Yay for the Boston Accent

There was a story in yesterday’s Boston Globe about people trying to essentially scour their Boston accents away.They fear people regard them as uneducated, or else they worry that the way they talk will prevent them from getting acting jobs because supposedly they sound so funny to everyone else in the country.Here's a video for you in this story by Globe reporter Billy Baker who attempts to use the accent-scouring technique he has just been telling about on his dad. You'll see what a dyed-in-the-wool South Boston accent really sounds like when you hear old Pops. (Gotta love the guy; he’s trying SO hard - right up until the end when he says "Now get the hell out of my house.")       

Bad Patch

I’ve been having a bad time this last week, I don’t know why. It's not  because I learned that that spot on my shin that I thought might cancerous actually is cancer, though just the basal cell-kind.I guess that threw me a little: no more sitting in the sun lubed up with Coppertone or that ridiculous Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil. It's not because I twisted my back muscles like a person making a pretend dachshund out of a bunch of party balloons either. That came from paddling too hard in a canoe. It's not even because  avid and I worked so hard scrubbing and scouring things that we both still smelled like Pine-Sol even after two showers and a whole night's sleep.I think really it’s because for the last seven or eight days I haven’t been able to write with my customary joy; or in a way write at all. I mean, you see stuff here every day but every day I'm sweating bullets to get something written. I've always felt that’s what Shakespeare was talking about in that one sonnet about the dead leaves. More than losing youth, or comeliness, or strength, it feels just awful when we open that drawer where we keep our special favorite thing we love to do and it’s Just. Not. There.Yesterday I got to where back hurt too much to keep on scouring but I was too antsy to read and too anxious to nap. Finally I drove into this tourist town’s little center. I was crossing two parking lots to get from the pharmacy (SPF 40 sunscreen) to the hardware store (a fresh bucket for the Pine-Sol) when this little vista opened up. I shot 12 frames before I could get a shot that didn't have cars zooming by between me and it but I did finally. Can you see the gentle rise of the Appalachians in the distance?  It calms me to look at them. I guess I need to remind myself to stop sometimes and try taking the long view.    

We've Been Hit!

We left our little vacation week for 26 short hours and came back to find our little rowboat gone. "Stolen!" we automatically thought. When we were in our 20s our car got stolen four times. Then ten years later, our whole house got stolen practically, all those wedding gifts my God what a mess. So we just assumed the boat got boosted – until our nice neighbor told us there’d been a sudden microburst kind of a thing the night we were gone with winds clocked at 70 mph just down the road. More likely those winds just picked her our little boat and headed across the cove with her. Also, no offense, she all but said, but who'd take her?It’s true. She’s just a little cork of a thing made of recycled Pepsi cans or whatever  they use these days, a thing so light oars hardly work which is why she also has a little trolling engine: to give her some heft. This nice neighbor even toured the cove herself  on her jet-ski, to see if she was caught in the underbrush somewhere out there. We went out ourselves in a canoe a few hours later. I was l but calling her name ‘til I remembered I had never thought to name her. What kind of boat people would we ever be? And would I do without her and her sweet little motor like a dragonfly perched on the back?Then, just when we got back from our search, here was word from Marine Patrol. A nice neighbor on the other side of  the cove saw the little thing bumping against the boat-ramp on the beach near his house. He pulled it to his own place, garaged the motor and the next morning when we went over to meet him, offered to run it back to our place on his truck.We didn’t need that though. Old Dave and I we just lifted her onto the top of my trusty little car and drove her home, leaving me to say two things here:

• God bless good all neighbors, and
• It's Mother Nature who's the most light-fingered one of all, known to toss bigger crafts than ours around, that's for sure. 

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDTbopUYg20]

Smoke 'em If You Got 'em

I shouldn’t be so hard on Newsweek. If it weren’t for Newsweek and TIME I would not only be unaware of who Snookie was I also wouldn’t know that the entire population of the US – 300 million people – is the same as the number of smokers in China. Think of it! That one fact alone! And here we are bitching about the smokers outside Applebee’s wanly dragging on their cigarettes.In fact I remember the night two summers ago when I was killing time outside a Chili’s with two little people no taller than the doorknobs. We were racing up and down the straight grey carpet of sidewalk alongside the place when the larger of the doorknob children stopped in his tracks and stared, open-mouthed: There on the lone bench outside the front door sat two old women squinting through smoke and puffing like steam engines.“What’s HE looking at?” demanded one of them.       “I think he’s just maybe noticing your beautiful blue eyes!” I said - her eyes were really blue - but she just snorted. She knew why he was staring really. She gets that all the time I bet.Well, we all have our weak moments when we make a bad decision and Newsweek’s troubling Diana's quiet grave is just one example. My sister getting caught dragging on a butt in the biggest armchair in our living room at age nine is another. We all do it. But hey it’s the weekend; it's no time to be focusing on the negative. Let’s end instead with this funny video from ONN the Onion’s spoofy news station, poking its own dry kind of fun at another ‘news magazine lite’, Henry Luce’s former baby TIME.

It's Not a GOOD Job...

...It's a great job and I love it. When I taught school I loved my job, too, though it nearly killed me, putting out all that joy and energy every day. (How do longtime teachers DO it? I would get home and topple like a felled oak onto the bed.)

(Blurry but there I am, smiling my face off in Room 334.) 

Here’s a story: Yesterday, I was in a coffee shop where I sometimes write, when the young guy waiting on me said, “Wow, you really work hard. You’re here all the time.”Then a little later he came over again. “Can I ask what you do for a living? Are you, like, a private investigator?”“A private investigator?! No, I’m just a writer.”“Oh,” he said, a look of extreme disinterest crossing his face. “A job more boring than mine,” was what he seemed to be thinking.But as I say it’s not a boring job. It’s a great job.Last Thursday, I sat for an hour in my car, nosed cozily up to a tiny city park. Everything was the color of a Crayola box, the sky just that shade of hurt-your-eyes blue and the grass that color of green you find in Easter baskets and everyone who passed looked fully alive.Here came a woman with a cloud of hair the color of corn. Here stood a young man, practicing the controlled hypnotic movements of Chung Moo Doe. In the usual martial arts garb, he turned and pivoted, swooped a sword in the air, and moved his hands in graceful gestures. As people passed him, literally every single one slowed down to watch.Now two dogs trotted by smiling. Now a squirrel the rare color of coffee ice cream executed arcing leaps across the grass, as unaware of its beauty as are all young creatures everywhere.A baby passed, speaking of young, pushed in an old-fashioned pram with the top down, the whole gliding like a 1960s convertible.Earlier that day, I had browsed in a wallpaper store and listened as two other customers fell to talking.“The trouble here is, you can’t pick your wallpaper quickly ’cause then you have to live with it.”“Like with marriage,” replied the other.“Only thing I did right in my life,” said the first. “Wonderful guy! Married for 37 years and he dies of a heart attack.”The clerk then picked up the phone to call his father, who, he told us, had just had bypass surgery.“Have you gone for your walk yet, Dad? Oh. Well, it’s great that you’re looking at treadmills but you’ve got to do more than look at them.”Now, back at the tiny park, two young woman sailed by on skates, chins high and backs arched. Now a van of nuns passed, veils flying.Later, at the coffee shop of a nearby college the day’s warmth got the best of me and I put my head down on my folded arms, the way your teachers had you do in grade school.Suddenly two campus police were beside me. “Ma’am. Are you all right, Ma’am?” one asked.“Oh. I fell asleep,” I said, sitting up straight.“You sure did,” said the second.“We figured it was all this homework,” he smiled, gesturing at the books and papers piled around me.So I guess this job wears me out a little too, as you can see.But it’s not the energy I put out that does it now. It’s the energy I witness in the people I see, all that lively human bustle. Writing for the paper is a great job, all right. And for sure it’s never ever boring.

Hey Kids, Let's Put on a SHOW!

I spent all of last weekend in a house with 11 other people, four of them aspiring screenwriters. The fact that they were, in age, only 4, 5, 7 and 9 diminished not at all the seriousness with which they approached their task. And, I wasn’t  just in the house with them; I was as central to the process as Della Street was to Perry Mason because they were dictating the entire screenplay to me and I was entering every word on my laptop, using Dragon Naturally Speaking, the voice-to-print software by Nuance. They told me a line, I repeated it through my headset and this dandy piece of software set it down on the waiting page, in crisp black and white, with stage directions and all.So far they've written only four scenes, involving mostly battle-of-the-sexes-style bickering and a dispute about who flushed somebody’s slippers down the toilet. (Best  to insert a touch of the madcap early on we thought. We also then began actively looking for the opportunity to use the word ‘ underpants.’ ) We did get as far as introducing the mother, who in Scene Three reveals that she is going off on a business trip and will cede control to the mysterious Neighbor Lady. She, in scenes as yet unwritten will turn out to be the secret weapon in the story,  giving this opus its title, The Ninja Next Door.The whole process reminded me so much of these children’s last collaboration two summers ago, I decided to dig out pictures of  that 2009 performance, was a rendition of Harry Potter  that you see directly below  in rehearsal.Though it was wonderfully brief it seems it was not quite brief enough to keep the attention of the younger future screenwriters who  took such a dim view of the proceedings that they fell to making  their own fun. (What can you say about the groundlings? Even Shakespeare had to deal with them!)  

A Day for Quick Tears

I spent the last six hours of the July Fourth holiday in ambivalent enjoyment of the peace in this house, all 10 houseguests having now left, and in watching the HBO marathon showing of John Adams with Paul Giamatti as the second American President and the wonderful Laura Linney as his wife Abigail.The day I graduated from high school I won the novelized tale of the Adams' long marriage as the English Prize but never had the sense to actually read it. I see that I must go back and do so now if I can possibly find it. (I should be able to. We never throw anything out around here. I certainly still have the explosion of brocade and chiffon that I wore to the Holly Hop in December of that year.)Anyway. I felt hot tears leaping to my eyes more than once as I watched. There is the scene where their grown daughter Nabby has a breast removed while tied to a bed in the family home with only a shot of liquor to dull the pain. (This is Nabby on the left as portrayed by Sarah Polley.) According to the website BreastReconstruction.org the facts were even worse: "Treatment was once so untenable that women neglected their disease if a lump was discovered. Their breasts became disfigured as their tumors took over their bodies. But the alternative was worse than the disease: Nabby Adams, the daughter of John and Abigail Adams, suffered through a mastectomy in which she was tied to a chair while, without anesthesia, her breast was removed. She survived the surgery only to die from the disease. This was common practice in the 18th century.”It's hard to say which brought me closer to tears, that scene, or the scene where Abigail herself dies of typhoid just after looking at the wondrous blue hydrangea bouquet that her husband has brought in to their bedroom. “Oh John!” she sighs at the sight of them, or the scene in which after Abigail’s death, the former President reads a letter from his old nemesis Thomas Jefferson, soon to be faithful correspondent. It goes like this:

The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding.. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medi cine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement,our sorrows and suffering bodies and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.

We wave to our children as they leave so certain that one day soon we will see them again and their children too as more such children come along and maybe someday their children's children as well but who knows really? Who ever knows? We can only hope that in the end there wil kindness, and an absence of pain and perhaps a view of flowers.

Everybody's Birthday

Here’s a great postcard that my college roommate sent me several years ago now. I could never mail it to anyone – I could never part with it! - and now I know why: This funny old-time card,  the work of the very clever Ashleigh Brilliant, is perfect for today.Because July Fourth is everybody’s birthday, right?  I know we’ve been setting off fireworks around here since Saturday. (Calm down; they’re legal in the state where I'm spending the weekend.) And tonight, just as the loons are starting to whoop, we'll drive into the village and see how the pros do it.Take a look at Ashleigh's website and support small business by ordering some cards for your own special occasions. Then take two minutes and watch this trailer from the great Barry Levinson's great 1990 film Avalon about the man who immigrates to America and lands in Baltimore on a day just like this day 97 years ago.  And here’s to a great Fourth for everyone - ND a great year upcoming for our big loping good-natured country, just now coming out of its long adolescence. After all this living I have done I still can’t think of a place I’d rather live.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b37auo3dSuM]

Diana, Dug Up

Newsweek man, I don’t know. The current cover story is about what Diana would be like if she had not died on the slow slow trip to the hospital in that French ambulance (Not the French’s fault! They say the only way she might possibly have lived is if she has been ejected from the car directly onto an operating table, so utterly torn from its mooring was her poor mortal heart.) There's definitely something creepy about the story. They have this photoshopped picture of Diana, looking slightly wrinkled with a ropey neck as she would at age 50, then a second, more chilling fake shot  showing her seated on a stage with other pundits in an event put on by Bill Clinton and his Clinton Global Initiative, which of course didn't exist in 1997 when she died. Nor did the iPhone exist that you see her clutching below. (Even the World Wide Web was still in the future, hard as that is to imagine.)  They have her making remarks on Facebook. They even have Camilla Parker Bowles friending her and her sending back a thumbs-up, the two of them having long since buried the hatchet.And she's been married a couple of more times in their scenario. (The thing with Dodi didn’t last.)I find I don't like Newsweek now that Tina Brown runs it. She was fine running Vanity Fair and the New Yorker but she is definitely cheesifying this fine old news magazine if you ask me. Her supposed reporter’s account of the wedding of Diana's son to his own new princess actually said “ When Catherine’s eyes met William’s over the marriage vows at the Abbey, there was a powerful vibe of contented sexual understanding.”I mean is that not smug presumptuousness taken as far as it can go? Add it to this current piece exhuming the poor lady and it's my subscription that I want to deep-six.

A Wardrobe Story

They say if you haven’t worn an article of clothing in 12 months you should get rid of it, right?Well what about clothing you haven’t worn in 12 years? I must have been binging when I bought those many articles of clothing though I don’t remember doing so. Was I sleepwalking as I bought some of these things? What about Exhibit A here, that looked so lovely on the model in the catalog? I put it on and I’m a scoop of caramel swirl ice cream, upended and melting. My own kids hint that I look like someone dressed for a play about a homeless rag doll and they may be right. This top is frayed, that one stained, this one I chopped a good ten inches off since my torso is getting shorter by the week as, by degrees, I come to look more and more like my mother.  My shirts, my sweaters, the floaty things we’re all wearing to hide our fat these days, all seem too long as bought. I put them on and I  feel like Bea Arthur back in Maude. So I cut them and sometimes don't even bother finishing the hems. So when did I stop caring enough to have a more respectable wardrobe, I the schoolgirl who taught herself to sew expressly so she could make her own clothes, hoping to ‘pass’ as someone who could afford the store-bought kind?I must have piled 40 articles of clothing into the car to bring to Goodwill last night. All are gone now except for a few sentimental items like this one sleep-set which God knows if it still fits. I could try it on but I’m afraid of winning the Kirstie Alley-look-alike contest that’s always going on in my bathroom mirror. Still, it’s so pretty. How can I just let it go?Then there’s this old friend:This was given to me for Christmas by my 4th period Junior English class. They asked me to step out of the room and they took up a collection. No one has done such a thing for me ever again -  well not counting that day four months later when these same kids again made me step out of the room. "Another sweater?” I smiled hopefully when they let me back in. “No,” they said. "Actually we just took a vote. We've decided we’re not going to write that Light in August paper you assigned last week.”And you know what? They didn’t write that paper. We had read so many books that year and they had written so many papers. We pushed William Faulkner and his sad old novel out of the boat then and there.I look at their sweater now, part Maude, part Happy Days, look at ME walkin’ down the street in my feathered-back hair and I sigh.It has what looks like a bite-mark on one shoulder and the pockets sag badly but tell you what, it’s going back right back in the closet. With me sentiment trumps fashion every time. 

Ready for a Break?

Being no ordinary mortal, I myself don’t need a long weekend, but I know some do. Some of my housemates, for example, show signs of being ready for one. This bottle of Captain Morgan rested all this week on a little table in our back bedroom, once the launching pad-slash-nursery for these little cuties,  but now functioning as Command Central for this former ‘child’ of ours (below) and his bride too, both living here since March.Now a total grownup, he moved back north with her back in March and yet was still able to work his job managing the databases for a Texas-based medical supply firm, which he does from right here at this desk. (It’s a great century the 21st!)She needs a weekend too but she won’t take it. She’s too blinded by the glare of the approaching CPA exams. And houseguest No. 3, a Fellow in Infectious Disease, has to work all weekend because (a) her job starts today and (b)  infectious disease itself just never takes a holiday.As for Old Dave and me, we beat the traffic and sneaked away north to our summer cottage yesterday.  Where others would have oiled up, flopped onto a lounge chair and started in attracting mosquitoes, Dave set right to work raking. Me I unpacked my little suitcase, kicked it under the bed and for no known reason started cleaning out a closet untouched since the late 90s.As it happened one of those teeth took revenge by breaking clean off so now here I am again today trying to take a lesson from all that. Why am I so dumb? Why such a slow learner in adulthood when at age 12 I could recite a list of every preposition in the language, in alphabetical order? Life humbles us and we deserve the humbling.I’m going to print this picture below and hang it on the fridge today. It’s the two of us in I think 1996. Anyway back in the day when we were happy renters and knew how to to kick back and take things slow. Hope all of you can do the same. :-) 

Mischievous

Picture it: a couple of eight-year-olds in backwards-facing baseball caps at the Y, looking out the window at the really little guys playing in the Child Care enclosure outside. It was one of the last days in June and the whole place was jumpin' because SUMMER DAY CAMP has started The eight-year-olds stood at the floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the narrow hallway you go down to enter the day’s activities on Fit-Linxx. They were knocking on the glass to get the attention of the little fellas,  most of them busy either sucking their fingers or squeezing their shirtfronts the way little kids do.I saw these two making faces at the wee ones and I couldn’t help myself. I started to smile. They smiled back - at first - but then you could see them registering the hard fact that this was a grownup here, smile or no smile, and there was no telling what trouble she might start.“Givin’ the little guys a hard time are ya?” I asked as I approached the Fit Lynx machine to record my Pilates session. I was still smiling madly.“NO!” they cried unison. They sprang back from the window, then broke into a run.“Not at all!” yelled one, passing me at a gallop.“What little guys?” said the other, and then just as they passed me one turned back. “Maybe just a little!” he shouted gleefully. Then they both burst out laughing, streaked around the corner and were gone.   You can see it, getting a boot out of watching those younger than themselves. Standing still and sucking their fingers or running like rabbits, young kids really are just plain funny.

Busy Ant Finally Stops, Smells Roses

 Woke by mistake at 5am. Thought “Oh well.” Went to desk and sent June bill out to subscribing papers. Did an hour of Zumba at the Y, had tire patched at Mobil station, picked up a prescription at CVS and was back on the job by 9.Whew!Then I:

• Looked inside my head for something to write about. Came up empty.
• Lost confidence; thought “best days are behind you!”
• Called plumber about seriously bad news where leaking water from unknown source appears to be causing wormlike horror-movie-style projections to emerge from basement ceiling.
• Upstairs shower also trickling down, soaking kitchen ceiling.
• Plumber came. Some things are mysteries!
• Plumber left.  
• Ate lunch, watching 20 minutes of 1996’s First Wives Club. Goldie Hawn character’s lips ha ha!
• Went upstairs to look for phone.
• Put away Rx bought at CVS 8am
• Pulled out new bottle of nail polish scored same time same place, first such bottle bought since before millennium.
• Thought Why not? Sat on bed and put it on. 
• Leaned back on bed; fell into deep sleep.
• Woke with start TWO HOURS LATER?!
• Stumbled downstairs. Ate like hungry dog. Husband out lifting a few with co-workers.
• Husband home! Announced having buddies over 8:30pm for cards!
• Buddies arrived. Much joshing, pouring of scotch.
• Back upstairs to bedroom to iron a world of wrinkled clothes.
• Instead got back on bed, took out 2nd secret bottle of new polish. Next up: lime green toenails.

OK NOW it feels like summer! :-)  

At the Ferris Wheel's Top

On the longest day of the year, small waves lapped against a raft.  A lone a swimmer oared leisurely along, his arm a sail raised repeatedly against the sky. A sudden breeze arose and the water's surface, cracking into a million shards of blue, coral and lemon, became an Impressionist painting: Monet's water lilies without the lilies.It was the longest day of the year, with many such long days to come yet and the wooden dock on which I lay felt smooth. Its wooden planks, gone silver with age, drank in the sun’s warmth.An hour before sunrise, I had risen to look for a window I could lie down next to. I do this to catch the Early Show put on by birds who swoop so close to our house they seem like aircraft, cleared one by one for flight. So fast do they pass I can detect neither species nor even color, only glimpsing in a flash the fuselage of an underbelly, the landing-gear of two tucked-up feet.At 8:00 I stepped outside and onto the now-hot griddle of sidewalk, across which an ant lumbered as ants always lumber, bearing their burden of crumbs or fallen comrades.Just nine weeks before this day it had snowed in this cove, the day before Easter or not. Six weeks after that, tornadoes skipped and whirled and set devastatingly down across the region.One early evening this past winter, four deer came over the deep, deep snow to nibble roots at the edge of the thick-frozen lake. The deer were starving, the papers all said, and they certainly seemed to be in sore need the way they came so close to our house, their antlers held aloft like complicated branching torches.Was it just four months ago? It seems from here an eternity. But Time plays tricks on us in this small season.  As I lay on that longest-day dock, the breeze stretched a new canvas over the frame of lake and did another killer impression of Impressionist painting: a Van Gogh this time, I thought.On how many a summer solstice have we stretched out on docks and decks and sun-warmed stoops, thinking each time that June would last forever? In her novel 2007 The Maytrees, the wonderful Annie Dillard says, “Old people were not incredulous at having once been young but at being young for so many decades running” she then thinks and as I read this passage on that dock I smiled at its wisdom. It’s true: People are young and for so many decades running. All of the living are young, as any bird or ant can tell you.Such were my thoughts on the year’s longest day with so many such long days to come yet.

Life Don't Clickety-Clack Down a Straight-Line Track

Jeez what a week. First Father's Day, then an anniversary as we ticked that much closer to the 50-year mark - if you use my mother’s reckoning anyway : “Here you are almost 20 and still acting like a child!” she once shouted at my sister.(Nan was 12 at the time.)Also we signed our wills AND I said goodbye the eight teens who fill most of my thoughts from September to June. AND, as yesterday’s entry shows, a new person came to live here a while who is not just a person but am actual MD person, a Fellow in Infectious Disease. (“So I have this rash” I see myself saying to over our 6am. coffee mugs.)A few nights ago, when everyone was here celebrating Doc Sarah’s arrival, a call came in to David from our only ‘away’ child, to say that after being gone for five years he was now planning to move back here, get an apartment a few towns over and see what his future looked like from there. When he heard the happy din in the background and learned that the rest of his generational cohort was here, he reportedly said, “Hey what’s the idea, having fun without me!”It got me thinking how all these young ones will be having fun without the two of us one day. Updating your will sure drives that point home. Life goes on, as they say,  but darned if its mysterious ways don’t keep on surprising us.There's a great old Ferron tune, here covered by Sarah Kenvyn. Ferron is talking about the end of a relationship but still. That lyric about how life don't clickety-clack down a straight-line track, it together and it comes apart?  well THAT lyric seems to me to be applicable to quite a bit in this life. Listen to the lovely Ms. Kenvyn here and see if you don't see what I mean. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMpXPqeDH_o]

Doctor in the House

The screen door bangs and they’re gone. Then, some time down the line it bangs again and they’re back, your kids, or your kids’ kids or your kids’ friends. It’s been like that for us anyway.Once we had six kids living here though really I gave birth to only three; just the three kids we made ourselves using the handy home kit. One by one they grew up and left home as kids do. The house got so quiet. We slept with the bedroom door open and cooked only when we felt like it. This lasted for almost ten years.Then this past March one of these ‘extra’ kids moved back in with his young wife and they have been living here ever since as they worked on finding a new job (him) prepping for the fearsome CPA exam (her) and finding a place of their own which we will be available to them on August 1.We love having them here but now something even cooler has happened: Above on the right you see Sarah, who has been our oldest daughter’s best friend from the day the two met as freshmen at Wellesley. Only now, more than ten years having passed, she’s a sure-enough MD, newly arrived in this medical Mecca to do a fellowship in Infectious Disease.She too will find an apartment when she gets the time to go looking but for now we are the lucky ones because for all of July and  maybe even until September, she is living here too.   Two night ago our local-enough kids came here to welcome her and they were all still laughing at the supper table when David and I went up to bed.So once again, the hot water tank is getting a workout. Once again the kitchen is always open. And I can’t think when I’ve been happier.

Go Safe

Most of them have gone home to their families now, the scholars of our town’s ABC program. I know this as the person who organizes their enrichment and outreach activities.Together with some stalwart helpers I set up all our adventures and didn't we have a lot of them this past year, among them a trip to the zoo, a viewing of Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra, frequent car ride in to the city to work with schoolchildren at 826 Boston, one of the most amazing after-school writing programs in the country to name but a few.ABC is pretty amazing itself but to go on for now with our list: We went go-carting one Saturday and did laser tag another. (I held the coats.) One bitterly cold weekend in January we went to an indoor water park called Coco Key, and treated ourselves to an overnight in the attached hotel, my husband David and I staying in a room two doors down from the eight students. (I smile at that memory: I must have cut up 10 pounds of fruit to leave in their suite in an attempt to at least partially counteract the harm done by the too many soft drinks and high-salt snacks I knew they would be consuming late at night as they watched TV and dropped one by one into sleep.) All year they participated in athletics,  swimming and wrestling, hoops and lacrosse, and now the three seniors are off to Northeastern, to SUNY Binghamton and to Phillips Exeter for a post-grad year before college.Meantime, the underclassmen are hot on their heels in the achievement department with their SAT prep classes and the summer programs. (Our poor exhausted kids these days! when do they rest?) I am part of what they need rest from no doubt, since I'm forever emailing, texting  and Facebook-messaging them to set up these various activities we do together. Not that they didn't reach out to me plenty of times too, especially when they needed one of those after-school rides to the Y. So I guess I won’t be hearing the glassy ping! of their incoming texts for a while and I admit I will miss that. I started volunteering with this town's ABC program back in '86 when I served simultaneously as the Enrichment Chair, the English Tutor and a Host Mom. Then I was away from it for 15 years but I sure am back now, since 2008, and looking at these pictures below I don't know as I'll ever be able to leave again. I wonder: Do kids ever know how much they mean to the adults who help nurture them?

No Flies on Us Chicks!

Once again someone has sent me that dire email about how we women tend to sit in our cars writing checks and playing with our cell phones WHICH WE SHOULD NEVER DO. What we should so instead is get in our cars, lock them, start the engine and drive away as fast as we can. And if some guy starts doing something fishy like walking past our car we should use our pointy elbows to inflict take his eye out.Also : if ever we should approach our car and find that there is already a man in it lying on the floor of the back seat WE SHOULD NOT GET IN if even if we think his bottom looks cute from that angle.Additionally in perilous situations we should:

• Throw our wallets far away from us and run as fast as we can in the other direction.
• React to any gun-to-your head move by men who have already broken into our car by gunning the engine and crashing anything at all – That’ll teach him!
• Recall that most serial killers attack their victims by pulling them into their vans while the women are attempting to get into their cars so we should ALWAYS LOOK AT THE CARS PARKED ON THE DRIVER'S SIDE OF YOUR VEHICLE AND THE PASSENGER SIDE... If a male is sitting alone in the seat nearest your car, you may want to walk back into the mall, or work, and get a guard/policeman to walk you back out since “it is always better to be safe than sorry. (and better paranoid than dead.)”
• Take the elevator instead of the stairs. And finally ...
• If the predator has a gun we should just pound sand “since the predator will only hit us, a running target, four times in a hundred and even then it most likely will not be a vital organ. RUN, preferably in a zigzag pattern.”

I'm not making light here; far from it. I'm just appreciating the heck out of the man who wrote these suggestions and yes it was a man; appreciating him for knowing that any woman is more than capable of kicking out a tail-light, winging a purse, crashing her own car, taking high-speed evasive action and more once she releases her own inner powers. In fact pity the poor man when she does!

Thy Will Be Done

"You JOKERS are all out of the will!"  I’ve always wanted to say that the way they do in the movies and I'll say it to you guys since I finally have one. A Will that is, to replace that Junior Will we made ages ago with its fearful provisions for looking after people still too little to dress themselves.This one feels a lot grander somehow, maybe because the old boathouse is no longer so far downstream.It comes with ancillary documents, natch - a warm letter to the now-grown children, a 'living will' to protects us from too many rib-breakingly 'heroic' measures, and, most entertainingly, a document stating our wishes for funeral arrangements. Here’s how the conversation went as we hashed that one over in the lawyer's office yesterday:Says my mate David, “Let them take any body parts they want, then cremate me.”“Whoa, not me!" say I. "I want to leave with everything I arrived with. For me a cardboard box and a plain green burial.”“I thought you wanted a wake," says Dave. "You can’t have a wake if you do that.”“Sure you can! They pack you in ice and hide the ice with that same ruffly velvet they all use. Dab a little blush on and you're good to go.”"Okaaay,” goes Dave which means he thinks that sounds gross. I can read the guy like a book.“And it's not gross to have them sew your eyes and mouth shut, and carve a big Y on your chest and drain out your blood?”“They won’t do that to ME,” he goes.“Why won’t they?”“Closed casket,” he says, smiling his best victory smile.That stopped me for just a second. Then I smiled. “What are you, some kind of Protestant?” (Catholics go for wakes more than Protestants do and we still kid each other about our respective religions of origin.)We both smiled then over this old joke between us, which goes back to when, at age 19m I brought him home to my Irish-on-all-sides family: this 21-year-old with a funny haircut who was not only a - what did they call it? - Congregationalist? - but an Italian too.We turned back to the lawyer then, both smiling big happy smiles, and signed those documents on the dotted line, babe. The good news is we’re to be put side by side in the end, my honest dust right by his grainy ashes with, we hope, plenty more laughs to be had for us then.

It Could Happen: Elder Stuns Family by Revealing He Has Left Everything to the Cats

Velcro!

What is it that binds people in marriage, really? I wonder this often. Especially I wonder it after yet another tussle with my mate over whose turn is it this time to clean the cat-vomit from the rug where an artsy feline of ours likes to 'work,' creating colorful collages of grass and fur and mouse parts, all bound in a matrix of recycled cat-chow. What is the agent, that cat-chow-like, holds couples together? For some maybe it’s the flowers and greeting cards that bind people like duct tape over the years of birthdays and anniversaries. For some it’s the vows alone maybe. What I think really holds couples together? Shared moments of humor. For me the real glue comes from the laughs you have, which hold  you together not like duct tape (stickily)  or like Superglue (permanently)  but more like the scratchy kiss of Velcro, which by its nature binds like to unlike.Study Velcro up  close and you’ll see it: A zillion tiny hooks catch a zillion tiny loops and there it is: the good firm fit, the yin and the yang, the unification of opposites. So too, my mate and I are vastly different. While I sleep like the dead at night, he has trouble sleeping at all and says he ponders shaving my eyebrows off or drawing whiskers on my face as I snooze on, oblivious to all. Me, I can‘t sleep mornings. By 5:30 I'm up, organizing the world and running loads of wash. I can’t stand to see others indulging the sleep-late habit, which to me shows weakness of character.He claims I barge in and make the bed, even while he’s still in it but I deny it. Much humor in marriage arises from denying the obvious.Another difference between us, between many men and women in fact: Men like teasing and find it funny. Women hate teasing and find it cruel.Old Dave and I were brushing our teeth together one day lately and when he got done he leaned down, as is his habit since boyhood, to slurp water directly from the faucet.“What are you, 12?” I said, pointing to the two nice ruby-tinted tumblers. "When will you start using one of the cups?!”  “Never,” he answered. “The cats drink from them.”That stopped me for less than a second. “Only from yours,” I said,  thinking, “Ho! This wiseguy stuff ain’t just for the fellas.”  The truth is, we get a kick out of our differences. And, after all this time, we’ve stopped trying to change each other.  So big deal, we’re apples and oranges, hooks and loops. So we pull away from each other with a good rip now and then. The laughs we have join us up again. 

Old Dave in days of yore. The poor guy didn't stand a chance