The Tenants

Off and on all spring we’ve had these thumb-sized mice darting around the kitchen baseboards faster than the light from a laser pointer. Off and on all spring we’ve had these shiny black ants using their delicate feelers to probe all the soaps and sponges in the bathroom.What to do? Mousetraps work, sure, especially when baited with peanut butter, but how many mousetraps can you set before you start feeling like a serial killer? How many exquisitely fashioned insect bodies can you crush before you feel twinges of shame?Yet I enter the kitchen nights and see a mouse scooting so fast around the baseboards my eyes can hardly follow it. I enter the bathroom mornings and the place is a-shimmer with ant-dancing.Our problem is we’ve grown tender-hearted enough over the years that we’re much slower to spring for the executioner’s implements. (I once watched as a little spider landed on David’s nose, a tiny thing that began rappelling down toward his chin like a climber descending a cliff-face. He just unhooked that delicate rope of web, went to the door and set the whole thing down outside.)Now, to complicate things even more, a sparrow has built her nest inside the glass globe of our front porch light.  We realized it because every time we set foot on the porch we there was this great and general fluttering. It took days before we thought to look over our heads to see where she flew from.We can’t actually see inside the light’s globe – its glass is opaque - but we’re think she’s hatching a family in there.  Also, a tiny egg appeared under this light fixture one day, smashed in pieces on the porch floorboards. Poor bird! She didn’t know she lived inside an oven; never guessed how likely it was that a switch could be slipped, wildly overheating her nest. Is this what happened, and the egg was damaged, so she nudged it overboard?Last summer, a mourning dove made her nest on the sill of an upstairs window here and for six straight weeks we watched her sit her eggs and tend her babes – not one, but two separate batches of them.  It just took us outside ourselves to watch them; softened our hearts to see the way she came to trust us. We could stand within inches of her, watching through the window glass and she would only regard us calmly as she stooped to feed and nuzzle her struggling offspring.So maybe soon this sparrow will trust us too. Anyway we've taped the light switch in the 'off' position, so no one will again set her nest on Broil. The mice and ants will move out soon, we know, but our thoughts keep returning to this small tenant, who is so like us in a way: who lives and moves and has her being entirely  oblivious to the fact that eyes more powerful than she can picture or imagine are daily upon her, watching,  to keep her safe. 

What Do You Think You're Doing?

If someone asked me what I thought I was doing with my life I'd say I was just always trying to tell what I saw. I'd explain that my mind produces figurative language the way iron produces rust.If we were talking about the column I’ve been producing all these years I think I'd say all I was trying to do there is connect the increasingly few people who read the paper with the increasingly many who don’t, either because they can’t afford to buy the paper or they’re too young to read, or too old and their eyes hurt, or they don’t speak our language.I grew up feeling like an outsider in the resolutely married, resolutely conforming America of old and I remember how awkward that was. I began gravitating early toward other left-out-seeming ones and there I found a home. Maybe I sound like a phony saying this since in some ways I’m about as mainstream as you can get: married forever, a mother and now a grandmother too, a person still happy to be driving the fourth incarnation of that original Dodge minivan, a vehicle so awesomely roomy I could carry my own own coffin in  it) but still: I’m uncomfortable with any organization based on principles of exclusion. And I can’t wait til someone takes our headphones away from us and makes us all go to work in the same big People Mover.I used to be a teacher and I still just want to make it a good class for the ones who show up. I also love making people laugh which is goes back to my being the baby of the family and thus the designated ray-of-sunshine.Also and finally I feel how Time is so quickly passing every day, every minute, every second. This morning I was lying on my back with my head hanging off the bed and saw what you see in this picture. It’s all here somehow: the lampshades I dye to make my world rosy, the ticking clock, all those CD’s now made archaic by newer technologies .. And also  the picture of the mild handsome man who was David’s father until he died at 45 in long-ago 1960.  Even the blooming late-spring day outside is here. They are all here. They are all fleeing. So why NOT bring yourself a smile by noting how you can see the very underpants of those little birds when they fly up over our heads?  It's a sweet notion that birds wear little white undies like the rest of us, and it invokes how young we all are how young this little blue planet is in the grand scheme of things.      

The Narrow Path

This child goes right to sleep if you read to him for  ten minutes.  Last night I hadn’t been reading for even that long before he folded his small shoulder into his body like a bird preparing for rest, turned on his side and was dead to the world.It was different with his littler brother, who, somewhere in the last six months, has gone from the man of limited vocabulary you see here to someone who has more to say than Robin Williams himself, and can say it just as fast.At home, the two sleep in twin beds pushed together to make better use of a room that is at all times spiky with Lego towers, and draped in clotheslines and various fort-making fabrics. But during their sleepover at our house last night the older child begged to sleep alone.So we tried the little guy in his old crib, with one of its side removed to make it seem like a youth bed. He wasn't having it. He kept saying that he wasn’t going to lie down; that he wasn’t tired at all and in fact thought he'd like to have another whole supper, then play with his toys... I tried for a solid hour to get him sleepy with songs and picture books.We finally left him there in his little room and for 15 whole minutes his grandpa and I lived in a fool's paradise, believing him to be asleep at last. That’s when the door to his room creaked open and he emerged all smiles, a toy hammer in one hand and wearing the kind of hearing protection ear muffs you see on the runways of your larger airports.It was then that David finally picked him up, “Let’s go tell stories in TT and Papa’s bed!” he said and into our room the child went, and there remained the night through while I took my pillow and slept elsewhere.  Poor little boy! He was fine today, as shiny as a new penny and ready to help dig that hole clear to China with his big brother above. (Here he is below, appreciating the heck out of those wind chimes I spoke of yesterday.) What a hard time we all do have when we can’t find that narrow path to dreamland![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGhpX7OdwgQ]

Amnesty

If there’s one weekend in the year when you can exhale it’s got to be this one with summer about to begin, yet the days still getting longer. There’s an amnesty feeling almost, as if Time has forgotten its chief task of hurrying us all along toward the exits.Even here on the internet things are quieter than a closed library. Winter weekend, rainy weekends it’s practically standing room only online, but today? With temperatures heading for the mid-80s it’ll be a ghost-town here, not counting the faint peeping sound Tweets and status updates coming in through people’s phones.I couldn’t sleep last night. At 3:00 I was wandering from room to room, reluctant to take a sleep aid because I knew the birds would be up talking within the hour. They do that in my part of the time zone: they get up before 4:00. With their happy racket and full daylight by 5:00 I wouldn’t want to be drugged-out and unable to wake when the day began.I work every single day to bring this little gift to you though there's no money in it. And, like millions of others , I buy food and cook it, I work a job and I spend time with our small people, I take our remaining old person out to break the terrible loneliness of the old. I can never sleep late is what I am saying; I feel all that waiting for me and I hate to admit that I'm often anxious.So at 3am today I was dragging my anxiousness with me into the living room, the hallway, the kitchen. There I suddenly heard the solemn tones of the wind chimes I had just hung outside the porch door the day before. They are made of iron and extend five feet down from tip to end and now a stiff steady breeze had called forth their deep belling sounds.I listened and listened, standing in the kitchen. Finally I returned to the bedroom and opened the windows wider to hear them still . And didn't they carry me into three hours of deep refreshing sleep, as they will perhaps do every night now until that far-distant day when the cold returns and the snow begins again to fall.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbJ_Jg_CX-c&feature=related]

~These are not my chimes but they are like mine and will give you the idea. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.~

Double Blind

It’s a rare thing when Dear Abby misses the mark but she did yesterday I think. A guy wrote in to ask about the right way, the "normal" or "proper" way of closing the blinds at night. Should they be closed with the slats in the upward position, or was the downward position better? He and his his wife couldn’t agree. Abby replied that it wasn’t a a matter of what was 'normal' or 'proper';  it was a matter of what worked best for them. She could report however that tilting the slats up blocked more light than when tilting them down.  But is that what you mostly worry about when it comes to your blinds?Don’t you worry more about how easy it is for someone to look in when they’re titled each way? I say this if a passersby can get close enough to your window to kneel down in front of it and the blinds are tilted up, the person can see right in and find you toweling off your little bare self. If the person lives in the apartment above you and you don’t shut those downward-facing blinds tight tight tight they can see you too.Maybe you don’t mind this, you have to ask yourself.Do you feel OK about having someone see you gluing on your toupée or painting that hot caterpillar of wax on your upper lip before ripping off your mustache? That’s the real question, and like Abby says there’s no normal or proper about it. 

Just Because You’re Paranoid

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you as we used to say in the final years of J. Edgar Hoover’s America. What do you think? Did JFK feel the beady eye of that FBI head when he was sneaking mob-boss girlfriend Judith Campbell Exner into the White House?  Did MLK  sense that one of the highest level officials in the government had teams  of people watching his every move? In other words, did they ever get paranoid?I got paranoid just this week while spending the night by myself in my normally jumpin’ household.Just after midnight when I was dead asleep, the TV set in the living room suddenly turned itself on, only I didn't know it was the TV because it sounded exactly like real bad guys muttering and whispering with each other as they crept into my house. Turned out it was some movie starring Joe Pesci of all the dark and unpredictable  bad-guy actors. It took every ounce of my strength to unlock my bedroom door and walk out into that living room. So what is the deal with paranoia anyway? Does  it actually help keep us alive to pass our genes down to following generations? You bet, say the experts, who also will tell you that  if the elevator opens and you don’t like the look in the eye of the only other person on that elevator, then don't step into it. Trust your instincts in other words.Just know that they'll sometimes betray you, as they betrayed this potential client who called up the private investigator my sister Nan used to work for. He wanted to set up surveillance on his house he said because he was  dead sure someone was sneaking in while he was at work and making all the chairs, tables and couches all shorter by cutting their legs down a half an inch at a time. It was either that or he was getting taller he said and at age 50 he didn’t  think that's what was happening. Maybe someone was sneaking in and leaving one of those growth potions like Alice found inside that rabbit hole on Wonderland. If I had to bet  money, I'd say the guy himself was shrinking. After all we do change shape our whole lives through. But that's how we humans are. We'll point out the dust mote in  the eye of 100 other people before ever once stopping to look inward and spot the beam  in our own.

Be fun to see Clint Eastwood's  J. Edgar coming out in December. Leonardo Di Caprio plays him and he's always great.

And on the Menu Tonight... Vomiting!

So people don’t like peas that much. This I gather from reaction to my question here yesterday about the most hated childhood dishes. They also dislike brussel sprouts, and really anything in the cabbage family. (Do you know you can’t eat  cabbage and broccoli and such  if you're breast-feeding? If you do your baby will draw up its legs and howl with stomach pain. You can’t have a whole lot of chocolate either or the child will be flying around the room like this baby in Gary Larson's famous Bellybutton Slipknot cartoon. (See left. We miss  you, Mr. Far Side! )Myself I try not to focus on things I dislike. Still, I'll never forget the first time and only time our mother gave us lobster.  It was  even more expensive then than it is now and for sure it was WAY beyond the range of what our little family usually ate. And here our mom had gone out and bought it for the 'young hooligans' as she sometimes called us. Bought it, boiled the big pot of water, committed the horrific act of murder-by-scalding, then cracked the lone lobster open and set out the melted butter.This is how Nan looked around the time of this experiment.This is how I looked.Mom might  have guessed we could never measure up to the high gastronomical bar she was setting for us.      Nan took her first bite and went "Ewww!! Ack!"  I took a bite and turned a kind of purple plaid.“Terry’s going to faint again!” Nan cried. (I was a tireless fainter: in church at the doctor’s office, during flag-raising ceremonies in school. And i really did turn a kind of mottled color just before I went sheet-white and keeled over backwards. But I didn’t faint. I ran from the room, hightailing it after Nan who had scooped up the fanciest wastebasket in the house, made from a kind of elegant rigid ricecloth, and spit the half-masticated lobster bite into it.  I watched it slither down inside the wastebasket and turned more of a Madras this time.  Then I threw up all over my  little sneakers, a pair of red P.F Fliers if memory serves. The next night we were back to nursery food, an ectoplasm of soft-boiled egg, a little toast, and a side order of canned spinach. And for the rest of my childhood every time I looked at that wastebasket I thought guiltily of Mom’s gallant effort to introduce us to a higher kind of living.Maybe fine food is like a Thomas Hardy novel: you have to get to a certain age before you can enjoy it.  

Clean Your Plate

People are heavier now than they used to be and to me that’s a mystery. When I think of all the bacon and eggs and pure suet devoured by my family of origin I really see why they all died of cardiac arrest.But food was different then, it's true. That classic Jell-O salad I referred to yesterday really was hugely popular. By the time the 60s were launched it had been sweetened with mini -marshmallows but a decade before that it was either the slimy syrup of canned fruit cocktail you saw imbedded there or the olives like these.  (Octopus eyes, eh?)It was no time to be young I can tell you. Children, powerless beings that they were, sat at the table and shut their mouths while the grownups droned on. Shut their mouths and tried as best they could to force down the food in front of them on account of all the starving children in (Europe, China Armenia -it depended on what country’s name your parents' parents drilled into their heads when they were young.)Everyone ate together and dessert was always served, though it was as likely to be what they called Fish-Eye Pudding as anything else.Fish-Eye Pudding was really Tapioca pudding with those little capsules of unchewable goo laced throughout it.We lived in fear for all our childhoods. What would they put in from of next? I live pretty fear-free now since I'm the one making the food. And when I go out I'm also safe. I don’t like carbonated drinks so I have no fear of the fast food joints and their super-sized calorie barrels. I'm not too crazy about any dish that makes me feel like an oil spill has occurred inside my mouth either so burgers and fries hold no fear for me.There’s really only one food that makes me shrink in horror and that is Creamed Chipped Beef. Sit me down in front of a plate of Creamed Chipped Beef and I’ll confess to anything rather than open my mouth.So…what vintage dish does that to YOU? Anything like the 10pm Set-Out you see here?  :-)

Dinner at the Slow 'n Easy Inn

It looked like any motel you might see, riding on the broad sloping shoulders of the highway. In the lobby, a sign hung just behind the front desk. “No visits,” it advised its employees. “Absolutely no personal calls.” Not five feet away from this sign, a weary-looking night clerk was making series of personal calls.finally she sighed mightily, hung up and checked me in. Nodding toward what looked like the restaurant, asked about room-service. “We got a lounge, honey. Your best bet? Go on in, order what you want and fetch it back to your room.”So I went on in, past a sign reading, “Entertainment Thursday at 9:00: Shock-Jock Dave!” It was Thursday. It was 9:15.It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the lounge’s dim light, but I soon identified a young woman with a ponytail as the lone waitress. I ordered a Chicken Caesar with light dressing to go and sat down to wait for it.Shock-Jock Dave looked utterly benevolent, a kind of cross between the Cowardly Lion and the Michelin Man. A same-age woman with poofy bangs and green glasses assisted him. At one point as they carried in their equipment and their first CD of the night played, they paused on the dance-floor with deadpan expressions, turned their backs to each other and executed that switch-bottom dance-step that resembles a person toweling off his rear after bathing.They were mellow, and, everyone knew them. Everyone there was mellow, I realized in the 15 minutes that had passed: Now and then a patron would step behind Dave’s tables and check out the tunes foe himself. From time to time, the bartender came out from behind the bar and let someone else fix the drinks. And at one point the waitress walked straight from the kitchen to four guys playing pool, held up a bare foot, and asked one of them to massage it.Ten minutes later, the chef herself sauntered out, dressed in hospital greens with long hair down her back.“We’re working on your Chicken Caesar but the chicken was froze” she said pleasantly. “As for your light dressing, why not head over to the salad bar when the chicken’s done and add the extras yourself?”“OK,” I said, and back she sauntered to the kitchen, followed by a muscular male patron who emerged after an interval bearing a giant burger. He took a seat at the bar between a rail-thin lady in a halter top and a quite-large one in a muu-muu, and tucked into his burger.By then 40 minutes had passed and I still had no food. A party of four at a booth were in the same boat. Exclaiming loudly, they summoned first the waitress, then the chef. When they asked to see the manager, the barkeep wearily rose from a stool, and absorbed their departing curses.It was then that the chef emerged with my plate. “Hey they want fast food, let ‘em go to McDonald’s,” she said, smiling. “Get your fixin’s now, honey. And don’t miss the nice Jell-o salad!”

♪ Get down tonight ♫

Please Squeeze Me Oh Yeah Like I Squeeze You

All these years I've stayed away from corsets, Spanx, all that stuff. I was 12 when I started wearing stockings and with stocking came corsets whether you liked it or not. They called them panty girdles back then and for all their similarity to chastity belts they were still better than those tight bands of elastic with garters dangling off them.Still, adamant as I am about never wearing a corset I have to acknowledge the jaunty appeal of this emails that arrived in my inbox last night:“Hello! We are professional corset supplier in China. Majored in exploring corset, make lingerie, bra, and corset by your requirement, best price, low MOQ, do OEM! Supply corset with 5-20% discount, assure you the best price, best quality, welcome to place sample order to check quality. Welcome to place sample order to check quality!”I haven’t gone to their website - I have that old late-'90's fear that my computer will explode into fever blossoms and fall down dead - but I think maybe I will find some way to reach out because they seem like such a competent bunch. They majored in exploring corsets and how impressive is that? I majored in overeating and all-nighters. I think I have a lot to learn.So sure call me crazy but I'd still rather keep going to Weight Watchers than wear one of these pubis-to-sternum squeezers. It's true that it's all about the bra after age 25. but you could never, ever EVER get me into one.

ouch!

This is the Day

Yesterday I...

• Slept late and dreamed a few of those really instructive dreams where you wake up and realize you've just saved yourself thousands of dollars in therapy,
• Marched in a town parade with two groups I belong to, namely the Multicultural Network which promotes diversity and inclusive  community, and our local chapter of A Better Chance. I'd be hard put to say which of the two organizations means  more to me. They're the best things I do with with my time, not counting hours spent with our little ones, meaning the grandchildren. 

And speaking of those little ones I also... 

• Went, to see them, staying long enough to play outside, work a few chocolate mustaches onto our faces and examine a missing tooth, and finally... 
• Came back home here, threw open the doors and windows on our musty screened in porch, evicted all the spiders and watched one really beautiful evening settle in.

These are some of the members of our ABC community:

These are the grandchildren: And this was the really beautiful evening as seen on a nearby lake:

Just when we thought the warmth would never come! 

~ This is the day the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it! ~

Duck and Cover

No one can say we're not on the cutting edge here in Boston. Consider the big doin's  my hometown has going on today: a rehearsal for what would happen if a large scale terrorist attack took place. They put it in the paper yesterday to give people the heads-up, which seems like a REALY good idea when you remember what happened with those low-flying planes in New York last winter.So see what you think of this for today’s tourist. The City of Boston and Homeland Security are planning a series of what they are calling "scenarios" with fake terrorists who will be  

• shooting a simulated weapon inside the Boston Marriott Copley Place
• seizing a control room in Everett, and taking hostages on a boat in Winthrop,
• issuing threats to detonate explosive devices at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, at the old Quincy High School in Quincy, aboard an Amtrak train, and in a market in Everett.
• There will also be an exercise to test teams responding to a structural collapse of some sort at the Quincy Shipyard.

"The weekend will culminate with two large exercises - one tomorrow evening and Sunday morning at a cruise terminal in South Boston - modeled after terror attacks in Mumbai. The exercise will include a car being set on fire, a partial building collapse, pretend shooters, explosions, and fake mass casualties, and will test how local law enforcement, as well as the FBI, National Guard, Coast Guard, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, coordinate.

But not to worry: "It’s an exercise. Repeat: Do not call 911. It is just a test."So come to Boston where we really know how to celebrate a return to the warmth.  Who needs fireworks and a street fair?  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW4s7TETtJA&feature=related]

Eye Exam

It’s like when the dentist says “You’ll feel a little pressure,” then  kneels on your chest and tries to pull out your whole lower jaw.Only here at the eye doctor they say  “This may sting just a little.” Then they squeeze three drops of pool-cleaning acid into your eyes. That’s for the glaucoma test.The three more drops per side are to dilate your pupils into deep black pools so they can see if all those quadratic equations you learned back in high school are still kicking around in there. It was the annual eye exam for me yesterday where besides staring sightless into a wall for an hour I also learned a lot because I asked a lot.Specifically I learned that:

• You can indeed tell if people are heavy drinkers by examining their eyes.
• You can also tell if they have high blood pressure.
• You can tell if they have age spots in their eyes because well, there they are.
• You can tell if they’re scaredy-cats by saying “Suspicious of glaucoma” even as they are writing this on your chart and then noticing if they start  hyperventilating ("Not to worry." the doctor said. "It just means your mother had glaucoma.")   She sure did have glaucoma. They found the glaucoma in her and sent her to the hospital without even letting her go home and pack a suitcase. They did a bilateral iridectomy and she went through the rest of her life with goats' eyes.

The age spots in the eye are called Drusen I also learned. "Do NOT look it up on the internet!" she said.  "They’re only a problem when they appear in the macula; yours are more nasal and temporal," meaning crowded into the corners of my eyes where they're hanging out like middle schoolers at the mall.She was nice, as always, but the technician was really great. She got briefly called away from my vision test when a young aide stepped into the room and said "I have a blinker next door. Can you help me?""What's a blinker?" I asked."Oh just a person who can’t keep his eye open for the drops." Sensible man, I thought. She slipped out and was back in a jiffy. "And hat do you do in a  case like that? Hypnotize the person?""Ha ha no" she said then paused for that crucial comical beat:  “We just give  ‘em a good hard whack on the head.”I laughed, stared sightless at the wall another three hours, then went home and looked up Drusen on the internet.

Uh Oh Arnold

What do you think happened, did the mother of this love child start things by saying "My what beautiful blue eyes you have Governor!" Or was he the one who crossed line first by casually letting it drop that his wife didn’t really understand him? A guy in his late 30s  said that to me in a pizza shop about ten years ago. To me, this middle-aged person who looks a whole lot more like this Mildred 'Patty' Baena than she does like Kim Kardashian I can tell you,  though I did send away for padded underpants once to get the laugh from my family. (They were a bust, it was sad. I just looked double-diapered.)This guy in the pizza shop anyway: he was worked up that day because the bank down the street had just been robbed and his wife was a bank teller there. She may have been the one the guy pointed his gun at I forget. Anyway he was wired, talking on and on.I just listened - it’s what I've learned to do in life - and maybe my listening created this warm bath for him in which he felt he could get real comfy and just say anything.“My wife. She doesn’t understand me” is what he said in those very clichéd  words. "Sometime I feel so alone.”    “Ah that’s just the human condition though, you know that, right?” I said. “Birds don’t feel that way; dogs either. It’s just us. We’re homesick for something we can’t quite remember. Steven Spielberg thinks it's the past, that we're homesick for childhood. Others think we’re half-remembering Eden.”He just looked at me. Then he sighed. “Maybe,” he finally said and picked up his pizza box and headed stoop-shouldered toward the door. “I guess I’ll head back and check on my wife,” he added.For sure it’s what the ex-Governor should have done. That longing that thinks it will find relief in sex? That's usually from a deeper place that sex can’t ever touch. Or maybe old 'Patty' reminded him of his mom, or the girl that got away. or maybe he really just wanted one more child. We’re mysteries even to ourselves isn’t it so? Sometimes I think especially to ourselves.

The Use of a Goose

Here's what else I've heard about nursery rhymes, just off the top of my head: Ring Around the Rosie is about the Plague, and 'ashes ashes we all fall down' brings to mind the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the crier goes up and down the street calling “Bring out your dead!” Ashes? Think Ash Wednesday. Think funerary urns. "Fall down?" Think of your final bow to Mistress Gravity.Also, tradition has it that Hey Diddle Diddle conveyed the gossip at court during the reign of Elizabeth I, the cay being the regent herself and spoon and the dish referring to two of her royal retainers (her official taster and her chief "dresser" who allegedly eloped.) Then of course the cow jumping over the moon stands for Ben and Jerry's ice cream.I used to teach a course in the uses of fantastical tales whose curriculum I got to write. "Fantasy in Literature" it was called and we did spend a day or two on nursery rhymes. In fact I am holding on my lap now the densely footnoted-book about them that I used in the preparation of that syllabus. The Annotated Mother Goose has the following nursery rhyme on page 13 6 and 137. I offer it for its pleasingly frisky lilt, to divert and delight us all midway through this rainy May week. Maybe I should have brought it to the pond where I met these geese today and read it aloud to them just to get a reaction. Neither of the two adult birds was wearing an apron but you never do know when Old Mother G. might step out incognito.

Now for this pleasing little chant:

Needles and ribbons and packets of pins,

Prints and chintz and odds bod-a-kins-

They'd never mind whether

You laid them together

Or one from the other in packets and tins.

But packets and tins and ribbons and needles

And odd bod-a-kins and chintz and prints

Being birds of a feather

Would huddle together

Like minnows in billows or pennies in mints.

Yup, just the thing for this rainy day. Internal rhyme even! Believe I'm feeling better already.  :-)

Not For Kids

One of my favorite illustrators, the guy who drew this. Back in the 70s Wallace Trip did a whole book of nursery rhyme illustrations, each with tongue-in-cheek text like you see here."A Diller a Dollar a Ten o’clock Scholar" is one I faintly remember from a childhood spent in the same house as three individuals born in the 1860s and 1870s. Back in the old days people had all kinds of things committed to memory, not like now when if we’re really on top of our game we can maybe recall the words to a jingle or two. (Our brains don’t seem to store stuff anymore. We might as find a way to pop them out and use them to sponge off the counters.)I bought the book this picture is from back in the fine old summer of ’78, after my first baby and before my second one when I had all those widely-flared hip hugger pants and hair like Farrah Fawcett’s (well, as long as it wasn't raining.) I tried to read it to my 18-month-old. thinking the music in the nursery rhymes would be nice, but  of course the cartoons were totally beyond her. I still have the book and last month tried reading it to my little grandsons.  “We don’t like this book”  the seven year old told me in no uncertain terms.  Looks like his momma, my former baby,  remembers the book and having looked at it in adulthood, has pronounced its tone not fitting for little ones.I'm looking at it again here, seeing what the little badger’s words are to the schoolmaster.  “Sir if I may be permitted to say so, sarcasm has no place in the classroom,”  he is saying. So it looks like irony has no place in the classroom either, still less the nursery. Live and learn I guess. Live and learn.

Smarter Together

Sure, by yourself you can have a good idea, maybe even a great one. But if more people can work on your idea and add their thoughts to yours then you are really on your way.Example: I wrote a couple of weeks ago on the subject of personal boundaries and received many letters in response.In fewer than 50 words a man I'll call Tom wrote me something that crystallized what I had tried for a solid week to get down. He said he had used the Twelve Steps to help him develop healthy boundaries.  “I was an emotional 15-year-old at the age of 36, which is when I found mental, physical and spiritual recovery. The wreckage of the past simply needs to be put into perspective.”A woman I’ll call Jill also wrote me and I wrote right back to ask a question. The she wrote again so I asked another question. She wrote a third time, explaining and explaining.In her first email, she agreed that “it sure is hard to set boundaries when you want to be a nice person.”  “But,” she added, “I remind myself that I don’t have to be nice, just be honest” because, as she put it, “honesty is more ‘respectful’ than niceness.” Then she linked the failure to set good boundaries to her outbursts of anger.This really rang a bell for me because I start OUT so nice with people I’m the nicest person in the room practically. “You want to borrow this book? Take it! Take this one, too, by the same author!” “You’d like to borrow my car with its nice roomy interior? Keep it for the day!” Then one day I’m wondering where on Earth did I PUT those two great books? And when did the hubcap get knocked off my right front tire? And by the way, why is my neck hurting so much all of a sudden?“Many times I have had to get to a point of anger to be able to set a firm boundary,” she went on. “It took a mental health crisis to finally learn to set boundaries without getting mad first. Also, when I start to feel a twinge of annoyance or muscle pain, I know that’s a sign for me to set a boundary before I become angry and feel resentful. I even had to change my cell phone number a couple of times before I finally learned it was OK to keep some people at a distance.”The good news is, learning to set boundaries has erased these physical symptoms  almost entirely. As she put it  “A counselor once told me my pain was the voice of my inner self that I ignore, that just wants to be heard and cared for. So love and care for yourself first, Terry. It’s not selfish at all.“Notice when you have pain and when it bothers you. Keep a record of it daily, moment by moment and check in with what you’re feeling. Our bodies speak to us when we ignore our needs. It’s a survival mechanism, and it is wonderful because our bodies always strive toward healing and health.”I don’t know where in this big country Jill lives, or Tom either, nor do I know what either of them does for work. I only know how lucky I feel that thanks to their generous spirits we made a little classroom where I could learn with them a while.

Who'da Thunk It?

I’m giving a talk this coming Thursday at the Theological Opportunities Program in Harvard Square. I know I’m doing this because I saw notice of it in the Boston Globe yesterday. Not that I forgot or anything. In fact I’m excited to deliver this speech, which is about that Who’d-a-Thunk-It place you end up in when you dread a thing that then  turns out to have more secret compartments than the lining of a pickpocket's jacket and each one full of happy surprises.Take this weekend for example. I went to a college reunion not my own for people just barely 30 and I’ll be honest: I dreaded it. I dreaded sleeping under a thin blanket in a chilly dorm room with a glaring overhead light that looked designed for conducting interrogations.It took me two trips to drag  all my stuff from my car into that dorm at 3pm on Friday. Then, at 5pm, I dragged it all back out and stuffed it in my car.  “You’re leaving at 6am tomorrow, " I told myself. "Why not just sleep in your clothes?”  I see now that I was ready for the whole experience to be pretty awful.In fact it was pretty great.It was great because I got to see the nice people who work in the Alumnae House. AND I got to play with that infant I was in charge of while his parents went out to dinner. PLUS  got to walk around the campus whose grand old trees still appear in my dreams from the long-ago years when I went to this school myself.I also got to spend time with my two girls, Ms. A . Marotta and Ms. S. DeYoung,  both of the Class of '01 , and also with the latter’s husband Kevin who is daddy to that pink-cheeked infant.I did have a moment of panic at the look of horror on Annie’s face when she arrived on campus Friday morning and I sidled  up to her: “I’ve been to our dorm,” I told her. “They gave you a  roommate.” They did WHAT?” she exploded. I was almost afraid to tell her that the roommate was me in case she would still be mad.She wasn't, thank God, and that was the final silver lining in an experience I thought would be so stressful: For the first time in 30 years, I had the privilege of watching all night long over the peaceful sleep of my onetime Baby Annie. 

Daughters' Reunion

Last night found me back in a dorm room; it's like I never left. I even felt a little bit the way I felt then: as if everyone else in the place was out having crazy weekend fun and I was stuck in my room, fantasizing about Peanut Butter Cups and trying to get my bangs to lie down flat.No really it's not like that at all. Really I’m sort of crashing my girls' 10th reunion and doing a little babysitting while they go out on the town. This is at Smith, which has been a women's college since its founding in 1875, just a couple of years before I was a student here ha ha.When I was here we thought we couldn't  get through the weekend unless there was a scheduled “mixer” to bring in guys from the guys’ schools. (Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams: all the schools you could get to in a reasonable amount of time were for men only.) When I first arrived on campus as a freshman I remember being surprised by the way some of the upperclassmen worked to get invited for the weekend to one of those ‘guy’ schools,  there to witness all the foolish behaviors associated with alcohol and male hormones. It's sad the way we all seemed to be full of such yearning back then. The students here nowadays  aren’t like that at all. When my two girls  were here at Smith and I would come visit them I couldn’t believe how simultaneously focused AND jaunty the students all were. They were studying their brains out AND they were chalking saucy sentiments on the footpaths; aspiring highly like we did but also having such fun doing it. And, as far as I can tell it's been years since anyone was  dying to get away on the weekends. Having been back on campus a lot when these two were here from '97 to '01 I can tell you that their class seemed utterly happy and fulfilled. And having come back here this weekend I can tell you they sure still seem that way. Take a look at the faces of these three, who let me take their picture last night. It just makes me thank God for the steady progress of the Women’s Movement; and thank God too for women’s education wherever in the world it's going forward.

Baby I'm Amazed

Pretty soon I’ll be sleeping on the roof, this place is getting so crowded: Besides the two who moved in back in March we now also have Susan her husband Kevin and their wide-eyed baby Peter. (Does he even HAVE eyelids? His dad says he keeps wanting to narrate his movements as he struggles to pick up his own toes let’s say. He has him  saying to himself “I know I can do this if I can just open my eyes a little wider!” ) Susie, or Sooz, as her pals call her, did some of her growing up right in this house. She was in Sixth Grade when she became another honorary kid around here, coming here most days after school, starting her homework, sometimes having a little pre-supper meal.And every Thursday night she slept over, right next to my girl Annie in Annie’s big queen-size bed. They fit just fine, though I do remember the morning Annie appeared in the kitchen ahead of Susie. She came in smiling and shaking her head and finally told me why: "She keeps finding MY hair in her sleep and tucking it behind HER ear! I’m out cold and suddenly my head gets yanked over to one side!”This was an easy mistake for Susie to make since Annie's hair was pretty long then,The two were best friends right on through senior year and even went to the very same college together, where one tore up the Rugby field and the other practically scoured the very language right off the Amendments to the Constitution so hard did she study them and all their thorny implications. They graduated from Smith College together ten years ago and are going back today for their reunion.Last May, when I was on that same campus for my own reunion, I am recalling that the Commencement Day speaker was Rachel Maddow with that mind of hers as sharp as a deli-meat guillotine. I love going back to that campus, where I will be before 9 am tomorrow. MY job besides walking around in in my usual haze of general admiration for my school? To look after this little guy tonight, while Kevin and Sooz and Sooz’s best pal Annie join some old pals and kick up their heels on the campus where my long-gone mom, and then I myself, and then the two of them learned so much and had such dandy fun.It's enough to make anyone smile. :-)