Good as New

Speaking of undoing cataclysm, here’s a shout-out to Kurt Vonnegut smoking those Pall Malls of his up in Heaven now. The passage below is from his book Slaughterhouse Five, a war novel by a veteran of WWII who refused to glorify war.In the book Billy Pilgrim gets abducted by aliens shaped like toilet plungers (as you can see)  is forced to mate with fellow captive and B-movie star named Montana Wildhack and ends up learning all about the way God sees the universe because ... all of a sudden Billy can time-travel.But first let's  back up again to yesterday and watch Titanic’s tragic fate reverse itself as the clothing of passengers and crew magically shed moisture, the waters course back into the sea, a thousand shattered dishes leap whole into cupboards and the ship itself mends – ah, mends!  Go ahead, watch it again here and take in that haunting music too. Then, when you’re done watching and listening, read the following passage, one of the most hopeful passages in all of literature. It starts with Billy Pilgrim who, seeing that he has an hour before the flying saucer comes back for him, decides to keep drinking and watch some TV:  

“He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation."The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.“When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.“The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve…."

Pretty nice vision eh? How great would life be if we really did all turn back into babies, guileless and innocent like this little guy who is skipping his nap to get in a little fishing.

All Things Bright and Beautiful

The ants are back in the bathroom and in the kitchen some mice are tap-dancing around among the cake pans. The mice I wouldn’t mind so much if I could get their tiny bottoms into diapers.  (And while we’re on the subject don’t mice ever wet their pants? Why is it with just the little caraway seeds always?)The ants I do mind but I feel terrible about pinching their shiny black-plastic bodies into a wad of tissue and tossing then in the toilet, because what must they be feeling they swirl round and round in an element foreign to them? Is it for them the way it was for those poor people who hung off the capsized half-hull of the Titanic 99 years ago now?I got to thinking about that tragedy: cold death in the North Atlantic. And so I went to YouTube to look for the fearful footage that James Cameron gave us in his 1997 film. Here below is what I found, as moving a five-minute clip as you will see anywhere. The person who made it just ran the film backward and set it to music, specifically to James Horner’s “Hymn to The Sea” which is part of the movie’s soundtrack.People of faith will see this and say “And so it shall be: all wounds mended, all suffering reversed." And what a thing it would be to see that day come, what a wonderful thing![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-W2rTj1bsY&NR=1&feature=fvwp]

Purse Panic

Last weekend I went by train to a conference in New York City and was forced to call on that sense of what I'll call willed calm. “We have a sold-out train, people!” the conductor bellowed. “Keep your belongings in your own area!” Obediently I stowed my suitcase overhead, my purse under my seat and my backpack under the seat in front of me.And sure enough at the very next stop there was someone at my elbow. “Do you mind if I sit here?” asked this boy in a baseball cap. "Not at all," I said back.We exchanged not a word more but traveled in companionable silence, he constantly probing the flat little belly of his iPhone like some old-time family doc on a house call.So calm did I in fact feel that I somehow came to assume our two fates were actually linked and we would both be exiting the train together. We were docked at Penn Station for a full 90 seconds before I blurted “You’re not going to New York?!”“Nope. D.C.”I shot out of my seat, flung my backpack on, clambered over him, grabbed my suitcase down and was carried by the mass of humanity all the way to the top of the two-story escalator before realizing, uh oh—my purse was still under my seat.I hurried over to an Amtrak official who said, “Go to Customer Service.” Customer service said “Get back downstairs before it leaves again! RUN!”I ran all right. The train was there still, but which car of the 15 cars had been mine? I knew it was near an ‘Up’ escalator but now all the escalators were ‘Down’ ones, all bearing fresh masses of people eager to board. Where was my seatmate? I ran past twelve 85-foot-long cars, but with the lights so bright in the station I couldn’t see really inside them.I ran again in the opposite direction, still frantically looking. “My purse!” was all I could think—before remembering: my purse didn’t have my money or my credit cards, which were hidden inside my ingeniously fashioned belt.What it held instead was my food: carrots and almonds, cereal, fruit and powdered milk. I ‘e been doing Weight Watchers Points Plus© Program since late November and I was darned if I was going to go three days without my fresh healthful food. Plus the purse itself was pretty nice.I took a deep breath and slowed to a walk. I went up to one window in every single car, cupped my hands around my face and peered in, until, finally, finally, finally I saw the boy. He looked up when I rapped on the glass. With a tragic face straight out of Ancient Greek theatre I pointed downward. He instantly swooped up the purse, ran to the rail-car’s door and with a big smile tossed me the bag just as the train began pulling from the station—leaving me with less faith in my own mental acuity, yes, but a much-increased faith in those angels of travel journeying right beside us.

A Nice Day

Mothers Day was good. I didn't dine out like this crazed person. I had way more fun than any poor sap forced to sit up straight  in a restaurant for two hours. What I did rather was to lie in the bed until 8,  just watching my dreams go by. (Did you know Bob Dylan came to my house for dinner? And he LIKES burned broccoli?) Then I wrote about my mom and I worked on the week’s column which has to go out by noon today. I read a book about Robert Frost. His poor father died at 35 of tuberculosis. (At 35!)  Once, so desperate to find healing, he resorted to a folk remedy: went with young 'Robbie' to the stockyards and drank down two whole cups of fresh blood collected from the slit throat of a just-slaughtered calf.He died anyway,Instead of blood I drank my signature blend of mint tea and lemonade that my grandchildren call ‘TT juice’  in honor of my name. (To Old Dave and these two little boys I am and always will be ‘TT.’) Then I went to the market because I had offered to make dinner for those grandchildren and their parents, who had had kind of a tough week. We traipsed over to their place where I broiled up salmon, scallops and swordfish, roasted a small orchard of asparagus, tossed together two fat corsages of that funny hydroponic lettuce, baked a pound cake, sliced up strawberries the size of hand grenades and made for the little guys a platter of gooey grilled cheese sandwiches and a couple of bowls of buttery pasta.The rest was the usual stuff:  kitchen chaos,  super hero action, ear exams, and a little shirts-vs.skins....Later as we sat in their living room we could just hear Chris’s murmuring voice as she read the boys from the night’s book. We talked quietly for a while when she came back down and by 10pm we four were  back here in our own beds.It was a nice day all right, topped off by the fact that our two new housemates gave me a bouquet of gorgeous individually picked flowers as well as a fresh tower of brand-new snap-together Tupperware for all the food we make between us every day. :-)

A Pack of Smokes at the Pearly Gates

Mothers Day was so easy once but it's all different now. Once you could just go outside and hunt around around 'til you found  a few apple blossoms, which you jammed into the crotch of a clothespin, swaddled  in soggy Kleenex and wrapped in tinfoil, just because tinfoil was so pretty. Then you just had to set it next to your mom's place at the breakfast table where she could enjoy looking at it while she took that bracing drag on the day's first cigarette. 

That’s how it was in my house anyway, long before the time when motherhood got all soaked in Clorox and sanitized. These days a mother is  supposed to be this purring and approving presence, building SELF ESTEEM in her young every minute.I knew my mother loved me - fiercely even - but she didn’t hand out compliments just to make me feel good about myself. When I got to the finals of the big annual Spelling Bee, then told her how I'd fallen down on the word ‘tongue’ she yelled, “You misspelled ‘TONGUE’?! Can you spell ‘LIP’?"I wasn’t hurt by the remark because I understood her, in the way that the second child often 'gets' the mother. Even as an 11-year-old I got it that her life had brought her heartache and that my being the best little speller in the city might somehow ease her pain.  I liked the way she was, strong and outspoken. I even liked it that she had a temper; and I didn’t mind that she smoked in a closed car. It was good knowing how human and  flawed she was; it made me feel better about my own shortcomings. Plus she never smothered me the way parents do nowadays.I miss her a lot. But I smile every time I look at this picture, taken that night in her 59th year when she came home after a week in the hospital with a  shattered pelvis and was still facing at least another couple of weeks in bed, which is how they did it in those days, never mind teh current method of trotting you around the corridors with your IV's from the surgery clanking along beside you.Her two sisters and her brother were there in the room as I was. Also my sister Nan, even sitting on the bed with Mom. I like that too, that she's sitting on the bed. The aunts and uncles were all drinking whiskey. So was our mother, as you can see, and she had that favored pack of cigs right handy too. Ah Cal Sheehy, born Caroline Theresa Sullivan! Here's to you, you cheerful soul who raised two cheerful daughters all alone. I hope they have Camels in heaven.

On Staying Dressed

I taped a TV show yesterday and managed to stay dressed the whole time, which was a great relief to me. I went through a period where there was nothing I liked better than getting the cameramen on the set to laugh right out loud. In a spot I did once on a noontime magazine show, I stood up at the climax of my story and whipped off my suit-jacket to reveal the fact that I had my blouse on inside-out, something that was immediately evident in that great age of shoulder pads. It was a story my sister Nan had told me, from the hard first year of her untimely widowhood.It seems that at long last she had been able to drag herself to a social event  and found herself actually chatting with a very nice man - only her teenage daughter kept darting by to say she needed to talk to her."Later!" Nan hissed to her. "In a minute!" she said a second time and yet the girl kept swooping in to say "Mom I need to talk to you!"Finally Nan made her apologies to the nice man and stepped aside with her daughter.  “This better be good!” she said.“It's good all right. You have your dress on inside-out.”  She looked down and sure enough: here were the little foam epaulets of the shoulder pads, the exposed seams, the pockets like little dead fish dangling down from the waistband.... That's all I was doing that time: showing everyone in TV-land how funny she must have looked. And sure enough the cameramen chortled audibly.So I guess it was a victory all right. Back then I would do just about anything to get a laugh. Probably the only reason I’m not like that now is that half the time I really do have my clothes on inside-out. Or backwards. Or else my earrings don’t match.So I was dignified yesterday instead of fearless. Maybe fearlessness is behind me for good now (but gosh I sure hope not!) 

French, Like the Braid

I got a comment on Wednesday’s piece in which I was mean to a mean old lady, at least in my mind and here’s the nice thing about a blog: the way people leave comments. Then you write to them and they write back to you and suddenly where once you had just your own little thin ponytail of a notion you now have this lovely thick layered thought like the French braid you see on Nicole Ritchie here.Today every single second of my day is scripted so I’ll hope to say more soon on this soon.For now let me just quote the central question that this nice person asked: How do we figure out how to call a person on his or her mean-spiritedness without becoming mean-spirited ourselves? I have a book I’ve been meaning to read  that promises to teach you exactly that. Feels like the time has come to pull it down from the shelf and see what it says.

That's me on the right when I'm at my worst. :-)

Put on Another Plate

Ah what fun we had when this place was crawling with kids, Bob Dylan playing on the third floor, Bob Marley on the second, backpacks slung all over the house, and the washing machine chugging  away 24/7.And it wasn’t just the kids we "made" either: we had "honorary" kids living here too. ranging in age from 15 to 21 - and this was all before the three month period when David’s brother moved in with his whole family and their dog. At that point there were 10 of us trying to use one shower, but it all worked out. Dodson just put us on a schedule, with the first turn of the faucet starting before dawn. I mention Dodson. He was our  first 'extra' kid. He came to us as a high school freshman, then did college, then moved back in for a bit when he was just starting that first high-tech job. Ah the nights they all stayed up late laughing in the kitchen! Ah the fun! And how we all danced at his Florida wedding to Veronica four years ago.They had moved down there and we never thought they’d return back but here they are again, as I explained in a post a few weeks back. To me it’s like heaven itself. Everybody helps cook. Everybody helps pick up. It’s like a Utopian community with really good beer.Last night we also had Nick here who for the last three years has been helping me with all my computer issues. Veronica had made her famous fruit platters and I'd whipped up that Weight Watchers Chicken with Balsamic Vinegar and Sweet Onions entrée. that I love.  After making a big pot of rice pilaf, Dodson broiled up some salmon and catfish. (Old Dave was on the road, bringing the joy of foam to a grateful world so he missed the fun.) This picture at the top is Dodson and Nick poking at their smart-phones and studying my new one just out of the box last night.The picture at the bottom? the old days when having a dozen for dinner seemed like nothing at all.

Button it

I’m not always clear about when to speak up and when not to.  Last month when I saw those two fools down by the Post Office spewing hateful talk about the President to a captive audience of middle-schoolers of all things, my vision literally darkened to scarlet.  And when they spoke to me and pointed to their picture of Obama as Hitler I lost it completely and uttered the crass two-syllable word for malarkey that I would never normally use around children.I waded in where I didn’t belong maybe.  But then yesterday at the Post Office I ran into a woman who  did that in spades. I was coming from Starbucks with my fistful of coffee and she was standing with the tiny leashed dog that was hers and face like a jar of pickles."Is this your car?” she demanded of me.“Ah, nope,” I said.“Because there’s a DOG in this car with the windows all closed on this hot day! I’m calling the police!” It was 66 degrees; I know this because I check the temperature on my phone like every five seconds.I took a quick peek inside the car and saw a nice big dog smiling and licking the inside of the back window and the entirely un-melted ice inside a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. It seemed pretty clear to me the driver had just ducked into the P.O. for a second. "I’m calling the police right now!” the woman said again but I was already edging away from her to see to my own errands.When I came back there she still was with her aggressive wide-legged stance, ready to pounce on the approaching dog owner who had sure enough been in the Post Office.  Maybe I should have gone over and stuck up for him or told his accuser to mind her own business.I didn’t though. I just watched from a distance while the poor guy came trotting along in high spirits and 20 seconds later was pulling away from the curb looking utterly cast down. I swear if I'd had a Sharpie on me I'd have drawn a quick Hitler mustache on that lady AND  her silly small dog, then high-tailed it on out of there fast. 

Weird Gifts

Here’s an added thing I should say about my weekend trip to New York: the most important thing I did there was to see my youngest child, who moved to that nirvana-for-the-young  after finishing  up at a college not 20 minutes from here. His birthday just rolled around again and for the 5th straight year I didn’t get to see him on it. I did send him an immersion blender.I sent him this because one of his big sisters gave me one and I just adore it. (Imagine! No more having to pour homemade tomato soup into a Cuisinart to make it look like food instead of throwup! No more having to ladle various kinds of goop into a blender! You just sink it into whatever you’ve got on the stove and its tiny steel fangs take it from there. (I picture them like the teeth of the bad gremlin Stripe.:-))  Michael does sometime cook for his pals, I know. That’s why I got him all those crystal glasses last December. I saw them at a consignment shop for a song, this set of stemware for 12, a dozen wines and a dozen waters, with the Mikasa sticker still on the bottom of a few. I bathed each one like a newborn baby, swaddled each in the softest cotton and laid them in what turned out to be four large gift boxes -  and never once stopped to think that of course he couldn’t lug 100 pounds of crystal stemware back to Brooklyn on the bus.“It’s Okay, I’ll just keep them here til you come back” I said, and then blushed fiercely for having spoken aloud my dearest hope: that he  will come back to us, maybe, someday.In the meantime they have sat in my dining room, where every night for some 60 seconds they break into tiny song. It took me forever to realize the source of this music which, when the house is hushed so we can hear it at all, turns out to begin just as the Boston-to-Lowell train that passes some 200 yards away. The glasses don’t even know him yet. is it possible that they’re calling to him just the same?  Watch this 30 second video and see what YOU think:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaHym4-WNG4]

Brands & Platforms

This past weekend I heard all about ‘brands’ and ‘platforms’ at my high-powered writers conference. (“You have to have a platform!” they all say. “You have to have a brand!” These days in America we’re all selling ourselves all the time.I can’t do it anymore. I tried all through the 90s with my first two (self-published) books. I tried all through the ‘00s with books Three Four and Five only I  overdid it one day, fainted twice in two  minutes and fell so hard the second time I pulled my neck permanently out of alignment and have had daily pain ever since. Now when people ask what I do I say “Peddle optimism,” and leave it at that.This past weekend I also leaned against a public building as rush-hour foot traffic pushed past. “Excuse YOU, jackass!” I heard somebody snarl to somebody else. I heard two guys in a sidewalk café going on about ‘big chicks’ and how they dug them. I listened, waiting to cross the street, while a woman 40 in very tight pants blasted her boyfriend to such an extent I thought the skin on his face would melt.And… I shared a cab with a stranger.I was heading to the Upper West Side. So was she. She asked if she could ride with me since I was ahead of her in line and the taxis were few and far between. “I won’t talk to you!" she said. "I won’t let my belongings touch your belongings!” which made me laugh out loud.It turned out she talked the whole way -  when I wasn’t talking that is. She wrote a book , due out in October, about an experience you could tell has totally altered her life. I said “Hey I’ll write about it in my column when it comes out!”  She said “Great!” and gave me her business card.I couldn’t give her one of my cards because once again at this conference they remained forgotten at home on my desk.I read her name aloud. “Jennifer Wilson” I said.“Jen,” she said. “I’m Terry” I said.“Hey,” she smiled and we parted on West 77^th Street, both of us paying for the cab and neither of us having paid a lot of homage to 'brand,' or 'platform' either.

Big Hat Week

There was so much attention focused on hats this past week it’s a wonder the Queen’s little dogs weren’t wearing them as they snuffled around the roots of trees.Once, lots of us wore hats and maybe now we will again. When I was nine my best little buddy got forced into an actual fedora every time his mom put him in a suit. He looked like a pint-sized Al Capone.But then hats kind of went out when the Kennedys came to Washington in the early 1960s and by the end of that decade kids were wearing their hair as their hats; heck, wearing their hair as their clothes practically. Then we had the fever-dream of the 70s and suddenly it was 1980 and from across the pond came the first images of that shy milkmaid peeking up at the world under a different hat every day.More than anyone Diana reversed my own stance on hats and I still have the ones I bought back then, including an Indiana-Jones-style felt one I wear to this day, especially when I go to give a talk. A hat like that  gets you past the formalities. People see you in it and think “Oh she doesn’t take herself too seriously because look at that ridiculous lid!” which is what you want: that you not strike them as stuck-up or formidable in any way.This past weekend stayed at Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel, named for the old Rough Rider who famously told the world he could manage the country or he could manage his daughter Alice but he couldn’t do both. I should have said right away that this is Alice at the top here, Alice Roosevelt Longworth as she became. She was a real character in the nations’ capital, always in a wide-brimmed hat and capable of stunning even a sitting president with her acid tongue as when poor LBJ said on leaning in to greet her, “Mrs. Longworth, I can’t kiss you in that hat!” Said lemony Alice,  “Mr. Johnson, that’s why I wear it!"These days nobody is intimidated by a hat. In fact when you wear one people just call out to you in jaunty fashion - and really, what could be nicer than that in the midst of your tame little day?

Happy to Be Here

In the lobby of this hotel a non-royal bride came and sat next to my on one of the loveseats, her wedding gown beside her in that special white body-bag they use for such garments. She had the bag unzipped too so you could just see the bust all puffed out with tissue paper to make it look as it would when filled with a live girl.I longed to take a picture but how could I when the rule in New York is to pretend nothing is surprising or novel? A man could walk past with a mastodon on a leash and people waiting for the bus would yawn and go back to tapping the new Morse code onto their cell phones.I came to this nice fusty old place for the annual conference the decidedly NON-fusty American Society of Journalist and Authors. The elevators are humid and slightly overheated and help us all remember that our fate is indeed linked to the fates of others riding.  I;m all for such reminders so I like the elevators. I also like the pendant crystal drops of the chandelier with its flags draping gracefully down from the balcony.It’s true that the tiles in my bathroom could use re-grouting and some unknown fool seems to have burned a corner of the comforter with the in-room iron provided for our convenience. And I did look down at the carpet Friday night and think “maybe I’ll keep my socks ON.”But the sheets are all-cotton  and the mattress is a fine firm chariot to carry me back and back through space and time to that furry cave of slumber. I have more conference sessions ahead before the five hour trip back to that other place where the bathroom tiles need re-grouting and where we all know exactly which fool it was that burned a hole in the comforter with her little iron. In the meantime I'm happy to be here in this room safe and tucked away with the view of an office building beside me. Looks like in spring the sun can shine on just about anything and make it pretty. 

A Guest at the Wedding

If you’re going to the royal wedding even in your mind. it’s not enough to make the appropriate gestures. I tried the royal wave but it just looked like I was hailing a cab.Also you can’t just smile your same goofy smile  like some camp counselor so I got that wrong too, see?What you have to do really  is sit up straight,suck in your stomach,then sit up even straighter.  Really though?  Really it’s all about the hat.:-)

My Friend the Internet

I've had some great insomnia suggestions from the Facebook crowd. Somebody said take Benadryl (but doesn’t the suck the moisture out of your whole skull so your nostrils stick shut and your tongue turns into snakeskin?)  Somebody said take melatonin right before bed, “it works every time.” (But for me it work hardly at all and my doc said better to take an over the counter sleep-aid than  overuse the melatonin which is a hormone after all. “Let’s not mess with your hormones,” she went on to which I say “Uh can you write GOD a letter to that effect for me?”)People are so jaunty and helpful when you reach out for help on the web.Once I wrote a column about the leg and foot cramps I was getting  where I found myself yelling "Somebody get me a hacksaw, whiskey and a bullet to bite on! I am amputating this thing!” The suggestions that time came in email and letter form. They were:

• Take quinine
• Take calcium
• Take zinc
• Take all three together
• Lean  into a wall, heels pressed to the floor, and...
• Place an unwrapped bar soap just under your bottom sheet.  

Two separate people actually suggested this last, one person adding that Irish Spring was the soap to use and the other testifying to the fact that an area physician had named this same tactic in a can’t-hurt-to-try-it feature he writes in her local paper. So see? You’re only alone till you reach out on this frisky world wide web that God gave us instead of toys. Then stand back because here comes a whole cavalry of help!                                                               

At Gravity's Mercy

NOW I remember why I kept thinking of the word 'chute' Monday night as I lay sleepless in my bed. I was dreaming in French, not a usual occurrence I assure you. The word ‘chute’ means ‘fall’ as in ‘take a fall’ and what I was fixed on in my semi-dreaming state was  falling, and specifically falling off ladders.On the weekend, David and I had been recalling the time an old ladder of he was on just cracked and fell apart under his weight, slamming him down hard on the ground from just six feet in the air but my, it hurt, he said. He got slammed on the ground a lot in earlier days – he played schoolboy football and has the scars to  prove  it– but this time he was surprised to find himself flat out; surprised to see that somewhere along the line he had lost that goatlike ability to make the quick lateral leap and land right-side-up. (How do young skateboarders DO it? How do they take those risky jumps and land on their backs or heads or elbows, then spring right up to collect commiserating high-fives from their pals?I heard about a worse fall last week, when a new friend told me about the spill she took using a ladder to get at the light fixture nestled into the high faraway ceiling of her old house’s front porch. She slipped in the reaching for it and one leg hurtled  down, carrying her body with it – while the other leg remained caught in the ladder’s rungs, splitting her in two almost, nearly snapping her like a wishbone. A full week after the fall her muscles were still in a state of spasm and the skin on the whole lateral side of one leg looked like tie-dye.We’re frail creatures all right. We can’t swim for more than a minute or two under water and we sure can’t fly, even when our lives depend on it. We’re baby birds, blind in the nest.Now this little-known video of the young Emmy Lou Harris doing that great other Defying Gravity song written by Jimmy Dale Gilmore and made mega-famous by Jimmy Buffet. It’s a love song, to a person and a planet. Give it a listen and – hold on tight to the branch.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFujVHeQJ0Y&feature=related]

Sleep Aid My Foot

I hate taking a drug to help me sleep. For me the Excedrin PMs and the Tylenol PMs are a total bust. They don’t work at all for like three whole hours and when they do they work they hold me under, against my will almost, like a bully holds some poor little kid under in a swimming pool.I do have a prescription for Trazadone but that stuff holds me under too - plus it makes my mouth feel like it’s been wet-vac’d. I have a prescription for Ambien even but I totally hate that stuff. It makes me feel like I’m having other people’s dreams and what do I want with that? I like having my own dreams during which my subconscious mind delivers to me cruel and searing truths about my own sorry self. (Example: The other night I dreamed I had a houseful of people over for some giant day-long event and there I was, car keys in hand, telling them all I had to go out on this crucial errand - and there they were looking at me with these baleful cow eyes. Even my clueless sleeping self knew there was a message in there for me all right all right.)No, sleep is like love making: it’s best begun upon with a clear head.Of course sometimes with insomnia your head is just TOO clear, like last night when I kept having thoughts about this one subject which I can’t quite recall now though the word ‘chute’ keeps coming to mind. Hmmmm. Was I having thoughts about stuffing things down a laundry chute? Could it have been about Chutes and Ladders the only board game I have ever been any good at? Maybe if I get back in the bed it will come to me but oh no wait it’s a weekday and I have all this stupid work to do never mind that trip to the darn YMCA with its zillion treadmills and ellipticals and wave machines all waiting for me to get over there and pump some blood through the  small splashing creature that lives in my chest; through that little pulsing fist that works day and night whether I’m out cold and doing dream therapy or lying awake like I was for hours last night, talking ragtime to the moon.  

How Boundaries Saved Me

A long time ago, I gave money to a young friend who said he needed it to buy tires. Then, some five years into his recovery from what turned out to be an addiction to cocaine, he told me the truth: “Remember that $80 you gave me for tires? It went right up my nose. You’re the adult child of an alcoholic, aren’t you? You should get to a 12-step meeting yourself. You  really need work on your boundaries.”He was right. As a girl was always getting kissed by people I didn’t even like. Even as a grown woman I could sit through a three-hour bus ride while some bigot seated beside me spouted hateful talk without ever requesting that he stop. I hadn't the faintest idea of what boundaries even were.So, I had to read up on them, watch people who seemed to have good boundaries, even role-play situations where they come into play before I developed even the weakest grasp of how to patrol my own borders. Because that’s what boundaries are, really. They’re borders that help us keep what’s important in and what’s harmful out.Yet, since old habits die hard, I have sometimes fallen back into old ways.I did this last spring when a woman I have never met called me on the phone.She said she wanted to surprise her boyfriend on his birthday by bringing him for a long weekend to my family’s summer place. Along with his kids, she said. And oh, her kids too.Now it’s true that this ‘boyfriend’ was once close to our family, which I guess is why I found myself saying a tentative yes. “But could you come mid-week instead of on a busy summer weekend?” I heard myself asking, because they would need a lot of beds. “And could you maybe … help with the cooking?”“Oh sure,” she said. Then she gave me email address and said she would call the following week, to nail things down.She hung up. And it was only then that I realized how, in a single instant, I had forgotten every last thing I had ever learned about boundaries. Because ff she and her party did come to our summer cottage I would have to (a) drive the 200 miles there, (b) arrange to work remotely, (c) miss a week of crucial back exercises at the Y, (d) leave my husband and 90-year-old uncle, both of whom count on me for food and companionship and (e) closely monitor the waterfront activities of the group, five of them total strangers and the sixth a person who has not once in 20 years’ time picked up the phone to ask how any of us are doing.My friend the former addict is now many years sober and I know he’d be proud to see how I handled the situation, though I am not proud of it particularly: I wrote the woman an email explaining that it was wrong of me to assume I could just sweep past the potential plans of my family who wait all year to use this place during our short northern summers, so I was sorry but it wasn’t going to work.I also mentioned the 20 years, which I should not have done.But if you didn’t grow up with good boundaries you sometimes panic as you try to set one and forget to put kindness first. Anyway, I never heard from her again.I still have a long way to go, but like my friend in his longtime sobriety, I try again every day. And like him I too now take things one day at a time.

New Day

I'm up north writing this. On Friday I sat on the deck here in 60-degree warmth, basking in sunlight. Then, an hour before sunset a big wind came along and tickled the treetops till they bent over laughing. It was a day like the painted landscapes inside one of those peek-a-boo Easter eggs: beautiful.  Then... we woke to a six-hour snowstorm. We think we know what a day will bring us, but we never do really. Example; this picture I just took with spring and winter together .... Where are those footsteps leading, forward into spring or back into winter?Anyway, that was yesterday. I post this today at 6am, hopeful of a return to the warmth. Today at the family celebration I will wear ivory colored slacks and a pale green sweater and will hope to look a little less like the grizzly bear I resembled yesterday in my furry brown jacket.This year I didn’t dye Easter eggs, what with our little people away in Florida. Nor did I try making the family bunny cake recipe, which is just as well since it always looks to me more like a bunny corpse, covered for decency with a white sheet of coconut. And thank God I didn’t have to go to the Mall, that industrial-strength crowd-magnet. Instead, I worked on my refinishing project and read my book and talked with David about how badly you can hurt yourself even just falling off a small step ladder if you don’t keep those quick-reacting stabilizer muscles active. We talk that way to each other for courage.The sun is just coming up now, see how lovely? A new day for us all; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

and now, with the sun so strong already, a last coat of finish on that just-stripped table 

Penance

I did keep silence yesterday. Until the sun went down I spoke not a word and found the experience grimly gratifying. The whole time I was standing over a ten-foot long dining table scrubbing and scrubbing it with a strong solvent and coarse steel wool until the badly dinged and gummy finish finally dissolved to reveal the living wood beneath.It was a good job for the day, though I stood for five hours bent to the task and filling my lungs with those toxic chemicals while just outside this sunny day to the left here bloomed like an Easter corsage.It kept reminding me of Confession, the way you‘d feel on a Saturday when you gathered all your  courage and ducked quick  into that velvet-curtained ‘phone booth’ . I always told not the slight small sins but the biggest and worst ones. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t getting forgiveness under false pretenses.  Stripping off a marred finish really does feel like you're examining your conscience, which is as unnerving a process as searching the back of that closet with the dead-mouse smell. As I scraped and sanded my way through the day I thought about the people I have harmed in my life.I started the day angry – some website lifted my whole post  yesterday and ran it as theirs - and then I thought of King Lear at the height of his poor-me prase carrying on about he was a man more sinned against than sinning. As if that’s ever true.  Anyway it’s never been true in my case, so I was glad to have spent the day clearing away the accretions of greasy diner’s fingers and lemon oil and the wax of a thousand candles to come at last upon the bare wood, as clean and plain and fragrant as ever it was in the silent forest.Now tomorrow some pigment to fire the grain and then a fresh coat of finish for protection.

shriven