Just a LITTLE Bit Broken

I sat riveted in that lecture hall listening to nationally known hoarding expert Randy Frost, fascinated to learn about the saving and acquiring patterns of the 6 to 15% percent of Americans exhibiting these behaviors.Fascinated up to a point, that is, because when he said that one of the marks of certain hoarders was the number of unusable appliances they owned all I could think was:“Uh oh.”Is my mate a hoarder? It’s true that he still insists on keeping not one but two broken CD players on the closet shelf. (Against what? The day when CDs make a comeback and there’s a CD-player repair shop on every corner?)And what about me? It’s also true that I still have every note I passed in 12th grade English class, with Ilona Wisniewski’s clever remarks sandwiched in between mine. Also: recipes on brittle brown index cards from an early 80s cooking group and a set of Harvest Gold sheets from the Laugh-In era.And that’s before we even get to the appliances.OK sure, some of them are borderline usable but isn’t that even a little normal? I think back to the double-doored refrigerator of my childhood, one of whose doors stopped shutting properly years before we got a new one. We just threaded a wooden fungo bat behind both handles and presto! the bad door followed the example of the good one and shut nicely too.Anyway, our appliances DO work – as long as you tweak them a little.Like the toilet in the downstairs bathroom which will cause the water to rush like Niagara Falls itself and for hours on end - unless you remember to jiggle the handle some 60 seconds in. Like the one on the third floor whose flusher you have to hold down for the count of 20 if you expect it to work at all. or take the clothes drier - please! - which will only dry if you set its indicator to one very specific place on the dial. (There’s no choosing between ‘Delicate’ and ‘Sturdy’ in this house. You want dry laundry, you set the indicator on ‘Sahara’ and come back in an hour and a half.)But these appliances keep us on our toes, along with the various other gizmos we own:I think of the left front burner on the stove that won't turn on at all unless you first light the left rear burner and blow hard on the one in front. I think of the toaster which, if you fail to dial it back to ‘Barely Warm’, will get a death grip on your bread and keep it for four solid minutes before spitting out a virtual roof-shingle that’s as black as tar and twice as hard.Once upon a time your TV set lived at least partly in the physical world, in that when the picture started to flip you could just get up and give it a good smack. Now if your TV goes rogue you get a message from some communications pod in another galaxy and you have to call up and talk to a robot.They say the day fast approaches when our machines will be smarter than we are. Soon we ‘masters’ will be the ones bleeping and jamming and praying that they show us some mercy.Maybe the sensing of that day’s approach is what lies behind this need to cling to the familiar.Anyway it’s such a dear doomed impulse, all this saving and keeping we humans do; how can we not smile at it? Smile and THEN go get ourselves new toasters!

Adam's Apple

Yesterday was Father's Day, today's my anniversary - how much fond personal narrative can  the blogosphere stand? And yet, I can't resist...Robert Louis Stevenson called marriage "a sort of friendship recognized by the police."I guess that's one person's account of it.  Here's another, from Annie Dillard's beautiful novel The Maytrees.The Maytrees are in this scene a young husband and wife, living in Provincetown: 

She lay shipwrecked on the sheets. She surfaced like a dynamited bass. She opened her eyes and discovered where on their bed she had fetched up. She lay spread as a film and as fragile.… She loved Maytree, his restlessness, his asceticism his, especially, abdomen…Maytree, flexed beside her, was already asleep. He usually fell asleep as if dropped from a scarp. From above he would look as if his parachute failed. Intimacy could not be unique to her and Maytree, this brief blending, this blind sea they entered together divng.His neck smelled as suntan does, his own oil heated, and his hair smelled the same but darker. He was still fresh from an outdoor shower. Awareness was a braided river. It slid down time in drops or torrents.Now she as he woke the room seemed to get smarter. His legs moved and  their tonus was tight. Her legs were sawdust; they were a line old rope shreds on sand. All her life the thought of his body made her blush."We should get up"  Maytree said and moor the dory. Tide's coming in."Now he stood and brushed sand from the side of the sheet. They always had sand in the bed it. It was a wonder she was not slimmer....

I'm happy to say I find marriage to be more like this second account than the first. Friendship is crucial of course – also the ability to laugh at yourself, to forgive and to admit that you’re no picnic to live with either. But if you also have those times when you get taken outside yourself? Well, that’s just the icing on the cake. :-)

Fathers Day

Some six or eight years ago now we had our best pals over for Sunday dinner who arrived with seven young children. The littlest, just three years old, approached me in the kitchen as the parents drank their drinks and talked their grownup talk. Did I have any toys anywhere? she wanted to know.  I dropped everything and took her to the a room upstairs where still slept the wooden blocks and the Fisher Price cash register and the Lego people with their funny round heads. The other six were hot on our heels and soon we were ringing up sales and arranging tiny schoolrooms and building beds for more stuffed animals than you could shake a stick at.We'd been playing with them for 10 or 15 minutes, when this littlest one, this three-year-old, nodded her head toward the stairs leading back to the kitchen and casually asked, as if I too were a child of three, “Which one is YOUR daddy?” She meant, “Which one looks after YOU, when you really need what a father can give?“  I didn’t even hesitate.  “The one with the white hair,” I said. We both smiled then, she for all the fun we were having, and I, fatherless from birth, for what she had given me: the fresh realization that a love begun as late as adulthood yet can heal the oldest wounds.And so Happy Fathers Day to all and a  belated blessing on the blue-eyed man who left before I came, wherever he may be today: and more blessings yet on this brown-eyed man with the once-dark hair who has stayed and stayed, and fathered quite a few people in his strong and quiet helping way.

Boom! (Drip Drip Drip)

Boom! It doesn’t take much. June 4th's volcanic eruption in Chile is bedeviling them in Australia with flight delays and fog, and I hope you know that just because some of us live in the northern hemisphere it don’t mean we won’t be affected too babe! (Can you say Mt Pinatubo? When it erupted in 1991 we had two whole years of lower than normal temperatures what with the ash kicked up into the atmosphere.)In fact can you say, or do you even know about,  Mt. Tambora, in Indonesia, which blew in April of 1815 and was the largest eruption in recorded history kicking off what is still referred to as “The Year Without a Summer” ? Also “The Year of Poverty” on account of all the people who starved to death. Here in the U.S. they had snow as far south as Pennsylvania - in June no less - and the crops all died: their little cells just  can’t endure even a mild frost according to what I’m reading here today.That volcano last winter in Iceland: is that out of earth’s system by now? I wonder. And how about this new one in Chile? Will Mama Earth shrug one shoulder and send the ash cloud from that caroming up our way?I hope not, though there are always silver linings. Wikipedia says that in July 1816 the "incessant rainfall" during that "wet, ungenial summer" forced Mary Shelley and pals to stay indoors for much of their Swiss holiday and hatch a contest to see who could write the scariest story, And what did that give the world? Frankenstein, one of the first books ever to show what mischief  man can make with his yeasty imagination and a few too many hours in the lab.So be on the lookout for more o’ this R-A-I-N.  It's sad I know  but look at this way: you'll be saving on sunscreen. AND your little battered hide will thank you (and maybe even grant you length of days.)  This is not a close-up of your latest sun blister but rather a picture taken by NASA showing the caldera created by that volcano that blew in Indonesia almost 200 years ago. It is 3.7 miles in diameter. Take heed earthlings!  More here if you wish to be further amazed.

Look at It This Way

I’m looking back at what I’ve written here in the last week and thinking Yikes! A lot of silly talk about ladies’ underwear? An account of setting fire to the evening meal once again? A video showing dogs with human hands eating with knives and forks? It must’ve been an off week for me, though it did bring me one nice thing: a brand-new friend who found me at Columnists.com. We had some back-and-forth about the scribbling trade and the next day he had this to say:

So you told me I should write in my blog every day, and if you read my post today you will see that can lead to a bit of a stretch. Then I read your post this morning and I say, “Geez she’s writing about her crooked frickin’ spine!?” And I am somehow strangely entertained by this. My initial response was genuine concern for your well-being, which is odd since up until Saturday I didn’t even know you existed. But then my concern lessened, and turned to ease and chuckles when you described the state of your pants. 

He was referring to the post where I talked about how I’m trying to ‘treat’ my recently-emerged case of scoliosis by going to the Y every day.

Someone said, not sure who, maybe me that  life has a way of putting us exactly where we need to be, when we need to be there.

“Wow!” was all I could think. “Maybe that’s true!” I mean I HATED to exercise when I was young; hated to do much of anything that didn’t involve either reading or talking my face off. And now here I am, thrilled every day to be hurrying into the Y to do the treadmill, and the  funny machine that makes you feel like you’re roller blading, and then the Pilates or the Yoga or the lifting of weights while balancing on a therapy ball, depending on what day it is.  This new friend has thanked me like six times in five days for the few tips I gave him about getting your writing out there. The the truth is I should be thanking HIM for having pulled me away from self-mockery AND self-pity and made me see that Old Alfred Lord Tennyson was right: "Though much is taken,” in the course of our living, “much abides. “And” - shall I finish it? I have it memorized. It’s Ulysses, aged now, at the end of his long, long voyage: "Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will - to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."   Yeah!Now here's me at the Y on the Technogym Wave Runner, which is the real name of that  thigh-and-glute building skatey machine. I look pretty good for my age don't I? ;-) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0KvopwtTB8&feature=related]  

Give Those Dogs a Smoke

Below is a video of these two dogs having a meal at a busy restaurant. It’s funny because they have human hands, which they use to drum and point and cradle their chins as they wait for the food, then eat the food and finally finish the food, all with knives and forks.The crowd noise in the background is excellent -  you can hear the hostess calling out numbers when it’s time to seat the various parties – and the waitress is very believable. I just would have like to see them each pull out a cigarette and smoke it afterward but I guess that’s a silly thought. Smoking isn’t allowed in restaurants anymore, right, never mind what the animal rights people would have to say about blindly waving live coals around the furry snouts of two such trusting creatures.What I do wonder is how the two hand-providing humans have themselves are situated for this shoot. I assume they're under the sweaters the dogs are wearing but are they behind the canines and cradling them with their thighs? Are they under them somehow?That’s Amazing Thing Number One. Amazing Thing Number Two is that 4 and a half million people have watched this video in the last three months. The question I ask there is one I asked through all my childhood (a) Where are the grownups?   and (b) how can we keep them from catching us and keeping us from having all this fun?  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVwlMVYqMu4]

Fine Dining

What is my problem? I know how a broiling lamb chop shed fat so why do I forget every time and cover the broiler-pan with tinfoil? Do I really not remember what you get when fat pools on foil in 500-degree heat? Fire! But they’re so little, went my thinking last night.  Just four slender little rib chops. How much fat can they produce?” I stretched the foil  over the rack that sits in the broiler pan and laid those chops DOWN, once again giving nary a thought to the fact that I was covering the holes designed to drain the fat away.Just then I got an emergency text from a reporter and begun madly texting back and the next thing I knew the kitchen was filled  with a cheerful crackling sound and a warm orange glow lit up the inside of the oven.“We got fire!  I yelled to Old Dave who was stretched out reading a couple of rooms away. “I’m on top of it !" I added even as I rapidly flung open every canister on the counter-top in search of the one with the flour.I turned off the broiler and opened the oven door: sure enough, a fire as merry as Christmas Morning. I tossed in a scoop of flour and half the flames went out.Then the smoke detector went off. I opened the back door to get the smoke out and David, newly arrived in the kitchen, took a dishtowel and began waving it in the air. I returned to the stove, threw more flour onto the flames and watched as they quickly disappeared.All this went forth without a word being spoken between us. We're old hands at this kind of thing.  He got out the plates and the silverware and set out some napkins. Then all that was left for me to do was to set out the salad and the rice, open a nice young  Chianti, throw a little salt on the floury goo, stir it around on its tinfoil and voilà: crispy lamb chops served up with some good-old-fashioned spur-of the-moment PAN GRAVY as an unexpected treat. :-)

 Bon Appetit! 

Keep on Dancin'

(This is a picture of my spinal column ha ha..) 

I've always said if something bad happened to me – say if I had a colon resection and needed to wear a colostomy bag forever after - I'd just strap on that sucker and keep on dancin’.Well I don’t have a colostomy bag and I HOPE I don’t have a melanoma (see last week's post) but I do have one heck of a crooked backbone, which did not express itself until I was part way through a yoga class in 2005.“Um, so you have scoliosis?” the yoga instructor came over and whispered to me as I was deep in Child's Pose.“What?  No! I mean I don’t think so! Why, is there something wrong with me?”She was so kind. She kept me after class and had me bend over from the waist and sure enough:  one half of my rib cage IS higher than the other which is the test they use in elementary schools the world over to check for this lateral twisting of the spine.It happens right in the womb it seems. You just sit curled up for too long in one position and the die is cast. People who have severe scoliosis have to have surgery: a rod goes in and by degrees straightens you right out. My friend had this operation back in the late '70s and had to walk around for a few months inside a tubular cast that went from her chin to her pelvis, Now she climbs mountains and paddles kayaks and I don’t know what-all else. She has no pain.I who started out with a case so mild nobody even knew about it had no pain either -  until this last year . Oh my pants started to fit funny, yes - the fly kept tending to the northwest - but I just figured I'd bought a bunch of cheap Made In China pants. It's when my vertically striped starting heading northwest too that I realized something was up.  I have pain now which is why I have to go the Y all the time and quite literally keep on dancin'.  I do Zumba and Nia and Hip Hop, I do Pilates and Yoga. I hang off a giant therapy ball, I do 40 sweaty minutes of Core and Glutes Class and I must say it's interfering hugely with my work day. Still, what are you gonna do? If it helps me keep moving then it's worth it. I know myself; I know my temperament. If I didn't HAVE to keep moving on account of this new affliction I'd just sit at my laptop  24/7 and slowly become a sort of garden gnome.Here's the honest to God image of my spine, the truth-in-advertising version of that Stairway to Heaven at the top here. It scares the daylights out of me every time I look at it. That undulating white thing is a backbone? 

Weaker Sex My Foot

I'll say one thing, speaking of that boy who came to my aid when my raspberries spilled onto the asphalt that day: people help women more readily than they help men, maybe because we’re not as afraid of showing weakness. Guys hate to show any kind of weakness or uncertainty. They don’t even want to be seen sitting down. I know, I watch 'em at my Mobil station. A guy can almost never just sit in his car when the attendant checks the oil even though he knows the man will come show him the dipstick. He has to get out, walk around to the front and look under the hood too, as if he wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a raccoon under there, or a tangle of spaghetti or somebody’s underpants.Men need to look like they’re in charge. They just do. I think of that line from Shakespeare when the two grown daughters of King Lear start sassing him the minute he signs his lands over to them. “Being weak, seem so!” one of them barks at him and the phrase often rings in my ears. It’s all guys ever wanted of us sure: that being ‘weak’, we act weak.Only somewhere in there we learned to read, and teach the children, and make the peace, and calm the angry waters. We even figured out some pretty good ways to not have a baby every ten months and to ease the pain of childbirth when we did. Midwives held centuries' worth of knowledge.Next thing you knew we'd gotten the vote, the job, a seat on the bench (and I don’t mean the bench at a ballpark.)  For some reason we still earn only 75 cents of each dollar guys earn but we're bound to close that gap too. In 2009 7,823 women earned medical degrees as against 8,164 men.AND, if we care to, we can still show weakness.  We can still show need. We don’t posture and brag not because we’re these big saints but because we’re not hard-wired to.I like being a woman and I like the stretchy tension of living with a man, especially one who is thrilled to see women doing so well. I just pray that when my kind is really on top we have the sense to stay away from war. I'm kinda thinking we will. 

If It's Cancer We'll Call You

I was just at the dermatologist’s  to see about a red patch I've had on my leg for some months now. “Hmmm,” smiled the person who saw me there. “I THINK this is nothing but let’s be certain. Would you mind if we did a little biopsy?”“Not at all,” I smiled back. She ducked out and was back in a jiffy with a wee digging tool so precise you could use it to tease apart every layer of dough in a pan of baklava."Will I have a scar?" "Maybe a teensy one.""Because it’s OK. I mean, I have a million scars on my legs.""Oh yeah?""Yup, and a story for every one. This one's from the time I sneaked out of my cabin to meet a boy from the camp down the road, this one from the time my sister freed me from my nap to go to the drugstore with her for candy… I figure what's another scar at this point”“Ha!” she said, even as she expertly popped out a tiny divot of flesh and dabbed at the blood. She studied me from head to toe then, first examining my whole front before flipping me like a pancake to study my back. "No cancerous growths here that I can see!" she sang."Yay!" I sang back. “Any other questions?” "Actually, yes. This past winter I got these little bumps. They're gone now.”"On your upper arms? Like little pimples?" There's a name for them!” she said, whipping out a pamphlet called Dry Skin and Keratosis Pilaris. “You can use this cream,” she added, writing its name on the front.I opened the pamphlet, the last page of which showed somebody's hand covered in a painful looking ‘glove’ of scaly white skin.  "Whoops!  Don't look at THAT picture!" she cried, reaching to fold over the page so I wouldn’t see it.Too late. “The poor soul!” I said as she turned to flash out of the room again for some bandages and the list of wound care how-to’s.“We see worse!” she called over her shoulder, and that comforted me too for the blunt truth of it: that she and her health care colleagues routinely ‘saw worse’ in us all and forgave us anyway in our human imperfection. “You can get dressed now,” she said when we were finally done.“Ok,” I said jumping off the table. “And you’ll let me know about the biopsy?”"Sure!” she gaily cried as she sailed out of the exam room. “If it's cancer we'll call ya! If not, we’ll write ya a letter!”  Now THERE was a sunny health care professional. I loved her, whether it's a little skin cancer among my living layers of phyllo dough or not.

what IS this thing?

Hitting the Wall

Before posting three whole hours late today I hurried to the handy people-counter called Site Meter to see who I'd disappointed and found someone in Paris, several people in Australia, three in the Netherlands, several in the UK, somebody New Delhi, somebody in Estonia and many more who came looking for something new from me and found only yesterday's lame post about the raspberries.This is a lot of people to let down and I’m sorry. It happened because I couldn’t sleep at all the night before last. At midnight when I had lain there for an hour I got up and changed the sheets. That didn’t help so at 1:30 I tried the Bath of Surprise where I get into a tubful of scalding water to stun myself into near-unconsciousness. That didn’t help either. Finally, at 3:30am I got up again and took an entire shower complete with hair washing, hair drying and hair squeezing –  what David calls the flat-iron step - AND, in an effort of true desperation, poured a giant tumbler  of cheap white wine and drank it all down while standing on one leg which is what I must do when I work on my hair. My hips are out of alignment these days and I find it feel better if, when standing for 40 minutes, I do the stork thing.It was 4:30 by the time I got back into the bed and finally did fall sleep, chirping birds or not – until 6am anyway when my alarm went off and I got up to do the thousand things I did yesterday.. Thus, last night, right smack in the middle of the evening fun I left my ten family members all still laughing and carrying on, went into my room and wham! toppled over onto the bed  like a felled tree.Blankness, Dreaming. Tardiness posting. And now a brand new day with all new adventures ahead.

"Hate When That Happens!"

Maybe you really can count on people to help you out.  I was crossing the supermarket parking lot yesterday when an entire quart of God’s most fragile fruit spilled from my cart. Picture it: a hundred raspberries rolling their sweet fuzzy-tender little bodies around in the gritty asphalt. (The waste!) I bent to see if I could salvage a few. That’s when this one guy rolled past me in his car and called “Hate when that happens ha ha!” Then an older gent  passed right after him. “Go back inside and tell them!” he shouted, gesturing earnestly toward the store but how could I do that? What would I try and say,  that it was their fault for placing that top-heavy bag in just that precarious place?I couldn’t do that and so remained bent to my task,  trying to judge whether I could salvage any of them at all and mentally listing the kinds of materials contained in that grit: salt from winter storms, engine oil, pigeon guano, droplets of gasoline,... Where did it end? And you can’t exactly scour a raspberry the way you can an apple.I was still sadly picking through them in my peasant’s crouch when the lowliest employee of all, the kid who brings in the shopping carts, appeared at my side.  "I’ll get you another," he said . "I don’t need the slip," he said . "You wait right here," he said and in I did and 60 seconds later he was back with a fresh treasure-chest of this heavenly fruit.I could have kissed him. I could also have tipped him but that would seem to me to put him in a one-down position somehow. Anyway this wasn’t a service; this was piece of pure gallantry. And I think I’ll remember that boy’s kind helping face pretty much forever.  (Maybe I'll go back tomorrow and ask I can take his picture so you can see and remember it too. :-)) 

That's The Way That the World Goes 'Round

I once read that Japanese businessmen smile all the time, happy or sad. In fact the article said the sadder they are the more they smile and I don’t know if this is true or not but the idea of it struck me like a thunderbolt. I identified. I also happened to read the piece the very same morning I was walking through the sanctuary of my church before the service began. “Why are you always smiling?! “someone said to me and in not all that nice a way either. I guess what he meant was “Nobody’s that happy” which is true enough, though teachers also smile no matter what, because they know that whatever pain or disappointment they’re dealing with those kids filing in have a right to see them at their best.I write here every single day because that’s what I vowed to do when I started this blog . Some days I’m ridiculously happy and some days I’m pretty sad but even I can't tell, reading back, how I felt on a given day. It's such a blend in this life, the joy and the sorrow, isn’t it though? My old neighborhood came together yesterday to remember the life of a man who was, in his way, a father to all of  us kids. We came from Missouri and Florida and Vermont to be there, first for the visiting hours and then for the  memorial service. For the better part of 24 hours we did our best, together with his three grown children once our closest pals and co-conspirators, to conjure up the past.He was such a funny man this Charlie Wilson yet he was always helping people too. Being around him was more fun than watching monkeys on a trampoline, yet he cussed like a sailor, which made you laugh even more. His son Alex said during our reminiscences that they wanted to rename his boat The Goddamit Barbara,  for how often he could be heard exclaiming those words around his relaxed and easy-going wife. We laughed so much over the last few days, the three bereaved children included, even though they wake again this morning with both parents still gone from them; with both parents in that other land, the  great and inimitable Charlie Wilson and his bride Barbara, who went on ahead last November. And that's how it is for us all We laugh and we mourn. We smile and we are sad. Maybe singer-songwriter John Prine said it best. Below his tragicomic vision of life, here performed by the luminous Norah Jones.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSHPsY2bY4&feature=related]

Clean Slate

I was such a good girl the other day: I cleaned out my half of the marital bedroom including the closet and the bureau. (Anyone for a long-line bra? A nursing nightie with those two strategically  placed  windows? Howsabout a never-been-worn pair of Spanx bought in the fast-passing moment when I thought I wouldn’t mind walking around with a torso you could bounce quarters off of? ) I also totally  vacuumed under the bed which I still can’t believe myself, since this is something I haven’t truly done since the year 2000 when I set up my massage table at its foot.Yep, a massage table at the foot of the bed. That's what's under the dark blue throw in this blurry picture here on the left. My groom thought he had died and gone to heaven for a while there though really my intentions were practical: I had to do home massages and write them up for the year-long course I was taking to become a massage therapist and he was  my perfect victim, being right there all the time either napping away or reading his many George Aaargh Aaargh Martin books. I did all my assignments and  got the license and worked on the public every Monday and Thursday from 2002 to 2006 in one of the rooms associated with  my chiropractor’s office.Then almost overnight my own neck began acting up with some painful  bone-on-bone rubbing between the vertebrae: Helloooo, osteoarthritis. And goodbye to that nice little secondary career. Still, I kept the table up all this time, using it to both set things down on and hide things under, like my shoes when I kicked them off nights. And my socks and yoga pants, and sports bras (Jesus said it: the bras you will have with you always!) The groom has always maintained that I crowd up the place with too much stuff  - and then there was that year-old apple we  found under the bed-and-massage table combo that looked like the little shrunken head of Ramses II. So he went away for the two days and I did all this cleaning and took down the massage table. I’m trying not to think about how it feels to finally put away the old dream of myself as a healer. ~ Sigh ~  Anyway the room looks a lot less crowded now so there's that. Look at all the books on the night stand by the way. That's not MY night stand. Just sayin' ! I'm not the only one around here who's getting a little odd. 

"The Prom"

“The Prom,” Ira Glass intones solemnly as the host of This American Life out of Chicago Public Radio: “We don’t make kids go into the Army in this country. We don’t make them go to college. We don’t make them get married. But if they’re still in school when they’re 18, they collide with the impenetrable fact that is the Prom. And then they have to take a stand: Go, not go, use it to try to climb to a new group of friends, use it to try and get the girl, just try to get through it….”“The older we get the more we tend to roll our eyes at the idea of Prom,” he goes on, and yet he says what we forget is how thrilling the whole thing seemed at the time.How thrilling it still seems, is what I say. Why else would hundreds of us plain old citizens gather each year as we gathered in my town last week to watch this year’s crop of high schoolers promenade past us two by two toward the buses waiting to carry them to the rented hall where the dance will take place?Again this year the boys came buttoned into their tuxes, cinched tight at neck and waist with bow tie and cummerbund.  Again this year the girls came dressed in dazzling versions of off-the-shoulder chic, with how many innocent flowers pinched at the stem and stabbed through the heart to serve as corsages!It’s how a lot of us felt on prom night: Pinched at the stem if not stabbed through the heart. So much rides on that one frail evening.In the months leading up to my own prom all I could do on my way to sleep was nurse this vision of the perfected self I would be that night. Maybe I saw it as a kind of reward for all the 20-hour days I had put in over four years’ time, on homework and play practice, on chorus rehearsal and all that prepping for the SATs. Perhaps not much has changed since then. In any case the day arrives at last with its attendant drama.I had become single in the course of my senior year and so had shopped for someone I could go with and feel relaxed around. I found that someone in a genial easy-going boy from the town’s Catholic school which had the bad manners to schedule its own graduation on that very same night.We got to the prom at 9:30 and left at 10:30 because that’s what kids did then: we  left early and went and sat in some ordinary restaurant for two hours, and only then drove to someone’s house to change clothes and stay up all night talking.But oh, that genial and easy-going boy. He produced a half-bottle of champagne for us to toast with when we first got to the parking lot where the prom was being held. I made him pour it out because I was NOT a genial and easy-going girl and how I regret that now, you boy, who I can see as if you stand before me with your wide grin and your thick blond hair. Halfway through college you died in a plane crash and changed forever the way I look at life.“It’s all so fragile” is what I now think, watching the young people march past. And also, “Let them grow old, God.”  Just let them grow old and have the joy of watching the waves of other young ones coming and coming and coming up behind them.

Here Lie...

  This isn't my house thank God but I'll tell you what it’s really like living here in the growing season. I know I said it was like living inside the Keebler Elf tree and proved it with these actual pictures but an even better analogy is coming to mind now: It's more like what that nutty little genius Emily Dickinson wrote.See if you remember this poem, where she pictures herself and the mystery person she addresses lying side by side in their graves, dressed just in the clean white bones maybe, or maybe still in their starched Sunday best with the undertaker's makeup pale upon their cheeks. You know it I betcha :

I died for Beauty--but was scarce Adjusted in the Tomb When One who died for Truth, was lain In an adjoining Room-

He questioned softly Why I failed? "For Beauty," I replied "And for Truth, Themself are One We Brethren are," He said--

And so, as Kinsmen, met at Night We talked between the RoomsUntil the Moss had reached our lips And covered up our names

Emily didn't do punctuation, aside from these crazy dashes every few words, but doesn't that ring a bell somehow? The image of us carrying right on with the talk while slowly - slowly and wonderfully in a way - Nature knits the green blanket that will cover us all in the end.

You saw the picture of the ivy outside my study window . Now here's the mother dove who sat on my window sill all last summer hatching babies; whose descendants may sit here still when I and that boy I fell in love with lie all quiet in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, beneath the grand old trees and under the wide cold sky.

Odd Jobs

My favorite cartoon of all time here. The dog just heard that third thing a little wrong.(I wonder if God looks down at us in the same way, knowing something we don't know; watching us brag away to our friends, as we happily picture events  in just this same sunny way. Poor lambs we humans, all headed for neutering one way or another)   

Home Address: Keebler Elf Tree

I've just had an email from someone who was reacting to my tale of the mouse-and-ant life in this house of mine.In it she said “not to make light of your column which I found cute BUT! Mice can be deadly. They poop and pee more than birds…  Also they can carry the deadly Hanta virus. They carry fleas and ticks (Lyme disease.)”She also referred me to a public health website and went on to quote from Wikipedia which says that a lady  mouse gives birth to litters of 6 to 8 babies on average, some five to ten times a year.Then she moved on to my ant problem, suggesting I get estimates from exterminators 'ASAP' to see if these black ants are carpenter ants. “Having them means having  wet, punky wood which also can mean termites." She said when they replaced the roof over their porch part of it was loaded with carpenter ants "scurrying up and down a bush that touched the roof."“TERRY, YOU NEED TO MAKE SURE THAT NO BUSHES OR TREE BRANCHES OR THEIR LEAVES OR ANYTHING THAT ANTS CAN GO UP EVER TOUCHES YOUR HOME!"Twice a month, you need to walk around your home and check under the eaves and other areas for insects nests, like the wasps. We now have an exterminator come four times a year and it has been so worth it."I wrote right back:“Wow, Janice, then I think we must be doomed because just look at the ivy that grows outside here!” And I included a picture.When she saw it she wrote me back immediately: “IS THAT IVY GROWING ON YOUR HOUSE?”By way of reply I  sent two more pictures, so now I will ask what you think:Is this stuff growing ON my house or IN my house?   And just how much trouble do you think I'm in here?

Worry Worry Better Hurry

Why does worry loom so large in our lives these days? Maybe it's all those solemn teasers they put on before the news:  “Cat Leprosy: Will it Jump to the Human Population?" etc.. I bet in the old days people didn't worry like this. They just spent all their time searching for the food and  pounding the grain and shoeing the mules, then fell into bed the second darkness fell.  You can bet they didn’t need sleep aids OR Valium.It’s not like that for us.Me I got up the other day to find my whole body vibrating with tension. How would I ever do all I was scheduled to do in the next 48 hours? Bring a shrimp dish and a salad to the Shakespeare group AND  prepare a passage to read?  Take my elderly uncle out for a ride AND buy his food for the week?  Write the column AND the blog? Meet a friend for his birthday lunch AND finish making the present I had planned to give him? Have a painful treatment for my lower spine which looks like this road sign AND run three high school guys in to the city to tutor little kids? Put in the two hours there, then fight my way back out of the city? Take a health-restoring walk, then dash over to the high school to see the prom kids march past en route to their version of that Stairway to  Heaven evening? See Uncle Ed again and get him food again? Go to a movement class for the pretzel-back (again, see above sign.) Write twice more, try again for that walk  AND THEN HOST TWELVE  PEOPLE FOR DINNER?But…  I got lucky:  The back therapist postponed our session and the high schoolers had to see to their own studies instead of tutoring others. My birthday friend canceled my lunch and black skies and a tornado warnings canceled my walk. AND, as I came slowly to realize, while I had indeed invited these 12 people to dinner I was doing almost none of the cooking. I just had to cut up some mangoes and make a pot of chili and toss another salad because our honorary kids now living here were doing all the res. Their chunk of the menu consisted of

• Real fried chicken
• Home cooked mashed potatoes
• Rice Pilaf
• Mac and cheese
• Asparagus
• Corn on the Cob
• Fresh cut mangoes

 Leaving me to just do the chili, the salad, the biscuits, cornbread and the cookies, the latter three of which I planned to buy and then we'd be SET, as indeed we were.And the moral of this story is?

• Forsooth, do not sweat what you think you see approaching, for half the time it never comes to pass.And also..
• Live communally if you possibly can, for everything is easier when you are not alone.

chef on the right, sous-chef standing by him

Goodbye to a Smart Sweet Man

I just found out that I’ve lost a friend. Bob Paquette, of public radio station WFCR in Amherst died over the weekend of an apparent heart attack. I don’t think I'll ever be able to drive the long road to U Mass again without feeling a twinge in my heart.His was the voice that roused tens of thousands from their beds mornings. He told me once he stopped to give a ride to a hitchhiker on the Mass Poke, only to have the kid immediately say, “Hey I know you! I know your voice! You’re that guy on the radio!”He was that guy on the radio and more. I would tear out to Amherst from Boston, bouncing over those old roads to get to him on time, running up the stairs with my little sheaf of commentaries hugged tight to my chest. He would have just finished “Morning Edition” and would no doubt have much preferred to have a coffee and check his email but no. Instead back we would go into Studio A while I recorded and he corrected my recording as we went. "Take it from the top of that last paragraph" he would say from his spot on the other side of . (My favorite thing was when I'd look up and see his shoulder shaking with laughter at something I funny  I had just said in my own best radio voice.) He was so welcoming always, the first news person ever to put me on the air and in the end I had done so many little oral essays for him and a few other Public Radio stations that I made an audio book of them. And before that when I recorded and wrote a How-to-Start- Journaling book, he had me come on the air to talk about it.It's funny: I never go back and listen to any of the pieces from these two books - You know how it is, your own voice just embarrasses you - but how many times have I gone to this link to listen to him making me laugh, helping me see things I never saw before the way he could always do. Take a minute if you can and go first here and then click on where it says 'journaling interview'  and on that new page click on either of the two hyperlinks. Do this either to listen in on the two of us talking about what journaling does for a person, or to just hear that voice, the warm incomparable voice of one smart sweet man.