The Hair of the Dead

A hundred years ago, people used to take the hair of the dead and fashion it into pins, wreaths, even wall-hangings. This was a huge practice even as recently as the time when Mark Twain lived. His wife and daughters fashioned these stunningly intricate weavings that you can still see if you ever visit that gorgeous ship of a house he built for them all in Hartford Connecticut. You can understand why people would save the hair of loved ones when they die. It’s so rich and lustrous looking, in a healthy person such a sign of health.Until I was three all I had for hair were these tiny light-brown circles close to my scalp. Then, almost overnight, my real hair came in, black and so wildly curly my mother had no clue how to arrange it. In most of my elementary school pictures I look like a Troll doll.But my lucky children have David’s hair, straight and shiny and thick as a horse’s tail. In fact both girls still wear their hair long and I don’t blame them lustrous, as it is.Here's a confession: once when she was asleep, I  crept into my older daughter’s room to look at her hair under the small portable microscope Santa had given her for Christmas. She was maybe eleven at the time but and even then it was a good foot-and-a-half long so I had no difficulty lifting up a strand of it.I placed it inside that that small lighted device and saw that what looked like the color of dark honey to the naked eye, under magnification was literally scarlet, golden, orange and black. It’s a sight I have never forgotten and it showed me at once why for thousands of years people have saved the hair of their dearly departed: They have saved it because it is radiant, and lovely, and somehow unconquered by death.

Try and Catch the Wind

If you’re going to look at pictures of the dead or dying you must as well look at beautiful ones: This sketch of the poet John Keats was done by one Joseph Severin as he sat up with his sick friend a month before his death in February of 1821.It was a hard death to watch by the sound of it: "The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until 11:00, when he gradually sunk into death."Severin said he couldn’t write more, "broken down as [he was] from four nights' staying awake with the dying man  and no sleep since." However he did rally enough to write that three days earlier the body had been 'opened': “The lungs were completely gone. The Doctors could not conceive by what means he had lived these two months. “I followed his poor body to the grave on Monday,” he added and ended by saying that "a mask has been done."A mask was indeed done and that is what you see above. The way you make one is seen below. (This person seeming to sit is actually dead.)It might seem grim to us moderns but what other way did people have then to remember the way a person looked? I study this photo a while, then quickly look up again at the result. Then I banish all thoughts of a young man dead at 26  and instead turn to the words he wrote which of course live on and on:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:Its loveliness increases; it will neverPass into nothingness; but still will keepA bower quiet for us, and a sleepFull of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Because it's like what Bob Dylan said : you can't capture a person's spirit by making a cast of his head anymore than you can tie down that ragged young wind that's blowing even now in all our trees.

And now let's hear 'Try and Catch the Wind,' as performed by Donovan long and long ago:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjIqVL7G-CI]

Eerie, that Naked Lady

It unsettles me: every time I opened this site lately, the music from Cocoon started playing and that naked actress with the really small waist once again began lowering herself into the pool.  The video was harder to upload than others I've posted here so maybe it came trailing some mysterious coding that has crept in like ringworm through my laptop's feet. Maybe my blog was under its spell in some way and yearned always to show that naked lady. I finally had to replace the video with a mere link to it so you're now a step away if you're in this for the skinny-dipping.Only one time did my computer get really infected and that was the time I went to that silly website that shows the autopsy photos. I was looking to see if the pictures said to be of our assassinated 35^th President are really out there for anyone to see. They sure are and you'd know it was JFK all right, just by that wonderful hair the color of maple syrup and the freckles on his torso from many a boatride.It's a hard photo to look at of course, though for me not nearly as hard as the one of Marilyn Monroe who in death looked nothing at all like the still-young woman-child she was the night she took that overdose. Her hair is all slicked back and the skin on her face is so slack and she just looks so... alone. Alone and in despair. Even the lividity in her face doesn't strike you as much as that look she has of one truly forsaken.As a sophomoric gross-out final act on this site, one of its last links takes to you to the autopsy picture of a man who died of worms, which I guess brings us right back to where we started. They’re seen spilling from his body cavity, which tells me that this site is mostly trying to scare us with the threat  of our own death but heck, I go with what the philosopher Epicurus said which is basically that when we are here death is not and when death is here we are not, simple as that.......Rain AND snow predicted in these parts so  another big day for Mother Nature. I say let’s go outside anyway and watch her water the flowers, something that she does even in places like this:

a graveyard, Anytown USA

Goodbye Frog, So Long Mouse

Here’s a scary sight from the trip my family and I took out west. While the rest of sat like fat lizards in sun so dry the skin on your face tightens like a mummy’s, Annie went hiking with her super-fit man, then sat for a bit in a gully while he ran up the side of a mountain. As she sat by that little creek-bed she saw this snake eating a frog who, she says, cried out in heart-rending fashion until only his little hands remained, which you can just see disappearing down the snake's throat.When I emailed this picture to a member of the family who couldn’t come on this trip she wrote back to say it was the saddest thing she had ever seen and there sure is enough plenty of sad stuff in the great outdoors I guess. Plenty of 'sad' indoors too if you count mouse death.Our new housemates, freshly transplanted from Florida, stayed behind and shivered in the late March cold.  (Click here to see one of the nice big fires they made so as not to die of frostbite in the 20-degree nights.) I bring them up because yesterday when we were cooking together in the kitchen I saw evidence of mouse-life over by the earthenware jars where we keep the coffee. “Shall we set a trap and kill it right away or wait for warmer days when it will go outside on its own?” I asked Veronica who as a size Zero is not much bigger than a mouse herself. (See?)“Oh I hate to kill it!” she said at first, then some ten or 15 minutes later reversed herself: “I’ve been thinking about that mouse…” she began.So the a death sentence it was: I smeared peanut butter on a 59-cent mousetrap and here he was this morning, all nicely packaged for his trip to the dump.It does feel sad - such perfection of form gone down to death! - but that's how it is in this world. The poet Tennyson said it; nature IS red in tooth and claw.

David put him into the bag; Veronica and I were useless.

Look Up, Dummy

This is  me with my new phone.  And yes that's my old phone in pieces on the floor beside me. (I bit it; I was mad.)I like this picture because it reminds me  how all of us are in this head-bent position all the time. We have so many screens in our lives, so many little gadgets we're poking and peering down at, while all this time the real excitement is happening above our heads.I mean the birds. The birds are going by thick and fast now. I feel like I’m on the tarmac at the airport almost, the big commercial birds and the little private birds, all zooming past. At 6 o'clock this  morning the sky was thick with them the way it used to be thick with passenger pigeons in America’s early days when they literally darkened the skies so numerous were they - until those pasty-faced Europeans arrived in the 1600s that is. They shot and ate them by the hundreds of thousands; then shot them and fed them to the pigs; then just plain shot them idly and for sport the way they later shot the buffalo, and in such numbers that by the year 1900 they were all but gone and by 1914 the very last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Sad.No birds are dying up there now though. You look up into the clean late-March skies and find yourself rooting for them, just the way you secretly did the first time you saw Alfred Hitchcock's famous movie.They're ba-a-a-a-ck!  Go to the window right now and look up. (And for heaven's sake turn off the phone!)

God had It Easier

I stood in Aisle 10B of the crafts store with a high school student bent on building two human arms complete with hands and fingers. He would then accompany this vivid display of with dense and complicated passages of prose explaining the physiology of the nerves involved but I had no part in any of that; I was just the ride.Though I'll admit when the call came asking for help getting to the craft store I dropped everything. Because don’t school projects furnish the most cliff-hanging and hilarious drama imaginable?  Just being in the presence of the appropriate materials seemed to fill us both with a kind of giddy optimism.“Look! 10 pound bags of plaster of Paris! Get three just in case! Look! Kits for making a model of the human hand! Get two and we’ll stick them on the end of each arm!” All these things did we buy and more besides, and went home happy.I was happy anyway, since all I had ahead was supper and a little TV and a nice early bedtime. I thought all was well for him too - until a dire second call came in a day later : The compound wasn’t setting up right; the arms looked nothing like arms.And that’s when I remembered the sphinx sculpture my best friend and I had tried to make for Ancient History way back when: its plaster of Paris on my sphinx hadn’t set up either! We bought bag after 10-pound bag of the stuff and still the beast had this little shrinking pinhead and hips that just kept on growing each night in my cellar: while we did our Algebra homework and ate our simple suppers; while we slept in our girlhood beds..  Wider and wider the sphinx-body grew, pooling and creeping like lava-flow.It all came back to me as we stood once again in Aisle 10B, scanning the shelves and considering the problem. We stood and we stood until suddenly I remembered: I save skeletons! I love skeletons! And wouldn’t this store carry those big bags of fiberfill you use for stuffing pillows? And also yarn to act as nerves?So bags of puffy stuff it was, and yarn, and poster board too; also, rolls of bandages from the drug store and we were SET.Two hours later we had wrenched the arms from the torso of my favorite little skeleton and padded them with an exquisite layering of fiberfill “muscles” held in place by a great winding of bandages. I even went and got some of my knee-high pantyhose and encased the arms like two fat sausages  in case he'd like that effect. (He didn't.)Ecstatic myself, I saw a good day’s work.  The student saw an all-nighter and then some.Why? Because for him the great challenge still lay ahead. It was the challenge of how to convey in mere words the intricate and divine engineering that lets our bones or the bones of Adam’s brethren, simply and miraculously…. get up and dance. :-)

Armless now, this little man used to give me a hand with my columns.

Love in the Pool

I guess it seemed mean to just tell about that scene from Cocoon where the sexy-looking alien 'initiates' the young guy into the way people make love on her planet but I couldn’t find it on YouTube.I was operating entirely on my 25-year-old memory of the scene in fact -until I happened upon it, led by my own curiosity about Tahnee Welch, and what do you know here it was in a post called “Alien Sex.”It’s as funny and innocent as I recalled. See if you don’t think it's nice too: go to http://www.hulu.com/watch/28463/cocoon-alien-sex

Foreplay Ourselves

Looks like this is Anatomy  week,  all right, Wednesday  the head, today the hand, though I guess every week is Anatomy week with these hands doing such delicate work all the time; with these sensitive feet forever analyzing the terrain and reporting back so we don't keep falling over…I spent two days this week on airplanes where my own hands were sure taxed, especially while yanking that 20-pound computer bag out from under the seat. They hurt a lot these days so I'm aware of them more. It's why I had to stop practicing massage. During one of the Deep Tissue workshops I took while studying muscular therapy the teacher told me I had to build up more hand strength.  I wasn't ever able to do that. I also realize now that I leaned in on them too much as I made my way down the back of whoever was on my table. The result after just four years: I could no longer bear the pain of working on people.If I only I could have massaged them with my mind! I’m thinking of that scene in the 1985 movie Cocoon when the Steve Guttenberg character is talking to the beautiful alien in the indoor pool where the space-pods first opened and asks her what making love is like on her planet. In reply she has him stand at the opposite end from her, then sends this ray of light across the water which caroms around off the walls and ceilings until it lands Pow! right in his chest. His head is thrown back and he smiles ecstatically, the camera pans away to the outside of the building and you can just barely hear him saying  “If this is foreplay I'm a dead man!”Maybe we humans are just the foreplay too. A humbling thought for all those Genesis readers out there raised on the belief that  we humans were the crown of creation.  Us the crown of creation? Us Nature’s best final project? We’re probably just one of Her rough sketches.Now watch this  trailer and tell me it isn’t great - not just Tahnee Welch's face in the love-making scene but what Wilfred Brimley says to his young grandson:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQLZlIoNI8c]

Go With It

Speaking of altering your look like the stars do, here’s a dog who actually had to have surgery because he couldn't see. His mom might be appalled but I bet the pooch himself feels just fine about the change. I mean he might not look like all his pals anymore but hey: he can SEE!To me it’s a reminder to us all to make our peace with our changing situation and move on. Some women, after mastectomies, tattoo the empty spot on chests, turning scar tissue into some gorgeous kind of wall covering.I can see doing that - if I could get the tattoo done under deep anesthesia or something. (It’s like what Woody Allen said about dying. That he didn't really mind the thought of  dying - as long as he didn’t have to be there when it happened.)The final episode of HBO’s Big Love gave a pretty good picture of how it is to be the person in those final moments. There’s that momentary fear as the faces leaning over you grow indistinct and then… that light we’ve all heard about and there you are looking down at that little ragdoll of a body and maybe wondering why it seemed such a major big deal to you while you were riding around inside it.It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Just let go and move into the light. Isn’t it so odd that not one of us REALLY knows what the transition is like? Science types say the light you see is a result of the brain’s being deprived of oxygen but you know how Science types are. Me. I’m not buyin’ that theory for a minute.

Thank You Liz

Elizabeth Taylor gave me my first lesson in how true it is that nobody likes a wise-guy. This was back in the mid-80s when face lifts were relatively rare  (meaning before current times, when even the family dog is getting work done.)Liz got some done on her jawline and then kept gaining weight so she kind of grew around it. I was mean and chilldish enough to mention this in one of my columns. What I actually said was  "at least one of her chins is still pointy."And boy did I get a lecture!  “Who do you think you are?” this one woman wrote in an angrily scrawled hand. “Where do you get off making fun of others when your eyes are beady, your teeth look false and your hair is out of style?” She could tell all that from the headshot that accompanied the column. And she was right on two counts: my eyes are beady and my hair is generally out of style but did that stop me? Nah. I then took that quote and put it on the cover of my very first book I Thought He Was a Speed Bump.Dear Elizabeth: she couldn’t learn to stop marrying (and what did Samuel Johnson call that, the triumph of hope over experience? ) Me I couldn’t learn for the longest time stop trying to get the laugh even if it meant sometimes getting it at somebody else’s expense. She did a lot of good that lady, AND singlehandedly saved over-the-topness after we lost Liberace. I hope the lids closed easily on those amazing blue eyes.

What Could Be Nicer Than This?

People have written me such great letters over the years. One I could never forget came from the person who wrote to say she laughed so hard reading one of my columns that the coffee she was drinking shot out her nose and across the room.But even better are  the messages that have heart – like the one I received some five or six years ago: ““Why am I writing to Terry Marotta?” it began. “It must be because of this sentence: ‘Wasn’t I once a person who refinished AND reupholstered all her furniture? Now I look at that pound of raw chicken and think ‘Who could I PAY to turn this into dinner?’ Yes it’s just a sentence from a newspaper clip saved among many in my desk. But the column it was from struck a chord for 86-year-old Me in my Old Folks Home. I think we were in a writing group years ago. I used to come with Charity Wetzler who died early last year. We met in someone's apartment on Whitney Avenue. Was that you?”Well no, it wasn’t. But I found this letter so wonderfully personal I could never throw it out, even after answering it. And she saved the best part for last: “Speaking of change being the essence of our lives here, getting old has been and remains a great education - and NOT an entirely negative one!”She closed by sending me best wishes and adding an original sketch of a person’s nose in profile with two legs and two sneakered feet emerging from the nostrils. The wry caption: “Running nose.”I came upon this note just yesterday and it was all I could do not to drop everything and search for its author, who would be 91 or even 92 by now. Maybe I will do that: Just find her somehow. Just reach out.I reached out immediately to a new friend who wrote me last January.She was referring to a column I had done about the traces of former inhabitants we sometimes come upon in our houses: “Your subject on Friday about finding unexpected treasures in the houses you have lived in reminded me of the inscription my husband wrote when he built an addition onto our former house,” her letter began.“Before he had installed the inside wall paneling, he wrote on the bare wood wall: ‘Built by (her husband’s name) on (the date) for the comfort of his wife.’“I liked that inscription, and I anticipated some future owner replacing the paneling and seeing it, sort of like something an old pioneer might have written.”I know I would have loved to come upon such an inscription, courtly as it is. When I got back to her to say how touching I found her note and to ask if I might share it, she wrote again, sending more words, also well worth saving and passing on.She said, “I sent this story to the paper and included in it mention of the inscription I have passed on to you. You are welcome to use it for it must have been at least 40 years ago that it appeared in the newspaper and now my husband is deceased, and I am an old person of 84 blessed with wonderful memories of a long and happy life.”I have read these words and the ones above them again and again, written as they were by two people who know – just know in their hearts - that at every stage of life we are meant to bless this life and call it good.

What's in That Head

I’ve been looking at drawings like these lately; I find it calms me. When I was in massage school I bought this book of drawings by one Frank Netter, believed to have been the greatest anatomical illustrator since Leonardo. (That’s Da Vinci not DiCaprio - and by the way you’e never supposed to say ‘Da Vinci’ in spite of the blockbuster book and the Tom Hanks movie. That would be like calling Mark Wahlberg DeBoston.)Anyway this is what we look like on the inside. You know when they say “What were you thinking?” Maybe this is what they do to find out.As I’ve  examined the workings of my own head lately I have come to see that all I wanted was for people to feel better. It’s why I’ve been writing that mostly light-hearted newspaper column since the fall of 1980: I didn’t want anyone to be sad, at least not for long. I wanted them to laugh and blow their nose and have a nice dish of ice cream. It’s also why I started to study the body: I wanted to understand how to comfort people that way too. We had just had a death when I began at the Massage Institute of New England and I never again wanted to find myself standing by the hospital bed of someone I loved and be at a loss.Here’s what you can do when you are in that situation: you can hold the person’s hands. You can stand at right angles to him and lay your hands on his tummy or his legs. You can cradle the eggshell of her head that holds all the amazing scaffolding you see here picxtured.When Uncle Ed, who is pictured below, had his last bad bout of congestive heart failure in June of 2006, he lay in the ER for eight whole hours waiting for a room. He was 85 at the time and didn’t tell any of us he was feeling funny; just drove himself to the hospital, the dickens. It wasn’t until I went to his house and found it empty that I put two and two together and called the ER. Yup, he was there all right.I hurried right over. They were taking fine care of him only he felt cold. I had my mom’s old fur coat on so I put it over him. Then I sat the edge of his bed and held his feet. It’s not rocket science; it’s just human touch.  When the day comes and I am at my own end with a mind quickly emptying I hope someone comes and sits by me, of course I do. But I hope even more that they get to think a minute about the miracle of life that carries us from youth to old age and lets this delicate vessel the mind carry its cargo of memories the whole voyage long.

Clarity?

Saturday was the night of the big close moon and yesterday was the day of the wide blue sky. So maybe today, with snow falling again, it makes sense to see the weekend for what it was: a window of.. can I call it clarity after that crazy week I put in last week?My friend Bobbie tells me I should stay away from all 'screens' one day a week and I actually did sort of do that this past weekend. I took a lot of pictures and read sections of the five or six books I’ve got going and fretted about the fact that we’re bombing another country. What I didn't do is remain chained to my laptop, beaming my faint message like E.T. out to the vast and empty skies.We had driven to our summer place partly to get out of the way of our new housemates as they settled in at our house - it seemed the  kind thing to do -  and it was beneficial to us as well. Certainly seeing that moon rise over a lake would clear anyone's vision.I’m working hard at figuring out why I pack so much 'doing' into my days and will report on that once I'm done. But at 11 last night when I turned out my light and saw the glow from that nice fat moon, a poem came into my mind. Mary Oliver's "The Moths" which I copy here as if it were prose. Read it aloud in as fast and breathless a way possible and see if you don't identify with the speaker at all. I know I do:

There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know what kind, that glimmers, it does, in the daylight, in mid-May in the forest, just as the pink moccasin flowers are rising. If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more. And anyway I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that. If I stopped, the pain was unbearable, If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can’t  be saved, The pain was unbearable. Finally, I had noticed enough. All around me in the forest the white moths floated. How long do they live, fluttering in and out of the shadows? ‘You aren’t much’, I said one day to my reflection in a green pond, and grinned. The wings of the moths catch the sunlight and burn so brightly, At night, sometimes, they slip between the pink lobes of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn, motionless in those dark halls of honey.

Rushing around or sitting motionless, we can all be glad of this: spring began last night and even the coldest, thickest ice is cashing in its chips s and starting to liquidate.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHhipkWMbKA]

Facing Facts

I felt such a soaring sense of gladness as I jotted all that down first thing yesterday, and then someone immediately wrote  “How on earth do you find time to WRITE?” and I realized how crazy I sounded. And – this is the embarrassing part – I didn’t even write down a lot of the stuff I did this past week. I didn’t say for example:That I also brought someone to the mall because his new red sneakers were too big. “It's Ok because I need new dinnerware!” I told myself and it’s true. Our plates and bowl are in terrible shape, so while he did his sneakers thing I literally sprinted to Housewares at the Sears store where I heard they had Corelle but alas, no such luck.That I went BACK to this Mall two days later when a flier came in the mail saying that Macy’s had all their dinnerware deeply discounted. I wasted 40 minutes of THAT day compiling bowls and plates from a Martha Stewart collection before I thought to read the writing on the bottom of each piece. “Dishwasher and microwave safe,” it said. “Will get hot in microwave.”  (You tell ME who wants a mug that practically brands your whole hand when you go to reach out your tea?)I didn’t say that I took the elderly relative to that little pond he loves, not once but twice between Monday and Thursday and on Thursday I bought him coffee at the coffee shop, and two subs at the sub shop and then, while I was running into the bank to deposit his checks, a burger at the McDonald’s next door which I quick ducked into on the spur of the moment, knowing how he loves a nice hot burger. (The subs he carefully cuts in sections and eat for his suppers. Born in 1920 to parents fleeing Armenia, he has trouble eating a thing all at once.)All this I did while he sat sweetly, patiently in the car waiting for me. All this I did before we then went to that same little pond he loves so much in spite of its stubborn snowbanks all covered with litter and its sulky seagulls. (They sulk because they’re seagulls I always figure and keep looking around and thinking  “This isn’t the beach!” which it sure enough isn’t.)There he ate his burger and I choked down the salmon salad I had hastily thrown in Tupperware so he would see that I was eating too.I see that I wrote “choked down.”  (Sigh.)  I believe I have some thinking to do on this sunny Sunday. More tomorrow I guess. Maybe some insight then,

Timecard

Timecard time. Here’s what MY week was like:

• Made dinner for 14 hungry mouths and toted it TO said mouths, along with pot, pan and cookie sheet. The cheesy potatoes: definite thumbs up. The homemade strawberry shortcake: apparently passé. My kitchen like a Jackson Pollock canvas. (Hey, I tried.)
• Took dear elderly relative to look at his favorite pond, a theoretical exercise at best since (a) pond still frozen and (b)  same darn snowbanks (now dotted with litter) block the view anyway. Enjoyed swooping birds at least.

• Offered to bring appetizer to Smith Club Book group and, hurrying out of the house, pressed container of shrimp too close to body, thus arriving in silk blouse puddled over entirely with stinky shrimp drool.
• Received call from two anxious high school seniors without the means of transportation to go buy supplies for the fashioning of human parts for Anatomy & Physiology class. Off to the crafts store in search of  plaster of Paris. Success! ($123 later.)
• Sat down to plan student activities for eight: Should it be outdoor paintballing or a trip to the science museum? Trampoline jumping or Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra. Tony & Cleo a definite I declare as the driver.
• Brought a college student together with a high school student for purpose of one tutoring the other in Italian. Envious of student.
• Received second call about Body Part Project: Plaster of Paris failed to set up! Back to crafts store for modeling clay, paint, giant fat bag of fiberfill. Rush rush, due next day lengthy text describing Physiology of feedback loops.
• Home at last to find prodigal son and bride arrived all the way from Florida with two cars stuffed to the roof, arrival having been preceded by the arrival all week of heavy box after heavy box. Two postmen! three bad backs! They are here to stay, these two. (See yesterday's post.)  Exclamations of joy! Hugs and kisses!
• Sleep came at last that night in a house once again full as in days of old.
• Saturday came. Tired. Dead tired at end of a long great week.

Homecoming

I’ve spent the last three weeks clearing out every drawer and closet on the third floor because he's coming home today. I mean Dodson. Dodson is coming home. We call him our oldest child, not because  I bore him  - I  didn't; his awesome parents are New Yorkers - but because he gave himself to us when, as a high school freshman just five feet tall he came into our lives as a member of the A Better Chance program in our town.He and his friend Keith were so small the football players once put them on top of the lockers just because they could. Dodson didn’t seem to mind; he had a fine sense of himself  even then. Didn't he wear his red and blue satin Mets jacket all that year? This in the fall of 1986 when everyone in every seat around him was rooting for the Red Sox?Our biological kids were 10, 7 and 2 when he came into our lives and he simply became... their big brother.For college he had a choice between Georgia Tech and RPI and we were so glad he chose RPI because Troy NY was just three and a half hours from here. He lived with us summers too, and on most school vacations. (I should say that this picture at the very top shows him with our girl Annie when Annie was a high school sophomore.)He got his first real job right near here, at Raytheon; bought his first car here, which Annie then drove for five years once he was done with it and Michael drove for five years after that; go this first apartment here. He let me practice on him when I was going to school to become a massage therapist. He really bulked up then as you can see.He called that process "the thickening" and it sent him straight to the gym where he magically transformed himself back into slenderness.Then one fateful day in 2005 while visiting my sister Nan and niece Gracie in Florida he met the little firecracker God had been saving for him all along. Veronica was visiting from Argentina, he was living in Lowell MA in one of the gorgeous converted mills along the Merrimack River. Could they make a life together?They could and they did, getting engaged in 2006 and marrying in 2007. They settled in Sarasota and now - now, saints be praised, they are moving back, to make their home and and start their family here by us. the ones who fell in love with him in that long-ago year when it was was the Mets and the Yankees in the World Series.

Dessert First

'Keep Calm and Carry On' (see yesterday's post) makes me think about my mother-in-law Ruth Payne Marotta who worked at the forward-thinking Tufts University lab school I mentioned yesterday. During her time there she would try to get me to  bring my first baby in. I'd do it sometimes, bring her dressed in a little baby bonnet  – she was balder than the Buddha – and sometimes even leave her for a while at Ruth's request. I was never sure just what happened while I was gone but I knew it had to be good.She was the most open-minded adult I have ever known, this Ruth Paybe Marotta. "There's no reason not to have dessert first," I heard her say to my kids more than once as she spooned ice cream into small Bert-and-Ernie bowls. You also couldn’t shock her so you didn’t try. She regarded children, and all young people,  as spiritual equals to adults and she spoke to them in grave matter-of-fact tones. That baby of mine graduated from the great high school she attended some 17 year after her visits to that Child Development Center, and her cousin Katy and her old pal Alden came all the way into the city to attend the ceremonies. At the special lunch we went to afterward Alden sat beside Grandma Ruth. He asked her what it was like to be old. He always had this childlike curiosity Alden did and he asked this in the most respectful way.She didn’t flinch or rise up in all haughty in her chair or rap his knuckles; far from it. She welcomed the question and answered it carefully and thoroughly. I remembering wishing I could sit just a little closer to better hear what she was saying.Ruth had a gay roommate back when they were both members of the Class of ’39 at Tufts and was  a loyal friend to her for their whole long lives. And she didn’t bat an eye when one of her own family members and then another revealed that they were gay themselves.I feel so lucky to have met her at age 19; to have had her as an 'extra mother' - even before I married her son at 21. For years I watched her calm way of dealing with life and learned at her feet, because my family’s way was so different. (We yelled, we laughed, we sobbed - sometimes while laughing. (We were Irish what can I say?))  But now all these years later I am actually more like 'Grandma Ruth' than I am like my own mother.Anyway I’m quieter than I was and calmer too, slow to take offense, and impossible to shock and all of this I lay at her doorstep. Or maybe on what promises to be this sunny warm Thursday I will go find her gravestone and lay it there, with some spring tulips for my thanks.

She was the beloved younger child of a couple of New Hampshire Unitarians. This is Ruthie now, peeking shly at the camera. I have to say her son is just like her.

Keep Calm

Keep calm and carry on: Good advice for us all right now in our state of near-panic over Japan’s unfolding tragedy. I saw Professor George Scarlett of Tufts University's famous Eliot-Pearson School of Child Development on TV this morning and he says that’s the ticket for us all now, especially as we relate to the children in our lives.He gave some basic Dos and Don’ts: Don’t say “Oh that’s way over there,” thus downplaying the magnitude of the loss, and don’t fan the fears that such a cataclysm is due here too any minute.  I especially see the wisdom of this last. Children are so tender; and if I’ve learned anything as a worker with youth all these years it’s that teens are too, with a world view still very much in the making.)In sum he says to (a) model an appropriate behaviors of concern and compassion but also of optimism that all will be well; (b) use this as an opportunity to help them learn about the forces of nature world; and (c) model helping behaviors in any way that seems natural for your family, from donating money to simply praying of prayer can ever be called simple.The worst thing I have seen people do and I’m sorry to say it’s older people who do it is to say “Oh the world is going to ruin. I’m glad I lived when I did!" If you feel that way I say go become a day trader or a mime or a toll taker at the edge of a bridge in the back end of nowhere, but please please please stay away from the young.And now if you have the six minutes, click here for one of the world’s tenderest songs by a singer-songwriter I have loved through all her career, from the wild rebellious young redhead she was at the Michigan Women’s Festival in the early 80s to today when she is.. well, not so young, but still so strong in her heart. "Clean your house in troubled times" the words say and seek out those people who will wait for you when you are walking through your own private hell.Seek good friends and clean your house. Stay calm and carry on.

The News from Toweltown

Whenever I get worked up about aging, I think of my sister Nan, who sees comic possibilities in every stage in life. One example: she finds it hilarious that in her 50s she was looked upon as a ‘trophy wife’ by the buddies of her older-by-a decade husband Chuck, who she married a decade ago, ending a period of widowhood for them both.Another: She has a sign in her kitchen: “Next Mood Swing: Six Minutes.”She’s pretty tart, Nan is. She’s also sharper than most people: A few years back she had that famous ‘look-around’ procedure we’re all supposed to have after 50 and when it ended up perforating her colon she quizzed the doctors gathered around her bed with the exact anatomical terms. My favorite part of that incident came a month later when, at the doctor’s for the follow-up visit, she seized the chance when he stepped out of the room, spun the chart around and read his notes on the whole procedure. “Stronger than appears,” he had written.She sure is strong and I think part of that strength comes from not caring much what people think of her.And aging? She laughs at it.Once when I was visiting her there in Florida she was recalling the time, mere  weeks before their wedding when she addressed Chuck where he was sitting watching TV some 20 feet away.“Are you done in the bathroom?” she called from the kitchen, her arms full of towels for the wash.“There’s a 70% chance,” he called back.“Uhhh, when do you think you’ll be done in the john?” she tried again.“Tomorrow - late afternoon!” came the pleasant answer.“This guy either needs a diaper or a hearing aid,” she thought to herself – and said under her breath, “It’s gonna be a lo-o-o-o-o-n-g 20 years!”As luck would have it, Chuck heard that part.I remember him agonizing when their little cat contracted an illness that caused it to walk crookedly and fall down often. It recovered though and soon all that remained of the malady was a slight cock of the head, giving it a sweet inquisitive look that makes Chuck melt with sympathy ever time it walks in the room.Nan just calls it “Two O’clock.”  “Hey Two!” she’ll jauntily say. “Come sit on the couch with us!”“Chuck says no more cats once this guy goes,” she told me that time. “He wants a puppy but I said forget it. Because then HE’LL  go and die and I can’t have some yippy little faux-dog coming between me and my next husband.”She’s just kidding natch. In truth Nan is as tender-hearted as Chuck is.I know because she has framed on the living room wall the card she gave him on their last anniversary.It’s a photo of a crazy-looking couple pulled over beside the highway.The woman is studying a giant road map - upside-down. The man, sporting the loud shirt-and-white-socks-with-dress-shoes look, stands alongside her, his hand over his face in despair.“Still Lost in Love!” the card says, and under that in Nan’s writing, “I’ll love you WHEREVER we end up” - and what could be nicer to hear than that for a person to hear?

Nan now (and her daughter Grace who came upon Shadow falling apart)

The Times They are a-Changin'

Man, there's nothing easy about this time change!  I got in the bed Saturday night at 9:00 and watched the news (terrifying as usual) while inserting photos into my 2010 album, a tedious and painstaking task long postponed. I turned out my light at 10:20.Someplace in there Old Dave, surfeited at last after his standard weekend marathon of Man TV (hoops, golf, hockey etc. etc.) crawled into bed beside me, turned out his light and said “Give it a  rest T! It’s 11  at night!”  (He likes to round up like that, to make me seem crazier than I am.)But here’s the question: WAS it 11:20 already in a way, or was it still 10:20? The Time Gods hadn’t yet turned the clocks back after all. And when I woke and got a drink of water at 1:30 they still hadn’t turned them back, so at what point did it start being an hour later? 2am on the dot you say? That just seems weird.It confuses me every year. I said to David Friday morning during  his shower - I opened the shower door to ask him this, that's how pressing a question it was -  I said, “Explain this to me again. I know at night we’ll all be thinking ‘Man it looks so early, this is great!’ when in fact it isn't early at all. But what about in the morning? Will it be harder to get up then and easier to go ot sleep at night? Is THAT how it works?”“Bad news,  T: it’ll be harder to get up in the morning and harder to get to sleep at night.”  What kind of a deal is that?My last act of the day Saturday was to go to the kitchen and change the time on the microwave. The next morning I was up before David; I always am. He found me tapping away on my keyboard in the dining area.“So the time in the kitchen's ALL screwed up,” he said mildly .“All screwed up! But I changed it last night!” I said.“Yup,” he said studying the little numbers. “You pushed it back an hour.”All which leaves me wondering: how on earth did I get all those A's back in high school?