The New Yorker. In the latest issue here's Tiny Fey using the F-word right alongside all the fancy ads like the one for that mystery camp that shows a close-up of a 12-year-old boy staring fixedly into the middle distance. The F-word! In the piece she’s agonizing about whether or not she should have another child and finally says “Maybe I’ll just wait ‘til I’m 50 and give birth to a ball of fingers.”See, she’s funny AND she’s willing to put herself in a bad light: a girl after my own heart. I tried to take up swearing ten or 15 years ago but I was too old for it; couldn’t get the hang of it at all. Plus it wouldn’t really fit with my image as a person who only uses the Mother Teresa stamp on her bills and letters.....I could go on but I turned the treadmill on like 40 minutes ago and then wandered away to get a bottled water before getting sidetracked by you guys here, and that's sure a waste of electricity! Better go turn it off and read more of this New Yorker. :-)

(Note the old guy in the background. Dangerous practice!)

Makeup or No Makeup

It’s probably best to let yourself be photographed warts and forget all vanity. My Sixth Grade school picture showed me with such a bad case of chapped lips I looked like a circus clown. I didn't care. I had just gotten a dog  and that dog was all I thought about.I think of Martin Schoeller who does these outsized close-ups of people, using none of the tricks photographers usually use to soften the blunt facts of the human face. They’re fascinating. Take a look at Christopher Walken here. The key to so many of his roles has to be that upper lip that Nature hiked up crookedly on him.And was Bill Murray actually trying to be funny in all his movies or did we laugh because of the odd mixture of that tentative smile and a certain hapless look signaled by the tilt of his eyebrows?I put Martin Schoeller’s photo of Brad Pitt up here a few days ago and now here’s his lady:Look at that face! She is one beautiful woman and kind too, as I hear (and to  those people who nastily suggest  say she is working out old issues in rearing six children under ten I say  what is anyone doing but exactly that?) As a child she wasn’t all that pretty as you can see . It just goes to show you: by the time you're a grownup you really DO have the face you deserve.

A Family's a Family

A heavy news week, from the earthquake in New Zealand to that crazy despot with the bad perm firing on his own people in Libya, but then came word  that the government will no longer pursue the fight to ban same-sex marriage. I have to say that made my day.A full year before equality in marriage became the law in my home state, the church I belong to declared that same-sex couples were more than welcome to their have nuptial ceremonies  in our sanctuary. This vote, to be what the United Church of Christ calls "Open and Affirming," was unanimous and heartfelt, a milestone that had special meaning for David and me especially since not one but two members of our family were to be the first to take our church up on its offer. The place was packed as these four took their vows, two brides exchanging rings with each other and two grooms doing the same.When, in time, I wrote a column about the day I received almost 100 letters, a good 97%  of which were positive. One person wrote, “When people of good will stand up for love and family, oppression will subside and love will flourish." Another confessed that there were times when he still "found it hard to conquer [his] prejudice.  As the discussion on gay marriage went on I was in support of civil unions only. I did not want to ‘demean’ my own traditional marriage. But the more I thought about the gay people I know, including friends and family, I knew that I was not being fair.”  I still have the transcription I made of all these letters, pages and pages of them.The photo above is from the little jewel of a documentary  A Family is a Family is a Family. I challenge you to watch this 47-second clip from it and remain unmoved. Talk about “A little child shall lead them”![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkFr-rjjzlw]

Just Keep Eating

I finally realized what the party-hearty Spring-Break college students remind me of: little kids. It’s all the throwing up that comes with the  body shots and drinking games. The Technicolor Yawn, that's what they call it when someone vomits.Just now I was rereading the diary I wrote when my kids were little: Technicolor on every page. In one 24-hour period when our oldest was in nursery school she threw up  12 times between 10pm and 2:00 the next afternoon. According to the diary she was still so miserable that night that we set up a card table in the living room so we could be right beside her while we ate our supper. She snoozed away there on the sofa in her Strawberry Shortcake Nightie, rescued in this way from the terrible isolation of the sick.She’s a big girl now of course and I just wrote her an email to report this fascinating bit of  news from the 80s.She wrote right back.  “Yes, I’m afraid David gets his propensity towards throwing up from me,” she said. (David is her youngest child, age three, while his older brother Eddie is a just-turned seven.) “He sometimes throws up at the table, then keeps right on eating. Eddie freaks out.""Ha ha ha, REALLY?” I wrote right back. I love stuff like this.“Yup. Eddie runs away from the table screaming as you can imagine.”You forget when you’re sitting around deciding whether to read yet another dry article in Newsweek or go start the darn dinner what life is really like for the parents of small children, but old diary entries and news reports like this sure bring it all back.

Part of the time it's like this.

But a whole  lot of the time it's like this.

No Fool Like an Old Fool

Around 5 o’clock on Monday Facebook decided it was sick of me and my stupid  birthday. Up until then it was meekly reporting that this one and that one had written on my wall and I’d go and read “Happy Birthday Terry!” again and again and how nice was that? Later it just seemed to be saying, “Okay 60 people wrote on your wall, all right? Can we just leave it at that?”But I was still happy. I loved getting all those greetings even thought by rights birthdays should  bring up weird stuff  for me what with that  phase I went through at 18 where the worse a guy acted the more determined I was to learn his birthday and send him a card. Who knows what I was trying to do there. The only thing our mom ever told us kids about our long-gone dad was that he let his brother use him as a doormat so maybe it was the doormat gene coming through. What can I say? I was young and trying to improve the whole universe through outlandish gestures of maidenly love.But back to Monday: The birthday greetings that really killed me came from two former students: One said “Happy Birthday Mrs. M! Still a babe!” (So chivalrous and so untrue!) He was a boy taller than all the doorways with wonderful blond curls. The other came from this kid always loping in late to class, pushing his glasses up on his nose and smiling like it was Christmas morning. His comment: “Happy Birthday! Thanks again for friending me!”But oh, you Boy-with-the-Glasses I am so glad I found you again! And you, Chivalrous Tall-Man! And you Marianne from the fourth seat in the middle who found ME! And you Christine in the row by the clock and you Jean with your delicate bones and you Sharon who I never actually had in class and you Paul and you Tom who went into the Air Force and of course you Michael who could tell even as young as you were that under my brave teachery line of chatter I was as shy as you were.Sigh. I’ll admit it: I cherish  my friends on Facebook, which is probably silly. I know it’s all supposed to be light and fun and ‘omg!’ and ‘lol!’ but there it is. The more greetings came in Monday the more “seen” I felt – and accepted and yes even understood . I just loved  everyone's shout-outs and especially the ones from  those former students to their teacher in room 334, who never found another job she loved as much.

even now when I drive by I want to go in  and teach a class

Hi-Def Birthday

I had a birthday and got an actual TV as a present; went and ordered it Friday and here it came last night. It’s for the kitchen, to help me get through the next 40 years of meal prep. The delivery guys tromped in and set it up when we were all digging into Chinese take-out. “This is so exciting!” our visiting First Grader kept saying to them. “Sure is, Sport!” said the really muscular one in the watch cap and earring. They had been going since 6 o'clock that morning they said and here it was 13 hours later - and they still had two more deliveries. They took the old 1985 set and boy was I glad to see it go. It made me feel like I was already on my deathbed the way I could never get it loud enough; the way it was slowly dimming the picture down to cocktail-lounge level all the time.My daughter-in-law Chris programmed the sleek new baby and that was a present right there.  Programmed it, set up the DVD player, the VHS player, the Super Nintendo from 1991 which brought the two TV guys to the brink of nostalgic tears. (Please no laughing at my ancient technologies!) Chris and Carrie gave me a gorgeous scarf, Annie gave me some tall rubber boots that are cool and practical which I wore all day today right in the house and the little guys made me a hand-lettered card that looks like a ransom note. David went to two different Chinese takeout places to satisfy everyone’s whims and here I am the morning after in my awesome boots and my scarf ready to cook up a storm in front of a televised image so sharp and clear all the men on the screen look like they need to quick go shave again before the paparazzi show up and paste their poor ruined faces all over the news.Here's one of them now, a less ruined specimen than some. And under him, well, that's  me in my new boots and my latest dye job . I never got dressed the whole day. :-)