Weekend Morning

I set the alarm for 5:15 so I could at least lie in the bed for a few minutes before our visiting little-guys woke; it went off and I was wide awake, all too aware that they were sleeping just on the other side of our bedroom wall. "This is good!" I thought. "I can think my own thoughts, stretch, do bound-angle pose and even change that darn dressing on my incision before they wake at 6!"

That's when I heard a small sound as a hand-scrawled note came sliding under the door. "Can we get up now TT? it said.

They were already awake!  At quarter past five in the morning!  And had evidently been awake long enough for the older one to have found paper and pencil and composed a full sentence.

Then the bedroom door opened and in they rushed us. They got right in the bed, with us, turned on the TV and for 45 minutes lay on their tummies watching the jazzy pre-teen lingo and fast moving graphics on Disney HD.

I won't lie: I lay on my tummy watching too. In fact we all watched except for Old Dave. "Papa can sleep through anything!" said the little brother. That he can, and always could, from way back when he looked like this, my sister has called him "Lying Down Man." 

After the pancakes and bacon, the juice and the mangoes,  the brushing of the teeth and the inspecting of TT’s green toenail polish we manned our battle stations to give those lights sabers a work out as promised.

I sigh happily remembering it even as I yearn for a nap here. Besides engaging in a little sword play what's nicer on a weekend morning than lying in bed with friends?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtKnGSOt5tk]

Tonight Tonight

Our kitchen has three fruit bowls on the counter, all brimming, all constantly being refilled. The washing machine goes day and night. If Person Five comes back today to clean out her stuff there’ll be six people in the house.This is all just temporary. Person Six was born here but he’s just visiting for the weekend. Person Five is moving to a new apartment to begin her real life in the area and Persons Three and Four have begun taking boxes over to their own new place that they’ve been waiting for since they first saw it in May.That will leave only Persons One and Two, Who brought their own boxes to this place over 30 years ago with a 26-month-old, then welcomed another baby a month later and a final baby a few turns of the moon after that.

(the big ones are Persons One and Two - that's me in my 80's hair )

It’s a big old house, with a long curving upstairs hallway around which we walked many nights holding this or that crying baby or toddler, BUT: It won’t feel big tonight when those two little guys come for their sleepover.Their parents tell us they wake fighting and fight the day through- in a manly way fisticuffs, wrestling moves, choke-holds. It’s what boys do, everybody says.Attempting to go with that I bought them both Star Wars Light Sabers for tonight's fun - plus one for me. We tested them out last weekend.“Are you out of your MIND?” said Old Dave, regarding this arsenal. He thinks the bigger child will deal the little one a mighty blow and in the process all three Light Sabers will spontaneously shatter.He doesn’t understand the delicacy of Jedi swordplay. We three do because we watched the 15 minute video that comes with our new toys.Anyway there’s this: Person Number Four took these two children to camp and to Magic Garden three mornings this week and recorded these moments as they said their goodbyes. Now does this look like fighting to you?Me I think it’s going to be a feast of hugs and kisses around here in the next 23 hours (with maybe some thudding feet at 5am around that upstairs hallway.)And if things take a more warlike turn I'll just channel my own inner Yoda :-)

anyway we look a lit alike

"Lust" I Lisped

That Dick and Jane series I referenced yesterday wasn't the reading book I had as a tyke. I had the John, Jean and Judy series made expressly for Catholic school kids and chock full of what the publisher called “religious elements”. I had so many religious elements in my life as it was it’s no wonder I thought I was having religious visions when I fainted in church. Even in our house we had holy water fonts, statues of Jesus, outfits for the statues of Jesus and on and on, all sold to us by those excellent businesswomen the nuns.Then every night for homework and every fear-filled day at school we had.... The Baltimore Catechism.Catholic school kids learned to memorize, I’ll say that. We could recite both the answers AND the questions from that little blue book, waking or sleeping, forward or back, ornate language and all. Even today I can give it to you: “Question: What are the sins against hope?” “Answer: The sins against hope are presumption and despair.”I was in Second Grade when I learned that one. and didn’t my mother wince when in front of a roomful of company I dished up the Seven Deadly Sins: “ Pride, Covetousness,  Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth" I whispered sweetly. "And ... and what is that other one Nan?""Lust" said my big sister, who was all of nine.“Lust”  I lisped with my toothless little-kid smile.Turns out this sin-drenched curriculum didn't just belong to the  Catholics. The New England Primer was a textbook used by students in English settlements in North America from the time of its publication is 1690 until at least halfway through the 19th century. Over five million copies were sold. As the source I just read says it combined the traditional alphabet study with Biblical precepts. “Emphasis was placed on fear of sin, God's punishment and the fact that all people would have to face death." Cheerful!Take these few examples from early in the alphabet: For the letter A, “In Adam's Fall We sinned all”, for B, “Thy Life to Mend This Book Attend, for I “The Idle Fool Is Whipt at School.”Shake my head as they say.  Just kinda makes ya wonder what we’ll be teaching the poor kids next.

And the Livin' is Easy

Yesterday fat white clouds drifted all stately across a sky that looked like something out of those old-time Dick and Jane books with Spot and Puff and Mother in her pretty checkered dress with the belling skirt and Father slim as Fred Astaire in his natty light grey suit. It was a picture-book summer day in other words and people weren’t exactly working hard as far as I could tell.At CVS the kid at the register was in such a fog he greeted me, thanked me and bade me goodbye without interrupting his open-eyed nap for so much as a second. I could have been wearing a clown wig and he wouldn’t have noticed.Work was the last thing on his mind.The last thing on my mind too.I knocked off early to go for my first massage in over two years’ time and after it  felt so relaxed I missed the step on my way out of the building and had to execute several super-fast Salsa steps to keep from pitching forward onto the sidewalk.I then went out for an early dinner, missed my mouth not once but twice, came back home for a quick nap, answered three emails, fell asleep watching the latest episode of Breaking Bad of all the impossible feats and went to bed for real at 10.I swear: there are tensed-up stomach muscles that don’t really let go until right now, in this fully flowered, children’s-book-beautiful stretch of high-summer weeks.

Fun for Me on the Old DL

What a huge thing to be forbidden trips to the Y, though I have devised this home workout you see on the left. (Yup that's me in the red fur and sure the knots were a little hard to get right but it all works great now.) And wow are the days deliciously long with no Y-trip to schedule into the old workday! Plus it’s really quieted me down to be sittin’ on the bench here with an incision that looks like what you see stitched into a football, only uglier; a wound you have to tend every day, unwrap and air out and poke with a Vaseline-daubed Q-tip and all.And so much for shorts and skirts with a dressing on my leg the size of a dinner napkin. I’m in so many pairs of jeans and long hippie dresses it feels like the 70s again. :-)Also I’m catching up on my sleep. I was in the bed ‘til ‘til 7:30 yesterday morning, a record for me. I did get up at 4am and make a quick tour of the house making improvements but that’s only because the leg hurts just enough to keep me in light-sleep mode.I figure I might try eating less since I can’t exercise. When I was on the table and the surgeon was  wrapping my leg with a super-tight Ace bandage I said “I heard when you have liposuction they put you in this all-over bandage for a whole month while your tissues get over the shock of being Hoovered half to death, did you know that?"She glanced up from her bandage winding to give me a bland noncommittal look. “I did know that. We do that here.”Only then did realize I was actually ON the cosmetic surgery floor of this famous hospital just because everybody just assumes the sky will fall if they they have a regular scar, even on their lower leg where no one is ever going to notice it. Who knew I'd be  in the cosmetic surgery unit? I mean it’s not like I'm Tina Fey after having her cheek slashed by some crazy guy that’s for sure.So I'm thinking hmmm .... Diet and exercise? Or the sucky thing and the body bandage after?  Diet and exercise or the sucky thing? It’s tempting to go with the latter but I figure with my home workout here and a little of what Jennifer Hudson and my WW pals call tracking I‘ll be ready for my close-up in no time  - from the knees up anyway. 

Better Than Abby

I was once giving a young man a bit of advice, something I didn’t realize I was doing until he suddenly held up his hand. “No, see I don’t want your advice; all I want from you is your encouragement and support.”It’s a remark I've never forgotten but what did it really mean? Do people really NOT want a word of counsel, preferring instead to blunder blindly forward on their own? And if they won’t take advice from someone they know, will they take it from someone they’ve never met?Well, if they’re smart they will, and if that someone is Jeanne Phillips also known as Abigail Van Buren, who now writes the feature her mother Pauline first brought to the world in 1956. Now, as then, ‘Abby’’ gives it to you straight. Take this recent response to a woman vexed with her husband who thinks it's fine to read over his wife's shoulder.“I have tried explaining that I think it's rude, but he says I’m rude for asking him not to do it. He thinks I have something to hide if I tell him to stop. What say you?” Abby’s reply: “I say you married a man who is insecure and suspicious, and you have my sympathy.”Or take this exchange, with a woman so desperate to maintain ties with a former boyfriend that she buys him a bottle of his favorite wine, even though “he is making no effort to hang out” even to accept the gift. “At what point do I put the bottle to better use and drink it myself?” she asks. Abby’s reply:  “How about tonight?”She's equally frank with a man agonizing about his girlfriend who has three children from three different fathers and a male ‘friend’ who she has the children addressing as Daddy. “She says she loves me and wants us to be married, but I’m having a hard time accepting that all of these children's fathers will be part of our life -- as well as the ‘friend.’ Can a psychologist help me get past this?” Abby’s response: “I don't know. But before you take this relationship further, you should definitely see one.”Yes she says more in saying less.But what I 've noticed is that sometimes saying nothing at all can also work pretty well in directing people toward good choices.In my second year teaching, I was assigned Girls Room duty, which meant spending every lunch hour on a bench in a basement lavatory where one day a student from my sixth period class sat down beside me.Her father had died the year before and she was just plain mad at the world. When she came to class at all she just sat scowling out the window. At quiz-time she would say she hadn’t done the reading and I should just give her the F.Yet now here she was every day on my bench, where, as the months passed, she slowly began talking about things, including the extralegal bits of mischief she had cooked up the night before.I just listened - until the day when she came to the end of this Daily Crime Report, paused, and blurted, “But I’m stopping all that now.”“Why?” was all I could ask.“Because I can tell that you think I should.”She knew this not because I said so but because I didn’t and there was the revelation of a truth I have never forgotten: Namely that true attention makes a space in which the person speaking can truly hear and truly see himself - and then make a good decision on his own.

This is What You Shall Do

"This is what you shall do," wrote Walt Whitman in the preface to the second edition of Leaves of Grass,the collection of verse that shook the literary establishment clear down to its knickers.I keep the whole passage in a frame on my desk and have read it so many times that it has entered me by now. I hear his voice in so many places I visit.I certainly heard it at sunset the other day when I drove to the stretch of city shoreline known as Revere Beach.Let me set down the whole of what Whitman says and you will maybe see why he sang to me here. He tells us,

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals; despise riches; give alms to everyone that asks; stand up for the stupid and the crazy; argue not concerning God; have patience and indulgence toward the people; go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and the Mothers of families; dismiss whatever insults your own soul and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency, not  only in words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the  lashes of your eyes and in every last joint and motion of your body...

Whenever I need to feel better I reread this and then I go out to where the people are. 'Stand up for the stupid and the crazy,' he says and I know that one day I will very likely be what the world calls stupid. As for crazy, my sister thinks I'm that already .It's fine if I am. It doesn't matter. I went to this beach and was smiled at by every single person I gave a smile to.We were all just there together. We walked or sat or stood, right where we should be: where God first put us and where He can find us again, here in His light, in His glorious late day-light.

Post Op

“Will this hurt when the drug wears off?” I asked David an hour or two after my surgery.“Nah," said the former football star. "It's just a cut. Cuts don't hurt."Actually it  hurts like a mothuh as the saying goes. So I turned to the boyfriend  of my girl Annie. He's a firefighter/medic.  "John, am I supposed to call the doctor? This really hurts.""Of course it hurts! They took a three-inch chunk out of your leg!"We're with John and Annie right now and in a few hours our other girl Carrie will arrive with her Chris and their two little ninja-boys. In this calm-before-the-storm-time I'm studying the post-op lit which says to take Tylenol, which I never do, relying instead on my best friend Excedrin, and occasionally going over to Advil because Dave takes Advil before playing golf.... BUT! you can’t take Excedrin or Advil in these first few days so here I am downing my two capsules of Tylenol every four to six hours. As it happens Annie is under the weather today too with a cough and bad sore throat and just now said, "I want to take some Tylenol too but John says I shouldn’t if  I want to have wine tonight."‘What?” I said. "Wha-a-a-a-t?"“Yeah, it’s too much for your liver when you have both.""Seriously?" I said. "Last night  I couldn’t sleep between the pain and a racing brain and I finally got up at 3am, tossed back two Tylenols and half a Trazadone from an '06 prescription and downed a couple of quick fingers of VO."“Then what did you do, smooth it all down with a hit of meth?”These kids: wiseguys all of 'em. They're bossing me pretty good right now but it actually feels kind of good to me, weak and wounded and ill-informed as I am. Plus I think all this self-moody absorption is kind of fun. Next up: hair-twirling and thumb-sucking.  

The Sisterhood

I don't mean to make light of it; I can’t think of anything scarier than being told you have real cancer, not like the basal cell kind that doesn't have the sense to move but just kinda sits there. That's all I have - or had anyway, until Thursday when the nicest surgeon in the world, serene and cool in a sleeveless dove-grey silk dress, cut a three-inch long slit in my leg and took it out. (Giant dressing! who knew?)I didn’t actually 'get it' that I wouldn’t be able to swim for two weeks, or shower. Or allow the area even to get even a little bit wet for 48 hours; that I wouldn’t be able do Zumba or Pilates or yoga, never mind jump on the treadmill or that funny Wave machine that makes you look like a roller-skating baby elephant.She and the nurse made me lie down flat, Then they draped the area with enough bunting for a Fourth of July bandstand. Then in went the Lidocaine“How come people don’t bleed more during surgery?”"Oh there’s some epinephrine in there with the Lidocaine. It constricts bloodflow."Subtly tied down or not I did a quick sit-up so I could take a look. Bleedin’ pretty good actually! (this is after all the cleanup.)I flopped back down fast but not so fast that she didn't see the look on my face.“So what would you be doing on a day like this if you weren’t coming here?” she asked cheerily, to distract me from the business at hand.My answer made reference to the fact that even now in America it is almost exclusively we women who act as caregivers to our elderly. “So much for equality there!” I said."I hear that! she cried. "I almost lost my mind over the fact that before we were married my man couldn't manage a simple RSVP !"I sighed happily and lay back on the table. There’s nothing that relaxes us women more than a nice little session complaining about our husbands. I mean heck, cancers come and go but the sisterhood you have with you always. :-)

Cool Yourself

They say it's gonna be another hot one and you can already tell that they're right. Maybe today the candlesticks will give up the ghost again and wilt onto the dining room table like they did that crazy-hot summer in the 90s. Maybe my skin will actually slide off my face.I don’t love air conditioning but I'd've been a goner without it this week. I step from our refrigerated box of a bedroom into the upstairs hall and it's like an actual furnace, even at 5am.I can’t imagine what it feels like to sleep on the third floor like the two family members living with us while waiting for their apartment to be ready. They refuse to let us get a little AC unit.They moved here from Florida so they’re tougher than we are.Some years ago, when the guy of the couple was a lad of 19 working toward the old Bachelor's degree at RPI, he spent the whole month of July painting the trim in the upstairs study I use as my office, taking numerous breaks to hang out with our kids and their pals, natch. What's summer for if not for hanging out with a fun crowd?

 (a typical day that summer . Painting-Man third from left)

Then, by night he climbed the stairs to that same hot room under the roof, turned on the two standing fans he had up there, stretched out in front of them both and sprayed himself at ten minute intervals with a plant mister.  He always swore there was no nicer a feeling in the world and he kept it up all night long. I’ve just now tried the same trick down here on the screened porch where it's already 85 degrees, just after sun-up or not and do you know what?He's right.It's almost as good as the cooling methods of yore. :-)

I especially like the Baby Jesus rays coming out of the seated kid's head. Catholic school memories!

You Slide Down Their Voices

How could I have copied out a mere half sentence of John Updike yesterday without giving the whole great passage? It’s from the short story “A & P”, at which arrive three girls in bathing suits.  “Sammy," the young guy working the register, describes the manager’s attempt to shame them for dressing the way they are dressed.When the prettiest of the girls responds Sammy suddenly 'sees' her whole life:  “All of a sudden I slid right down [it} into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them.”That’s his view of their home, very different from the place to which he will return to after work: “When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on." Remember that old cartoon? Remember those free drinking glasses you got at the gas station, or because your grape jelly came in them? Ours were covered with pictures of the Flintstones and their good neighbors the Rubbles. But back to the master:

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. …The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. ….. She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks"  - and it’s then that Sammy sees the life of privilege behind her voice, her origins “in a place “a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy.

This is three times more than I usually write here but how I miss this writer, gone from us since January of '09!. Every time I read him I slide down HIS voice and into HIS world. I just had to say that. I'm thinking of him these warm  days, seeing all around me the bare shoulders of the young girls in their suits and their camis, the lovely young the girls in their summer dresses.   

This is What We Got for Ya Kid

In my favorite scene from the 1986 movie Stand by Me,12-year-old Chris Chambers is talking to his best pal Gordie Lachance. Chris’s old man is a drunk and he knows his own future looks pretty bleak but Gordie? Sure, his brother just died but Gordie can write stories! That’s a gift, Chris tells him. “It’s like God says to you 'This is what we got for ya, kid. Try not to lose it.’”We all have gifts but do we even know what they are? For sure we all know what our gifts aren’t.  I, for example, can’t type to save my life, can’t identify makes and models of cars, can’t hold on to the Alto part for the life of me if there’s a Tenor singing beside me. The list goes on.What I can do is remember what people tell me. When people talk about themselves I can almost slide right down their voices and into their living rooms as John Updike put it in his wonderful short story A & P. It's as if I can actually see what they're telling me. And then I remember it. It's nice because then if they forget what’s good about them I can remind them. Or if they get fuzzy about the narrative of their life.Or if they need a letter of reference.God gave me that gift: the ability to tell the good things about a person in a letter of reference.And a lucky thing too because the other day a young person asked me to write such a letter right away for him.I wrote it yesterday and it took me almost the whole day, Not because I can’t type or because someone was singing tenor in my ear or asking me to tell the difference between a Kia Sportage and a Rav 4 but because if it's true that you only have about 60 seconds of a potential employer's time to express something real and true about a person you'd better pick the right words.Just before waking yesterday I dreamed I had to build a sort of platform for this person, and  make it functional and lasting and oh yes carve his initials into the middle of it so everyone would know it was his. I don’t know the first thing about carpentry and woodworking so you can imagine my relief when I woke and realized really all I had to do was write him a recommendation.So that’s what I did yesterday, to the exclusion of almost everything else. I thought and thought about all that this person has ever said to me and then I wrote down as many true things about him as I could about him in the smallest number of words. And I have to say at the end of the day it seemed like time well spent. And now, nostalgia for Rob Reiner’s beautiful ode to the end of childhood: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUVnfaA-kpI]

The Old Bait and Switch

I always got a great tan. Tanned legs like you wouldn’t believe. As a kid at summer camp I used to tell the new campers my father was black. They knew my mom was white because they saw her every day as the camp’s director, but I was safe with that fib about my dad. I knew they’d never meet him, anymore than I ever had, that guy with the map-of-Ireland-face and the blue blue eyes. Anyway it explained the tan, which I loved for how glamorous it made me feel.I guess that’s all light-skinned folks ever wanted from a tan: that “wow” moment when they entered a room.Tanned skin was once the sign of an outdoor laborer, but when most jobs moved indoors it came to signify leisure. Then they really came into fashion in the early 1920s, just after World War I and the great Spanish Influenza of 1918 -1919. Americans wanted a return to “normalcy,” as Presidential candidate Warren G. Harding called it, and so they elected him. Maybe they  just wanted to forget death and go out in the sun a while.Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, living in Paris in those years, journeyed to the South of France as often as they could for the purpose of “browning ourselves,” as Zelda wrote. Later, in the big love scene in her novel Save Me the Waltz, she describes the moon “cradling the tanned face” of her heroine. More glamour!Right on through the 60s and 70s the message remained clear: a healthy tan was a great thing. Certainly Coppertone made millions with that ad showing the waistband of a small child’s bathing-suit bottom being tugged down in back by a frisky pup, revealing how pale she was under her clothes; how burnished where the clothes didn’t cover.They called it a tanline; in Playboy centerfolds it was as erotic as anything else on the page.This is the world lots of us grew up in.The summer before college I lifeguarded at a city pool and patrolled all day under the sun. The soles of my bare feet grew as tough as horse’s hooves and my skin turned a dark mahogany brown.Then the next decade found me sunbathing on the hot tar roofs of various apartment buildings in quest of further bronzing. And of course like everyone else I wrapped tinfoil around an album cover and held it under my chin, the better to reflect the sun’s rays onto my face and chest.Eventually in the 80s, I began to hear more about sunscreen and I used it. I think. Sort of.Anyway I was using it last week when the call came from the dermatologist’s office to say “the biopsy we did on your leg? It came back positive. Basal cell carcinoma.” A surgeon will excise it next week.I asked this kind nurse practitioner if she had any advice for me as I await the scalpel.“Wear a hat. Wear sunglasses. Use sunscreens with an SPF factor of 40.” (She said an SPF any higher than that was fear-mongering.) “And for heaven's sake, steer clear of the ones with an SPF of 15. They don’t protect you at all!”“How about the Coppertone with an SPF of 4 that I’ve been using?” I asked, mostly to get the laugh.I got the laugh all right. She didn’t know I was speaking the truth.No one is laughing now, I can tell you, least of all me. Who said it first? We really are too soon old and too late smart.

Bad Moon on the Rise?

The utilities guy pulled into our driveway, hopped out of his truck and begun creeping around among the pine trees.Hey hi, what’ve ya got?” I asked, walking out to greet him.“Crows, “he said. “You have these two crows just sitting here. I’ve never seen crows do that!”He walked closer. They stood their ground. Even closer. Still they stood. When he was six feet away one crow hopped a bit leftward and looked away. The other kind of hunkered down and regarded us.“Is he hurt? Maybe he’s hurt and his friend is staying to comfort him.”“He looks OK.”“I’ve been hearing crow calls for an hour, come to think of it.”We both looked around. A third crow was sitting on the roof of the shed and a fourth one perched in a tree.”“Wo, maybe this is a.. whadyacallit?”“An omen? Like maybe something bad is going to happen?”“Yeah to the nice guy from the electric company!”“Are they drawn to carrion? I think they’re drawn to carrion.”We got really quiet, and looked around for corpses.“My tendency is to go inside. I almost got my finger taken off by a swan once.”His tendency? To get even closer.  He wasn’t a foot away when the birds finally flew off, first the sentinel and then the immobile one who had been staring us down.He came inside, then, fixed the trouble, recommended a restaurant for us to try and said he’s hoping that his son will join the Navy after high school.After he left the place got quiet. Too quiet. Two hours later the sun went down and the moon came up, a full moon,  and all over the woods the crows kept cawing.

A Day at the Beach

You threw a T-shirt on over your bathing suit and stepped into your cut-offs, grabbed a beach-towel and some shades and off you went for your day at the beach. It didn’t matter how you got there, in your friend’s old car or on three buses; sooner or later there you all were in the great republic of the nearly-bare, all of you stretched out like hot dogs rotating slowly.I went to the beach for the first time in 8^th grade with my first-ever boyfriend. His parents, too smart to still be sunbathing themselves, dropped us off and sought other, indoor, amusements. I had on my new two piece bathing suit, white with the navy piping and kept my hands over my bare stomach the whole time except when I lay flat beside this alien being, this human boy. Maybe we all felt shy like this once.Ten years down the line I would go as often as I could to this one Boston beach called Nahant, a beautiful mile-and a half long spit of land within view of the steeples of Boston. By then it was either bikinis or those super-short swim trunks depending on gender and it didn’t matter that our tummies showed. We were young, our skin was perfect and we knew we would live forever.I drove back there near the end of this past work-week: through tiny crowded Chelsea and Revere with its three-deckers, a couple of which you see here...All the way to Lynn, Lynn, the City of Sin You Never Come Out the Way You Went In as the old piece of doggerel goes but really a fine old town, once a great manufacturing hub and proud of it. You went right at the rotary in Lynn and there it was.

I hadn’t been to this beach in decades, I realized, driving along it on that bright windy day at 4pm. Parking for the day still costs $3; that was one miracle. Another was that the kid manning the gate waved me in for free.

There was one surfer sprinting oceanward and a mom and three children, and all this beauty.These days my summer travels take me north and keep me inland but I can feel a pull on me now from the dark salt magnet of the tides. I think it's time to get back to the beach.

Advice for Us All

How boringly self-absorbed do we get to BE on our various blogs and social networks? I mean are there rules? Since I'm still thinking of that old Army guy who told me that nobody reads past the first page of a thing, I've hunted down an old list of tips I once made for myself,  cribbed from the amazing Brenda Ueland who wrote for all of her whole long life and walked six to nine miles every day.  She said we should all write fiercely and fearlessly, letting it all come out until the stream runs clear. This hero of mine also said:

1. Don’t try to be smarter than you are. (Not hard for me I can tell you.)
2. Don’t write what you don’t feel.  (Couldn’t if I tried.)
3. Be Careless, Reckless! Be a Lion, Be a Pirate, when you write, and. finally,
4. Don’t say your heroine is wonderful. If you do your reader will see you as both a propagandist and a self-adoring prig. (ouch! Pretty sure I was the latter all through high school.)

She believed that in any piece of writing you are attempting to find the thing you most truly believe.To find out what I most truly believe, I begin by trying to cut out as many words as I can. When I unsheathe my knife it’s amazing: I see at once where the blubber is and off it comes, easy as trimming a steak. I just have to keep ego out of it and I can do it every time.This post, for example, started out 580 words long. and now look: it’s just 355, 354, 353 but still too long, still too long, get that knife back out! 36-  (See? It works! I cut it off mid-number that time!)Strunk and White said it in their classic writers' manual The Elements of Style: "When In Doubt Cut it Out." Or, as my mother once hissed in the  world's loudest stage whisper just after the second encore and before the third at a truly endless children’s concert in a hot-box of a rented hall, "GAD! Let my people GO!”

Button It!

I once knew an old Army guy who told me that no one reads past the first page and no one listens past the first minute.  When I started this blog I just tossed paragraph after paragraph into the mix, talking way too long as I now think.Look at this one, my first post ever, put up in December of ’07, when the  i-Phone was just a pup. Over 700 words and now I cut myself off after 400. People are in a hurry, I just assume, and nobody wants to have to scroll endlessly down.  But was that NOT true back then? Did we feel more leisurely in 2007? Read this and see if you’re fatigued afterward. Maybe there are lessons for us all tucked in here.

Recently the two secretaries of my college class sent an email to us all begging for news. How were we really?they wanted to know. Well let’s see, is what I thought. I'm how old, 57? I might be in better shape than my mom was at my age since women didn't even walk in the old days, never mind exercise. Men didn't either, and they all had these little fat tummies which they wore under their belts for some reason.Everybody was soft, takin' it easy after the War maybe – AND they all smoked their brains out. My mother smoked in a closed car on the hour-long ride to our cousins' house on every holiday; smoked madly for 50 years when she got a bad bronchial infection and was put on bed rest. She dragged a little TV into her room to watch the Watergate hearings. “That man is disgusting!” she yelled at one point about poor old Nixon, “and this is disgusting too!” she said, looking at her cigarette. She never smoked again and lived until her 80th birthday party when she died within the space of about ten seconds, a little plate of cookies on her lap.I guess I expect to live way up into my 80s  too – if I can start paying pay better attention and not step off the curb into the path of some big old bus.So in general I feel pretty much as I did at 19, though God knows what color my hair really is. Still, it’s fun to grow older. I lie in bed at 5 in the morning when the alarm first goes off and time-travel all the way back to crib days. I like that: the way we are hot air balloons, still tethered but throwing off a little more ballast every day; starting to rise enough so that we can sometimes almost glimpse the whole landscape.My oldest girl wanted to have her baby at home last May and I was a wreck. We could feel him kick when we place a hand on her tummy and sometimes even feel his little spine right through her skin. We drummed on his little bottom: "Are you OK?" we said the way you would to someone trapped in a cave…Along with not knowing what anybody's real hair color is anymore I find we don’t know what natural labor is like. The doctors hurry everyone along with their Pitocin and then Oops the labor slowed down! and Oops the baby looks upset! and then it’s C-sections all around.I was proud of my girl  for wanting to do it God’s own way with her two midwives. They had said “Put sheets you don't care about on the bed and under those a set of waterproof sheets and under THOSE your very favorite sheets in the world." (I love that because well, you know, there's the progression of most thing right there: peace at the end of the struggle.)As it turned out, the medical establishment won anyway. They took their tests when the baby was a week late and said the amniotic fluid was draining clear away. So in the end it was Induced labor and Pitocin and an Epidural after all - everything but the dread C-section.I wrote all that in my email to the college and they printed like three lines of it in the Alumnae Quarterly.The moral of the story: How I am is how they are, meaning my children, and right now anyway my children are just fine and that new baby smiles away alone his crib like he was getting paid to do it. Even his big brother three is growing rather fond of him. He said recently that despite popular belief you actually do get to go back inside your mother’s belly. “WHEN YOU DIE!” he yelled happily and doesn’t that sound like a pretty nice deal come to think of it? 

So there it was in 2007: 763  words. Have I changed or did the world? (And isn't THAT the question again and again in life!)   

 

Dinner at the Loudmouth Grill

I knew this was no fine-dining joint and that was OK with me. I was happy to shovel my own leftovers into a Styrofoam box.  What I wasn't happy about was being witness to the loud monologue coming from the booth at the end of my row of booths where a man I could not see was holding forth to the woman I took to be his wife. (All of this happened over the holiday weekend I should maybe add.)"Whole place is going to hell!" was the first thing I heard the man say."What place?" asked his wife with what sounded like keen trepidation."Whole country, that's what place! Used to be we'd get 1,500 in the Fourth parade!" he roared.I signaled to the waiter. "On second thought I believe I will take that bowl of popcorn," I told him. As Diet Girl, I always refuse the roll that comes with your salad. As for popcorn in a bowl is my version of an all-out binge. I ordered it this night in a kind of rattled desperation, the way a man might order a triple martini with a chaser of scotch.Meanwhile, the man went on: "1,500 people minimum and 150 dogs...""Dogs?" asked his wife. He just ignored her. "These days hardly anybody! Not even half that number!""Ah well..." she began in a mollifying tone. But again he wasn't listening."Now what're they doing? Going AWAY! Going out on their BOATS! With their FRIENDS, and their KIDS, and their friends' KIDS. I say let 'em go! Hell with 'em!""Now WHO are we talking about again?" "Not that it'll be much of a parade anyway. And only half the dogs...""Hot dogs?" she timidly asked."Jeez!" he shouted. "DOG dogs, for cripes sake."And then his anger took an even odder turn: "And there's another group: teachers! Most underworked, overpaid people in the country!"The topsy-turvy nature of THAT remark stopped me in my tracks. It was all I could do not to lean out of the booth and stare at this guy. Teachers underworked and overpaid TEACHERS?"Like I say, the whole country is wrecked." Only he didn't say ‘wrecked.’What was most certainly wrecked was the sense of peace that had previously hovered over the six or eight parties dining in earshot of this angry man. We ate our respective meals in relative silence, then humbly stowed our leftovers in our Styrofoam boxes. "It takes all kinds," I could almost hear us all thinking.And also "Pity the poor wife," who could only repeat again her plaintive one-word question:"Dogs?" 

The Soft Animal of Your Body

On Sunday I posted about being on the brink of a major fall-apart, which caused a dozen great people to write in telling me to take some time for myself.I couldn’t seem to take time away though and so therefore wrote something both Monday and yesterday. Things aren’t exactly better so here comes the part where I do stop, probably just for a day or two but even that will be huge to me. I'll put up last week’s column tomorrow since I do that every week anyway to give myself at least one day off and then, well, I’ll just have to see where I am.For now here is the amazing Mary Oliver with a poem I think I never really felt the truth of until today. It’s called Wild Geese and it goes like this:

You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your bodylove what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers,Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air,are heading home again,Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -Over and over announcing your placein the family of things.

Still Here. Still Tawkin' Like We Do in Fenway Pahk

I once called on an editor who’d been using my column for years but in the face of declining ad revenues and high production costs it seems he was looking to cut me. He suggested I write very specifically about doings in his town alone instead of trying to talk to the world at large the way I always do. “But what about the nice people in Michigan?” I remember asking him. “What about the ones in the pretty towns surrounding Rochester a couple of hours past Syracuse and a bit to the South? How can I abandon them?”He just looked at me unsmiling and that’s when it hit me: he was trying to get me to fall on my sword. “Listen,” I blurted finally, “if you want to get rid of me you’re going to have to fire me because I’m never going to quit!”And I didn’t quit and he didn't fire me and now his paper is part of a sizeable chain of papers many of whom use me each week. Including his. Including the papers of those nice people in Oklahoma and California and that chunky old workboot of a state that has New Orleans in it. AND a lot of them run my blog every day too which really keeps me on my toesI mention all this today obviously I didn’t stop writing in spite of Sunday’s confession of inner bleakness . How could I, when that reader named Brian with his own great blog so exactly hit it on the head when he said we all write for ourselves first? How could I after reading Art’s advice to "stay home, the home where your comfort arises. Home at the park where children play while their mothers gossip about the latest. Home at the corner restaurant where strangers gather as friends. Home at the mall where a hundred people pass hurrying in a hundred directions with who-knows-what on their minds." Or Morgan’s, to read in a hammock. Or Joan’s, to go take pictures.Sigh. People are sure are nice. I never waitressed so that’s easy for me to say.This seems a little boring so let’s move on to more video, one I just now made in fact. It’s just me having a little more fun with the old Boston accent, using a few dumb-blonde jokes this time. (No offense girls! I was one of you from 2005 - 2008, It was the result of a misunderstanding between myself and my hair stylist.)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sutl7Ou6DV4]