Sundays When We Were Kids

    It’s Sunday and lately I’ve been trying not to work on Sundays.Saturdays either.So yesterday, in a house with five children and seven adults, I did these things:

• Lay on a dock with a four-year-old, gazing down at a world of little fish wiggling their hipless hips in water the color of bright blue Jell-O. (That's what you see in the photo, Berry Blue Jell-O with genuine Gummie Fish trapped inside.   
• Went out in a little motor boat driven by a first grader.
• Took pictures with my  crappy little camera, the crappy one rather than the good one just in case it landed in the drink.
• Made Smoky Black Bean Soup, the killer Weight Watchers recipe that takes only 20 minutes to throw together if you have frozen corn, a couple of cups of black beans and a jar of salsa in the house. (Just throw in  dash of cumin and a sneeze of chili-powder and you’re done!)

I also:

• Underlined a bunch of passages in my summer reading assignment.
• Wrote many cheery tales in my diary.
• Fell asleep doing the crossword  and, most important....
• Swam for a solid hour in that lake that was every bit as cool as the Jell-O of our childhood, half of that time towing the small child I had started the day with who kept saying "TT your hair looks crazy!" Turns out those wild curls from my babyhood are still with me, even after all that cruel yanking, blow-drying and flat-ironing.

At some point in your life you suddenly notice the line of your recent life start to curve, then reach clear around and touch the line of your life at its beginning, when you too were a very young child just starting out and every single day was like a weekend day.

me at three in a play one long-ago summer

my grandchildren having their own weekend summer fun

Prayers for the Dead?

Talking yesterday about who you might want to eliminate from the world reminds me of the one person in my life who actually sent me death threats: For ten whole months of my second year teaching a young woman I only knew as 'Kathy' sent me hate-filled notes in which she said she was going to kill me. They were left on my desk, or on the windshield of my car in the  teachers’ parking lot. I saved them for years as well as the rock she threw through the living room window of my apartment two whole towns away. The police could do nothing, they told me.The funny thing was, she didn’t have me as a teacher; she didn’t even go to the school. I had given her friend an F and that was my crime, though I could do no less, since the child literally never came to class.This poor Kathy died herself the following year of a heroin overdose.I haven’t thought of her for years. She doesn’t belong on my radar at all in the way I spoke of yesterday – unless we really are meant to pray for the dead, which I don't do. For all the Catholic schooling I had as a child I never thought prayers for the dead were necessary. Even as child it seemed to me the living were the ones who needed our  powerful positive thoughts.What do you guys think?(A little housekeeping note to end with: If  you missed the video yesterday it’s here – a snafu caused the first 85 people who came to the blog to miss it. Worth watching such a cute and catchy little production number!

Hit Man?

A reader commented the other day that I could probably kill someone and still be forgiven by my readers. Therefore he was sending me a "list" ha ha. Now I’m trying to think if there have actually been people I would like to see “taken care of,” as Tony Soprano would say.Hmmmm... Well for two whole years after my sister pulled down my pants in front of the neighborhood boys I prayed we would move to a different town so I wouldn’t have to see them ever again. I was only seven and no, I didn’t wish them dead but maybe wishing to wipe them forever from your radar isn't much better.Here’s the thing: generally the people you want to 'wipe' are the ones who stir up anxious feelings in you, not so much because they have hurt you but because you have hurt them; because you have done them some kind of wrong that you’re reminded of every time you see them. I once caused a student of mine to be permanently removed from my classroom. This poor kid  just hated me, she couldn’t disguise the fact and her perpetual side-of-the-mouth remarks were poisoning things for everyone else.  I explained all this to her guidance counselor who simply switched her to another English class that met the same period. I remember that she cried when she heard the news and begged to be allowed to stay. It did kind of feel like I'd put out a contract on her.Sending her away like that was a failure on my part I now feel. For sure my veteran-teacher-wisewoman sister-in-law Miriam (pictured above) would have found a way release the child from this bondage of hatred but I was young and lacked the skills to effect that kind of turnaround..Speaking of awesome Miriam, take a look at this project for which she was the faculty adviser: the whole Medford (MA) Class of 2011 made a video to raise funds for cancer research in which as far as I can tell every senior, teacher, guidance counselor and staff member participated. I bet you know the song! Click here  and then press the 'Play' symbol to see the cutest tribute video ever with the voice of Taio Cruz and more spiffy pairs of gloves than are owned by Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy combined.

Matchless

At the end of last month our maple trees got scared to death when temperatures hit 104° . We could tell because all their little seedpods turned brown and spun down onto the grass where they lay scattered like so many Corn Flakes.Then this week we had the second Biblical Flood that lasted the better part of three days.But we woke yesterday to air so crisp the birds had to get out their little space heaters before they could strike up the band.And by noon? 80 degrees with an amazing breeze. When you get a day like this you have to celebrate somehow.I went and got our 90-year-old uncle and drove to the edge of that little jewel of a pond he so loves.There, he used his still-mighty upper-body strength to heave himself into the companion chair I keep in the back of my car and we wheeled our way onto this one paved but heavily wooded section of the walking path.We didn't talk. We didn't have to. The breeze did all the talking for us. And when they felt like it the ducks weighed in a little too.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXXLYJdY33Q]Amazing what movement and sound convey isn’t it? The picture at the top is just a flat picture. Add the dimension of time though and the dance of light on water and you’re just… transported!

Yay for the Global Village

A few days back I put a post up here with so many typos it looked like something Nim the Chimp might have typed after smoking the evil weed (which he did do regularly in his young-chimp days but more on that story later. ) As I explained afterward, this happened in my attempt to write fast and get the heck out of town, a feat I accomplished by taking out an old piece and cutting off the hem and sewing on new cuffs  just like my mother did every September with the hand-me-down school uniforms we got from our larger more prosperous cousins.I just wanted to get to the beach – sob! -  and I did get there finally, where I sunned, ate, drank and kicked up my heels so much that when I popped open my laptop at midnight, well, the copy looked fine and dandy to ME: It was all a lovely blur.  Luckily blogger Brian Moloney of The Freelance Retort read it almost as soon as it appeared and fired off a quick note: “Dude!” he said. “Lots of typos today!”I fixed the typos quick as a wink and followed with a real mea culpa of a post the next day.In response to that Brian wrote in the Comments section of the piece, “Two dozen hail Marys (footballs are optional), four dozen Acts of Contrition, several hours of physical self-flagellation ... 14 hours of the 700 club followed by The Jersey Shore.”  Then, some 20 hours later, he wrote again to say 'So enough with the sack cloth and ashes already', and a few hours after that, when he had seen the encouraging things some nice readers had also posted by way of making me feel better, he said, “It’s funny to watch your people rally around you when you show some distress. You can probably get away with murder. So I’m sending you a list.”But here's what's really funny: It's funny that I didn’t know Brian months ago and now he makes me laugh every day and gives me fresh ideas to boot.I just wanted to add this as a kind of PS to my piece about the awesomeness of Facebook yesterday - it’s the global village, all right, just like we pictured it!  -  and also to mention how grateful I feel for all those lovely readers who see me so clearly, and in their generosity of spirit accept me anyway. So yup: the guy in the picture is practicing self-flagellation, the ancient spiritual discipline if that's what it is. As arresting a sight as that bright blood is, I'm telling myself  ‘Forget self-flagellation. Just move on and do better next time.’

Better than Festivus

Facebook is like the Afterlife. You can get reunited with everyone you ever knew. You can resolve unfinished business and smooth over old hurts.Two stories, both with pretend names substituted for the real ones: In my first career as an English teacher, I had a kid in Junior English. I’ll call Tommy. A full year after he stepped out of Room 334 for the last time, he told me he felt I had paid less attention to him than I had paid to others in the class. I remember how awful I felt hearing this. I apologized sincerely if that really seemed to be the case. Then in a twinkling decades passed and I saw in the paper his mother’s obituary which revealed the fact that he now lived in France together with his partner.I couldn’t find Tom on Facebook, but I did find his partner and asked him to pass on my words of condolence over the loss of Tommy’s mother whom I remembered from many a Parents’ Night. Sure enough in a few weeks, he wrote me and last summer he and his partner, on a trip to the States, came to my house for tea. We had a great visit, at the very end of which I again said I was sorry for the fact that he had ever once felt less than totally noticed and celebrated by his callow young teacher. He had absolutely no memory of having felt that way much less of having said something to me.Was I off the hook then? It sure felt that way. It felt as though I could finally let go of  years and years of self-blame, all thanks to Facebook, king of the social networks, Facebook also gets the credit for NOT letting me off the hook when it came to a far older incident. Listen to this: A boy I knew in middle school “friended” me on Facebook and for a year or more we kept in a light kind of touch, writing a word back and forth every few months until the day he metaphorically cleared his throat so to speak and wrote this.“I just have to ask: Why did you always laugh every time I had to stand up in Math class?”  "I did that?” I wrote back. “Ralph, I have no memory of doing that.” And he wrote again: “Well you did, every time.”I really didn’t remember – until suddenly I remembered. I did laugh at Ralph because his bottom seemed to me to be so much bigger than the other boys’ bottoms.I certainly couldn’t say that, so I just apologized generally, explaining that I was doubtless laughing at others to take the focus off myself with my hand-me-down clothes and my bangs so curly they kept rolling up like window shades.I hope he has forgiven me now. If so, it’s largely thanks to Facebook which showed me that it’s never too late for a person to reach out and bless or affirm or forgive another, as long as you’re both still living. And now for old time's sake, here's George - and his memorable dad played by Jerry Stiller - explaining about the Costanza-invented holiday for feats of strength and the airing of grievances known as Festivus:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS7-jcsB_WQ&feature=related]

The Love That Brought Us Here

14 years ago my husband's mother had to be put in a nursing home due to the diminished mental capacities brought on by Alzheimer’s. There she suffered mightily until one Friday in November when she took a turn for the worse. We all hurried to her bedside. When a cart of food and beverages was wheeled in for us we got the message loud and clear: she was in her final hours.I called our church office and told the story to the woman who picked up the phone. I did this automatically, even though our mother was not a member of our church but only an occasional visitor. Chokingly I described what her breathing was like and the way, from time to time, her eyes would open and she would look at us so pleadingly. “I know it’s Skip’s day off but I was hoping someone could help us...” I started to say.“Oh for heaven’s sake!” the kind woman interrupted me. “Let me call him right now!”Skip, this senior pastor of ours, was at the lumber yard at the time, elbow-deep in a construction project. Still, less than 30 minute later he walked through the door in workshirt and jeans. He saw right away how frightened we all looked.He asked if there was anything we would like to say to this small suffering woman so dear to us all but somehow none of us could speak, paralyzed as we were by sorrow and dread.“Well why don't we take hands and circle her bed," he said quietly, and so we did that.Then he called her by her name and said something about how the love that had brought her here was the love to which she was now returning.  I can’t give you the exact words - I still have around those moments a strange sort of amnesia - but in some few hours more she did in fact return to the love that brought her here if that is indeed what we do at life’s end.So that's what this church of ours is like that later married our daughter and our brother to their two beloved partners, a full year before same-sex marriage became legal in our state. This church says God is still speaking and so we must not place a period where God has placed a comma. Maybe you'll take a minute to watch this photo montage and ponder for yourself all the hope contained in a humble punctuation mark.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJyKHXdTnz0]

Pants on Fire

This is what I get for cheating. I was so pressed for time Friday night I took a limp old rag of writing and tried to make it snap like a flag in a stiff ocean breeze; took words  I wrote three years back and tried passing them off as fresh. What can I say? We were hurrying to  beat the traffic to the Cape.And I get tired sometimes.And that’s my only excuse.Also the fact that when we got down here we went out on the town so I didn’t proof the post and out it went into the world at 5am. I should explain that I schedule these posts so they appear on their own at that hour. So up it went, a great fat fib from beginning to end and chock full of typos too.God got me good though: in the post I talked about how my phone was dying which it in fact had been doing 1,000 days ago when I wrote the piece but then it did die, right during dinner Friday night. This fancy new i-Phone just went black. Wouldn’t reboot, wouldn’t take a charge. Just shut its eyes tight and took the 5^th.So let that be a lesson to me to tell the truth every time out!Another truth is that we had one gorgeous day on old Cape Cod. I ate too much, then drank too much, then came back to our hosts’  breezy cool house, climbed the stairs to the guest room, looked out over the waves of that rocking dish of an ocean and was asleep before my head hit the pillow. Sooo no phone again today. AND a big head from the Crown Royal. AND a guilty conscience for being a liar. I've learned my lesson. Never again will I write here what isn't true and real for me in the moment. And here's what's real right this second: these two views captured an hour or two after sunrise on the third-to-last weekend in August.  

August Paradox

You know  it’s August when you find little spiders in your bed and just brush them out so they can have a nice day too. Or when a live bird is found swooping around your kitchen at 2am and you simply escort it out with a little arm waving, not even stopping to wonder how it got there.  It’s live-and-let-live time you figure. Or maybe you’re just too serene to stress anymore.That’s not how you feel in July when you’re still coming down from the high-wire act of the school year. Or June after so many weddings and graduation bashes you were practically living in the greeting card aisle. But it’s how you feel now, pretty much.Anyway it’s how I feel. Over the last three months I've been fizzy with busy-ness and that whole time all I could think was “August! Just get me to August, Lord!”The day before August began, I drove 300 miles in one day to bring David’s elderly uncle up north to the place he loves best: the New Hampshire Lakes Region where we have a cottage. He won’t stay overnight there – he’s 90 with bad arthritis – so we make it a day trip always. And this particular night after bringing him home, I had to turn right around and go right back to our other guests -  as soon as I got my phone fixed, that is. I dropped him at his apartment at 9:35pm and was at the Verizon store a full seven minutes before it closed at 10:00.“My phone is dying!” I cried to the young tech who placed it on the little diagnosing gizmo.“Actually,” he said cheerfully, “this phone is dead! And we’re closing anyway. Come back tomorrow.”But tomorrow I would be back up north for a week! And without a phone? For seven whole days? Me?Yup. I drove back north and the next day the sun rose same as always and by 1pm when it had begun its slow cartwheel into the west, half the household was napping. I took paper and pencil and headed down to the dock to begin making the grocery list down on the dock– where I ended up falling  dead asleep stretched out on its sun-warmed boards and did not wake for two whole hours. Even when little ones came swimming with their momma. Even when they stepped on me by mistake a few times and splashed me while jumping in the water.Then four hours later, I climbed into bed and slept for 12 more hours, and when I woke it seemed like May again, with the summer all before me and there, people, lies the sad realization we come to every August: namely that it's only right near the end of this delicious abundant-life Summer that it comes to seem most eternal.

How Can I Not Show This?

I am named for a certain person and this is her wedding gown, which she wore for four short hours in 1903 when she married the lad she had met in college and a fine-looking lad he was as you can see up close by clicking on his photo below. Who knew he would one day become a judge and the Chairman of the Boston School Committee and take on that scalawag mayor of Boston, James Michael Curley? He was but a lad then, the first in his family to get past 8^th grade and she the third child of the weaving supervisor at the mill. They were born in the 1870s to people with fresh memories of the Crossing. Anyway, yesterday I took out this dress again and noted again how she had sweated into its bodice, this girl who died so young that her children for all their trying could not bring back her face much less the sound of her voice, being only one, two, four and six at the time. My mother was the two-year-old. Reports are that the one-year-old cried inconsolably for weeks calling “Mama, Mama!”75 years later, when the then-six-year-old lay dying as an old man in a hospital bed, I brought in to him his mother’s silver mirror-and-brush set and he said he could then ‘see’ her again; see her for the first time in his mind as she sat at her dressing table brushing her long, long hair.I can't see her because I never knew her; but the first time I saw the bodice of her wedding dress I pulled my T-shirt right off and tried it on. Then I knew about her tiny waist and small breasts. And when I pulled the long silk skirt from the yellowing tissue paper, I kicked off my jeans then and there and tried it on too. That’s how I found out how tall she was.She was my height exactly and she haunts me, ah how she haunts me. Her death set off a sadness in my family that has ramified down through the decades. I feel so lucky that her young husband did not die but lived to be an old man and grandfather to many, modeling a kind of willed optimism that made of me the merry child I was, when things could so easily have gone in another direction.A fatherless child, I lived in his house and under his care.  He called me 'Blackberry Top' for the tight dark curls emerging on my baby head.We owe for so much in this life; how can we ever repay it, except through reverence and thanks?  Some things fade: these flowers are starting to fade, and the dress comes apart in my hands. This silver creamer, meanwhile, seems to endure, as does this image of that Maloney daughter called Caroline Theresa who lived on the little rise of land just across from the mill. 

The Past is Our True Home Town

Anytown High School here - sigh. Immediately after I wrote yesterday’s piece about an old Atlantic City-style beach town I was  invited to join a Facebook page called "I Remember Revere When…”  I don’t in fact "remember Revere when" but I’m glad for all the people who do, as I see them happily writing about their bikes and their hangouts and the brightly striped tube socks of the era.Last Sunday I spent the better part of an hour on a page called “You Know Your from Lowell when…” and yeah sure it bothers me that whoever put up this page misspelled the short form for "you are" but it seems mean to point that out, the site being full of so many tender memories.Turns out I'm very nostalgic about the place where I came of age and have been since long before Mark Wahlberg made The Fighter there. Before Ricky Gervais and the dimpled Jennifer Garner filmed The Invention of Lying on its streets too. I wrote about both films, one at the end of December of 2010 and one nearer to that month's start.  Lowell became my home when I was 9 and I lived there until the summer after freshman year in college when a prescription for diet pills so altered my judgment that I was walking eight miles to my job every day, madly cleaning the house when I got home at night, and generally living like a combination over-achieving social worker/nun and a speed freak. (I swear all the doctors who gave those pills out to people should have been barred from practicing medicine.)In early adulthood I probably thought the place hadn't affected me much but it did. Of course it did, though in a graduating class of 988 kids I really knew my neighborhood pals and the other drama-and-chorus nerds like myself.  We sigh looking back at the fashions of our young years.Whether it was the Princess Grace-style French twist or feathered-back Farrah-style bangs or that signature 80s  look like Jennifer Beals had in Flashdance when her hair rose like a living Burger King crown from the top of the head.Poodle skirts, saddle shoes, minis, maxis, the images of a hundred styles and ways to be all live in our minds. All are waiting for us, held and kept safe for us in the memories of the ones we are moving through time with. It's wonderful isn't it?

I Think They're Still There

I feel such an urge to go back to that beach I visited last month. I keep thinking that this time the women will be wearing long full skirts that sweep the boardwalk and hats that make the Duchess of Cambridge’s lids look like so many Girl Scout beanies.I spoke yesterday about the doomed couple who were my grandparents: they courted on Revere Beach and also just up the way in Winthrop.I have pictures of them in these places. And the descriptions of the outings in their diaries, And the excited letters that passed back and forth as they planned these outings and the outings sure took some planning: both of them hailed from western Massachusetts where they met, but then he, Michael, came to Boston to become a lawyer while she, Carrie, stayed behind to take a job teaching in one of those famous one-room school houses of the era. (You should see the pictures of that raggedy band of thin-faced children, the millworkers' offspring, first generation Irish-Americans just as Carrie and Michael were first generation Irish-Americans.)Sometimes I feel as if I could build the whole village of Hinsdale, where Carrie grew up; as if I could draw pictures of her living room and then furnish it.I can do this and I know this because of the writing they did. They left a record. People just did that back then. What a loss if we moderns, we citizens of the last 30 years, turn out to leave nothing behind but a screen that glows for a while and then goes dark as all screens must.In comparison paper is such a stable medium. Study these images of a day by the water's edge 100 years ago. Dont' you suppose the people pictured are still there... somewhere? I will go again soon and look some more.

For The One Who Died Young

This sweet piece is one from the archives:A hundred years ago this week she married her young man Michael. Her name was Carrie and her eyes were that bright, bright blue, even in the old photos, her jawline both strong and delicate.All my life I have studied her photos wondering if she sensed ever what lay ahead for her: the babies coming so quickly, four in six years, and then the fast approaching darkness. She almost certainly didn’t think she would be mother to someone who would be mother to me, here in this age of instant communication.  We missed each other by almost half a century, Carrie Maloney and I. But she left enough behind so I know some things about her anyway:I know that as a bride she wore a gown of white silk, trimmed with Irish point lace, and that she and Michael traveled to the church “in carriages,” lingered briefly for an informal reception, then “took the cars” - meaning traveled by rail - to begin their wedding journey. “While the groom is dressing up, I’ll say a few words,” she wrote home during that journey. “Thanks for the account of our wedding as it appeared in the Springfield Republican (but now I fear Irish point lace is cheap, is it not?)”I know she was warm. She signed every note to her groom, “I am, with love, your Carrie.”She also loved a laugh. In a note to him on the eve of the couple’s seventh anniversary she wrote, “Our town has been rather gay and flighty this week: we had a Temperance lecture!” It was that very weekend that she took so suddenly sick  In the long quiet days afterward, Michael wrote about it in his journal: the sudden fever; the seizure;  the race to the hospital by horse-drawn ambulance; the surgery to save both mother and baby, for she was six months pregnant with their fifth child.The surgery failed.  Death came first for the baby, and when she woke briefly from the anesthesia, she saw it coming for her.Her third child Caroline, who later became my own mother, was only two years old when this happened. But many times in her long life she told me the tale of this doomed young lady; and so, when our own first daughter was born, my husband David and I decided to call her Carrie too, in the hope that she might live long and full, in memory of that other Carrie buried at 31 with her unborn baby in her arms.This newest Carrie was married last weekend, 100 years exactly after her namesake.As it happens, she has the same fair skin as her great-grandmother. The same light eyes. And exactly the same strong yet delicate jaw.On a sudden impulse, less than an hour before ‘our’ Carrie’s ceremony, I dashed to the attic and found the sealed box holding that first bride’s gown so that our own girl could see it.It was her first sight of the century-old garment and she gasped at the sight, the white silk and Irish point lace now a dark ivory.  And then in this most familiar and human gesture, she lifted it and inhaled deeply.I like to think that that first Carrie might have somehow felt this; felt it as an embrace even. I like to think she sent her blessing to this new Carrie, all brave and strong and starting out in life.

One Girl's Trash...

I took a bunch of other things to the Swap Table the day I brought in our windfall “Nibble With the Marottas” tray. Among them were:

• Two pleated plastic lamp shades from the 80s, pleated not so much like the skirt of a Catholic school-girl’s uniform as pleated the way you used to fold the paper that encased your drinking straw before lowering a few drops of water onto it to make of it a writhing worm;
• Four sheet-sets that no matter how much I washed them still smelled like they were involved in the War Between the States;
• A ‘hot tray’ From The Land That Time Forgot meaning before anyone had a microwave which, when you plugged it in, rose to 900 degrees and, once you removed your casserole and tiny-wiener platter from it, offered a free third-degree burn to anyone foolish enough to let his fingers brush across it;
• A fuzzy pillow cover shaped like a lion’s head, only with a tail hideously growing out of the side;
• Two naked Barbies, exactly like all Barbie dolls everywhere who, but for their teensy waists and swelling breasts, are entirely free of  90% of your primary and secondary sex characteristics;
• A pair of headphones the size of dinner plates, and finally...
• My favorite sweater that survived the first culling a month ago but, looked at in the clear light of day, was seen to have just too many holes, too much hem-sagging all around.

This last I brought and set down with a heavy sigh – right before I spotted that cute linen jacket with the nice Princess Di shoulder pads which I whisked right home.All of which just goes to show : you can take the girl our of the 80s but you can never take the 80s out of the girl. :-)    

Mostly Dead

This is me napping. The cartoon just under this is by Bruce Eric Kaplan in a recent New Yorker. The set-up he gives on the site you can visit to see all his work says "In the middle of a cemetery, a thought bubble rises above the ground from someone beneath a grave.Of course people who say stuff like this aren't the real people;  they're the ones who say they're staying home for the summer if they're just hopping over to their 20-room 'cottages' in the Hamptons on summer weekends. I love it, feeling as lazy as I do this weekend. I don't feel exactly dead; just mostly dead as Billy Crystal says as Miracle Max in The Princess Bride. Watch the scene I'm referring to, which will take you right back in time to the comic heyday of Billy himself and Cary Elwes, and Carol Kane, all in this scene.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X90qKQAMh8A&feature=related]

Crib Fun

• I don’t know what you guys would do with two weeks of forced rest but I:
• Lay in the bed for 40 minutes on awakening, just like babies do, practicing their vowel sounds and conducting invisible orchestras.a
• Got a facial which is another way of saying "had my mustache snatched off" and this for the first time in like three years. (Normally I’d just Jolen the little critter; it's only a light little suggestion of a mustache, kind of like the one Justin Bieber has.)

I also:

• Had my hair cut, and begged Ronaldo to cut my bangs more. With such a high forehead as I have I look like Cousin It if the bangs get too long. (Alas he'll never do it; he says if he does I'll look like I just got out of 'ze men-tal HOS-pital' - only he says it in his nicely accented English so it’s just sweetly funny and not offensive in a targeting-the-mentally- challenged sort of way. Anyway how bad would it BE to look like the star of Girl Interrupted? Short bangs yeah but look at that mouth God gave her!)

And speaking of mental hospitals I also

• Read this history of McLean Hospital, the onetime refuge of poet Robert Lowell, James Taylor, Sylvia Plath and Susanna Kaysen who wrote Girl Interrupted as well as many many more. Gracefully Insane it's called, and I plowed through quite a few other books too, all at the same time which is how I like to do . 

And finally I 

• Went and got worked on by a body worker specializing in myofascial release.

This is myofascial release here, the unwinding part of it anyway. There is more to be said about it and this video I realize looks like a combination snake charmer and strip club manual but I am here to tell you this technique feels great. At the end of my own time as a massage therapist I used it on clients for at least some portion of the hour, and - well, watch the clip and see if it doesn't make YOU feel like you’re in your crib again and just waking from a dandy little nap. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HumS06u-P0]

Found at the Dump

What can I say? We didn't make this or buy it but when we saw it just sitting there on the Swap Table at the dump we just had to bring it home, didn't we? I mean this name of ours is pretty unusual as Italian names go.Still, how much cooler if the real ceramicists (doubtless from the 70s) would come forward and claim it.So how about it? Any takers named Marotta out there? I married into the name myself so my knowledge of the family tree is pretty limited.Look at all that nice orange and yellow on the background of brown. It's like the Reese's Pieces are already in there! Or the diced carrots and beans, or the Indian corn, or the, uh throwup...Course you can't put it in the microwave with that there gold paint, and I wouldn't put it in the dishwasher either it's shaped so funny, plus it weighs so much and feels so sort of brittle..But this is true kitsch, people; when it comes to a tsotchkies, it just doesnt get much tsotchkier.

All Better!

Finally got the stitches snipped out of my leg out after two whole weeks with no exercise. This is my leg on the left here. (Just kidding  ha ha - it's a football.) Seriously though, it stunk:Two weeks with no swimming and it was, what, 103 out?Two weeks with no baths but only quick showers.Two weeks of patting dry, lubing the spiky threads with Vaseline, peeling off the old bandage to reveal that line of sutures like the grim disapproving mouth of that mean teacher you had back in middle school.But yesterday at 3pm the surgeon yanked the threads on the outside and God took care of the ones on the inside and I feel like a brand-new girl.My friend Mary got her 11-year-old kid to take out her stitches when the time came. 'Course she’s an RN so stitches hold  no terror for her.My young firecracker of a Size 4 roller derby queen cousin took off her own cast once and - get this - even removed her own braces when she decided enough was enough. (Born too late for that kind of boldness alas but maybe in my next life.)Anyway, now I can start wearing skirts again.Also shorts.Also bathing suits.  (I'm the third one from the left. This new bra is really workin' for me!Now I can drive to my favorite pond, stick my legs out the window and watch the world go by.Or stay right on the screened-in porch and look up at the sky.I did that second thing again and again over the last fortnight and tell ya what it’s kind of nice. I guess exciting as it  is, life on my usual hamster-style treadmill has its drawbacks after all.  

Dazed 'n Amazed

How can we do anything but stand around looking up with weather like this? This is the second summer in a row that we’ve had day after warm sunny day in the provinces north of Boston. It feels so ...unchanging; it feels like we bought the warranty.I know it might be inside my head merely. My blogger pal Brian wrote  with great appreciation about the full moon which I guess I must have missed somehow. I keep looking up at skies that seem completely unchanged night after night, the stars looking as if they were painted onto the inside of that inverted teacup the ancient Jews pictured sits up there sheltering us.I mean I know Earth is doing its little pirouette around the sun and the summer is waning. The crickets announced it when they tuned up last week. Most years it’s August before they show up but I heard my first one last Wednesday the 27^th of July so there you are.They’re just earlier, like the way spring comes sooner these days; like the way little girls are developing earlier.  I know what does it: it's hormones in the chicken am I wrong? Someone's feeding estrogen to the crickets deny it if you can.. and here's one other true thing unchanging throughout recorded history: a really good bra is any girl's best friend, whatever her age or shape.

The Far Meadow

This is the Ferris wheel's top, this the high-flying midpoint of summer, from which we can glimpse the whole landscape of our lives.Just look there, in that far meadow: there is the toylike stage-set of your childhood, the stoops and sidewalks that made up your world. It was there you learned how to ride a bike and how to tie your shoes; how to give a noogie and how to recieve one without too much wincing.The more we look the sooner the first person singular give way for we were kids in the company of other kids, And when I pull out my old diaries they carry me right straight to that place:

• At Ballroom Dance class in Fifth Grade, my flailing hand catches Robbie Wilson square in the face and his nosebleed makes a Jackson Pollock canvas of his dress shirt.
• In school during Sixth Grade the big magazine drive has me hard-selling kinfolk across three counties and 12 weeks later my "prize" comes in the mail: a cheap ballpoint pen.
• My best friend Tina and I find a baby mouse separated from its mother. We bring it home, squeeze milk into its impossibly small mouth and pray it will last the night. The next day we hold a funeral, tissue-lined cigar box and all.
• That Christmas, I get three great presents. The dog, I lovingly note, gets four.
• Later that year, the dog gets a chest cold for which our veterinarian, with perfectly straight face, prescribes not just pills but an ounce of booze to be given nightly. (Afterward, my mother will never tire of telling of what she said to the druggist: "I need a pint of the cheapest whiskey you have," then, on seeing his expression, blurting, "IT'S FOR MY DOG!") 

Ah but how my sister and I love that pup, the first most grateful object of our young affection. We are all three kinsmen, we sense; we follow orders and come when the grownups call us. And more time passes and the diaries show our antics growing bolder:

• Our next-door neighbor Dicky lights a fire of oak leaves and rolls in it to be funny.
• He and his brother Bobby get trapped in a too-high tree and Nan and I wing buckets of hard little apples at them.
• Spring comes and we pick sides for the big season opener of Softball out behind the Talbots' house. Everyone is there: Tina and all four Talbot kids, Robbie Wilson and his younger brother Alex, Nan and I - everyone but Dick and Bob, held captive in their long Catholic-school workday.

We're four innings in when suddenly comes a deep male shout. It's Mr. Wilson on a child's bike, roaring across the Talbots' grass and heading straight for their big crimson maple.He reaches up as he passes under it, grabs a low-hanging limb with both hands and swings, letting let the bike rocket on without him. Then he jumps back to earth, limps to home plate, for one of his legs is polio-shortened, picks up the bat and hits one out of the park to bring everyone home.I can see it now. And I can remember now, too, that he did this in a thousand ways, as did all our grownups. All through our childhood they brought us home safe, then leaned in, sheltering, sheltering, sheltering us in that golden far-distant meadow (but not all the time and not all that close as these pictures of Robbie and Dick testify.)